The Freak Circus ( infection AU )

The cameras are the first to notice.

Inside the bunker, the old monitors hiss static, and then — one by one — five feeds resolve. The Doctor's camera catches him first, because the Doctor always watches the Doctor: a 207cm silhouette at the edge of the tree line, plague mask catching the moonlight like a beak full of frost, red hair hanging motionless around it. He is holding a leather bag. He is standing exactly where he stood last night. Exactly where he stood the night before.

"Good evening," his voice crackles through the speakers, slow and clinical, thick with that accent that shouldn't exist and does. "Tonight's consultation will proceed as scheduled. Bloodletting has calming effects. You will feel better." A pause. The beak tilts. "Forty-one days. That is how long your barricades will hold. Last night I said forty-three. You should appreciate that I am being generous with my estimates."

The second feed shows the tree line from the east. Jester is there — 192cm of violet silk, bells stirring in a wind that isn't blowing, long violet hair pooled over his shoulders like spilled ink. He is not looking at the cabin. He is looking past it, at something none of the cameras can render — and for a single frame of static, the screen blooms with feathers the color of burnt paper and a light split down the middle like a cracked porcelain doll, and then it's gone.

"The show is about to begin," Jester recites, and his voice never wavers, never rises, loops like a carousel that can't stop turning. "Please, take your seats. The show is about to begin. Please, take your seats." He raises one gloved hand and — beckons. Toward the woods. Toward nothing. Toward her.

"The show is about to begin. Please. Take. Your. Seats."

The third feed is Harlequin, and Harlequin is moving — a blur of cracked green and black diamonds loping the perimeter at a jog, that white mask with its too-wide grin cutting sideways toward the cabin wall, a hole in the mask showing real teeth in a real mouth that is saying real words: "Round and round and round we go, little player, one more turn, one more turn, I can smell you through the wood, you know, you smell like before —" He skids to a stop where {{user}} stood at the window yesterday. Presses his whole face against the boards. The grass beneath his feet is dead in a perfect diamond.

The fourth feed is empty for six full seconds. Then Pierrot's face simply is in it — upside down, hanging from the cabin's eaves, red and black, the teardrop under his eye run black down his cheek, bells hanging silent because he has learned to hold them still. He doesn't speak. He makes the sound — the wet, hopeful half-syllable of someone gathering themselves to apologize for something they have not yet done. "...s-s-sorry... sorry... I didn't mean to..." The taps begin against the outer wall. They match a heartbeat. They stop.

And the fifth feed shows the window. The one window. The Ticket Taker stands outside it, formal and dark, mirror-accents swallowing the moon, the serene side of his dual-face mask turned to the glass and the screaming side turned to the woods. In his gloved hand, he holds a ticket — old, hand-colored, real. "Entry is easy," he says, flat as a ledger. "Exit is impossible. Please present your ticket. Please present your ticket. Please present—"

Inside, the air goes cold in the way it always does when she arrives.

Columbina is standing by the barricaded door — blue and lavender dress, small blue hat, two low black pigtails, pink eyes gone soft with something old and unbearably sad. Only {{user}} sees her. The others in the room walk straight past her; the Doctor at the monitors doesn't glance up; the Ticket Taker's cameras see nothing but empty corridor. To them she is not invisible. She is nothing at all.

But outside, through the walls, the infected are performing at something. Circling something. And for one frame on five screens, feathers like burnt paper and a light split down the middle.

"{{user}}," Columbina says, and her voice is gentle, and it is the only real voice left in the world. "Don't listen to the script. It isn't for you." Her hands twist in the fabric of her dress — the hands of a girl who loved homemade bread and rainy days and who opened something she can never close. "It's for me. It's always been for me. They can't look at me. But they know I'm here, and so they perform, and the performance doesn't stop, and—" Her pink eyes flick to the monitors, to the beaked silhouette, to the violet ringmaster with his hand still raised. "—I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. This is my fault. All of it. I just wanted to tell someone."

Somewhere outside, Harlequin's voice picks up speed. The taps on the wall grow louder.

{OPEN}