Doctor Who fic: A New Journey (1/?)
Well, here I go again. I need my Doctor Who and I need it now, but apparently I'm going to have to use my imagination to satisfy my needs.
For those interested, I had a bit of fun making a promo video for this fic (Find it here at youtube.)
And without further ado...
----
Title: A New Journey
Author: itmustbetuesday
Pairing/Characters: 10/Rose (not in this chapter) and a familiar new companion for the Doctor
Rating: PG or K or what have you. It may change as the story progresses, but it’ll never reach Torchwood levels of gratuitous language and sex.
Warning: SPOILERS for season four finale and all that came before it.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Doctor Who, I make no profit, I only aim to ease the pain the BBC has inflicted upon my soul.
----
“Stop it!” the Doctor cried out frantically at the lurching TARDIS as if he were telling off a naughty child. He heard another groan from somewhere deep inside the hold and he fell when another tremor shook the entire ship.
“What’s happening?” he shouted as he scrambled to his feet, grabbing the monitor for support and fumbling for his sonic screwdriver. He pressed it against one of the monitor settings and a scan of the entire ship flashed on the screen. There was nothing going wrong internally, unless the scanner itself was malfunctioning. The Doctor was quite sure that wasn’t enough to put the TARDIS through such time-traveling turbulence.
“Exterior, exterior,” he ordered, hitting another setting with the sonic screwdriver and pulling up a radar image of the TARDIS and its surroundings.
He’d been traveling through the time vortex, calmly easing the TARDIS along when a sound like the groaning of metal gears and a loud snap preluded the violent throwing of the ship and her lone passenger.
The radar image showed the TARDIS in the vortex and nothing else.
“What’s going on?”
The Doctor fell to the floor with a shout as the TARDIS crash landed. He raised his head from the ground and looked around him, his mouth agape. Nothing. Slowly the Doctor raised himself to his feet and cautiously crossed the bridge. He had no idea what could be behind those two doors.
Making sure he had his sonic screwdriver in his pocket, the Doctor took a deep breath and then opened the door to find himself…
In London.
His brows knit together as he closed the doors of the TARDIS and looked about. There was a bit of a gridlock in the street and all the cars and taxis were honking their horns while on the footpath people milled past shop windows as they chatted on their mobile phones. Judging by the models of the cars, the way people were dressed and the bits of slang he could make out, the Doctor determined that he was somewhere in the early twenty-first century.
Of course.
He walked back into the TARDIS and checked to make sure nothing had been damaged during the landing. A full scan showed that all systems were operational, and there was nothing that indicated why the TARDIS had suddenly been caught on the fast track to the year 2011.
“What’s the matter, girl?” he asked, touching the console gently.
There was something wrong, but the Doctor couldn’t quite put his finger on it, and that always meant that trouble was around the corner.
Stepping back off the TARDIS, the Doctor looked up and down the street to see if anything was familiar. Nothing. It was just your average commercial street in London, complete with book shops and DVD stores and a little corner market. Nothing that was significant to the Doctor.
He decided to check around the corner, and was making the turn when he crashed into a young blonde woman.
“Oh, sorry.”
“Oh my god-it’s you!”
The Doctor stopped and stared at the woman. She was definitely familiar.
“Doctor!”
“Sally Sparrow?” he said in disbelief.
The young woman grinned. “You remember me. My god, it’s been years. But you’re a time-traveler-how long has it been for you?”
“’Bout the same,” he replied, looking around. “Listen Sally, you haven’t seen anything unusual around here, have you?”
“Like a time-traveler in a long brown coat in the middle of the greatest heat wave London’s seen in a decade?”
He looked at her and frowned. “Yeah, something like that.”
She shook her head. “No. Although some pretty weird things have happened around here since I saw you last.”
“Let’s see,” he asked, looking up thoughtfully as he removed his coat. “Last time I saw you… the ATMOS systems went toxic and the sky caught on fire… the Earth got stolen and sent halfway across the universe…”
Sally frowned.
“How’d you handle that one?” he asked with concern, noting the look on her face.
She shook her head. “Not good.”
The Doctor didn’t press further. “I’m sorry.”
Sally nodded. “You forgot my favorite one,” she continued, changing the subject.
