fic: children of time (7/14)
Title: Children of Time: Echoes in the Void
Characters: Donna Noble, Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith, Jack Harkness and the Doctor.
Rating: PG
Summary: Following on from Journey's End...
Index Post
Echoes in the Void
“Broken ankle,” Martha had said, “and pretty dehydrated. We should get them both to hospital, and since UNIT and Torchwood are both on their way anyway, and Clyde and Luke are going to tell them where we are, it might be safer to stay here.”
“And wait for the Daleks to find us?” Sarah had said. “No way. We are getting out of here.”
But it’s easier said than done. While Jack and Martha are supporting Alan between them, Sarah’s leading them back out of the cell block, and, somewhere along the way, she’s taken a wrong turning. There aren’t any recriminations, because it wouldn’t do any good, because neither Jack or Martha are sure they’d have remembered the way out and because it’s dark and cramped and there is at least one Dalek down here with them.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to leave me here?” asks Alan when they take a break. He’s in a lot of pain, and the group can only move as fast as he can. Martha’s gone to have a scout ahead with the sonic, leaving them without a light source. Alan gives Sarah a wry grin, though she can’t see it in the darkness. “I trust that you wouldn’t forget about me,” he says. He’d rather yell at them, and tell them to stop worrying about him and get his daughter somewhere safe, but he doubts that would make any more of an impression on Sarah Jane than asking nicely.
“No,” says Sarah, her tone leaving no room for dissension. “No one gets left behind, not down here.”
“You’re doing fine, Dad,” says Maria, and he has to smile because even now her confidence and optimism is unbroken. Once he might have thought it worrying and not the way a teenage girl should be facing life and death situations, but after finding out about her adventures with Sarah Jane, he likes to think that it’s justified.
“We’re out,” says Martha, appearing round the corner in a haze of reddish light. “Exit to the cell block’s just ahead and then it’s back up and through the laboratories.”
“I guess we just have to hope that Dalek’s moved on,” says Jack.
Martha purses her lips, but she doesn’t sound too worried: “We’ll be careful,” she says.
It’s not easy being careful when all you’ve got is long featureless corridors with no place to hide. They go slow and steady, always listening for the slightest sound that could warn them of what’s ahead. They pause in the infrequent side corridors, and they aren’t that much safer objectively but their closeness and the shadows give the illusion of a slightly more secure respite.
And it’s as they turn into one of those corridors to rest that Sarah, leading, spots the Dalek looming out of the shadows towards them. “Other way,” she hisses, turning around, a note of panic caught in her voice.
“Halt!” The Dalek’s screech seems to fill the air around them and Sarah fights down the nausea as she remembers another time and place with smooth metal corridors and the possibility of a Dalek waiting round every corner. “Halt! Or you will be exterminated!”
“Get going,” says Jack. “I’ll hold it off as best I can.”
“I said-” begins Sarah.
“I know what you said,” he says, “but we can’t outrun that thing, and a dead body lying across the corridor might cause it some inconvenience, enough for you lot to get away.”
“Jack...”
He flashes her a grin. “Don’t worry, I’ve been dead before. Tell you all about it later. Now get going.”
“Halt!” But this time the voice is from the other direction. Another Dalek; the group turns back.
“So much for your heroics, Captain,” says Sarah. “We’re trapped.”
-
The Doctor understands silence very well. It’s been his constant companion since the end of the Time War, and though he’s never found it comfortable, he’s learned to live with it. He knows it’s not supposed to be like this, that that part of his mind was never meant to be a void but to be a constant reminder of the great truth: you are not alone in the universe.
Except that in the sense his people had meant, he is, and in the sense he can still do something about now, he just ran away from someone who could’ve kept it back just a little longer. He thinks of Sarah Jane, and he knows that she was right about him and who he thinks of as family, and yet everyone he loves has someone else now, someone that matters more to them than he does.
He wonders if he used to be this selfish, this needy, this wanting, and he thinks not, because he never truly understood loneliness before and he doesn’t want to now, but it courts him as surely and as unrelentingly as Time and Pain and Death ever did.
