Red Bicycle Chapter Five: Everything Changes (5/8?) (Doctor Who)
Type: Fanfiction
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: T/PG-13
Status: Incomplete (but not by much)
Title: Red Bicycle
Pairings/Characters: The Doctor (Ten), young!Rose, young!Mickey, younger-Jackie, Boe!Jack; Ten/Rose, Ten/young!Rose
Spoiler Warnings: This story is AU post-Doomsday. It could take S3 into account, but it might not. I read my ficathon prompt over and over and this is the one idea that kept coming back. It is Rose pre-Doomsday, however, I do realize that it was one of the looser interpretations of my prompt. There is a very ambiguous reference to a Torchwood character (not Jack) in later chapters but you'd have to watch closely to catch it. The thing that's most important to understand about this story is that the Doctor has been through the events of Doomsday (at least) and the others have not.
Beta(s), other credit: fancy_galloway for beta-ing, jedi_of_urth for her plotting help
Summary/Public Notes: The Doctor decides to do something reckless to ease his conscience. A Time Agent is given an assignment that may change the history and future of the Universe. A teenage girl on a Council Estate in London is caught in the middle.
*[This summary could do with some work.]
**The reason for the delay is a good one: I had two important essays, a governor's school application, and a research paper I had to work on during the writing period. I also have an icon challenge that needs doing in the next week.
This story is a response to a challenge at the time_x_space Ficathon
Previous Chapter list:
Chapter One: Christmas Presents
Chapter Two: Breaking the Rules
Chapter Three: Orders from Above
Chapter Four: Any Other Day
Red Bicycle
The Doctor leaned the palms of his hands against the TARDIS console, rather bleakly considering what sort of job he could get on the Estate without unraveling the space-time continuum. He stood up slowly and pried his eyes off the monitor. There wasn't anything that unusual that he could tell. Jack was present somewhere between here and Cardiff and that made any reading a bit off. For a moment the Doctor wondered if any reading would ever be right again because of the Captain.
As if to answer his question the monitor crackled into white snow and the TARDIS's health seemed to suddenly further decline. The Doctor always had had a fairly spot-on intuition and if Jack had anything to do with why the TARDIS was ill then the repercussions could be far worse than he had first thought. He grabbed his jacket and ran out of the TARDIS. If he was right, and he usually was, then he could lose both of them forever...
Jack's telltale heart was the only thing he could hear as he silently followed Rose. She had no idea he was there as she briskly walked out of the school and down the veins of alleyways that connected her little part of the world. She almost skipped along with a childish abandon for a moment, readjusting her bag so it wouldn't fall down into any of the standing water pooled on the street.
He reached down and hooked his finger into the trigger and gently fingered the cool metal of the gun, but he didn't aim it. He had a clear line of sight. No one was around. Still, he couldn't do it. What could this girl have possibly done-- what was she going to do, in fact-- that was so wrong that she had to die for it?
Rose rubbed just above her eyebrow with her fingertips as she went around the corner. She exhaled heavily as she walked saw the little sandwich board and the building behind it. It was so familiar now that she didn't really see it and could just barely smell the petrol that was spattered on the pavement. When she walked inside she reflexively found a spot on a work bench that was mostly devoid of any recent grease spills or other muck and flopped her bag down.
"Oi, Mickey," she said as she tapped her foot to a familiar pair of dirty sneakers that were just visible beneath a car.
She stepped back with practiced timing to keep him from rolling into her as he pulled himself from beneath the car with his knees. He sat up, stabilizing himself with his feet as he looked up at her from the ground. She stifled a laugh as he grinned at her; some kind of greasy dark smear on his face looking like poorly applied stage make-up.
"How was school?"
"Awful. I got detention again," Rose said as she looked down idly at her fingernails. She looked back up since they weren't particularly interesting. "Pellington hates me."
Mickey broke eye contact with her and went back beneath the car but continued talking, "What'd you do now?"