“And what’s that?”
“The Titanic nearly crashing into Buckingham Palace.”
The Doctor half-smiled. “Right, of course.”
Sally Sparrow was beaming. She’d always hoped to see the Doctor again someday; there were so many questions that she felt he could answer.
“You know, it’s rather unusual for me to meet somebody twice,” he confessed. “Not that it hasn’t happened…”
She narrowed her eyes and couldn’t hide a small smile. “Are you accusing me of something, Doctor?”
“Accusing? What? No! Well, I’m just saying. Something’s wrong with my ship and I just ran into Sally Sparrow. ‘S gonna be a hell of a day.”
Sally frowned. “Doctor,” she said, looking around her. “Everything’s stopped.”
“What?”
It was quiet. There was no honking, no talking, no feet hitting the pavement. Everyone was frozen in place, like time had been cancelled out.
“Now that’s not right…”
All of a sudden two figures materialized on the sidewalk beside them wielding blaster guns. Sally yelped in surprise and instinctively stepped closer to the Doctor. One of the figures was some sort of humanoid koala bear, the other a young black man with a thin face and deep-set eyes.
“Finally,” said the young man. “We’ve been on your tail for a while now.”
“Have you?” the Doctor replied, warily eyeing the blasters in their hands. “And who would ‘we’ be, exactly?”
The stranger smiled, but not in a friendly way. “Come quietly and you might live to find out.”
“Oh,” said the Doctor with a laugh. “Now, if you’ve been following me then you’d know that I never come quietly.”
“Yeah?” the man replied, raising his eyebrows. He nodded at his koala-faced comrade and the creature shoved Sally backwards. She gasped as she lost her balance and a look of surprise froze on her face. In fact, her entire body froze.
“It’s a time-locked force-field,” the man explained as the koala-man aimed his blaster at Sally’s frozen form. “Do what we say or she’s dead.”
“Hang on a moment, hang on,” the Doctor said, raising his hands. “You’re saying that you’ve put a time lock on this entire street save this square metre of concrete we’re standing on?”
“Yeah?”
“And by ‘time lock’ you really mean you’ve just tapped in to the greatest public energy source-in this case, the sun-to stop all movement by using a molecular converter?”
“Um… yeah. How’d you know that?”
“Simple. There’s only way to freeze everything around you and still be able to move…”
The Doctor braced himself before quickly shoving both the man and his lackey backwards, causing them to freeze like Sally had done.
“And for you, that’s by using stolen technology.” He looked at the two frozen figures with a grave expression, surprised that he’d turned that trick around on them. “Can’t believe you didn’t see that coming.”
He turned from the two men and looked at Sally with a sigh. Slipping back into his brown coat, the Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver and adjusted the settings before pointing it at Sally. He caught her just before she could continue her fall.
“What-what happened? He pushed me and then you-”
“-stopped them. Sally, I’m sorry, but these men are after me and they’ve already threatened you. I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
“My ship. Now,” he continued before she could comment. “I’m going to have to reenergize the surrounding molecules which will start a chain reaction and everything around us will be able to move again, including those two lug heads behind us. We’re going to have to leg it around the corner and run fast into the TARDIS, do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation.
The Doctor couldn’t surprise the small smile that tugged at the corner of his lips. “Good. Now get ready.”
He pointed his sonic screwdriver in the direction they were to run and pressed the button. “Three… two…”
A loud honk from one of the cars on the street signaled his success.
“That’s ‘one,’ now let’s go!”
The Doctor took her hand and they ran around the corner, their would-be assailants shouting in frustration behind them as they regained mobility. The TARDIS was just ahead, but their two new friends were close behind them. The Doctor quickly opened the door and pulled Sally in behind him, slamming the door shut and locking it behind her.
“We made it!” she exclaimed victoriously as the Doctor secured the doors.
Sally looked around at the TARDIS interior with a gaze of appreciative wonder. It was even better than she remembered, but still just as freaky.
“They must’ve used some sort sensory tracking device to pull the TARDIS in,” the Doctor said urgently. He tossed his coat over the rail of the bridge and ran over to the console. “No, that can’t be. The TARDIS can detect tracking devices.” He ran a hand over his face. “Think think think…”
Sally turned in surprise when the doors behind her shook from a blast, followed by screams that were coming from the street.
