Alternatively - 8/65
Vynn glanced away for a moment.
"All that I know is that it appeared about six months ago, was identified a week or so after that, and that it's going to kill us all."
"Oh, he's optimistic, isn't he?" muttered Rose.
The Doctor's lips twitched for a moment before he turned and glanced between the trees, to where the glowing form of the heliovore was barely visible just above the horizon.
"So," he said, with that flippant voice which told Rose that there was something very wrong indeed, "we've got about... ooh..." He frowned at the creature for a few moments, calculating.
She shifted.
"Twelve hours," he said. "Give or take."
She nodded wisely at this. "Twelve hours to convince a massive, living nebula thing-"
"With the intelligence of a very large puddle," supplied the Doctor helpfully, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet.
"-to kindly not eat a star which we and a lot of other people are currently orbiting around," she finished.
"Are you doubting my abilities, Rose Tyler?" he asked, doing a surprisingly good imitation of a kicked puppy.
"'Course not."
"Good."
Vynn and Illa had been regarding them with an odd combination of hope, despair, and outright bafflement, and this did not go away when the Doctor turned to talk to them again.
"Could you tell me what year it is?"
Illa gave him an odd look. "How could you not know?"
The Doctor opened his mouth.
"His ship, she's a time machine," interrupted Rose before he started rambling in a complicated mix of technobabble, alien slang and overusage of the word "thingie" that even he probably couldn't understand.
He glared at her, but she didn't much care.
The girl's eyes widened. "You..."
"Yes, yes, we wander through time and space in a blue box that's bigger on the inside, now could you get on with it and tell me when we've ended up?" the Doctor cut in sharply, irked at Rose.
Illa shifted her weight to her other foot. "2.8/Yam/12," she said, a distinct note of uncertainty in her voice.
The Doctor winced. "Not... exactly the best time to be for heliovore-defeating, technology-wise," he said. "Meh," he eventually continued. "Adds a bit of challenge to it, I suppose."
"Can't be easy every time," agreed Rose, who had decided to just go along with the Doctor's rapidly changing moods.
"Quite right." He straightened up and walked away.
"Is he always like that?" inquired Illa as he vanished into the village... hamlet... thing.
"You get used to it," said Rose reassuringly as she ordered her protesting legs to obey her and limped after him.
"Let me guess," she said quietly as she disguised the slight pain still running up her calf, "there's something going on with someone's timelines that doesn't let you do anything for this planet at all."
He glanced down, frowning. "Not as such."
"So what's wrong, then?"
"What makes you think something's wrong?" he shot back, confirming the niggling suspicion that there was something wrong.
"Rose Tyler superpowers."
He raised an eyebrow at her. So she did have an inherent telepathic control matrix aimed at him, then?
"You're doing that thing where you're acting like everything is right with the universe," she clarified.
"I always do that," he half-lied, scanning the mostly empty houses for things he could scavenge.
"Well, yeah, but this is a different sort."
He turned his attention back to her.
"You study my moods?"
"I've got a list back home," she answered, grinning, the tip of her tongue poking out from between her lips and that particular habit of hers most certainly did not interest him at all.
A wicked light was gleaming in her Time-flecked, honey-coloured eyes and there was a distinctly teasing nuance in her absolutely-not-fascinating-to-the-Doctor-at-all smile.
"Really?" he asked, giving her a look that was clearly labelled Absolutely Not Fooled and trying to keep an oddly hopeful note out of his voice. Why was there an oddly hopeful note in his voice, anyway?
"I've got it back in the TARDIS, yeah," she said, drawing her fingernail across the side of her nose and tucking a strand of golden hair behind her ear (and he did not want to do it for her; be reasonable, Time Lords didn't do that sort of thing). "I can show you when we get back."
The corner of his mouth twitched.
She was silent for a moment, then gaped at him. "Were you trying to change the subject back there?" she asked, voice a little shrill with the sudden realisation that she had fallen for it.
He made an odd humming noise that Rose had never heard from anyone but him. "Maybe."
"Right," she said. "How long until the universe suddenly implodes in a big ball of fire?"
