Alternatively - 12/65
WARNING: I think it's pretty self-explanatory that I've never been in the 1700s. I don't know what they did there. Don't know what they looked like, don't know much. All the stuff ensconced in the following four chapters was scavenged from Wikipedia, a brief Google search (Do you know how hard it is to find pictures of eighteenth-century dresses that someone who regularly finds herself running every time she so much as looks at something with a skirt attached would be caught dead, alive or partially decomposed in??), and the movie Becoming Jane, which I watched several months ago and don't own either, and sincerely hope (although also sincerely doubt) contained some form of historical accuracy. I don’t know. But this was betaed by three people, so it should be survivable. If it isn't, I'm sorry.
-BAD WOLF-
The Doctor paced.
He knew a lot about humans. One couldn't travel with them for over a thousand Earth years and not pick up a few bits of information about them.
One of the things he knew about humans was that they needed an undue amount of sleep. Another was that this amount was rather increased by the length of the day and the difficulty they had encountered in getting through it. Yet another thing he had learned about them was that, being lazy creatures, a large number of them liked to stay in a vague sort of half-awake state quite a bit longer than even their ridiculous need for rest entailed.
He understood that Rose was human. He understood that not only had she basically been awake for two days, but also that those two days (well, one day, seven hours and thirty-six minutes, assuming that she hadn't slept well- which he had a nagging suspicion that she hadn't, considering the chemical imbalances he could detect in his companion) had been particularly difficult ones. Physically and emotionally, he acknowledged with a mild guilty start. He could therefore understand that she would need quite a bit more rest than was normal for any human.
He could understand all of this. What he couldn't understand was why it was still happening.
Fourteen hours, eleven minutes and twenty-seven seconds ago she had wobbled tiredly out of the console room in search of something large and soft. And now that was fourteen hours, eleven minutes and thirty seconds ago, and she had still not appeared.
Maybe something was wrong.
The TARDIS instantly denounced this theory with a distinctly insulted air. She liked the girl, as she had assumed her behaviour towards her for the entirety of their acquaintance, and did not wish her any harm. If anything had gone wrong, which it hadn't, she would have told the Doctor instantly and probably fixed it herself. Honestly, he-
"Okay, point taken," he snapped at her. “You can stop now.”
She silenced, lights dimming slightly in her version of a glare.
Fourteen hours, eleven minutes, forty-two seconds.
Fourteen hours, eleven minutes, forty-three seconds.
Fourteen hours-
He should stop counting. Preferably now, before she shorted out all of her navigation circuits and left him to float in the Vortex forever.
He shut up. Rose walked into the room and he shut up more.
He was staring. He knew he was staring. Was that rude? He thought it might be rude. He should probably stop staring. He should most definitely stop.
It was fairly apparent that she had raided the TARDIS wardrobe, as it was notoriously difficult to find something that was obviously from the 18th century in the 21st, unless one lived very close to a particularly ornery rift, and Rose didn’t.
The item she had picked was, obviously, a dress. More to the point, it was dark green, mostly; a formation of fabric like a slender, slightly concave triangle of a sort of pale sage colour split the skirt, running from her waist down to the floor, but apart from that it was dark green. The sleeves went to around halfway down her forearm, he was of course not noticing how far down the neckline dipped. The dark fabric was swathed around her curves (She hadn’t had those before. Either that, or they just weren’t on display. Knowing Rose and her varied quirks, he rather suspected the former) so perfectly that it looked like the garment had been made exclusively for her to wear it. Knowing his TARDIS, it probably had been. Her hair had been pulled back from her face in exactly the sort of way that someone who had no idea what else to do with it to make it fit in even slightly would do it, leaving only a couple of slightly damp golden strands free to curve along the side of her face. She rubbed her palms absently against her thighs and she worried her lip, the picture of adorable bashfulness.
Not adorable. No.
He hadn’t stopped staring. Why hadn’t he stopped?
“What do you think?” asked the woman before him, fingers nervously tapping against the fabric.
He swallowed to try to reconstitute his throat. It didn’t work. “It’s good,” he said. “It’s really… good. It’s…” He swallowed again. “Good. Very… umm…” He stopped himself. “Why are you wearing it?”
The TARDIS laughed at him.
