The One True Free Life (25/26)
Title: The One True Free Life (25 / 26 + epilogue)
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
While Rose and Donna struggled to hold the heavy wooden door shut long enough to turn the bolt, the Doctor and Heths sized one another up, as well as their relative relations to the Phoenix orb, glowing and calmly humming under a wing back chair grouped with other similar pieces of furniture in the centre of the office. The Doctor could easily see his advantages--having a straight shot at it while Heths was caught behind the desk--and also possessing the longer arms and legs to get him there. Heths meanwhile did not look overly fussed and, given the racket going on outside the door, he did seem to have the upper hand in the final tally.
The Doctor closed the distance to where the orb lay in three long strides, and he was careful this time to pick it up by its base. Heths, for his part, had taken advantage of the Doctor concentrating his attention elsewhere, and reached in to his jacket pocket to pull out a surprisingly large gun, which he now aimed at the Doctor.
The shock of having a gun pointed at him wore off in a split second, and he addressed Heths with a steely voice that could barely be heard over the cries of the men outside the door, and the sounds of his companions' exertion.
"How certain are you that the mutations on my eighteenth and nineteenth chromosomes don't allow me to predict the trajectory of that bullet and give me the reflexes necessary to place this precious item in its path?"
"I suspect that if you could do that, you wouldn't tell me about it first," Heths replied coolly, walking around the desk and towards the door. "But just to be safe, let's assume there's little chance of your friends being able to do the same." He shifted his aim from the Doctor to Rose, whom he then grabbed roughly around the chest from where she'd been propping a chair against the door.
Rose involuntarily let out a cry of, "Doctor!" as if he wasn't already riveted to the scene. As the cold steel of the muzzle pressed against her temple, all she could think of was how alone the Doctor would be in this world without her, and how the other Doctor would never know of her death.
Vincent Heths had seen a lot of things that defied his expectations during his short tenure at Torchwood and subsequent work on Phoenix, but it struck him now that none of those strange things could hope to compare with what he saw in the Doctor's eyes in this moment. Even as the Doctor placed the Phoenix orb on the desk and raised his hands at the elbow, the hard, unblinking darkness of his eyes seemed nothing short of a harbinger of holocaust. While it should have been this alien man, or his human lover, trembling in fear and at a disadvantage, it was Heths who felt his capillaries constrict and his mouth go suddenly dry.
Donna felt the door shudder under her hands, and heard the fixture housing the bolt begin to splinter, as the men outside rammed it repeatedly. There were too many things going on at once, and she found she could only concentrate on one at a time.
Rose was being held firmly by Heths, who, while he held the gun to her head, looked as if he might be sick at any moment. The Doctor moved a few steps away from where he'd placed the orb, and towards Heths, who then backed away as much as he was able to while Rose tried her best to anchor herself to one spot.
"Doctor, just destroy it!" Rose cried, but the Doctor didn't even glance at the thing.
"It's hardly worth it," stammered Heths. "We're not hurting anyone."
"And yet you're willing to kill for it." The Doctor's partially lidded eyes blazed with understanding. "Bit of a contradiction, don't you think?"
While these three players were engaged thus in a seeming stand-off, the orb sat innocently on the desk, the object of all this contention. So small and harmless-looking, beautiful even. Donna barely knew what she was doing as she left her post at the door and in a few steps was reaching out for it, holding it in her hand, wondering whether, if she threw it to the floor hard enough, it would be smashed.
"Doctor, I--"
She meant to ask him what she should do with it, but as he turned to face her, she saw Heths release Rose, though her relief over the seeming end of the hostage situation was short-lived as she was suddenly cast to the ground, dropped the orb, and felt a searing pain that seemed to be everywhere in her body all at one. The orb did not break when it fell, though she likewise did not notice.
If Rose had thought there was a lot going on before, she would need to study quantum physics to comprehend everything that occurred simultaneously now. She found herself released from Heths' grip, the pop of the gun being fired sending an expectation of pain that never came through her nervous system.
The Doctor uttered not a word as he easily overpowered Heths and wrenched the gun from his hands. Heths sank to the ground and the Doctor stood over him, drawing himself up to his full height and glaring with every single minute of his thousand years.