He rolled his eyes in vague disgust. "You people always assume that the end of the universe is-"
"Doctor."
"It's nowhere near that bad. Just..." He screwed his face up a little trying to think of a way to explain. "Weird. Like a niggling... itch. I've had it for a while, but it's getting stronger."
"Is it bad?"
"Could be. Could be nothing at all. No way of telling."
-BAD WOLF-
It was definitely something. The Doctor's piloting skills may not exactly be the best in the entire multiverse, but his temporal instincts are almost as good as those of his ship.
Something had happened in the timestream that was never meant to happen, and its very happening disguised the fact that it wasn't supposed to have happened in the first place. If the thing happening had just been left alone, things might have been all right, but the Doctor had to go and mess with it because he's the Doctor and that's what he does.
All right, so he didn't know he was messing with it at the time- the thing didn't know, either- but the point still stands.
The thing happened more insistently than it would have had he left the thing alone, and almost every timeline abruptly changed. Oh, one or two timelines are fine as long as they're minor; hell, all the timelines can be altered if you're A. me and B. careful. But, needless to say, the Doctor was not me, or careful, and now the entirety of spacetime is beginning to fracture under the sudden and unexpected stress.
To put it simply, in terms that you mortals will understand perfectly, the Doctor has just cocked things up again and Very Bad Things Indeed are going to happen at some point in the near future.
Now I'm going to have to leave you for a second; Q has started insulting the Ori again and I should probably stop them before they get in another fight and the galaxy implodes. Keep an eye on the Doctor and Rose for me until I come back, okay?
Oh, what am I on about? You can't help them if they get into trouble again. Never mind. I'll just try to come back before they decide to blow something up and end up dead.
-BAD WOLF-
"So what's the brilliant plan?" asked Rose. The Doctor had abruptly sat down on an unusually large fallen branch in front of a particularly ramshackle mix of unidentifiable bits of metal, wood, and something that looked like plastic, and was now staring at it.
"Heliovores," he said, "are not completely undefeatable. I think." He frowned at the sky.
Rose rolled her eyes.
"Their one weakness, really, is that they're stupid."
"Very large puddle," she recalled.
"Exactly. Now, under normal circumstances that wouldn't help us much because it's hard to persuade something like that not to do something- have you ever tried to persuade a puddle?" He turned to her, eyes wide and innocent, framed with thick lashes that surely would have looked absurd on anyone else, and for a moment her breath caught in her throat.
She shook herself.
"Can't say I have, no," she said, plopping down on the stick next to him. It shifted at the added strain, but held. "Although there was that one weird thing on Praxmillia VI."
"Doesn't count."
"No."
There was silence for a moment.
"Anyway, what were you talking about?"
He shook himself abruptly. "Right. Under normal circumstances, the intelligence of a patch of water wouldn't be very helpful, but right now it might, because since it's so stupid it won't know the difference between a real star and something that feels like a star, but isn't."
"So... you're gonna make it think that it's heading the wrong way?" she asked, brow furrowing a little.
"I'm going to cloak the real star and move the signal in a different direction," he clarified. "The thing's too stupid to know that stars don't move, it'll go towards the fake one. Hopefully."
"So what are we waiting for?" she prodded.
"Something to look useful." He glared at the plastic lining one of the crude windows as if he could melt it with his gaze.
She wouldn't be surprised if it really happened.
"Meaning?" she prompted.
"Meaning I need to construct a transmitter strong enough to trick the thing, and then build a very large and complex cloaking device, and I don't have any duct tape with me."
She snorted a little, swinging her legs. The branch rocked with the movement, swaying them rhythmically. "Always thought that's what you used to fix the TARDIS."
"Staazula, you've found me out," he said, a mocking lilt to his tone. The slight upward curve of his lips betrayed his amusement. Silhouetted against the dark sky, he had rarely looked more alien or more beautiful, and Rose's eyes flickered across his outline, unbidden.
He turned his head and she felt her skin prickle sharply at the vague affection glowing in them. Amiability. Not love. Not her Doctor. Never had been, never would be.
She turned away, the loss stinging anew.