In a not-impressive-at-all show of willpower he glanced away, looking at a completely innocuous switch and wondering why his hearts were thudding so rapidly in his ribcage. The sudden rush of blood made him dizzy and he surreptitiously used the console for support as he tried to manually slow his cardiovascular system before he had a fatal double arrhythmia.
“Jane Austen,” she said. He lost interest in the switch and his eyes slipped disobediently back towards her as she pulled a stray lock of hair behind her ear, apparently more composed now.
He blinked and managed, by some miracle, to look at her face instead of what the dress did to her. The same miracle, however, did not manage to connect the three syllables she'd uttered to any logical thought, or keep the exceedingly complimentary things trying to get out of his mouth away from his vocal cords.
"What?" he said, instead. Green, he thought. He liked green.
Rose chortled- that was really the only word for it, he supposed. He was almost a little insulted; of course he was surprised at her appearance. Really. Seeing her in more 21st century attire for the entirety of his knowing her (or knowing of her, if he was being completely honest) couldn't possibly prepare him for seeing her in something else. It hadn't occurred to her that she might even wear anything else. Well, he supposed that it had been a niggling thought at the back of his mind, as traipsing around, say, the eighteenth century in jeans and a t-shirt might not be the best idea, but he'd never really thought it through. It was a shock; that was all. He was surprised. It wasn't that the dress made her look gorgeous; it was that he hadn't been expecting her to show up in it. Yes. That was it. His vocal cords could unfreeze now.
He liked green.
"I want to see Jane Austen," she clarified, stepping around the console and sitting on the chair. Her mild embarrassment had vanished in the face of his fascination and it had been replaced with a kind of faint and almost melancholy amusement. “You told me to think about where I wanted to go next, yeah?” she reminded him gently.
"Jane Austen?" he echoed. He got the distinct impression that his ship was laughing at him.
Green was a good colour. Especially-
He stopped that train of thought before he said anything stupid.
You’re enjoying this, he accused his ship as her mirth went very firmly into the level of “hysterical”.
"What?" she demanded of him, a little snappishly.
Something clicked, and he wasn't entirely surprised to find something like surprise exploding behind his eyes. "You like Jane Austen?"
"Yes," she said defensively, crossing her arms- and act which probably wasn’t altogether the wisest thing she could have done, considering how low the neckline was in the first place. Not that he was thinking about that at all. No. Someone else might have thought about it. He was not thinking about it and the thought had only faintly crossed his mind because that someone else might have thought about it, and you never knew what someone else might do when a thought crossed someone else’s mind. "What's wrong with that?" She seemed to realise the very thing the Doctor had not been thinking about and abruptly uncrossed the aforementioned extremities.
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Wouldn't have put you down as an Austen fan," he said. He considered the previous statement. "No offence."
Rose shrugged, drumming her fingertips on the battered leather beneath her. "There's a lot you don't know about me," she replied.
The Time Lord's eyes flickered over his companion. Yes, he didn't say. Far too much. One of the most important being why the simple act of her being in period clothing had taken the entire extent of his infinitely complex thought processes and winnowed them down to the knowledge that green was a good colour, despite the fact that he didn't even have a slight interest in her in any way other than what he normally felt for a companion. Well, a companion who didn't irritate the hell out of him, at least.
She sighed, shifting a little. “I started reading her stuff not long after I came here,” she explained.
He leaned against the console. “Why?” he inquired of her, if only to distract her from the simple fact that his irrepressible urge to talk had been repressed.
She looked at the pulsating column in the centre of the room, eyes slightly unfocussed. “I was scared,” she admitted. “Nothing here was really the same. She was the first thing I found whose parallel wasn’t completely different- although I dunno,” she added, frowning slightly. “Never knew much about her in the first place. Anyway, she seemed about the same, so I just kind of latched on. And then I figured out that I actually liked her stuff.” She chuckled lightly.
“How far’d you get?” he inquired, sensing a melancholy mood descending over his companion and wishing to remove it as soon as possible.
She glanced over at him, gaze losing its distance. “Managed to get through Pride and Prejudice and was around halfway through Persuasion when you came along,” she answered proudly.
Confusion etched a frown across his face. “Pride and Prejudice?” he echoed.
She furrowed her brow for a moment before realisation cleared her features. “First Impressions, sorry,” she corrected herself. “She called it Pride and Prejudice back on my world.”
He winced inwardly at “my world”, but didn’t remark on it. What was he to say, anyway? “Sorry, but there actually is a way back to your old universe, I just never told you because I’m a selfish git and want to keep you for myself?” Not bloody likely.
