Fic: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 13: Time Bomb
Title: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 13: Time Bomb
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Characters/Pairings: Twelfth Doctor, Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Donna Noble, Eighth Doctor
Rating: PG-13
Excerpt: Rassilon’s illusions had worked well, perhaps too well.
Word count: 4,606
Disclaimer: Until she’s Jossed, Twelve is mine-but of course, based entirely on stuff that ain’t mine… All hail Auntie Beeb!
A/N*: Continuing Part II of Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse. Which, if you haven’t read yet, will give you important backstory and character details which are essential to this ‘verse (the link to the GitM masterlist is provided below). This series is a sort of Season Two. Also written before the end of DW season 6, so some details have gone AU.
Part I: Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse Masterlist
Part II: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Giant, knitting needle-sized claws stretched out for the Tenth Doctor!
At the Twelfth Doctor’s shout, he flung himself down onto the sharp rocks. Despite his agile repositioning, he still only narrowly missed being shredded by their talons.
The grotesque bird-things rose up again, squawking in protest. They gathered for another attack.
“FLAMING NORA!!” roared the Twelfth Doctor. She scuttled up behind him and sank her stinging fingers into the collar of his coat, yanking him up again. “Up! Up!” she yelled. “They’re coming back!”
“Get to the door!” he yelled. “Find the Seal!”
There were now five shrieking Hell Beasts above them-each of them taking turns at the two Doctors, like overzealous children in an apple bobbing contest…
Dividing her attention between the stinging rain, the fluttering of the leathery wings above her and the treacherous climb down slippery boulders was becoming a bit of a bother. It was if she were stuck in some demented decathlon, fighting for life and limb! For a second, she mused at how their journey had become very similar to the Death Zone games of old. It was too bad the elite back in the Dark Time weren’t viewing their predicament-for they certainly were playing a game against Death, now!
They came awkwardly down the wreckage, bobbing, weaving, ducking and swearing, until Twelve’s luck ran out. Slipping on the wet shale, she stumbled down the last bit of the rocks and landed hard on the scree below.
The Tenth Doctor yelled after her-and this time, she heard the fluttering of the wings as the beasts descended towards her.
Suddenly, the whirring of the sonic echoed off the sheer face of the mountains next to them-matched only by the angry screeches of the pterodactyl-like things as they were halted in mid-swoop.
“GET OUTTA HERE!” Ten shouted at them as he bounded off the rocks and reached Twelve where she sat, crumpled on the ground in pain.
Giant, pointed mouths opened revealing sharp, serrated teeth. Their angry yellow eyes showed little intelligence beyond basic survival, and the wrath of having their hunt thwarted, yet again.
Still holding his buzzing sonic aloft, he bent down to check on Twelve.
“It’s twisted, but I can walk,” she said and he helped her to stand. Together they hobbled over to the rock-face, searching for the door.
“This won’t hold them off much longer,” he said. “They’re only adjusting to the frequency!”
“Gotcha. Almost there,” she replied, limping and feeling along the crags of the rock for the precise location of the secret door.
They were nearing another heap of fallen rocks in their path-end of the line.
“I really hope it’s not under there,” muttered Ten about the rocks, wondering if their luck had just run out. Their leathery-winged pursuers were gathering for yet another attack. “Anytime, Twelve…” He muttered, watching them.
“No, I think it’s here!” she exclaimed, wiping her stinging eyes with a dry part of her jacket’s sleeve and picking at some of the dirt on her white piping. “Blasted things got my new coat dirty!”
The squawking grew closer.
And the stinging rain was absolutely chucking it down.
“Oi! Twelve! Priorities?!”
The air hummed with another sonic: Twelve was using the red settings to find the differential in quantum realities. The Seal of Rassilon glowed back at her under the red light of her sonic’s diode.
“Here! It’s here!” she shouted excitedly, “The old bugger hid it in another quantum reality!!” The door slid open with a crack and then a grinding noise, like a millstone coming to life. “In, in, in!” She wrapped her sparkly nails around the lapels of his camel coat and yanked him into the doorway, and cried out as she stepped down on her sore ankle, “Oooch!!”
“And who didn’t want that Schrödinger setting?!” teased Ten, safely inside the narrow passageway at last. “That was worth it alone!”
