Curtains [2/9]
Curtains
by ErtheChilde
‘I’m not a miracle worker.’
DISCLAIMER & OTHER WARNINGS
She spent the first fifteen minutes wandering down a hexagonal hallway, opening and closing what seemed to be an endless supply of guest rooms.
Who for, though, she wondered. There was no one on the TARDIS but her and the Doctor. Maybe at one point more people had lived here as well? People who had been lost in the War? Maybe his crew, or perhaps -
Oh! She came to a halt when she realized. What if his family lived on here with him? Parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles…? It’s definitely big enough in here…
The idea of going through rooms that may have once housed the Doctor’s dead people creeped her out a bit, and so she stopped investigating the doors until she came to what seemed to be a dead end.
‘Not get lost my arse,’ she pouted, turning to go back the way she came only to find herself in a wide, open hallways that looked like something from an M.C. Escher painting she had seen once at the Tate Modern.
It was like a dozen different hallways and stairwells had been connected to each other, and not in any logical fashion either. Ceilings grew out of floors and stairs led to nowhere, while others simply circled round into an endless spiral. Hardwood flooring grew into carpet drew into cobblestones, and while paintings of familiar Earth scenes hung side by side with floating alien sculptures.
Daunted by the confusion tangle of stairs and doorways, Rose quickly slipped through the nearest archway that looked a little less overwhelming than the others and followed it out of the odd stairwell and onto…
Blimey!
‘How the hell d’you get a cricket pitch in here?’ Rose asked, amazement and admiration colouring her tone as she looked around the vast green space that stretched out around her.
She had expected to walk into another loo or maybe a boiler room of some sort. This was beyond her expectations.
Some sort of artificial light streamed down from above, like a sun but not, and the sound of birds chirping in the distance momentarily made her forget that she wasn’t actually outside anywhere but still in the depths of the TARDIS.
‘Okay, well, that’s a bit cool, even if it’s not exactly my thing,’ she admitted as she wandered across the grassy surface.
The wicket itself was interesting, but not really her thing. She wasn’t a huge fan of watching sports - what was the point of watching when you could be doing? - and even if she had been, cricket wouldn’t have been her game of choice.
There was an inexplicable matte glass door at the end of the field, which she almost didn’t see until she walked straight into it. After recovering her misstep and examining it to see that it didn’t seem to lead anywhere, she opened it up and found herself wandering through a veritable labyrinth full of croquet courts - which, again, she was amazed by, but it wasn’t really her thing.
At the edge of the last court, an ivy trellis door led her into a domed corridor of leaves and branches. She followed it for several minutes, ducking low hanging twigs and vines, before the passage became larger and finally opened out onto an enormous, sprawling garden.
The same kind of artificial sun was radiating overhead, bathing the flowers and shrubs with light and heat, while a warm breeze whispered past her.
‘S’amazing,’ she gaped, turning around several times to see how far the place stretched. The door she had come through had gone, but she wasn’t too worried about it. If she wanted to leave, she somehow knew the TARDIS would provide her with a way to do so -
In the same way she appeared to have left a bottle of sunscreen and a stack of alien gossip magazines in a nicely shaded part of the garden.
‘That the plan for the day?’ Rose asked, though as expected there was no response. ‘Can’t complain about that!’
· ΘΣ ·
It was as if he was destined to finish fixing one thing, and then to have another thing break!
While finishing up the issue with the coolant, he’d accidentally entered the wrong control command in the guidance systems and deactivated the Vortex Shields - which had refused to turn back on first when he attempted the do it through the computer, and then because the manual trigger-mechanism under the button that reengaged them had stopped working. He’d ended up scrambling through the empty hallways to scavenge spare parts from whatever closet he happened upon, only to discover upon returning that the entire system was operating on auxiliary power.
After sorting that bit of trouble, he’d fixed a loose connection that would’ve caused a miscommunication between the central processing units of the TARDIS computers and the drive systems - only to realize that there was also a loose section of piping mucking those up as well.
He kept one eye on the mean-free path tracker to ensure their path back through the Vortex remained clear. If the TARDIS knocked into any debris or hit turbulence, it could throw off his work and possibly kill them all.
Another thing he wouldn’t be telling Rose.
After that, he headed down to fix the flux comparator in the Eye of Harmony, doing a quick gage of the energy flow. Eventually he’d need to top it up, and being unable to go back to Gallifrey, there were considerably fewer places in the universe he could go to in order to do that.
He was surprised to see the levels were still relatively stable, and then remembered that they were in Cardiff not a month and a half before. He did the mental calculations, and nodded in thoughtfully. The TARDIS would be alright for another year little bit - roughly a human year, to borrow Rose’s terms - which was a shorter period than he’d like, but better than he expected.
Oh, well, if he had to land in Cardiff again, he’d try to get the TARDIS to find somewhere a little more fun than the nineteenth century. Maybe before Cardiff was Cardiff - the Rift existed at a fixed spatial-temporal location, after all, but the continents moved around it and living organisms evolved around it.
Maybe they could visit Pangea in the Triassic - or Laurasia in the Cretaceous! He bet she’d like to see some of the more recognizable prehistoric species there, and he could show her just how wrong the films always got it. Or they could go snowshoeing across the glaciers in the Miocene, that’d be fun…
He realized he was doing it again and if he could glare at himself with stuffy Time Lord disapproval, he would be.
· ΘΣ ·
Rose wasn’t sure how long she spent lying in that field of pink and yellow flowers, soaking up the sun with her trainers cast off, but it felt like hours. Once she grew tired of reading about the celebrity feud between two famous Groske and Graske families, she lay back with an arm flung over her eyes and dozed. Grass tickled her ears and the backs of her ankles, and birdsong echoed across the meadow, lulling her to sleep.