The door to the office burst open, the wood around the bolt finally splintered, and an amalgam of uniformed guards and armed men in suits entered, but then looked around in confusion trying to determine what exactly was happening.
Rose rushed to where Donna lay on the floor, her breath laboured and wheezing, blood pouring from a wound at her left shoulder. Rose took her jacket off and ripped out the lining to use to try and staunch the blood. The orb lay a few feet away on the floor, forgotten.
As the armed men turned to face where a tall, unkempt and possibly mentally unstable man was quite clearly holding the Secretary of Education at gunpoint, there was the sound of breaking glass on the other side of the room. Everyone turned to investigate, except the Doctor who still had not moved and still had not lowered the weapon.
The guards, looking in the direction of the windows where one pane had been broken, watched as a small black object, like a spiky golf ball, sailed in to the room and landed on the floor. They looked at one another, frozen in silent fear that this was an explosive device.
Rather than explode, it made a metallic click, and all (or all but one) of the occupants of the office, friendly and un-, doubled over clutching their ears in pain. The armed men dropped their weapons and sank to the floor, the guards fled the room, Heths clutched his head and prayed for the Doctor to shoot him already and end the agony. Rose stood up in time to watch Jake Simmonds unlatch the window through the broken out pane and enter, followed by Pete Tyler, both wearing hearing protection.
Pete rushed to where Rose was standing over Donna, while Jake collected the weapons that had been flung to the ground and picked up the device emitting the piercing sound, shutting it off. He held it up and threatened to turn it back on again if the men did not turn and leave immediately, which they did with tears in their eyes and heaving chests.
"She needs to get to hospital," panted Rose to Pete, stating the obvious.
Pete nodded to Jake, who removed his ear protection and lifted Donna carefully, losing his grip momentarily because of the blood, but, with Pete helping, he was able to spirit her out of the window again. Rose turned to the Doctor for the first time in what seemed like hours.
He was still standing over Heths, his face twisted with rage, his breaths short and tight. His hand was steady however, keeping the gun trained at the other man's head. Heths for his part seemed ready to weep but understood that no amount of words would make any difference to his situation.
"Doctor," Rose pleaded, "let him go." She approached him carefully, arms out, eyes wide and unblinking. "This isn't what you want."
She touched his arm and, while he didn't turn his head away from Heths, she saw his eyes move to look at her hand, which was leaving bloody prints on his shirt sleeve. "Leave him go," she said again, like she would speak to a wild animal to coax it to her.
The Doctor lowered his arm slightly, and in one smooth movement turned away from Heths and towards where the Phoenix orb lay in a pool of red, squeezing the trigger and watching the orb shatter. The Universe sang in his head, a dam breaking, time racing and then coming to a shuddering halt at this moment. The flight of the butterfly, the progress of the tides, the fraying and rejoining of time and space all came in to clear focus for the first time since he'd left his beloved ship and his other self.
The gun slipped from his hand unnoticed and landed with a sickening splat on the swampy floor around the desk. Heths sobbed loudly and the crackle of radios and flashing of red lights could be seen and heard from outside the window.
Rose took the Doctor's trembling hand and led him to the sill, where she sat and swung her legs over, never taking her eyes off of him as he did the same. On the outside, they were met with uniformed men and handcuffs, with the sound of an ambulance fading in to the night, and with long strings of words shouted from Pete Tyler, also being led to a police car, to the effect of there being nothing to worry about, something about the President, about documents being sent, but none of it made much sense.
It all happened mostly in silence. They were separated from each other in silence, taken to different cars, and Rose could not even hear her own voice as she pleaded for them to not hurt the Doctor, to please let them stay together. Without sound he shook his head, looked at her with heavy eyes, and let himself be placed in to a back seat. He may even have smiled, just a little bit, just to put her at ease. There was enough pain in the world, there was no point in her worrying needlessly for his well being.
A fog had descended while they had been in the building, and the Doctor looked up at a street lamp as he was driven away, where a moth fluttered in impotent desire. He followed the moth with his eye as the car rounded a corner, and then with his mind, perceiving the impact even a small creature has on the Universe. Even a moth. Especially a moth. It always comes down to that, in the end.
