Alternatively - 3/?
Ah, you've come back! I was almost afraid you wouldn't.
Well, since you're here, we'd better get on with it before your attention span vanishes. I never understood mortal attention spans; they're always too short to be of any use...
...Where was I?
Oh. Right.
-BAD WOLF-
Going through a secondary transmat system hadn't been fun the first time, and the first time she hadn't even fully appreciated the "secondary" part of the name.
She was torn apart cell by cell; each individual atom was scanned and then burned and discarded. Her mind was wrenched forcefully out of her body, then it and the data required to reconstruct her was transferred across time and space- emailed, she thought with a mental half-smile- to another computer.
And then the "secondary" part of the name started.
Her mind was left to float aimlessly in the sea of numbers which would allow the computer to rebuild her, trapped, but not tied down to anything.
She wasn't sure how long she sat there, but as soon as her consciousness decided to settle down and call the computer home it was torn away again and thrust into her body once more- while it was still under construction.
As soon as the process was over her reconstructed legs gave out and she started to fall, but never actually managed to hit the ground.
"Ooh, careful," said the not-quite-Doctor as he caught her. She clutched weakly at his arms for balance as the room spun around her and for a moment she could pretend that the not-quite-Doctor was the Doctor, and that she had finally come home.
But as he pulled her to her feet, she caught a glimpse of his eyes and the fantasy shattered.
They were warm, yes; they were concerned, but they lacked that deeper, darker emotion with which her Doctor had always gazed at her- that shadow which gave her the impression that she was all that mattered.
"You all right?" inquired the not-Doctor.
"Yeah," she replied, disentangling herself from him to prove her point. Her legs are still a little shaky, but she'd rather stand on her own than be close to this not-Doctor.
"Time travel without a capsule will do that to you. Forgot to warn you." He looked mildly guilty. "Sorry."
She shook her head. "It's all right."
The not-quite-Doctor blinked. "Tell you what," he said tersely, "let's get out of the way." He wrapped his fingers around her forearm and led her away from the transmat machine a few moments before several more people came through them.
"Thanks."
"No problem. Now..." He turned around, squinting at the ceiling. "We're on a spaceship of some kind- actually, more like movable space station, it's massive."
"Any idea who built it?"
"Can't tell from here, but it looks a bit Racnoss. Funny, really; I thought they'd been wiped out long ago..." He paused. "Well, s'pose nothing stays dead around me except the things I want to bring back."
She bit her lip, resisting the urge to try to comfort him any way she could.
"Tell you what," he said, suddenly slipping into flippancy. "Let's go this way." He wandered off in an apparently random direction, and Rose was left with no choice but to follow as more people were transmatted in and started panicking.
"What're the Racnoss?" she inquired, having to run for a few moments to catch up to the Doctor.
"Big spider-thingies. They're omnivores, they devoured entire planets. I thought they'd all been killed, but apparently not..." He turned and started walking in a different direction. "Might not be the Racnoss anyway."
"What do they want with us, though?"
He turned back to her. "Food," he said as if it was perfectly self-explanatory. "They're going to pick off the population one by one so that nobody can fight back, and then they're going to invade the planet itself." He paused. "You know, they steal one or two people or a train, and then the people who could stop them go blundering in to investigate-"
"Oi! You fell in too!"
He sent her a glare. "Ran," he corrected her. "I ran in. Anyway, the people who can stop them go in, they eat them, the people who can rescue the people who can stop them go in, they eat them..."
"And then they just go after the entire planet?"
"Basically, yeah." He wandered off again, tapping at a wall coated with spider-webs. "Yeah," he repeated.
"What? What is it?"
"Definitely a Racnoss ship. Their webs are surprisingly strong, they build their spaceships out of them."
Rose frowned. "Doesn't that, I dunno, leave a bunch of holes in it?"
He gave her an impatient look. "They aren't just spiders, Rose," he said irritably. "They can seal their webs together so it's airtight. Engine, propulsion system, controls, everything's built out of this stuff."
"How many Racnoss?" she asked, touching the wall herself. It was smooth and silky and ever-so-slightly sticky.
"No way of telling. Could be as few as ten or as many as two thousand, depending on the size of the ship, but judging by the sound of the engines, I'd say it's closer to two thousand."
Rose shivered slightly. "Any way of stopping them?"
