Alternatively - 9/65
The instant the words were out of her mouth, Rose knew she had said something incredibly wrong.
The Doctor stilled, momentary anguish flashing deep within his dark eyes before all emotion was quickly wiped away, face and eyes hardening into an expressionless mask. He wordlessly closed his fingers around the gun and turned away, shutting her out completely.
Pain. I'm sorry, she screamed inwardly, but was outwardly silent as she berated herself. Backstabber. Traitor. She had called herself his friend and then used his own tortured, tormented past as a weapon against him. Heartless. Despicable. Unforgivable.
No sounds left her mouth. She bit her lip, the bitterly metallic taste of blood on her tongue almost distracting her from the fact that she was the worst person in the history of everything.
Almost.
Not quite.
After quickly hitting the button of the screwdriver to loosen it, the Doctor pried one of the metal plates off of the weapon. He poked inside with his forefinger, prodding the squat cylindrical object he needed. It sparked at him a little, sending a small jolt of electricity through his hand, but he didn't react. He pushed at the bit of technology until it disconnected from its spot with a snap, then shook it out into his hand.
He threw the now-useless weapon away. It collided with a tree with a muffled crunch and fell.
Rose was silent from her perch at his side and a little behind him. Her right knee, which had been resting against his left shoulder-blade, had shifted away. The only thing that informed him that she was still there was her faint scent in the air around him and the slight temporal distortion that perpetually followed her around like a lost puppy.
Rather like the Doctor, in fact.
He swallowed quietly. He dimly recognised he was angry, but wasn't entirely sure with what. Her for bringing up the Time War? Him for his actions in it? The Daleks for instigating it? The Time Lords for not seeing the full threat before it was too late? The whole stupid situation?
All of them?
Probably.
He plugged the energy converter into the odd conglomeration of scavenged technology and it hummed as it came to life.
He didn't smile at the triumph.
The problem with having clever companions who had inherent telepathic abilities directed towards him was that they knew exactly what to say to win such an argument as he and Rose had had. She had to have some sort of mind-reading skills. How else would she know that the Time War had happened in this universe as well as in her own? How else would she know what he'd eventually done to end it?
She was getting dangerous. Oh, it was all very well and good before, but now... He wasn't hurt, of course. Not at all. But if she knew that about him, she'd know any other weakness he might have, and if she could use those against him too... He wasn't sure anymore.
Maybe he should take her back.
Every single nuance of his mind screamed denial as that particular thought crossed his mind and he quietly growled at himself.
"Is it working?" asked Illa, interrupting the Doctor's somewhat melancholy inner dialogue.
The Doctor struggled to his feet with the cumbersome, now-malevolently buzzing device.
"Should be," he replied. "Only one way to find out, really." He grinned manically at her.
Only Rose could see the emptiness behind it and she bit her lip against another wave of guilt. The other Doctor, her Doctor, might have been able to get over the remark after a while, but this version... This version she wasn't entirely sure about yet. He acted more like his ninth self than the Doctor Rose had known, and this worried her.
The Doctor turned to the third human accompanying him. "Vynn," he addressed him, "are there any hills out in open air anywhere near where we are? Say... less than an hour?"
Vynn considered.
"This way," he said, indicating, after a long moment, and set off in exactly that direction.
The Doctor followed quickly and it was not, absolutely not, because he wanted to get away from Rose.
Rose was not about to let him escape. She half-ran to catch up with him and started walking beside him, catching one of the more precarious pieces of technology he held and holding on to it.
He didn't say anything.
"I'm sorry," she said softly.
"What for?" he lied, twisting his voice into some semblance of the vague confusion his words conveyed.
"For... for what I said back there. I mean, about the Time War. I shouldn't have... I dunno. I'm sorry."
There was silence for a moment.
"Doesn't matter," he replied. "It was a long time ago."
"To a human, maybe," she shot back, sounding for all the world like she was a little irritated at him trying to avoid the subject.
She probably was.
He was silent.
"'S been what, a couple of years?" she prompted.
"Three." And seven months, two weeks, five days, eighteen hours, twenty-seven minutes and two seconds, he intoned to himself in a dull monotone. He wasn't counting, though.
"Three. And all right, so maybe you might have got over a normal war, but..." She worried her lip between her teeth.
The path narrowed and the Doctor was vaguely relieved that Rose could no longer walk beside him.
