Fic Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 21: Time Is Running Out
Title: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 21: Time is Running Out
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Characters/Pairings: Valeyard!Ten
Rating: PG-13
Excerpt: This time he would fix it...
Word Count: 5,725
Disclaimer: Until she’s Jossed, Twelve is mine-but of course, based entirely on stuff that ain’t mine… All hail Auntie Beeb! And the pictures included in the text aren’t mine. I got them off Google images, but now I can’t remember where.\
A/N*: Continuing Part II of Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse. Which, if you haven’t read yet, will give you important backstory and character details which are essential to this ‘verse (the link to the GitM masterlist is provided below). This series is a sort of Season Two. Also written before the end of DW season 6, so some details have gone AU.
Part I: Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse Masterlist
Part II: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12
Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18
Chapter 19 Chapter 20
This time he would fix it.
He would fix everything!
“Weeeellll, here we are now,” purred the Tenth Doctor to no one in particular.
His self-satisfied voice echoed off the hard surfaces of the cavernous console room.
For just a moment, he’d forgotten he was alone.
He’d landed on Transboolian, however any initial smugness about his ingenious plan quickly dissolved. Unhappily reminded of recent events, the gloating abruptly changed and he was now eager to get on with his mission. As usual, he covered it with anxious impatience, and strode purposefully around the console, flipping off switches with pursed lips.
There was also some horribly annoying alarm going off in a particularly crotchety way that was very bothersome indeed!
Ten blew out his frustration forcefully enough to flutter his fringe and pulled the monitor towards him. The screen showed him how there was a fault in the TARDIS’s Time Track Crossing Protection Protocol within the Governing Circuits. And while it must’ve come loose after that rather bumpy ride out of Gallifrey’s atmosphere, the Doctor decided it could wait, as most repairs on the ship could. There certainly weren’t any Timelords to bump into around here, he reasoned to himself.
After all, he was the only one gallivanting throughout the universe… again…
He switched off its shrill, relentless whining and busied himself for his adventure.
The Doctor had decided to find the Cave of Mysteries and discover the monk’s hiding place. He’d remembered Marette’s story about the Gem of Salvation, how it had been found by the colonist’s Elders from Sto and had shown them the way to their heart’s desire. He also remembered her tale of how extraordinary it seemed, and how men had killed each other in a greedy attempt to claim it and wield the power for themselves.
He remembered that night of the Emergence and the Death Winds as well. He could still hear the muffled scream of Marette and her nephew as they were obliterated into strands of DNA right in front of him as his hand stretched out impotently to save them. He also remembered his panic of losing Twelve in the crush of the panic…
Losing Twelve…
He shook it off. After all he couldn’t afford to be weepy and grief-stricken now. He had things to do, alien amulets to find, great cosmic wrongs to right!
But first, he needed a wash and a change of clothes-his were still filthy from enduring his nightmare on Gallifrey, and he couldn’t shake the feeling of Death crawling over him like so many ants. He took the main staircase up two at a time and directly after washing up headed for the wardrobe, knowing that the TARDIS must still have some kit in his size yet.
The giant wardrobe of the TARDIS was a filing cabinet of epochs past and a sort of musty old stasis chamber for the clothing of all of his former selves. Walking its meandering corridors, he passed his old giant raccoon fur jacket, the Victorian ties, frilly shirts, wide-lapel suit jackets, garish plaids and rack after rack of familiar old tweed trousers.
He didn’t know why he kept any of this old junk.
Although he had been rather glad to find his old brown and blue pinstriped suits still hanging on the racks after his reanimation.
But he had no wish to use any them now.
He skipped over his incarnation’s section of the wardrobe and kept going, pushing the grimy metal hangers over their rods and fingering the wool nubbins, sleek satins and smooth velvets until he found what he’d had in mind.
It was perfect. And just in his size… Almost as though it’d been made for him.
He slipped into a slim-cut charcoal and light grey pinstriped suit and pulled on his old black Chucks-Cos if you’re gonna play the part of Chief Mourner, you might as well go all out, right? He chuckled at his image in the long wardrobe mirror. He looked pretty good, he had to admit. His Sixth self was right: He could never resist a touch of the Grand Guignol!
