Held in Trust: Chapter 25 (omg)
Title: Held in Trust: Chapter 25
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: A Ten II action/adventure fic, with sci-fi, a bit of romance, and alt!Donna. The Doctor, Rose and Donna investigate an apocalyptic death cult, with a whole boatload of unforeseen consequences, including time travel, a mysterious planet with burnt-orange sky, and a human empire gone horribly wrong.
A/N: *cough* Blimey. So, uh, it's been a year since I updated this fic, to my eternal shame. Right in the middle of the climax, too. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But I'm really for-real working on finishing it now (next chapter is already written, will be posted next week).
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| Chapter 24
"Her name is on his lips. The circle draws him to it. You are expected." Elpis reached out to touch the strange object on the table, but the Doctor stepped in front of her and grabbed her wrist. She shook her head and cleared her throat.
"Back with us?" the Doctor asked.
Crede stood off to one side, his brow deeply furrowed.
"Yeah, sorry. It must be that thing," Elpis answered while removing her arm from the Doctor's grasp.
The three of them drew close around the black box, clearly the most impressively out-of-place item in the cave, aside from perhaps the arsenal.
"What is it?" Crede asked.
The Doctor gestured in the air over top of it impressively. "Temporal failsafe. Or rather the housing for the cold fusion reaction that creates the energy necessary to power the temporal failsafe. And a teeny tiny hole in time and space."
Crede took a nervous step back at the same time that Elpis took one more step forward, enthralled with the object.
"I'm not sure that's such a good-" the Doctor began, but Elpis waved a hand in front of his face and shushed him.
"Why should I be afraid of time?" she said, her nose inches from it now. "You're not, I can see that. And why should you be? You've changed time. That's why it bends around you. Fear-it fears you...destroyer of worlds!"
The Doctor blanched and took Elpis by the shoulder, perhaps more harshly than he'd meant to.
"Stop it," he growled, unable to control himself.
"Doctor, I don't think she can," Crede interjected, watching helplessly from a few paces away.
"No, not changed time," she muttered, considering. "It's more than that. Time changed you, time created you. Doctor, what are you?" She backed away from him and from the table now, clutching her head.
Crede tentatively approached her and guided her even further away from the box on the table.
"I'm just a man," the Doctor said, unconvincingly. "I'm just the Doctor."
At that moment all three jumped at the sound of other voices. Loud, shouting voices from outside the chamber, perhaps even above the fissures, but there was no way to be sure without revealing themselves in the process.
"Elpis, please. It's just this thing that's giving you the heebie-jeebies, I promise. I just need to figure out how to open it-"
Crede looked alarmed and let go of Elpis's shoulders in order to hold both of his hands out and back away even more. "You want to what?"
"Open it," the Doctor said. "So I can deactivate the failsafe."
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Crede asked apprehensively. Elpis just chuckled a little and leaned against a nearby rock wall.
"How else am I going to turn it off? I know what I'm doing. Mostly." He leaned down over it and squinted appraisingly. "Oh, no."
"What?"
"Isomorphic lock," the Doctor moaned. "It reads the biological signature of the person trying to open it."
"That's not good," Elpis said, coming back to herself, but now staying far across the room from it.
There were more sounds of shouting, now seemingly louder and closer. The Doctor bounced on the balls of his feet and ran a hand through his hair. "Okay, think, think, think... You're a genocidal maniac- No, not a maniac, you've been driven to it, driven mad. But not so mad that you don't think to put an isomorphic lock on your Doomsday Device..."
"So no one but this Tane guy can get in to it? And he's that guy you already met, where you came from?" Crede asked.
"Yeah, I think it's safe to say he won't be showing up here to lend a hand."
More shouting from outside, even closer, with sounds of falling rock mixed in.
"Too bad. All we'd need was his hand anyway," Elpis said, casting worried looks towards the passageway by which they'd entered. "You know, we didn't really make an effort to hide the entry, did we?"
"Yes!" cried the Doctor, causing looks of confusion from his companions.
"That wasn't meant to be a positive observation," Elpis said dryly.
"His hand!" the Doctor continued, heedlessly. "If he set the lock up for his own signature... no, that's not right."
"Doctor, shouldn't we push the boulder back or hide our tracks or something? We're sort of trapped in here." Crede shifted from foot to foot and he looked around the room nervously. "Enough of this," he said, exasperated, and before the Doctor could even look round from where he was lost in thought, the boy was grabbing a rifle and a box of ammunition from the corner and shimmying back through the passageway.
