The Black Rose - 2/?
Dear Rassilon, it's been a while since I updated this, hasn't it? Sorry, one-person-who's-been-following-this-story-on-here. -meek look-
-BAD WOLF-
Shaking, she put the terror down to nothing but an unexpected side-effect of a bad dream. She unconsciously dressed herself in the most concealing clothes she had and practically slunk to Torchwood.
Once there, the terror and the need to be Inside started to fade as she twirled absently around in her chair for a moment. It was a slow day. A particularly slow day. A slug would be impressed at the sheer tedium and sloth.
Rose grimaced unconsciously and twirled around in her chair again, patiently ignoring the dreadfully important something-or-other on her computer screen. She hated slugs. They were slimy and squishy and made the most disgusting noises (not to mention oozing all over the place) when you crushed them and they were just so... sluglike.
The whiteness of the dreadfully important something-or-other looked calmly back at her, angular text covering half of its blank expanse. She sighed and rested her forehead against the coolness of the desk, wishing (not for the first time) that she could be in Torchwood Three instead of One. Torchwood Three got to do all the fun stuff. But no, she was invaluable, so they just chained her up in here where there was only an alien invasion once a month or so. The occasional lost, confused hitchhiker definitely did not count as "alien activity", no matter what the newbies said.
She heard footsteps and snapped her head back up, glaring studiously at the screen. The characters seemed to meld into one another and she lazily imagined them seeping through the screen and wrapping her up in a shell, a cold and dark shell of grey. Bronze. A shell would be nice. Nothing could hurt her if she had a shell.
She shook herself. Not that anything would try to hurt her anyway, she thought sulkily. Not that anything happened that bloody Mickey and Whatshisname- Jake- didn't get to first because apparently she was the expert and was only to be used for emergencies. She hated that. Wasn't her experience there to be useful? How could it be, when...
Something angular and metal was placed before her. She glanced at it, then up at Matt.
"It's your turn," he said by way of explanation.
She unconsciously scooted a little bit away from him, glancing at the metal and then back up. He was still too close, so she curled into herself a little bit, folding her legs up to her chest.
"What do you mean, it's my turn?"
"It's a puzzle," he said. "Apparently when all the bits are slotted together in the correct configuration, it forms an almost perfect model of a... what's it called..." He paused. "Glaznee...?"
"Glazsinine?"
"Yeah."
She glanced down at the lump of interconnected triangles and saw that this could, in fact, happen. Maybe if that bit was over there, it would make more sense. Her fingers twitched slightly, but she didn't touch it.
"And you're giving this to me... why?"
"All the new Torchwood people are given it for a couple of months. If you complete it, something happens." He smiled slightly. "Not sure what the something is, as no-one's managed to do it yet."
The situation might have been faintly humorous, but she just nodded and picked up the puzzle, eyes flickering over it.
Her tongue poked out from between her lips as she studied the little triangular bits of metal, connected with what appeared to be strips of duct tape rolled into slender cylinders, and the arrangement made some sort of sense. She heard Matt's footsteps fade away, but she paid him no heed. Experimentally she slid two of the pieces against each other; they slotted together with a satisfying clunking noise and the puzzle instantly made just a little more sense than it had a few seconds beforehand.
She grinned her triumph, calculations flitting through her mind as she tried to figure out what to do next. Fold that over, put it in there, and there was one angular, vestigial wing. Slot that in there, and there was the bony tail. Twist it around, and the neck began to form.
Fifteen minutes later she grinned as she put the last two pieces together and put the little model fish-bird-horse-thing on her desk before proceeding to spin around again.
She should probably finish that dreadfully important thing. She sighed and reluctantly started typing, absentmindedly listing the characteristics, species, traditions and basic history of the planet Sto.
There was a planet she didn't miss. Bloody Titanic.
Finished with that task, she tapped the desk absently for five minutes and forty-three seconds before getting bored and going home.
She dreamt about life inside the shell and the melody of dying screams.
