Fic: Borrowed Time (9/11)
Title: Borrowed Time (Part 9 of 11)
Author: lemon_pencil
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Ten, Donna, various others
Disclaimer: Rusty is fail, so I'm taking over. But they're not mine, I'm afraid.
Warnings/Spoilers: Series 4; Planet of the Dead.
Word Count: About 1,700
Summary: Donna wants to go on one last adventure before it's too late...
Author's Notes: Umm, I'm kinda going to be out tomorrow at my usual posting time (at Pizza Hut, for the record) so I'm going to leave posting the next part till Wednesday. Apologies.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
“Well that’s just bloody fantastic!” exhaled Donna. “Knew we shouldn’t have trusted him.” The Doctor looked at her. “Oh alright, so I didn’t see that coming either. It’s always the quiet ones.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “I thought old Hector was okay. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault, is it?” she said. To his surprise, she giggled. “I’m getting slight déjà vu here. God, all the times you and me have ended up tied up or handcuffed or in chains.”
He flashed a grin at her, but there was worry in his features.
She sobered up, thinking about what this would mean. “It’s not really funny, I suppose. Who knows what he’s going to do? And… if we’re in here long enough… I might never see my family again.” She tried to keep her voice even, but it was a struggle. After all, it was approaching one o’clock now and that meant time was fast slipping away. “Still, you’ve got us out of worse situations than this before.”
The Doctor tried to appear confident to reassure her. “Well, aliens are my specialty,” he boasted.
Donna’s mouth fell open. “Oh, of course! He’s…?”
“Yep,” he confirmed. “With that technology, it’s pretty likely, and the plants prove it. Like I said before, they only grow in the Yeksveltan Galaxy. And it explains the advanced brain scanner. He must have been visiting the morgue to examine the effects on the officer.”
A few minutes later, Hector re-entered the room. “Neither of you possess Houdini-like powers then?”
“Apparently not,” said the Doctor, lightly. “So here we are. You’ve got us. Congratulations, yada yada et cetera. But since we played along so nicely, don’t you think you owe us some explanation? Why are you doing all this?” He inclined his head towards the fields outside the window.
“Very well,” said Hector, beginning to pace up and down the room. “As you walked so docilely into my trap, I think I will tell you.”
He took a deep breath. Donna was reminded of a nervous little boy standing up in class to speak. “I think you know by now, Doctor, that I am not from this world. I come from a small planet in the Yeksveltan Galaxy - ah, I see you recognise the name - called Hastos.”
“Oh,” the Doctor interrupted. “The bombs!” He turned to Donna. “Hastos had a great big industrial workshop where they tested explosives, but things went badly wrong one day and the whole planet was engulfed in toxic gases. You were evacuated?” he asked the man now staring at him with mild surprise.
“Yes,” Hector resumed. “My family had to seek a new planet. Yeksveltan immigration laws are tight, so we knew we would have to go far. My grandfather had always told me stories of the expedition he’d been on to a little planet named Earth, thousands and thousands of miles away. He loved it. I begged my father to go there. I was only six years old at the time, but he agreed. He’d always wanted to go too, and it was as good a time as any. Our race are humanoid in appearance, so we knew that we would be able to blend in. We set off to seek our new home.”
“But it must have taken you years to get here!” remarked the Doctor. “Blimey, Hastos is light years away from Earth.”
Hector looked once again surprised at the Doctor’s knowledge. “We used long-range teleportation, travelling through the portals in the ship that my father built - he was a very accomplished mechanic,” he explained. “We could not travel the entire distance by one teleport; the process is very unreliable over distances too great. So we had to divide the journey into sections, sometimes travelling between portals for months to reach another one that linked to the next stop in our voyage. It took three and a half years in total.” He paused as though remembering. “I can still see the way the planet looked when I had my first sight of it, after travelling for so long. So blue and green and swirling white, and so beautiful.”
He gazed out of the window, a far-off look in his eyes.
Donna interrupted. “Hang on though, what’s all this go to do with you brain-washing innocent people? If you love this planet so much, why are you doing this?” she demanded fiercely.