He paused, then gave her a smile. "I'll think of something," he said, and walked past her again, shoving a couple of bewildered people out of the way. "So, Rose Tyler," he said, scanning the door with his sonic screwdriver, "why were you at the disturbance?"
"Same as you. Trying to figure out what it was."
"Ah, but that implies that you are one of those people who could possibly stop this from happening."
"I'm with Torchwood," she said in explanation.
The not-quite-Doctor winced. "Oh." He paused. "Does that mean you're going to try to kidnap me?"
Rose laughed. "No, it's different now. It's changed, since..." She paused. "Well. Everything."
The not-quite-Doctor glanced over his shoulder. "Canary Wharf?" he inquired.
She nodded.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly.
She nodded again, forcing the pain back. "What are you doing?" she inquired of him.
"Trying to find a way out so we can find the Racnoss and..." He paused. "Yeah, that's as far as it goes, actually."
She rolled her eyes at him.
He gave a triumphant cry as the door slid open, then put the screwdriver back in his pocket and walked down the corridor as the door slid shut behind them.
"Shouldn't we... let them out or something?" asked Rose, gesturing back to the door.
"They're safe there as long as the Racnoss don't come and get them, and I haven't seen any yet." He paused. "Which is weird, actually; I thought we'd have found one by now..."
"Maybe it's a really big ship but most of the Racnoss died," suggested Rose, tilting her head to look at the ceiling.
He glanced back. "Good point." He could see why his alternate self chose her; she was clever... Well. He'd rather be on his own, but... She seemed worth at least a trip. Definitely more than Earth could give her, even when she was with Torchwood.
"So," he said. "How long have you been with Torchwood?"
"Six months. Once you see everything, the size of it all..." She trailed off. "You can't just leave it behind, you know?"
He grinned. "Yeah."
She paused. "On Satellite Five... what happened? With you?"
His smile faded. "I used the delta wave, it killed me and everything else in a surprisingly large area around the Satellite, I regenerated, I wandered off, that's all you need to know." He paused. "Does it matter?"
She shook her head. "No. Just curious."
He turned a random corner. The lack of Racnoss concerned him; it was almost as if they didn't want to be found... He had thought that he had escaped the cages unnoticed, but if they had seen...
Lost in his wonderings, he didn't see the Racnoss until they were a few metres in front of him.
"Ah, clever humans escaped the cage, clever," hissed one of the spiderlike creatures.
"We feed early," said a second, and they started to advance.
The Doctor instinctively grabbed Rose's hand.
"Run!" he ordered. Startled, she obeyed.
They ran along the dismal greyish corridors until the Doctor found another hallway, pulling her quickly to the right and dashing across the ever-so-slightly sticky floor.
He skidded to a halt as the hallway came to an end, a stark wall in their way.
"All right, maybe that one wasn't a good idea," he said before turning and trying to go back.
But the Racnoss had already caught up with them and were slowly, malevolently clicking towards them.
"Now we can feast," snarled the first one happily.
"Ah, now, you really want to think about that," said the Doctor, backing towards the wall. "We can help you. Do you really want to eat someone who can help?"
"Human thinks he can talk himself out of death," chuckled a Racnoss.
"Your transmat," he said. "It's not working properly, is it? It should have waited until we were very firmly out of the way before transmatting more people in, but I only figured out that we should go away because I heard it powering up. We nearly got spliced with two other people, didn't we, Rose?"
"Yep."
"And that would really mess up the rest of your meat, if the others weren't as observant as me, and of course nobody could be."
The Racnoss paused, cocking their arachnidian heads to the side.
The Doctor relaxed slightly. "I can fix it for you," he said. "All I ask is that you keep Rose and I alive, if only until it's finished."
"Why must we keep her alive?" inquired one of the arachnoids. "If you are the only one who can help us..."
"There have to be two people to fix it," said Rose quickly.
"She's vital. And if you kill her, I won't do anything."
The words spilled from his lips before he had thought them through, and it surprised him. He barely knew her- true, his alternate self had known and trusted her and, judging by what she had said, loved her, but he himself had only met her the previous day. And even then she had run away from him. And now he had said he'd die to keep her alive?
She didn't have some sort of mind-control over him, did she? He wouldn't be surprised, what with his alternate self practically begging her to come with him. True, he had never been refused before and that was odd, but if a potential companion refused, that was it; he was gone, and he never looked back. None of his selves ever did. But the ninth one, the least likely to beg anything from anyone, who had insisted to himself and his TARDIS that he just wanted to be alone...