The imposing stone door closed noisily behind them, leaving them in pitch darkness. They could hear the sound of the angry, leathery-winged mob screeching and clawing at the cliff-face in frustration.
“That was a little more David Attenborough than I like it!” exhaled Ten.
Twelve grunted as she shifted her weight off her bad foot. “Got any of those everlasting matches?” She shook the toxic rain off her black coat.
“Nope,” said Ten, his voice echoing in the hallway. “But I’ve a torch…” With a click, a cool, white LED light lit the cramped passageway ahead.
“Much better than a match and a candle stub!” said Twelve, impressed.
“How’s your ankle?”
“Smarts.”
“Well, the good news is that we’re all in one piece and we didn’t get too drenched. All in all, I reckon we’ve earned ourselves a bit of a lie-down…” He said, sweeping his torch over the walls. “Any of this look familiar to you?”
“I think there might be an antechamber off to the left somewhere? Sweet Rassilon, it’s been a long time since I was in here…” she looked around, feeling a little turned around. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not remembering this as well as I should…”
“Yeah, well… The last time we were in here we weren’t exactly… ourselves…” Ten offered his arm to lean on and together they moved down the rough passageway that was barely wide enough for two, with Twelve limping slightly. The ankle wasn’t terrible, but an hour or so off her feet would make all the difference, if they could only find somewhere to sit down.
“Ahh, just as homey as I remembered…” she said sarcastically of their surroundings, and Ten raked his torchlight around the roughly made passageway that looked more “coal mine” than “tomb.” Usually, when the Doctor thought of tombs, she thought of the brilliant engineering that went behind the Pharaoh’s tombs in Egypt-many tonnes of rocks stacked up upon one another, fitting impressively together like complicated jigsaw puzzles-and all of them interlocking with barely a hair’s breadth of space between them. That Vizier Hemiunu really knew what he was doing, she thought, too bad he was a lousy Senet player. That night at Khufu’s birthday party had ended up costing Hemiunu quite a lot-come to think of it, that camel might still be somewhere in the TARDIS zoo… Good thing the old girl was set on auto-feed, or that camel would be a nasty surprise to somebody now…
“Left here, I reckon, huh?” asked Ten, interrupting her thoughts.
“Umm,” she said, noncommittally, looking at the fork in the narrow tunnel. “Your guess is as good as mine, I’m afraid.” Twelve hissed in pain as they turned the corner. The rough rocks that formed the walls jutted out towards them, looking more like someone had dug the passageways with a prison issue spoon under great duress than a bunch of Gallifreyan engineers working from blueprints and superior technology.
They also appeared to be headed downhill.
“We have to get you off that leg,” said Ten. “I hope that antechamber is around here somewhere.”
“What do you think those things were that attacked us?” asked Twelve.
Ten handed her one of two flannels he’d found in his transdimensional pocket to dry her hair. “Did you hear the sound their wings made?” he asked, vigorously rubbing his hair with his flannel.
“Dunno, I guess I was too focused on saving our skins…”
“Was there anything familiar about them at all?”
Twelve scowled into the darkness. “What are you saying, that I’m too addled to remember all of the living creatures indigenous to Gallifrey?”
“No… Yes-maybe.”
“Whaaa?” Twelve’s indignant voice echoed off the craggy tomb walls.
“Look, I’m just saying that their wings made a particularly familiar sound when they flapped. Sort of a… ahhhh…”
“Sounded like leather,” offered Twelve. “So, Shrieking, Leather-Winged Bat-Thingies That Wanted To Eat Us-Is that a good enough name for them, then? Don’t remember anything like that in the Natural History Museum of Gallifrey…”
Ten ignored her frustrated sarcasm, born out of exhaustion and pain. “But besides the shrieking, what else did you hear?”
“I dunno, they just fluttered around and tried to eat-“
“Oh, yes! Fluttered!!”
She paused as his insinuation hit home. “Oh, you don’t think…” breathed Twelve, turning to look at him in incredulity. The torchlight illuminated her shock.
“Why not?”
“Flutterwings?!?”
“Mutated Flutterwings,” he emphasized.