After fixing his cuffs just so he ran a hand through his hair, reveling in the feel of it-the way each silky chestnut strand of hair tickled his fingers, the pleasant pressure of his fingertips on his scalp… It was the first pleasant thing he’d felt in days.
Bored in his leisure, he ran back downstairs and put on the long black coat after giving it a good shake, noting that the TARDIS had already cleaned it in his absence.
He fished his sonic from his pocket and spun a half pirouette on his heel. “Well, old girl,” he crowed, addressing the TARDIS, “here’s hoping you’ve brought me to where I needed to go once again!”
He stepped out onto the Transboolian soil to find himself in yet another bloody cave.
“Brilliant,” he muttered sarcastically, rolling his eyes, however in another few steps he realised that indeed, it was brilliant.
“Ooohhh. You’re not a cave at all,” he gushed, inspecting the pockmarked walls. “You’re a troglodyte city! A very, very old city!” He raked his torch further down the passageway and illuminated a very neat little warren of rounded-passageways with sandy floors. Each passage wound this way and that. Some went uphill or upstairs, with even, well-chiseled steps at a reasonable incline, perfectly manageable for people lugging awkward or heavy payloads, as long as they weren’t too large to fit through the passages. Other passageways circled down and down-and led to still more rooms and chambers. One room even had an expertly fashioned stone catwalk bridging two passageways together over yet another passageway snaking underneath.
This was incredibly complicated and intricate work. Whatever ancient civilisation had produced it had been highly advanced. It was certainly much higher quality work than his own people had used to create the tunnels under Rassilon’s tomb in the Death Zone.
His blood chilled at the memory of the catacombs under the Dark Tower, finding the visions of Rose and everyone else there.
Rose, I want to hug you… I’ve missed you so much. I just want to hug you…
But she’d looked so completely herself! So completely perfect, completely beautiful and completely Rose…
And just like a life-sized ancient stone statue, she’d been constructed completely from his memory.
“Stop it,” he demanded out loud.
There was no need for this maudlin self-pity. Soon, these memories would be erased and everything that was wrong would be put to right!
After a good fifteen minutes of exploration, it appeared to the Doctor that several thousand people could actually live down here, if they needed to.
It sickened him to think of the Death Winds and all of those colonists who might have survived if only they had reached the shelter of this cave in time.
He decided he couldn’t think about that either.
Maybe he could do something about that, too.
He sternly reminded himself again that if he’d had any luck in choosing his landing site then he wasn’t far away from a device that could see to it that he would never be tormented by his memory of the lost again!
Cos, he knew that if he was right in his calculations, he should be close. And while it was true he had no idea what precisely he was looking for beyond Marette’s mythical description of the function of the Gem of Salvation, he knew that if it could predict the desires of those that held it, then the material it was formed out of must have some sort of telepathic ability. And the only materials he knew of that could come close to that description was Palladite, Opaque Illudium or Bosesium. And if he was lucky, very, very lucky, it would be Crystallized Chronosium-and he would be in business!
A flick of his sonic told him that materials containing telepathic elements were indeed contained nearby. The Doctor clapped and rubbed his hands together in excitement. Turning on his heels, he went off in search of his reward.
Somehow the monk had found this old underground city and had hidden himself and his Gem of Salvation away from the townspeople who sought to exploit it. This was actually not a difficult thing to do considering all the naturally existing warren of caves and crannies pockmarking the landscape around Transboolian. One could look for years and not find this place; however the Doctor reckoned that the monk simply asked the gem to find him the perfect hiding place, and his treasure obeyed. The hostile citizens would doubtlessly have recognised the futility-or would have given up their search even after years of looking-and left the monk and the gem unmolested for decades.
All the same, the Doctor bet that the covetous Transboolians had lacked a trusty sonic screwdriver…
He continued to weave further into the city, down into the lower levels-the newer parts-as directed by the sonic. As he descended, the chiseled walls became lower, narrower and distinctly rougher. This section appeared unfinished, like a quick sketch in an architect’s plan-book, rather than an entirely completed idea. There were less adjoining rooms, no ornamentation on the walls and more of a tunnel feel rather than a warren. Whatever this section was, the Doctor deduced that it was not built to enhance the sociability of the community and was made for some kind of necessity. Although what function it fulfilled precisely, he couldn’t yet tell. Grain storage perhaps? If so he didn’t see any evidence of grain…
With a sharp turn, his torch showed that the path ahead now tunneled sharply down a flight of stone stairs. The stairs themselves disappeared off the edge of the light of the torch, giving them an impression of stretching endlessly into the depths of the planet’s core.