He liked green.
-BAD WOLF-
Hopeless, he is. Absolutely hopeless. Possibly more so than my version. He should have seen it coming, really; he is the Doctor, and she is Rose. If the other one fell for her as hard and fast as he did, then what makes the parallel think that he’ll be immune to her?
This does completely mess up my plans, you know. Not that they weren’t messed up in the first place, but I had revised them. They went somewhere along the lines of antagonising them until the Doctor decided to drop her off with her original Time Lord, or putting the idea into Rose’s head that since he’d said that when the others of his species were still alive, travel between parallels was possible, that maybe the addition of one of them would be enough, or some combination thereof, but if the Doctor keeps hanging on to her like he has been and will continue to do…
I do love them. I do. And don’t get me wrong, the new Doctor is a fascinating individual, but he’s not mine, and Rose doesn’t belong with him and won’t unless Q gets past my guard and starts fiddling with the timelines again, and he’s so clumsy with them that he’d probably destroy the multiverse right then and there. And if the alternate would be so kind as to return my host back to me and our Doctor, then I would be so kind as to prod him over to another creature who has the potential of healing him as well as Rose can. He can even be in love with it, if he wants. I don’t much care. I just want my host back where she belongs, with me and the real Doctor.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go and argue with some Ancients. Daniel’s died again and they’re thinking about not letting him Ascend again if he keeps messing about with his powers like he does.
-BAD WOLF-
The unscheduled appearance of a ridiculously anachronistic police box in the late eighteenth century went even more unnoticed than it usually did. The squirrels and birds and assorted other innocuous creatures which were the phenomenon’s most frequent observers were more interested in the humans, and the humans, imperceptive creatures by nature, were made even more oblivious by their own agitation.
Rose stepped out first, glancing around rapidly- partially in a keen interest to figure out where they were and partially in the completely founded suspicion that he had got the co-ordinates wrong again and she was about to find herself suddenly faced with sixteen angry aliens pointing guns at her. It wouldn't have been the first time.
Fortunately, however, everything looked normal from what she could detect, so she dared to step out into the open. The Doctor followed, closing the door behind him.
"So this is where she lived, yeah?" Rose inquired.
He made some form of acceding noise.
"Thought it'd be… I dunno." She faltered a little; the Time Lord was looking at her with that all-too-familiar "I pity you, you silly little rodent" expression. "More impressive?" she guessed.
The Doctor shook his head. "Nah, she didn't exactly take the world by storm- not for a while, anyway. Not until after she died in 1817."
She nodded. "When are we?" she inquired.
"We're in the eighteenth century. She should be at her creative height right now."
"Unless you've got the co-ordinates wrong."
He stared at her. "Rose Tyler, are you insulting my driving?"
"Always."
"I'd like to see you try."
"Did it pretty well the last time I did."
He gave her another look. This one very plainly said, in large block letters, "Don't be ridiculous."
"How many controls did I give you?" he challenged her.
She shifted uncomfortably. "Well, three, but-"
"How long did it take you to locate them?"
"Well-"
"And how many times did I save you from accidentally pressing something that would destroy the entire universe?"
She glared.
"There you are, then," he said triumphantly. "You can't insult me any more."
"Wanna bet?" she snapped at his retreating back, clumsily gathering her infinite skirts into one hand so that she didn't end up losing her balance even more than she usually did while walking on watery mud in ridiculously inadequate shoes.
Well, maybe "shoes" was a bit of an exaggeration.
"Humans," he muttered, as she caught up with him. "So irrational."
"You love us anyway," she accused him, tearing her eyes from the ground for long enough to grin at him.
"'Course," he agreed happily. "Besides, who wants rationality?"
Rose, having very nearly killed herself when she looked away from where she was going, only dared to split her concentration enough to make a vague sound of agreement before she was silent again.
The Doctor, noting her plight, took her hand and threaded her arm around his- although how in the name of all that was good and holy in the multiverse he could be so totally unfazed by the notably hazardous condition of the surface they were walking on, she had no idea. She wasn't about to refuse the support, though.
"Thanks," she said, as she removed her eyes from the ground again.
He started to speak, but suddenly frowned at something Rose couldn't detect and stopped in his tracks. She slid a little at the unexpected development, but kept her footing.
"What is it?"
