fic: children of time (8/14)
Title: Children of Time: Time Lords Squared
Characters: Donna Noble, Ten, the Rani
Rating: PG
Summary: Following on from Journey's End...
Index Post
Time Lords Squared
The first thing the Doctor hears when he steps out of the TARDIS is a slow hand clap. He frowns, and turns around, and there’s a woman who he’s definitely met before and, oh Rassilon, he’s met her and he didn’t have a clue and now he knows her.
“Next time,” says the Rani, “I’m not even going to try for subtlety. I’ll just grab one of these humans you’re so fond of and demand that you turn up at once.”
The Doctor swallows, fear and anger rising as he thinks of Donna and the Rani’s usual modus operandi on Earth. “If you’ve harmed her...”
“Oh, please.” The Rani rolls her eyes. “And do stop posturing; you’re not going to impress me. I’m not the one who forced a metacrisis on a human, good luck fixing that without my help, by the way.”
She steps aside and nods towards a chair half-hidden around the other side of the TARDIS. The Doctor dashes round and finds Donna lying back, unconscious. “Martha!” he yells.
The Rani snorts. “I think we’re well beyond the limits of human medicine,” she says, as Martha appears.
“What’s going on?” she asks, coming to Donna’s side. “Who’s that?”
The Doctor glances at the Rani. “Remember Utopia?” he says.
“Another Time Lord?” says Martha, as she looks Donna over.
“Yeah, likes to be called the Rani.”
The Time Lord in question folds her arms. “Would you mind not talking about me as if I’m not here?”
“For the moment, Rani,” says the Doctor, turning on her, his voice hard, “I’m more concerned about my friend and what you’ve done to her than catering to your ego.”
The Rani takes two short steps towards him, thoroughly unintimidated by his cold stare. “You really are a fool, Doctor. I haven’t done anything to her. I was looking for you, but my transmat was keyed to search for and retrieve a subject with Gallifreyan brain patterns and I failed to realise that you’d managed to do something quite as stupid as paste your sorry excuse for a mind into one of these primitives’ heads. Nevertheless, she’s part Time Lord and I tried to help, actually.”
“And what ghastly experiment did this help involve?” he snarls.
“Look around you!” she snaps, raising her hands. “What do you think is going on here, Doctor? Or did you not notice the Daleks or the locked door? I’m as much a prisoner here as your friend.”
“Donna’s burning up,” Martha tells the Doctor. “But she’s breathing, strong steady pulse.”
“You can’t help her,” says the Rani. “She’s got a little over two hours left before she expires.”
“You said you were helping her,” says the Doctor, “how?”
The Rani’s mouth twists into a thin smile. “Care to make a deal, Doctor?”
The threat’s already on his lips when he remembers who he’s speaking to and that she knows him as well as he knows her. He has questions, so many questions, because he survived and the Master survived and she has too, of course she has, because she was always the cleverest. But right now, this minute, Donna’s the priority and that’s what he has to concentrate on.
“What do you want?” he asks, trying to sound calm and failing miserably.
The Rani sighs. “Don’t be so petulant, it’s not much and it’s perfectly reasonable. I want off this planet and back to Miasimia Goria and I want to collect my equipment from my laboratory before I leave.”
“And that’s it?” asks the Doctor, sounding doubtful. She’s right; it really isn’t much to ask. Of course, he doesn’t know exactly what her equipment is yet and she’s probably going to have some pretty unpleasant stuff in there, but as demands go... “What’s the catch?” he asks.
She narrows her eyes. “Were you always this mistrusting?” she asks irritably. “I’ve said what I want, and, yes, that’s it.”
“You’ll save Donna?” he asks.
She gives him a pitying look. “There are no guarantees in medicine, there are likelihoods, and I will do my best to restore Donna Noble to good health, without resorting to the butchery of hacking her mind into separate pieces. With the equipment in your TARDIS’s medical bay, I should be able to do that.”
Suddenly the room shakes, the walls rumbling violently. Somewhere, not too far away, an explosion sounds. “That doesn’t sound like Dalek fire,” says the Rani, turning to look at the door.
“It must be UNIT,” says Martha. “Or Torchwood.”
The Doctor blinks, looks at her blankly, “They’re bombing Cornwall?”
“Well, we did let them know about the Daleks. I guess they’re maybe bombing the castle?”
“Oh, brilliant,” says the Doctor, “just great. They’re blazing away out there and while we’re in here. That’s military intelligence for you.”
“If my lab isn’t intact,” the Rani tells him, “then the deal’s off.”
-
The Rani strolls into the TARDIS followed by the Doctor and Martha supporting Donna. Jack moves to help them, and the Doctor asks to the pair to take her to the medical bay.
“Well, isn’t this jolly?” says the Rani, looking around the console room, “A whole team of your favourite species just ready to dance and do tricks and whatever else it is that they do.”
“Hello again, Mrs Keeper,” says Sarah.
“The reporter.” The Rani gives her a humourless smile. “How nice. Doctor, are we going?”
“You help Donna first,” he says.
“You take me to my lab.”
The Doctor shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so, Rani. You know me, you’ll know I’ll keep my word, but I’m not so entirely sure about you.”
She rolls her eyes. “So what am I going to do? Get my research, then refuse to help your friend and be stuck in this clapped out piece of junk with you for company for the rest of my natural, because you’re too petty to take me back to my planet if the ape’s brain melts? Somehow, I think you overestimate my ability to tolerate your company.”
