Ficathon Entry: Tomorrow 1/5
Title: Tomorrow 1/5
Characters: Ten, Rose
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Series Two, baby. With some random Old School references that you may or may not notice and/or care about.
Disclaimer: There are so many things here that don't belong to me. Seriously - it's shameful.
Beta: My main man
jlrpuck. She sends me pretty pictures of intense!Time Lords. It makes me happy.
Summary: After the events of Fear Her, Rose and the Doctor play detective and find themselves taking a rather unexpected detour. Along the way, Rose learns a little something about "forever".
(Look, Mum! I wrote a real summary! *preens*)
Written for the Anywhere But Cardiff ficathon at
time_and_chips. My very first ficathon entry, ladies and germs. Aren't you proud? My prompt was the happily vague: Planet Palba, Year 3040.
++
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
- Delmore Schwartz, Calmly We Walk Through This April Day
“What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.”
- Phil Connors, Groundhog Day
++
The air smelled of sulphur, burning a little in the back of her throat. This newest world was wild, magnificent - red stone beneath their feet and a cold wind at their backs. The sun set low over the sea, the sky aflame with its dying light. After a moment, he turned to her.
“How long are you going to stay with me?”
She smiled. “Forever.”
++
Rose woke to the sound of rain against the roof.
Given that the TARDIS had no roof, she found this rather disconcerting. She opened one eye to confirm that she was safely in her bed and not locked in a prison cell on some unwelcoming, rainy alien world. She took in the crumpled clothes on the floor and the slightly shabby but comfortable armchair in the corner. Definitely her bedroom. Sighing contentedly, she buried her face in her pillow. The gentle patter of rain drops was soothing and she began to fade once again into a hazy slumber.
“Cowabunga!” she heard an all-too-familiar voice cry, and her bed heaved as a sharp elbow dug into her stomach. “Good morning, Rose,” the Doctor said cheerily, smiling down at her from his new position sprawled across her bed. “We have a glorious day of adventure and excitement ahead of us.”
She shoved hard at the offending elbow and its owner collapsed, his upper body falling across hers, his chin landing on the curve of her collarbone. “I hate you,” she said, her voice thick with sleep. “A lot. I hate you a lot.”
“Oh, you don’t mean that.” He tweaked her nose and sat up. “Any good dreams?”
She pulled the duvet over her head and was swallowed by warm, stuffy darkness, and though she knew any attempt at sleep was futile she closed her eyes tightly. “More penguins. With typewriters, this time.”
He poked her shoulder. “Sorry, couldn’t hear that through your fortress of solitude.”
She lifted the duvet slightly. “Penguins with typewriters,” she said, enunciating carefully, and covered her face again.
“Fascinating!” There was a moment of silence while he considered this. “How did they type?”
She raised the duvet and replied, “With their beaks,” before letting it fall.
“Of course,” he mused. “I should have thought of that.”
They spent a few quiet minutes listening to the rain and Rose discovered to her great annoyance that she was now completely awake.
“This is unusual,” he said eventually.
“You not talking?” she asked, though she knew he couldn’t hear her.
“The TARDIS simulating the sound of external meteorological conditions. Only in your bedroom, as well.” He flicked her in the side of the head with his finger, but the duvet over her face absorbed most of the impact. “And that’s for the sass.”
She sat up a little and peeked over the edge of the duvet at him. “It’s raining outside? Where are we?”
A wild, eager grin bloomed across his thin face. “We, Rose, have landed on the Lost Planet of Palba, home to the Lost Temple of the Lost Race of the Palbanians. It’s been missing for three millennia, and I just stumbled across it this morning while making toast.”
“How do you lose a planet?”
“You’d be surprised. One too many Long Island Iced Teas one night at the pub and…” He noticed Rose’s sceptical expression. “Have I ever given you my speech on just how really, really big the universe is? Because it is. Big. Very, very big - quite a bit bigger than your wardrobe, actually, and you still can’t find that ‘I Heart NNY’ t-shirt you bought on New Earth.”
She frowned. “The wardrobe ate it.”
“Unlikely, but not impossible.” He scratched his chin and glanced over his shoulder at the accused piece of furniture. “Maybe I should have a look at that.”
She sat up fully, the duvet falling into her lap. “Lost Planet of Palba?” she prompted impatiently.
“Hmm?” He was still warily sizing up the wardrobe.
She sighed. “Honestly, sometimes it’s like talking to a freakishly intelligent goldfish.”