Still, he could puzzle over that later. Right now they were in danger.
They! There it was again! He fought an increasing urge to bang his head against the wall.
The Racnoss looked at each other, hissing slightly. Two of them stepped forwards and the Doctor and Rose backed up slightly, fearing that he hadn't actually convinced them not to eat them, but the creatures just stepped over them to stand behind them.
"Try to escape and we will devour you," the Racnoss before them informed them, turning around slowly before starting to walk.
"Wouldn't dream of it," replied the Doctor with mock severity before grinning momentarily at Rose and following the arachnoid out of the dead-end and back into the main corridor.
"So," he said conversationally. "How many of you are there?"
"One hundred and sixty-seven," answered the creature before them, who the Doctor spontaneously decided to call Sadie.
"And the children," reminded one of the Racnoss behind them, which he dubbed Fred.
"But this ship is massive," objected the Doctor. "I would have thought..."
"The others were murdered," snarled Sadie.
"Really? By who?" he inquired, feigning ignorance.
"The Time Lords," hissed Carrie. "They hunted us, murdered us. We are the only ones left."
"But now they are extinct," said Sadie smugly. "They cannot stop us now. We are victorious."
The Doctor clenched his jaw to avoid snapping back at them with something which would completely destroy his facade. To them, he was a knowledgeable human, nothing more.
Rose glanced up at him. "I'm sorry," she murmured.
He just nodded.
"I'll get us out," he whispered, his voice barely audible. "Whatever happens, I'm getting both you and I out of this alive. I promise."
She nodded, but her fear was readily apparent. She had trusted his alternate self, he knew that, so didn't she trust him? He was exactly the same, as far as he could tell... Well, judging by her description, his alternate self wasn't quite as depressed, but still.
So what, he had to prove himself again?
He paused. Judging by her stammering tale, her alternate mother and father had been nothing like her own parents. She was probably expecting the same sort of change in him. She was lost and confused and probably didn't know how to react to any of this.
Before he realised what he was doing, he had reached out and taken her hand in a hopefully comforting gesture. She glanced up at him, seeming almost surprised, but didn't pull away like she had previously.
That was an improvement, he thought, and the spent the rest of the walk in relative silence.
Well, since you're here, we'd better get on with it before your attention span vanishes. I never understood mortal attention spans; they're always too short to be of any use...
...Where was I?
Oh. Right.
-BAD WOLF-
Going through a secondary transmat system hadn't been fun the first time, and the first time she hadn't even fully appreciated the "secondary" part of the name.
She was torn apart cell by cell; each individual atom was scanned and then burned and discarded. Her mind was wrenched forcefully out of her body, then it and the data required to reconstruct her was transferred across time and space- emailed, she thought with a mental half-smile- to another computer.
And then the "secondary" part of the name started.
Her mind was left to float aimlessly in the sea of numbers which would allow the computer to rebuild her, trapped, but not tied down to anything.
She wasn't sure how long she sat there, but as soon as her consciousness decided to settle down and call the computer home it was torn away again and thrust into her body once more- while it was still under construction.
As soon as the process was over her reconstructed legs gave out and she started to fall, but never actually managed to hit the ground.
"Ooh, careful," said the not-quite-Doctor as he caught her. She clutched weakly at his arms for balance as the room spun around her and for a moment she could pretend that the not-quite-Doctor was the Doctor, and that she had finally come home.
But as he pulled her to her feet, she caught a glimpse of his eyes and the fantasy shattered.
They were warm, yes; they were concerned, but they lacked that deeper, darker emotion with which her Doctor had always gazed at her- that shadow which gave her the impression that she was all that mattered.
"You all right?" inquired the not-Doctor.
"Yeah," she replied, disentangling herself from him to prove her point. Her legs are still a little shaky, but she'd rather stand on her own than be close to this not-Doctor.
"Time travel without a capsule will do that to you. Forgot to warn you." He looked mildly guilty. "Sorry."
She shook her head. "It's all right."
The not-quite-Doctor blinked. "Tell you what," he said tersely, "let's get out of the way." He wrapped his fingers around her forearm and led her away from the transmat machine a few moments before several more people came through them.
"Thanks."
"No problem. Now..." He turned around, squinting at the ceiling. "We're on a spaceship of some kind- actually, more like movable space station, it's massive."
"Any idea who built it?"