"I know what you did back there."
He did not, did not, flinch. Not at all. Not even an infinitesimal bit. Not even enough to make the more delicate pieces of the amalgamation in his hands jerk just slightly.
Staazula.
"It was them or the universe," he said shortly, clipped tones echoing harshly in the quiet air. "It doesn't matter now."
"But it does. And I..." She trailed off for a moment, obviously fighting to figure out what to say.
"You're sorry. It's fine. It doesn't matter," he interrupted, hoping with every single fibre of his being that she didn't detect the ever-so-slight tremble in his attempt at a calm voice.
She probably did, but she didn't speak on the subject again. He felt a surge of something like gratitude.
So perhaps he hadn't healed from the Time War as much as he'd assumed that he had, said the part of him that had screamed at him when he had considered taking Rose back. Perhaps the horrific, eternal silence in his head did still bother him. Perhaps the dark wounds stretching down to his core still hadn't mended except on the surface.
Maybe that was why she was there.
The thought pattern had a tone of gentle persuasion, and the Doctor felt himself submitting.
He didn't look at Rose, but he could tell she was hurt. He'd overreacted, he'd snapped, he'd hurt her and now he wouldn't even let her apologise for pointing out the truth.
Guilt whipped through his mind, tightening around his hearts and making him want desperately to fix everything.
He shook himself and focussed on walking.
-BAD WOLF-
All right, so maybe that particular remark didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped...
What are you looking at me like that for? Of course I made her say it! Well, I suppose I didn't MAKE her say anything, but I did influence her emotions enough for her to do something, or rather say something, that she would never have said otherwise. Stop it, I was being perfectly logical. If the Doctor gets hurt enough by Rose, then he'll stop holding on to her for dear life and will drop her back off with her original Doctor, and then problem solved. When Rose is returned to the proper Doctor, the anomaly mucking everything up ends, the timelines sort themselves out, and...
Wait. You didn't figure it out already?
Of course Rose is the anomaly. What else could it be? ...All right, so it could be a thousand other things, most of them with the word "Dalek" stamped on them in big, unfriendly, and forcibly mauve letters. But no, the astronomical spanner that has been chucked in the engine of spacetime happens to be our own dearly beloved Rose.
Still don't understand? Gah, I hate talking to mortals. You'd think that if I used words like "spanner" and "chucked" in my initial explanation, you'd get what I was talking about without too much fuss. But apparently some of you didn't, so I'm going to explain in more detail, without the words "spanner" or "chucked". Or "engine", if that helps.
Imagine an engine. A really, really big and complicated engine. It's got all these little tubes and bits and pieces that keep it from making ugly noises and then promptly exploding in a large ball of flames and thus dramatically winking out of existence. One of the aforementioned bits, the really really big and impressive one, is the Doctor.
I see you giggling over there! Omega's orifice, does no-one have a clean mind any more?
Anyway, this bit, named the Doctor- stop it- goes all the way through the engine. Mess with that, and the messiness spreads to the entire engine in a fairly rapid manner. Now, this engine has failsafes which keep it from making ugly noises before exploding dramatically in the aforementioned large ball of flames. It can repair itself, to an extent. Actually, pretty much every part of it can be repaired- except for one.
Three guesses as to which one that is.
Now imagine there's a second engine. This one has a spanner. The spanner's name is Rose. This spanner was very tightly entwined with the other engine's part-labelled-the-Doctor- oh, for the love of Rassilon, STOP IT!- for a very long time, before another large part, named the Daleks, ripped this poor innocent spanner-named-Rose from this not-so-innocent bit-named-the-Doctor and, through a complicated series of events which you presumably already know, chucked her and her mum, who was a nut, and her ex-boyfriend, who was one of those extra bits that you can never figure out exactly what to do with, into the first engine we discussed.
The extra bit (who actually fit quite well into this second engine, as the second engine actually needed that bit) and the nut happily ensconced themselves into some minor parts of the engine and promptly made no trouble whatsoever, and for a time the spanner-named-Rose joined them and made only a very little trouble, only about twice a week.