He turned back to her, confused. “What is?” She opened her mouth to reply but he cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Look at you, Rose Tyler. Typical human, sitting about gabbing while there’re adventures to be had.” He leapt off her bed and grabbed her hands, pulling her forward slightly. “Come, Watson! The game’s afoot.”
She smirked up at him, refusing to budge. “So now I’m the doctor and you’re a cranky, violin-playing drug-addict who thinks the sun goes ‘round the Earth?”
The Doctor dropped her hands and scowled. “I told you, Rose,” he snapped. “That was a joke. Holmes was just-”
“Giving his stupid little sidekick a hard time?” she drawled. “That’s not what Conan Doyle said when I asked him at tea last week.”
“Conan Doyle?” he exclaimed. “That delusional, occult-obsessed bully? He wouldn’t know deductive reasoning if you slathered him in it like butter.” He paused, tilting his head to one side. “Mind you, the man did serve us those excellent little cakes.”
“With the flowers made of sugar?”
He nodded and absently licked his lips. “And the pink icing. I quite liked those.” Rose watched, amused, as his mind snapped suddenly back to the matter at hand. He pointed a finger at her and said severely, “Sherlock Holmes was a genius.”
She grinned at him. “You have such a fictional character crush.”
Rose always thought that the Doctor looked a bit like a puffed up, scolding squirrel when he was indignant. This morning was no different. “I do not!”
“You so do!” She covered her mouth to stifle her laughter. “And I’ll be reminding you of it next time you decide to tease me about Mr. Darcy.”
“You just fancy that actor bloke,” he said, plopping back onto her bed, his arms folded across his chest. “You’ve never even read the book.”
“Get Colin Firth to rub my shoulders while I read it and I’d be happy to.” She sat forward and nudged him gently with her elbow. “Oi. No pouting on our glorious day of excitement and adventure.”
“I don’t pout,” he said, pouting.
“Of course not,” she conceded and patted him on the shoulder. After a moment she gave a pointed sigh.
He glanced over at her. “What?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said despondently. “It’s just that…well, I was really looking forward to leaving my nice, warm bed and getting drenched on a long-lost and no doubt incredibly dangerous alien world, stumbling through some muddy ruins and then running for our lives when everything inevitably goes wrong.” She shrugged and sighed again. “But if you’d rather sit here and continue not pouting…”
He hopped off her bed and rubbed his hands together gleefully. “We’ll need wellies.”
And with that he left the room, practically skipping in his excitement. Rose collapsed back onto her pillow and threw an arm over her face. “Note to self,” she mumbled. “Shut up.”
++
The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS and opened his umbrella. In just that short moment of exposure to the elements, the shoulders of his coat went dark with water and a few stray raindrops rolled down his face, one settling precariously on the end of his nose. He looked over his shoulder and grinned at her. “What did I tell you? Lovely.”
Still lingering in the doorway, Rose fumbled with the last button on her yellow plastic Mackintosh. “I don’t even know why we’re bothering,” she grumbled, but the smile creeping over her face betrayed her. “We’re going to get soaked no matter what.”
“Into each life some rain must fall,” the Doctor replied cheerily and wandered around to the other side of the TARDIS, his trainers squelching in the muddy grass. He had, in the end, decided to forgo more practical footwear. Rose hadn’t been surprised.
From the door, all Rose could see of the long-elusive Lost Planet of Palba was dark clouds and rolling green hills. In the far distance she could just make out the tree line where hills met dense forest. The air smelled oddly sweet.
“Come on, Rose,” she heard the Doctor cry, a touch impatiently. “You won’t melt, I promise.”
She sighed and gripped the handle of her umbrella, which was strangely enough shaped like a question mark. The Doctor had chuckled when she’d selected it, but when she’d asked what the joke was, he’d simply smiled and shook his head. She released the snap holding the black folds of fabric together and, with one sharp movement, unfurled the umbrella as she stepped onto the planet for the first time. Her boots made an unpleasant slurping sound in the mud. “Yeah,” she said sourly. “Lovely.”
She closed the door behind her and stomped after the Doctor, the soft, muffled percussion of the rain against the fabric over her head strangely comforting. She stopped short when she caught sight of the view from the other side of the TARDIS.
