Held in Trust: Chapter 24
Title: Held in Trust (24/30-ish)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure! Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut, Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | 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
"Doctor, do you hear that?" Crede said in an urgent whisper as the party reached more level ground again.
"Almost there," the Doctor answered between clenched teeth. "In fact... Do you see it?" He pointed off towards the northwest and both of his companions craned their necks and squinted, trying to follow his finger.
"I don't see anything," Elpis remarked, though not by way of a challenge-just an observation. Crede noted a subtle change in her demeanour and wondered what the two had been discussing back when he was trying to contend with his much higher centre of gravity on the rocks.
"Good, that's sort of the point," the Doctor answered and quickened his pace, causing Elpis to have to break in to a jog again.
When they did come to the area that the Doctor had indicated, it really was the case that the fissures were undetectable until one was nearly ready to fall in. They ran perpendicular to a shelf of blue-grey rock veined with purple, and the edges were overgrown with long silver grasses and dusky shrubs with tiny yellow flowers. The foliage obscured the apertures and caused an optical illusion of there being solid ground where there was none.
"Are they deep?" Crede asked warily, standing at the lip along side Elpis and the Doctor, all three peering down.
"No, not really. A few metres. Not something you'd like to fall in to unawares, but not hard to climb down in to on purpose." He seemed to sniff the air for a moment and took a deep breath. "Which I think we should do right about now."
He sat with his legs dangling over the lip of the fissure and then turned around and hung by his fingers for a moment before letting go. The sound of his impact came a fraction of a second later and he cleared his throat of the dust kicked up by his fall.
"Crede, you next, and then we'll help Elpis."
The operation went smoothly and soon all three were blinking and dusting themselves off in the dim light of the floor of the rocky cleft.
"Our footprints are all over the place up there. I think we need to keep moving further down," the Doctor said with an air of authority that belied his concern that the flip side of having such a hiding place was that they'd quite easily be trapped.
"Don't suppose you've got a torch," Crede asked, running his hand along the face of one of the rock walls.
"Oh!" the Doctor cried suddenly, startling Elpis into emitting a little peeping noise, which she tried to cover up with coughing. "Oh, Crede my lad, you are brilliant!"
"Who doesn't ask for a torch when they're in a cave?" he said, shooting a glance towards Elpis, who still wore a surprised look.
"No, but I'd totally forgotten about this!" The Doctor reached in to his inside jacket pocket and pulled out the sonic probe. "I've gotten so used to not having one of these, I keep forgetting I've got it!" He squeezed a button and it emitted a faint red light.
"So, you don't have a torch," Elpis noted. "Doesn't give much light, does it?"
"Light's over-rated," the Doctor answered flippantly. "Oh, now that is interesting!" He brought the probe close to his nose and squinted at the tiny screen embedded into the stalk, and then flipped it around to shove in front of Elpis's face.
She crossed her eyes and stopped walking just in time to avoid getting a sonic probe-shaped lump on her forehead. "Watch it!"
"Exactly!" the Doctor squeaked. "Watch it! See, that little number there? That's Hawking radiation. And it just keeps going up, up, up, doesn't it?"
"And that means...are we doomed, or is that a good thing?" Crede said, looking down over Elpis's shoulder at the probe.
"It means," the Doctor said, palming the probe again with a flourish, "that the farther we walk in this direction, the closer we're getting to a temporal disturbance." He immediately turned on his heel and began walking again, leaving Crede and Elpis to fall in to step side-by-side behind him. "What is your spider sense telling you now?" he continued, over his shoulder towards Elpis.
"Her what?" Crede asked.
"It feels closer, but at the same time sort of...further away. You wouldn't understand," Elpis, replied, undaunted by the unusual terminology.
"Wouldn't I?" the Doctor chuckled under his breath, and continued muttering to himself and letting frequent red bursts out of the end of the sonic probe until coming to a complete, abrupt halt. "We've gone too far," he said, frustrated and gritting his teeth again. "But I didn't see anything, did you?"
"See what?" Crede asked.
"Well, precisely," the Doctor nodded. "There was nothing to see." He jiggled the sonic probe, waved it around and turned it on and off several times. "There's got to be something here, look at the readings-but they're going down again, the more we keep walking."