“I thought Gallifrey was gone,” says Sarah.
“My other planet,” says the Rani, “the one I rule. Or ruled, before this idiot decided to go set the timelines on fire.”
“UNIT are bombing this building,” says the Doctor calmly, “the longer you delay, the more chance your lab will be in pieces by the time we get there.”
“And you think I’m more worried about my research than you are about your friend?” she says, raising a mocking eyebrow. “Please. We both know how pathetically well bled your hearts are.”
“Fine,” says the Doctor, leaning back against the console and folding his arms. “We’ll just wait it out then, and when UNIT gets here, I’ll hand you over to them.”
She stares at him. “You wouldn’t.”
A mirthless smile ghosts across his face. “Try me.”
For a long moment, their gazes are locked and neither moves. It’s the Rani who looks away first. “Materialise outside my lab first, and then I’ll see about fixing the mess you made inside that woman’s head.”
The Doctor grins. “Done.”
-
He tries to ignore the Rani, standing by the door, leaning back against the wall. Her arms are folded, but she’s looking extremely pleased with herself. She’s said Donna’s going to be fine, given sufficient rest, and whatever else he thinks of her, the Rani’s not prone to making mistakes, not when it comes to her work at any rate.
“How do you feel?” he asks Donna, sitting by her bed. She’s just come round, her eyes are flickering and he squeezes her hand gently to let her know she’s not alone. Not that she needs the physical contact, he can feel her right there inside his head, and she’ll be feeling much the same thing.
Her eyes manage to focus on him, and she opens her mouth. “You bastard,” she breathes, barely audible.
“Okay, that’s... good that you’re talking. Maybe?”
She makes a noise that might have been a laugh, if she weren’t so weak. “You,” she whispers, “why did you?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry. Donna, I couldn’t do anything else. There wasn’t time, and if I hadn’t, you’d have died. I couldn’t let you die. And it might’ve been alright, somehow, it might’ve been alright and it was, for those glorious minutes everything was just perfect, and I’m sorry. I am sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You fixed it now?” she asks, every word an effort.
“Don’t be absurd,” says the Rani, stepping forward, “you don’t want to know the reason he passed xenobiology.”
The Doctor glares at her, but only for a second. “The Rani was able to stabilise the metacrisis, with a little help from equipment in the TARDIS.”
“A very little,” she says.
“How?” asks Donna.
“Put simply, I mutated the neurons in your brain until they were able to assimilate the Time Lord consciousness.” The Rani’s not prone to displaying her emotions, but the Doctor can detect a certain amount of pride in her tone, and, as he won’t admit to her, what she did was very, very impressive.
Donna frowns. “Mutated?” she says, the word clearly causing her concern that, were she not physically and mentally exhausted, would be expressed a great deal more loudly.
“Yes,” says the Rani, irritated at what sounds like some sort of criticism, “and it was brilliantly done. You should be grateful.”
“Thank you,” Donna says, and she receives a curt nod in response. “I can feel you,” she says, “in my head. You and the Doctor.”
“Yes, yes, all part of the endlessly mind-numbing legacy of the Time Lords.” The Rani looks at the Doctor. “Now, if you’re quite satisfied, I’d like to collect my research.”
The Doctor leans forward, kisses Donna gently on the forehead and tries to ignore the scorn he can feel pouring in his direction from the Rani. “I’ll be back soon,” he tells her, and she just about manages to smile.
-
There are slightly more people in the console room when the Doctor gets back than there were when he left. “Martha,” he says, voice just a little pleading, “why are there soldiers in my TARDIS?”
“Just medics,” she says, “don’t worry we’ll be out in a minute. UNIT may not be able take on the Dalek Empire, but they can take of a half dozen Daleks hiding out in a Cornish castle.”
“Right,” says the Doctor. “Good.”
“Though there are a lot of slightly less lethal Daleks they’ve got some questions about,” she adds.
“Yeah,” says the Doctor as Alan’s carried out on a stretcher, Maria following. He glances at the Rani. “I should probably ask you to explain those.”
“How’s Donna?” asks Sarah, popping back inside after promising Maria she’d see her at the hospital.
The Doctor’s face lights up. “Better,” he says. “She just needs to rest.”
“Thank goodness. I’ll see you later, all right. I’ve got to go check on the kids.”
“And I’d better go see what my lot are up to,” says Jack. “See you round, Doctor.”
“Got to get back to work too,” says Martha. “UNIT’s taken some casualties.”
The Doctor sticks his hands in his pockets and sighs as he watches them leave. Brilliant people, all of them, off to save the world, and he’s all-
The Rani makes a pointed cough. “Yes, right,” says the Doctor. “Laboratory, right away, next stop, off we go. But if you think I’m letting you bring any dinosaur embryos onboard...”
-
The Rani’s laboratory is small, but perfectly organised and makes some rather inventive use of twenty-first century Earth technology. She pulls a pile of boxes out of a cupboard and directs the Doctor to what she wants to take with her. He begins to pack as she disassembles the more delicate experiments.
“So,” he says, being rather more careless than he should be as he piles in circuit board after circuit board, “what happened?”
He hears her sigh, and can feel her looking at him, probably with some degree of contempt. “If you’re going to get needlessly sentimental about this,” she warns.