"I was late. I really should go home, but I came by because... Shareen's brother is in the hospital. You think we should go see him?"
Mickey rolled back out again and stood up.
"Yeah. What's he in the hospital for?" He walked over to a utility sink and began washing the muck from his hands and arms.
"I dunno. Shareen said he--"
Rose never finished her statement because something in the very bottom of her intuition told her to look up from where she had come. She looked up just in time to see the Inspector's face peeking around and her eyes met his.
Mickey noticed that she had stopped mid-sentence and tried to see what had stopped her. When he did he felt like his stomach was reeling with a kind of unearthly cold. He stepped in front of Rose, though he wasn't very well armed-- he just had a dirty towel.
"Who the hell are you?" he asked.
Rose looked just around Mickey nervously in time to see the Inspector step into clear view and pull a gun on them.
"Don't move," he said, but there seemed to be some doubt- a decided lack of conviction- in his voice.
She couldn't even register that she was looking down the barrel of a deadly weapon- she could only hear alarm bells ringing in her head that it shouldn't be there at all.
The Doctor ran full speed down the familiar arteries until his eyes rested upon a sight that thrust him into desperate urgency. He stopped cold when ten feet in front of him, across the garage's entrance, was something the Doctor at first couldn't bring himself to understand. Jack Harkness was standing with a gun trained on Rose Tyler and Mickey Smith. He tried to assess the situation, but his Time Lord nature wouldn't let him see anything but the future that was trying to exert itself.
The pulling of the trigger. Everything past, everything future, absolutely everything dissolving in a roar of sound. Everything he knew- no matter how much it hurt- coming down to nothing. Everything gone. Everything bleeding out in a sea of hot, quickly-cooling human blood.
If he'd even had time to think he may have been able to think of some better response. But he couldn't think- not about anything.
"Jack, don't you dare," came the firm command, spewing more from boiling blood and breaking hearts than mind.
Jack instinctively turned the gun toward the voice. He'd thought he'd had the situation under control, even though it was not the situation he'd wanted, but this man suddenly made him lose any delusion of that.
"Jack!" Rose said, pushing past Mickey without a thought as she saw the gun in line with the stranger's chest. "Just... put the gun down," she pleaded. Somehow she felt- she knew- that the appeal would work. Neither of the men felt like strangers, even though she knew they should. It didn't make sense, but it didn't matter. All she wanted was both of them safe-- even though one of them had been holding a gun on her.
Jack replaced the gun in its holster and an ironic smile came across his lips. He felt himself instinctively preparing for some kind of fallout that never actually came.
Mickey nearly lunged toward him as soon as he heard the gun slip back into its place.
Rose grabbed his forearm and the other stranger's voice further deterred him.
"Don't, Mickey," the Doctor said in a calm, measured tone, his eyes never leaving Jack's now that he had them.
"How do you know my name?!" he demanded.
Part of the Doctor wanted to tell him. Wanted to tell her. But he couldn't-- not now. He glanced toward Rose and Mickey once with a pang of regret, but he wouldn't let his eyes linger. His attention had to be on Jack.
"Who do you work for?" he asked.
"What?" came all three replies.
"Jack, who do you work for?!" he asked. This didn't make any sense- why would Jack ever want to hurt Rose? There was only one way he ever would...
Jack felt himself losing control of the situation. It was a feeling that seemed to run down his arms into his fingers and he felt them go cold. Any pretentious, cocky vestige of a smile left his face. His fingers clinched up into his palms and he felt them press inward with so much force that he almost thought they were the only thing that kept him standing there. He looked at the man before him. He looked at the girl. He couldn't really decide which he wanted to look at more, but he couldn't keep eye contact with either of them. He only knew that what he had tried to do was so very wrong that he couldn't even comprehend it.
"Who is it?!" the Doctor continued, his eyes ablaze as he advanced a single step toward Jack.