She only woke when it became too hot for her in the sun, the beginnings of a sunburn flaring across her bared skin. She went looking for the exit and instead found a panelled glass door like something out of a greenhouse. Upon going through it, however, she found herself standing in front of a huge swimming pool.
‘Guess you really are a mind reader,’ she told the TARDIS. Just when she was contemplating taking a dip in just her underthings, she happened to look to one side and find a swimsuit and towel already laid out for her. The suit was yellow and frilly like something out of the nineteen fifties, but Rose was charmed by it and quickly pulled it on.
She did a few experimental lengths of the pool, idly thinking maybe she should put that into her routine - never know, we could end up on some planet where there’s only water and swimming’s the only way to get around! - and then hopped out to explore some more. There was a wood-panelled sauna nearby, and after she finished up in there she found a different bundle of clothes from her room waiting for her.
Upon leaving the pool by one door, she ended up walking into thin air before the world righted itself around her and she found herself in an armoury containing thousands of types of armour from different time periods - and probably different planets as well.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a flurry of unbelievable chambers - a mad scientist’s laboratory, a botanical house with hundreds of alien looking plants, a garage where someone had parked a Vespa and an old Volkswagon, and for some reason a room filled entirely with LEGO.
‘I knew it,’ she said, shaking her head with a fond smile on her face. ‘He really is just a big kid.’
The next door gave her a bit of pause.
It turned out there actually was a laundromat on the TARDIS. Why hadn’t he said anything when she’d asked? For that matter, why hadn’t the TARDIS shown her to it? Whenever she thought of anything she needed, the TARDIS tended to bring her right to it - or vice versa.
‘Unless you knew how important it was for me to visit my mum,’ Rose suggested tentatively, still unsure of how exactly one communicated with a sentient time ship. And the fact the Doctor had just gone along with it was a sign that maybe he had recognized Rose’s needs too.
‘Daft man,’ she murmured fondly as she closed the door behind her.
Around noonish - or what she expected to be noonish, considering she didn’t exactly have a watch on her and it could have been later - she started to get a bit peckish and found herself in a fully stocked Italian bistro, where the food had already been laid out.
‘If I didn’t know you were a sentient time-space ship, I’d be looking for House Elves,’ she remarked as she bit into some rather amazing garlic bread au gratin. There was no response from the ship that she could hear. ‘Well, however you do it - you’re a brilliant cook. Which is a good thing, cos I’m rubbish and I highly doubt the Doctor ever takes the time to eat more than those horrible bars from the food machine.’
She shuddered. She wasn’t really one for gourmet cooking, especially having grown up on Jackie Tyler’s attempts and then leftovers, but she knew enough to find anything made by the machine dull and tasteless.
The Doctor might be all for efficiency, but with his so-called superior senses, he should know better!
Licking the garlic off her fingers, she wondered if she should bring him anything to eat from here.
Probably make a fuss about me distracting him, she thought, feeling a little down at the thought. Or bringing food near the console.
She weighed her options, knowing he could go days without eating, but deciding to bring him a bit of food anyhow.
Hang his complaining, she decided. It would give her a chance to say thanks about him taking her home “to do laundry” without getting a gruff brush-off about it.
· ΘΣ ·
The Doctor soldered the last loose connection along the circuit board and then scanned the finished work. The sonic whirred a moment, searching, and then indicated that the time shields were fully re-instated.
Nodding in satisfaction, the Doctor headed back to console room to check the diagnostic readout once more and hope that this time he hadn’t managed to add to his problems instead of reducing them. That sometimes happened when he was in the middle of repairs.
Absently, he studied the navigation system and wondered whether he should take a look at the time element today or put it off until the next time Rose was asleep. Or visiting her mother. There wasn’t any hurry, really, but then again, he was travelling with a jeopardy friendly human…
Never know when you need an emergency microjump…
So he set about disconnecting the time element and replacing the wires before putting it back.
There. Ready for all Rose Tyler related emergencies.
There was a bit of a build-up of artron energy circulating the ship, and so he brought them back out of the Vortex in order to bleed a bit of it off into space. Ensuring that the atmospheric shields and gravity containment were properly operational, he flung open the front door -
And froze.
He hadn’t been paying attention to where the TARDIS had slipped out of the Vortex, but he knew it without having to go back and make sure.
In the distance, the familiar constellation seemed somewhat diminished, not least of all because there were several planets missing. The seventeen suns still burned on, their light reflecting across planets and moons that had survived the war. The two that had shone down on him as a boy seemed smaller, though.
Nothing but dust and debris remained, and he knew if he brought the TARDIS closer, he would come up on the floating corpses of dead Daleks and war TARDISes.
The very idea sickened him.
‘You have got to tell me why there’s an Italian bistro on your ship,’ Rose declared from somewhere behind him, not noticing his current emotional state. She brought with her the smell of food - cacciatore by the smell of it. ‘And for that matter, why d’you have a room full of…Doctor?’
Oh. Well, maybe she had noticed. Perceptive little ape.
His hand tightened on the door, which he had been preparing to slam.
He swallowed down the lump in his throat, wrestling with whether to brush it all off as nothing and lie or to tell her the truth.
No, he couldn’t do that. It was too much.
He turned and shot her an insubstantial smile, and nodded at the blackness beyond the door. ‘You forget, sometimes. How big it is. Seeing it makes even someone like me feel a bit small.’
She looked like she didn’t believe him, but didn’t call him on it. Instead, put the platter of whatever she was carrying on the jumpseat and strode forward.
‘Know what the cure to that is?’
He shot her an indulgent, slightly patronizing look. ‘Tell me.’
She took his hand and turned her attention to the vast inky darkness of the galaxy. ‘Don’t look at it alone.’
He couldn’t think of a word to say after that.