“Now why would I get sentimental about the fact we’re the only two left of our species in the whole universe?” he asks.
“See? That’s exactly what I mean, and you’re the one who blew up the planet. It was your choice, you did it and now you’re whining about it. Rassilon, it’s tedious and this conversation’s not even a minute old. And I swear if you so much as think the word procreation, I will knee you hard enough that the subject will thereafter be entirely academic.” She flashes him a sweetly poisonous smile. “Got it?”
He turns away, opening another cupboard, but he’s not going to give up that easily. “We’re the only two left, Rani, doesn’t that make a difference?”
“No, not really.” She hisses in pain as something sparks that shouldn’t.
“Need any help?” the Doctor asks politely.
“Only if I want to set the whole thing on fire,” she says, sucking delicately on her burnt forefinger. He gives a slight shrug and she sighs. “Don’t be so precious, Doctor. I haven’t had a thing to do with Gallifrey for centuries. They’re the ones who exiled me, remember? I owe them nothing. If anything, the absence of the Time Lords makes it a bit easier to get on with my work. It does wonders for one’s blood pressure when you don’t have to look over your shoulder for a CIA operative lurking in the crowd.”
The Doctor stops, fixes her with a hard look and his voice is deadly serious. “And that’s what you really think? The universe is better off with all our people dead?”
“What did I say about posturing?” she murmurs, refusing to look at him.
“I’m not, I mean it. I want to know.”
She turns sharply on her heel and her eyes are chips of grey ice. “I think that there’s nothing I can do about it either way, and so I am not going to waste my time either celebrating or grieving their demise. All civilisations end, all stars go cold, and thinking it could be any other way is a naive foolishness that I’m surprised even you are capable of.” She holds his gaze, daring him to contradict her.
The Doctor nods slowly. “I think I understand.”
They work on in silence for a few minutes before the Doctor ventures another question: “What happened to you? During the War, I mean.”
“Nothing,” she says blandly. “I was sitting it all out quite happily until it became horribly obvious who was winning. I can’t imagine the Daleks would’ve left me alone after destroying Gallifrey, so I pre-emptively found myself an employment with the Adipose Royal Family, who had the advantage of leading an advanced civilisation existing in a stable part of the timelines almost untouched by the War.”
“But you weren’t a Time Lord, haven’t been until today... how did you-“
“Oh, don’t be so dim,” she says, frustrated. “I’m not an idiot, I left myself a note. And I was able to gain access to a substantial amount of my knowledge by having the pocket watch occasionally opened some distance from me. Unlike you and that cretin, I had the sense not to give up all sense of self-awareness when I used a chameleon arch.”
The Doctor frowns. “I assume you’re referring to the Master,” he mutters.
“Anyway,” she says, “I barely survived that fall, and after that I was stuck here. Thought I might actually have a chance to get away when the Daleks turned up, negotiate transport to somewhere civilised, but no, a small group arrived here a few days before they pull the Earth across half the galaxy and d’you know what their back up plan was?”
“They wanted to take over the Earth?”
She glares at him. “Besides that.”
“Surprise me,” says the Doctor, “I like surprises.”
“Apparently there are millions of reptilians still living in hibernation beneath the seas of this planet,” she says.
“Yeah,” says the Doctor, “I’ve met them.”
“Of course you have,” says the Rani, forcing herself not to roll her eyes. “The Daleks wanted to wake them up, and use them as host bodies for newly genetically engineered Dalek mutants, and then use them to fight against the humans.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It was an interesting problem.”
The Doctor pulls a face. “Oh, tell me you didn’t.”
“They were offering me a way off the planet, Doctor. Anyway, it didn’t work. Nothing to do with me, my part was perfect, but they underestimated the reptilians' science. So now they’re dead.”
“How?”
“Poisoned. The reptilians pumped the sea full of the stuff, whatever it is. Doesn’t seem to harm the natural marine life, or the reptilians, or the humans for that matter, but it’s been deadly to the Dalek creatures. No idea what it is, didn’t have time to analyse it as I was much more interested in your friend at that point.” She closes up the box. “Done yet?”
“Just about finished,” says the Doctor. “Not taking any of the frozen stuff?” He taps a tall cylinder, chill to the touch, the glass fogged over.
The Rani gives the cylinder a speculative look, then shakes her head. “Best not,” she says, and picks up her box to carry out to the TARDIS.
The Doctor pulls down his coat sleeve to cover the heel of his hand and rubs it against the glass, curious to see what the Rani’s so uninterested it. He peers through the clear glass, and gapes: someone’s inside the cylinder.
Righteous indignation rising, he rubs at more and more of the glass, uncovering a suit and tie and sandy hair and a thin, familiar face and it can’t possibly be... but it is, and she was just going to -
“Rani!”
“What?” she asks mildly, reappearing in the doorway, then realises what he’s been doing. “Oh. That.” She sniffs. “Well, you did say you liked surprises.”
“Why have you got the Master locked up and frozen like a popsicle?” he demands, caught between anger and a growing excitement that there are four Time lords, four! All alive (...well, three and a half, but who’s counting?) And twenty-four hours ago he’d been alone.
“Better than being burnt to a crisp,” the Rani retorts, “which is what he was when I popped along to his funeral pyre and picked up his ring. I was hoping for a TARDIS key.”