Rose knew she should take the opportunity to run. She knew she and Mickey should try to get away. Still, she just stood there, staring. Her hand went to her mouth and she almost bit her fingernail nervously but her feet didn't move to walk away even when she felt Mickey tug her hand. She barely even felt it; instead, she just stared at the man standing there in a pinstripe suit. There was something very different about him, and she got the same feeling that she had felt when she had met 'Jack' this morning: there was the impulse to run and hide but the greater impulse was to run to him- to try to soothe the anger that she saw burning from the very depths of who he was.
"Rose--" Mickey pleaded.
She just shushed him, waiting with bated breath for the dream world she found herself trapped in to shatter.
"I'm a Time Agent," Jack replied eventually.
"Oh, what kind of--" Mickey began and again advanced toward Jack. "You try to kill her because--"
"Mickey, stop it," Rose insisted, putting herself between them and she boldly stepped forward, right between Jack and the Doctor, looking up and searching Jack's blue eyes.
"You were supposed to kill me?" she asked.
"Y-Yeah. Yeah, I was," he replied, finding it difficult to keep his eyes on hers. He looked over her head at the Doctor whose anger seemed to have dissipated as quickly as it had come.
"I didn't want to," he began to explain desperately, "I didn't even know who she was. They told me to come and find her with this." He gestured toward the thing that until now Rose had just assumed was a wristwatch.
"I know you didn't, Jack," the Doctor said, barely above a whisper.
"Really, I didn't. I'm sorry," he insisted. When he looked into Rose's eyes he felt like he had known her all his life- like he had loved her all his life- and he had just tried to kill her.
"I know," she said, her hand tentatively touching his forearm.
Mickey almost tried to pull her back away but as he looked at the three people before him he somehow understood that there was something he couldn't understand going on. He didn't have time to think about it before he felt wind begin to blow colder, whipping pieces of litter around and around a few feet beyond them in the street.
What began as a faint winter breeze began to howl against nothing and, in the center, the black shape of a dog- a wolf- began to materialize.
The Doctor, Rose, and Jack looked around at it, too.
It was a shadow at first, but it began to take a solid, cold, metallic shape. Green light pulsated along the sutures in the metal as it finally stood there, inhuman, backlit eyes glaring at them.
"You have failed me," came a voice, trembling with laughter- not from the mouth of the metal wolf but from a speaker on its upper back. It didn't seem to be from the 'animal' at all, and Jack knew that it wasn't.
"Run!" he shouted and desperately looked around, trying to decide which way to go.
"This way," the Doctor said as he instinctively, without a thought, grabbed Rose's hand and led them toward the TARDIS.
Mickey's foot caught on his baggy work clothes and he tripped, catching himself on one knee, as they began to run.
The wolf gained on him, singling him out mindlessly as the most vulnerable target, its computer brain ticking away with mechanized bloodlust. Its mouth whirred open almost silently, two fangs descending that ended in fine needle points. A quick burst of fluid expelled itself as the wolf almost salivated though it knew no hunger.
Rose felt everything happening at once. The stranger's hand wrapped around hers without a word. She was surprised at first and almost jerked it away but found her hand gripping instead of pulling away. His hand was cool to the touch at first but quickly its warmth went up her arm and she felt completely safe until she heard Mickey cry out as he fell. She looked back around her shoulder and stopped dead but didn't let go of the stranger's hand- not being able to move.
"Mickey!"
Mickey felt like he was in a dream, one of those dreams where you try your hardest to scream but nothing comes out. He felt his hands and feet scrambling to get up. He finally stood and felt like his knees might collapse again, but he ran from sheer force of adrenaline. He heard the electronic jaws snap closed with all the force of a guillotine where he had just been, but he dared not look back.
The Doctor was relieved to see Mickey start to run again, but now he had to get Rose to just move her feet. She was afraid, and understandably so. He remembered the first time he'd helped her run away and remembered the way she had looked back. He wondered if that would ever happen now.
"Rose," he begged.