Checking his sonic again reassured him that he was, indeed, headed the right way.
He shrugged and headed down. Long shadows streaked behind him by the jangle of the torch as he trudged down the path, looking like a lanky shadow himself, clad all in black. The stairs ticked by underneath his feet like railroad ties. He counted his heartsbeats as the minutes passed.
After a while he began to sense a change in the air.
While previously there had only been the dry, cold, sandy smell of rock, there was now a faint tang of water and a distinct feel of a higher humidity point in the air.
Perhaps the ancient underground community had exhausted their water supplies and had desperately dug further into the depths to find suitable drinking water?
The Doctor continued to shine his torch along the rough-hewn walls and told himself that yes, this must be the case-although he could no longer ignore the little hairs that were standing up on his arms and neck…
He set his mouth into a big, skeptical U and stilled his descent for a moment.
He couldn’t hear anything aside from his own beating hearts.
“Stop being a baby,” he muttered to himself and kept moving.
Out of the shadows, his torch finally illuminated a huge stone door that blocked his way. It was round, and it was taller than him, just like a millstone in a gristmill. It filled the entire passageway-and there was also a small depression dug into the centre of the circle, just big enough to put two hands into.
Why would they need to cordon off a passageway to water? He wondered, and then thought that perhaps there had been a flood at some time or another.
He stuffed his fingers into the small hole and pulled the stone back. “Blimey!” He grunted with the weight of it. He pushed it back with a dull thud and quickly deduced that if he simply let the stone roll back into place he would be locked inside the cave forever.
“That’s odd…” the Doctor said to no one in particular, and kicked a big rock he found on the other side of the doorway over to wedge under the stone door to hold it securely open.
Once that was sorted, he scanned his torch around again to discover he was in a gigantic cave! But this was a proper cave-a natural cavern this time-rimmed with impressive stalactites and stalagmites that gave him the feel of having walked into the gaping mouth of an enormous, toothy beast!
In this section, the stairs were gone, so the Doctor followed the natural slope of the cave floor down to the pool of glassy clear water at the bottom.
“Awwww, that’s beautiful!” he breathed, noting how the limestone deposits gave way in some areas to attractively colourful speleothem that emerged like rock candy clusters or massive icicles hanging from the ceiling. He saw red bands and pinkish glazes on the rocks, yellow and green spears thrusting through the crust of the cave-an exotic kaleidoscope of colours from the mix of minerals and happenstance over the centuries.
Then he noticed the glowing flecks on the cave walls. He switched his torch off and allowed his eyes to adjust to the shining phosphorescent green of the glow worms, their presence giving the effect of stars glittering overhead in a subterranean sky. Their light also formed speckled, sparkling patterns on the mirrored surface of the clear pool below. Its water was so clear and still that objects seemed to be sitting on the floor, partially hidden by a veneer of colour. This eerie effect made the pool itself look less like a pool, and more like a portal to an alternate universe, as the brain had a difficult time comprehending that standing liquid could be that clear.
The Doctor flashed the light on again to light up the deposits in the massive stalactites, some pointy and dangerous looking, others looking like soda straws or spun glass affixed to the roof; some were bulbous, like polyps; and still others delicate and lacy, like angel’s wings or Florentines. These giant, open-air reefs shone back, a marbled, wet mixture of calcium carbonate, assorted minerals and sand. To the Doctor, they looked like the glistening spires of the Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s Cathedral in Spain after a rainstorm. A cathedral, which, he dourly noted, was in Barcelona.
The city, not the planet…
He raked his fingers through his hair impatiently and checked his sonic again.
It led him over to an area where the cavern appeared to narrow and turn. He made his way over, walking around the monolithic stone teeth of stalagmites. Situated a tad higher up, the water did not follow here. Clicking on his torch again, he shined the light around into the darker, deeper recesses of the adjoining cave.
