Fic: A haunted house, Donna? Pshawww! - part 2/3
Title: A haunted house, Donna? Pshawww!
Genre: General, adventure, horror them holiday thangs :D
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Ten, Donna
Summary: The Doctor tries to prove to Donna that it’s just a stereotype.
Warning: Creepiness
Spoilers: None
Words: 2393
Disclaimer: Lonely, I am so lonely, I’ve got nobody, to call my own, oooh (see what I did thar?)
A/N: Hope you guys had a great halloween, I definitely had moments close to a heart attack -.-
Also, that lovely song the Doctor practically dies to is Aprés Moi by Regina Spektor. <3
Previously...
"He's an idiot, he's an idiot, he's an idiot."
When Donna realizes she's awake she can’t tell whether they’re really open or not. Her back is on a cold surface, and everything seems lopsided and her head feels heavy. Oh, she’s on the floor. Nothing mysterious about that.
Everything’s black. The space around her feels smaller and not as endless like a black hole. She stays where she is, trying to control the little jitters in her chest and to normalize her breathing. There’s silence, something she wasn’t so fond of but right now she didn’t mind. But there was something missing, there was still…
Donna, a distant voice whispers and she almost lets out the most unnecessary yelp.
“Doctor?” she calls lacking a proper. “Is that you? Are you there?”
Donna, he says, still so far off and it sounds like all the honesty in his voice has been sucked out of his mouth. She notices that, but is relieved that he’s here.
I’m leaving.
Donna sits up and tries to support herself while burdened with a numb and heavy head. “What? What do you mean leaving?” she demanded to know.
I have to go.
Donna tries to stand to come after him, but her legs are two useless logs. “Doctor,” she begins to weep. “Help me, just please, I’m scared.”
Goodbye, Donna.
He’s kidding, right? Please be kidding.
“Doctor!” she yells more agitatedly and less desperately frightened. She can hear footsteps only a short distance from her start to pace the other direction, really leaving.
She couldn’t get up, for God’s sake, why couldn’t she get up? The frustration builds up as she tries to desperately crawl but her hopelessness festers as his footsteps disappear and she hears a door opening and closing, one she can’t see.
He’s left her alone, alone. In the dark, in the empty space with no known way to get out, with no knowledge of the possible risks or dangers, alone.
Donna covers her face with the sleeves of the coat she still has from him, tears soaking them and the hollowness in her throat from irregular breathing and crying is all she feels.
I want to wake up now, she thinks to herself. I really, really, really would like to wake up.
Arms wrap around her and she briefly falls into imaginary hole.
“Donna?” the Doctor asks in heavy concern.
“What?” she answers in confusion and fright at his voice, his actual voice, not the one she heard that seemed years away. “Is that you?”
“Yes, I’m here,” he replies with an assuring tone and she shifts around in his hold to feel for his face. That was his hair, soft and messy; his nose, his cheeks, his lips.
Donna sighs heavily in relief as she keeps her hands on his face. Then slaps him.
“Ow!” He yelps, resonating through the dark. “What the--?”
“I told you not to go in,” she hisses, and pushes herself a little closer to him despite herself.
“Yeah, you did…” the Doctor mumbles, inwardly damning himself for his hubris.
She wraps her arms around what she feels as his torso and feels her heart beating less furiously. She can feel his, too. He’s been scared.
“Are you alright? Are you hurt?” she asks him, looking at where she thinks his eyes would be. She hears him swallow hard before he speaks.
“Mostly.”
“Mostly what?”
“I’ll let you decide,” he says quietly, almost in a sullen but calm tone.
“Have you been hearing things?”
“Yes. Most of them you crying.”
Donna settles her head against his chest and inhales the air around them, making sure that it was real even though a few moments ago she was hoping it was all just a big nightmare she was going to wake up from.
“I thought I heard you,” she says a little above a whisper, and the pressure behind her eyes collected to form tears again at the recent memory. “You told me you were going to leave without me. And you did.”
“I’d never leave you like that.”
“You did before you went inside.”