"D'you think you can manage without the tape, or do we have to go back to the TARDIS to get it?" she inquired, forcing her thoughts from the melancholy turn they'd taken. An entire planet (and everyone on it) was in serious danger and it most definitely wasn't a good time for mourning what would never come back again.
"Well, I'm a genius," he said, still lilting. He'd seen her expression just before she looked away and it nearly broke him. He hadn't even known her for twenty-four hours, but he knew that the level of pain she bore should never have been placed upon her.
She chuckled. "So you tell me," she teased. Before he could retort, she'd jumped off of the branch. It bobbed wildly and the Doctor was forced to leap to his feet immediately afterwards to avoid being flung off into the earth. As springy as it might have been, he had never liked the taste of the particular sort of dirt that Earth creatures used.
"So go on," she prompted. "What do you need?"
"Vynn and Illa, for one," he replied, sticking his hands in his pockets and walking back up the hill.
-BAD WOLF-
Ah, good. They're still alive. It might have only been a minute, but it only takes a second for the Doctor to discover a new and interesting way of killing himself and everyone around him...
As I'm sure you already know. Really, it gets on my nerves, the scrapes I have to get him out of half of the time...
Anyway.
-BAD WOLF-
The house collapsed in a cloud of dust and the Doctor jumped away, grinning with delight at this new act of destruction and pocketing the sonic screwdriver, which had caused most of the damage to the building. Vynn, sadly lacking the Time Lord's superior reflexes, started coughing loudly as he backed away from the crumpled wreckage.
Rose, perched on the branch she had vacated an hour or two before, narrowed her eyes as the cloud came her way and Illa sneezed violently from her seat next to her. Fifteen minutes into the Doctor's attempts at resonating the structure and Vynn's attempts to pull it down by brute force, the helpful teenager had gone to find some lights. They weren't much, but they illuminated the smallish corner of the mostly-deserted village the Time Lord and his companion had claimed and thus eliminated the possibility of the humans tripping or otherwise injuring themselves in the darkness.
Not for the first time, Rose silently cursed the Doctor for his alien ability to find his way around in the dark. Perfectly.
He crouched in the rubble, picking it apart, grinning quietly to himself at each new unidentifiable object he found. He tossed a bulky object at Vynn, who instinctively caught it and looked down at it blankly.
"It's an empty box," he said.
"Yep," confirmed the Doctor, turning something shiny over in his hands, peering at it through his glasses.
"You're going to save the planet with...?"
"Yep," the Time Lord repeated, getting up without warning and taking the box back, darting over to a clear area near where Rose resided and sitting cross-legged on the earth, holding his sonic screwdriver in his mouth to leave his hands free. Aforementioned box nestled in his lap, he took a thin filament that looked like one of those fibre optic toys that used to so utterly fascinate Rose and poked what might have been a circuit board with it.
"Rose," he said, voice more than a little muffled by the screwdriver, "could you get me the-"
What followed was so garbled that the Doctor himself probably couldn't have understood it.
"The what?"
He repeated it.
She took the screwdriver away from his mouth, gingerly holding it by one end. She didn't think she'd much enjoy getting Doctor drool all over her hand, thank you very much.
"The-" he tried again.
"Just point at it," she interrupted him.
He gave her a condescending look. "My hands are currently otherwise occupied," he said, as if he was trying to explain something very simple to a particularly stupid child.
She glanced down at the array of things before her, picked one, and handed it to him.
She dozed off shortly thereafter, lulled into slumber by sheer boredom, and therefore wasn't sure how much time had passed when a particularly rude Gallifreyan curse ripped through the air and made her jerk awake, terrified that something was about to blow up.
"What is it? What's wrong?" she stuttered, adrenaline forcing any last vestiges of tiredness out of her system.
"I haven't got an energy converter," he said, glaring at the box (which now held a complicated array of junk) as if it was all its fault. "At least not one small enough to fit in here.
Rose swallowed, slipping her fingers into the pocket of her jacket, pulse unexpectedly jumping. She'd wondered, she'd always wondered what the Doctor would do if he found out about that particular device; now, she supposed, it was time she found the answer.
"Like this?" she inquired, almost shyly, bringing the metallic object out of her pocket and offering it.
