The One True Free Life (23/26)
Title: The One True Free Life (23/26)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: Teen
Spoilers: Everything
Disclaimer: It would be a very different, and possibly quite upsetting, world if I owned these characters. For the sake of the world's children, I don't.
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues?
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 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
"So, what now? How do we stop it?" Rose asked in hushed tones as the Doctor unfolded his long limbs out of the boot of the car.
"We need to find the object that is acting as their psionic mainframe and destroy it."
"It's that simple?" asked Pete, looking through Rose's bag and adding a few items of his own from the back seat.
"Should be. If there's just one and it got here to Earth by accident, that should pretty well take care of it."
Rose gave a toothy smile and put her hands on her hips. "That sounds easy enough. We just break in, hit it with a hammer or whatever, make our get-away andbob's your uncle, eh? This could be fun!"
"Well, that's assuming it's actually in there. And you know what happens when we assume, Rose," said the Doctor pedantically.
"Where else would it be but in there?" She gestured over her shoulder in the general direction of the Liberty Systems building, though it was blocked from sight by the structures surrounding them in the alley Pete had pulled in to.
"It doesn't necessarily have to be. It compiles and processes brainwaves, it doesn't have to be in any particular location in order to do that. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is as good a place to start as any."
Pete handed Rose's bag back to her and gave the Doctor an appraising glance but said nothing.
"All right then, allons-y."
Rose furrowed her brow. "What does that even mean?"
"It's French," the Doctor chirped.
"I know that. By why couldn't you just say 'let's go' in, you know, English?"
"It's so much more fun to say, 'allons-y.'" He reached for her hand and she giggled in spite of herself and his ridiculous affectations.
"Do you two mind not flirting when lives are at stake?" Pete scowled and gave them both a very disapproving, very dad-like glare, and they couldn't keep themselves from looking at one another with poorly-suppressed smirks on their faces.
"Never stopped us before," Rose muttered.
"Well, there was that one time...." And they both dissolved in to silent little giggles, as they rounded out of the alley and on to the street.
"Right then," Rose said as she regained her composure and put on her game face, "that carpark is how I got in the last time. And watch out, there's a CCTV camera right on that corner, so it's best to just cross here and make a dash for it."
On the roof of the carpark again, there were still a few cars here and there, and they looked around furtively to make sure no one was watching as they pitched themselves over the low wall and on to the roof of the attached office building.
The Doctor peeked over the edge of the roof and down on to the Liberty building. "Psst!" he hissed, and then did it again a bit louder, such that Rose elbowed him in the ribs and gave him a glare.
Donna Mott appeared from around the back of a piece of climate control equipment, wearing a white lab coat and clutching a sheaf of papers in her hand. The Doctor began to wave wildly, but Donna just gave a crooked smile and nodded.
"I think she sees you, Doctor," whispered Rose. "You're going to take off if you keep doing that."
Donna looked up at them and made a sharp beckoning gesture, mouthing, "Hurry up!"
Pete shuffled off to the side, meanwhile and located the rope that Rose had thrown back over after her previous break-in and began to check and coil it in preparation to toss over once again.
After Donna tied it off on the other side, they all stood for a very long moment staring at the gap between the two buildings, not saying anything and not looking at each other. Rose was first to sit down on the ledge and take it in her hands. "This is not getting any less conspicuous the longer we stand here," she whispered and lowered herself off the edge to begin the hand-over-hand crossing.
Pete shook his head but never took his eyes off of Rose. "I am way too old for this. Good luck, Doctor." He stuck his hand out and the Doctor shook it before setting himself down on the ledge and waiting for Rose to let go of the rope as she hit the other roof before beginning his own descent.
He'd never been particularly afraid of heights, but swinging ten stories up while trying to move under his own power was extremely unsettling and he was so overjoyed to make it to the other side that he gathered both of the women waiting there in to a group hug, much to their surprise.
Donna pushed herself away from him after a moment and gave them both a sideways look. "Yeah, I don't know what they do on your planet, sunshine, but I'm not really in to that kind of thing," she whispered, backing away.