He has nothing to say in his defense, and instead wraps his arms more securely around her, his lips resting on the top of her head.
“What is this place, Doctor?”
“Well,” he sighs. “Looks like we have no choice but to find out.”
He feels Donna tense against him in his hold. “Donna, whatever this place is, it’s definitely not from Earth, and it has to be stopped.”
She nods, not much comfort given but calmer nonetheless.
He carefully feels around to hold the collar of the coat on Donna. “Could you get the sonic? I don’t want to risk it,” he coughs and Donna is still too scared to quip back.
She runs her fingers through the inside of the coat, feeling for the pocket where the sonic is. She finds it and he takes it after clumsily bumping his hands against her arm and taking hold of the wrong parts of her hand.
“There should be a light setting on this thing…” he fiddles with the buttons and then successfully sets it to work as a little flashlight.
The blue light, as soon as it is flicked on, reveals a face, staring straight at them.
“Oh my-“ Donna gasps as the Doctor drops the sonic and a light from above and a ceiling fan switches on and off. Between the transitions of darkness and vision were stairwells, little bodies in grey clothing and white eyes hiding by the railings, then hiding behind each other, hiding behind nothing, closer and closer and closer, closing in and in and in.
The Doctor lifts himself and Donna up, searching frantically for an escape, but he can’t see anything past the ocean of deathly, voiceless figures, hands reaching out like waves, eyes like daggers.
“Donna, Donna, just hold on!” he says more to himself than her.
“Not really having a choice here!” Donna yells back breathlessly as she has another panic attack.
The lights won’t stay on, for the brief moments they are, the room changes like a slow stop motion film.
Her nails are digging into the back of the Doctor’s hand. Hands, hands, hands; her nails aren’t the only ones digging into skin. Black continuously shifts to pale skin and irisless eyes, everywhere, piercing every inch of their bodies like needles, their little cold hands tearing theirs apart from each other.
“Doctor! Doctor what’s going on?” Donna yells as she feels them pull at her, away from him and away from her last inch of sanity.
The Doctor tries to reach for his fallen sonic but one’s foot crushes it completely, and more and more hands plaster them selves onto his shoulders, his arms, pulling like strings attached to a puppet.
“Donna!” He extends his hands to try and reach hers, the distance between their fingertips getting bigger and bigger, the flickering lights making it so hard to see where he should wrap his fingers.
The silence is the worst part. Nothing is audible but the shuffling of hands and feet and their own terrified breathes and cries.
Hands, hands, hands. There are no more bodies from which they come from. There are just hands and long arms rooting from a puddle of melted wax that wrap them selves around them, around their waists, around their legs, and the contact horrifies Donna, it paralyzes her very soul.
She’s lost sight of the Doctor, her vision is too blurred by her tears, and oh god does dying sound so much more appealing right now.
The Doctor tries move his limbs free, but the vines of elastic limbs only pull tighter, and they go from just pulling to constricting, not only directing their force in one direction but all. He keeps his eyes on Donna, whose eyes and whose face motivates him to keep fighting, though by now it’s hopeless.
“Doctor,” she calls him with a raspy and desperate voice. She needs help so badly, but he couldn’t and it bothers him to the farthest extent. “Make it stop.”
He can’t. He doesn’t know how. He’s choking. He’s constricted. He’s crying.
“I’ll get you,” he promises huskily as a hand wraps around his throat. “I will! I swear I will, Donna, I will!”
And the lights go off, and stay off.
He doesn’t feel multiple things confining his movement anymore, just one whole force, as if cement was poured over his body. He doesn’t want to open his eyes. He’s not sure if he can. He’s afraid of what he might see. But hell, who was he to not take those chances.
After all, it was his taking of chances that led him and Donna here in the first place.
He lifts his eyelids. He’s in an old room, several candles lit and placed on end tables. He takes one of them and he thinks to himself how it doesn’t feel the same as using the sonic.
There’s a hallway opening at every corner of the room, and he peers his head through each of them, seeing which one his instinct would react to the most. Faint scratchy music was heard around the hall opposite to him, and he followed the tune of eerie piano.