“Ring,” says the Doctor frowning. “I remember a ring; it had the Lazlabs logo on it.”
“Yes,” says the Rani. “It’s around here somewhere. It had his biodata and enough energy to reconstruct a body stored in it.”
“So you brought him back?” says the Doctor, and he’s trying not to grin but he can’t help it, and the Rani looks vaguely terrified that he might try and hug her. “Oh, this is brilliant!”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says, stepping round the other side of the lab bench. “And I’d rather leave him here, if it’s all the same to you.”
“It absolutely is not all the same to me, Rani. We are not leaving him here, and certainly not like that.”
“He’s a hyperactive sociopathic cretin, and he talks too much.”
“You have to wake him up,” insists the Doctor.
“I don’t see why,” she says sounding bored.
“Well, I’m waking him up. Where are the cryogenic controls?”
“Find them yourself.”
“Don’t be like that! Come on, it’ll be great, just like old times.”
She stares at him and shakes her head disbelievingly. “You really have gone senile, haven’t you? And at such a young age. It’d be tragic if it wasn’t so irritating.”
“Oh, come on. You were looking for me, weren’t you? Well now I’m here and you’re getting what you want and... why were you looking for me?”
She shrugs nonchalantly. “Obviously it had occurred to me that the Daleks might not keep their word, and I thought I might ask you for a lift. It was bad enough dealing with one of the tin cans, but when that raging megalomaniac turned up, it was obviously time to make plans to leave.”
The Doctor goes cold, his skin tingles and he asks: “What raging megalomaniac?”
“Davros.”
“Davros!” He jumps up, hands running frantically through his hair. “You couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?”
She shrugs, entirely unconcerned. “You didn’t ask.”
“And you were working with him?”
“He happens to be a brilliant geneticist, almost up to my standard. And I needed a ship.”
“Working with the creator of the Daleks?” repeats the Doctor. “Well, that’s a plan with no obvious flaws, isn’t it?”
“Calm down, for goodness sake, you look like some sort of hyperactive gerbil.”
“Is he still here?” asks the Doctor, not entirely sobering, but managing to make a show of it under the Rani’s ice-cold gaze.
“Somewhere,” she says. “The place is riddled with laboratories now.”
The Doctor leaps to the door, then pauses, looks back, then looks at the Rani. “Right, right... Davros first, then the Master, and you are coming with me.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Am I really?”
“Only if you want a lift back to Miasimia Goria,” he says.
The Rani huffs, but goes with him anyway. They’re met in the corridor outside by an out-of-breath Martha. “Need your help,” she says. “You’re not going to believe who’s here.”
“Davros?” asks the Doctor innocently.
Martha nods. “I think we’ve taken out the last of the Daleks, but he retreated to one of the labs downstairs and we can’t get in. We’ve tried blowing the door open, but we’ve barely made a scratch.”
-
Martha escorts him to the laboratory, and it looks as though UNIT have managed to secure the place as they pass an awful lot of soldiers on the way down. The door in question’s under guard and there’s no visible locking mechanism.
“Any ideas?” asks Martha.
“Oh, the usual,” the Doctor says with a smile, and takes out his sonic screwdriver. He glances at the Rani, daring her to say something, but she restricts herself to an amused smirk. It takes him a moment to find the right setting, but then the door rolls back easily. He waves back the soldiers and walks in first, Martha just behind him.
He spins on his heel, looking around. “You’re sure this is where he went?” he asks Martha. It’s clearly a laboratory, every bit as well-organised as the Rani’s, but containing rather more sophisticated equipment, and absolutely no sign of Davros.
“There must be another way out,” says Martha, scanning the walls. “A secret door?”
“In a manner of speaking,” says the Rani, stepping into the room and determinedly ignoring the soldier at her shoulder. “Look over there, Doctor.” He follows her finger and in the corner of the room there’s an unassuming little box, matte grey and metallic, but it’s not what he sees, rather what he feels when he looks at it.
“I’ve got goose bumps,” he murmurs, picking it up. It’s heavier than it looks.
“What is it?” asks Martha.
“Something very clever,” he tells her, running his fingers over the sides. He glances at the Rani. “How did you know?”
“I guessed at what he was working on; it isn’t that difficult a deduction considering he wanted Time Lord knowledge. He might be a brilliant geneticist, but he’s not much of a temporal engineer.”
“Still got it to work though,” says the Doctor.
“Doctor, explanation? If you wouldn’t mind?” Martha insists.
“This little box is a very primitive sort of time machine,” he says. “The Daleks, before they started stealing technology from us, were able to develop their own sort of time travel which relied on unstable conduits through space/time that they called Time Corridors. And this little thing is capable of opening one up.”
“Why didn’t he take it with him?” she asks.
“Oh, it has to stay here, keep the entrance to the Corridor stable until the subject’s actually entered it.”
“So he’s escaped?” she says.
“Afraid so... but there might be a way to track him.” The Doctor frowns, thinking. “Yes, I think there is. Can’t have the creator of the Daleks running amuck across the universe, after all, can we?” He flashes her a smile. “Best get after him.”
“Doctor!” He pauses, mid dash, and turns back to her. Martha smiles. “Good luck,” she says.
"Thank you, and, oh, you'll probably want to let UNIT know that the Silurians might pop up again, they'll be in the files somewhere, you should look them up." And with that, he's gone, the Rani following at a rather more dignified pace.