Then a computer virus, named the Racnoss, tried to kill off and eat a large chunk of the engine about five billion years before that bit of engine was scheduled to be demolished. The large-bit-named-the-Doctor went to stop them. So did the spanner-named-Rose, even though she was never a part of that engine and wasn't meant to save it, as that was the large-bit-named-the-Doctor's job. The spanner-named-Rose and the large-bit-named-the-Doctor latched on to each other as if magnetised, which they may very well have been. Thus, the spanner-named-Rose is following the accustomed path of the large-bit-named-the-Doctor, and is accordingly being drawn more and more deeply into this engine, doing considerable damage the longer she's magnetically attached to this large-bit-named-the-Doctor.
Do you see now?
There, now, do you understand why I'd like to separate the Doctor and Rose as soon as possible?
Thank you.
We'll continue, then.
(You're still doing it.)
-BAD WOLF-
They didn't speak again for the entire walk, and Rose found herself considerably irritated. So she'd been silly and emotional and had snapped at him; it wasn't as if he hadn't done the same to her.
The words "stupid ape" wandered absently through her head and she flicked them away.
If he was always this sulky, came a thought, maybe she should just leave. Go home.
She rebelled. It wasn't as if she could go home, anyway. It would probably kill her to leave now, by choice. And, said the more sympathetic part of her, maybe the Doctor was just having a bad day.
Wouldn't have been the first time.
Besides, she considered, this one didn't seem to have had anyone to help him after the War; he was, after all, still as vulnerable as her first Doctor had been, early on in their travels.
Didn't mean he got to completely shut her out every time she said something stupid, though, muttered the part of her brain that was not attached to any sympathy circuits.
She realised she was stepping considerably more heavily than she was generally accustomed to doing and vaguely wondered about ceasing the admittedly somewhat childish reaction.
Nah, she thought, and revelled in the loud, obnoxious crunch and the slight shock that ran up her calf whenever a thin branch was unfortunate enough to be in her path.
Did she want to leave him? prodded a thought.
She paused to consider. Illa nearly ran into her, so she started to walk again, but carried on thinking.
No, she decided. One little spat wasn't enough to drive her away from the life she'd wanted more than anything.
The prodding thought retreated almost sulkily, and she shook her head sharply to rid herself of the suspicion that it hadn't been entirely hers. What telepathic being would want to be in her head, anyway?
-BAD WOLF-
Yep, completely failed. QI'yaH.
Just have to try again...
...
...Meh, I'll leave it for now. Might as well keep the alternate Doctor from sulking all the time. Sulky Doctors tend to blow up things more often, and more recklessly, than normal ones.
What's that?
Stop it! He is NOT growing on me! I just don't want any galaxies completely annihilated simply because the Doctor is too depressed to care about them, that's all.
Like you'd know. Trust me, he's even more careless about threatening buttons when he's on his own.
Oh, have it your way...
But this doesn't mean he gets to keep her.
-BAD WOLF-
It was roughly a forty-five minute trip, but it felt longer for the oppressive, almost palpable silence.
The Doctor was still in denial, Rose was still sulking, and Vynn and Illa had no idea what to make of it. All in all, the situation, Rose deemed, had a distinct tinge of the adjective "crap".
And her ankle still hurt. She had been forced to give up stomping along the path because of that bloody ankle, and the cessation of that activity did not make her particularly happy.
The forest cleared, revealing the aforementioned hill that the Doctor had been so keen to reach, and Rose realised that the sun had actually begun to rise while they had been stuck in the darkness between the trees. Glancing back, she discovered that she probably would have found that out earlier had certain emotions not been very much in play.
The Doctor ran up the slope and Rose dashed unevenly after him, ungainly on the uneven and springy ground.
He glanced at the horizon, glared at it for a moment, and then suddenly flopped down on the ground in a surprisingly neat cross-legged position with the box perched in his lap.
"Thought you'd finished it," objected Rose, folding her legs underneath her and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as the wind whipped about in an unforeseen direction.
"Gwssnddayfnjsmn," said the Doctor around a chunk of metal that Rose couldn't identify.
"Say what?"
He pulled the metal bit out of his mouth and dropped it on the side of his knee instead.
"Just need to make a few adjustments," he said, seeming a little irritated at having to repeat himself.
Rose furrowed her brow at him, but decided that "irritated" was better than "completely silent" and let it go in favour of studying the machine he'd made while she was sleeping.