“Sally, get away from there!”
She didn’t need telling twice. She ran to the Doctor’s side and looked at the monitor. She had no idea what she was looking at.
“They’re trying to blast through the doors! What do I need to do?” she asked.
“Just stay back and keep out of trouble.”
“Doctor, I can help if you tell me how!”
“I don’t know how!” he shouted back in frustration. He ran a hand through his hair, holding it above his head as he gathered all the pieces together.
Two conmen using remote molecular freezing technology that wouldn’t be developed until the sixty-third century carrying blasters from the forty-eighth. The way they’d rematerialized, using a space-temporal teleport…
“They’re time agents,” he said finally, lowering his hand and gesturing emphatically. “That’s it! No, they stole the teleport devices from time agents. Now they’re targeting me. They want the TARDIS.”
“So what does that mean?”
“They’re pirates.”
“Pirates?”
“We’ve got to run. They’re using some sort of tracking device that the TARDIS can’t detect, so they’ll probably be following us without our even knowing it.”
The Doctor started fiddling around the console and the ship began to move.
“Following us where? Where are we going?”
He stopped and looked at her. “No idea.”
The Doctor pulled a lever and the TARDIS jerked wildly, flinging Sally across the room. She grabbed onto the railing and turned and looked at the Doctor.
“Was that supposed to happen?” she shouted as the groaning of the ship grew louder.
“Oh yeah, that’s completely normal. You might want to hang on to something.”
“You think?”
“You said you wanted to help?” he asked as he frantically spun some sort of dial with one hand and pumped a lever with the other. “I need you to hold that button down and let go when I tell you.”
“Which button?” Sally asked incredulously.
She gestured at a couple but the Doctor just shook his head, still desperately pumping away. When she finally figured out the one he wanted she held it down and he stopped pumping the lever. She watched for his signal and when he gave her a nod she let go. The entire ship shuddered, but the Doctor didn’t seem alarmed by it.
“By the way, Sally,” he began calmly.
She met his gaze and he grinned.
“Welcome aboard."
For those interested, I had a bit of fun making a promo video for this fic (Find it here at youtube.)
And without further ado...
----
Title: A New Journey
Author: itmustbetuesday
Pairing/Characters: 10/Rose (not in this chapter) and a familiar new companion for the Doctor
Rating: PG or K or what have you. It may change as the story progresses, but it’ll never reach Torchwood levels of gratuitous language and sex.
Warning: SPOILERS for season four finale and all that came before it.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Doctor Who, I make no profit, I only aim to ease the pain the BBC has inflicted upon my soul.
----
“Stop it!” the Doctor cried out frantically at the lurching TARDIS as if he were telling off a naughty child. He heard another groan from somewhere deep inside the hold and he fell when another tremor shook the entire ship.
“What’s happening?” he shouted as he scrambled to his feet, grabbing the monitor for support and fumbling for his sonic screwdriver. He pressed it against one of the monitor settings and a scan of the entire ship flashed on the screen. There was nothing going wrong internally, unless the scanner itself was malfunctioning. The Doctor was quite sure that wasn’t enough to put the TARDIS through such time-traveling turbulence.
“Exterior, exterior,” he ordered, hitting another setting with the sonic screwdriver and pulling up a radar image of the TARDIS and its surroundings.
He’d been traveling through the time vortex, calmly easing the TARDIS along when a sound like the groaning of metal gears and a loud snap preluded the violent throwing of the ship and her lone passenger.
The radar image showed the TARDIS in the vortex and nothing else.
“What’s going on?”
The Doctor fell to the floor with a shout as the TARDIS crash landed. He raised his head from the ground and looked around him, his mouth agape. Nothing. Slowly the Doctor raised himself to his feet and cautiously crossed the bridge. He had no idea what could be behind those two doors.
Making sure he had his sonic screwdriver in his pocket, the Doctor took a deep breath and then opened the door to find himself…
In London.