He walks long empty corridors, brooding, sulking, kicking at empty air as though it’ll make him feel any better, because there’s no-one around right now who’ll judge him for his immaturity. And nothing very much changes as he walks, except somewhere in that dark and empty void inside his mind, there’s someone calling.
And then it stops.
And he’s alone.
And it couldn’t have happened. Obviously.
He closes his eyes and he’s a split-second away from panic because the part of him that is silent is only small from the outside. Within that place, the silence is vast and unending, enough to swallow all the lives of a Time Lord with barely an echo.
That’s what it had sounded like: an echo, or something so very weak that it had barely been able to reach this place of shared consciousness. And it had hurt. That moment of hope, of possibility, gone before he had time to even contemplate what it could mean.
But the only other person... Donna is fine. She has a family that loves her and they’ll take care of her and she’ll be alive and she’s fine. And if she isn’t, he knows her presence would be rather more than just that- there it is again.
He slides to the floor and leans back against the wall of the corridor, eyes open but all his concentration is focussed on that single moment of possibility within himself, that echo. He won’t allow himself to hope, because that’s happened already and he doesn’t know if he can bear to deal with a loss like that again, but he can’t just ignore it and he’s almost certain he’s not imagining it.
And it’s there again, but this time he’s ready, and he lets himself drift. He lets time slow until he can catch a sense of it, of who it might be. He manages to start a rhythm, letting himself speed between the echoes, and then letting them linger. It’s almost hypnotic, and it’s only when he falls to one side, hitting his head hard against the floor that he comes round and realises the danger of what he’s been doing. There’s a temptation there, just to let go, and the promise of another microsecond of even the barest contact with someone who would be able to understand, who might be able to respond as another Time Lord, is more than enough.
It’s pathetic, he thinks as he stands up, and he decides that he really shouldn’t be alone and he’ll be just as able to sense the echo with other people around him as when he’s sitting Rassilon knows where in his own TARDIS going quietly mad.
He walks into the console room and sees Martha’s phone sitting on the chair. There’s a smidgen of guilt at the fact that he knows perfectly well it’s been ringing and he’s been deliberately ignoring it, but that’s instantly quashed by a dozen excuses he comes up with, though he does admit that he can’t imagine Martha or Jack or Sarah buying into most of them, any of them really.
Still, he picks the phone up and takes a look. He frowns as he reads the little screen: there seems to be a lot of messages waiting for him. He takes a moment to smile, because, actually, that’s rather nice: there are people in the universe who’ve taken time out of their lives not only to call him specifically, but actually leave a few words behind too. He rather likes that.
The frown returns as he begins to listen to the messages. Martha’s annoyed at him, very, very annoyed, and, oh, they’ve found out about Donna. Which he should have realised they would because they all live on the same planet in the same time and really that was very, very stupid of him, but he was quite upset at the time and somehow it isn’t entirely his fault, he’s sure, but at the moment he can’t quite work out why not.
Right, first things first, they’ve most likely done something that’s almost certainly put Donna in danger and that would probably explain the echo inside his head. He starts punching in the co-ordinates.
He stops, because his head’s buzzing and something’s happening and there’s the echo again and that’s fine except there are two of them.
He tries not to thinks about what that means too much as he listens to the last message on the phone, and really, that just makes his day. What could be better? Donna in danger, maybe just maybe there actually is another Time Lord out there and, oh, the Daleks are still alive and on Earth. Again.
He’s still in the midst of feeling extremely put out at how things are so very not as they’re supposed to be when that dark silent void inside his head flashes liquid gold and he feels all the hope and terror of knowing with an absolute certainty that he’s not alone any more.
-
“My head hurts.”
“It’s going to get a lot worse,” says Miss Foster, undoing the cuffs on Donna’s wrists. The Daleks have retreated out of the room, but the door is still locked. Still, no point in having one’s only ally tied down.
“Have I ever mentioned how bad your bedside manner is?” asks Donna, rubbing at her wrists even though the blood flow to her hands is just fine and there’s nothing more than a dull ache in her muscles from them being inactive for so long.
“That would depend on who’s asking.” Miss Foster picks up her fob watch, snaps it shut and puts in her pocket. “Donna Noble or the Doctor.”