I must go on standing; you can’t break that which isn’t yours.
He finds an old classic record player, in rough condition but still usable, obviously. Then he notices the stained walls behind it, sizable picture frames holding intricate and detailed paintings of people’s faces.
I must go on standing; I’m not my own, it’s not my choice…
The Doctor observes them all in order as he walks down with the candle, holding it in various positions against the paintings to see every little speck down to the direction of each brushstroke.
These faces disturb him.
There is a little boy, about the age of eight; an older girl, looking closely related to the previous child, about fourteen. An old elderly couple, a younger couple, another curious looking little one. They all differentiated as he went along the numerous frames in a row upon the wall. But all of them have the same look on their faces: dread, trepidation, terror-fear.
Be afraid of the lame, they'll inherit your legs. Be afraid of the old, they'll inherit your souls. Be afraid of the cold, they'll inherit your blood.
The last two pictures alarm him the most. They are unframed and unfinished, but hang purposefully side by side. They are of him and Donna.
“What in the…?” he says as he furrows his brows and squints as an invisible paintbrush smears paint colored of Donna’s paling skin across where her cheek should be, another coloring the watery grays and redness of her anxious eyes.
Après moi le deluge,
Then he knows it now, he knows what’s happening and what this damned hell of a place is, and he must find Donna, he has to right this instance.
After me…
There’s something not right with the noise and it eats at him until he notices it’s because the record player has broken. He tries to make it stop, but accidentally turns the volume up higher.
The flood-the flood-the flood-the flood-
“The flood…”
Then he hears it. A sound similar to when you switched to a channel that didn’t exist on TV, like billions of tiny pebbles being thrown to the ground, like waterfall-
“The flood!” He whips around to face the sound of tides as it crescendos and before releasing a burst of water, destroying the tables, and embracing the little flames on the candles, blinding the Doctor once more.
He tries to quickly navigate through what he remembers of the room but his legs are stabbed with ruthless and icy waves of pain, seeping through the cloth of his pantlegs and the soles of his trainers, so cold, so bloody, flippin’ cold.
His limbs stiffened as the hand of the sea wrapped around his body, crushing him with not its force, but it’s sharp, stinging frigidity. He’s taken afloat as the room expands to a boundless space, and his arms are useless, his legs are useless, he is useless. He doesn’t even know how to swim.
Everything burns; every fiber of his being is pierced with millions of icy needles through the skin of his hands, his feet, his back, his face, his eyes and to the bone.
Its only time until he loses feeling of every nerve. He can’t open his eyes. He can’t feel them. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything, anything, and it drives him mad.
He must be mad, he must definitely be, because he’s hearing things. He hears voices; some he doesn’t know, some he recalls, some he knows on the spot. One is the loudest, one is the clearest, one is the one he’s wanted to hear.
Doctor.
Donna?
Get up.
Where are you?
Get up.
I can’t.
Why.
I….
You promised me.
I did.
You’re a bit of a failure now, aren’t you, Doctor? That’s not her voice anymore. It’s someone else’s. It’s his.
What’s caught you now? What’s got the mighty Time Lord, last of his kind, the God of the Universe?
I’m not a god.
Really? Cause you sure seem to like to act it. You hurt people. You dictate them. You turn them into your little own warriors. You put them at risk, unfathomable danger. Where’s Donna now? Do you know? Will you ever know? Is she all right? Will she be? You don’t know everything, Doctor, but it’s because of you; you take the calls, you decide what’s done, you decide who lives and who does not.
Stop it.
It ticks you doesn’t it? You’re alone now, all on your own, you’re nothing, without your little ship or your little sonic, without your little humans who make up almost everything that makes you unstoppable. You’re nothing alone. You’re useless alone. And it bothers you. It bothers you because you can be so much more.
The Doctor forces his eyes open, furious, tantalized, abhorred, feeling the frost bite his eyelids and sink into his vision, hazy like a dream, and the first thing he sees through the murk is the single frame hanging upon the black, with his face and the last minute of his existence.