(To Chapter 26 + Epilogue)
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
While Rose and Donna struggled to hold the heavy wooden door shut long enough to turn the bolt, the Doctor and Heths sized one another up, as well as their relative relations to the Phoenix orb, glowing and calmly humming under a wing back chair grouped with other similar pieces of furniture in the centre of the office. The Doctor could easily see his advantages--having a straight shot at it while Heths was caught behind the desk--and also possessing the longer arms and legs to get him there. Heths meanwhile did not look overly fussed and, given the racket going on outside the door, he did seem to have the upper hand in the final tally.
The Doctor closed the distance to where the orb lay in three long strides, and he was careful this time to pick it up by its base. Heths, for his part, had taken advantage of the Doctor concentrating his attention elsewhere, and reached in to his jacket pocket to pull out a surprisingly large gun, which he now aimed at the Doctor.
The shock of having a gun pointed at him wore off in a split second, and he addressed Heths with a steely voice that could barely be heard over the cries of the men outside the door, and the sounds of his companions' exertion.
"How certain are you that the mutations on my eighteenth and nineteenth chromosomes don't allow me to predict the trajectory of that bullet and give me the reflexes necessary to place this precious item in its path?"
"I suspect that if you could do that, you wouldn't tell me about it first," Heths replied coolly, walking around the desk and towards the door. "But just to be safe, let's assume there's little chance of your friends being able to do the same." He shifted his aim from the Doctor to Rose, whom he then grabbed roughly around the chest from where she'd been propping a chair against the door.
Rose involuntarily let out a cry of, "Doctor!" as if he wasn't already riveted to the scene. As the cold steel of the muzzle pressed against her temple, all she could think of was how alone the Doctor would be in this world without her, and how the other Doctor would never know of her death.
Vincent Heths had seen a lot of things that defied his expectations during his short tenure at Torchwood and subsequent work on Phoenix, but it struck him now that none of those strange things could hope to compare with what he saw in the Doctor's eyes in this moment. Even as the Doctor placed the Phoenix orb on the desk and raised his hands at the elbow, the hard, unblinking darkness of his eyes seemed nothing short of a harbinger of holocaust. While it should have been this alien man, or his human lover, trembling in fear and at a disadvantage, it was Heths who felt his capillaries constrict and his mouth go suddenly dry.
Donna felt the door shudder under her hands, and heard the fixture housing the bolt begin to splinter, as the men outside rammed it repeatedly. There were too many things going on at once, and she found she could only concentrate on one at a time.
Rose was being held firmly by Heths, who, while he held the gun to her head, looked as if he might be sick at any moment. The Doctor moved a few steps away from where he'd placed the orb, and towards Heths, who then backed away as much as he was able to while Rose tried her best to anchor herself to one spot.
"Doctor, just destroy it!" Rose cried, but the Doctor didn't even glance at the thing.
"It's hardly worth it," stammered Heths. "We're not hurting anyone."
"And yet you're willing to kill for it." The Doctor's partially lidded eyes blazed with understanding. "Bit of a contradiction, don't you think?"
While these three players were engaged thus in a seeming stand-off, the orb sat innocently on the desk, the object of all this contention. So small and harmless-looking, beautiful even. Donna barely knew what she was doing as she left her post at the door and in a few steps was reaching out for it, holding it in her hand, wondering whether, if she threw it to the floor hard enough, it would be smashed.
"Doctor, I--"
She meant to ask him what she should do with it, but as he turned to face her, she saw Heths release Rose, though her relief over the seeming end of the hostage situation was short-lived as she was suddenly cast to the ground, dropped the orb, and felt a searing pain that seemed to be everywhere in her body all at one. The orb did not break when it fell, though she likewise did not notice.
If Rose had thought there was a lot going on before, she would need to study quantum physics to comprehend everything that occurred simultaneously now. She found herself released from Heths' grip, the pop of the gun being fired sending an expectation of pain that never came through her nervous system.
The Doctor uttered not a word as he easily overpowered Heths and wrenched the gun from his hands. Heths sank to the ground and the Doctor stood over him, drawing himself up to his full height and glaring with every single minute of his thousand years.