"Wait!" the Doctor cried, too late. He looked back and forth between Elpis, the black box, and the passageway, raking his hands roughly over his head and stammering half-formed scoldings.
"What, we're just supposed to wait here to be found?" Elpis said in a whisper. "I don't think so Doctor. You have no idea what will happen to us if we get caught."
"I don't want us to get caught, but I don't want him to get killed," he answered, making an effort to keep his voice low, despite his agitation.
"That's his choice," Elpis answered. "Let's not make it be in vain." She looked pointedly at the black box, but remained as far from it as possible. "Do what you've come here to do."
***
Crede had never fired a rifle in his life; never even held one. As an indenture, he'd never been permitted, but he'd seen the guards loading and discharging their weapons enough times. How hard could it be? He crouched at the end of the passageway and inspected the gun in the minimal light. His hands shook as he opened the box of ammunition and fumbled his way through loading, hoping he wasn't doing it in such a way that it would backfire and wind up doing him in instead.
He searched for some sort of calm, a thought or feeling that would make what he was about to do all right. He'd certainly be signing his own death warrant, which was perhaps better than the decades on a penal station that he was currently facing as a deserter and a fraterniser. The day previous had dawned as his one day off in a hundred, and now look where he was: Huddled in a cave, thumbing a rifle, waiting to...
Waiting to... what? Shoot another human? Several humans, even?
He tried to think of them as guards, not like him at all. That was normally his opinion of them, anyway. Not as bad as the Proprietors or sixers, but not like him. They could order him around, humiliate him, make him fetch and carry and do silly pointless tasks just to see if he would.
Would the guard he'd encounter here be one of the ones who'd kicked him, sent him on wild goose chases, hidden his clothes while he bathed? It might be easy to shoot such a one. It could possibly even be satisfying.
He squinted down at the rifle's stalk and flipped what he hoped was the safety.
Moving slowly out of the passageway, he looked up and down the fissure. There was no one in the immediate area, but he flattened himself up against one rock wall and began inching his way from the direction that his party had originally come. Coming around a slight bend in the corridor, he saw his first target, and his heart squeezed painfully. The light of a torch bobbed off in the distance-just one-and then a blue-uniformed guard came into view. Crede levelled his rifle and approached as the man's back was turned.
"Drop your gun," Crede said, his voice sounding absurdly young and tremulous. He half-expected the guard to simply start laughing-probably before turning about and killing him in one easy shot.
The guard did turn, but as he did so he cast his own rifle off to the side where it landed with a heavy clatter and a cloud of kicked-up dust. Crede couldn't possibly have been more surprised if the gun had then turned in to a sand-rat and run away.
It was then that Crede realised that he hadn't really planned beyond this moment. Was he taking a hostage now? Executing this man? His hands shook, the tremors going right down the barrel, so that it was blatantly apparently that he was a rank amateur. He chided himself for so easily being sucked in to the Doctor's world-view, where everything was possible just through... what had he said? Self-confidence? What utter nonsense, but enough to convince a naive young boy that he could be a hero of some sort.
"Crede?"
Crede started and came nauseatingly close to squeezing the trigger just from reflex. It took another long moment for him to realise that it was the guard who'd said his name-his real name, not his designation number. Looking back, it struck him as funny how much context aids in recognition, even of the most basic things.
"Crede," the man said again, in a maddeningly calm tone, "what are you doing?"
"Theris," Crede said, but not as a question. There was no doubt now-it had only been a year since they'd last seen one another. "I thought you completed your indenture." Again, when he looked back later, that this was perhaps the stupidest question of all time. Everything, all of his assumptions, seemed stupid in hindsight.
"I did," Theris said, rubbing a hand through his thinning hair absently, seemingly unconcerned that he was being held at gunpoint.
"But-" Crede stammered, wondering if he really did have to state the obvious.
"But...you're holding me at gunpoint. You, an indenture in serious violation, holding me, a level nine security guard, at gunpoint. There's a whole other unit of guards topside right now, waiting for me to check in with them."
As if on cue, there were a series of dull thuds-boots hitting the ground after pitching over the edge of the fissure. Theris looked Crede dead in the eye and then swept his gaze over to the gun he was holding.
"Give me that and I'll tell them you... I don't know; you were kidnapped, or were sleepwalking or something."