The Doctor stood at the top of the hill, one hand in his pocket, the other gently spinning the dark circle of his umbrella as it rested in the curve of his shoulder. Beyond him, two massive stone shapes rose out of a valley, crumbling with age and decay and overgrown with clinging green vines. Between them arched an immense structure of glass and stone, curving into the sky and sheltering the ground below from the rain. It was beautiful and ancient and, Rose felt deep in her bones, absolutely forbidden.
She couldn’t wait to get a closer look.
She loped up to the Doctor and slipped her hand inside his coat pocket, where his cold fingers twined tightly about hers. “So,” she said. “Lost Temple?”
“Bingo,” he answered, and they grinned.
Their joined hands swung gently between them as they slid and staggered down the muddy hill toward the ruins. She noticed, not for the first time, the change in his grip since that night in 2012 when fireworks had fizzled over their heads and he’d smelled something new on the wind. A storm was coming, he’d said, and ever since he’d held her hand with something like determination. Like defiance.
Sometimes it felt like he reached for her just to be sure she was still there.
The Doctor’s trainers slipped in the muck but Rose caught him before he hit the ground. He leaned into her for balance, laughing, and their umbrellas bumped against each other. “So how’d you find it?” she asked as they stumbled, arm in arm, to the bottom of the hill.
“Find what?”
She gestured vaguely with her umbrella to the world around them, spilling raindrops down her collar. She shivered. “The planet. If it was lost, how did you find it?”
The ground evened out and Rose had to skip a little to keep up with his long legs. “The TARDIS picked up on a temporal disruption - an artificial manipulation of time. It’s far too slight to be anything serious, of course, but it would seem that someone on this planet left the gas on.” He glanced up at the silent, empty temple, which loomed large as they grew nearer. “When they left the house, say, two or three thousand years ago.”
His smile never wavered but she didn’t miss the slight brittleness that had crept into his tone. Another dead planet. She squeezed his hand. “The Palbanians had time travel?”
“They wanted it. Spent centuries trying to sort it out but they never got beyond the elementary stages.” He sniffed and stared off into the distance, unseeing. “My people, we - well, I say ‘we’ but I mean ‘they’ - weren’t terribly pleased by the possibility of their success. That kind of power in the hands of such a crude, uncultured race? Shocking, an unimaginable travesty. Almost makes you wish there was something you could do to interfere.”
Rose frowned. “So they were nasty, then? The Palbanians?”
A small, sad smile curved his lips. “Oh no. They were lovely. Sweet, really, if a bit foolish. They just didn’t much care for rules or status or pointless, endless formalities. Thus the culture clash between their people and mine.”
She guided them around a large puddle. “Why’d they want time travel?”
He sighed. “It’s such a lot of power, Rose. And there are all sorts of reasons to want that.” The Doctor paused. “But the Palbanians…they wanted to help, I think. They saw all that we could do and wouldn’t, and they wanted to do better.”
She pressed her face into his shoulder and smiled against the damp fabric of his overcoat. “Sounds like your sort of people.”
He laughed a little. “Oh, absolutely. When I was young I used to say…” He stopped and for a moment he was silent, his lips pressed together in a thin line. “But that was a long time ago. I’ve never been here before. Never even met a Palbanian - just read about them in books.” He stared straight ahead, his face empty. “They’re all gone now.”
They came upon a worn, winding stone path that led to a grand archway, the only break in the high wall surrounding the temple. As they drew closer, Rose squinted to make out the words engraved in the stone around the arch. They read:
Beware Ye who Seek What Is Not to be Found. Heed These Words: Go No Further.
Another few feet and she was able to read a second, smaller inscription carved just below the first:
No, but seriously, folks - bugger off. It’s for your own good.
The Doctor gave her an amused look and Rose realised that she’d begun to bounce up and down on her toes slightly in excitement. She grinned. “So this disruption the TARDIS felt - you think it’s coming from in there?”
He shook his head, his expression one of wry humour. “I’ve created a monster.”
“As if you aren’t just as curious.”
“Oh, I am. I absolutely, definitely am.” He scratched idly at the back of his neck. “I suppose I’ve just developed an instinctual reaction of intense foreboding whenever I see that look on your face.”
“What look?” she asked innocently.
He tapped the tip of her nose with one long finger. “That look.”
“Oh,” she said, and wrinkled her nose. They stood in silence for a long moment, the rain loud against their umbrellas. “Does that mean we’re not going in?”
A sudden grin illuminated his features. “Oh no, we’re definitely going in.” He offered her his arm and she took it. “Shall we?”