Rose and the Doctor shared a look that included four extremely arched eyebrows and some amount of speechlessness, but Donna was already marching over to the door that led back in to the building, and they were forced to scurry behind her, feeling oddly chastened.
The echo in the stairwell was unnerving, and the Doctor tried to keep his voice pitched low enough in to a whisper that they would not be heard. "I want to thank you, Donna Mott. You've just been fantastic, really. If you ever feel like,er...well, I guess you know where we live."
"What, I'm just getting left behind now am I? Thank you ma'am, off you go? Call us when you want to get all kinky?" Donna's voice carried much more easily than the Doctor's and Rose bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, getting anxious.
"He means, this could get very dangerous now. You don't have to stay, you can leave and no one will ever know you were here."
Donna put her hands on her hips and huffed. "You mean picking locks and breaking and entering and squirrelling away secret documents wasn't dangerous? No way, I'm coming with you."
Rose opened her mouth to speak but the Doctor cut her off with a shake of his head. "Right, so we're looking for a small object, though I'm not sure what exactly it will look like. Probably about the size of a cricket ball, maybe a bit bigger. It won't look like a computer. It could besomeone's paperweight, it could be anywhere really. Did you see anyone up here before, Donna?"
She shook her head. "But I found what I needed in the first office I went in to, so I didn't really stick around to find out if the others were occupied."
"All right, we'll start there." The Doctor rubbed his hands together. "Ready?"
He was just about to put his hand on the door knob when Rose spoke: "What happens if there's people? If we're seen?"
The Doctor flashed a wide grin. "We run."
"That's your plan? Run?" Donna asked incredulously. "A couple of amateurs, you two are. I can see you're going to need me about."
Three heads poked out from around the door frame and peered down the corridor, and saw no one about to impede their progress to the office Donna had been in just a half an hour before. The trio began searching as quietly as possible, opening desk drawers, examining stacks of papers, feeling around in the top shelves of cabinets, but finding nothing, not even anything that could be described as an actual terrestrial paperweight. Periodically one or all of them would stop and look about to find the others shaking their heads desultorily, and they would return to the search.
The Doctor was about to beckon to Rose and Donna to give up this office and move on to the next when Rose's mobile vibrated in her pocket, startling everyone. When she pulled it out and looked at the display her mouth drew in to a thin line. "It's Pete," she mouthed silently to the Doctor, and then unfolded the handset.
"What?" she hissed, cupping her hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. The Doctor watched the expression on her face go from worried and annoyed to worried and anxious and she rung off quickly. "He's out front in the car and just saw a commotion in the lobby."
At that moment the lifts began to whir to life, and they all jumped and looked towards the door. "Bugger!" the Doctor bit out between clenched teeth, no longer bothering to whisper.
"What do we do?" Rose asked.
He ran a hand through his hair and looked around the room, as if somewhere on a piece of paper might be written the way to solve their problems, and then inexplicably picked up a framed photograph that was on Dr. Callahan's desk which featured herself standing next to a middle-agedmoustachioed man in a suit, looking quite official.
"Oh, no way!" he exclaimed and turned it around to show the others. Rose and Donna just stared at him and made nervous fluttering movements with their hands. "You see that?" The Doctor pointed to the picture. "It's in Whitehall! Whitehall!" he said again, as if he expected his companions to get his meaning just with repetition.
"What are you on about? They're coming!" Donna hissed.
"This picture! It was taken at a government office, in Whitehall. See, there's the top of the London Eye, through the window. And right there, on thischap's desk, that's it." He kissed the picture and put it back on the desk. "Bloody brilliant!"
"People. Coming. Lifts." Rose reminded him.
"Right, now we run. The stairs!"
The three of them filed out of the office and ran for the stairwell, the door shutting behind them just as they could hear the lift doors opening. "This is not good!" shouted Rose as it became clear that they were being pursued in to the stairs from above. They continued downwards, jumping over the last several stairs in each flight, skidding on the linoleum. "Not good at all!" Rose said again as she heard voices below them now too.