His stomach gave a lurch when he saw a wall...
Yet there was a part of him that could hardly believe it. He stepped forward to inspect it and then moved backwards. Yep, a wall. A man-made wall! He could see sloppy piles of mortar in-between the rocks. There was a wall in the middle of a cave! Moreover, it looked like a hastily built wall built in the middle of a cave...
Now why would they need a wall?
More importantly: Was it to keep something in or out?
He stepped forward again, and stumbled over something.
His torchlight landed on a sparkly, ancient skeleton that looked more like sand than bone. It was cemented to the floor by age and calcite. It glittered like a raw sugar coated baked confection.
The Doctor wondered if this could possibly be the missing monk?
But why then would the stone door at the top of the passage be built to lock from the outside of the cave?
Sensitively avoiding the remains, he moved forward again and pressed his ear to the crudely made mortared wall. He heard nothing. Yet the sonic told him that the object he was looking for was behind this wall.
Brilliant…
First, he used his sonic to resonate the concrete of a section of the wall, and then he removed a ballpoint pen from his black coat and shoved it into a join in the cement. The wall was very old, and had endured the dripping water in the cave for at least fifty years if the monk had built it-and much, much longer if it had been built by the native species of the planet before the colonists from Sto had arrived. Whatever the case, the Doctor reckoned that if living things had been relegated to the other side of the wall, chances were very high that by now, nothing remained alive. Indeed, with the indigenous simple organisms, creepy crawlies and other troglobite thingies that habitually populated caves, there shouldn’t be any evidence left at all of anything bigger that had died out for lack of food.
“You, Bonsey,” he said, cheerily addressing the skeleton under him, “are only here because oozing deposits cemented you into the ground. Not that that’s a comfort or anything…” The Doctor tipped an imaginary hat to his sandy ivory friend and returned to digging stones out of the wall.
******
After an hour the Doctor had removed enough stones to shimmy through the wall, however initial peeks with his torch revealed that his initial analysis that this section was no longer inhabited seemed correct. This new section of the cave was much smaller, both in height and width. It also lacked the showy and impressive ornaments perforating into the room that seemed so prolific in the proper cave-as there was no calcite homage to Gaudí in here, only a roundish-shaped cavern-and no glow worms, either.
Perhaps sealing off the smaller, less grandiose cavern had exhausted the air in the space, eventually killing off whatever had been in it? He shrugged.
The Doctor decided that even if this was the case, the last hour with airflow restored should have brought enough breathable air inside for a Timelord to survive a quick spelunking.
He slipped inside.
It took him no time at all to find the gem.
In the centre of his small, walled-up cavern stood a carved stone plinth, on top of which rested a deep, gold bowl. Inside, was a vividly coloured violet crystal sitting in water: The Gem of Salvation!
He’d found it!
But before he dipped his hand inside the bowl, his brain questioned the possibility of standing water remaining so long in a room with little apparent evaporation…
He reached into his pocket, pulled out the pen again, and dipped it into the bowl.
He was so intent on being careful not to spill or splash any of the liquid, he failed to notice the shadows moving in the darkness.
Using his tool, he flipped the gem out of the bowl and onto the floor. Tiny little drops of liquid from the gem and the inertia of the flip dropped onto the stone floor and began to smoke.
His pen was slowly melting as well…
Acid!
He recognised its hallmarks. It was Base Tellurium, an acid similar to Earth’s Nitric Acid-gold was insoluble, but the Gem of Salvation was made of Crystallized Chronosium, a material more like tempered glass, and therefore impervious as well.
His fingers, however were another matter…
Regardless of the danger, he felt a surge of triumph-Crystallized Chronosium! He’d known it! This is what he’d been hoping for! Now all he had to do was figure out how to get it.
But surely that would be a piece of cake for somebody like him…
And now he also understood why the room had been sealed off from oxygen flow-to delay the evaporation process! And also to avoid the nasty habit of explosion if it should touch organic materials-like a stray troglobite creature-as Base Tellurium was highly reactive when in contact with anything that was soluble. Indeed, cotton, stone, most metals and especially skin would not only dissolve, but any organic materials would surely cause a violent reaction akin to explosion.