"How do you know--" she said, her head whipping around to look at him.
"Never mind that," he assured her and pulled her along and again all four of them were running.
The Doctor breathed a sigh of relief through his heavy panting when he saw the blue box.
Jack recognized it from that morning but this time it went deeper and he half expected what would be inside when he heard the key go in.
The four of them were seconds from protection behind the door when all four male hearts nearly stopped.
Rose screamed out in pain as the wolf's needles sank into her ankle.
Jack pulled out his gun and fired it at the nape of the wolf's neck, screaming with a boundless anger.
The dispelled blast bounced off the wolf, but the viscous computer let go, its fangs withdrawing to refill themselves as it ran back.
Rose exhaled sharply and sat down on the ground, her back against the TARDIS. She made a weak, breathy sound that sounded almost like a laugh as she grabbed her ankle, the tiny puncture wounds feeling huge and like nothing all at once.
"Get her inside," Jack said, his gun still trained in the direction the wolf had retreated, a memory that wasn't a memory showing him the way to the TARDIS's medical bay.
The Doctor scooped Rose up, her head lulling against his shoulder though her breathing remained steady as she slowly lapsed into unconsciousness.
Mickey's mind was reeling with guilt and fear and confusion but he followed, saying Rose's name over and over, sometimes out loud and sometimes in his mind.
The Doctor felt her body, warm against his, even smaller than he knew it to be and it seemed so frail now.
Rose again laughed, the pain was gone now and it didn't make any sense. She didn't know why she was laughing either. She felt the stranger pick her up and carry her inside the closet- no, it wasn't a closet- it was outside. He had carried her into a shed. It wasn't a shed- a room- a big room- many rooms. Her mind swirled around, disconnected thoughts seeming to be the best she could manage.
Jack backed gingerly inside, closing the door and turning around. He knew what would likely be in the robot's first injection- he only hoped he was right.
"You smell good," was the last thing Rose murmured under her breath before the final vestiges of her will to stay awake evaporated and she fell into a deep, calm, but unnatural sleep.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: T/PG-13
Status: Incomplete (but not by much)
Title: Red Bicycle
Pairings/Characters: The Doctor (Ten), young!Rose, young!Mickey, younger-Jackie, Boe!Jack; Ten/Rose, Ten/young!Rose
Spoiler Warnings: This story is AU post-Doomsday. It could take S3 into account, but it might not. I read my ficathon prompt over and over and this is the one idea that kept coming back. It is Rose pre-Doomsday, however, I do realize that it was one of the looser interpretations of my prompt. There is a very ambiguous reference to a Torchwood character (not Jack) in later chapters but you'd have to watch closely to catch it. The thing that's most important to understand about this story is that the Doctor has been through the events of Doomsday (at least) and the others have not.
Beta(s), other credit: fancy_galloway for beta-ing, jedi_of_urth for her plotting help
Summary/Public Notes: The Doctor decides to do something reckless to ease his conscience. A Time Agent is given an assignment that may change the history and future of the Universe. A teenage girl on a Council Estate in London is caught in the middle.
*[This summary could do with some work.]
**The reason for the delay is a good one: I had two important essays, a governor's school application, and a research paper I had to work on during the writing period. I also have an icon challenge that needs doing in the next week.
This story is a response to a challenge at the time_x_space Ficathon
Previous Chapter list:
Chapter One: Christmas Presents
Chapter Two: Breaking the Rules
Chapter Three: Orders from Above
Chapter Four: Any Other Day
Red Bicycle
The Doctor leaned the palms of his hands against the TARDIS console, rather bleakly considering what sort of job he could get on the Estate without unraveling the space-time continuum. He stood up slowly and pried his eyes off the monitor. There wasn't anything that unusual that he could tell. Jack was present somewhere between here and Cardiff and that made any reading a bit off. For a moment the Doctor wondered if any reading would ever be right again because of the Captain.