“Impending doom, here we come,” she said, and together they walked through the archway.
++
Characters: Ten, Rose
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Series Two, baby. With some random Old School references that you may or may not notice and/or care about.
Disclaimer: There are so many things here that don't belong to me. Seriously - it's shameful.
Beta: My main man
jlrpuck. She sends me pretty pictures of intense!Time Lords. It makes me happy.
Summary: After the events of Fear Her, Rose and the Doctor play detective and find themselves taking a rather unexpected detour. Along the way, Rose learns a little something about "forever".
(Look, Mum! I wrote a real summary! *preens*)
Written for the Anywhere But Cardiff ficathon at
time_and_chips. My very first ficathon entry, ladies and germs. Aren't you proud? My prompt was the happily vague: Planet Palba, Year 3040.
++
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
- Delmore Schwartz, Calmly We Walk Through This April Day
“What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.”
- Phil Connors, Groundhog Day
++
The air smelled of sulphur, burning a little in the back of her throat. This newest world was wild, magnificent - red stone beneath their feet and a cold wind at their backs. The sun set low over the sea, the sky aflame with its dying light. After a moment, he turned to her.
“How long are you going to stay with me?”
She smiled. “Forever.”
++
Rose woke to the sound of rain against the roof.
Given that the TARDIS had no roof, she found this rather disconcerting. She opened one eye to confirm that she was safely in her bed and not locked in a prison cell on some unwelcoming, rainy alien world. She took in the crumpled clothes on the floor and the slightly shabby but comfortable armchair in the corner. Definitely her bedroom. Sighing contentedly, she buried her face in her pillow. The gentle patter of rain drops was soothing and she began to fade once again into a hazy slumber.
“Cowabunga!” she heard an all-too-familiar voice cry, and her bed heaved as a sharp elbow dug into her stomach. “Good morning, Rose,” the Doctor said cheerily, smiling down at her from his new position sprawled across her bed. “We have a glorious day of adventure and excitement ahead of us.”
She shoved hard at the offending elbow and its owner collapsed, his upper body falling across hers, his chin landing on the curve of her collarbone. “I hate you,” she said, her voice thick with sleep. “A lot. I hate you a lot.”
“Oh, you don’t mean that.” He tweaked her nose and sat up. “Any good dreams?”
She pulled the duvet over her head and was swallowed by warm, stuffy darkness, and though she knew any attempt at sleep was futile she closed her eyes tightly. “More penguins. With typewriters, this time.”
He poked her shoulder. “Sorry, couldn’t hear that through your fortress of solitude.”
She lifted the duvet slightly. “Penguins with typewriters,” she said, enunciating carefully, and covered her face again.
“Fascinating!” There was a moment of silence while he considered this. “How did they type?”
She raised the duvet and replied, “With their beaks,” before letting it fall.
“Of course,” he mused. “I should have thought of that.”
They spent a few quiet minutes listening to the rain and Rose discovered to her great annoyance that she was now completely awake.
“This is unusual,” he said eventually.
“You not talking?” she asked, though she knew he couldn’t hear her.
“The TARDIS simulating the sound of external meteorological conditions. Only in your bedroom, as well.” He flicked her in the side of the head with his finger, but the duvet over her face absorbed most of the impact. “And that’s for the sass.”
She sat up a little and peeked over the edge of the duvet at him. “It’s raining outside? Where are we?”
A wild, eager grin bloomed across his thin face. “We, Rose, have landed on the Lost Planet of Palba, home to the Lost Temple of the Lost Race of the Palbanians. It’s been missing for three millennia, and I just stumbled across it this morning while making toast.”
“How do you lose a planet?”
“You’d be surprised. One too many Long Island Iced Teas one night at the pub and…” He noticed Rose’s sceptical expression. “Have I ever given you my speech on just how really, really big the universe is? Because it is. Big. Very, very big - quite a bit bigger than your wardrobe, actually, and you still can’t find that ‘I Heart NNY’ t-shirt you bought on New Earth.”
She frowned. “The wardrobe ate it.”
“Unlikely, but not impossible.” He scratched his chin and glanced over his shoulder at the accused piece of furniture. “Maybe I should have a look at that.”
She sat up fully, the duvet falling into her lap. “Lost Planet of Palba?” she prompted impatiently.
“Hmm?” He was still warily sizing up the wardrobe.
She sighed. “Honestly, sometimes it’s like talking to a freakishly intelligent goldfish.”