"Can't tell from here, but it looks a bit Racnoss. Funny, really; I thought they'd been wiped out long ago..." He paused. "Well, s'pose nothing stays dead around me except the things I want to bring back."
She bit her lip, resisting the urge to try to comfort him any way she could.
"Tell you what," he said, suddenly slipping into flippancy. "Let's go this way." He wandered off in an apparently random direction, and Rose was left with no choice but to follow as more people were transmatted in and started panicking.
"What're the Racnoss?" she inquired, having to run for a few moments to catch up to the Doctor.
"Big spider-thingies. They're omnivores, they devoured entire planets. I thought they'd all been killed, but apparently not..." He turned and started walking in a different direction. "Might not be the Racnoss anyway."
"What do they want with us, though?"
He turned back to her. "Food," he said as if it was perfectly self-explanatory. "They're going to pick off the population one by one so that nobody can fight back, and then they're going to invade the planet itself." He paused. "You know, they steal one or two people or a train, and then the people who could stop them go blundering in to investigate-"
"Oi! You fell in too!"
He sent her a glare. "Ran," he corrected her. "I ran in. Anyway, the people who can stop them go in, they eat them, the people who can rescue the people who can stop them go in, they eat them..."
"And then they just go after the entire planet?"
"Basically, yeah." He wandered off again, tapping at a wall coated with spider-webs. "Yeah," he repeated.
"What? What is it?"
"Definitely a Racnoss ship. Their webs are surprisingly strong, they build their spaceships out of them."
Rose frowned. "Doesn't that, I dunno, leave a bunch of holes in it?"
He gave her an impatient look. "They aren't just spiders, Rose," he said irritably. "They can seal their webs together so it's airtight. Engine, propulsion system, controls, everything's built out of this stuff."
"How many Racnoss?" she asked, touching the wall herself. It was smooth and silky and ever-so-slightly sticky.
"No way of telling. Could be as few as ten or as many as two thousand, depending on the size of the ship, but judging by the sound of the engines, I'd say it's closer to two thousand."
Rose shivered slightly. "Any way of stopping them?"
He paused, then gave her a smile. "I'll think of something," he said, and walked past her again, shoving a couple of bewildered people out of the way. "So, Rose Tyler," he said, scanning the door with his sonic screwdriver, "why were you at the disturbance?"
"Same as you. Trying to figure out what it was."
"Ah, but that implies that you are one of those people who could possibly stop this from happening."
"I'm with Torchwood," she said in explanation.
The not-quite-Doctor winced. "Oh." He paused. "Does that mean you're going to try to kidnap me?"
Rose laughed. "No, it's different now. It's changed, since..." She paused. "Well. Everything."
The not-quite-Doctor glanced over his shoulder. "Canary Wharf?" he inquired.
She nodded.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly.
She nodded again, forcing the pain back. "What are you doing?" she inquired of him.
"Trying to find a way out so we can find the Racnoss and..." He paused. "Yeah, that's as far as it goes, actually."
She rolled her eyes at him.
He gave a triumphant cry as the door slid open, then put the screwdriver back in his pocket and walked down the corridor as the door slid shut behind them.
"Shouldn't we... let them out or something?" asked Rose, gesturing back to the door.
"They're safe there as long as the Racnoss don't come and get them, and I haven't seen any yet." He paused. "Which is weird, actually; I thought we'd have found one by now..."
"Maybe it's a really big ship but most of the Racnoss died," suggested Rose, tilting her head to look at the ceiling.
He glanced back. "Good point." He could see why his alternate self chose her; she was clever... Well. He'd rather be on his own, but... She seemed worth at least a trip. Definitely more than Earth could give her, even when she was with Torchwood.
"So," he said. "How long have you been with Torchwood?"
"Six months. Once you see everything, the size of it all..." She trailed off. "You can't just leave it behind, you know?"
He grinned. "Yeah."
She paused. "On Satellite Five... what happened? With you?"
His smile faded. "I used the delta wave, it killed me and everything else in a surprisingly large area around the Satellite, I regenerated, I wandered off, that's all you need to know." He paused. "Does it matter?"
She shook her head. "No. Just curious."
He turned a random corner. The lack of Racnoss concerned him; it was almost as if they didn't want to be found... He had thought that he had escaped the cages unnoticed, but if they had seen...
Lost in his wonderings, he didn't see the Racnoss until they were a few metres in front of him.