The Doctor wrenched open the next door that they came to, and they found themselves in a large room filled with cubicles, filing cabinets and standard office machinery. "Are there any more stairwells?" he asked Donna, panting and looking around frantically. "Any other way down?"
She shook her head, her hand on her chest, trying to catch her breath. "That's the only one, just that and the lifts."
The voices and footfalls in the stairwell from both above and below got considerably louder, and as one the three fugitives took off at a run down a corridor formed by low cubicle walls on either side. They heard the door open behind them but did not look back, concentrating on dodging the photocopiers and dustbins, and on the windows that formed the outer wall of the building that were fast approaching in front of them.
The Doctor, with his much longer legs, was several paces out in front and reached the wall of windows first, skittering to a halt and looking left and right, before placing both hands on the cubicle wall to his right and vaulting over, and coming to stand on the desk of some poor office drone that the next morning would wonder why there were trainer prints all over their paperwork.
When Rose reached the same spot, she grabbed a dustbin laying nearby and turned it upside-down, creating a step for her and Donna to follow the Doctor, who had now jumped over the other side of the cubicle and was off running again down another hallway, looking over his shoulder to ensure that Rose and Donna were still safely behind him.
Behind Rose and Donna were several men in dark suits who would not have looked out of place guarding the President, plus one gentleman who lagged behind them and was dressed in a very smart grey pinstripe paired with a sky blue oxford and matching tie.
They all found themselves now running back towards the end of the building they'd just come from, and the Doctor darted to the right again, using an office chair this time to get up on another desk and offer a hand up to Donna and then Rose. All three of them landed on the other side of the cubicle wall as a unit, to find they were just a few yards from the stairwell door again, having come around the perimeter of the building. Behind them were two of the men in dark suits, and in front of them at a very good clip indeed ran another of them, so that their only option was to make a run for the stairwell or be trapped from either side.
Rose started running first, calculating the distance the man running towards her had to cover versus the distance she herself had to sprint in order to make it to the stairs before him. The Doctor followed, grabbing Donna's hand and tugging her behind him as she began to lose the ability to think clearly. They could hear the men who'd pursued behind them leaping over the same cubicle, and for Rose, everything slowed down momentarily. She could almost see the trajectory of her movements projected in front of her, the distances laid out like on a map with dotted lines and arrows indicating where all of the actors would wind up, and her own arrow along with the Doctor's and Donna's, going straight through the door and down the stairs.
She almost fell down the first flight head-first, she came on it so quickly, and on their way down they perhaps hit three actual stairs before catching themselves on the banister and hurtling down the next set. In this way they sailed down four floors, the echoes of the men behind them grunting and calling to one another drowning out the sounds of their own laboured breathing.
They came flying out of the final doorway in to the lobby as if ejected forcibly from it, all three running abreast and making for the front doors as the security guard hollered and came around the side of his large desk. As he did so however, the door to the stairwell opened again and four more men came running out, and he found himself standing precisely in their way, given that they were moving too quickly to change course before ploughing in to him and the lot of them sprawling on the very hard, very cold marble floors.
Racing down the granite steps of the Liberty building, the Doctor yelled "I'll drive!" to where Pete was waiting at the kerb with the Morris Minor, all doors ajar and the motor running. The three of them dove in and Pete could barely shut his door before the Doctor was tearing off down the road, at which point he began to laugh his head off.
"Oh, good show!" he beamed.
"Bloody hell!" Donna panted, her head lolling against the back seat.
Rose craned her head and looked behind them to see a police car, sirens blazing, followed by a black SUV. "We're not alone."
The Doctor sped up. "Right, to Westminster!"
Pete looked around and squinted at the road signs. "You're going the wrong way, Doctor! You're not even from here, do you even know where you're going?"
"Oh yes!" the Doctor shouted.
"But we should have taken a right!" Donna boomed from behind him. "Go right! You're taking us right to the bloody river!"