As if to answer his question the monitor crackled into white snow and the TARDIS's health seemed to suddenly further decline. The Doctor always had had a fairly spot-on intuition and if Jack had anything to do with why the TARDIS was ill then the repercussions could be far worse than he had first thought. He grabbed his jacket and ran out of the TARDIS. If he was right, and he usually was, then he could lose both of them forever...
Jack's telltale heart was the only thing he could hear as he silently followed Rose. She had no idea he was there as she briskly walked out of the school and down the veins of alleyways that connected her little part of the world. She almost skipped along with a childish abandon for a moment, readjusting her bag so it wouldn't fall down into any of the standing water pooled on the street.
He reached down and hooked his finger into the trigger and gently fingered the cool metal of the gun, but he didn't aim it. He had a clear line of sight. No one was around. Still, he couldn't do it. What could this girl have possibly done-- what was she going to do, in fact-- that was so wrong that she had to die for it?
Rose rubbed just above her eyebrow with her fingertips as she went around the corner. She exhaled heavily as she walked saw the little sandwich board and the building behind it. It was so familiar now that she didn't really see it and could just barely smell the petrol that was spattered on the pavement. When she walked inside she reflexively found a spot on a work bench that was mostly devoid of any recent grease spills or other muck and flopped her bag down.
"Oi, Mickey," she said as she tapped her foot to a familiar pair of dirty sneakers that were just visible beneath a car.
She stepped back with practiced timing to keep him from rolling into her as he pulled himself from beneath the car with his knees. He sat up, stabilizing himself with his feet as he looked up at her from the ground. She stifled a laugh as he grinned at her; some kind of greasy dark smear on his face looking like poorly applied stage make-up.
"How was school?"
"Awful. I got detention again," Rose said as she looked down idly at her fingernails. She looked back up since they weren't particularly interesting. "Pellington hates me."
Mickey broke eye contact with her and went back beneath the car but continued talking, "What'd you do now?"
"I was late. I really should go home, but I came by because... Shareen's brother is in the hospital. You think we should go see him?"
Mickey rolled back out again and stood up.
"Yeah. What's he in the hospital for?" He walked over to a utility sink and began washing the muck from his hands and arms.
"I dunno. Shareen said he--"
Rose never finished her statement because something in the very bottom of her intuition told her to look up from where she had come. She looked up just in time to see the Inspector's face peeking around and her eyes met his.
Mickey noticed that she had stopped mid-sentence and tried to see what had stopped her. When he did he felt like his stomach was reeling with a kind of unearthly cold. He stepped in front of Rose, though he wasn't very well armed-- he just had a dirty towel.
"Who the hell are you?" he asked.
Rose looked just around Mickey nervously in time to see the Inspector step into clear view and pull a gun on them.
"Don't move," he said, but there seemed to be some doubt- a decided lack of conviction- in his voice.
She couldn't even register that she was looking down the barrel of a deadly weapon- she could only hear alarm bells ringing in her head that it shouldn't be there at all.
The Doctor ran full speed down the familiar arteries until his eyes rested upon a sight that thrust him into desperate urgency. He stopped cold when ten feet in front of him, across the garage's entrance, was something the Doctor at first couldn't bring himself to understand. Jack Harkness was standing with a gun trained on Rose Tyler and Mickey Smith. He tried to assess the situation, but his Time Lord nature wouldn't let him see anything but the future that was trying to exert itself.
The pulling of the trigger. Everything past, everything future, absolutely everything dissolving in a roar of sound. Everything he knew- no matter how much it hurt- coming down to nothing. Everything gone. Everything bleeding out in a sea of hot, quickly-cooling human blood.
If he'd even had time to think he may have been able to think of some better response. But he couldn't think- not about anything.
"Jack, don't you dare," came the firm command, spewing more from boiling blood and breaking hearts than mind.
Jack instinctively turned the gun toward the voice. He'd thought he'd had the situation under control, even though it was not the situation he'd wanted, but this man suddenly made him lose any delusion of that.