-BAD WOLF-
The next day, she started fiddling. Life was too still, too normal. She hated this planet, needed to get offworld and she knew that she wouldn't be able to just hitchhike on the next ship. Not without eliminating whoever was watching her, and that was too much work. No, she'd have to call the spaceships to her, keep her saviours carefully hidden away from Torchwood eyes, make sure her departure was kept secret until she was long gone. Maybe go to Barcelona. She'd never been there.
When she took the equipment, none of those idiots asked her why she needed those particular components. Orders from above, they thought. Rose knows what she's doing.
"More than they could ever know," she murmured quietly, smiling a little at their ignorance.
She chuckled absently to herself as she plugged a wire in its receptacle. She did know. Too much, perhaps. Sometimes she hated the Doctor for showing her what life could be.
Something beeped obnoxiously and she jumped before she realised it was just her phone. Her dimensionally transcendent phone. Not that that mattered now, of course.
But perhaps, if she was very, very lucky...
She winced as the sound came again, scraping against her eardrums. She pressed the button that answered the call (and stopped the rather irritating noise) and held the mobile to her ear.
"Hello?"
"We've got a spaceship," came Mickey's voice.
She nodded slowly, realised he couldn't see her nodding, and spoke again. "Really? You think you're going to keep me from this absolutely exhilarating paperwork with a mere alien spaceship? Please." Her voice dripped with as much sarcasm as she could muster, which was quite a lot, actually. The lie about the paperwork rolled off her tongue with no problems at all and she grinned to herself in triumph.
"Yeah, I know, bit below you," said Mickey in a similar vein. "But I thought I'd ask if your majesty would deign to-"
"I'm coming, I'm coming," interrupted Rose as she suddenly tired of the game, getting up and pressing the "End" button with a little more force than was strictly necessary. She sighed at her half-finished hyperspacial signalling device before shoving it in a drawer. She straightened up and pressed a few buttons on her keyboard until a programme appeared, tracing Mickey's biosignature, then pressed another button to download it to her mobile and practically ran out of the building. Spaceships she liked. They had interesting things in them. Helpful things. Things which could possibly get her off this planet more quickly than any distress signal could. They also had aliens, which, although a great deal of the ones she had encountered in this world were either slimy, ugly, or both, had their good points as well.
She might as well not have bothered downloading the bio-tracer at all, she realised; she could remember where the thing had said Mickey was located- perfectly.
She dodged a particularly imposing and odorous individual when he wouldn't move out of the way and sent a glare at his oblivious back. Couldn't he tell that she was someone more important than he was? Couldn't he see her obvious superiority?
She made some sort of derisive noise in the back of her throat and carried on walking.
Something niggled at the back of her mind, telling her that something was Very Impressively Not Right.
She ignored it.
A few minutes later she didn't even need to use her oddly strengthened memory to locate Mickey and the spaceship; she could see the plume of smoke winding its way up between the buildings. She quickened her pace, shoving her way past several people who weren't going quickly enough for her, and half-ran the rest of the way to the crash site.
She grimaced when she saw the ship. The niggling part of her calculated the chances of there being anyone left alive inside it; the rest was quietly mourning the fact that it was almost completely destroyed and therefore probably couldn't help her.
She shook herself and stepped forwards, ignoring Mickey's greeting. She ran her fingertips over the twisted hulk, trying to find a door mechanism that hadn't been fried.
"Heat shield must have failed," she murmured as she felt the still-warm metal, hunting along the half-melted expanse. After a time she both heard and felt a click and a panel of metal sank into the ship before it laboriously screeched open a few inches.
An alien flopped out of the crack and she instinctively jumped back, grimacing slightly at the state of the creature. She'd never seen it before, but she had seen a myriad of other creatures in the state it was in and that was all she really had to know.
Its skin- or carapace, or shell, or whatever it was- was blackened and torn, with rusty brown liquid oozing out from the myriad rends. One eye was fused shut, another was burnt out, and the other two glittered dully at Rose. It might have been somewhat humanoid at some point in time, but it was so tattered from the crash that it was difficult to tell now.