His eyes flickered down to it and she felt his mood abruptly change from frantic tension to angst- a subtle change for most, but she could feel the alteration shuddering through every nerve. It frightened her.
"You carry a gun?" he asked, voice tight and low and almost, almost a growl. His eyes were crystalline and harsh, glittering coldly in the dim light as if gemstones had replaced the dark amber pools.
"I had to defend myself somehow," she said, a little snappishly, anger rising in her gut. He didn't know her, didn't know what she had been through day after day. How dare he judge her?
"That doesn't justify it," he snapped, eyes blazing. "There are a thousand other ways to-"
"And none of them worked!" she shouted, all pretence of patience spent, and he silenced. Anger and a vague emotion like betrayal emanated almost palpably from him, but he didn't speak.
Assured that he wouldn't interrupt her again, her voice dropped.
"When I was with you, yeah, it was all right. I could run all I liked, you'd be right behind me doing something clever." She inhaled shakily, pain washing over her anew. "And when I joined Torchwood, I just assumed... I assumed that it'd be the same. And then I nearly got killed."
"Nearly," he repeated, as if that justified everything.
Something inside her snapped, crimson light blazing across her consciousness, and she suddenly just wanted to hurt him.
"I was captured, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, left for dead, again and again and again, and I was sick of it!" Her voice echoed across the little hollow they resided in and surely Vynn and Illa could hear from wherever they'd gone off to, but she didn't care. "So yeah, I picked up the gun, and yes, I've killed with it, but I'm still here and it might just save the planet."
"That doesn't make it-"
"You don't know what it's been like, do you?" she interrupted. "Everything was all right when I was with you and then suddenly I was trapped here, on the other side of the Void from my entire life, and there was nobody left who could save me whenever I got into trouble. I had to rescue myself no matter what it took. And I didn't like it, didn't want it, tried so hard to get by without a weapon, but I didn't have a bloody choice in the matter and you know that."
He glowered at her.
Her voice lowered again to a malevolent hum as she forcefully ground out her next words.
"And what I can do with this thing is nothing compared to what you've already done without one."
"All that I know is that it appeared about six months ago, was identified a week or so after that, and that it's going to kill us all."
"Oh, he's optimistic, isn't he?" muttered Rose.
The Doctor's lips twitched for a moment before he turned and glanced between the trees, to where the glowing form of the heliovore was barely visible just above the horizon.
"So," he said, with that flippant voice which told Rose that there was something very wrong indeed, "we've got about... ooh..." He frowned at the creature for a few moments, calculating.
She shifted.
"Twelve hours," he said. "Give or take."
She nodded wisely at this. "Twelve hours to convince a massive, living nebula thing-"
"With the intelligence of a very large puddle," supplied the Doctor helpfully, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet.
"-to kindly not eat a star which we and a lot of other people are currently orbiting around," she finished.
"Are you doubting my abilities, Rose Tyler?" he asked, doing a surprisingly good imitation of a kicked puppy.
"'Course not."
"Good."
Vynn and Illa had been regarding them with an odd combination of hope, despair, and outright bafflement, and this did not go away when the Doctor turned to talk to them again.
"Could you tell me what year it is?"
Illa gave him an odd look. "How could you not know?"
The Doctor opened his mouth.
"His ship, she's a time machine," interrupted Rose before he started rambling in a complicated mix of technobabble, alien slang and overusage of the word "thingie" that even he probably couldn't understand.
He glared at her, but she didn't much care.
The girl's eyes widened. "You..."
"Yes, yes, we wander through time and space in a blue box that's bigger on the inside, now could you get on with it and tell me when we've ended up?" the Doctor cut in sharply, irked at Rose.
Illa shifted her weight to her other foot. "2.8/Yam/12," she said, a distinct note of uncertainty in her voice.
The Doctor winced. "Not... exactly the best time to be for heliovore-defeating, technology-wise," he said. "Meh," he eventually continued. "Adds a bit of challenge to it, I suppose."
"Can't be easy every time," agreed Rose, who had decided to just go along with the Doctor's rapidly changing moods.
"Quite right." He straightened up and walked away.