"Jack!" Rose said, pushing past Mickey without a thought as she saw the gun in line with the stranger's chest. "Just... put the gun down," she pleaded. Somehow she felt- she knew- that the appeal would work. Neither of the men felt like strangers, even though she knew they should. It didn't make sense, but it didn't matter. All she wanted was both of them safe-- even though one of them had been holding a gun on her.
Jack replaced the gun in its holster and an ironic smile came across his lips. He felt himself instinctively preparing for some kind of fallout that never actually came.
Mickey nearly lunged toward him as soon as he heard the gun slip back into its place.
Rose grabbed his forearm and the other stranger's voice further deterred him.
"Don't, Mickey," the Doctor said in a calm, measured tone, his eyes never leaving Jack's now that he had them.
"How do you know my name?!" he demanded.
Part of the Doctor wanted to tell him. Wanted to tell her. But he couldn't-- not now. He glanced toward Rose and Mickey once with a pang of regret, but he wouldn't let his eyes linger. His attention had to be on Jack.
"Who do you work for?" he asked.
"What?" came all three replies.
"Jack, who do you work for?!" he asked. This didn't make any sense- why would Jack ever want to hurt Rose? There was only one way he ever would...
Jack felt himself losing control of the situation. It was a feeling that seemed to run down his arms into his fingers and he felt them go cold. Any pretentious, cocky vestige of a smile left his face. His fingers clinched up into his palms and he felt them press inward with so much force that he almost thought they were the only thing that kept him standing there. He looked at the man before him. He looked at the girl. He couldn't really decide which he wanted to look at more, but he couldn't keep eye contact with either of them. He only knew that what he had tried to do was so very wrong that he couldn't even comprehend it.
"Who is it?!" the Doctor continued, his eyes ablaze as he advanced a single step toward Jack.
Rose knew she should take the opportunity to run. She knew she and Mickey should try to get away. Still, she just stood there, staring. Her hand went to her mouth and she almost bit her fingernail nervously but her feet didn't move to walk away even when she felt Mickey tug her hand. She barely even felt it; instead, she just stared at the man standing there in a pinstripe suit. There was something very different about him, and she got the same feeling that she had felt when she had met 'Jack' this morning: there was the impulse to run and hide but the greater impulse was to run to him- to try to soothe the anger that she saw burning from the very depths of who he was.
"Rose--" Mickey pleaded.
She just shushed him, waiting with bated breath for the dream world she found herself trapped in to shatter.
"I'm a Time Agent," Jack replied eventually.
"Oh, what kind of--" Mickey began and again advanced toward Jack. "You try to kill her because--"
"Mickey, stop it," Rose insisted, putting herself between them and she boldly stepped forward, right between Jack and the Doctor, looking up and searching Jack's blue eyes.
"You were supposed to kill me?" she asked.
"Y-Yeah. Yeah, I was," he replied, finding it difficult to keep his eyes on hers. He looked over her head at the Doctor whose anger seemed to have dissipated as quickly as it had come.
"I didn't want to," he began to explain desperately, "I didn't even know who she was. They told me to come and find her with this." He gestured toward the thing that until now Rose had just assumed was a wristwatch.
"I know you didn't, Jack," the Doctor said, barely above a whisper.
"Really, I didn't. I'm sorry," he insisted. When he looked into Rose's eyes he felt like he had known her all his life- like he had loved her all his life- and he had just tried to kill her.
"I know," she said, her hand tentatively touching his forearm.
Mickey almost tried to pull her back away but as he looked at the three people before him he somehow understood that there was something he couldn't understand going on. He didn't have time to think about it before he felt wind begin to blow colder, whipping pieces of litter around and around a few feet beyond them in the street.
What began as a faint winter breeze began to howl against nothing and, in the center, the black shape of a dog- a wolf- began to materialize.
The Doctor, Rose, and Jack looked around at it, too.