It gurgled something in a language Rose didn't know, but she assumed the basic definition probably ran somewhere along the lines of, "Help me". That's what they generally said. Either that or some sort of threat. Really, they were getting depressingly predictable.
She pulled out her gun and shot the alien right in the middle of what she assumed was its head. When it flopped in a satisfactorily dead manner to the ground, she considered her hunch confirmed.
"What the hell did you do that for?" demanded Mickey, bringing attention to himself for... Actually, she realised, he'd been trying to talk to her before. She thought that she might have been rude in some way, but why should she behave otherwise? It wasn't as if he was her superior...
"It was almost dead anyway," she pointed out, quite logically she thought. "I just saved it from a lot of pain."
"Rose, you murdered it! Did you even know what it was?"
"No, but... You saw it," she snapped back. "It was... it was... It was euthanasia. I... I saved it from..." She paused. "You're staring at me," she noted, a little worried at that.
"It could have had some alien regenerative powers or something, it might have survived if you'd left it alone. Didn't you think of that?" he demanded harshly. She flinched a bit. He was too close to her, she needed to get away... but... oh, Zarquon, he was right.
She bit her lip. What was going on? Her dream that morning and the one before it, her reaction to completely harmless people... Thinking Mickey wasn't important, shooting that creature...
"I didn't think about that," she admitted, not quite repentant enough to remove the belligerent tone from her voice.
Mickey gave her an odd look. "You all right, Rose?"
"Fine," she lied. "Just... fine. Just a bit tired is all." She scratched the side of her nose a bit. "Think I'm gonna go home."
He frowned in confusion. "...," he managed to say, but she she quickly interrupted him.
"Whatever it is, it's not going to blow up unless you do something stupid," she called over her shoulder as she walked away.
She sensed that he was going to speak and sped up, feet pounding on the ground more and more quickly until she was running like her life was in danger. She just had to run, run and hide.
She finally stopped, leaning against the inside of the door to her room, panting more than a little. She closed her eyes, forced herself to calm down, just a little bit, and think.
This wasn't her. She hadn't noticed she was changing, but shooting an innocent alien? She wouldn't have dreamt of it just a few days before. Mickey was right, her mum was right, she wasn't Rose any more.
Maybe that was good.
"No," she growled, turning so her forehead rested against the coolness of the door. Not-Rose wasn't good. Not-Rose was not good, damn it. Something was happening to her.
It couldn't be mind control. She knew mind control, had been through too much of it not to know the signs. It wasn't possession; she knew she was completely in control of her own body and had been for some time. No, this had to be coming from inside her.
She sighed. Maybe she'd just been overworking herself a little. She should try to sleep.
Maybe it'd sort itself out after that.
-BAD WOLF-
She whirred forwards, the numbers scrolling across her vision. He was close, the man with the two hearts, her enemy. And then there was... huh. She could have sworn he was dead.
No matter. He couldn't hurt her, and he wasn't her target. Her fellows had concocted too many plans which did not involve finding and exterminating him first, and that was why they'd lost so many times.
They'd given her the honour. The new member of their superiority, a creature who had once been one of the impure. She wasn't worthy, yet they wanted her to do it, to kill the man who had brought them all such pain.
She turned the corner and there he was. He wasn't even trying to run, he was just standing there. Was that defeat she read in his eyes? But the adrenaline... It didn't make sense.
No matter.
She raised her gun.
"Rose," was all he said, in a voice which would have broken her heart if it had not been locked away.
"Doctor," she acknowledged.
"You can't do this. Remember who you are."
"I am this," she said. "I am a Dalek."
"No." He shook his head. "You might have changed a bit, but Rose is still in there, somewhere."
"She is this. I am this." Her shell shuddered as she started to panic. "I will exterminate you."
He blinked at her. "Go on, then."
She paused, confused at his sudden suicidal tendencies, but didn't hesitate for more than a moment.
She shot.
There was a scream-
Rose jerked awake, falling off of the bed and hitting the ground with a cry. She lay panting there for a while before she curled into herself, trembling.