"Is he always like that?" inquired Illa as he vanished into the village... hamlet... thing.
"You get used to it," said Rose reassuringly as she ordered her protesting legs to obey her and limped after him.
"Let me guess," she said quietly as she disguised the slight pain still running up her calf, "there's something going on with someone's timelines that doesn't let you do anything for this planet at all."
He glanced down, frowning. "Not as such."
"So what's wrong, then?"
"What makes you think something's wrong?" he shot back, confirming the niggling suspicion that there was something wrong.
"Rose Tyler superpowers."
He raised an eyebrow at her. So she did have an inherent telepathic control matrix aimed at him, then?
"You're doing that thing where you're acting like everything is right with the universe," she clarified.
"I always do that," he half-lied, scanning the mostly empty houses for things he could scavenge.
"Well, yeah, but this is a different sort."
He turned his attention back to her.
"You study my moods?"
"I've got a list back home," she answered, grinning, the tip of her tongue poking out from between her lips and that particular habit of hers most certainly did not interest him at all.
A wicked light was gleaming in her Time-flecked, honey-coloured eyes and there was a distinctly teasing nuance in her absolutely-not-fascinating-to-the-Doctor-at-all smile.
"Really?" he asked, giving her a look that was clearly labelled Absolutely Not Fooled and trying to keep an oddly hopeful note out of his voice. Why was there an oddly hopeful note in his voice, anyway?
"I've got it back in the TARDIS, yeah," she said, drawing her fingernail across the side of her nose and tucking a strand of golden hair behind her ear (and he did not want to do it for her; be reasonable, Time Lords didn't do that sort of thing). "I can show you when we get back."
The corner of his mouth twitched.
She was silent for a moment, then gaped at him. "Were you trying to change the subject back there?" she asked, voice a little shrill with the sudden realisation that she had fallen for it.
He made an odd humming noise that Rose had never heard from anyone but him. "Maybe."
"Right," she said. "How long until the universe suddenly implodes in a big ball of fire?"
He rolled his eyes in vague disgust. "You people always assume that the end of the universe is-"
"Doctor."
"It's nowhere near that bad. Just..." He screwed his face up a little trying to think of a way to explain. "Weird. Like a niggling... itch. I've had it for a while, but it's getting stronger."
"Is it bad?"
"Could be. Could be nothing at all. No way of telling."
-BAD WOLF-
It was definitely something. The Doctor's piloting skills may not exactly be the best in the entire multiverse, but his temporal instincts are almost as good as those of his ship.
Something had happened in the timestream that was never meant to happen, and its very happening disguised the fact that it wasn't supposed to have happened in the first place. If the thing happening had just been left alone, things might have been all right, but the Doctor had to go and mess with it because he's the Doctor and that's what he does.
All right, so he didn't know he was messing with it at the time- the thing didn't know, either- but the point still stands.
The thing happened more insistently than it would have had he left the thing alone, and almost every timeline abruptly changed. Oh, one or two timelines are fine as long as they're minor; hell, all the timelines can be altered if you're A. me and B. careful. But, needless to say, the Doctor was not me, or careful, and now the entirety of spacetime is beginning to fracture under the sudden and unexpected stress.
To put it simply, in terms that you mortals will understand perfectly, the Doctor has just cocked things up again and Very Bad Things Indeed are going to happen at some point in the near future.
Now I'm going to have to leave you for a second; Q has started insulting the Ori again and I should probably stop them before they get in another fight and the galaxy implodes. Keep an eye on the Doctor and Rose for me until I come back, okay?
Oh, what am I on about? You can't help them if they get into trouble again. Never mind. I'll just try to come back before they decide to blow something up and end up dead.
-BAD WOLF-
"So what's the brilliant plan?" asked Rose. The Doctor had abruptly sat down on an unusually large fallen branch in front of a particularly ramshackle mix of unidentifiable bits of metal, wood, and something that looked like plastic, and was now staring at it.
"Heliovores," he said, "are not completely undefeatable. I think." He frowned at the sky.
Rose rolled her eyes.
"Their one weakness, really, is that they're stupid."
"Very large puddle," she recalled.