Part 2.5 hehe
Genre: General, adventure, horror them holiday thangs :D
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Ten, Donna
Summary: The Doctor tries to prove to Donna that it’s just a stereotype.
Warning: Creepiness
Spoilers: None
Words: 2393
Disclaimer: Lonely, I am so lonely, I’ve got nobody, to call my own, oooh (see what I did thar?)
A/N: Hope you guys had a great halloween, I definitely had moments close to a heart attack -.-
Also, that lovely song the Doctor practically dies to is Aprés Moi by Regina Spektor. <3
Previously...
"He's an idiot, he's an idiot, he's an idiot."
When Donna realizes she's awake she can’t tell whether they’re really open or not. Her back is on a cold surface, and everything seems lopsided and her head feels heavy. Oh, she’s on the floor. Nothing mysterious about that.
Everything’s black. The space around her feels smaller and not as endless like a black hole. She stays where she is, trying to control the little jitters in her chest and to normalize her breathing. There’s silence, something she wasn’t so fond of but right now she didn’t mind. But there was something missing, there was still…
Donna, a distant voice whispers and she almost lets out the most unnecessary yelp.
“Doctor?” she calls lacking a proper. “Is that you? Are you there?”
Donna, he says, still so far off and it sounds like all the honesty in his voice has been sucked out of his mouth. She notices that, but is relieved that he’s here.
I’m leaving.
Donna sits up and tries to support herself while burdened with a numb and heavy head. “What? What do you mean leaving?” she demanded to know.
I have to go.
Donna tries to stand to come after him, but her legs are two useless logs. “Doctor,” she begins to weep. “Help me, just please, I’m scared.”
Goodbye, Donna.
He’s kidding, right? Please be kidding.
“Doctor!” she yells more agitatedly and less desperately frightened. She can hear footsteps only a short distance from her start to pace the other direction, really leaving.
She couldn’t get up, for God’s sake, why couldn’t she get up? The frustration builds up as she tries to desperately crawl but her hopelessness festers as his footsteps disappear and she hears a door opening and closing, one she can’t see.
He’s left her alone, alone. In the dark, in the empty space with no known way to get out, with no knowledge of the possible risks or dangers, alone.
Donna covers her face with the sleeves of the coat she still has from him, tears soaking them and the hollowness in her throat from irregular breathing and crying is all she feels.
I want to wake up now, she thinks to herself. I really, really, really would like to wake up.
Arms wrap around her and she briefly falls into imaginary hole.
“Donna?” the Doctor asks in heavy concern.
“What?” she answers in confusion and fright at his voice, his actual voice, not the one she heard that seemed years away. “Is that you?”
“Yes, I’m here,” he replies with an assuring tone and she shifts around in his hold to feel for his face. That was his hair, soft and messy; his nose, his cheeks, his lips.
Donna sighs heavily in relief as she keeps her hands on his face. Then slaps him.
“Ow!” He yelps, resonating through the dark. “What the--?”
“I told you not to go in,” she hisses, and pushes herself a little closer to him despite herself.
“Yeah, you did…” the Doctor mumbles, inwardly damning himself for his hubris.
She wraps her arms around what she feels as his torso and feels her heart beating less furiously. She can feel his, too. He’s been scared.
“Are you alright? Are you hurt?” she asks him, looking at where she thinks his eyes would be. She hears him swallow hard before he speaks.
“Mostly.”
“Mostly what?”
“I’ll let you decide,” he says quietly, almost in a sullen but calm tone.
“Have you been hearing things?”
“Yes. Most of them you crying.”
Donna settles her head against his chest and inhales the air around them, making sure that it was real even though a few moments ago she was hoping it was all just a big nightmare she was going to wake up from.
“I thought I heard you,” she says a little above a whisper, and the pressure behind her eyes collected to form tears again at the recent memory. “You told me you were going to leave without me. And you did.”
“I’d never leave you like that.”
“You did before you went inside.”
He has nothing to say in his defense, and instead wraps his arms more securely around her, his lips resting on the top of her head.