"Doctor?" the sound of Elpis's voice was unexpectedly far away, but the Doctor didn't register it anyway, befuddled by the conflict between his own eyes and the numbers scrolling across the tiny screen of the probe.
"I suppose if he had the right technology he could have made some sort of cloaking device-"
"Doctor?" Elpis called again, and Crede squinted in to the gloom, trying to see where she'd gone.
"-or maybe there's a time bubble being employed, or some sort of time/space camouflage, a rift maybe? There weren't any rifts in this part of the planet, though, not that I remember. That was a long time ago though so maybe-"
"Doctor!" Elpis cried again, and followed it up with a sound that was somewhere in between a whistle and a shriek.
"Bloody hell!" The Doctor clutched a hand to his chest, where he was sure his heart stopped beating for a moment. "What was that?"
Crede stood mutely pointing in the direction they'd come from, finally mouthing, "Elpis."
They found her standing next to a large boulder, her hands on her hips and a very annoyed look on her feathered face.
"Was that...you?" the Doctor stammered as they approached.
"Of course it was, do you see any other Campheline around? I wouldn't have to shout if you'd listen to me the first time around." The Doctor opened his mouth to try to deny her accusations, but she continued: "You were so busy staring at your little red-pointy-light-thing that you walked right by this." She stepped back and gestured to the area behind the boulder.
There was a crevasse in the rock wall, large enough for a man to crawl through on hands and knees. The boulder was covering it most of the way, but they now saw that the dirt on the ground bore evidence of the boulder having been moved back and forth several times.
"Oh, good show," the Doctor grinned. "But for the record, it's a sonic probe, and it's been very useful, thank you very much."
With the boulder pushed out of the way, entering the chamber was relatively easy, even for Crede. The passageway was only a few metres long and then opened in to a much larger room. The Doctor waved the probe around, apparently causing no end of annoyance to Elpis who flapped her arms in the dark and anxiously wished out loud for a torch.
"Scared of the dark?" Crede taunted, as the Doctor aimed the probe away from them and twiddled a knob until a small desk lamp turned on. In its light, Crede saw that Elpis was clinging to the wall nearest the passageway by which they'd entered, her eyes squeezed shut. The Doctor was occupied by looking about the room and whistling with admiration, and thus didn't notice Crede approach Elpis to take one of her hands gently.
"It's okay," he said softly. "See? The light's on."
Elpis opened her eyes tentatively and looked around. Her shoulders relaxed and she quickly took her hand out of Crede's, looking away from him as she smoothed her feathers down.
"Extraordinary!" the Doctor exclaimed, surveying the contents of a low table sitting incongruously in the midst of a cave.
"That's one word for it," Crede said, looking at something sitting on the floor next to where he was standing.
Elpis looked back and forth between them, but she seemed pulled towards Crede's discovery, wide-eyed. "Oh, now that's... that's a lot," she said, leaning over to inspect the contents.
Finally the Doctor could no longer stand the lack of attention for what he was bent over examining and turned around to look at the competition.
"Don't touch that!" he shouted as soon as he saw Elpis's little hand reach down towards it.
She jumped back, but looked anything but chastened. "I think I know what to do with T-98 blasting compound, thanks."
"It's used in mining," Crede explained. "But the guns aren't." He stepped aside to reveal five rifles of the sort that the Doctor had seen the guards carrying, plus several boxes of ammunition.
"Quite a little arsenal," the Doctor mused, trying to subtly but effectively move his young charges away from the explosives. "Insurance against being discovered prematurely."
Elpis looked around and up at the high ceiling of the chamber. "Are we thinking this is Tane's little workshop? I'd be willing to bet he blasted this out himself. Funny, we never heard a thing."
"Well, why would you, with your own mining operation going," the Doctor said. "But moving on from the things that go boom..."
He moved back over to the table, with its ridiculous little office desk lamp creating a warm circle of yellow light. Illuminated, among other things, was a seamless, solid black box, about a foot square. "Whaddya say? That looks a bit out of place for a cave, don't you think?"
Elpis slowly approached it, her eyes unfocused and half-lidded, as if she were sleep walking.
"Her name is on his lips," she moaned softly. "The circle draws him to it. You are expected."