Rose sucked on her bottom lip, watching the progress of the cars behind them through traffic. "They're not wrong, we should be turning right," she said, much more calm than anyone else in the car.
"Are you questioning my navigational abilities, Rose Tyler?" he asked, peering at her with one eye through the rear-view mirror.
"Erm, no. It's just that...is that the bloody Tower Bridge?"
"I love how it's all lit up at night now, don't you? It used to be such a bad neighbourhood. Had my pocket picked."
He brought the little car up over the kerb and on to the plaza outside the Tower, where tourists were still snapping photos of one another in front of the atmospheric lighting. "Last stop!" he said as he popped the car out of gear and yanked the key out of the ignition.
Before anyone else in the car could say anything, he took off at a run across the square and they were forced to just acknowledge that he clearly had a destination in mind, and followed. They could all hear the siren blaring and getting closer every second, and increased their pace as they followed the Doctor towards the river and right on to the muck left by low tide under the Tower Bridge. Coming out the other side, the Doctor was waiting for them and ready to give each a hand up on to solid ground and the promenade that separates St. Katherine's Dock from the river proper.
He stood at the edge of the dock and surveyed the boats there, squinting a bit and cocking his head. Rose, Donna and Pete anxiously looked behind them and tried once again to catch their breath. When they turned back around again, they found the Doctor untying a rope nonchalantly and stepping on to a small but rather speedy looking boat.
"Come on then," he stage-whispered. "All this way, I'd hate to get derailed by some peg-legged harbourmaster." After giving each a steadying hand in to the craft, he moved to the bow and began to fiddle underneath with the controls. The boat roared to life and he eased it out of it's berth and towards the river. "All hands, hit the deck!" he said jauntily over his shoulder and there was really nothing they could do but take the advice. From where they hid, crouching on the deck, they couldn't see four men in suits standing on the promenade looking about with angry confusion before getting out their mobiles and shouting breathlessly in to them.
"You are completely mental," Rose said, venturing off the deck and towards the bow.
"No TARDIS," he said simply, shrugging, the wind scattering his words behind him.
(To Chapter 24)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: Teen
Spoilers: Everything
Disclaimer: It would be a very different, and possibly quite upsetting, world if I owned these characters. For the sake of the world's children, I don't.
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues?
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 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
"So, what now? How do we stop it?" Rose asked in hushed tones as the Doctor unfolded his long limbs out of the boot of the car.
"We need to find the object that is acting as their psionic mainframe and destroy it."
"It's that simple?" asked Pete, looking through Rose's bag and adding a few items of his own from the back seat.
"Should be. If there's just one and it got here to Earth by accident, that should pretty well take care of it."
Rose gave a toothy smile and put her hands on her hips. "That sounds easy enough. We just break in, hit it with a hammer or whatever, make our get-away andbob's your uncle, eh? This could be fun!"
"Well, that's assuming it's actually in there. And you know what happens when we assume, Rose," said the Doctor pedantically.
"Where else would it be but in there?" She gestured over her shoulder in the general direction of the Liberty Systems building, though it was blocked from sight by the structures surrounding them in the alley Pete had pulled in to.
"It doesn't necessarily have to be. It compiles and processes brainwaves, it doesn't have to be in any particular location in order to do that. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is as good a place to start as any."
Pete handed Rose's bag back to her and gave the Doctor an appraising glance but said nothing.
"All right then, allons-y."
Rose furrowed her brow. "What does that even mean?"
"It's French," the Doctor chirped.
"I know that. By why couldn't you just say 'let's go' in, you know, English?"
"It's so much more fun to say, 'allons-y.'" He reached for her hand and she giggled in spite of herself and his ridiculous affectations.
"Do you two mind not flirting when lives are at stake?" Pete scowled and gave them both a very disapproving, very dad-like glare, and they couldn't keep themselves from looking at one another with poorly-suppressed smirks on their faces.
"Never stopped us before," Rose muttered.
"Well, there was that one time...." And they both dissolved in to silent little giggles, as they rounded out of the alley and on to the street.