His brows knit together as he closed the doors of the TARDIS and looked about. There was a bit of a gridlock in the street and all the cars and taxis were honking their horns while on the footpath people milled past shop windows as they chatted on their mobile phones. Judging by the models of the cars, the way people were dressed and the bits of slang he could make out, the Doctor determined that he was somewhere in the early twenty-first century.
Of course.
He walked back into the TARDIS and checked to make sure nothing had been damaged during the landing. A full scan showed that all systems were operational, and there was nothing that indicated why the TARDIS had suddenly been caught on the fast track to the year 2011.
“What’s the matter, girl?” he asked, touching the console gently.
There was something wrong, but the Doctor couldn’t quite put his finger on it, and that always meant that trouble was around the corner.
Stepping back off the TARDIS, the Doctor looked up and down the street to see if anything was familiar. Nothing. It was just your average commercial street in London, complete with book shops and DVD stores and a little corner market. Nothing that was significant to the Doctor.
He decided to check around the corner, and was making the turn when he crashed into a young blonde woman.
“Oh, sorry.”
“Oh my god-it’s you!”
The Doctor stopped and stared at the woman. She was definitely familiar.
“Doctor!”
“Sally Sparrow?” he said in disbelief.
The young woman grinned. “You remember me. My god, it’s been years. But you’re a time-traveler-how long has it been for you?”
“’Bout the same,” he replied, looking around. “Listen Sally, you haven’t seen anything unusual around here, have you?”
“Like a time-traveler in a long brown coat in the middle of the greatest heat wave London’s seen in a decade?”
He looked at her and frowned. “Yeah, something like that.”
She shook her head. “No. Although some pretty weird things have happened around here since I saw you last.”
“Let’s see,” he asked, looking up thoughtfully as he removed his coat. “Last time I saw you… the ATMOS systems went toxic and the sky caught on fire… the Earth got stolen and sent halfway across the universe…”
Sally frowned.
“How’d you handle that one?” he asked with concern, noting the look on her face.
She shook her head. “Not good.”
The Doctor didn’t press further. “I’m sorry.”
Sally nodded. “You forgot my favorite one,” she continued, changing the subject.
“And what’s that?”
“The Titanic nearly crashing into Buckingham Palace.”
The Doctor half-smiled. “Right, of course.”
Sally Sparrow was beaming. She’d always hoped to see the Doctor again someday; there were so many questions that she felt he could answer.
“You know, it’s rather unusual for me to meet somebody twice,” he confessed. “Not that it hasn’t happened…”
She narrowed her eyes and couldn’t hide a small smile. “Are you accusing me of something, Doctor?”
“Accusing? What? No! Well, I’m just saying. Something’s wrong with my ship and I just ran into Sally Sparrow. ‘S gonna be a hell of a day.”
Sally frowned. “Doctor,” she said, looking around her. “Everything’s stopped.”
“What?”
It was quiet. There was no honking, no talking, no feet hitting the pavement. Everyone was frozen in place, like time had been cancelled out.
“Now that’s not right…”
All of a sudden two figures materialized on the sidewalk beside them wielding blaster guns. Sally yelped in surprise and instinctively stepped closer to the Doctor. One of the figures was some sort of humanoid koala bear, the other a young black man with a thin face and deep-set eyes.
“Finally,” said the young man. “We’ve been on your tail for a while now.”
“Have you?” the Doctor replied, warily eyeing the blasters in their hands. “And who would ‘we’ be, exactly?”
The stranger smiled, but not in a friendly way. “Come quietly and you might live to find out.”
“Oh,” said the Doctor with a laugh. “Now, if you’ve been following me then you’d know that I never come quietly.”
“Yeah?” the man replied, raising his eyebrows. He nodded at his koala-faced comrade and the creature shoved Sally backwards. She gasped as she lost her balance and a look of surprise froze on her face. In fact, her entire body froze.
“It’s a time-locked force-field,” the man explained as the koala-man aimed his blaster at Sally’s frozen form. “Do what we say or she’s dead.”
“Hang on a moment, hang on,” the Doctor said, raising his hands. “You’re saying that you’ve put a time lock on this entire street save this square metre of concrete we’re standing on?”
“Yeah?”
“And by ‘time lock’ you really mean you’ve just tapped in to the greatest public energy source-in this case, the sun-to stop all movement by using a molecular converter?”