***
The prisoner picks lint off of his uniform. He has spent too much time covered in the filth and the dust of a world not his own, he will not be now sullied by even a speck of this polluted rock, spinning around its doomed sun.
When he sees her, she will have forgotten her pain. The gods of her people will have made sure of that. She will have forgotten in a way that he can not and never will. Not in ten-thousand forevers, and this is the hell he will occupy even in the bliss of her presence.
The universe will still churn forward, will still belch out life at a dizzying rate. What would anyone care if there were one less species? One less race to grow powerful and corrupt and sick at heart. One less set of gods to occupy the already over-crowded space between worlds.
He has moved beyond the despair of the appointed moment passing, and the disappointment at his continued existence. It will come. These toy soldiers have simply delayed it, somehow-these primitive shades of the race that they will become. He's come a dozen millennia on the power of his will to undo, to redo and write over. It will come, but he is weary.
He longs to be with her again and his skin prickles with the promise of kisses that he will feel in a hundred centuries, or tomorrow, or felt a year ago. Time is meaningless. It can be used and folded and then discarded when no longer needed. He is through with time.
He sits primly on the mattress and removes the precious gem he's been keeping close to his heart. Dropped from the window of a zeppelin passing over-head, perhaps by a naughty child having a first go at joining the thoughtless, selfish human race. Tossing a bottle out a window, just to see it fall, just to see it shatter hundreds of feet below. And shatter it did, the guards in the exercise yard scrambling to pick up the pieces before their lone charge even knew what had happened.
He examines the edge, sharpened discreetly on the concrete floor, the repetitive sound of scraping being the only thing that could finally bring him calm and sleep at nights. The promise of a new world.
The glass is warm from where he has been keeping it next to his skin, where it has left little cuts. Practise for this moment.
Two swift slashes and he lays back with a sigh. His vision begins to iris in and dim. Orange and yellow lights flicker off in the periphery and his breathing becomes shallow.
No one will ever get his secrets from him. Perhaps he was born to be a prisoner, a servant, a slave, a dupe. But he knows one thing for certain. He has always known.
"Amaia," he says, his lips dry.
There is too much time, but there is never enough.
To Chapter 25
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure! Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut, Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | 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
"Doctor, do you hear that?" Crede said in an urgent whisper as the party reached more level ground again.
"Almost there," the Doctor answered between clenched teeth. "In fact... Do you see it?" He pointed off towards the northwest and both of his companions craned their necks and squinted, trying to follow his finger.
"I don't see anything," Elpis remarked, though not by way of a challenge-just an observation. Crede noted a subtle change in her demeanour and wondered what the two had been discussing back when he was trying to contend with his much higher centre of gravity on the rocks.
"Good, that's sort of the point," the Doctor answered and quickened his pace, causing Elpis to have to break in to a jog again.
When they did come to the area that the Doctor had indicated, it really was the case that the fissures were undetectable until one was nearly ready to fall in. They ran perpendicular to a shelf of blue-grey rock veined with purple, and the edges were overgrown with long silver grasses and dusky shrubs with tiny yellow flowers. The foliage obscured the apertures and caused an optical illusion of there being solid ground where there was none.
"Are they deep?" Crede asked warily, standing at the lip along side Elpis and the Doctor, all three peering down.
"No, not really. A few metres. Not something you'd like to fall in to unawares, but not hard to climb down in to on purpose." He seemed to sniff the air for a moment and took a deep breath. "Which I think we should do right about now."
He sat with his legs dangling over the lip of the fissure and then turned around and hung by his fingers for a moment before letting go. The sound of his impact came a fraction of a second later and he cleared his throat of the dust kicked up by his fall.
"Crede, you next, and then we'll help Elpis."
The operation went smoothly and soon all three were blinking and dusting themselves off in the dim light of the floor of the rocky cleft.
"Our footprints are all over the place up there. I think we need to keep moving further down," the Doctor said with an air of authority that belied his concern that the flip side of having such a hiding place was that they'd quite easily be trapped.
"Don't suppose you've got a torch," Crede asked, running his hand along the face of one of the rock walls.
"Oh!" the Doctor cried suddenly, startling Elpis into emitting a little peeping noise, which she tried to cover up with coughing. "Oh, Crede my lad, you are brilliant!"