The quiet laugh that issued from within Hector was mirthless and full of bitterness. “The dream of living on Earth was shattered by reality,” he said resentfully. “I began an English school at the age of ten. My mother had taught me English from the books my grandfather brought back, but I soon realised that I spoke with an accent that was very different to any of the other children. I changed how I spoke over time to try and fit in, but the damage was already done. Added to the fact that I understood little of the subjects taught at first, I quickly found myself with no friends, teased by all for being different and bullied by more than a few. My parents died six months after we arrived, from a virus - their immune systems were not able to cope with the pathogens here that were alien to us, but I being younger could adapt. I was put into an orphanage. That just added to the bullies’ ammunition. They knew I had nobody who cared what happened to me.”
“And this is payback?” Donna asked incredulously. “You’re going to make hundreds of people suffer for what a few kids did to you?” Her tone became gentler. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, but this isn’t the answer.”
This time Hector’s smile was tinted with malice. “No. You do not understand me. All I ever wanted was to be accepted. And now I will be.”
“By causing pain?” she frowned, baffled.
“No,” he repeated. “By saving the day.”
“What?”
“Let me explain,” he said calmly. “What I have done so far is nothing. I will soon begin the reaction that will cause so many more to be affected by the pollen - I gather that you’ve worked out, Doctor, that it is the pollen that is the cause. I have been watching the two of you; we have cameras everywhere. Incidentally, it was I that set off the security protocol that activated the hosepipes. I knew after you escaped that I had to come down and meet you. But I digress. Thousands of people will be infected. Hundreds of thousands. A few thousand will probably die - when a very high amount is inhaled, it is fatal. I regret it; however, it cannot be helped. But not everyone will be affected, for only about a quarter of the population are susceptible to the spores’ effects and many are not within range of the fields though the pollen can travel far -”
“You’ve got the cure!” interjected the Doctor, open-mouthed at his sudden realisation. He had clearly decided that Hector’s monologue had gone on long enough. “You’re going to announce that you’ve found the solution and then -”
“I’ll be a hero,” finished Hector. “Everybody will know me as the man who rescued England from disaster. When once all shunned me, I will be received with open arms. The country’s saviour. Oh, it will be sweet.” He looked at his watch. “I must leave. I have much to do. Plans to set in motion. And then,” he smiled, “then it begins.”
After he had exited, the Doctor and Donna looked at each other in dismay.
“Now what?” Donna asked. “People are going to die!”
The Doctor closed his eyes. “Hold on, let me think!” He screwed up his face in concentration. “The weather station… what’s it for? Looking at that screen -” he jerked his head towards the machinery “- he’s been keeping the weather constant for weeks, but why?”
“People have noticed that, you know,” said Donna. “Because usually it rains every other day in the summer here, but this summer it’s been warm every day - no rain, no cold spells. Not boiling hot, just warm.”
He looked thoughtful. “Oh… yes, that would… oh!” he exclaimed. Donna knew that if his hands weren’t bound in chains, he’d be grasping big tufts of his hair in that way he did when he was thinking. “The Croën plants are adapted to a warm environment - the planet where they come from, Lytane, which is the neighbouring planet to Hastos, is warm all of the time. Great holiday resorts - oh, that was a brilliant week, the Lytaneans really know how to party -” He hastily broke off as Donna fixed him with an impatient stare. “Anyway, Hector would have needed to keep the atmosphere at a stable temperature to keep the plants alive.”
“Sometimes,” said Donna, shaking her head. “I wonder how you fit all of that stuff in your head. I mean, I’ve felt what it’s like and whoa! It’s so noisy inside your brain!”
He smiled. “I’m used to it. But I could do with being able to fit more stuff in my head, because I’m struggling to remember the pollen production patterns of Croën flowers. It’s funny, we studied them at The Academy, on Gallifrey. I had to do a whole project on pollination.” He looked sheepish. “I… I failed Biology.”
Donna snorted with laughter. “You rebel.”
“Ah, what did the examiner write on the mark sheet?” he said, trying to remember. “Something like, ‘Theta, you’ve drawn your graphs upside-down.’” His eyes opened very wide. “I know what Hector’s going to do! Pollen production increases with hotter temperatures, that’s it, so he’ll turn the temperature right up and it’ll spread further!”
“Then surely all we have to do is to make it colder?” Donna suggested.
“Well, I’ll have to work out how it all works but yes,” he replied. “Basically. That’s why the spores in the body of Officer Carl Goodson were dead - he’d been kept at a low enough temperature to kill them. We may be able to thwart young Hector yet!”
“So there’s only one problem we have to overcome now.”
He looked at her expectantly.
