trans_9 | Sobek the Immortal: Bringing a God to His Knees [Closed]

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Sobek the Immortal: Bringing a God to His Knees [Closed]

Who: Daniel Jackson, Vala Mal Doran, Eva, The Master, Eleventh Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon
Where: Kalimba (planet side)
Summary: A small crew goes on an archaeological expedition to a jungle planet, where System Lord was imprisoned. Taking Daniel as his host, he captures the crew and tortures them, while rebuilding his fleet.
Warnings: Violence, torture, gore

((Part One and Part Two here))

As time drew on, there was no sign of Stacy, rescue parties or of a single landing pods. The typhoon season approached closer with each day, rain and wind spattering the leaves on some days, varying between intense heat and humidity on other days. The megafauna in the jungles had grown more active too. The earth rumbled under their feet as they starting their migration amidst hooting calls and croaks. Throughout the varying weather, one thing remained constant. The hive of activity around the three step pyramids never ceased, slaves either taking shifts or in the most fanatical cases, working themselves near to death or to death. It was like this all across Kalimba. The call had gone out with the instructions for the slaves: work was to begin on restoring the Crocodile God's fleets underneath each step pyramid all across the planet. They were his Chosen, his Children, and he would ensure they were rewarded for their faith.

The complex swarmed with slaves and guards moving weapons and parts. Sobek and his personal guards were also in and out more often as the fleet began to take shape, often traveling to other sites to check on progress. Stones fell away from each ship as far as the eye could see. More and more of each ha'tak was revealed, while lines of human bodies went inside to work on the interiors. If the number of step pyramids that towered through the jungle were any indication, his fleet would be massive.

((same as Part 2: run your own posts with each other, more private threads with Sobek are available at the start. Part 3 does not have to immediately include end-plot stuff. If you want more CR amongst each other or your character being messed with by Sobek, please do!))

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Oh yes. Yes, he can see she’s doing reasonably well. And that she’s still dependable and up for catching Doctors falling at her, which is just as well. He had to say she was much better than the floor, if that was any comfort, and he doesn't have it in him yet to sit up and get back on his feet. His eyes close for a moment at Eva's touch.

It's odd, actually. He hasn't had anyone touch his hair like that in...well. Easily longer than Eva's been alive most likely, probably much longer than that because everything's starting to blur together when you start getting old, between the adventures and all the friends you accumulate. For some reason he feels even more vulnerable than back under Sobek's idea of "mercy", the Doctor relaxing with a low sigh as Eva runs her hands through his hair. He cracks open an eye when she asks him what to do. Not that he needs the TARDIS or Stacy translating that. Amazing what loads of time on your hands, literally, and a hobby of Anything At All can do with picking up a few languages here and there across the universe.

It's another little bit of Earth on this horrid planet.

"Well," The Doctor flutters his hand. It trembles slightly as he brings it up to his chest, over the heart that's stopped. "Here. One of my hearts. See? Useless right now when you've only got the one."

Right now he has to struggle to remember what he wanted to ask her. It's not often he runs around putting one of his hearts out of commission and he's wondering if asking her to do what Martha Jones did will make it worse or if he should try to adjust to the terrible thought of one heart in this body. Oddly enough, Eva seems to have no problems at all with her one heart struggling to pump that blood throughout her human's body, the Doctor tilting his head slightly to gaze up at her. Flushed cheeks, looking the very picture of physical health. Amazing. Utterly amazing she can function like that!

Eva catches her lip under her teeth as she brings her hand to match his again, as if she doesn't trust his strength enough to even let him gesture without her support.

"Doc..." She exhales deeply from her nose and wraps the arm stroking his hair around his shoulders in a Pieta-like embrace. She remains in Spanish, because they're alone in this dungeon, universes away from her home. There's no point in pretending that she considers herself an American anymore. Besides, when she speaks in English too long around him she starts to mimic his accent. "I'm not a doctor. I don't know the first thing about it, besides treating my son's chicken pox and sore throats. If you tell me what to do I'll try."

Her fingertips tremble some. What if she fails? What if she kills him? That would be more suiting to her, wouldn't it? This barbarian they've made of a working woman who tears her enemies apart with her teeth. She was ridiculous to ever believe there was good in her when there's only brutality. Not even evil, just crude and brutish impulses.