"Hear that?" he inquired of her, glancing in her direction.
She concentrated. She could hear a vaguely discontented murmur coming from the house, but she couldn't decipher its full meaning.
"'S like…" She paused. "Shouting?" she guessed.
"Something's gone wrong," he said.
"Well, with you, that's a given," Rose remarked, but he had already dropped her arm and begun half-running towards the house.
-BAD WOLF-
The Doctor paced.
He knew a lot about humans. One couldn't travel with them for over a thousand Earth years and not pick up a few bits of information about them.
One of the things he knew about humans was that they needed an undue amount of sleep. Another was that this amount was rather increased by the length of the day and the difficulty they had encountered in getting through it. Yet another thing he had learned about them was that, being lazy creatures, a large number of them liked to stay in a vague sort of half-awake state quite a bit longer than even their ridiculous need for rest entailed.
He understood that Rose was human. He understood that not only had she basically been awake for two days, but also that those two days (well, one day, seven hours and thirty-six minutes, assuming that she hadn't slept well- which he had a nagging suspicion that she hadn't, considering the chemical imbalances he could detect in his companion) had been particularly difficult ones. Physically and emotionally, he acknowledged with a mild guilty start. He could therefore understand that she would need quite a bit more rest than was normal for any human.
He could understand all of this. What he couldn't understand was why it was still happening.
Fourteen hours, eleven minutes and twenty-seven seconds ago she had wobbled tiredly out of the console room in search of something large and soft. And now that was fourteen hours, eleven minutes and thirty seconds ago, and she had still not appeared.
Maybe something was wrong.
The TARDIS instantly denounced this theory with a distinctly insulted air. She liked the girl, as she had assumed her behaviour towards her for the entirety of their acquaintance, and did not wish her any harm. If anything had gone wrong, which it hadn't, she would have told the Doctor instantly and probably fixed it herself. Honestly, he-
"Okay, point taken," he snapped at her. “You can stop now.”
She silenced, lights dimming slightly in her version of a glare.
Fourteen hours, eleven minutes, forty-two seconds.
Fourteen hours, eleven minutes, forty-three seconds.
Fourteen hours-
He should stop counting. Preferably now, before she shorted out all of her navigation circuits and left him to float in the Vortex forever.
He shut up. Rose walked into the room and he shut up more.
He was staring. He knew he was staring. Was that rude? He thought it might be rude. He should probably stop staring. He should most definitely stop.
It was fairly apparent that she had raided the TARDIS wardrobe, as it was notoriously difficult to find something that was obviously from the 18th century in the 21st, unless one lived very close to a particularly ornery rift, and Rose didn’t.
The item she had picked was, obviously, a dress. More to the point, it was dark green, mostly; a formation of fabric like a slender, slightly concave triangle of a sort of pale sage colour split the skirt, running from her waist down to the floor, but apart from that it was dark green. The sleeves went to around halfway down her forearm, he was of course not noticing how far down the neckline dipped. The dark fabric was swathed around her curves (She hadn’t had those before. Either that, or they just weren’t on display. Knowing Rose and her varied quirks, he rather suspected the former) so perfectly that it looked like the garment had been made exclusively for her to wear it. Knowing his TARDIS, it probably had been. Her hair had been pulled back from her face in exactly the sort of way that someone who had no idea what else to do with it to make it fit in even slightly would do it, leaving only a couple of slightly damp golden strands free to curve along the side of her face. She rubbed her palms absently against her thighs and she worried her lip, the picture of adorable bashfulness.
Not adorable. No.
He hadn’t stopped staring. Why hadn’t he stopped?
“What do you think?” asked the woman before him, fingers nervously tapping against the fabric.
He swallowed to try to reconstitute his throat. It didn’t work. “It’s good,” he said. “It’s really… good. It’s…” He swallowed again. “Good. Very… umm…” He stopped himself. “Why are you wearing it?”
The TARDIS laughed at him.
In a not-impressive-at-all show of willpower he glanced away, looking at a completely innocuous switch and wondering why his hearts were thudding so rapidly in his ribcage. The sudden rush of blood made him dizzy and he surreptitiously used the console for support as he tried to manually slow his cardiovascular system before he had a fatal double arrhythmia.
“Jane Austen,” she said. He lost interest in the switch and his eyes slipped disobediently back towards her as she pulled a stray lock of hair behind her ear, apparently more composed now.