"Who doesn't ask for a torch when they're in a cave?" he said, shooting a glance towards Elpis, who still wore a surprised look.
"No, but I'd totally forgotten about this!" The Doctor reached in to his inside jacket pocket and pulled out the sonic probe. "I've gotten so used to not having one of these, I keep forgetting I've got it!" He squeezed a button and it emitted a faint red light.
"So, you don't have a torch," Elpis noted. "Doesn't give much light, does it?"
"Light's over-rated," the Doctor answered flippantly. "Oh, now that is interesting!" He brought the probe close to his nose and squinted at the tiny screen embedded into the stalk, and then flipped it around to shove in front of Elpis's face.
She crossed her eyes and stopped walking just in time to avoid getting a sonic probe-shaped lump on her forehead. "Watch it!"
"Exactly!" the Doctor squeaked. "Watch it! See, that little number there? That's Hawking radiation. And it just keeps going up, up, up, doesn't it?"
"And that means...are we doomed, or is that a good thing?" Crede said, looking down over Elpis's shoulder at the probe.
"It means," the Doctor said, palming the probe again with a flourish, "that the farther we walk in this direction, the closer we're getting to a temporal disturbance." He immediately turned on his heel and began walking again, leaving Crede and Elpis to fall in to step side-by-side behind him. "What is your spider sense telling you now?" he continued, over his shoulder towards Elpis.
"Her what?" Crede asked.
"It feels closer, but at the same time sort of...further away. You wouldn't understand," Elpis, replied, undaunted by the unusual terminology.
"Wouldn't I?" the Doctor chuckled under his breath, and continued muttering to himself and letting frequent red bursts out of the end of the sonic probe until coming to a complete, abrupt halt. "We've gone too far," he said, frustrated and gritting his teeth again. "But I didn't see anything, did you?"
"See what?" Crede asked.
"Well, precisely," the Doctor nodded. "There was nothing to see." He jiggled the sonic probe, waved it around and turned it on and off several times. "There's got to be something here, look at the readings-but they're going down again, the more we keep walking."
"Doctor?" the sound of Elpis's voice was unexpectedly far away, but the Doctor didn't register it anyway, befuddled by the conflict between his own eyes and the numbers scrolling across the tiny screen of the probe.
"I suppose if he had the right technology he could have made some sort of cloaking device-"
"Doctor?" Elpis called again, and Crede squinted in to the gloom, trying to see where she'd gone.
"-or maybe there's a time bubble being employed, or some sort of time/space camouflage, a rift maybe? There weren't any rifts in this part of the planet, though, not that I remember. That was a long time ago though so maybe-"
"Doctor!" Elpis cried again, and followed it up with a sound that was somewhere in between a whistle and a shriek.
"Bloody hell!" The Doctor clutched a hand to his chest, where he was sure his heart stopped beating for a moment. "What was that?"
Crede stood mutely pointing in the direction they'd come from, finally mouthing, "Elpis."
They found her standing next to a large boulder, her hands on her hips and a very annoyed look on her feathered face.
"Was that...you?" the Doctor stammered as they approached.
"Of course it was, do you see any other Campheline around? I wouldn't have to shout if you'd listen to me the first time around." The Doctor opened his mouth to try to deny her accusations, but she continued: "You were so busy staring at your little red-pointy-light-thing that you walked right by this." She stepped back and gestured to the area behind the boulder.
There was a crevasse in the rock wall, large enough for a man to crawl through on hands and knees. The boulder was covering it most of the way, but they now saw that the dirt on the ground bore evidence of the boulder having been moved back and forth several times.
"Oh, good show," the Doctor grinned. "But for the record, it's a sonic probe, and it's been very useful, thank you very much."
With the boulder pushed out of the way, entering the chamber was relatively easy, even for Crede. The passageway was only a few metres long and then opened in to a much larger room. The Doctor waved the probe around, apparently causing no end of annoyance to Elpis who flapped her arms in the dark and anxiously wished out loud for a torch.
"Scared of the dark?" Crede taunted, as the Doctor aimed the probe away from them and twiddled a knob until a small desk lamp turned on. In its light, Crede saw that Elpis was clinging to the wall nearest the passageway by which they'd entered, her eyes squeezed shut. The Doctor was occupied by looking about the room and whistling with admiration, and thus didn't notice Crede approach Elpis to take one of her hands gently.