"Right then," Rose said as she regained her composure and put on her game face, "that carpark is how I got in the last time. And watch out, there's a CCTV camera right on that corner, so it's best to just cross here and make a dash for it."
On the roof of the carpark again, there were still a few cars here and there, and they looked around furtively to make sure no one was watching as they pitched themselves over the low wall and on to the roof of the attached office building.
The Doctor peeked over the edge of the roof and down on to the Liberty building. "Psst!" he hissed, and then did it again a bit louder, such that Rose elbowed him in the ribs and gave him a glare.
Donna Mott appeared from around the back of a piece of climate control equipment, wearing a white lab coat and clutching a sheaf of papers in her hand. The Doctor began to wave wildly, but Donna just gave a crooked smile and nodded.
"I think she sees you, Doctor," whispered Rose. "You're going to take off if you keep doing that."
Donna looked up at them and made a sharp beckoning gesture, mouthing, "Hurry up!"
Pete shuffled off to the side, meanwhile and located the rope that Rose had thrown back over after her previous break-in and began to check and coil it in preparation to toss over once again.
After Donna tied it off on the other side, they all stood for a very long moment staring at the gap between the two buildings, not saying anything and not looking at each other. Rose was first to sit down on the ledge and take it in her hands. "This is not getting any less conspicuous the longer we stand here," she whispered and lowered herself off the edge to begin the hand-over-hand crossing.
Pete shook his head but never took his eyes off of Rose. "I am way too old for this. Good luck, Doctor." He stuck his hand out and the Doctor shook it before setting himself down on the ledge and waiting for Rose to let go of the rope as she hit the other roof before beginning his own descent.
He'd never been particularly afraid of heights, but swinging ten stories up while trying to move under his own power was extremely unsettling and he was so overjoyed to make it to the other side that he gathered both of the women waiting there in to a group hug, much to their surprise.
Donna pushed herself away from him after a moment and gave them both a sideways look. "Yeah, I don't know what they do on your planet, sunshine, but I'm not really in to that kind of thing," she whispered, backing away.
Rose and the Doctor shared a look that included four extremely arched eyebrows and some amount of speechlessness, but Donna was already marching over to the door that led back in to the building, and they were forced to scurry behind her, feeling oddly chastened.
The echo in the stairwell was unnerving, and the Doctor tried to keep his voice pitched low enough in to a whisper that they would not be heard. "I want to thank you, Donna Mott. You've just been fantastic, really. If you ever feel like,er...well, I guess you know where we live."
"What, I'm just getting left behind now am I? Thank you ma'am, off you go? Call us when you want to get all kinky?" Donna's voice carried much more easily than the Doctor's and Rose bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, getting anxious.
"He means, this could get very dangerous now. You don't have to stay, you can leave and no one will ever know you were here."
Donna put her hands on her hips and huffed. "You mean picking locks and breaking and entering and squirrelling away secret documents wasn't dangerous? No way, I'm coming with you."
Rose opened her mouth to speak but the Doctor cut her off with a shake of his head. "Right, so we're looking for a small object, though I'm not sure what exactly it will look like. Probably about the size of a cricket ball, maybe a bit bigger. It won't look like a computer. It could besomeone's paperweight, it could be anywhere really. Did you see anyone up here before, Donna?"
She shook her head. "But I found what I needed in the first office I went in to, so I didn't really stick around to find out if the others were occupied."
"All right, we'll start there." The Doctor rubbed his hands together. "Ready?"
He was just about to put his hand on the door knob when Rose spoke: "What happens if there's people? If we're seen?"
The Doctor flashed a wide grin. "We run."
"That's your plan? Run?" Donna asked incredulously. "A couple of amateurs, you two are. I can see you're going to need me about."
Three heads poked out from around the door frame and peered down the corridor, and saw no one about to impede their progress to the office Donna had been in just a half an hour before. The trio began searching as quietly as possible, opening desk drawers, examining stacks of papers, feeling around in the top shelves of cabinets, but finding nothing, not even anything that could be described as an actual terrestrial paperweight. Periodically one or all of them would stop and look about to find the others shaking their heads desultorily, and they would return to the search.