Flutterwings were native to the planet. On Earth, the Doctor had always been fond of hummingbirds, partially because they reminded her of Gallifreyan Flutterwings, which could only be described as some sort of cross between a hummingbird and a cockatiel, of sorts. They were beautiful, docile little things that had decorative head feathers and long, drooping, and dramatic primary feathers. They came in iridescent colours, like hummingbirds, but acted more like butterflies than a traditional Earth bird, fluttering from flower to flower, sipping nectar and behaving in a generally pleasant, completely tame way-certainly not enraged and engorged as if they were pumped full of some sort of steroid, hell-bent on peeling the flesh from their victims!
Romana had even studied their life cycles in her Academy days. They were completely harmless!
Twelve was still gobsmacked, struggling with Ten’s hypothesis. “We just got attacked by carnivorous, mutated Flutterwings?”
“Weeelll, it’s certainly possible,” he said, talking out one side of his face. “Perhaps they… suffered mutation as a result of having been altered and distorted by The Moment? Or, perhaps the temporal forces that keep the Time War in stasis affected them? If so, then their evolution could have been greatly accelerated, turning the once docile, beautiful creatures into terrible, omnivorous beasts!”
“Oh, there are so many things this planet needs to thank us for…” sighed Twelve sardonically. She thrust her flannel back at Ten and limped on. “C’mon.”
Ten followed after her, pocketing his flannels, his torchlight bobbing ahead of them. “Yeaaah,” he breathed after a bit, “’Cept, s’not really a tunnel, is it?”
Twelve hesitated in mid-hobble and shook her head, imperceptivity. “Oh, you are not doing this to me,” she warned.
“Weeelll, it’s really more of a-“
“Shut it!”
“But it’s-“
“What did I say??”
“But it really is-“
“A maze, yes. I know.”
“Or a labyrinth,” he added, helpfully.
“No. Not a labyrinth… Can’t be. Do you even remember the difference?”
She heard him sniff behind her.
“You don’t, do you?” she challenged. She shook her head again. Daft fool, always so eager to prove himself right…
“We should really get you off that ankle-“
“No, you brought it up, Mister Know It All. Answer my question: Do you remember the difference between a labyrinth and a maze?”
He huffed again before reciting, “A labyrinth leads in a single twisting line to its centre and a maze is broken up with dead ends and wrong turns. If you get lost, simply put a hand on either the right or left wall, sooner or later you’ll come out!”
“Well, that’s the long way ‘round, to be sure,” she muttered, continuing to painfully pick her way down the rough, stone and dirt corridors. “May I remind you that there are no Minotaurs on Gallifrey? And those are what are traditionally put inside the centres of mythical labyrinths to keep them imprisoned, yeah? So. By definition, this cannot be a labyrinth. It’s a maze.”
“There haven’t been many choices of left or right here… we’ve mostly just kept on the same winding path.” His voice was defensive.
“Oh are you trying to be an infant?” Twelve exclaimed, exasperated with his competitive word play, “or are you trying to keep my mind off the pain?” she finished, spinning around to face him.
He stopped and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I have no idea what you’re on about…” His big brown eyes looked at her through his lashes.
“Looks like you’ve been caught in your own web,” she said, and stuck her tongue out at him before moving along.
“It did work, though!”
“Not for a second!”
******
Approximately 636 heartsbeats later-or about seven minutes in time-the rough-hewn walls and dirt gave way to properly smooth stone floors and walls. Approximately 1,006 heartsbeats later-or a little over ten minutes in time-they arrived at a break in the wall.
“A room!” beamed Ten.
“Or another hallway…”
“Nope,” he said, moving inside. “It’s most certainly a room! We found a room!”
“Has it any minotaurs?”
She missed the way his eyes rolled to look at her in the darkness. “Thought there weren’t any Minotaurs on Gallifrey?”
“Well, as far as I knew three hours ago, there weren’t man-eating, leathery-flapping Mutant Future!Flutterwing things, either…”
“Ooh, this regeneration gets cranky when she’s tired!” he teased, helping her down on what appeared to be something of a low-slung, stone bench. He sat next to her and pulled her leg up to drape across his legs, elevating it. His free hand held the torch, which he jiggled with restless energy.
Twelve shifted to get as comfortable as she could in a cold, dark chamber under the tomb of her race’s biggest benefactor and most profound megalomaniac that she’d helped doom to his death. She sighed. “It’s just. If I’m honest… I’m rather dreading this bit,” she admitted, picking at her nails.
The shaft of light from the torch Ten held stopped its manic bouncing as he stilled his arm and considered her admission.