"Ah, clever humans escaped the cage, clever," hissed one of the spiderlike creatures.
"We feed early," said a second, and they started to advance.
The Doctor instinctively grabbed Rose's hand.
"Run!" he ordered. Startled, she obeyed.
They ran along the dismal greyish corridors until the Doctor found another hallway, pulling her quickly to the right and dashing across the ever-so-slightly sticky floor.
He skidded to a halt as the hallway came to an end, a stark wall in their way.
"All right, maybe that one wasn't a good idea," he said before turning and trying to go back.
But the Racnoss had already caught up with them and were slowly, malevolently clicking towards them.
"Now we can feast," snarled the first one happily.
"Ah, now, you really want to think about that," said the Doctor, backing towards the wall. "We can help you. Do you really want to eat someone who can help?"
"Human thinks he can talk himself out of death," chuckled a Racnoss.
"Your transmat," he said. "It's not working properly, is it? It should have waited until we were very firmly out of the way before transmatting more people in, but I only figured out that we should go away because I heard it powering up. We nearly got spliced with two other people, didn't we, Rose?"
"Yep."
"And that would really mess up the rest of your meat, if the others weren't as observant as me, and of course nobody could be."
The Racnoss paused, cocking their arachnidian heads to the side.
The Doctor relaxed slightly. "I can fix it for you," he said. "All I ask is that you keep Rose and I alive, if only until it's finished."
"Why must we keep her alive?" inquired one of the arachnoids. "If you are the only one who can help us..."
"There have to be two people to fix it," said Rose quickly.
"She's vital. And if you kill her, I won't do anything."
The words spilled from his lips before he had thought them through, and it surprised him. He barely knew her- true, his alternate self had known and trusted her and, judging by what she had said, loved her, but he himself had only met her the previous day. And even then she had run away from him. And now he had said he'd die to keep her alive?
She didn't have some sort of mind-control over him, did she? He wouldn't be surprised, what with his alternate self practically begging her to come with him. True, he had never been refused before and that was odd, but if a potential companion refused, that was it; he was gone, and he never looked back. None of his selves ever did. But the ninth one, the least likely to beg anything from anyone, who had insisted to himself and his TARDIS that he just wanted to be alone...
Still, he could puzzle over that later. Right now they were in danger.
They! There it was again! He fought an increasing urge to bang his head against the wall.
The Racnoss looked at each other, hissing slightly. Two of them stepped forwards and the Doctor and Rose backed up slightly, fearing that he hadn't actually convinced them not to eat them, but the creatures just stepped over them to stand behind them.
"Try to escape and we will devour you," the Racnoss before them informed them, turning around slowly before starting to walk.
"Wouldn't dream of it," replied the Doctor with mock severity before grinning momentarily at Rose and following the arachnoid out of the dead-end and back into the main corridor.
"So," he said conversationally. "How many of you are there?"
"One hundred and sixty-seven," answered the creature before them, who the Doctor spontaneously decided to call Sadie.
"And the children," reminded one of the Racnoss behind them, which he dubbed Fred.
"But this ship is massive," objected the Doctor. "I would have thought..."
"The others were murdered," snarled Sadie.
"Really? By who?" he inquired, feigning ignorance.
"The Time Lords," hissed Carrie. "They hunted us, murdered us. We are the only ones left."
"But now they are extinct," said Sadie smugly. "They cannot stop us now. We are victorious."
The Doctor clenched his jaw to avoid snapping back at them with something which would completely destroy his facade. To them, he was a knowledgeable human, nothing more.
Rose glanced up at him. "I'm sorry," she murmured.
He just nodded.
"I'll get us out," he whispered, his voice barely audible. "Whatever happens, I'm getting both you and I out of this alive. I promise."
She nodded, but her fear was readily apparent. She had trusted his alternate self, he knew that, so didn't she trust him? He was exactly the same, as far as he could tell... Well, judging by her description, his alternate self wasn't quite as depressed, but still.
So what, he had to prove himself again?
He paused. Judging by her stammering tale, her alternate mother and father had been nothing like her own parents. She was probably expecting the same sort of change in him. She was lost and confused and probably didn't know how to react to any of this.
Before he realised what he was doing, he had reached out and taken her hand in a hopefully comforting gesture. She glanced up at him, seeming almost surprised, but didn't pull away like she had previously.
That was an improvement, he thought, and the spent the rest of the walk in relative silence.