It was a thoroughly Doctorish contraption, being an odd mix of genuinely dangerous objects and things that looked like pens and disco balls (and Rose was sure she'd spotted some sequins somewhere on the bottom, just before he put it down). There wasn't any set direction in which it seemed to be pointing, so she assumed that the opening of the box was it- but then again, she'd been wrong before.
"How much time's left?"
"Well," he said, poking at something that looked for all the world like a Rubik's cube, "technically speaking, the heliovore won't actually reach the sun for about six hours and even then it'll take about eight minutes for the notable lack of heat and light to have any effect. But," he added, apparently satisfied with that part of the amalgamation as he suddenly decided to turn it over and start poking at that side with his screwdriver (She was amused at the confirmed sighting of several obnoxiously pink sequins covering what appeared to be a holo-projector), "that's not the time we have."
Well, at least he was talking, she thought. That was good. "So what's the time we have?"
"Meh," he said, picking at one of the sequins with a disgusted look, only to find that his fingernails were inadequate for the task, "the machine itself needs a few minutes to power up and the signal will take about... ooh... half an hour to reach the heliovore. Wouldn't be that difficult, except then, of course, we've got to get back to the TARDIS and then use her as a very concentrated gravity source to shift the creature away from the real star. Heliovores don't really propel themselves, they just sort of float about a bit until they latch on to a centre of gravity, i.e. a star, and then they let that pull them in."
He paused for a moment.
"We've got about two minutes."
She took pity on him, leaned over and pried the sequins off with the nail of her forefinger.
"Thanks," he said, sounding genuinely relieved. He plugged the sonic screwdriver into the open end of the box for a moment, and the contraption began to hum more powerfully.
"And now," he said, putting the screwdriver back in one of his myriad pockets, "we run."
He carefully placed the box on the ground, the side directly opposite of the opening facing towards the sun and its predator, scrambled to his feet and demonstrated his order.
Rose jumped up and half-ran, half-limped after him to join Vynn and Illa. When they reached the bottom of the hill, they turned to look at the odd little device which might just save a planet.
It glowed, practically singing with power now, and Rose felt a smile curve her lips upwards. She glanced at the Doctor and saw a similar expression beginning to take over his features.
She was just beginning to experiment with the idea of taking his hand when sparks jettisoned wildly from the contraption, the hum of energy taking on a sick quality as the pyrotechnics continued.
The Doctor stilled, momentary anguish flashing deep within his dark eyes before all emotion was quickly wiped away, face and eyes hardening into an expressionless mask. He wordlessly closed his fingers around the gun and turned away, shutting her out completely.
Pain. I'm sorry, she screamed inwardly, but was outwardly silent as she berated herself. Backstabber. Traitor. She had called herself his friend and then used his own tortured, tormented past as a weapon against him. Heartless. Despicable. Unforgivable.
No sounds left her mouth. She bit her lip, the bitterly metallic taste of blood on her tongue almost distracting her from the fact that she was the worst person in the history of everything.
Almost.
Not quite.
After quickly hitting the button of the screwdriver to loosen it, the Doctor pried one of the metal plates off of the weapon. He poked inside with his forefinger, prodding the squat cylindrical object he needed. It sparked at him a little, sending a small jolt of electricity through his hand, but he didn't react. He pushed at the bit of technology until it disconnected from its spot with a snap, then shook it out into his hand.
He threw the now-useless weapon away. It collided with a tree with a muffled crunch and fell.
Rose was silent from her perch at his side and a little behind him. Her right knee, which had been resting against his left shoulder-blade, had shifted away. The only thing that informed him that she was still there was her faint scent in the air around him and the slight temporal distortion that perpetually followed her around like a lost puppy.
Rather like the Doctor, in fact.
He swallowed quietly. He dimly recognised he was angry, but wasn't entirely sure with what. Her for bringing up the Time War? Him for his actions in it? The Daleks for instigating it? The Time Lords for not seeing the full threat before it was too late? The whole stupid situation?
All of them?
Probably.
He plugged the energy converter into the odd conglomeration of scavenged technology and it hummed as it came to life.
He didn't smile at the triumph.
The problem with having clever companions who had inherent telepathic abilities directed towards him was that they knew exactly what to say to win such an argument as he and Rose had had. She had to have some sort of mind-reading skills. How else would she know that the Time War had happened in this universe as well as in her own? How else would she know what he'd eventually done to end it?