He blinked and managed, by some miracle, to look at her face instead of what the dress did to her. The same miracle, however, did not manage to connect the three syllables she'd uttered to any logical thought, or keep the exceedingly complimentary things trying to get out of his mouth away from his vocal cords.
"What?" he said, instead. Green, he thought. He liked green.
Rose chortled- that was really the only word for it, he supposed. He was almost a little insulted; of course he was surprised at her appearance. Really. Seeing her in more 21st century attire for the entirety of his knowing her (or knowing of her, if he was being completely honest) couldn't possibly prepare him for seeing her in something else. It hadn't occurred to her that she might even wear anything else. Well, he supposed that it had been a niggling thought at the back of his mind, as traipsing around, say, the eighteenth century in jeans and a t-shirt might not be the best idea, but he'd never really thought it through. It was a shock; that was all. He was surprised. It wasn't that the dress made her look gorgeous; it was that he hadn't been expecting her to show up in it. Yes. That was it. His vocal cords could unfreeze now.
He liked green.
"I want to see Jane Austen," she clarified, stepping around the console and sitting on the chair. Her mild embarrassment had vanished in the face of his fascination and it had been replaced with a kind of faint and almost melancholy amusement. “You told me to think about where I wanted to go next, yeah?” she reminded him gently.
"Jane Austen?" he echoed. He got the distinct impression that his ship was laughing at him.
Green was a good colour. Especially-
He stopped that train of thought before he said anything stupid.
You’re enjoying this, he accused his ship as her mirth went very firmly into the level of “hysterical”.
"What?" she demanded of him, a little snappishly.
Something clicked, and he wasn't entirely surprised to find something like surprise exploding behind his eyes. "You like Jane Austen?"
"Yes," she said defensively, crossing her arms- and act which probably wasn’t altogether the wisest thing she could have done, considering how low the neckline was in the first place. Not that he was thinking about that at all. No. Someone else might have thought about it. He was not thinking about it and the thought had only faintly crossed his mind because that someone else might have thought about it, and you never knew what someone else might do when a thought crossed someone else’s mind. "What's wrong with that?" She seemed to realise the very thing the Doctor had not been thinking about and abruptly uncrossed the aforementioned extremities.
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Wouldn't have put you down as an Austen fan," he said. He considered the previous statement. "No offence."
Rose shrugged, drumming her fingertips on the battered leather beneath her. "There's a lot you don't know about me," she replied.
The Time Lord's eyes flickered over his companion. Yes, he didn't say. Far too much. One of the most important being why the simple act of her being in period clothing had taken the entire extent of his infinitely complex thought processes and winnowed them down to the knowledge that green was a good colour, despite the fact that he didn't even have a slight interest in her in any way other than what he normally felt for a companion. Well, a companion who didn't irritate the hell out of him, at least.
She sighed, shifting a little. “I started reading her stuff not long after I came here,” she explained.
He leaned against the console. “Why?” he inquired of her, if only to distract her from the simple fact that his irrepressible urge to talk had been repressed.
She looked at the pulsating column in the centre of the room, eyes slightly unfocussed. “I was scared,” she admitted. “Nothing here was really the same. She was the first thing I found whose parallel wasn’t completely different- although I dunno,” she added, frowning slightly. “Never knew much about her in the first place. Anyway, she seemed about the same, so I just kind of latched on. And then I figured out that I actually liked her stuff.” She chuckled lightly.
“How far’d you get?” he inquired, sensing a melancholy mood descending over his companion and wishing to remove it as soon as possible.
She glanced over at him, gaze losing its distance. “Managed to get through Pride and Prejudice and was around halfway through Persuasion when you came along,” she answered proudly.
Confusion etched a frown across his face. “Pride and Prejudice?” he echoed.
She furrowed her brow for a moment before realisation cleared her features. “First Impressions, sorry,” she corrected herself. “She called it Pride and Prejudice back on my world.”
He winced inwardly at “my world”, but didn’t remark on it. What was he to say, anyway? “Sorry, but there actually is a way back to your old universe, I just never told you because I’m a selfish git and want to keep you for myself?” Not bloody likely.
He liked green.
-BAD WOLF-
Hopeless, he is. Absolutely hopeless. Possibly more so than my version. He should have seen it coming, really; he is the Doctor, and she is Rose. If the other one fell for her as hard and fast as he did, then what makes the parallel think that he’ll be immune to her?