He flicked the pen away and looked at the tiny, smouldering holes in the floor that his small splatter had caused. Luckily it was not enough for a huge reaction, although the fumes were still highly toxic.
Still, it was breathable enough for a Timelord in small doses, at least.
The Doctor bent down and pushed the gem around in the dirt with his sonic to absorb the remainder of the acid. Once he was finished, he withdrew a kerchief from the black coat pocket and tipped it into it. No burns. Satisfied that the gem was acid free he chanced to hold it.
BEWARE!
It was a flash, just a word! A psychic flash in his mind!
Was it the gem?
It came again:
BEWARE!
It had to be coming from the gem!
BEWARE!
It was! It was the gem! The Crystallized Chronosium was conveying messages to him telepathically!
He’d handled telepathic crystals before, but none this powerful.
BEWARE!!!
The warning grew louder.
Then he saw the movement in the cavern… and his stomach plunged with dread…
The Shades…
He could see them scampering about beyond the lighted ring of his torch. They moved fast because they were slight-like children-which is why they were also known throughout the galaxy in all the places they appeared by their other name of Ghoul Children. Except you would never see normal children like this: They were born sightless, their eyes having disappeared through evolution due to their subterranean life, which also made them semi-transparent, like one of those deep water fishes on nature programmes. They also had multiple mouths, to suck out all of the nutrients out of the rocks, dirt and calorie deprived surroundings of their hostile environments underground.
They also did not reproduce, but instead would infect and transform other beings into new members of their species…
And apparently they thought the Doctor would make a good flatmate…
Just outside the range of his torch they were gathering. Jumping and crawling, they looked practically giddy to have a new potential in their midst. The Doctor backed himself towards the door, but The Shades had already anticipated his exit strategy and some had broken off to begin to swarm in from the sides where his light could not reach.
BEWARE!
The gem he was holding was still giving off powerful messages of imminent doom. Impulsively, he wanted to move his light beam towards his exit; yet instinctively, he knew that if he were to move it quickly, they would fill in the darkness he would leave behind. And that was where The Shades were as deadly as the Weeping Angels and the Vashta Nerada combined: One wrong move and they would pounce. And just like the Vashta Nerada, their semi-transparent, sensitive subterranean skins were repelled by light-but unlike them, not completely deterred by it.
His simple little LED torch would not hold them off for long…
The Doctor knew that their skins would soon acclimate to the light, and once they tired of this game of cat and mouse, they would rush him.
He kept backing towards the door, his peripheral vision scanning the narrowing cone of darkness to the side of him.
Suddenly he saw a few pasty, silvery arms in the light. Tentative, briefly, they were pushing their limits, testing the waters.
He didn’t have much time now…
BEWARE!
Holy bugger! They were crawling on the ceiling!
He bolted backwards, unable to see if any had filled into the darkness behind him, but The Shades on the ceiling were getting closer. He was also able to see entire bodies filing into the light! He reckoned that they would never let him get beyond the stone doorway into the main cave. Soon they would charge him and he would be one of them! The (Somewhat) Last of the Timelords, sucked into the shadowy, desperate existence of the dreadful Shades…
The silvery bodies forming around him seemed to swell in numbers and then they surged forward, only meters away.
There had to be a way he could get out of this.
His mind raced to think of one last-ditch effort he could make.
Of course!!
There was no way that this would be how it all ended for him!
Inspired, the Doctor bent down, picked up a large, dusty rock, and with a sly smile, pitched it at the deep, gold bowl on the plinth, smacking it broadside. The bowl tumbled spectacularly, spilling acid in a cartwheeling motion into the air, splashing the ceiling and instantly reacting to the organic matter it touched-namely all The Shades that were in the spray radius-which instantly caused a highly reactive combustible reaction.
It was kill or be killed, he justified to himself. A pretty ingenious solution, really.
The small, low-ceilinged room erupted with a toxic fireball.
As the immolating Shades screamed, the others were too startled and terrified to charge him-but the Doctor knew that soon they would be enraged, and would come for vengeance.