Crede swallowed hard, his extremities tingling with both fear and the palpable desire to forget any of this ever happened and to return to the only real home he'd ever known.
"C'mon, Crede-for me. I don't want to see you die in front of me. Not after all those times I saved your skin. I'd hate to think I'd just been wasting my time."
Theris smiled warmly, and Crede smiled back-a dark little grin of remembrance between two friends who stood gazing together at the chasm that had come between them. The footsteps grew nearer and mens' voices began to clarify in to distinct words.
"They will kill you, if they see you pointing that thing at me." Sweat stood out on Theris's brow and he glanced nervously behind him. "Crede!" he hissed in desperation. "Don't be an idiot!"
"That's a tall order," came a clear voice from behind them, and a grey blur followed, running past them in a flurry of feathers.
"Shit!" Crede croaked, and spun around on the spot, looking back at the direction she'd come from and then following her progress as she actually ran towards the approaching guards, weaving between both sides of the fissure, fumbling with something in her hands. Before he could even work out what was going on, and what to do about Theris and what decision he'd make regarding whether he wanted to live or die, Elpis was running back towards them, waving her arms wildly.
"Run!" she cried, clearly not concerned about anyone hearing her.
"What are you-" Crede looked back and forth between Elpis and Theris and his own hands which still held the rifle.
"Shut up! Just run!" She ran as fast as her short legs could carry her right past the two men. "Now!" she added, turning around and running backwards for a moment.
Crede regarded Theris, who regarded him right back. They both smelled a familiar acrid tang in the air, and time slowed in a way that Elpis would doubtless have something to say about. Crede lowered his gun, reached a hand out, and when Theris took it instinctively, he tugged, hard, sprinting and dragging the other man behind him.
At their backs they felt the heat of the explosion before the sound-a deafening, echoing, roiling noise that neither would ever forget. Pebbles, and some rocks that were far too large to be described as pebbles, hit them on the back and treacherously littered the ground they were attempting to run on.
They caught up to Elpis easily, and the three of them together slowed to a walk again, coughing and brushing dust off of their clothing. As they reached the entrance to the secret chamber, she turned to them both, her face an unreadable mask and her mouth a straight line, and said, "You're welcome."
To Chapter 26
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: A Ten II action/adventure fic, with sci-fi, a bit of romance, and alt!Donna. The Doctor, Rose and Donna investigate an apocalyptic death cult, with a whole boatload of unforeseen consequences, including time travel, a mysterious planet with burnt-orange sky, and a human empire gone horribly wrong.
A/N: *cough* Blimey. So, uh, it's been a year since I updated this fic, to my eternal shame. Right in the middle of the climax, too. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But I'm really for-real working on finishing it now (next chapter is already written, will be posted next week).
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| Chapter 24
"Her name is on his lips. The circle draws him to it. You are expected." Elpis reached out to touch the strange object on the table, but the Doctor stepped in front of her and grabbed her wrist. She shook her head and cleared her throat.
"Back with us?" the Doctor asked.
Crede stood off to one side, his brow deeply furrowed.
"Yeah, sorry. It must be that thing," Elpis answered while removing her arm from the Doctor's grasp.
The three of them drew close around the black box, clearly the most impressively out-of-place item in the cave, aside from perhaps the arsenal.
"What is it?" Crede asked.
The Doctor gestured in the air over top of it impressively. "Temporal failsafe. Or rather the housing for the cold fusion reaction that creates the energy necessary to power the temporal failsafe. And a teeny tiny hole in time and space."
Crede took a nervous step back at the same time that Elpis took one more step forward, enthralled with the object.
"I'm not sure that's such a good-" the Doctor began, but Elpis waved a hand in front of his face and shushed him.
"Why should I be afraid of time?" she said, her nose inches from it now. "You're not, I can see that. And why should you be? You've changed time. That's why it bends around you. Fear-it fears you...destroyer of worlds!"
The Doctor blanched and took Elpis by the shoulder, perhaps more harshly than he'd meant to.
"Stop it," he growled, unable to control himself.
"Doctor, I don't think she can," Crede interjected, watching helplessly from a few paces away.
"No, not changed time," she muttered, considering. "It's more than that. Time changed you, time created you. Doctor, what are you?" She backed away from him and from the table now, clutching her head.
Crede tentatively approached her and guided her even further away from the box on the table.