Characters: Donna Noble, Ten, the Rani
Rating: PG
Summary: Following on from Journey's End...
Index Post
Time Lords Squared
The first thing the Doctor hears when he steps out of the TARDIS is a slow hand clap. He frowns, and turns around, and there’s a woman who he’s definitely met before and, oh Rassilon, he’s met her and he didn’t have a clue and now he knows her.
“Next time,” says the Rani, “I’m not even going to try for subtlety. I’ll just grab one of these humans you’re so fond of and demand that you turn up at once.”
The Doctor swallows, fear and anger rising as he thinks of Donna and the Rani’s usual modus operandi on Earth. “If you’ve harmed her...”
“Oh, please.” The Rani rolls her eyes. “And do stop posturing; you’re not going to impress me. I’m not the one who forced a metacrisis on a human, good luck fixing that without my help, by the way.”
She steps aside and nods towards a chair half-hidden around the other side of the TARDIS. The Doctor dashes round and finds Donna lying back, unconscious. “Martha!” he yells.
The Rani snorts. “I think we’re well beyond the limits of human medicine,” she says, as Martha appears.
“What’s going on?” she asks, coming to Donna’s side. “Who’s that?”
The Doctor glances at the Rani. “Remember Utopia?” he says.
“Another Time Lord?” says Martha, as she looks Donna over.
“Yeah, likes to be called the Rani.”
The Time Lord in question folds her arms. “Would you mind not talking about me as if I’m not here?”
“For the moment, Rani,” says the Doctor, turning on her, his voice hard, “I’m more concerned about my friend and what you’ve done to her than catering to your ego.”
The Rani takes two short steps towards him, thoroughly unintimidated by his cold stare. “You really are a fool, Doctor. I haven’t done anything to her. I was looking for you, but my transmat was keyed to search for and retrieve a subject with Gallifreyan brain patterns and I failed to realise that you’d managed to do something quite as stupid as paste your sorry excuse for a mind into one of these primitives’ heads. Nevertheless, she’s part Time Lord and I tried to help, actually.”
“And what ghastly experiment did this help involve?” he snarls.
“Look around you!” she snaps, raising her hands. “What do you think is going on here, Doctor? Or did you not notice the Daleks or the locked door? I’m as much a prisoner here as your friend.”
“Donna’s burning up,” Martha tells the Doctor. “But she’s breathing, strong steady pulse.”
“You can’t help her,” says the Rani. “She’s got a little over two hours left before she expires.”
“You said you were helping her,” says the Doctor, “how?”
The Rani’s mouth twists into a thin smile. “Care to make a deal, Doctor?”
The threat’s already on his lips when he remembers who he’s speaking to and that she knows him as well as he knows her. He has questions, so many questions, because he survived and the Master survived and she has too, of course she has, because she was always the cleverest. But right now, this minute, Donna’s the priority and that’s what he has to concentrate on.
“What do you want?” he asks, trying to sound calm and failing miserably.
The Rani sighs. “Don’t be so petulant, it’s not much and it’s perfectly reasonable. I want off this planet and back to Miasimia Goria and I want to collect my equipment from my laboratory before I leave.”
“And that’s it?” asks the Doctor, sounding doubtful. She’s right; it really isn’t much to ask. Of course, he doesn’t know exactly what her equipment is yet and she’s probably going to have some pretty unpleasant stuff in there, but as demands go... “What’s the catch?” he asks.
She narrows her eyes. “Were you always this mistrusting?” she asks irritably. “I’ve said what I want, and, yes, that’s it.”
“You’ll save Donna?” he asks.
She gives him a pitying look. “There are no guarantees in medicine, there are likelihoods, and I will do my best to restore Donna Noble to good health, without resorting to the butchery of hacking her mind into separate pieces. With the equipment in your TARDIS’s medical bay, I should be able to do that.”
Suddenly the room shakes, the walls rumbling violently. Somewhere, not too far away, an explosion sounds. “That doesn’t sound like Dalek fire,” says the Rani, turning to look at the door.
“It must be UNIT,” says Martha. “Or Torchwood.”
The Doctor blinks, looks at her blankly, “They’re bombing Cornwall?”
“Well, we did let them know about the Daleks. I guess they’re maybe bombing the castle?”
“Oh, brilliant,” says the Doctor, “just great. They’re blazing away out there and while we’re in here. That’s military intelligence for you.”
“If my lab isn’t intact,” the Rani tells him, “then the deal’s off.”
-
The Rani strolls into the TARDIS followed by the Doctor and Martha supporting Donna. Jack moves to help them, and the Doctor asks to the pair to take her to the medical bay.
“Well, isn’t this jolly?” says the Rani, looking around the console room, “A whole team of your favourite species just ready to dance and do tricks and whatever else it is that they do.”
“Hello again, Mrs Keeper,” says Sarah.
“The reporter.” The Rani gives her a humourless smile. “How nice. Doctor, are we going?”
“You help Donna first,” he says.
“You take me to my lab.”
The Doctor shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so, Rani. You know me, you’ll know I’ll keep my word, but I’m not so entirely sure about you.”
She rolls her eyes. “So what am I going to do? Get my research, then refuse to help your friend and be stuck in this clapped out piece of junk with you for company for the rest of my natural, because you’re too petty to take me back to my planet if the ape’s brain melts? Somehow, I think you overestimate my ability to tolerate your company.”