"Exactly. Now, under normal circumstances that wouldn't help us much because it's hard to persuade something like that not to do something- have you ever tried to persuade a puddle?" He turned to her, eyes wide and innocent, framed with thick lashes that surely would have looked absurd on anyone else, and for a moment her breath caught in her throat.
She shook herself.
"Can't say I have, no," she said, plopping down on the stick next to him. It shifted at the added strain, but held. "Although there was that one weird thing on Praxmillia VI."
"Doesn't count."
"No."
There was silence for a moment.
"Anyway, what were you talking about?"
He shook himself abruptly. "Right. Under normal circumstances, the intelligence of a patch of water wouldn't be very helpful, but right now it might, because since it's so stupid it won't know the difference between a real star and something that feels like a star, but isn't."
"So... you're gonna make it think that it's heading the wrong way?" she asked, brow furrowing a little.
"I'm going to cloak the real star and move the signal in a different direction," he clarified. "The thing's too stupid to know that stars don't move, it'll go towards the fake one. Hopefully."
"So what are we waiting for?" she prodded.
"Something to look useful." He glared at the plastic lining one of the crude windows as if he could melt it with his gaze.
She wouldn't be surprised if it really happened.
"Meaning?" she prompted.
"Meaning I need to construct a transmitter strong enough to trick the thing, and then build a very large and complex cloaking device, and I don't have any duct tape with me."
She snorted a little, swinging her legs. The branch rocked with the movement, swaying them rhythmically. "Always thought that's what you used to fix the TARDIS."
"Staazula, you've found me out," he said, a mocking lilt to his tone. The slight upward curve of his lips betrayed his amusement. Silhouetted against the dark sky, he had rarely looked more alien or more beautiful, and Rose's eyes flickered across his outline, unbidden.
He turned his head and she felt her skin prickle sharply at the vague affection glowing in them. Amiability. Not love. Not her Doctor. Never had been, never would be.
She turned away, the loss stinging anew.
"D'you think you can manage without the tape, or do we have to go back to the TARDIS to get it?" she inquired, forcing her thoughts from the melancholy turn they'd taken. An entire planet (and everyone on it) was in serious danger and it most definitely wasn't a good time for mourning what would never come back again.
"Well, I'm a genius," he said, still lilting. He'd seen her expression just before she looked away and it nearly broke him. He hadn't even known her for twenty-four hours, but he knew that the level of pain she bore should never have been placed upon her.
She chuckled. "So you tell me," she teased. Before he could retort, she'd jumped off of the branch. It bobbed wildly and the Doctor was forced to leap to his feet immediately afterwards to avoid being flung off into the earth. As springy as it might have been, he had never liked the taste of the particular sort of dirt that Earth creatures used.
"So go on," she prompted. "What do you need?"
"Vynn and Illa, for one," he replied, sticking his hands in his pockets and walking back up the hill.
-BAD WOLF-
Ah, good. They're still alive. It might have only been a minute, but it only takes a second for the Doctor to discover a new and interesting way of killing himself and everyone around him...
As I'm sure you already know. Really, it gets on my nerves, the scrapes I have to get him out of half of the time...
Anyway.
-BAD WOLF-
The house collapsed in a cloud of dust and the Doctor jumped away, grinning with delight at this new act of destruction and pocketing the sonic screwdriver, which had caused most of the damage to the building. Vynn, sadly lacking the Time Lord's superior reflexes, started coughing loudly as he backed away from the crumpled wreckage.
Rose, perched on the branch she had vacated an hour or two before, narrowed her eyes as the cloud came her way and Illa sneezed violently from her seat next to her. Fifteen minutes into the Doctor's attempts at resonating the structure and Vynn's attempts to pull it down by brute force, the helpful teenager had gone to find some lights. They weren't much, but they illuminated the smallish corner of the mostly-deserted village the Time Lord and his companion had claimed and thus eliminated the possibility of the humans tripping or otherwise injuring themselves in the darkness.
Not for the first time, Rose silently cursed the Doctor for his alien ability to find his way around in the dark. Perfectly.