He turned back to her, confused. “What is?” She opened her mouth to reply but he cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Look at you, Rose Tyler. Typical human, sitting about gabbing while there’re adventures to be had.” He leapt off her bed and grabbed her hands, pulling her forward slightly. “Come, Watson! The game’s afoot.”
She smirked up at him, refusing to budge. “So now I’m the doctor and you’re a cranky, violin-playing drug-addict who thinks the sun goes ‘round the Earth?”
The Doctor dropped her hands and scowled. “I told you, Rose,” he snapped. “That was a joke. Holmes was just-”
“Giving his stupid little sidekick a hard time?” she drawled. “That’s not what Conan Doyle said when I asked him at tea last week.”
“Conan Doyle?” he exclaimed. “That delusional, occult-obsessed bully? He wouldn’t know deductive reasoning if you slathered him in it like butter.” He paused, tilting his head to one side. “Mind you, the man did serve us those excellent little cakes.”
“With the flowers made of sugar?”
He nodded and absently licked his lips. “And the pink icing. I quite liked those.” Rose watched, amused, as his mind snapped suddenly back to the matter at hand. He pointed a finger at her and said severely, “Sherlock Holmes was a genius.”
She grinned at him. “You have such a fictional character crush.”
Rose always thought that the Doctor looked a bit like a puffed up, scolding squirrel when he was indignant. This morning was no different. “I do not!”
“You so do!” She covered her mouth to stifle her laughter. “And I’ll be reminding you of it next time you decide to tease me about Mr. Darcy.”
“You just fancy that actor bloke,” he said, plopping back onto her bed, his arms folded across his chest. “You’ve never even read the book.”
“Get Colin Firth to rub my shoulders while I read it and I’d be happy to.” She sat forward and nudged him gently with her elbow. “Oi. No pouting on our glorious day of excitement and adventure.”
“I don’t pout,” he said, pouting.
“Of course not,” she conceded and patted him on the shoulder. After a moment she gave a pointed sigh.
He glanced over at her. “What?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said despondently. “It’s just that…well, I was really looking forward to leaving my nice, warm bed and getting drenched on a long-lost and no doubt incredibly dangerous alien world, stumbling through some muddy ruins and then running for our lives when everything inevitably goes wrong.” She shrugged and sighed again. “But if you’d rather sit here and continue not pouting…”
He hopped off her bed and rubbed his hands together gleefully. “We’ll need wellies.”
And with that he left the room, practically skipping in his excitement. Rose collapsed back onto her pillow and threw an arm over her face. “Note to self,” she mumbled. “Shut up.”
++
The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS and opened his umbrella. In just that short moment of exposure to the elements, the shoulders of his coat went dark with water and a few stray raindrops rolled down his face, one settling precariously on the end of his nose. He looked over his shoulder and grinned at her. “What did I tell you? Lovely.”
Still lingering in the doorway, Rose fumbled with the last button on her yellow plastic Mackintosh. “I don’t even know why we’re bothering,” she grumbled, but the smile creeping over her face betrayed her. “We’re going to get soaked no matter what.”
“Into each life some rain must fall,” the Doctor replied cheerily and wandered around to the other side of the TARDIS, his trainers squelching in the muddy grass. He had, in the end, decided to forgo more practical footwear. Rose hadn’t been surprised.
From the door, all Rose could see of the long-elusive Lost Planet of Palba was dark clouds and rolling green hills. In the far distance she could just make out the tree line where hills met dense forest. The air smelled oddly sweet.
“Come on, Rose,” she heard the Doctor cry, a touch impatiently. “You won’t melt, I promise.”
She sighed and gripped the handle of her umbrella, which was strangely enough shaped like a question mark. The Doctor had chuckled when she’d selected it, but when she’d asked what the joke was, he’d simply smiled and shook his head. She released the snap holding the black folds of fabric together and, with one sharp movement, unfurled the umbrella as she stepped onto the planet for the first time. Her boots made an unpleasant slurping sound in the mud. “Yeah,” she said sourly. “Lovely.”
She closed the door behind her and stomped after the Doctor, the soft, muffled percussion of the rain against the fabric over her head strangely comforting. She stopped short when she caught sight of the view from the other side of the TARDIS.