This does completely mess up my plans, you know. Not that they weren’t messed up in the first place, but I had revised them. They went somewhere along the lines of antagonising them until the Doctor decided to drop her off with her original Time Lord, or putting the idea into Rose’s head that since he’d said that when the others of his species were still alive, travel between parallels was possible, that maybe the addition of one of them would be enough, or some combination thereof, but if the Doctor keeps hanging on to her like he has been and will continue to do…
I do love them. I do. And don’t get me wrong, the new Doctor is a fascinating individual, but he’s not mine, and Rose doesn’t belong with him and won’t unless Q gets past my guard and starts fiddling with the timelines again, and he’s so clumsy with them that he’d probably destroy the multiverse right then and there. And if the alternate would be so kind as to return my host back to me and our Doctor, then I would be so kind as to prod him over to another creature who has the potential of healing him as well as Rose can. He can even be in love with it, if he wants. I don’t much care. I just want my host back where she belongs, with me and the real Doctor.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go and argue with some Ancients. Daniel’s died again and they’re thinking about not letting him Ascend again if he keeps messing about with his powers like he does.
-BAD WOLF-
The unscheduled appearance of a ridiculously anachronistic police box in the late eighteenth century went even more unnoticed than it usually did. The squirrels and birds and assorted other innocuous creatures which were the phenomenon’s most frequent observers were more interested in the humans, and the humans, imperceptive creatures by nature, were made even more oblivious by their own agitation.
Rose stepped out first, glancing around rapidly- partially in a keen interest to figure out where they were and partially in the completely founded suspicion that he had got the co-ordinates wrong again and she was about to find herself suddenly faced with sixteen angry aliens pointing guns at her. It wouldn't have been the first time.
Fortunately, however, everything looked normal from what she could detect, so she dared to step out into the open. The Doctor followed, closing the door behind him.
"So this is where she lived, yeah?" Rose inquired.
He made some form of acceding noise.
"Thought it'd be… I dunno." She faltered a little; the Time Lord was looking at her with that all-too-familiar "I pity you, you silly little rodent" expression. "More impressive?" she guessed.
The Doctor shook his head. "Nah, she didn't exactly take the world by storm- not for a while, anyway. Not until after she died in 1817."
She nodded. "When are we?" she inquired.
"We're in the eighteenth century. She should be at her creative height right now."
"Unless you've got the co-ordinates wrong."
He stared at her. "Rose Tyler, are you insulting my driving?"
"Always."
"I'd like to see you try."
"Did it pretty well the last time I did."
He gave her another look. This one very plainly said, in large block letters, "Don't be ridiculous."
"How many controls did I give you?" he challenged her.
She shifted uncomfortably. "Well, three, but-"
"How long did it take you to locate them?"
"Well-"
"And how many times did I save you from accidentally pressing something that would destroy the entire universe?"
She glared.
"There you are, then," he said triumphantly. "You can't insult me any more."
"Wanna bet?" she snapped at his retreating back, clumsily gathering her infinite skirts into one hand so that she didn't end up losing her balance even more than she usually did while walking on watery mud in ridiculously inadequate shoes.
Well, maybe "shoes" was a bit of an exaggeration.
"Humans," he muttered, as she caught up with him. "So irrational."
"You love us anyway," she accused him, tearing her eyes from the ground for long enough to grin at him.
"'Course," he agreed happily. "Besides, who wants rationality?"
Rose, having very nearly killed herself when she looked away from where she was going, only dared to split her concentration enough to make a vague sound of agreement before she was silent again.
The Doctor, noting her plight, took her hand and threaded her arm around his- although how in the name of all that was good and holy in the multiverse he could be so totally unfazed by the notably hazardous condition of the surface they were walking on, she had no idea. She wasn't about to refuse the support, though.
"Thanks," she said, as she removed her eyes from the ground again.
He started to speak, but suddenly frowned at something Rose couldn't detect and stopped in his tracks. She slid a little at the unexpected development, but kept her footing.
"What is it?"
"Hear that?" he inquired of her, glancing in her direction.
She concentrated. She could hear a vaguely discontented murmur coming from the house, but she couldn't decipher its full meaning.
"'S like…" She paused. "Shouting?" she guessed.
"Something's gone wrong," he said.
"Well, with you, that's a given," Rose remarked, but he had already dropped her arm and begun half-running towards the house.