"I'm just a man," the Doctor said, unconvincingly. "I'm just the Doctor."
At that moment all three jumped at the sound of other voices. Loud, shouting voices from outside the chamber, perhaps even above the fissures, but there was no way to be sure without revealing themselves in the process.
"Elpis, please. It's just this thing that's giving you the heebie-jeebies, I promise. I just need to figure out how to open it-"
Crede looked alarmed and let go of Elpis's shoulders in order to hold both of his hands out and back away even more. "You want to what?"
"Open it," the Doctor said. "So I can deactivate the failsafe."
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Crede asked apprehensively. Elpis just chuckled a little and leaned against a nearby rock wall.
"How else am I going to turn it off? I know what I'm doing. Mostly." He leaned down over it and squinted appraisingly. "Oh, no."
"What?"
"Isomorphic lock," the Doctor moaned. "It reads the biological signature of the person trying to open it."
"That's not good," Elpis said, coming back to herself, but now staying far across the room from it.
There were more sounds of shouting, now seemingly louder and closer. The Doctor bounced on the balls of his feet and ran a hand through his hair. "Okay, think, think, think... You're a genocidal maniac- No, not a maniac, you've been driven to it, driven mad. But not so mad that you don't think to put an isomorphic lock on your Doomsday Device..."
"So no one but this Tane guy can get in to it? And he's that guy you already met, where you came from?" Crede asked.
"Yeah, I think it's safe to say he won't be showing up here to lend a hand."
More shouting from outside, even closer, with sounds of falling rock mixed in.
"Too bad. All we'd need was his hand anyway," Elpis said, casting worried looks towards the passageway by which they'd entered. "You know, we didn't really make an effort to hide the entry, did we?"
"Yes!" cried the Doctor, causing looks of confusion from his companions.
"That wasn't meant to be a positive observation," Elpis said dryly.
"His hand!" the Doctor continued, heedlessly. "If he set the lock up for his own signature... no, that's not right."
"Doctor, shouldn't we push the boulder back or hide our tracks or something? We're sort of trapped in here." Crede shifted from foot to foot and he looked around the room nervously. "Enough of this," he said, exasperated, and before the Doctor could even look round from where he was lost in thought, the boy was grabbing a rifle and a box of ammunition from the corner and shimmying back through the passageway.
"Wait!" the Doctor cried, too late. He looked back and forth between Elpis, the black box, and the passageway, raking his hands roughly over his head and stammering half-formed scoldings.
"What, we're just supposed to wait here to be found?" Elpis said in a whisper. "I don't think so Doctor. You have no idea what will happen to us if we get caught."
"I don't want us to get caught, but I don't want him to get killed," he answered, making an effort to keep his voice low, despite his agitation.
"That's his choice," Elpis answered. "Let's not make it be in vain." She looked pointedly at the black box, but remained as far from it as possible. "Do what you've come here to do."
***
Crede had never fired a rifle in his life; never even held one. As an indenture, he'd never been permitted, but he'd seen the guards loading and discharging their weapons enough times. How hard could it be? He crouched at the end of the passageway and inspected the gun in the minimal light. His hands shook as he opened the box of ammunition and fumbled his way through loading, hoping he wasn't doing it in such a way that it would backfire and wind up doing him in instead.
He searched for some sort of calm, a thought or feeling that would make what he was about to do all right. He'd certainly be signing his own death warrant, which was perhaps better than the decades on a penal station that he was currently facing as a deserter and a fraterniser. The day previous had dawned as his one day off in a hundred, and now look where he was: Huddled in a cave, thumbing a rifle, waiting to...
Waiting to... what? Shoot another human? Several humans, even?
He tried to think of them as guards, not like him at all. That was normally his opinion of them, anyway. Not as bad as the Proprietors or sixers, but not like him. They could order him around, humiliate him, make him fetch and carry and do silly pointless tasks just to see if he would.
Would the guard he'd encounter here be one of the ones who'd kicked him, sent him on wild goose chases, hidden his clothes while he bathed? It might be easy to shoot such a one. It could possibly even be satisfying.
He squinted down at the rifle's stalk and flipped what he hoped was the safety.
Moving slowly out of the passageway, he looked up and down the fissure. There was no one in the immediate area, but he flattened himself up against one rock wall and began inching his way from the direction that his party had originally come. Coming around a slight bend in the corridor, he saw his first target, and his heart squeezed painfully. The light of a torch bobbed off in the distance-just one-and then a blue-uniformed guard came into view. Crede levelled his rifle and approached as the man's back was turned.