The Doctor stood at the top of the hill, one hand in his pocket, the other gently spinning the dark circle of his umbrella as it rested in the curve of his shoulder. Beyond him, two massive stone shapes rose out of a valley, crumbling with age and decay and overgrown with clinging green vines. Between them arched an immense structure of glass and stone, curving into the sky and sheltering the ground below from the rain. It was beautiful and ancient and, Rose felt deep in her bones, absolutely forbidden.
She couldn’t wait to get a closer look.
She loped up to the Doctor and slipped her hand inside his coat pocket, where his cold fingers twined tightly about hers. “So,” she said. “Lost Temple?”
“Bingo,” he answered, and they grinned.
Their joined hands swung gently between them as they slid and staggered down the muddy hill toward the ruins. She noticed, not for the first time, the change in his grip since that night in 2012 when fireworks had fizzled over their heads and he’d smelled something new on the wind. A storm was coming, he’d said, and ever since he’d held her hand with something like determination. Like defiance.
Sometimes it felt like he reached for her just to be sure she was still there.
The Doctor’s trainers slipped in the muck but Rose caught him before he hit the ground. He leaned into her for balance, laughing, and their umbrellas bumped against each other. “So how’d you find it?” she asked as they stumbled, arm in arm, to the bottom of the hill.
“Find what?”
She gestured vaguely with her umbrella to the world around them, spilling raindrops down her collar. She shivered. “The planet. If it was lost, how did you find it?”
The ground evened out and Rose had to skip a little to keep up with his long legs. “The TARDIS picked up on a temporal disruption - an artificial manipulation of time. It’s far too slight to be anything serious, of course, but it would seem that someone on this planet left the gas on.” He glanced up at the silent, empty temple, which loomed large as they grew nearer. “When they left the house, say, two or three thousand years ago.”
His smile never wavered but she didn’t miss the slight brittleness that had crept into his tone. Another dead planet. She squeezed his hand. “The Palbanians had time travel?”
“They wanted it. Spent centuries trying to sort it out but they never got beyond the elementary stages.” He sniffed and stared off into the distance, unseeing. “My people, we - well, I say ‘we’ but I mean ‘they’ - weren’t terribly pleased by the possibility of their success. That kind of power in the hands of such a crude, uncultured race? Shocking, an unimaginable travesty. Almost makes you wish there was something you could do to interfere.”
Rose frowned. “So they were nasty, then? The Palbanians?”
A small, sad smile curved his lips. “Oh no. They were lovely. Sweet, really, if a bit foolish. They just didn’t much care for rules or status or pointless, endless formalities. Thus the culture clash between their people and mine.”
She guided them around a large puddle. “Why’d they want time travel?”
He sighed. “It’s such a lot of power, Rose. And there are all sorts of reasons to want that.” The Doctor paused. “But the Palbanians…they wanted to help, I think. They saw all that we could do and wouldn’t, and they wanted to do better.”
She pressed her face into his shoulder and smiled against the damp fabric of his overcoat. “Sounds like your sort of people.”
He laughed a little. “Oh, absolutely. When I was young I used to say…” He stopped and for a moment he was silent, his lips pressed together in a thin line. “But that was a long time ago. I’ve never been here before. Never even met a Palbanian - just read about them in books.” He stared straight ahead, his face empty. “They’re all gone now.”
They came upon a worn, winding stone path that led to a grand archway, the only break in the high wall surrounding the temple. As they drew closer, Rose squinted to make out the words engraved in the stone around the arch. They read:
Beware Ye who Seek What Is Not to be Found. Heed These Words: Go No Further.
Another few feet and she was able to read a second, smaller inscription carved just below the first:
No, but seriously, folks - bugger off. It’s for your own good.
The Doctor gave her an amused look and Rose realised that she’d begun to bounce up and down on her toes slightly in excitement. She grinned. “So this disruption the TARDIS felt - you think it’s coming from in there?”
He shook his head, his expression one of wry humour. “I’ve created a monster.”
“As if you aren’t just as curious.”
“Oh, I am. I absolutely, definitely am.” He scratched idly at the back of his neck. “I suppose I’ve just developed an instinctual reaction of intense foreboding whenever I see that look on your face.”
“What look?” she asked innocently.
He tapped the tip of her nose with one long finger. “That look.”
“Oh,” she said, and wrinkled her nose. They stood in silence for a long moment, the rain loud against their umbrellas. “Does that mean we’re not going in?”
A sudden grin illuminated his features. “Oh no, we’re definitely going in.” He offered her his arm and she took it. “Shall we?”
“Impending doom, here we come,” she said, and together they walked through the archway.
++