She was getting dangerous. Oh, it was all very well and good before, but now... He wasn't hurt, of course. Not at all. But if she knew that about him, she'd know any other weakness he might have, and if she could use those against him too... He wasn't sure anymore.
Maybe he should take her back.
Every single nuance of his mind screamed denial as that particular thought crossed his mind and he quietly growled at himself.
"Is it working?" asked Illa, interrupting the Doctor's somewhat melancholy inner dialogue.
The Doctor struggled to his feet with the cumbersome, now-malevolently buzzing device.
"Should be," he replied. "Only one way to find out, really." He grinned manically at her.
Only Rose could see the emptiness behind it and she bit her lip against another wave of guilt. The other Doctor, her Doctor, might have been able to get over the remark after a while, but this version... This version she wasn't entirely sure about yet. He acted more like his ninth self than the Doctor Rose had known, and this worried her.
The Doctor turned to the third human accompanying him. "Vynn," he addressed him, "are there any hills out in open air anywhere near where we are? Say... less than an hour?"
Vynn considered.
"This way," he said, indicating, after a long moment, and set off in exactly that direction.
The Doctor followed quickly and it was not, absolutely not, because he wanted to get away from Rose.
Rose was not about to let him escape. She half-ran to catch up with him and started walking beside him, catching one of the more precarious pieces of technology he held and holding on to it.
He didn't say anything.
"I'm sorry," she said softly.
"What for?" he lied, twisting his voice into some semblance of the vague confusion his words conveyed.
"For... for what I said back there. I mean, about the Time War. I shouldn't have... I dunno. I'm sorry."
There was silence for a moment.
"Doesn't matter," he replied. "It was a long time ago."
"To a human, maybe," she shot back, sounding for all the world like she was a little irritated at him trying to avoid the subject.
She probably was.
He was silent.
"'S been what, a couple of years?" she prompted.
"Three." And seven months, two weeks, five days, eighteen hours, twenty-seven minutes and two seconds, he intoned to himself in a dull monotone. He wasn't counting, though.
"Three. And all right, so maybe you might have got over a normal war, but..." She worried her lip between her teeth.
The path narrowed and the Doctor was vaguely relieved that Rose could no longer walk beside him.
"I know what you did back there."
He did not, did not, flinch. Not at all. Not even an infinitesimal bit. Not even enough to make the more delicate pieces of the amalgamation in his hands jerk just slightly.
Staazula.
"It was them or the universe," he said shortly, clipped tones echoing harshly in the quiet air. "It doesn't matter now."
"But it does. And I..." She trailed off for a moment, obviously fighting to figure out what to say.
"You're sorry. It's fine. It doesn't matter," he interrupted, hoping with every single fibre of his being that she didn't detect the ever-so-slight tremble in his attempt at a calm voice.
She probably did, but she didn't speak on the subject again. He felt a surge of something like gratitude.
So perhaps he hadn't healed from the Time War as much as he'd assumed that he had, said the part of him that had screamed at him when he had considered taking Rose back. Perhaps the horrific, eternal silence in his head did still bother him. Perhaps the dark wounds stretching down to his core still hadn't mended except on the surface.
Maybe that was why she was there.
The thought pattern had a tone of gentle persuasion, and the Doctor felt himself submitting.
He didn't look at Rose, but he could tell she was hurt. He'd overreacted, he'd snapped, he'd hurt her and now he wouldn't even let her apologise for pointing out the truth.
Guilt whipped through his mind, tightening around his hearts and making him want desperately to fix everything.
He shook himself and focussed on walking.
-BAD WOLF-
All right, so maybe that particular remark didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped...
What are you looking at me like that for? Of course I made her say it! Well, I suppose I didn't MAKE her say anything, but I did influence her emotions enough for her to do something, or rather say something, that she would never have said otherwise. Stop it, I was being perfectly logical. If the Doctor gets hurt enough by Rose, then he'll stop holding on to her for dear life and will drop her back off with her original Doctor, and then problem solved. When Rose is returned to the proper Doctor, the anomaly mucking everything up ends, the timelines sort themselves out, and...
Wait. You didn't figure it out already?
Of course Rose is the anomaly. What else could it be? ...All right, so it could be a thousand other things, most of them with the word "Dalek" stamped on them in big, unfriendly, and forcibly mauve letters. But no, the astronomical spanner that has been chucked in the engine of spacetime happens to be our own dearly beloved Rose.
