Pack Mentality
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is the property of the BBC
Title: Pack Mentality
Rating: K+
Word Count: ~2,500
Summary: She scattered the words throughout all of time and space, but why those particular words? In what manner, exactly, is Rose Tyler a bad wolf?
A/N: This was written because I am me, and I focus on lupine terminology. And because as prickly as the ninth incarnation of the Doctor may be (bless his hearts) he might as well have HIGHLY SOCIAL ORGANISM stamped across his forehead. It was supposed to be short and introspective. It ended up longish and a bit silly - which, let’s face it, is what happens to pretty much everything I write.
Also available on FF.net.
Rose Tyler woke up with the mother of all hangovers pounding in her skull, an unfamiliar pillow beneath her, an imposing stone ceiling above her and an alien life form wrapped around her. She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
When she woke up some indeterminate amount of time later, the headache was slightly less crippling but everything else remained unchanged. Same coarse fabric against her cheek. Same cracked and pitted stone overhead. Same Doctor against her back with his chin in his hand, glaring over her shoulder at the barred door set in the wall opposite them. They were curled up together on some poor imitation of a decent bed, she on her side with her knees tucked to her chest and he pressed against her with one arm flung over her. All in all, not the best place to wake up but certainly not the worst, even if she couldn’t remember exactly how she had gotten there.
She racked her brains and cleared her throat carefully before speaking. “Aztecs?” she whispered.
“That was last week,” he said, apparently unconcerned about being overheard. “We’re on Gubbio Seven, where the ‘usage of any mental-override technology is strictly forbidden.’” That last bit was quoted downright contemptuously and his glare at the door somehow intensified.
“Wha’ . . . ?”
“I tried to get us into the gardens using the psychic paper and they arrested us.”
“Oh. Why don’t I remember that?”
“They had to catch us before they could arrest us.”
“O’ course.”
The hand on her hip suddenly tugged up her shirt tail. She was so busy stifling a gasp of shock that the yelp of pain slipped out unimpeded. His hand immediately went still, but he levered himself up to peer at her exposed skin. She craned her neck to have a look too. There was an ugly mottled green and purple bruise about the size of her palm evenly centered between her last rib and the top of her hipbone.
“You had to go and get hit by a tranquilizer dart, didn’t you?” he said, prodding at the scab in the center of the bruise with one finger.
She hissed and flailed one hand for a few seconds before she managed to swat him away. “Don’t go gettin’ all high and mighty on me!” she snapped. “You’re in here, too.”
His glare shifted to her face without softening one whit. “Well I wasn’t going to leave you, now was I?”
A clatter echoed through the small room and his head snapped up, body tensing like a predator about to spring. Someone lanky and furry and armored was already slamming the door closed again, but there was a plastic tray on the floor where there hadn’t been one earlier.
“Dinner is served, lovebirds,” it - he? - said with a raspy laugh.
The Doctor made a sound in his throat very much like a growl. The guard laughed again as he moved away from the door. Rose heard another cell door open and close farther along.
“You may as well eat,” the Doctor said. And the glare was back, thankfully directed at the door again.
Rose wrinkled her nose. “Don’t think I could keep it down just now, supposing I even wanted to.”
“It won’t hurt you.”
“I’m really not hungry.”
He huffed. She could practically feel him rolling his eyes. “Go back to sleep, then.”
“Shouldn’t we be, I dunno, escaping or something?”
He tipped his head to look down at her, eyebrows lifted skeptically. “How’s your coordination again?”
She managed to kick him on the second try.
“Like I thought. Better to make a break for it after that drug’s worn off. Should only be a few more hours.”
“D’you have to work at being this insufferable or does it just come naturally?” she said.
“Don’t be like that,” he said. “How often do we get the chance for a nice lie-in between bouts of running for our lives?’
“You saying I should be happy about this?” she said incredulously.
“It’s really not too bad as far as imprisonment goes. They only want to keep us for a day or two anyway.”
“Doctor,” she said slowly. “Please don’t tell me we are staying here for two days.”
“Well, I never said that.” His grin was downright cheerful and only a little bit crazy. She would never understand him.
“Aren’t you two just precious?”