“What are you worried about?”
Twelve let her head roll backwards against the stone wall behind her. “Aw, you know. The usual: Global warming, the bees disappearing, hostile alien invasion, finally losing the TARDIS for good, a great big reality imploding paradox, finding myself at school without trousers on exam day and then…” she paused. “Him, I guess.” She bit at her lip nervously before elaborating, “Seeing him again.”
There was a brief silence before he responded.
“Our Eighth incarnation?”
“Yeah.” She twirled the longest piece of her asymmetrical hair and glanced up at him. “Aren’t you?”
“You say that like we were some sort of horrible monster…”
“Well, weren’t we?”
He bobbled the torch a bit to diffuse some of his own anxiety. “No. I really don’t judge him.”
“No…” she exhaled, letting her head fall backwards into the wall again with a dull thud. “It’s not judgment. I don’t judge him-us-me-whatever… Not at all. What I mean is, that incarnation didn’t have it easy, did he? There we were, so gentle and full of life, like a child filled with wonder about everyone and everything! And then…” she shook her head in remembrance. “The things we had to do, to survive through...” Her eyes watered and she paused, attempting to re-batten the hatches. “There were other incarnations that would have fared better…”
Ten nodded, wordlessly.
“It just wasn’t fair,” she said, finally, the earnestness in her voice reverberating in the dark underground chamber. “All that love and light and hope and he had to live through so much, and then once he did, he had to stop this…”
“That version of us wasn’t built for that,” added Ten, quietly.
“No, but it was what was meant for him.” She glanced at him again. “Doesn’t that make you angry?”
The Tenth Doctor scratched at his ear. “Yeah… It does.”
“Well, it bloody well cheesed him off too,” she said, “and that’s what I’m afraid of finding… That version of us that had to make those choices.”
They both sat for a moment, lost in their shared remembrance of the final moments of their Eighth incarnation-lost, blind, insane, terrified-and in so much pain. Their Ninth self had been born amidst the burning of his planet, the burning of his TARDIS, and the harrowing burning of his own previous incarnation’s flesh.
Twelve sighed. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant nighttime story to tell oneself before bed.
Ten shifted and wrapped his arm around her. “You’re exhausted,” he said. “And that ankle will heal quicker if you rest. I’ll keep watch. Sleep.”
She nodded wearily and drew her black coat around her, resting her head against him. Surrendering to sleep, the pounding rhythm Ten’s hearts in the darkness fortified her against her memories of her Eighth self, the battles from long ago and ghostly echoes of the past. Pulling the coat more tightly around her, she snuggled into Ten’s bony shoulder and rested.
******
His voice came to her in the musty dark, several hours later as she stirred, “That ruff of yours is ticklish.”
“S’not a ruff…” she groaned back. “S’ides, Donna was right about the whole papercut thing… Your shoulder isn’t the most comfortable pillow in all the universe.”
“Not a morning person, either, huh?”
“S’not morning. It’s quarter of three. And stop testing me.” She yawned indelicately. “Blimey, you let me sleep for five hours.”
He shrugged, but she didn’t see it in the darkness. “Yeah. Well, I guess neither of us is in too much of a hurry to meet the neighbour…”
She ducked out from under his arm to stretch. “Well, we are under sort of a constraint here, Ten. Open rifts? Earthquakes in London? Mount Saint Helens? Chaos coming? A whole reality tearing at the seams? Ring any bells?”
Ten sang quietly, “You can ring my beeeelll, ring my bell-“
Twelve nudged him. “I’m serious…”
“Yep, I know y’are. But reality is still in one piece, I kept an eye on it. ‘Sides, you needed to rest your ankle.”
The Twelfth Doctor stood gingerly, testing out her ankle in the pitch-blackness.
“How’s it?” he asked.
She shifted her weight, appraising it. “Not too bad. I’d say good as new.”
Ten clicked on the torch and a beam of cool bluish light sliced through the room. “Brilliant. Then why don’t we-“
Suddenly there was a loud thumping noise somewhere outside their chamber. With the echo it was difficult to tell exactly how far away it had come from. Both Doctors looked to one another in alarm. Their eyes dilated out of fear and vigilance. They strained to hear anything more.
There was another thump, this time from further away.
“This way,” whispered Ten. He grabbed her hand and they rushed out of the room.