Maybe she's just letting this place get to her.

"Tell me what to do," she repeats.

His fingers curl around hers.

She's warm, almost feverishly hot compared to what he's used to with the average human. The Jaffa and the worshippers that he has seen might be human too (or a very close off-shoot) but to the Doctor, Eva was human, in all senses of the word, and he felt like he could trust her. Even if she is trembling. That's what they can really do at this point - keep trying, whether it's to keep holding the Moment from Sobek to something like trying to cling onto your sanity, like Em having a human here. It's not even just that. It's that he considers Eva one of those good friends, the sort that makes all this worth it.

"Well," the Doctor says, swallowing. He supposes that it really was too much to ask for Eva to be a doctor trained with binary vascular systems. "You could try giving it a good whack and see what that does."

He manages to give her a tired, (aiming for not too) shaky grin. It worked before, right? Then again, that was only a few minutes at most and he'd been trying to play half-dead in the first place to begin with. This was a bit...different. Painfully different. It was seeing out half an eye or having your lungs stolen from you. The Doctor focuses on Eva's face peering down at him, only half-joking. Unless she's managed to smuggle away a defibrillator or his sonic, wherever it's gotten to this time, their options are limited.

"You want me to..." Eva's eyes widen, and then she cracks up with quiet laughter at the ridiculousness of the situation, because the alternative is to call the Doctor insane and she really shouldn't be appointing herself as the arbitrator of what is and isn't sane. "Are we talking CPR or do you just want me to wallop you in the chest?"

In a way, she's stalling, too. His asking her to take charge of his health is quite the favor to call on. Not that she won't, not that she ever wouldn't, but it's intimidating. She's supposed to be the mom. The one who cleans the wreckage. The caretaker of the aftermaths. So while she wants to protest more and put it off longer, she starts to lay him on the ground so she can press her hands, one over the other, to his chest.

"Which heart is it?" She moves her hands over his chest, looking for the beat but she's trembling, just a little, and it throws her off. She momentarily rid herself of the fidget but somehow she still can't stay still.

Ironic. He's the Doctor. He should be doing the medical nonsense.

Eva’s laugh makes him smile. It’s a bit strained, yeah, but it’s still a laugh and he’s always thought that Eva looks loads better when she smiles. When she doesn’t, she tends to get a pinched expression particularly around the nose and mouth and it always brings out those scars. When she smiles, though. Loads better. Unfortunately smiling won’t fix the heart problem and the Doctor suspects whacking it might not help much either. Not after all this time with it sitting there like a dead lump in his chest. He supposes a human might not understand. That’s the problem with one heart, basically.

“At this point you could go with either,” the Doctor says, biting back a cough. His breath rattles in his throat as he decides that indulging in Eva’s humanity and giving her an explanation about these sorts of things won’t be of much use. She’s always been especially specific about wanting to know the hows, whens and whys.

He feels her hand over his chest. The shirt he’s had has been torn to pieces and he’s sorry to say that the tweed jacket isn’t doing much better. Shame, really. He’d like that jacket, rubbish pockets and all. If he focuses on the jacket and Eva’s smile, it’s easier to keep on track with what he’d told her that first day in the cells.

“This one. Here.” The Doctor takes Eva's hand in his, moving it to the side. He gives her a squeeze when he realizes she’s trembling like a leaf, as if to tell her that everything will be fine one way or another.

She pinches her lips together in an expression of almost comical seriousness and steadies her hand over the place on his chest. "Tell me if I'm doing more harm than good."

To get the boat license, Edriss had had to pass a CPR certification test. It wasn't well-taught, just a volunteer course put on by the Red Cross, and Edriss had feigned very little interest in the proceedings. Eva, trapped in her head, probably paid even less attention, and anyway, that was over a decade ago. It's a miracle she remembers she took the course at all.

She exhales deeply from her nose and laces the fingers of one hand into the other, locking her elbows, up above the Doctor. She begins to pump, earnestly if not with any exceptional skill.

Under her breath she's just praying not to break all his ribs. Please, God, don't let her inflict more damage on the friends who've placed their safety in her hands.

The Doctor nods. Do your worse – or better yet, do your best and hopefully by some miracle he might recover and then Eva could add Miracle Worker to her growing list of skills. “Do Your Best” is preferable, actually!