It was a shadow at first, but it began to take a solid, cold, metallic shape. Green light pulsated along the sutures in the metal as it finally stood there, inhuman, backlit eyes glaring at them.
"You have failed me," came a voice, trembling with laughter- not from the mouth of the metal wolf but from a speaker on its upper back. It didn't seem to be from the 'animal' at all, and Jack knew that it wasn't.
"Run!" he shouted and desperately looked around, trying to decide which way to go.
"This way," the Doctor said as he instinctively, without a thought, grabbed Rose's hand and led them toward the TARDIS.
Mickey's foot caught on his baggy work clothes and he tripped, catching himself on one knee, as they began to run.
The wolf gained on him, singling him out mindlessly as the most vulnerable target, its computer brain ticking away with mechanized bloodlust. Its mouth whirred open almost silently, two fangs descending that ended in fine needle points. A quick burst of fluid expelled itself as the wolf almost salivated though it knew no hunger.
Rose felt everything happening at once. The stranger's hand wrapped around hers without a word. She was surprised at first and almost jerked it away but found her hand gripping instead of pulling away. His hand was cool to the touch at first but quickly its warmth went up her arm and she felt completely safe until she heard Mickey cry out as he fell. She looked back around her shoulder and stopped dead but didn't let go of the stranger's hand- not being able to move.
"Mickey!"
Mickey felt like he was in a dream, one of those dreams where you try your hardest to scream but nothing comes out. He felt his hands and feet scrambling to get up. He finally stood and felt like his knees might collapse again, but he ran from sheer force of adrenaline. He heard the electronic jaws snap closed with all the force of a guillotine where he had just been, but he dared not look back.
The Doctor was relieved to see Mickey start to run again, but now he had to get Rose to just move her feet. She was afraid, and understandably so. He remembered the first time he'd helped her run away and remembered the way she had looked back. He wondered if that would ever happen now.
"Rose," he begged.
"How do you know--" she said, her head whipping around to look at him.
"Never mind that," he assured her and pulled her along and again all four of them were running.
The Doctor breathed a sigh of relief through his heavy panting when he saw the blue box.
Jack recognized it from that morning but this time it went deeper and he half expected what would be inside when he heard the key go in.
The four of them were seconds from protection behind the door when all four male hearts nearly stopped.
Rose screamed out in pain as the wolf's needles sank into her ankle.
Jack pulled out his gun and fired it at the nape of the wolf's neck, screaming with a boundless anger.
The dispelled blast bounced off the wolf, but the viscous computer let go, its fangs withdrawing to refill themselves as it ran back.
Rose exhaled sharply and sat down on the ground, her back against the TARDIS. She made a weak, breathy sound that sounded almost like a laugh as she grabbed her ankle, the tiny puncture wounds feeling huge and like nothing all at once.
"Get her inside," Jack said, his gun still trained in the direction the wolf had retreated, a memory that wasn't a memory showing him the way to the TARDIS's medical bay.
The Doctor scooped Rose up, her head lulling against his shoulder though her breathing remained steady as she slowly lapsed into unconsciousness.
Mickey's mind was reeling with guilt and fear and confusion but he followed, saying Rose's name over and over, sometimes out loud and sometimes in his mind.
The Doctor felt her body, warm against his, even smaller than he knew it to be and it seemed so frail now.
Rose again laughed, the pain was gone now and it didn't make any sense. She didn't know why she was laughing either. She felt the stranger pick her up and carry her inside the closet- no, it wasn't a closet- it was outside. He had carried her into a shed. It wasn't a shed- a room- a big room- many rooms. Her mind swirled around, disconnected thoughts seeming to be the best she could manage.
Jack backed gingerly inside, closing the door and turning around. He knew what would likely be in the robot's first injection- he only hoped he was right.
"You smell good," was the last thing Rose murmured under her breath before the final vestiges of her will to stay awake evaporated and she fell into a deep, calm, but unnatural sleep.