The door to the office burst open, the wood around the bolt finally splintered, and an amalgam of uniformed guards and armed men in suits entered, but then looked around in confusion trying to determine what exactly was happening.
Rose rushed to where Donna lay on the floor, her breath laboured and wheezing, blood pouring from a wound at her left shoulder. Rose took her jacket off and ripped out the lining to use to try and staunch the blood. The orb lay a few feet away on the floor, forgotten.
As the armed men turned to face where a tall, unkempt and possibly mentally unstable man was quite clearly holding the Secretary of Education at gunpoint, there was the sound of breaking glass on the other side of the room. Everyone turned to investigate, except the Doctor who still had not moved and still had not lowered the weapon.
The guards, looking in the direction of the windows where one pane had been broken, watched as a small black object, like a spiky golf ball, sailed in to the room and landed on the floor. They looked at one another, frozen in silent fear that this was an explosive device.
Rather than explode, it made a metallic click, and all (or all but one) of the occupants of the office, friendly and un-, doubled over clutching their ears in pain. The armed men dropped their weapons and sank to the floor, the guards fled the room, Heths clutched his head and prayed for the Doctor to shoot him already and end the agony. Rose stood up in time to watch Jake Simmonds unlatch the window through the broken out pane and enter, followed by Pete Tyler, both wearing hearing protection.
Pete rushed to where Rose was standing over Donna, while Jake collected the weapons that had been flung to the ground and picked up the device emitting the piercing sound, shutting it off. He held it up and threatened to turn it back on again if the men did not turn and leave immediately, which they did with tears in their eyes and heaving chests.
"She needs to get to hospital," panted Rose to Pete, stating the obvious.
Pete nodded to Jake, who removed his ear protection and lifted Donna carefully, losing his grip momentarily because of the blood, but, with Pete helping, he was able to spirit her out of the window again. Rose turned to the Doctor for the first time in what seemed like hours.
He was still standing over Heths, his face twisted with rage, his breaths short and tight. His hand was steady however, keeping the gun trained at the other man's head. Heths for his part seemed ready to weep but understood that no amount of words would make any difference to his situation.
"Doctor," Rose pleaded, "let him go." She approached him carefully, arms out, eyes wide and unblinking. "This isn't what you want."
She touched his arm and, while he didn't turn his head away from Heths, she saw his eyes move to look at her hand, which was leaving bloody prints on his shirt sleeve. "Leave him go," she said again, like she would speak to a wild animal to coax it to her.
The Doctor lowered his arm slightly, and in one smooth movement turned away from Heths and towards where the Phoenix orb lay in a pool of red, squeezing the trigger and watching the orb shatter. The Universe sang in his head, a dam breaking, time racing and then coming to a shuddering halt at this moment. The flight of the butterfly, the progress of the tides, the fraying and rejoining of time and space all came in to clear focus for the first time since he'd left his beloved ship and his other self.
The gun slipped from his hand unnoticed and landed with a sickening splat on the swampy floor around the desk. Heths sobbed loudly and the crackle of radios and flashing of red lights could be seen and heard from outside the window.
Rose took the Doctor's trembling hand and led him to the sill, where she sat and swung her legs over, never taking her eyes off of him as he did the same. On the outside, they were met with uniformed men and handcuffs, with the sound of an ambulance fading in to the night, and with long strings of words shouted from Pete Tyler, also being led to a police car, to the effect of there being nothing to worry about, something about the President, about documents being sent, but none of it made much sense.
It all happened mostly in silence. They were separated from each other in silence, taken to different cars, and Rose could not even hear her own voice as she pleaded for them to not hurt the Doctor, to please let them stay together. Without sound he shook his head, looked at her with heavy eyes, and let himself be placed in to a back seat. He may even have smiled, just a little bit, just to put her at ease. There was enough pain in the world, there was no point in her worrying needlessly for his well being.
A fog had descended while they had been in the building, and the Doctor looked up at a street lamp as he was driven away, where a moth fluttered in impotent desire. He followed the moth with his eye as the car rounded a corner, and then with his mind, perceiving the impact even a small creature has on the Universe. Even a moth. Especially a moth. It always comes down to that, in the end.
(To Chapter 26 + Epilogue)