Back out in the maze, the noise became more regular.
“It sounds like pounding,” murmured Twelve, “or a knocking?”
“Help!”
The voice stopped them cold.
“A woman’s voice?” Both Doctors stood stock-still and stared at each other. It was a woman’s voice! And there was something sickeningly familiar about it…
“Hello? Help! S’anybody there?”
Twelve stared at Ten as she tried to place the voice.
“Um, hello? I’m lost! Isn’t somebody there-“ came a distinct, youthful voice with a London accent.
“It’s Rose!” hissed Ten. But before Twelve could open her mouth, the Tenth Doctor had dropped her hand and went sprinting in the direction of the voice. “ROOOOSE??!”
“Wait! TEN!!” cried Twelve. “It can’t possibly-“ But he didn’t stop. His plimsolls hardly touched the dirty stone floor as he ran towards Rose’s voice. The cool light of the LED torch bounced madly away with him, leaving her in darkness. Twelve swore and took off after him.
As she turned the corner she noticed that the torches on the walls in this new section were lit. It was just enough light to catch a glimpse of the Tenth Doctor’s coat as he sped around the next corner and disappeared again.
His desperate footfalls scratched over the stone as his voice pitched higher in worried agitation. “Rose! Roooose, where are you?!”
“Doctor! I’m here, Doctor! Ohmigod, is that really you? Help me!!” Rose’s voice was getting nearer, and the Twelfth Doctor followed, trying to catch up.
“ROSE!!”
“WAIT! Don’t come any nearer, Doctor!” she sounded panicked. “There’s a forcefield! I’ll die if you get too close!”
Twelve heard Ten’s steps skitter to a halt.
She cleared the corner to see Rose and Ten staring at each other in a fork in the hallway, only meters apart.
Ten ruffled his hair wildly and growled in frustration. “Ughhh! It’s Rassilon’s boobytraps! He’s held you prisoner!” He patted his pockets down for his sonic.
“Ten wait!” yelled Twelve. “How can this be Rose? Think about it!”
“I woke up here!” said Rose. “I don’t know how I got here!”
The Twelfth Doctor rushed over to Ten who was looking for the source of the forcefield. “She’s not real, Ten,” trying to reason with him. “She’s an illusion…”
Twelve reached out to touch his arm and he pulled it roughly away. “Stop it! She is here! Look at her!”
“Where am I, Doctor? How did I get here?”
He looked at her, his eyes gleaming with concern, “You’re underground. You’re in Gallifrey. You’re-“
“Not here,” finished Twelve. “This isn’t possible,” she said in a low, sad voice to Ten, “and you know it…”
“Why does she say I shouldn’t be here?” asked Rose, looking terrified.
Twelve stepped forward. “Because you’re in a parallel world now, Rose,” she answered.
Rose turned to look at her. “I’m where?”
“A parallel world. With your mum and your little brother and Pete and the man you lo-“
“Stop it.” Ten’s voice was icy cold. “Just stop it!”
“You know it’s true. You know she isn’t here! She’s an illusion. Rassilon’s dead but his boobytraps remain! We must be near the old burial chamber. It’s a trap that plays on the fears and memories of those who come near it. You remember what happened the last-“
“JUST STOP IT!” he yelled, staring hopelessly at Rose, who turned at looked at him with tears in her eyes. He moved towards the far wall, looking for a break in the forcefield.
“You can’t come this way, Doctor,” said another voice. And from around the corner behind Rose came a ginger haired woman.
It was Donna Noble.
The Tenth Doctor’s eyes grew wide. “Donna?!” And then the candle of hope behind his eyes flickered and went out. Something broke inside him. His eyes grew infinitely sad.
Reason was beginning to break through his harassed brain.
The Twelfth Doctor spoke again, taking this crack in his optimism as an opportunity to reach him. “Yes. Just like Zoe and Jamie the last time. Someone is here who couldn’t be and someone is here who shouldn’t remember you… Oh, Ten, they’re just illusions. Cold, heartsbreaking illusions,” she said evenly, staring at Rose and marveling at the precise level of detail-the pattern of her mascara on her cheek as her tears came, the individual brown hairs of her eyebrows as they screwed up in confusion and hurt…
Rassilon’s illusions had worked well, perhaps too well.