What was happening to her?
-BAD WOLF-
Shaking, she put the terror down to nothing but an unexpected side-effect of a bad dream. She unconsciously dressed herself in the most concealing clothes she had and practically slunk to Torchwood.
Once there, the terror and the need to be Inside started to fade as she twirled absently around in her chair for a moment. It was a slow day. A particularly slow day. A slug would be impressed at the sheer tedium and sloth.
Rose grimaced unconsciously and twirled around in her chair again, patiently ignoring the dreadfully important something-or-other on her computer screen. She hated slugs. They were slimy and squishy and made the most disgusting noises (not to mention oozing all over the place) when you crushed them and they were just so... sluglike.
The whiteness of the dreadfully important something-or-other looked calmly back at her, angular text covering half of its blank expanse. She sighed and rested her forehead against the coolness of the desk, wishing (not for the first time) that she could be in Torchwood Three instead of One. Torchwood Three got to do all the fun stuff. But no, she was invaluable, so they just chained her up in here where there was only an alien invasion once a month or so. The occasional lost, confused hitchhiker definitely did not count as "alien activity", no matter what the newbies said.
She heard footsteps and snapped her head back up, glaring studiously at the screen. The characters seemed to meld into one another and she lazily imagined them seeping through the screen and wrapping her up in a shell, a cold and dark shell of grey. Bronze. A shell would be nice. Nothing could hurt her if she had a shell.
She shook herself. Not that anything would try to hurt her anyway, she thought sulkily. Not that anything happened that bloody Mickey and Whatshisname- Jake- didn't get to first because apparently she was the expert and was only to be used for emergencies. She hated that. Wasn't her experience there to be useful? How could it be, when...
Something angular and metal was placed before her. She glanced at it, then up at Matt.
"It's your turn," he said by way of explanation.
She unconsciously scooted a little bit away from him, glancing at the metal and then back up. He was still too close, so she curled into herself a little bit, folding her legs up to her chest.
"What do you mean, it's my turn?"
"It's a puzzle," he said. "Apparently when all the bits are slotted together in the correct configuration, it forms an almost perfect model of a... what's it called..." He paused. "Glaznee...?"
"Glazsinine?"
"Yeah."
She glanced down at the lump of interconnected triangles and saw that this could, in fact, happen. Maybe if that bit was over there, it would make more sense. Her fingers twitched slightly, but she didn't touch it.
"And you're giving this to me... why?"
"All the new Torchwood people are given it for a couple of months. If you complete it, something happens." He smiled slightly. "Not sure what the something is, as no-one's managed to do it yet."
The situation might have been faintly humorous, but she just nodded and picked up the puzzle, eyes flickering over it.
Her tongue poked out from between her lips as she studied the little triangular bits of metal, connected with what appeared to be strips of duct tape rolled into slender cylinders, and the arrangement made some sort of sense. She heard Matt's footsteps fade away, but she paid him no heed. Experimentally she slid two of the pieces against each other; they slotted together with a satisfying clunking noise and the puzzle instantly made just a little more sense than it had a few seconds beforehand.
She grinned her triumph, calculations flitting through her mind as she tried to figure out what to do next. Fold that over, put it in there, and there was one angular, vestigial wing. Slot that in there, and there was the bony tail. Twist it around, and the neck began to form.
Fifteen minutes later she grinned as she put the last two pieces together and put the little model fish-bird-horse-thing on her desk before proceeding to spin around again.
She should probably finish that dreadfully important thing. She sighed and reluctantly started typing, absentmindedly listing the characteristics, species, traditions and basic history of the planet Sto.
There was a planet she didn't miss. Bloody Titanic.
Finished with that task, she tapped the desk absently for five minutes and forty-three seconds before getting bored and going home.
She dreamt about life inside the shell and the melody of dying screams.