Their friend was back at the door. Rose jumped and the Doctor’s grin shifted into a glower faster than she could blink. The guard seemed unperturbed and bared a mouthful of needle-like teeth in what was presumably a smile.
“Mind you don’t get too precious or we’ll have to separate you,” he continued. “You aren’t supposed to enjoy your imprisonment, after all.”
It took a moment for Rose to catch on to what he was implying, but she felt her cheeks heating up when she did. She turned over, putting her back to the guard at the door and hiding her face in the Doctor’s jacket. He grumbled at her to mind her knees, but the arm on her waist tightened protectively. After a few moments she felt him relax a bit and settle a little deeper in their lumpy bed. Presumably the guard had wandered off again.
She tried to push away the embarrassment and concentrate on dredging her memories out of a drug-filled haze. Right. Aztecs had been last week. They had escaped ritual sacrifice thanks to a bit of string and a timely thunderstorm. After that, they had decided that there were safer ways to acquire chocolate. He had apologized by taking her to meet John Cadbury and letting her pick their next destination.
“You promised me animals,” she mumbled suddenly.
She felt the chuckle reverberating in his ribs. “That’s right.”
A zoo. A huge, intergalactic zoological and botanical garden. She remembered now. She had met alien people but hadn’t seen much in the way of alien animals. The Doctor, of course, couldn’t do anything by halves. When she’d asked, he’d said that he might take her to East Rannok to see the annual lok migration, or to the jungles of Delarespian to see the iridescent sunbees, or to Balentess Rin to see the floating reefs . . . or he could just take her to Gubbio Seven, the universe’s greatest asteroid-turned-park, to see everything.
She giggled suddenly.
“What?”
“It’s just . . . we came here to go to the zoo, but now we’re the ones in a cage and some furry alien on the outside is pointing and laughing at us.”
“Now, Rose,” he said in his best why-do-I-put-up-with-your-daft-species voice, “just because he’s got fur doesn’t mean he’s an animal.”
“I know that,” she said. “But think about it. He lives at this place and it’s crawling with tourists from everywhere. Imagine the peoplewatching.”
He chuckled again.
“They could probably do as many documentaries on the guests as they do on the animals,” she continued. “Get their own version of David Attenborough sneaking around the gardens with cameras.”
He laughed aloud. “Rose Tyler, you’d better be glad there aren’t any cameras around. I don’t think those drugs agreed with you.”
“Oi!” Her head popped up and almost collided with his.
His smile, the truly relaxed and happy one that she only rarely managed to coax out of him, was just as disarming as his glare if only for a very different reason. Seeing it at rather close quarters wasn’t helping matters either. She flopped down and hid in his jacket once more. He stroked her hair very lightly a few times. “Just go back to sleep,” he said gently.
But she couldn’t, of course. The tranquilizers had worn off just enough for her to realize that they were still in her system and making her embarrassingly loopy. And now she was thinking about zoos and documentaries and how the Doctor’s heartbeat was soothing and a little bit weird against her cheek.
Someone should do a documentary on him, she thought. Now, that would be useful film. I’d take notes and everything.
She could just imagine a narrator’s hushed, reverent tone in the background as the Doctor did yet another incomprehensible thing. It would be like one of those research programs where teams of scientists and students pored over hours of notes and observations trying to glen some understanding (because of course he couldn’t just tell them).
Speaking of incomprehensible . . . .
“Doctor? Why are you here, again?”
He sighed. “Psychic paper. Tranquilizer dart. Try to keep up.”
“No, I mean, right here,” she said and flapped her hand to indicate the general lack of personal space that was going on.
The door rattled again. This time, the Doctor really did growl and he sat up so fast that Rose squeaked.
“Too cozy to eat?” said the raspy voice. “Tough luck. You won’t get anything until breakfast . . . unless you ask very nicely.”
“We’re fine, thanks,” the Doctor said curtly.
“Suit yourself.” There was a scraping noise as the guard picked up the tray and then the door clanged shut again.
The Doctor settled down again. Rose curled up a little tighter and watched him with one eye.
He was making his usual show of bristling and posturing at a stranger he didn’t like. If they had been standing, she would have twined her fingers with his and stepped close, touching but not quite leaning. Nothing frightened her when she was at the Doctor’s side, and she made a point of letting him and the universe at large know it.