He crouched in the rubble, picking it apart, grinning quietly to himself at each new unidentifiable object he found. He tossed a bulky object at Vynn, who instinctively caught it and looked down at it blankly.
"It's an empty box," he said.
"Yep," confirmed the Doctor, turning something shiny over in his hands, peering at it through his glasses.
"You're going to save the planet with...?"
"Yep," the Time Lord repeated, getting up without warning and taking the box back, darting over to a clear area near where Rose resided and sitting cross-legged on the earth, holding his sonic screwdriver in his mouth to leave his hands free. Aforementioned box nestled in his lap, he took a thin filament that looked like one of those fibre optic toys that used to so utterly fascinate Rose and poked what might have been a circuit board with it.
"Rose," he said, voice more than a little muffled by the screwdriver, "could you get me the-"
What followed was so garbled that the Doctor himself probably couldn't have understood it.
"The what?"
He repeated it.
She took the screwdriver away from his mouth, gingerly holding it by one end. She didn't think she'd much enjoy getting Doctor drool all over her hand, thank you very much.
"The-" he tried again.
"Just point at it," she interrupted him.
He gave her a condescending look. "My hands are currently otherwise occupied," he said, as if he was trying to explain something very simple to a particularly stupid child.
She glanced down at the array of things before her, picked one, and handed it to him.
She dozed off shortly thereafter, lulled into slumber by sheer boredom, and therefore wasn't sure how much time had passed when a particularly rude Gallifreyan curse ripped through the air and made her jerk awake, terrified that something was about to blow up.
"What is it? What's wrong?" she stuttered, adrenaline forcing any last vestiges of tiredness out of her system.
"I haven't got an energy converter," he said, glaring at the box (which now held a complicated array of junk) as if it was all its fault. "At least not one small enough to fit in here.
Rose swallowed, slipping her fingers into the pocket of her jacket, pulse unexpectedly jumping. She'd wondered, she'd always wondered what the Doctor would do if he found out about that particular device; now, she supposed, it was time she found the answer.
"Like this?" she inquired, almost shyly, bringing the metallic object out of her pocket and offering it.
His eyes flickered down to it and she felt his mood abruptly change from frantic tension to angst- a subtle change for most, but she could feel the alteration shuddering through every nerve. It frightened her.
"You carry a gun?" he asked, voice tight and low and almost, almost a growl. His eyes were crystalline and harsh, glittering coldly in the dim light as if gemstones had replaced the dark amber pools.
"I had to defend myself somehow," she said, a little snappishly, anger rising in her gut. He didn't know her, didn't know what she had been through day after day. How dare he judge her?
"That doesn't justify it," he snapped, eyes blazing. "There are a thousand other ways to-"
"And none of them worked!" she shouted, all pretence of patience spent, and he silenced. Anger and a vague emotion like betrayal emanated almost palpably from him, but he didn't speak.
Assured that he wouldn't interrupt her again, her voice dropped.
"When I was with you, yeah, it was all right. I could run all I liked, you'd be right behind me doing something clever." She inhaled shakily, pain washing over her anew. "And when I joined Torchwood, I just assumed... I assumed that it'd be the same. And then I nearly got killed."
"Nearly," he repeated, as if that justified everything.
Something inside her snapped, crimson light blazing across her consciousness, and she suddenly just wanted to hurt him.
"I was captured, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, left for dead, again and again and again, and I was sick of it!" Her voice echoed across the little hollow they resided in and surely Vynn and Illa could hear from wherever they'd gone off to, but she didn't care. "So yeah, I picked up the gun, and yes, I've killed with it, but I'm still here and it might just save the planet."
"That doesn't make it-"
"You don't know what it's been like, do you?" she interrupted. "Everything was all right when I was with you and then suddenly I was trapped here, on the other side of the Void from my entire life, and there was nobody left who could save me whenever I got into trouble. I had to rescue myself no matter what it took. And I didn't like it, didn't want it, tried so hard to get by without a weapon, but I didn't have a bloody choice in the matter and you know that."
He glowered at her.
Her voice lowered again to a malevolent hum as she forcefully ground out her next words.
"And what I can do with this thing is nothing compared to what you've already done without one."