"It's okay," he said softly. "See? The light's on."
Elpis opened her eyes tentatively and looked around. Her shoulders relaxed and she quickly took her hand out of Crede's, looking away from him as she smoothed her feathers down.
"Extraordinary!" the Doctor exclaimed, surveying the contents of a low table sitting incongruously in the midst of a cave.
"That's one word for it," Crede said, looking at something sitting on the floor next to where he was standing.
Elpis looked back and forth between them, but she seemed pulled towards Crede's discovery, wide-eyed. "Oh, now that's... that's a lot," she said, leaning over to inspect the contents.
Finally the Doctor could no longer stand the lack of attention for what he was bent over examining and turned around to look at the competition.
"Don't touch that!" he shouted as soon as he saw Elpis's little hand reach down towards it.
She jumped back, but looked anything but chastened. "I think I know what to do with T-98 blasting compound, thanks."
"It's used in mining," Crede explained. "But the guns aren't." He stepped aside to reveal five rifles of the sort that the Doctor had seen the guards carrying, plus several boxes of ammunition.
"Quite a little arsenal," the Doctor mused, trying to subtly but effectively move his young charges away from the explosives. "Insurance against being discovered prematurely."
Elpis looked around and up at the high ceiling of the chamber. "Are we thinking this is Tane's little workshop? I'd be willing to bet he blasted this out himself. Funny, we never heard a thing."
"Well, why would you, with your own mining operation going," the Doctor said. "But moving on from the things that go boom..."
He moved back over to the table, with its ridiculous little office desk lamp creating a warm circle of yellow light. Illuminated, among other things, was a seamless, solid black box, about a foot square. "Whaddya say? That looks a bit out of place for a cave, don't you think?"
Elpis slowly approached it, her eyes unfocused and half-lidded, as if she were sleep walking.
"Her name is on his lips," she moaned softly. "The circle draws him to it. You are expected."
***
The prisoner picks lint off of his uniform. He has spent too much time covered in the filth and the dust of a world not his own, he will not be now sullied by even a speck of this polluted rock, spinning around its doomed sun.
When he sees her, she will have forgotten her pain. The gods of her people will have made sure of that. She will have forgotten in a way that he can not and never will. Not in ten-thousand forevers, and this is the hell he will occupy even in the bliss of her presence.
The universe will still churn forward, will still belch out life at a dizzying rate. What would anyone care if there were one less species? One less race to grow powerful and corrupt and sick at heart. One less set of gods to occupy the already over-crowded space between worlds.
He has moved beyond the despair of the appointed moment passing, and the disappointment at his continued existence. It will come. These toy soldiers have simply delayed it, somehow-these primitive shades of the race that they will become. He's come a dozen millennia on the power of his will to undo, to redo and write over. It will come, but he is weary.
He longs to be with her again and his skin prickles with the promise of kisses that he will feel in a hundred centuries, or tomorrow, or felt a year ago. Time is meaningless. It can be used and folded and then discarded when no longer needed. He is through with time.
He sits primly on the mattress and removes the precious gem he's been keeping close to his heart. Dropped from the window of a zeppelin passing over-head, perhaps by a naughty child having a first go at joining the thoughtless, selfish human race. Tossing a bottle out a window, just to see it fall, just to see it shatter hundreds of feet below. And shatter it did, the guards in the exercise yard scrambling to pick up the pieces before their lone charge even knew what had happened.
He examines the edge, sharpened discreetly on the concrete floor, the repetitive sound of scraping being the only thing that could finally bring him calm and sleep at nights. The promise of a new world.
The glass is warm from where he has been keeping it next to his skin, where it has left little cuts. Practise for this moment.
Two swift slashes and he lays back with a sigh. His vision begins to iris in and dim. Orange and yellow lights flicker off in the periphery and his breathing becomes shallow.
No one will ever get his secrets from him. Perhaps he was born to be a prisoner, a servant, a slave, a dupe. But he knows one thing for certain. He has always known.
"Amaia," he says, his lips dry.
There is too much time, but there is never enough.
To Chapter 25