Twelve pulled her eyes away from Rose to study her Tenth self, whose sad eyes now just looked haunted and in so much anguish as he realised the truth…
Rose and Donna were never coming back.
She watched Ten’s throat work to swallow down all the emotion he had swimming behind his eyes. The illusion of Rose followed him with her hazel eyes, looking so alive. His stoic veneer twitched when she quirked her pearly-pink mouth into the tiniest of hopeful smiles, and then vanished.
He stared at her for a second before he spoke.
“Rose, I want to hug you,” he said quietly.
Her face changed to one of fear. “No, Doctor, you can’t come any closer to me! I’ll be killed!”
“I’ve missed you so much,” he said softly. “I just want to hug you…”
“No, I don’t think-“
He stepped forward. “I need to hug you, Rose.”
Rose looked panicked. “No, Doctor! No! Just-“
“Please,” his voice cracked, “let me-“
“No! NO!”
The Tenth Doctor opened his arms and walked right through her image. Both she and Donna screamed and disappeared in a cloud of black smoke.
Broken, he hung his head.
From behind him, the Twelfth Doctor wrapped her arms around him and gave him a big hug. “Here,” she said into his shoulder blade, “Hug me if you need a hug. I could do with one, too.”
With a strangled sob he turned around and buried his head into her neck, squeezing her tightly. “I’m sorry! I just-“
“I know, I know,” she replied. “But remember where we are. This place is evil. Nothing is as it seems.”
“I just wanted to see her again!”
“And this place picked up on that. It used you.”
“I know. I’m sorry!”
“S’all right,” she rubbed her hands on his back, trying to comfort him. “At least we know where we are now. And the lights are on for us. It knows we’re here. The bunker is right through there, I remember now,” she said, indicating the way that the illusions of Rose and Donna had warned them away from. “I don’t know about you, but I think I could do without any additional bother today.”
Ten lifted his head-his eyes red-but did not return her gaze. Twelve pulled the purple bandana off her hand that had been injured whilst climbing the rocks. Thanks to superior Timelord biology, it was healed now. She handed him the bandana. He took it with an embarrassed nod but instead of blotting his eyes he stuffed it back into his coat pocket.
Twelve was astonished at the way he withheld his feelings, even in front of her, of all people.
“I remember now, too,” said Ten. “The bunker’s through here.” He moved forward without another word about what they’d just experienced.
They turned the corner and found themselves at what appeared to be a dead end in the maze. He glanced to the side. There was a crude carving on one of the rocks in Old High Gallifreyan that just looked like part of the rock to an untrained eye. With a swipe of his hand the stone in front of them pulled away-a secret entrance to the underground war bunkers, dug out during the Time War. And there was no better place to put the entrance than here, kept safe by the phantoms of whoever sought to gain access.
The stone slid back to reveal a black maw.
Suddenly the Twelfth Doctor felt ill. She pushed it down, knowing it was just another trick of Rassilon, part of his boobytrap-the hand of fear reaching out and touching her…
Or was it the emotional ripples held in place by The Moment?
But she could feel the inexorable pull of these events. She’d felt it before-always-the inertia towards death, towards regeneration. It was like rolling downhill into her own grave-that hollow feeling of destiny, lying in wait…
There was something very bad waiting for them, she could feel it shimmering in their timelines.
Another storm was brewing.
The two Doctors stepped inside into the darkness. As they cleared the threshold, the stone slab that separated the catacombs of the tomb from the bunkers of war slid tightly closed behind them with a dull thud.
Once again they were enveloped in black.
As soon as the echoes died away from the closing of the bunker door, they heard it…
It was him.
His buttery soft voice reverberated off the walls of the pitch-blackness. However, his formerly childlike and affable nature had been twisted into a spiteful, hostile coldness.
He sounded so angry, and filled to the bursting with venom for everyone, including himself.
She felt her blood run cold as she heard the Eighth Doctor’s familiar voice, chanting a very familiar Galifreyan nursery rhyme-one that she could never forget.
It was about her, when she had worn his face…
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed, And eats you when you're sleeping…
To be continued in Chapter 14: Man Out of Time...
*In addition to the usual Nu-Who references, Classic Who references are made to The Five Doctors (specifically http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-z12abufW8); Pirate Planet; the DW book, Vampire Science; and the DW Big Finish Audiobooks, “Caerdroia” and “Zagreus” are also quoted.