-BAD WOLF-
The next day, she started fiddling. Life was too still, too normal. She hated this planet, needed to get offworld and she knew that she wouldn't be able to just hitchhike on the next ship. Not without eliminating whoever was watching her, and that was too much work. No, she'd have to call the spaceships to her, keep her saviours carefully hidden away from Torchwood eyes, make sure her departure was kept secret until she was long gone. Maybe go to Barcelona. She'd never been there.
When she took the equipment, none of those idiots asked her why she needed those particular components. Orders from above, they thought. Rose knows what she's doing.
"More than they could ever know," she murmured quietly, smiling a little at their ignorance.
She chuckled absently to herself as she plugged a wire in its receptacle. She did know. Too much, perhaps. Sometimes she hated the Doctor for showing her what life could be.
Something beeped obnoxiously and she jumped before she realised it was just her phone. Her dimensionally transcendent phone. Not that that mattered now, of course.
But perhaps, if she was very, very lucky...
She winced as the sound came again, scraping against her eardrums. She pressed the button that answered the call (and stopped the rather irritating noise) and held the mobile to her ear.
"Hello?"
"We've got a spaceship," came Mickey's voice.
She nodded slowly, realised he couldn't see her nodding, and spoke again. "Really? You think you're going to keep me from this absolutely exhilarating paperwork with a mere alien spaceship? Please." Her voice dripped with as much sarcasm as she could muster, which was quite a lot, actually. The lie about the paperwork rolled off her tongue with no problems at all and she grinned to herself in triumph.
"Yeah, I know, bit below you," said Mickey in a similar vein. "But I thought I'd ask if your majesty would deign to-"
"I'm coming, I'm coming," interrupted Rose as she suddenly tired of the game, getting up and pressing the "End" button with a little more force than was strictly necessary. She sighed at her half-finished hyperspacial signalling device before shoving it in a drawer. She straightened up and pressed a few buttons on her keyboard until a programme appeared, tracing Mickey's biosignature, then pressed another button to download it to her mobile and practically ran out of the building. Spaceships she liked. They had interesting things in them. Helpful things. Things which could possibly get her off this planet more quickly than any distress signal could. They also had aliens, which, although a great deal of the ones she had encountered in this world were either slimy, ugly, or both, had their good points as well.
She might as well not have bothered downloading the bio-tracer at all, she realised; she could remember where the thing had said Mickey was located- perfectly.
She dodged a particularly imposing and odorous individual when he wouldn't move out of the way and sent a glare at his oblivious back. Couldn't he tell that she was someone more important than he was? Couldn't he see her obvious superiority?
She made some sort of derisive noise in the back of her throat and carried on walking.
Something niggled at the back of her mind, telling her that something was Very Impressively Not Right.
She ignored it.
A few minutes later she didn't even need to use her oddly strengthened memory to locate Mickey and the spaceship; she could see the plume of smoke winding its way up between the buildings. She quickened her pace, shoving her way past several people who weren't going quickly enough for her, and half-ran the rest of the way to the crash site.
She grimaced when she saw the ship. The niggling part of her calculated the chances of there being anyone left alive inside it; the rest was quietly mourning the fact that it was almost completely destroyed and therefore probably couldn't help her.
She shook herself and stepped forwards, ignoring Mickey's greeting. She ran her fingertips over the twisted hulk, trying to find a door mechanism that hadn't been fried.
"Heat shield must have failed," she murmured as she felt the still-warm metal, hunting along the half-melted expanse. After a time she both heard and felt a click and a panel of metal sank into the ship before it laboriously screeched open a few inches.
An alien flopped out of the crack and she instinctively jumped back, grimacing slightly at the state of the creature. She'd never seen it before, but she had seen a myriad of other creatures in the state it was in and that was all she really had to know.
Its skin- or carapace, or shell, or whatever it was- was blackened and torn, with rusty brown liquid oozing out from the myriad rends. One eye was fused shut, another was burnt out, and the other two glittered dully at Rose. It might have been somewhat humanoid at some point in time, but it was so tattered from the crash that it was difficult to tell now.