“I thought Gallifrey was gone,” says Sarah.
“My other planet,” says the Rani, “the one I rule. Or ruled, before this idiot decided to go set the timelines on fire.”
“UNIT are bombing this building,” says the Doctor calmly, “the longer you delay, the more chance your lab will be in pieces by the time we get there.”
“And you think I’m more worried about my research than you are about your friend?” she says, raising a mocking eyebrow. “Please. We both know how pathetically well bled your hearts are.”
“Fine,” says the Doctor, leaning back against the console and folding his arms. “We’ll just wait it out then, and when UNIT gets here, I’ll hand you over to them.”
She stares at him. “You wouldn’t.”
A mirthless smile ghosts across his face. “Try me.”
For a long moment, their gazes are locked and neither moves. It’s the Rani who looks away first. “Materialise outside my lab first, and then I’ll see about fixing the mess you made inside that woman’s head.”
The Doctor grins. “Done.”
-
He tries to ignore the Rani, standing by the door, leaning back against the wall. Her arms are folded, but she’s looking extremely pleased with herself. She’s said Donna’s going to be fine, given sufficient rest, and whatever else he thinks of her, the Rani’s not prone to making mistakes, not when it comes to her work at any rate.
“How do you feel?” he asks Donna, sitting by her bed. She’s just come round, her eyes are flickering and he squeezes her hand gently to let her know she’s not alone. Not that she needs the physical contact, he can feel her right there inside his head, and she’ll be feeling much the same thing.
Her eyes manage to focus on him, and she opens her mouth. “You bastard,” she breathes, barely audible.
“Okay, that’s... good that you’re talking. Maybe?”
She makes a noise that might have been a laugh, if she weren’t so weak. “You,” she whispers, “why did you?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry. Donna, I couldn’t do anything else. There wasn’t time, and if I hadn’t, you’d have died. I couldn’t let you die. And it might’ve been alright, somehow, it might’ve been alright and it was, for those glorious minutes everything was just perfect, and I’m sorry. I am sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You fixed it now?” she asks, every word an effort.
“Don’t be absurd,” says the Rani, stepping forward, “you don’t want to know the reason he passed xenobiology.”
The Doctor glares at her, but only for a second. “The Rani was able to stabilise the metacrisis, with a little help from equipment in the TARDIS.”
“A very little,” she says.
“How?” asks Donna.
“Put simply, I mutated the neurons in your brain until they were able to assimilate the Time Lord consciousness.” The Rani’s not prone to displaying her emotions, but the Doctor can detect a certain amount of pride in her tone, and, as he won’t admit to her, what she did was very, very impressive.
Donna frowns. “Mutated?” she says, the word clearly causing her concern that, were she not physically and mentally exhausted, would be expressed a great deal more loudly.
“Yes,” says the Rani, irritated at what sounds like some sort of criticism, “and it was brilliantly done. You should be grateful.”
“Thank you,” Donna says, and she receives a curt nod in response. “I can feel you,” she says, “in my head. You and the Doctor.”
“Yes, yes, all part of the endlessly mind-numbing legacy of the Time Lords.” The Rani looks at the Doctor. “Now, if you’re quite satisfied, I’d like to collect my research.”
The Doctor leans forward, kisses Donna gently on the forehead and tries to ignore the scorn he can feel pouring in his direction from the Rani. “I’ll be back soon,” he tells her, and she just about manages to smile.
-
There are slightly more people in the console room when the Doctor gets back than there were when he left. “Martha,” he says, voice just a little pleading, “why are there soldiers in my TARDIS?”
“Just medics,” she says, “don’t worry we’ll be out in a minute. UNIT may not be able take on the Dalek Empire, but they can take of a half dozen Daleks hiding out in a Cornish castle.”
“Right,” says the Doctor. “Good.”
“Though there are a lot of slightly less lethal Daleks they’ve got some questions about,” she adds.
“Yeah,” says the Doctor as Alan’s carried out on a stretcher, Maria following. He glances at the Rani. “I should probably ask you to explain those.”
“How’s Donna?” asks Sarah, popping back inside after promising Maria she’d see her at the hospital.
The Doctor’s face lights up. “Better,” he says. “She just needs to rest.”
“Thank goodness. I’ll see you later, all right. I’ve got to go check on the kids.”
“And I’d better go see what my lot are up to,” says Jack. “See you round, Doctor.”
“Got to get back to work too,” says Martha. “UNIT’s taken some casualties.”
The Doctor sticks his hands in his pockets and sighs as he watches them leave. Brilliant people, all of them, off to save the world, and he’s all-
The Rani makes a pointed cough. “Yes, right,” says the Doctor. “Laboratory, right away, next stop, off we go. But if you think I’m letting you bring any dinosaur embryos onboard...”
-
The Rani’s laboratory is small, but perfectly organised and makes some rather inventive use of twenty-first century Earth technology. She pulls a pile of boxes out of a cupboard and directs the Doctor to what she wants to take with her. He begins to pack as she disassembles the more delicate experiments.
“So,” he says, being rather more careless than he should be as he piles in circuit board after circuit board, “what happened?”
He hears her sigh, and can feel her looking at him, probably with some degree of contempt. “If you’re going to get needlessly sentimental about this,” she warns.