Donna sits up, and plants her chin in her hands. “So, should I keep calling you Miss Foster or...?”
“Rani will be fine, thank you,” she says, pacing the room.
“You want to tell me why you’re working with the Daleks then?”
The Rani turns around and fixes Donna with a piercing gaze over the top of her glasses. “Bad enough that I know precisely the sort of sanctimonious lecture I’d receive from him, but I’m certainly not going to listen to it delivered by some half-human abomination who couldn’t possibly understand what she’s talking about.”
“Yeah, cause I’m the idiot who let Davros know what I was up to and lock me up. And a few hours ago I was fascinating, so you said.”
“Yes.” The Rani folds her arms. “Yes, fine. But right now, I think it’s rather more important that we get out of this room than discuss the semantics of the name to give your condition.”
“Well, as it happens, I have an... an... an...” Donna gasps, clutching at her head. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
“If you mean that your little ape-brain is about to melt because it lacks the proper anatomical structure to cope with a Time Lord consciousness being melded with your own human one, then yes, it’s happening. Again, I assume, refers to the Doctor’s rather inept attempt to suppress the change.”
Donna grits her teeth and glares up at the Rani. “How about less of the insults and more of the doing something to help me?”
“I would,” she says coolly, “if there was anything that I could do, but I can’t. If it’s any consolation, you do have a few hours left since my attempt to force your brain to adapt did have some very limited effect.”
“Is it going to hurt this much the whole time?” asks Donna, palms pressed against her temples, her eyes screwed up.
“Oh, no. I imagine it’ll reach a critical level in a few minutes and you’ll pass out.”
-
“We surrender!” shouts Sarah Jane, raising her hands. “We’re not armed, we’re not dangerous, we surrender!”
The two Daleks are closing in on either side and there’s nowhere left to go and they’re pressing closer to one another and she’s holding onto Maria’s hand on one side and Martha’s on the other.
“Exterminate!” She sees the Dalek gun fire, that flash of deadly energy coming straight towards them, and then there’s most wonderful sound in the universe.
The TARDIS is materialising. She blinks, and then realises it’s materialising around them. The Daleks are outside and they’re all inside, and safe.
Sarah gasps a sob of relief and pulls Martha and Maria into a hug and when she looks around again, they’re okay, they’re all alive, they’re inside the TARDIS and the Doctor’s standing at the console looking irritatingly smug. “About time too!” she snaps at him.
“That goes double for me,” says Jack, as Martha adds, “I take it you finally got our messages? Nice of you to show up.”
“Good to see you too, Sarah Jane,” the Doctor says, heedless of anything except how happy he is to see them all, “and you Martha, Jack. I don’t know you two, I’m afraid, but I’m sure it’s lovely to see you as well.”
“That’s Maria,” says Sarah, “my neighbour and Alan, her father. We need to get them to a hospital.”
“No Donna though,” says the Doctor.
“Donna disappeared,” Martha tells him. “We don’t know where she is, and why on Earth didn’t you tell us what happened to her?”
“Yes, well.” He looks away, rather abashed. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No kidding,” says Jack. “So you’re looking for her then, not rescuing us?”
The Doctor shrugs, offers him a slight smile. “I can do both, can’t I? What d’you mean she’s missing?”
“Vanished,” Martha tells him. “Right in front of our eyes, one moment she’s there, the next, gone.”
“Interesting,” says the Doctor, as he checks the scanner. “Ooh, I was close. You lot must have distracted the TARDIS. She’s very fond of you all, aren’t you, old girl?”
“Thank goodness someone has some sense,” mutters Sarah Jane, catching Martha’s eye as she nods her agreement.
“Donna’s around here somewhere,” says the Doctor half-to-himself as he moves round the console. He pauses as he realises there’s a small human in his way. “Hello,” he says.
“Hello,” says Maria. “Are you really the Doctor?”
“Yes.”
She frowns, looking at him for a long moment and then turns to Sarah Jane. “You made him sound so impressive,” she says, sounding rather betrayed.
The Doctor blinks, shakes his head and then gives a yell of triumph. “Gotcha!” he says then leaps round the panels and with the flick of a switch, the TARDIS dematerialises.