“Um… yeah. How’d you know that?”
“Simple. There’s only way to freeze everything around you and still be able to move…”
The Doctor braced himself before quickly shoving both the man and his lackey backwards, causing them to freeze like Sally had done.
“And for you, that’s by using stolen technology.” He looked at the two frozen figures with a grave expression, surprised that he’d turned that trick around on them. “Can’t believe you didn’t see that coming.”
He turned from the two men and looked at Sally with a sigh. Slipping back into his brown coat, the Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver and adjusted the settings before pointing it at Sally. He caught her just before she could continue her fall.
“What-what happened? He pushed me and then you-”
“-stopped them. Sally, I’m sorry, but these men are after me and they’ve already threatened you. I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
“My ship. Now,” he continued before she could comment. “I’m going to have to reenergize the surrounding molecules which will start a chain reaction and everything around us will be able to move again, including those two lug heads behind us. We’re going to have to leg it around the corner and run fast into the TARDIS, do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation.
The Doctor couldn’t surprise the small smile that tugged at the corner of his lips. “Good. Now get ready.”
He pointed his sonic screwdriver in the direction they were to run and pressed the button. “Three… two…”
A loud honk from one of the cars on the street signaled his success.
“That’s ‘one,’ now let’s go!”
The Doctor took her hand and they ran around the corner, their would-be assailants shouting in frustration behind them as they regained mobility. The TARDIS was just ahead, but their two new friends were close behind them. The Doctor quickly opened the door and pulled Sally in behind him, slamming the door shut and locking it behind her.
“We made it!” she exclaimed victoriously as the Doctor secured the doors.
Sally looked around at the TARDIS interior with a gaze of appreciative wonder. It was even better than she remembered, but still just as freaky.
“They must’ve used some sort sensory tracking device to pull the TARDIS in,” the Doctor said urgently. He tossed his coat over the rail of the bridge and ran over to the console. “No, that can’t be. The TARDIS can detect tracking devices.” He ran a hand over his face. “Think think think…”
Sally turned in surprise when the doors behind her shook from a blast, followed by screams that were coming from the street.
“Sally, get away from there!”
She didn’t need telling twice. She ran to the Doctor’s side and looked at the monitor. She had no idea what she was looking at.
“They’re trying to blast through the doors! What do I need to do?” she asked.
“Just stay back and keep out of trouble.”
“Doctor, I can help if you tell me how!”
“I don’t know how!” he shouted back in frustration. He ran a hand through his hair, holding it above his head as he gathered all the pieces together.
Two conmen using remote molecular freezing technology that wouldn’t be developed until the sixty-third century carrying blasters from the forty-eighth. The way they’d rematerialized, using a space-temporal teleport…
“They’re time agents,” he said finally, lowering his hand and gesturing emphatically. “That’s it! No, they stole the teleport devices from time agents. Now they’re targeting me. They want the TARDIS.”
“So what does that mean?”
“They’re pirates.”
“Pirates?”
“We’ve got to run. They’re using some sort of tracking device that the TARDIS can’t detect, so they’ll probably be following us without our even knowing it.”
The Doctor started fiddling around the console and the ship began to move.
“Following us where? Where are we going?”
He stopped and looked at her. “No idea.”
The Doctor pulled a lever and the TARDIS jerked wildly, flinging Sally across the room. She grabbed onto the railing and turned and looked at the Doctor.
“Was that supposed to happen?” she shouted as the groaning of the ship grew louder.
“Oh yeah, that’s completely normal. You might want to hang on to something.”
“You think?”
“You said you wanted to help?” he asked as he frantically spun some sort of dial with one hand and pumped a lever with the other. “I need you to hold that button down and let go when I tell you.”
“Which button?” Sally asked incredulously.
She gestured at a couple but the Doctor just shook his head, still desperately pumping away. When she finally figured out the one he wanted she held it down and he stopped pumping the lever. She watched for his signal and when he gave her a nod she let go. The entire ship shuddered, but the Doctor didn’t seem alarmed by it.
“By the way, Sally,” he began calmly.
She met his gaze and he grinned.
“Welcome aboard."