Toby in Limbo

Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures™.

Note: spoiler alert.

Toby was... actually, Toby had no idea as to where she was, exactly. The landscape around her was grey, the air around her was also grey – with fog, and there was no visible sky...or any landmarks at all: just a grey expense of more grey.

"Hello, is anyone here? Mac? Ange? Lt. Leeds? Anyone?" Toby yelled, as this place, while not Hell exactly, still was really quite intolerable to the sociable young woman. "Is anyone around here? Please? Anyone?"

"Well," a completely unknown voice sounded behind Toby, "there's me. I was just passing by, admittedly, but still – hello?"

"Hi!" Toby turned around with a bright grin, and that grin did not even falter when a complete and utter stranger looked back at her. "Hello! I am Toby, and you-" Toby paused, seeing how her new interlocutrix clearly favored one of her legs. "You're not me, are you?" she finished cautiously, looking at the weathered face of the other woman.

"Why are you thinking-?" the other woman paused, before looking at Toby's own hurt leg. "Ah. What has happened to you?"

"I got stung by a prehistoric scorpion," Toby confessed. "You?"

"It was more of a spider – a camel spider, and it was straight into the foot. No venom, but it still hurt," came the answer. "So, on that notion, welcome to Limbo, I suppose."

There was a pause as Toby thought over this statement. "What's Limbo?" she finally asked.

"The halfway junction between the living and the dead," was the nonchalant reply. "What?"

"I, uh, don't believe in the afterlife – into any afterlife," Toby said carefully.

"Fascinating. What do you believe in?"

"Um, happy endings?"

"When I was about your age, I believed into them and into love too," the older woman sighed. "Maybe you are me, sort of."

Toby kept silent, unsure as to how to deal with this little revelation. "Are you in love with anyone?" the other woman asked suddenly.

Toby thought of Mac and their relationship, lately. "I'm not sure," she confessed, "maybe. He has name is Mac, and I do not know where we are going, where we were going... I don't want to die!"

"What makes you think that you're going to die?"

"Well, a prehistoric scorpion stung me, and for the last hour or so my condition was steadily getting worse. The last thing I remember from the land of the living, I think, was my heart attack, or heart failure, or something-"

"And yet here you are, in Limbo, rather than in the afterlife," the other woman smiled, in a rather reassuring way. "So don't give up just yet, even though this is a land of misery and despair. If you don't give up then your friends and cohorts have a better chance of saving you."

"Really?" Toby asked in a hopeful way, and then, with a flicker, she was gone – in either direction.

"...Well, that was interesting," Helen Cutter, nee Ambroise, said with her customary cutthroat smile. "This is a very interesting young lady, and once I get out of here, I really should go and look her up. After all, why should Connor have all the fun?"

She stood up and continued on her own journey towards the exit.

End