Characters: Donna Noble, Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith, Jack Harkness and the Doctor.
Rating: PG
Summary: Following on from Journey's End...
Index Post
Echoes in the Void
“Broken ankle,” Martha had said, “and pretty dehydrated. We should get them both to hospital, and since UNIT and Torchwood are both on their way anyway, and Clyde and Luke are going to tell them where we are, it might be safer to stay here.”
“And wait for the Daleks to find us?” Sarah had said. “No way. We are getting out of here.”
But it’s easier said than done. While Jack and Martha are supporting Alan between them, Sarah’s leading them back out of the cell block, and, somewhere along the way, she’s taken a wrong turning. There aren’t any recriminations, because it wouldn’t do any good, because neither Jack or Martha are sure they’d have remembered the way out and because it’s dark and cramped and there is at least one Dalek down here with them.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to leave me here?” asks Alan when they take a break. He’s in a lot of pain, and the group can only move as fast as he can. Martha’s gone to have a scout ahead with the sonic, leaving them without a light source. Alan gives Sarah a wry grin, though she can’t see it in the darkness. “I trust that you wouldn’t forget about me,” he says. He’d rather yell at them, and tell them to stop worrying about him and get his daughter somewhere safe, but he doubts that would make any more of an impression on Sarah Jane than asking nicely.
“No,” says Sarah, her tone leaving no room for dissension. “No one gets left behind, not down here.”
“You’re doing fine, Dad,” says Maria, and he has to smile because even now her confidence and optimism is unbroken. Once he might have thought it worrying and not the way a teenage girl should be facing life and death situations, but after finding out about her adventures with Sarah Jane, he likes to think that it’s justified.
“We’re out,” says Martha, appearing round the corner in a haze of reddish light. “Exit to the cell block’s just ahead and then it’s back up and through the laboratories.”
“I guess we just have to hope that Dalek’s moved on,” says Jack.
Martha purses her lips, but she doesn’t sound too worried: “We’ll be careful,” she says.
It’s not easy being careful when all you’ve got is long featureless corridors with no place to hide. They go slow and steady, always listening for the slightest sound that could warn them of what’s ahead. They pause in the infrequent side corridors, and they aren’t that much safer objectively but their closeness and the shadows give the illusion of a slightly more secure respite.
And it’s as they turn into one of those corridors to rest that Sarah, leading, spots the Dalek looming out of the shadows towards them. “Other way,” she hisses, turning around, a note of panic caught in her voice.
“Halt!” The Dalek’s screech seems to fill the air around them and Sarah fights down the nausea as she remembers another time and place with smooth metal corridors and the possibility of a Dalek waiting round every corner. “Halt! Or you will be exterminated!”
“Get going,” says Jack. “I’ll hold it off as best I can.”
“I said-” begins Sarah.
“I know what you said,” he says, “but we can’t outrun that thing, and a dead body lying across the corridor might cause it some inconvenience, enough for you lot to get away.”
“Jack...”
He flashes her a grin. “Don’t worry, I’ve been dead before. Tell you all about it later. Now get going.”
“Halt!” But this time the voice is from the other direction. Another Dalek; the group turns back.
“So much for your heroics, Captain,” says Sarah. “We’re trapped.”
-
The Doctor understands silence very well. It’s been his constant companion since the end of the Time War, and though he’s never found it comfortable, he’s learned to live with it. He knows it’s not supposed to be like this, that that part of his mind was never meant to be a void but to be a constant reminder of the great truth: you are not alone in the universe.
Except that in the sense his people had meant, he is, and in the sense he can still do something about now, he just ran away from someone who could’ve kept it back just a little longer. He thinks of Sarah Jane, and he knows that she was right about him and who he thinks of as family, and yet everyone he loves has someone else now, someone that matters more to them than he does.
He wonders if he used to be this selfish, this needy, this wanting, and he thinks not, because he never truly understood loneliness before and he doesn’t want to now, but it courts him as surely and as unrelentingly as Time and Pain and Death ever did.