The Doctor, only a meter away from the doorway, took his chance and ran, stuffing himself through the hole he had made and sprinted through the stalagmite-ridden main cave and up the dirt incline to the tunnel.
Now he understood why that locking stone door was there…
Not bothering to check to see if any creatures were still behind him, he kicked the rock holding the large, round stone door aside and flew up the narrow staircase.
He heard the stone roll into place with a heavy, dull thump behind him.
While he knew the remaining Shades must have been left behind in the closed-off cavern, he didn’t stop running. He got all the way up past the lower levels, into the city proper, but he kept going. At this moment, all he wanted was to get out of this cave.
TURN RIGHT
He turned. It was a section of the city’s warren he hadn’t seen before. He didn’t care. He followed the gem’s guidance-after all, it had given good advice so far!
He thought of his narrow escape in the caves downstairs, suddenly grateful that he’d had no companion, as this seemed to him like one adventure that two people would have never have survived. For without a doubt, a wider opening would have allowed more Shades to escape from their walled-off prison. Perhaps even he’d be dead now, too-or at least become one of them, trapped in a ghastly existence…
Dead…
TURN LEFT
He thought of Twelve. Surely, if she hadn’t died on Gallifrey then she might’ve died in that hole downstairs? Maybe it was better this way. Maybe she was right about him going on?
Hot tears started again, but the Doctor kept going, following the directions the gem gave him telepathically. He didn’t bother to stop them. There wasn’t anyone around to see, and this gem thing certainly wasn’t going to judge him for his grief.
He just wished he could see her again.
TURN RIGHT
Suddenly he felt the breeze on his cheek. The tunnels were still dark, but he could smell the air-like freshly scrubbed laundry-wafting down the tunnels towards him. He was still underground, but he was nearing the surface. The gem told him to turn again and he went upwards.
He thought he heard something.
Like the breeze, it wafted down to him through the remaining stretches of subterranean passageways. The sound twisted this way and that in its downward path, but as he rose higher the sound increased.
It sounded like a speeding freight train…
The next turn took him more steeply upwards-he was at a stone stairway that led up. The breeze was now a wind and he could see the bluish light of night illuminating the walls of the stone halls around him.
That was quite a gale outside…
Then he saw bursts of flashes bouncing its light off the walls-and he smelled that freshly laundered smell for what it was: The smell of ozone.
He’d smelled this before…
It was the smell of the Death Winds!
His eyes still adjusting, he stumbled out into the clear, past the hollowed-out entrance to the underground city in the rocky side of the hill. He watched in horror as once again, an angry plasma funnel rocketed towards the planet’s surface. Struggling in the grip of horrid déjà vu, he tripped on a jagged rock sticking out of the ground. He flung out his arms to steady his fall.
His hands fell against something tall, sturdy-and wood.
Suddenly, the sky violently flashed with the light of several thunderbolts…
…and illuminated the TARDIS, in front of him!
He gasped and heard the noise of a small rockslide off to his side. Several meters away, descending rapidly from the top of a rocky hill, was the Twelfth Doctor…
IT WAS TWELVE! ALIVE!
His voice stuck in his throat. He was bewildered, confused, horrified, overcome. He meant to move forward out of the shadows to greet her, but then with another agonising churn of his stomach, he realised:
He’d unwittingly landed here on the night of Installation Day-at the time of Emergence.
He’d crossed his own timeline!
Then he felt very, very ill-woozy and unfocused. It was much more than just seeing Twelve alive-it was the shift in timelines…
Once again, he felt the sickening dip and slip of reality as threads of time pulled apart and stitched together in new ways, fixed ways…
Once again, he felt the Emergence become a fixed point in time-a death knell for the Transboolians.
Without warning, the sky around them tore open in giant shafts as the pulsating light of countless portals ripped through the atmosphere like massive bolts of lighting, greedily racing toward the soil. The Doctor’s nose tingled with the laundry fresh smell of the air, a result of the violent rupture of oxygen atoms in the atmosphere.
And he realised something else:
The faulty Governing Circuit in his TARDIS!
These circuits were responsible for preventing the operator from breaking the First, Second, Third and Fourth Laws of Time, and would diffuse any dangerous chronal energy from a TARDIS crossing its own timestream.