Then Eva decides to give it a go.

The Doctor almost immediately trying to bat Eva’s hands away and thinking that at the rate she’s going, she’s going to add broken ribs to the rest of the mess. Okay, so that. Not such a good idea. Not one of the best ideas he’d had, he was willing to admit. The Doctor gives a wheezing sort of wheeze that flutters out of him – Eva, good arms on that woman; filing that away for future reference – his hand coming up to rub at his chest and what will probably be several more bruises to add to the splotchy collection of them he already has. Most definitely a case of doing more harm than good. Could be worse. Could be better. His heart is still a glorified lump.

He’s had pet rocks that were more useful.

The Doctor decides in the future he’ll probably tell Eva to keep her hands to herself and not to listen to him. Maybe train her – he almost thinks of her as “his” human, like Jamie and the others –how to tell the difference between one of his brilliant plans and one of the…not-so-brilliant ones she’s better off ignoring. Sometimes he does have those moments.

“Let’s…skip-skip that,” the Doctor gasps. He flaps his hand at her, as if he means to give her an encourage pat on the cheek. It’s a contact thing.

Tears sting the rims of her eyes as she stops. She should have figured. She ceases immediately when she sees the look on the Doctor's face. The tension goes out of her shoulders as if a cable between them is cut.

"Are you alright?" She places a hand over his on her cheek, hungry for the contact, something to ground her, lapping it up like milk. He can probably feel the stress radiating off her. If he's doing his little mind probe thing, he can find all the awful things she did in the last few days, and she can learn all the horrible things that happened to him.

She leans down, planning to wrap an arm around his back and pull him into a sitting position with her, but figuring that's too stressful, she changes her mind and lays on the floor besides him.

The Doctor has one of those funny little pauses where you’re trying to decide how much to fib – it’s not even a question of if.

“I’m fine. I’d even go so far as to say I’m okay!” See, the Doctor even has it in him to flash her a feeble thumbs up, that’s how fine he is. Dead heart aside. He waits as she tries to get herself uncomfortable, her body heat radiating out from her at this close proximity and even that feels humans. Humans and their odd little ranges for body temperatures. Okay, so he wasn’t entirely lying when he said he was fine; maybe what he should have said was he’d be fine, that even something like having someone there with you even during times like this.

It might even be the selfish reason why he’s had a rather good track record for dying around his friends all the time. Sometimes you need someone just there.

The Doctor listens to the wind and rain slapping at the leaves outside, the jungle’s megafauna hooting and roaring only to be drowned out by the sounds of Sobek’s faithful working at preparing the fleet for the Time Vortex. His mouth quirks up at the idea. He’s not even sure he’d be alive to see what happens when they try their first maiden voyage – if he isn’t, he hopes it’s at least entertaining for Eva, Jamie and the others. Speaking of Eva…the Doctor tilts his head, his hand feeling in the dark with that silent may I she’s probably gotten used to by now.

You may. It's a silent little acceptance, visible only from the quirk i the corner of her mouth and the way the tension leaks out of her brow, the way that small '11' of crinkles on her forehead vanishes for just a moment.

"It's not pretty, though," she warns. There's blood and guts in there. There's the memory of biting Ammit's head off and swallowing it, of hacking her way through Sobek's faithful as if they're vines in the jungle, of Sobek pouring all his many, many legacies of hate and despair into her head. It's almost too much ugliness for her little body to carry, so it feels like it's seeping from the corners of her body. Her sweat is brutal, her spit violent, all this awfulness that can't be contained in skin and bone just dripping from her.

The Doctor is old, she knows. The Doctor's seen ugly, but there is some part of her that still wants to impress him. Not to be his human, obviously, but to be his equal. Someone he'll stand by with respect and say "you were wrong, you are more than the sum of your species and genetics" to. How will he ever see her that way now?

She rests her cheek in his hand.

The Doctor appreciates the warning. Even with all he's seen and done, seeing a human like Eva in the middle of that is still shocking to the core: blood everywhere, her biting onto that snake like a wild animal, nothing like the Eva Salazar he's grown to know. His fingers tense against Eva's cheek as the worst of all comes - Sobek's invasion of Eva's mind, a glowing light like the sun burning into her (their) eyes, all the terrible things he'd done and gloried in searing into their mind's eye. All of that is colored with what's going through Eva's mind: another layer of impressions, feelings. Knowing that he knows.