“What is this place, Doctor?”
“Well,” he sighs. “Looks like we have no choice but to find out.”
He feels Donna tense against him in his hold. “Donna, whatever this place is, it’s definitely not from Earth, and it has to be stopped.”
She nods, not much comfort given but calmer nonetheless.
He carefully feels around to hold the collar of the coat on Donna. “Could you get the sonic? I don’t want to risk it,” he coughs and Donna is still too scared to quip back.
She runs her fingers through the inside of the coat, feeling for the pocket where the sonic is. She finds it and he takes it after clumsily bumping his hands against her arm and taking hold of the wrong parts of her hand.
“There should be a light setting on this thing…” he fiddles with the buttons and then successfully sets it to work as a little flashlight.
The blue light, as soon as it is flicked on, reveals a face, staring straight at them.
“Oh my-“ Donna gasps as the Doctor drops the sonic and a light from above and a ceiling fan switches on and off. Between the transitions of darkness and vision were stairwells, little bodies in grey clothing and white eyes hiding by the railings, then hiding behind each other, hiding behind nothing, closer and closer and closer, closing in and in and in.
The Doctor lifts himself and Donna up, searching frantically for an escape, but he can’t see anything past the ocean of deathly, voiceless figures, hands reaching out like waves, eyes like daggers.
“Donna, Donna, just hold on!” he says more to himself than her.
“Not really having a choice here!” Donna yells back breathlessly as she has another panic attack.
The lights won’t stay on, for the brief moments they are, the room changes like a slow stop motion film.
Her nails are digging into the back of the Doctor’s hand. Hands, hands, hands; her nails aren’t the only ones digging into skin. Black continuously shifts to pale skin and irisless eyes, everywhere, piercing every inch of their bodies like needles, their little cold hands tearing theirs apart from each other.
“Doctor! Doctor what’s going on?” Donna yells as she feels them pull at her, away from him and away from her last inch of sanity.
The Doctor tries to reach for his fallen sonic but one’s foot crushes it completely, and more and more hands plaster them selves onto his shoulders, his arms, pulling like strings attached to a puppet.
“Donna!” He extends his hands to try and reach hers, the distance between their fingertips getting bigger and bigger, the flickering lights making it so hard to see where he should wrap his fingers.
The silence is the worst part. Nothing is audible but the shuffling of hands and feet and their own terrified breathes and cries.
Hands, hands, hands. There are no more bodies from which they come from. There are just hands and long arms rooting from a puddle of melted wax that wrap them selves around them, around their waists, around their legs, and the contact horrifies Donna, it paralyzes her very soul.
She’s lost sight of the Doctor, her vision is too blurred by her tears, and oh god does dying sound so much more appealing right now.
The Doctor tries move his limbs free, but the vines of elastic limbs only pull tighter, and they go from just pulling to constricting, not only directing their force in one direction but all. He keeps his eyes on Donna, whose eyes and whose face motivates him to keep fighting, though by now it’s hopeless.
“Doctor,” she calls him with a raspy and desperate voice. She needs help so badly, but he couldn’t and it bothers him to the farthest extent. “Make it stop.”
He can’t. He doesn’t know how. He’s choking. He’s constricted. He’s crying.
“I’ll get you,” he promises huskily as a hand wraps around his throat. “I will! I swear I will, Donna, I will!”
And the lights go off, and stay off.
He doesn’t feel multiple things confining his movement anymore, just one whole force, as if cement was poured over his body. He doesn’t want to open his eyes. He’s not sure if he can. He’s afraid of what he might see. But hell, who was he to not take those chances.
After all, it was his taking of chances that led him and Donna here in the first place.
He lifts his eyelids. He’s in an old room, several candles lit and placed on end tables. He takes one of them and he thinks to himself how it doesn’t feel the same as using the sonic.
There’s a hallway opening at every corner of the room, and he peers his head through each of them, seeing which one his instinct would react to the most. Faint scratchy music was heard around the hall opposite to him, and he followed the tune of eerie piano.