“We’re still tied up in chains, dumbo…”
Next part
Author: lemon_pencil
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Ten, Donna, various others
Disclaimer: Rusty is fail, so I'm taking over. But they're not mine, I'm afraid.
Warnings/Spoilers: Series 4; Planet of the Dead.
Word Count: About 1,700
Summary: Donna wants to go on one last adventure before it's too late...
Author's Notes: Umm, I'm kinda going to be out tomorrow at my usual posting time (at Pizza Hut, for the record) so I'm going to leave posting the next part till Wednesday. Apologies.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
“Well that’s just bloody fantastic!” exhaled Donna. “Knew we shouldn’t have trusted him.” The Doctor looked at her. “Oh alright, so I didn’t see that coming either. It’s always the quiet ones.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “I thought old Hector was okay. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault, is it?” she said. To his surprise, she giggled. “I’m getting slight déjà vu here. God, all the times you and me have ended up tied up or handcuffed or in chains.”
He flashed a grin at her, but there was worry in his features.
She sobered up, thinking about what this would mean. “It’s not really funny, I suppose. Who knows what he’s going to do? And… if we’re in here long enough… I might never see my family again.” She tried to keep her voice even, but it was a struggle. After all, it was approaching one o’clock now and that meant time was fast slipping away. “Still, you’ve got us out of worse situations than this before.”
The Doctor tried to appear confident to reassure her. “Well, aliens are my specialty,” he boasted.
Donna’s mouth fell open. “Oh, of course! He’s…?”
“Yep,” he confirmed. “With that technology, it’s pretty likely, and the plants prove it. Like I said before, they only grow in the Yeksveltan Galaxy. And it explains the advanced brain scanner. He must have been visiting the morgue to examine the effects on the officer.”
A few minutes later, Hector re-entered the room. “Neither of you possess Houdini-like powers then?”
“Apparently not,” said the Doctor, lightly. “So here we are. You’ve got us. Congratulations, yada yada et cetera. But since we played along so nicely, don’t you think you owe us some explanation? Why are you doing all this?” He inclined his head towards the fields outside the window.
“Very well,” said Hector, beginning to pace up and down the room. “As you walked so docilely into my trap, I think I will tell you.”
He took a deep breath. Donna was reminded of a nervous little boy standing up in class to speak. “I think you know by now, Doctor, that I am not from this world. I come from a small planet in the Yeksveltan Galaxy - ah, I see you recognise the name - called Hastos.”
“Oh,” the Doctor interrupted. “The bombs!” He turned to Donna. “Hastos had a great big industrial workshop where they tested explosives, but things went badly wrong one day and the whole planet was engulfed in toxic gases. You were evacuated?” he asked the man now staring at him with mild surprise.
“Yes,” Hector resumed. “My family had to seek a new planet. Yeksveltan immigration laws are tight, so we knew we would have to go far. My grandfather had always told me stories of the expedition he’d been on to a little planet named Earth, thousands and thousands of miles away. He loved it. I begged my father to go there. I was only six years old at the time, but he agreed. He’d always wanted to go too, and it was as good a time as any. Our race are humanoid in appearance, so we knew that we would be able to blend in. We set off to seek our new home.”
“But it must have taken you years to get here!” remarked the Doctor. “Blimey, Hastos is light years away from Earth.”
Hector looked once again surprised at the Doctor’s knowledge. “We used long-range teleportation, travelling through the portals in the ship that my father built - he was a very accomplished mechanic,” he explained. “We could not travel the entire distance by one teleport; the process is very unreliable over distances too great. So we had to divide the journey into sections, sometimes travelling between portals for months to reach another one that linked to the next stop in our voyage. It took three and a half years in total.” He paused as though remembering. “I can still see the way the planet looked when I had my first sight of it, after travelling for so long. So blue and green and swirling white, and so beautiful.”
He gazed out of the window, a far-off look in his eyes.
Donna interrupted. “Hang on though, what’s all this go to do with you brain-washing innocent people? If you love this planet so much, why are you doing this?” she demanded fiercely.