He had landed on Transboolian unprotected! He’d crossed his own timeline!
HIS ARRIVAL EARLIER HAD LIKELY CAUSED THE DEATH WINDS IN THE FIRST PLACE!
This was the cost of his blundering and his impatience, and the Death Winds were here to sanitise the wound in Time!!
The horrible sick feeling that struck him was not from the timeline change alone.
He’d killed all of those people.
Horrified, he pushed himself off the TARDIS, knowing his contact had likely only made this event worse. In desperation, he turned towards the Twelfth Doctor, hoping she could help him. He felt like a bad child, frantic to be forgiven and comforted. Trying to say her name, he stepped forward, and saw her shadowy outline raise her arm.
Suddenly the ground disappeared from next to him!
He fell into the pit that had magically materialized in front of him with a startled shout, hit his head, and blacked out.
******
By the time he came to, the Twelfth Doctor and her TARDIS were gone, but the Death Winds were much, much closer to him.
Their swirling, circular plumes towered above him, probably only several meters away from him now. The winds they generated whipped the Tenth Doctor as he struggled to sit up in the hole. Quickly he surveyed it: Its distinctive square shape told him it had likely been made by the Twelfth Doctor’s squareness gun, used against him unknowingly as he was likely seen as an unknown shadowy threat during a time of great panic and duress.
He fleetingly thought it odd that she’d never told him about the stranger she’d thwarted that fateful night as she’d fetched the TARDIS to save them.
But one thing he did know was that if he didn’t get out of the hole he’d fallen into he would most likely get sucked up into their vortices, his DNA ripped apart-like so many leaves scattered in the wind.
He urgently dug his feet into the rocky walls of his pit and awkwardly climbed up. He was down about four meters, and every foothold threatened to crumble and slide as he went.
Once again he found himself in a stony grave, but he was determined that this time it would not be his.
He struggled with his ascent. Nearing the top, one particularly treacherous foothold dissolved under his weight, and a whole cascade of rocky soil slid down, pushing him back to the bottom. He swore loudly as he fell, but then his spirits brightened: He would use the cave-in to construct tiers that he could use to climb out!
He dug frantically at the walls as the Death Winds neared. Forcing tiny landslides and collapses, he kicked the stones perpendicularly to one of the walls, bisecting the square pit. His hair whipped wildly in the windstorm coming off the Death Winds as he shielded his eyes and kicked at the dirt. Finally, he made enough of a pile so he could pull himself up onto the smaller section and then hoist himself up to the topsoil. His ears rang as the howling winds bore down on him, but the entrance to the cave was only meters away.
He made it inside easily, if not breathlessly.
He did not stick around to watch where the Death Winds went next. He knew the rest of this story. He just wanted to leave, now.
However this time, instead of using the gem, he used his sonic and activated the homing beacon to find the TARDIS-his TARDIS.
As he made the trip back through the tunnels and passageways of the underground city, he thought about his mistake, and how this was also up to him to put right.
But he had the Gem of Salvation now. And now he could fix all of his past mistakes.
Once he returned to the TARDIS he would hook the gem up to the navigation circuits and let it lead him to the thing he knew his heart desired first:
The Skasis Paradigm.
Then, once he had that, he could accomplish what he’d set out to do:
Prevent the Time War.
To be continued in Chapter 22: Time Warp…
* In addition to Nu Who references, DW audiobook “The Stone Rose” is referenced. Classic Who references are given specifically to The Ultimate Foe, the last in the Trial of a Timelord series and another quick glance at the DW comic, “The Forgotten,” for Valeyard!Ten’s new suit.
None of the cave reference pics here are mine. In researching, the Derinkuyu Underground City in Turkey served as a direct inspiration for the underground troglodyte city of Transboolian-complete with the round stone door. All pictures in this entry were snagged from these places:
www.flickriver.com/photos/tags/luraycaverns/interesting/
http://www.luxuryistanbul.com/itemDetails.aspx?id=143
http://www.playdota.com/forums/showthread.php?t=559446
And for those of you who want to know waaaaay too much information about the inner workings of the TARDIS (and what a Governing Circuit is), try here: http://www.whoniverse.net/tardis/tardisatoz.php