The Doctor was about to beckon to Rose and Donna to give up this office and move on to the next when Rose's mobile vibrated in her pocket, startling everyone. When she pulled it out and looked at the display her mouth drew in to a thin line. "It's Pete," she mouthed silently to the Doctor, and then unfolded the handset.
"What?" she hissed, cupping her hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. The Doctor watched the expression on her face go from worried and annoyed to worried and anxious and she rung off quickly. "He's out front in the car and just saw a commotion in the lobby."
At that moment the lifts began to whir to life, and they all jumped and looked towards the door. "Bugger!" the Doctor bit out between clenched teeth, no longer bothering to whisper.
"What do we do?" Rose asked.
He ran a hand through his hair and looked around the room, as if somewhere on a piece of paper might be written the way to solve their problems, and then inexplicably picked up a framed photograph that was on Dr. Callahan's desk which featured herself standing next to a middle-agedmoustachioed man in a suit, looking quite official.
"Oh, no way!" he exclaimed and turned it around to show the others. Rose and Donna just stared at him and made nervous fluttering movements with their hands. "You see that?" The Doctor pointed to the picture. "It's in Whitehall! Whitehall!" he said again, as if he expected his companions to get his meaning just with repetition.
"What are you on about? They're coming!" Donna hissed.
"This picture! It was taken at a government office, in Whitehall. See, there's the top of the London Eye, through the window. And right there, on thischap's desk, that's it." He kissed the picture and put it back on the desk. "Bloody brilliant!"
"People. Coming. Lifts." Rose reminded him.
"Right, now we run. The stairs!"
The three of them filed out of the office and ran for the stairwell, the door shutting behind them just as they could hear the lift doors opening. "This is not good!" shouted Rose as it became clear that they were being pursued in to the stairs from above. They continued downwards, jumping over the last several stairs in each flight, skidding on the linoleum. "Not good at all!" Rose said again as she heard voices below them now too.
The Doctor wrenched open the next door that they came to, and they found themselves in a large room filled with cubicles, filing cabinets and standard office machinery. "Are there any more stairwells?" he asked Donna, panting and looking around frantically. "Any other way down?"
She shook her head, her hand on her chest, trying to catch her breath. "That's the only one, just that and the lifts."
The voices and footfalls in the stairwell from both above and below got considerably louder, and as one the three fugitives took off at a run down a corridor formed by low cubicle walls on either side. They heard the door open behind them but did not look back, concentrating on dodging the photocopiers and dustbins, and on the windows that formed the outer wall of the building that were fast approaching in front of them.
The Doctor, with his much longer legs, was several paces out in front and reached the wall of windows first, skittering to a halt and looking left and right, before placing both hands on the cubicle wall to his right and vaulting over, and coming to stand on the desk of some poor office drone that the next morning would wonder why there were trainer prints all over their paperwork.
When Rose reached the same spot, she grabbed a dustbin laying nearby and turned it upside-down, creating a step for her and Donna to follow the Doctor, who had now jumped over the other side of the cubicle and was off running again down another hallway, looking over his shoulder to ensure that Rose and Donna were still safely behind him.
Behind Rose and Donna were several men in dark suits who would not have looked out of place guarding the President, plus one gentleman who lagged behind them and was dressed in a very smart grey pinstripe paired with a sky blue oxford and matching tie.
They all found themselves now running back towards the end of the building they'd just come from, and the Doctor darted to the right again, using an office chair this time to get up on another desk and offer a hand up to Donna and then Rose. All three of them landed on the other side of the cubicle wall as a unit, to find they were just a few yards from the stairwell door again, having come around the perimeter of the building. Behind them were two of the men in dark suits, and in front of them at a very good clip indeed ran another of them, so that their only option was to make a run for the stairwell or be trapped from either side.