It gurgled something in a language Rose didn't know, but she assumed the basic definition probably ran somewhere along the lines of, "Help me". That's what they generally said. Either that or some sort of threat. Really, they were getting depressingly predictable.
She pulled out her gun and shot the alien right in the middle of what she assumed was its head. When it flopped in a satisfactorily dead manner to the ground, she considered her hunch confirmed.
"What the hell did you do that for?" demanded Mickey, bringing attention to himself for... Actually, she realised, he'd been trying to talk to her before. She thought that she might have been rude in some way, but why should she behave otherwise? It wasn't as if he was her superior...
"It was almost dead anyway," she pointed out, quite logically she thought. "I just saved it from a lot of pain."
"Rose, you murdered it! Did you even know what it was?"
"No, but... You saw it," she snapped back. "It was... it was... It was euthanasia. I... I saved it from..." She paused. "You're staring at me," she noted, a little worried at that.
"It could have had some alien regenerative powers or something, it might have survived if you'd left it alone. Didn't you think of that?" he demanded harshly. She flinched a bit. He was too close to her, she needed to get away... but... oh, Zarquon, he was right.
She bit her lip. What was going on? Her dream that morning and the one before it, her reaction to completely harmless people... Thinking Mickey wasn't important, shooting that creature...
"I didn't think about that," she admitted, not quite repentant enough to remove the belligerent tone from her voice.
Mickey gave her an odd look. "You all right, Rose?"
"Fine," she lied. "Just... fine. Just a bit tired is all." She scratched the side of her nose a bit. "Think I'm gonna go home."
He frowned in confusion. "...," he managed to say, but she she quickly interrupted him.
"Whatever it is, it's not going to blow up unless you do something stupid," she called over her shoulder as she walked away.
She sensed that he was going to speak and sped up, feet pounding on the ground more and more quickly until she was running like her life was in danger. She just had to run, run and hide.
She finally stopped, leaning against the inside of the door to her room, panting more than a little. She closed her eyes, forced herself to calm down, just a little bit, and think.
This wasn't her. She hadn't noticed she was changing, but shooting an innocent alien? She wouldn't have dreamt of it just a few days before. Mickey was right, her mum was right, she wasn't Rose any more.
Maybe that was good.
"No," she growled, turning so her forehead rested against the coolness of the door. Not-Rose wasn't good. Not-Rose was not good, damn it. Something was happening to her.
It couldn't be mind control. She knew mind control, had been through too much of it not to know the signs. It wasn't possession; she knew she was completely in control of her own body and had been for some time. No, this had to be coming from inside her.
She sighed. Maybe she'd just been overworking herself a little. She should try to sleep.
Maybe it'd sort itself out after that.
-BAD WOLF-
She whirred forwards, the numbers scrolling across her vision. He was close, the man with the two hearts, her enemy. And then there was... huh. She could have sworn he was dead.
No matter. He couldn't hurt her, and he wasn't her target. Her fellows had concocted too many plans which did not involve finding and exterminating him first, and that was why they'd lost so many times.
They'd given her the honour. The new member of their superiority, a creature who had once been one of the impure. She wasn't worthy, yet they wanted her to do it, to kill the man who had brought them all such pain.
She turned the corner and there he was. He wasn't even trying to run, he was just standing there. Was that defeat she read in his eyes? But the adrenaline... It didn't make sense.
No matter.
She raised her gun.
"Rose," was all he said, in a voice which would have broken her heart if it had not been locked away.
"Doctor," she acknowledged.
"You can't do this. Remember who you are."
"I am this," she said. "I am a Dalek."
"No." He shook his head. "You might have changed a bit, but Rose is still in there, somewhere."
"She is this. I am this." Her shell shuddered as she started to panic. "I will exterminate you."
He blinked at her. "Go on, then."
She paused, confused at his sudden suicidal tendencies, but didn't hesitate for more than a moment.
She shot.
There was a scream-
Rose jerked awake, falling off of the bed and hitting the ground with a cry. She lay panting there for a while before she curled into herself, trembling.
What was happening to her?