Still don't understand? Gah, I hate talking to mortals. You'd think that if I used words like "spanner" and "chucked" in my initial explanation, you'd get what I was talking about without too much fuss. But apparently some of you didn't, so I'm going to explain in more detail, without the words "spanner" or "chucked". Or "engine", if that helps.
Imagine an engine. A really, really big and complicated engine. It's got all these little tubes and bits and pieces that keep it from making ugly noises and then promptly exploding in a large ball of flames and thus dramatically winking out of existence. One of the aforementioned bits, the really really big and impressive one, is the Doctor.
I see you giggling over there! Omega's orifice, does no-one have a clean mind any more?
Anyway, this bit, named the Doctor- stop it- goes all the way through the engine. Mess with that, and the messiness spreads to the entire engine in a fairly rapid manner. Now, this engine has failsafes which keep it from making ugly noises before exploding dramatically in the aforementioned large ball of flames. It can repair itself, to an extent. Actually, pretty much every part of it can be repaired- except for one.
Three guesses as to which one that is.
Now imagine there's a second engine. This one has a spanner. The spanner's name is Rose. This spanner was very tightly entwined with the other engine's part-labelled-the-Doctor- oh, for the love of Rassilon, STOP IT!- for a very long time, before another large part, named the Daleks, ripped this poor innocent spanner-named-Rose from this not-so-innocent bit-named-the-Doctor and, through a complicated series of events which you presumably already know, chucked her and her mum, who was a nut, and her ex-boyfriend, who was one of those extra bits that you can never figure out exactly what to do with, into the first engine we discussed.
The extra bit (who actually fit quite well into this second engine, as the second engine actually needed that bit) and the nut happily ensconced themselves into some minor parts of the engine and promptly made no trouble whatsoever, and for a time the spanner-named-Rose joined them and made only a very little trouble, only about twice a week.
Then a computer virus, named the Racnoss, tried to kill off and eat a large chunk of the engine about five billion years before that bit of engine was scheduled to be demolished. The large-bit-named-the-Doctor went to stop them. So did the spanner-named-Rose, even though she was never a part of that engine and wasn't meant to save it, as that was the large-bit-named-the-Doctor's job. The spanner-named-Rose and the large-bit-named-the-Doctor latched on to each other as if magnetised, which they may very well have been. Thus, the spanner-named-Rose is following the accustomed path of the large-bit-named-the-Doctor, and is accordingly being drawn more and more deeply into this engine, doing considerable damage the longer she's magnetically attached to this large-bit-named-the-Doctor.
Do you see now?
There, now, do you understand why I'd like to separate the Doctor and Rose as soon as possible?
Thank you.
We'll continue, then.
(You're still doing it.)
-BAD WOLF-
They didn't speak again for the entire walk, and Rose found herself considerably irritated. So she'd been silly and emotional and had snapped at him; it wasn't as if he hadn't done the same to her.
The words "stupid ape" wandered absently through her head and she flicked them away.
If he was always this sulky, came a thought, maybe she should just leave. Go home.
She rebelled. It wasn't as if she could go home, anyway. It would probably kill her to leave now, by choice. And, said the more sympathetic part of her, maybe the Doctor was just having a bad day.
Wouldn't have been the first time.
Besides, she considered, this one didn't seem to have had anyone to help him after the War; he was, after all, still as vulnerable as her first Doctor had been, early on in their travels.
Didn't mean he got to completely shut her out every time she said something stupid, though, muttered the part of her brain that was not attached to any sympathy circuits.
She realised she was stepping considerably more heavily than she was generally accustomed to doing and vaguely wondered about ceasing the admittedly somewhat childish reaction.
Nah, she thought, and revelled in the loud, obnoxious crunch and the slight shock that ran up her calf whenever a thin branch was unfortunate enough to be in her path.
Did she want to leave him? prodded a thought.
She paused to consider. Illa nearly ran into her, so she started to walk again, but carried on thinking.
No, she decided. One little spat wasn't enough to drive her away from the life she'd wanted more than anything.
The prodding thought retreated almost sulkily, and she shook her head sharply to rid herself of the suspicion that it hadn't been entirely hers. What telepathic being would want to be in her head, anyway?
-BAD WOLF-
Yep, completely failed. QI'yaH.
Just have to try again...
...