“Now why would I get sentimental about the fact we’re the only two left of our species in the whole universe?” he asks.
“See? That’s exactly what I mean, and you’re the one who blew up the planet. It was your choice, you did it and now you’re whining about it. Rassilon, it’s tedious and this conversation’s not even a minute old. And I swear if you so much as think the word procreation, I will knee you hard enough that the subject will thereafter be entirely academic.” She flashes him a sweetly poisonous smile. “Got it?”
He turns away, opening another cupboard, but he’s not going to give up that easily. “We’re the only two left, Rani, doesn’t that make a difference?”
“No, not really.” She hisses in pain as something sparks that shouldn’t.
“Need any help?” the Doctor asks politely.
“Only if I want to set the whole thing on fire,” she says, sucking delicately on her burnt forefinger. He gives a slight shrug and she sighs. “Don’t be so precious, Doctor. I haven’t had a thing to do with Gallifrey for centuries. They’re the ones who exiled me, remember? I owe them nothing. If anything, the absence of the Time Lords makes it a bit easier to get on with my work. It does wonders for one’s blood pressure when you don’t have to look over your shoulder for a CIA operative lurking in the crowd.”
The Doctor stops, fixes her with a hard look and his voice is deadly serious. “And that’s what you really think? The universe is better off with all our people dead?”
“What did I say about posturing?” she murmurs, refusing to look at him.
“I’m not, I mean it. I want to know.”
She turns sharply on her heel and her eyes are chips of grey ice. “I think that there’s nothing I can do about it either way, and so I am not going to waste my time either celebrating or grieving their demise. All civilisations end, all stars go cold, and thinking it could be any other way is a naive foolishness that I’m surprised even you are capable of.” She holds his gaze, daring him to contradict her.
The Doctor nods slowly. “I think I understand.”
They work on in silence for a few minutes before the Doctor ventures another question: “What happened to you? During the War, I mean.”
“Nothing,” she says blandly. “I was sitting it all out quite happily until it became horribly obvious who was winning. I can’t imagine the Daleks would’ve left me alone after destroying Gallifrey, so I pre-emptively found myself an employment with the Adipose Royal Family, who had the advantage of leading an advanced civilisation existing in a stable part of the timelines almost untouched by the War.”
“But you weren’t a Time Lord, haven’t been until today... how did you-“
“Oh, don’t be so dim,” she says, frustrated. “I’m not an idiot, I left myself a note. And I was able to gain access to a substantial amount of my knowledge by having the pocket watch occasionally opened some distance from me. Unlike you and that cretin, I had the sense not to give up all sense of self-awareness when I used a chameleon arch.”
The Doctor frowns. “I assume you’re referring to the Master,” he mutters.
“Anyway,” she says, “I barely survived that fall, and after that I was stuck here. Thought I might actually have a chance to get away when the Daleks turned up, negotiate transport to somewhere civilised, but no, a small group arrived here a few days before they pull the Earth across half the galaxy and d’you know what their back up plan was?”
“They wanted to take over the Earth?”
She glares at him. “Besides that.”
“Surprise me,” says the Doctor, “I like surprises.”
“Apparently there are millions of reptilians still living in hibernation beneath the seas of this planet,” she says.
“Yeah,” says the Doctor, “I’ve met them.”
“Of course you have,” says the Rani, forcing herself not to roll her eyes. “The Daleks wanted to wake them up, and use them as host bodies for newly genetically engineered Dalek mutants, and then use them to fight against the humans.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It was an interesting problem.”
The Doctor pulls a face. “Oh, tell me you didn’t.”
“They were offering me a way off the planet, Doctor. Anyway, it didn’t work. Nothing to do with me, my part was perfect, but they underestimated the reptilians' science. So now they’re dead.”
“How?”
“Poisoned. The reptilians pumped the sea full of the stuff, whatever it is. Doesn’t seem to harm the natural marine life, or the reptilians, or the humans for that matter, but it’s been deadly to the Dalek creatures. No idea what it is, didn’t have time to analyse it as I was much more interested in your friend at that point.” She closes up the box. “Done yet?”
“Just about finished,” says the Doctor. “Not taking any of the frozen stuff?” He taps a tall cylinder, chill to the touch, the glass fogged over.
The Rani gives the cylinder a speculative look, then shakes her head. “Best not,” she says, and picks up her box to carry out to the TARDIS.
The Doctor pulls down his coat sleeve to cover the heel of his hand and rubs it against the glass, curious to see what the Rani’s so uninterested it. He peers through the clear glass, and gapes: someone’s inside the cylinder.
Righteous indignation rising, he rubs at more and more of the glass, uncovering a suit and tie and sandy hair and a thin, familiar face and it can’t possibly be... but it is, and she was just going to -
“Rani!”
“What?” she asks mildly, reappearing in the doorway, then realises what he’s been doing. “Oh. That.” She sniffs. “Well, you did say you liked surprises.”
“Why have you got the Master locked up and frozen like a popsicle?” he demands, caught between anger and a growing excitement that there are four Time lords, four! All alive (...well, three and a half, but who’s counting?) And twenty-four hours ago he’d been alone.
“Better than being burnt to a crisp,” the Rani retorts, “which is what he was when I popped along to his funeral pyre and picked up his ring. I was hoping for a TARDIS key.”
“Ring,” says the Doctor frowning. “I remember a ring; it had the Lazlabs logo on it.”