The quiet laugh that issued from within Hector was mirthless and full of bitterness. “The dream of living on Earth was shattered by reality,” he said resentfully. “I began an English school at the age of ten. My mother had taught me English from the books my grandfather brought back, but I soon realised that I spoke with an accent that was very different to any of the other children. I changed how I spoke over time to try and fit in, but the damage was already done. Added to the fact that I understood little of the subjects taught at first, I quickly found myself with no friends, teased by all for being different and bullied by more than a few. My parents died six months after we arrived, from a virus - their immune systems were not able to cope with the pathogens here that were alien to us, but I being younger could adapt. I was put into an orphanage. That just added to the bullies’ ammunition. They knew I had nobody who cared what happened to me.”
“And this is payback?” Donna asked incredulously. “You’re going to make hundreds of people suffer for what a few kids did to you?” Her tone became gentler. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, but this isn’t the answer.”
This time Hector’s smile was tinted with malice. “No. You do not understand me. All I ever wanted was to be accepted. And now I will be.”
“By causing pain?” she frowned, baffled.
“No,” he repeated. “By saving the day.”
“What?”
“Let me explain,” he said calmly. “What I have done so far is nothing. I will soon begin the reaction that will cause so many more to be affected by the pollen - I gather that you’ve worked out, Doctor, that it is the pollen that is the cause. I have been watching the two of you; we have cameras everywhere. Incidentally, it was I that set off the security protocol that activated the hosepipes. I knew after you escaped that I had to come down and meet you. But I digress. Thousands of people will be infected. Hundreds of thousands. A few thousand will probably die - when a very high amount is inhaled, it is fatal. I regret it; however, it cannot be helped. But not everyone will be affected, for only about a quarter of the population are susceptible to the spores’ effects and many are not within range of the fields though the pollen can travel far -”
“You’ve got the cure!” interjected the Doctor, open-mouthed at his sudden realisation. He had clearly decided that Hector’s monologue had gone on long enough. “You’re going to announce that you’ve found the solution and then -”
“I’ll be a hero,” finished Hector. “Everybody will know me as the man who rescued England from disaster. When once all shunned me, I will be received with open arms. The country’s saviour. Oh, it will be sweet.” He looked at his watch. “I must leave. I have much to do. Plans to set in motion. And then,” he smiled, “then it begins.”
After he had exited, the Doctor and Donna looked at each other in dismay.
“Now what?” Donna asked. “People are going to die!”
The Doctor closed his eyes. “Hold on, let me think!” He screwed up his face in concentration. “The weather station… what’s it for? Looking at that screen -” he jerked his head towards the machinery “- he’s been keeping the weather constant for weeks, but why?”
“People have noticed that, you know,” said Donna. “Because usually it rains every other day in the summer here, but this summer it’s been warm every day - no rain, no cold spells. Not boiling hot, just warm.”
He looked thoughtful. “Oh… yes, that would… oh!” he exclaimed. Donna knew that if his hands weren’t bound in chains, he’d be grasping big tufts of his hair in that way he did when he was thinking. “The Croën plants are adapted to a warm environment - the planet where they come from, Lytane, which is the neighbouring planet to Hastos, is warm all of the time. Great holiday resorts - oh, that was a brilliant week, the Lytaneans really know how to party -” He hastily broke off as Donna fixed him with an impatient stare. “Anyway, Hector would have needed to keep the atmosphere at a stable temperature to keep the plants alive.”
“Sometimes,” said Donna, shaking her head. “I wonder how you fit all of that stuff in your head. I mean, I’ve felt what it’s like and whoa! It’s so noisy inside your brain!”
He smiled. “I’m used to it. But I could do with being able to fit more stuff in my head, because I’m struggling to remember the pollen production patterns of Croën flowers. It’s funny, we studied them at The Academy, on Gallifrey. I had to do a whole project on pollination.” He looked sheepish. “I… I failed Biology.”
Donna snorted with laughter. “You rebel.”
“Ah, what did the examiner write on the mark sheet?” he said, trying to remember. “Something like, ‘Theta, you’ve drawn your graphs upside-down.’” His eyes opened very wide. “I know what Hector’s going to do! Pollen production increases with hotter temperatures, that’s it, so he’ll turn the temperature right up and it’ll spread further!”
“Then surely all we have to do is to make it colder?” Donna suggested.
“Well, I’ll have to work out how it all works but yes,” he replied. “Basically. That’s why the spores in the body of Officer Carl Goodson were dead - he’d been kept at a low enough temperature to kill them. We may be able to thwart young Hector yet!”
“So there’s only one problem we have to overcome now.”
He looked at her expectantly.
“We’re still tied up in chains, dumbo…”
Next part