He believes the Master would scoff at another ape showing her true colors.

Perhaps he'd even be impressed at just how many followers she'd injured and killed.

The Doctor lets time stretch between them, giving her a little glimpse into what he wants her to know about Right Now, and, after a pause, he lets her go deeper. A bit personal. Something to let her know that she is who she is. She's his friend; she's a survivor, and there's always a reason he trusts some humans and not others. They can't take back what she did and he doesn't think they should, at any rate. She did what she had to and here she is.

Here they all are.

The Doctor asks her to think of home. The simple things, really, the things she thinks are worth saving.

After a moment he pulls his hand back.

In a perfect inversion of the Doctor's tension, Eva relaxes in his hand and closes her eyes. As horrible as it is to spread this plague, it's a relief to share it and no longer be along in carrying the burden of her crimes. At least, these crimes - she lets the last few weeks slip into his hands but holds tight to her secrets from the Yeerk war. There are some battles she's not yet ready to surrender, not to herself and certainly not to the Doctor.

And then he starts to fill her back with these gestures of emotions, these feelings that pour into her like warm bathwater. It's a welcome feeling, comforting. He sees past the violence and the rage and wraps his good thoughts around the deep core of her like the fingers of a glove. She's okay. They're okay. Given the circumstances she might even be fine, more fine than most other people would be.

Think of home.

She thinks of attending symphonies in her black turtleneck and skirt. She thinks of sitting on the patio with a glass of wine, back when a glass of wine was just a drink and not a one-way ticket into hurling her mind into the void. She thinks of the water cooler at work and of interns that don't always avert their eyes when they see her. She thinks of Peter, her hands running up under his shirt, him falling asleep in front of the computer, him drumming his hands on the steering wheel as he drives, him linking his hand with hers. She thinks of Marco, the little boy being lifted up to play airplane with her and the dark-eyed young man coming by their house every other day to make sure she's alright, under the pretense of showing off his new gadgets or endorsements.

She thinks of the color green, and all the promises it makes. The Doctor pulls away and she's still thinking of green.

"Between the two of us we'll almost make one functioning person." A smile teases her lip. "My body and your mind. So what do we do now?"

Green and blue. Earth, essentially. Everything there, from Eva's turtlenecks to her family, to the wind whistling past the half-opened car window. The Doctor thinks those are all perfectly good reasons to hold onto herself and remember how human she is.

The Doctor's own smile is wry. Eva does have a way with words, even in a dim prison and surrounded by thousands of Sobek's faithful.

"I'd say we're almost out of time," the Doctor says, and somehow he makes that sound like a good thing. He reaches out to pat her hand, his voice barely above a whisper - Eva can hear him, but the guard posted at the door can't. "Have you and Vala found anything about how to stop Sobek himself. Anything we can use to separate it from Daniel."

He'd had that one psychic connection with the beast his first interrogation session, but after that, Sobek had made sure to say out of range, knowing full well than anything within touching with the Doctor was risky. Quite right, too! If he'd had more time, he thinks he could have dug in deep into the False God's mind, only "could" isn't what they need right now and that's why Vala and Eva are in such important positions. They can move about, far more than he or Jamie can. The Doctor shifts again, slowly, mouth thinning into a line as the dead heart continues to sit there, his face turning toward Eva's.

"He plans to use Vala's body still. During the switch may be the only time he's without his healing abilities." And thus vulnerable. Subject to the same interminable injuries that everyone else has to live with. Eva's voice drifts around - she's only halfway present right now, the other half of her trying to hold onto that peace she found while digging into the calm moments of her life.

She rolls onto her stomach and breathes deep, the dank foul stench of the cell. Right. Reality. A cage again, always a cage.

"You know we might not be able to save him." And of course, while Eva's writing Daniel off, it's hanging over her shoulders. She's the one who set off this chain of events, and if Daniel ends up as a loss on this failed mission she'll be the one to blame. And the universe will be minus one Daniel Jackson.

It's really not fair, when she thinks about it.

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Sobek the Immortal: Bringing a God to His Knees [Closed]

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sorry it's so late ;a;

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