Rose started running first, calculating the distance the man running towards her had to cover versus the distance she herself had to sprint in order to make it to the stairs before him. The Doctor followed, grabbing Donna's hand and tugging her behind him as she began to lose the ability to think clearly. They could hear the men who'd pursued behind them leaping over the same cubicle, and for Rose, everything slowed down momentarily. She could almost see the trajectory of her movements projected in front of her, the distances laid out like on a map with dotted lines and arrows indicating where all of the actors would wind up, and her own arrow along with the Doctor's and Donna's, going straight through the door and down the stairs.
She almost fell down the first flight head-first, she came on it so quickly, and on their way down they perhaps hit three actual stairs before catching themselves on the banister and hurtling down the next set. In this way they sailed down four floors, the echoes of the men behind them grunting and calling to one another drowning out the sounds of their own laboured breathing.
They came flying out of the final doorway in to the lobby as if ejected forcibly from it, all three running abreast and making for the front doors as the security guard hollered and came around the side of his large desk. As he did so however, the door to the stairwell opened again and four more men came running out, and he found himself standing precisely in their way, given that they were moving too quickly to change course before ploughing in to him and the lot of them sprawling on the very hard, very cold marble floors.
Racing down the granite steps of the Liberty building, the Doctor yelled "I'll drive!" to where Pete was waiting at the kerb with the Morris Minor, all doors ajar and the motor running. The three of them dove in and Pete could barely shut his door before the Doctor was tearing off down the road, at which point he began to laugh his head off.
"Oh, good show!" he beamed.
"Bloody hell!" Donna panted, her head lolling against the back seat.
Rose craned her head and looked behind them to see a police car, sirens blazing, followed by a black SUV. "We're not alone."
The Doctor sped up. "Right, to Westminster!"
Pete looked around and squinted at the road signs. "You're going the wrong way, Doctor! You're not even from here, do you even know where you're going?"
"Oh yes!" the Doctor shouted.
"But we should have taken a right!" Donna boomed from behind him. "Go right! You're taking us right to the bloody river!"
Rose sucked on her bottom lip, watching the progress of the cars behind them through traffic. "They're not wrong, we should be turning right," she said, much more calm than anyone else in the car.
"Are you questioning my navigational abilities, Rose Tyler?" he asked, peering at her with one eye through the rear-view mirror.
"Erm, no. It's just that...is that the bloody Tower Bridge?"
"I love how it's all lit up at night now, don't you? It used to be such a bad neighbourhood. Had my pocket picked."
He brought the little car up over the kerb and on to the plaza outside the Tower, where tourists were still snapping photos of one another in front of the atmospheric lighting. "Last stop!" he said as he popped the car out of gear and yanked the key out of the ignition.
Before anyone else in the car could say anything, he took off at a run across the square and they were forced to just acknowledge that he clearly had a destination in mind, and followed. They could all hear the siren blaring and getting closer every second, and increased their pace as they followed the Doctor towards the river and right on to the muck left by low tide under the Tower Bridge. Coming out the other side, the Doctor was waiting for them and ready to give each a hand up on to solid ground and the promenade that separates St. Katherine's Dock from the river proper.
He stood at the edge of the dock and surveyed the boats there, squinting a bit and cocking his head. Rose, Donna and Pete anxiously looked behind them and tried once again to catch their breath. When they turned back around again, they found the Doctor untying a rope nonchalantly and stepping on to a small but rather speedy looking boat.
"Come on then," he stage-whispered. "All this way, I'd hate to get derailed by some peg-legged harbourmaster." After giving each a steadying hand in to the craft, he moved to the bow and began to fiddle underneath with the controls. The boat roared to life and he eased it out of it's berth and towards the river. "All hands, hit the deck!" he said jauntily over his shoulder and there was really nothing they could do but take the advice. From where they hid, crouching on the deck, they couldn't see four men in suits standing on the promenade looking about with angry confusion before getting out their mobiles and shouting breathlessly in to them.
"You are completely mental," Rose said, venturing off the deck and towards the bow.
"No TARDIS," he said simply, shrugging, the wind scattering his words behind him.
(To Chapter 24)