...Meh, I'll leave it for now. Might as well keep the alternate Doctor from sulking all the time. Sulky Doctors tend to blow up things more often, and more recklessly, than normal ones.
What's that?
Stop it! He is NOT growing on me! I just don't want any galaxies completely annihilated simply because the Doctor is too depressed to care about them, that's all.
Like you'd know. Trust me, he's even more careless about threatening buttons when he's on his own.
Oh, have it your way...
But this doesn't mean he gets to keep her.
-BAD WOLF-
It was roughly a forty-five minute trip, but it felt longer for the oppressive, almost palpable silence.
The Doctor was still in denial, Rose was still sulking, and Vynn and Illa had no idea what to make of it. All in all, the situation, Rose deemed, had a distinct tinge of the adjective "crap".
And her ankle still hurt. She had been forced to give up stomping along the path because of that bloody ankle, and the cessation of that activity did not make her particularly happy.
The forest cleared, revealing the aforementioned hill that the Doctor had been so keen to reach, and Rose realised that the sun had actually begun to rise while they had been stuck in the darkness between the trees. Glancing back, she discovered that she probably would have found that out earlier had certain emotions not been very much in play.
The Doctor ran up the slope and Rose dashed unevenly after him, ungainly on the uneven and springy ground.
He glanced at the horizon, glared at it for a moment, and then suddenly flopped down on the ground in a surprisingly neat cross-legged position with the box perched in his lap.
"Thought you'd finished it," objected Rose, folding her legs underneath her and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as the wind whipped about in an unforeseen direction.
"Gwssnddayfnjsmn," said the Doctor around a chunk of metal that Rose couldn't identify.
"Say what?"
He pulled the metal bit out of his mouth and dropped it on the side of his knee instead.
"Just need to make a few adjustments," he said, seeming a little irritated at having to repeat himself.
Rose furrowed her brow at him, but decided that "irritated" was better than "completely silent" and let it go in favour of studying the machine he'd made while she was sleeping.
It was a thoroughly Doctorish contraption, being an odd mix of genuinely dangerous objects and things that looked like pens and disco balls (and Rose was sure she'd spotted some sequins somewhere on the bottom, just before he put it down). There wasn't any set direction in which it seemed to be pointing, so she assumed that the opening of the box was it- but then again, she'd been wrong before.
"How much time's left?"
"Well," he said, poking at something that looked for all the world like a Rubik's cube, "technically speaking, the heliovore won't actually reach the sun for about six hours and even then it'll take about eight minutes for the notable lack of heat and light to have any effect. But," he added, apparently satisfied with that part of the amalgamation as he suddenly decided to turn it over and start poking at that side with his screwdriver (She was amused at the confirmed sighting of several obnoxiously pink sequins covering what appeared to be a holo-projector), "that's not the time we have."
Well, at least he was talking, she thought. That was good. "So what's the time we have?"
"Meh," he said, picking at one of the sequins with a disgusted look, only to find that his fingernails were inadequate for the task, "the machine itself needs a few minutes to power up and the signal will take about... ooh... half an hour to reach the heliovore. Wouldn't be that difficult, except then, of course, we've got to get back to the TARDIS and then use her as a very concentrated gravity source to shift the creature away from the real star. Heliovores don't really propel themselves, they just sort of float about a bit until they latch on to a centre of gravity, i.e. a star, and then they let that pull them in."
He paused for a moment.
"We've got about two minutes."
She took pity on him, leaned over and pried the sequins off with the nail of her forefinger.
"Thanks," he said, sounding genuinely relieved. He plugged the sonic screwdriver into the open end of the box for a moment, and the contraption began to hum more powerfully.
"And now," he said, putting the screwdriver back in one of his myriad pockets, "we run."
He carefully placed the box on the ground, the side directly opposite of the opening facing towards the sun and its predator, scrambled to his feet and demonstrated his order.
Rose jumped up and half-ran, half-limped after him to join Vynn and Illa. When they reached the bottom of the hill, they turned to look at the odd little device which might just save a planet.
It glowed, practically singing with power now, and Rose felt a smile curve her lips upwards. She glanced at the Doctor and saw a similar expression beginning to take over his features.
She was just beginning to experiment with the idea of taking his hand when sparks jettisoned wildly from the contraption, the hum of energy taking on a sick quality as the pyrotechnics continued.