I must go on standing; you can’t break that which isn’t yours.
He finds an old classic record player, in rough condition but still usable, obviously. Then he notices the stained walls behind it, sizable picture frames holding intricate and detailed paintings of people’s faces.
I must go on standing; I’m not my own, it’s not my choice…
The Doctor observes them all in order as he walks down with the candle, holding it in various positions against the paintings to see every little speck down to the direction of each brushstroke.
These faces disturb him.
There is a little boy, about the age of eight; an older girl, looking closely related to the previous child, about fourteen. An old elderly couple, a younger couple, another curious looking little one. They all differentiated as he went along the numerous frames in a row upon the wall. But all of them have the same look on their faces: dread, trepidation, terror-fear.
Be afraid of the lame, they'll inherit your legs. Be afraid of the old, they'll inherit your souls. Be afraid of the cold, they'll inherit your blood.
The last two pictures alarm him the most. They are unframed and unfinished, but hang purposefully side by side. They are of him and Donna.
“What in the…?” he says as he furrows his brows and squints as an invisible paintbrush smears paint colored of Donna’s paling skin across where her cheek should be, another coloring the watery grays and redness of her anxious eyes.
Après moi le deluge,
Then he knows it now, he knows what’s happening and what this damned hell of a place is, and he must find Donna, he has to right this instance.
After me…
There’s something not right with the noise and it eats at him until he notices it’s because the record player has broken. He tries to make it stop, but accidentally turns the volume up higher.
The flood-the flood-the flood-the flood-
“The flood…”
Then he hears it. A sound similar to when you switched to a channel that didn’t exist on TV, like billions of tiny pebbles being thrown to the ground, like waterfall-
“The flood!” He whips around to face the sound of tides as it crescendos and before releasing a burst of water, destroying the tables, and embracing the little flames on the candles, blinding the Doctor once more.
He tries to quickly navigate through what he remembers of the room but his legs are stabbed with ruthless and icy waves of pain, seeping through the cloth of his pantlegs and the soles of his trainers, so cold, so bloody, flippin’ cold.
His limbs stiffened as the hand of the sea wrapped around his body, crushing him with not its force, but it’s sharp, stinging frigidity. He’s taken afloat as the room expands to a boundless space, and his arms are useless, his legs are useless, he is useless. He doesn’t even know how to swim.
Everything burns; every fiber of his being is pierced with millions of icy needles through the skin of his hands, his feet, his back, his face, his eyes and to the bone.
Its only time until he loses feeling of every nerve. He can’t open his eyes. He can’t feel them. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything, anything, and it drives him mad.
He must be mad, he must definitely be, because he’s hearing things. He hears voices; some he doesn’t know, some he recalls, some he knows on the spot. One is the loudest, one is the clearest, one is the one he’s wanted to hear.
Doctor.
Donna?
Get up.
Where are you?
Get up.
I can’t.
Why.
I….
You promised me.
I did.
You’re a bit of a failure now, aren’t you, Doctor? That’s not her voice anymore. It’s someone else’s. It’s his.
What’s caught you now? What’s got the mighty Time Lord, last of his kind, the God of the Universe?
I’m not a god.
Really? Cause you sure seem to like to act it. You hurt people. You dictate them. You turn them into your little own warriors. You put them at risk, unfathomable danger. Where’s Donna now? Do you know? Will you ever know? Is she all right? Will she be? You don’t know everything, Doctor, but it’s because of you; you take the calls, you decide what’s done, you decide who lives and who does not.
Stop it.
It ticks you doesn’t it? You’re alone now, all on your own, you’re nothing, without your little ship or your little sonic, without your little humans who make up almost everything that makes you unstoppable. You’re nothing alone. You’re useless alone. And it bothers you. It bothers you because you can be so much more.
The Doctor forces his eyes open, furious, tantalized, abhorred, feeling the frost bite his eyelids and sink into his vision, hazy like a dream, and the first thing he sees through the murk is the single frame hanging upon the black, with his face and the last minute of his existence.
Part 2.5 hehe