"Drop your gun," Crede said, his voice sounding absurdly young and tremulous. He half-expected the guard to simply start laughing-probably before turning about and killing him in one easy shot.
The guard did turn, but as he did so he cast his own rifle off to the side where it landed with a heavy clatter and a cloud of kicked-up dust. Crede couldn't possibly have been more surprised if the gun had then turned in to a sand-rat and run away.
It was then that Crede realised that he hadn't really planned beyond this moment. Was he taking a hostage now? Executing this man? His hands shook, the tremors going right down the barrel, so that it was blatantly apparently that he was a rank amateur. He chided himself for so easily being sucked in to the Doctor's world-view, where everything was possible just through... what had he said? Self-confidence? What utter nonsense, but enough to convince a naive young boy that he could be a hero of some sort.
"Crede?"
Crede started and came nauseatingly close to squeezing the trigger just from reflex. It took another long moment for him to realise that it was the guard who'd said his name-his real name, not his designation number. Looking back, it struck him as funny how much context aids in recognition, even of the most basic things.
"Crede," the man said again, in a maddeningly calm tone, "what are you doing?"
"Theris," Crede said, but not as a question. There was no doubt now-it had only been a year since they'd last seen one another. "I thought you completed your indenture." Again, when he looked back later, that this was perhaps the stupidest question of all time. Everything, all of his assumptions, seemed stupid in hindsight.
"I did," Theris said, rubbing a hand through his thinning hair absently, seemingly unconcerned that he was being held at gunpoint.
"But-" Crede stammered, wondering if he really did have to state the obvious.
"But...you're holding me at gunpoint. You, an indenture in serious violation, holding me, a level nine security guard, at gunpoint. There's a whole other unit of guards topside right now, waiting for me to check in with them."
As if on cue, there were a series of dull thuds-boots hitting the ground after pitching over the edge of the fissure. Theris looked Crede dead in the eye and then swept his gaze over to the gun he was holding.
"Give me that and I'll tell them you... I don't know; you were kidnapped, or were sleepwalking or something."
Crede swallowed hard, his extremities tingling with both fear and the palpable desire to forget any of this ever happened and to return to the only real home he'd ever known.
"C'mon, Crede-for me. I don't want to see you die in front of me. Not after all those times I saved your skin. I'd hate to think I'd just been wasting my time."
Theris smiled warmly, and Crede smiled back-a dark little grin of remembrance between two friends who stood gazing together at the chasm that had come between them. The footsteps grew nearer and mens' voices began to clarify in to distinct words.
"They will kill you, if they see you pointing that thing at me." Sweat stood out on Theris's brow and he glanced nervously behind him. "Crede!" he hissed in desperation. "Don't be an idiot!"
"That's a tall order," came a clear voice from behind them, and a grey blur followed, running past them in a flurry of feathers.
"Shit!" Crede croaked, and spun around on the spot, looking back at the direction she'd come from and then following her progress as she actually ran towards the approaching guards, weaving between both sides of the fissure, fumbling with something in her hands. Before he could even work out what was going on, and what to do about Theris and what decision he'd make regarding whether he wanted to live or die, Elpis was running back towards them, waving her arms wildly.
"Run!" she cried, clearly not concerned about anyone hearing her.
"What are you-" Crede looked back and forth between Elpis and Theris and his own hands which still held the rifle.
"Shut up! Just run!" She ran as fast as her short legs could carry her right past the two men. "Now!" she added, turning around and running backwards for a moment.
Crede regarded Theris, who regarded him right back. They both smelled a familiar acrid tang in the air, and time slowed in a way that Elpis would doubtless have something to say about. Crede lowered his gun, reached a hand out, and when Theris took it instinctively, he tugged, hard, sprinting and dragging the other man behind him.
At their backs they felt the heat of the explosion before the sound-a deafening, echoing, roiling noise that neither would ever forget. Pebbles, and some rocks that were far too large to be described as pebbles, hit them on the back and treacherously littered the ground they were attempting to run on.
They caught up to Elpis easily, and the three of them together slowed to a walk again, coughing and brushing dust off of their clothing. As they reached the entrance to the secret chamber, she turned to them both, her face an unreadable mask and her mouth a straight line, and said, "You're welcome."
To Chapter 26