“Yes,” says the Rani. “It’s around here somewhere. It had his biodata and enough energy to reconstruct a body stored in it.”
“So you brought him back?” says the Doctor, and he’s trying not to grin but he can’t help it, and the Rani looks vaguely terrified that he might try and hug her. “Oh, this is brilliant!”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says, stepping round the other side of the lab bench. “And I’d rather leave him here, if it’s all the same to you.”
“It absolutely is not all the same to me, Rani. We are not leaving him here, and certainly not like that.”
“He’s a hyperactive sociopathic cretin, and he talks too much.”
“You have to wake him up,” insists the Doctor.
“I don’t see why,” she says sounding bored.
“Well, I’m waking him up. Where are the cryogenic controls?”
“Find them yourself.”
“Don’t be like that! Come on, it’ll be great, just like old times.”
She stares at him and shakes her head disbelievingly. “You really have gone senile, haven’t you? And at such a young age. It’d be tragic if it wasn’t so irritating.”
“Oh, come on. You were looking for me, weren’t you? Well now I’m here and you’re getting what you want and... why were you looking for me?”
She shrugs nonchalantly. “Obviously it had occurred to me that the Daleks might not keep their word, and I thought I might ask you for a lift. It was bad enough dealing with one of the tin cans, but when that raging megalomaniac turned up, it was obviously time to make plans to leave.”
The Doctor goes cold, his skin tingles and he asks: “What raging megalomaniac?”
“Davros.”
“Davros!” He jumps up, hands running frantically through his hair. “You couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?”
She shrugs, entirely unconcerned. “You didn’t ask.”
“And you were working with him?”
“He happens to be a brilliant geneticist, almost up to my standard. And I needed a ship.”
“Working with the creator of the Daleks?” repeats the Doctor. “Well, that’s a plan with no obvious flaws, isn’t it?”
“Calm down, for goodness sake, you look like some sort of hyperactive gerbil.”
“Is he still here?” asks the Doctor, not entirely sobering, but managing to make a show of it under the Rani’s ice-cold gaze.
“Somewhere,” she says. “The place is riddled with laboratories now.”
The Doctor leaps to the door, then pauses, looks back, then looks at the Rani. “Right, right... Davros first, then the Master, and you are coming with me.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Am I really?”
“Only if you want a lift back to Miasimia Goria,” he says.
The Rani huffs, but goes with him anyway. They’re met in the corridor outside by an out-of-breath Martha. “Need your help,” she says. “You’re not going to believe who’s here.”
“Davros?” asks the Doctor innocently.
Martha nods. “I think we’ve taken out the last of the Daleks, but he retreated to one of the labs downstairs and we can’t get in. We’ve tried blowing the door open, but we’ve barely made a scratch.”
-
Martha escorts him to the laboratory, and it looks as though UNIT have managed to secure the place as they pass an awful lot of soldiers on the way down. The door in question’s under guard and there’s no visible locking mechanism.
“Any ideas?” asks Martha.
“Oh, the usual,” the Doctor says with a smile, and takes out his sonic screwdriver. He glances at the Rani, daring her to say something, but she restricts herself to an amused smirk. It takes him a moment to find the right setting, but then the door rolls back easily. He waves back the soldiers and walks in first, Martha just behind him.
He spins on his heel, looking around. “You’re sure this is where he went?” he asks Martha. It’s clearly a laboratory, every bit as well-organised as the Rani’s, but containing rather more sophisticated equipment, and absolutely no sign of Davros.
“There must be another way out,” says Martha, scanning the walls. “A secret door?”
“In a manner of speaking,” says the Rani, stepping into the room and determinedly ignoring the soldier at her shoulder. “Look over there, Doctor.” He follows her finger and in the corner of the room there’s an unassuming little box, matte grey and metallic, but it’s not what he sees, rather what he feels when he looks at it.
“I’ve got goose bumps,” he murmurs, picking it up. It’s heavier than it looks.
“What is it?” asks Martha.
“Something very clever,” he tells her, running his fingers over the sides. He glances at the Rani. “How did you know?”
“I guessed at what he was working on; it isn’t that difficult a deduction considering he wanted Time Lord knowledge. He might be a brilliant geneticist, but he’s not much of a temporal engineer.”
“Still got it to work though,” says the Doctor.
“Doctor, explanation? If you wouldn’t mind?” Martha insists.
“This little box is a very primitive sort of time machine,” he says. “The Daleks, before they started stealing technology from us, were able to develop their own sort of time travel which relied on unstable conduits through space/time that they called Time Corridors. And this little thing is capable of opening one up.”
“Why didn’t he take it with him?” she asks.
“Oh, it has to stay here, keep the entrance to the Corridor stable until the subject’s actually entered it.”
“So he’s escaped?” she says.
“Afraid so... but there might be a way to track him.” The Doctor frowns, thinking. “Yes, I think there is. Can’t have the creator of the Daleks running amuck across the universe, after all, can we?” He flashes her a smile. “Best get after him.”
“Doctor!” He pauses, mid dash, and turns back to her. Martha smiles. “Good luck,” she says.
"Thank you, and, oh, you'll probably want to let UNIT know that the Silurians might pop up again, they'll be in the files somewhere, you should look them up." And with that, he's gone, the Rani following at a rather more dignified pace.