He walks long empty corridors, brooding, sulking, kicking at empty air as though it’ll make him feel any better, because there’s no-one around right now who’ll judge him for his immaturity. And nothing very much changes as he walks, except somewhere in that dark and empty void inside his mind, there’s someone calling.
And then it stops.
And he’s alone.
And it couldn’t have happened. Obviously.
He closes his eyes and he’s a split-second away from panic because the part of him that is silent is only small from the outside. Within that place, the silence is vast and unending, enough to swallow all the lives of a Time Lord with barely an echo.
That’s what it had sounded like: an echo, or something so very weak that it had barely been able to reach this place of shared consciousness. And it had hurt. That moment of hope, of possibility, gone before he had time to even contemplate what it could mean.
But the only other person... Donna is fine. She has a family that loves her and they’ll take care of her and she’ll be alive and she’s fine. And if she isn’t, he knows her presence would be rather more than just that- there it is again.
He slides to the floor and leans back against the wall of the corridor, eyes open but all his concentration is focussed on that single moment of possibility within himself, that echo. He won’t allow himself to hope, because that’s happened already and he doesn’t know if he can bear to deal with a loss like that again, but he can’t just ignore it and he’s almost certain he’s not imagining it.
And it’s there again, but this time he’s ready, and he lets himself drift. He lets time slow until he can catch a sense of it, of who it might be. He manages to start a rhythm, letting himself speed between the echoes, and then letting them linger. It’s almost hypnotic, and it’s only when he falls to one side, hitting his head hard against the floor that he comes round and realises the danger of what he’s been doing. There’s a temptation there, just to let go, and the promise of another microsecond of even the barest contact with someone who would be able to understand, who might be able to respond as another Time Lord, is more than enough.
It’s pathetic, he thinks as he stands up, and he decides that he really shouldn’t be alone and he’ll be just as able to sense the echo with other people around him as when he’s sitting Rassilon knows where in his own TARDIS going quietly mad.
He walks into the console room and sees Martha’s phone sitting on the chair. There’s a smidgen of guilt at the fact that he knows perfectly well it’s been ringing and he’s been deliberately ignoring it, but that’s instantly quashed by a dozen excuses he comes up with, though he does admit that he can’t imagine Martha or Jack or Sarah buying into most of them, any of them really.
Still, he picks the phone up and takes a look. He frowns as he reads the little screen: there seems to be a lot of messages waiting for him. He takes a moment to smile, because, actually, that’s rather nice: there are people in the universe who’ve taken time out of their lives not only to call him specifically, but actually leave a few words behind too. He rather likes that.
The frown returns as he begins to listen to the messages. Martha’s annoyed at him, very, very annoyed, and, oh, they’ve found out about Donna. Which he should have realised they would because they all live on the same planet in the same time and really that was very, very stupid of him, but he was quite upset at the time and somehow it isn’t entirely his fault, he’s sure, but at the moment he can’t quite work out why not.
Right, first things first, they’ve most likely done something that’s almost certainly put Donna in danger and that would probably explain the echo inside his head. He starts punching in the co-ordinates.
He stops, because his head’s buzzing and something’s happening and there’s the echo again and that’s fine except there are two of them.
He tries not to thinks about what that means too much as he listens to the last message on the phone, and really, that just makes his day. What could be better? Donna in danger, maybe just maybe there actually is another Time Lord out there and, oh, the Daleks are still alive and on Earth. Again.
He’s still in the midst of feeling extremely put out at how things are so very not as they’re supposed to be when that dark silent void inside his head flashes liquid gold and he feels all the hope and terror of knowing with an absolute certainty that he’s not alone any more.
-
“My head hurts.”
“It’s going to get a lot worse,” says Miss Foster, undoing the cuffs on Donna’s wrists. The Daleks have retreated out of the room, but the door is still locked. Still, no point in having one’s only ally tied down.
“Have I ever mentioned how bad your bedside manner is?” asks Donna, rubbing at her wrists even though the blood flow to her hands is just fine and there’s nothing more than a dull ache in her muscles from them being inactive for so long.
“That would depend on who’s asking.” Miss Foster picks up her fob watch, snaps it shut and puts in her pocket. “Donna Noble or the Doctor.”