“He’s a Tanissian,” he said suddenly, nodding towards the door. “Most of the workers here are. They’re a friendly bunch, all in all. Sometimes a bit too friendly.”
She smothered a sigh. Typical. Another man shows the slightest bit of interest in her and the Doctor is there standing over her like a bulldog guarding a bone. Granted, considering the alarming frequency with which the “too friendly” ones tried to cop a feel, she couldn’t really object to him watching over her, especially while she was unconscious. The fact that he had been spooning her while she was unconscious was not lost on her, but she wasn’t bothered by it in the least. She decided not to examine that logic too closely.
He was safe. She understood that on some basic, fundamental level. From the moment he had taken her hand in that basement, she had trusted him. While she didn’t know much of anything about space travel or history or technology that made things bigger on the inside, Rose knew people. She knew that the Doctor was a good man, even if he didn’t always believe it. Even if he was often deadly dangerous to other people, he was safe to her.
The door rattled suddenly, making her jump, and the Doctor growled low in his chest. She wondered if it was something he always did when he was annoyed or if was just a means of communicating with the rude Tanissian. It wasn’t often that she was pressed up this close to him. Maybe she could make a study of it. The guard laughed hoarsely and moved on. Rose snuggled a little closer, in the interest of science, of course. He propped his chin on her shoulder.
She really did try to sleep, safe in the arms of her overprotective alien, but her mind wouldn’t let her. It rambled and wandered, touching briefly on one subject or another before moving on to something else entirely. Nature documentaries intersected with the Doctor’s not-quite admission that he’d allowed himself to get captured along with her, even though she wasn’t in any real danger. While he gave the impression of a prickly lone wolf, he was fiercely loyal and protective.
Her mind jumped back to some David Attenborough special or the other in which he had talked about the myth and the reality of wolves. What had stuck in her mind was irony of the lone wolf. The commonly accepted image was one of a confident and independent loner. In truth, the lone wolf was a miserable creature with an uncertain and dangerous life. It couldn’t hold a territory or bring down large prey alone, but it was more likely to be killed by its own kind than accepted. Only a lucky few managed to pair up with another loner and form a new pack together.
That was actually a bit too much like the Doctor for her liking.
He approached strangers with a sort of false bravado, half wary and half hopeful, expecting either comfort or confrontation and equally unsure of which he wanted. She had compared him to a bulldog, but even a fierce dog like that was too tame for him. He was wild and unpredictable, dangerous if provoked but gentle and even playful in his own sort of way. His presence was compelling and polarizing. People they met loved him or feared him (or, rather, did both to varying degrees) but no one ever forgot him. It was strange, then, how he managed to move on once the adventure was over and leave them all behind like he wasn’t affected at all.
All but one, she amended, pressing a little closer to him.
He shifted around a bit, obviously still a bit tense and very likely still watching the door.
“You could sleep too, you know,” she mumbled.
“Nah, don’t need to.”
“Bloody alien.”
“Oi!”
“Quit squirming and growling so I can sleep, then.”
“I am not growling,” he said, sounding very put-upon for a man who was currently cuddling her and had been, not thirty seconds ago, doing the very thing he so adamantly denied.
“Are so. I can feel it,” she said and thumped his chest.
“Time Lords do not growl,” he insisted.
He’d told her that he was the last of his kind. The agonizing loneliness of that little fact was unimaginable. Never mind the guilt stacked on top of it. In the middle of that crowded London street, she’d blithely told him that he didn’t have to be alone. She wasn’t a Time Lord, but that didn’t mean she was nothing. A lone wolf needed a companion. The Doctor needed one, too. For whatever reason, he had chosen her, a shop girl from twenty-first century Earth.
“I’d make a pretty bad wolf,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“For you - I mean, because - oh, never mind . . .” She wasn’t even sure of her own train of thought anymore. She meant to glare at him, but for some reason found it difficult to open her eyes.
“I mean it, now. Go to sleep.”
He was laughing at her. She was sure of it. But she’d meant what she said. She still wasn’t sure what he saw in her.
“Doesn’t mean I’m not gonna try,” she whispered just before she let sleep take hold.