Donna sits up, and plants her chin in her hands. “So, should I keep calling you Miss Foster or...?”
“Rani will be fine, thank you,” she says, pacing the room.
“You want to tell me why you’re working with the Daleks then?”
The Rani turns around and fixes Donna with a piercing gaze over the top of her glasses. “Bad enough that I know precisely the sort of sanctimonious lecture I’d receive from him, but I’m certainly not going to listen to it delivered by some half-human abomination who couldn’t possibly understand what she’s talking about.”
“Yeah, cause I’m the idiot who let Davros know what I was up to and lock me up. And a few hours ago I was fascinating, so you said.”
“Yes.” The Rani folds her arms. “Yes, fine. But right now, I think it’s rather more important that we get out of this room than discuss the semantics of the name to give your condition.”
“Well, as it happens, I have an... an... an...” Donna gasps, clutching at her head. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
“If you mean that your little ape-brain is about to melt because it lacks the proper anatomical structure to cope with a Time Lord consciousness being melded with your own human one, then yes, it’s happening. Again, I assume, refers to the Doctor’s rather inept attempt to suppress the change.”
Donna grits her teeth and glares up at the Rani. “How about less of the insults and more of the doing something to help me?”
“I would,” she says coolly, “if there was anything that I could do, but I can’t. If it’s any consolation, you do have a few hours left since my attempt to force your brain to adapt did have some very limited effect.”
“Is it going to hurt this much the whole time?” asks Donna, palms pressed against her temples, her eyes screwed up.
“Oh, no. I imagine it’ll reach a critical level in a few minutes and you’ll pass out.”
-
“We surrender!” shouts Sarah Jane, raising her hands. “We’re not armed, we’re not dangerous, we surrender!”
The two Daleks are closing in on either side and there’s nowhere left to go and they’re pressing closer to one another and she’s holding onto Maria’s hand on one side and Martha’s on the other.
“Exterminate!” She sees the Dalek gun fire, that flash of deadly energy coming straight towards them, and then there’s most wonderful sound in the universe.
The TARDIS is materialising. She blinks, and then realises it’s materialising around them. The Daleks are outside and they’re all inside, and safe.
Sarah gasps a sob of relief and pulls Martha and Maria into a hug and when she looks around again, they’re okay, they’re all alive, they’re inside the TARDIS and the Doctor’s standing at the console looking irritatingly smug. “About time too!” she snaps at him.
“That goes double for me,” says Jack, as Martha adds, “I take it you finally got our messages? Nice of you to show up.”
“Good to see you too, Sarah Jane,” the Doctor says, heedless of anything except how happy he is to see them all, “and you Martha, Jack. I don’t know you two, I’m afraid, but I’m sure it’s lovely to see you as well.”
“That’s Maria,” says Sarah, “my neighbour and Alan, her father. We need to get them to a hospital.”
“No Donna though,” says the Doctor.
“Donna disappeared,” Martha tells him. “We don’t know where she is, and why on Earth didn’t you tell us what happened to her?”
“Yes, well.” He looks away, rather abashed. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No kidding,” says Jack. “So you’re looking for her then, not rescuing us?”
The Doctor shrugs, offers him a slight smile. “I can do both, can’t I? What d’you mean she’s missing?”
“Vanished,” Martha tells him. “Right in front of our eyes, one moment she’s there, the next, gone.”
“Interesting,” says the Doctor, as he checks the scanner. “Ooh, I was close. You lot must have distracted the TARDIS. She’s very fond of you all, aren’t you, old girl?”
“Thank goodness someone has some sense,” mutters Sarah Jane, catching Martha’s eye as she nods her agreement.
“Donna’s around here somewhere,” says the Doctor half-to-himself as he moves round the console. He pauses as he realises there’s a small human in his way. “Hello,” he says.
“Hello,” says Maria. “Are you really the Doctor?”
“Yes.”
She frowns, looking at him for a long moment and then turns to Sarah Jane. “You made him sound so impressive,” she says, sounding rather betrayed.
The Doctor blinks, shakes his head and then gives a yell of triumph. “Gotcha!” he says then leaps round the panels and with the flick of a switch, the TARDIS dematerialises.