Held in Trust (27/29)
Title: Held in Trust: Chapter 27
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: A Ten II action/adventure fic, with sci-fi, a bit of romance, and alt!Donna. The Doctor, Rose and Donna investigate an apocalyptic death cult, with a whole boatload of unforeseen consequences, including time travel, a mysterious planet with burnt-orange sky, and a human empire gone horribly wrong.
A/N: Are everyone's loins girded for tomorrow? Ten II and the gang will return for the final chapters after the dust from Elevensplosion clears.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23| Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26
Both suns were reaching their respective apexes in the burnt orange sky. Four figures of comically disparate heights were picking their way across ground covered with sharp, purple-veined scree. Hugging the edge of a rocky outcropping kept them in shadow, but didn't protect them from the view of anyone on the plains below the plateau around which they travelled.
"Do you think it worked?" Crede's eyes darted over to Theris, who looked just as uncomfortable with the situation.
"I don't even know what I'm doing," he grumbled, not really answering Crede's question.
"You're an outlaw!" the Doctor chirped. "Better than being an inlaw, believe me."
"We're still alive," Elpis said quietly, "so I'd say that's at least a tentative yes."
"Indeed we are," the Doctor mused. The two of them-Elpis and the Doctor-seemed to have formed some kind of grim bond. In the moments between the closing of the temporal failsafe and Theris dispatching a decoy distress beacon, Elpis had grown pensive. The Doctor also seemed to be talking less, as well, and had lost a certain spring in his step.
"You've saved our lives," Crede said to Theris.
"There's been a lot of that going around," the Doctor said.
"But I don't understand what's going on here," Theris said, kicking a small stone off the ledge they were walking across. It broke into several jagged pieces as soon as it hit the rocks below and the entire party hewed a bit closer to the stone wall behind them. "Who are you?"
The Doctor opened his mouth to speak, but Crede interrupted: "You should talk," he said. "I thought I'd never see you again. Your indenture was complete, but apparently you've been a guard this whole time. Why? Why would you want to stay on this gods-forsaken planet?"
Theris laughed coldly, a single, mirthless ha! "Stupid kid. You think we have a choice?"
"But... you were freed. I saw the ceremony myself. You said you were going off-world, to start a new life. You talked about it so much, no one could stand to listen to you any more."
"Turns out I was mistaken," Theris said, without emotion.
"Mistaken?" Crede asked.
"You and I were born to serve, you got that? Do you understand what that means?" Theris's voice grew louder and more gruff. "That's our whole point; it's why we exist. We're a resource, and that's all. You're no different than the aritanium this little sixer mines."
"Hey!" Elpis protested. "I've got a name."
Theris ignored her. "The day you see one of us actually living a free life will be the day the Proprietors start giving aritanium away. And at least I'm not sweating away in the laundry any more."
"No, you're lording it about the place, are you? Enjoying your extra rations and getting the indentures to fetch and carry for you? How many of them have you beaten for not shining your shoes the right way?"
"We're not all like that," Theris said, refusing to meet Crede's eye. "You wouldn't understand."
Both Crede and Elpis appeared to take a long breath of air in preparation for really giving Theris a piece of their minds, but the Doctor interrupted before they could begin.
"You know what I think?" He didn't wait for a response. "I think that we've all demonstrated to each other that there's more that connects us than divides us. Arguing with one another is what the Proprieters want, and it's why they keep this caste system in place. You really want to be free?"
The three of them looked either up or down at the Doctor with gobsmacked expressions. Elpis began to slowly nod, followed by the two humans, looking rather more sceptical.
"Then come with me. I've got a plan."
***
"You weren't lying when you said these readings were going mental," Rose said, casting her eyes over a series of computer monitors. "Any idea what it means?"
"We were hoping you could shed some light on that, " the young lab assistant said.
"I'm not really the expert on the theoretical stuff," Rose said. She cast a glance over to Donna, who was sporting an ugly Torchwood 'Visitor' badge and a smug look left-over from an encounter with one of her admirers on the security team.
"We're really more ladies of action," Donna confirmed.
"I'm sure you have a theory, though, yeah? Clever guy like you." Rose smiled, a little flirtatiously.
Paul Wilshire stood a little straighter and pushed his glasses up. "Yeah, loads. But they're all just guesses, really."
"Well, let's hear 'em," Rose said, and sat down on a nearby lab stool. Donna did the same.
Paul cast a glance over to the centre of the room, where the device still sat, along with Donna's old wristwatch, inside the faintly glowing blue circle of the time lock.
"Okay," Paul said, tentatively. "I think it's something to do with the device, and not the time lock. Dr. Chaudhry thinks that maybe the lock is failing-the fact that it worked at all is a miracle in the first place. But, if you look here," he pointed to print-out on a clipboard, "you can see that not all the readings are fluctuating. It's just this set here, while these others stay constant. From the beginning, we've had a hard time sorting out what forms of energy are coming from where, given that both a working time lock and the device inside are unprecedented But, if I had to guess-which, as a scientist, I'm only doing because you asked-my guess would be that something about the device inside the time lock has changed, while the lock itself is holding."
Donna looked at him and pursed her lips. "Changed-good, or changed-bad?" she asked.
"How do you mean?"
"I mean," Donna continued, a little impatiently, "are we all about to die?"
"Oh." Paul fiddled with the splitting edges of his own ID badge. "Well, that's not really something I have enough data to speculate on."
"Call Dr. Chaudhry," Rose said, or rather, ordered.
"Well, I don't think she'd have much more-"
"Just do it." Rose said with a steely tone in her voice that made Paul take a step backwards. "Please."
Donna stood and moved next to her friend, placing a hand on her shoulder. "I think what Ms. Tyler means to say is that you should just do it, please. Did I get that right?"
Rose nodded. "Yeah, that's about the size of it."
Paul hurried to a bank of phones across the room, casting furtive glances over his shoulder along the way.
"So, why is it so important to call in the big guns?" Donna whispered out of the corner of her mouth. "I mean, it is important, right? I didn't just back you up because you have a pressing need to ask Dr. Chaudhry where she gets her suits tailored."
"I think the Doctor's coming back."
Donna tilted her head. "Because of that stuff that Paul was talking about?"
"Other way around. The change in the device has to mean just one thing: the Doctor has disabled the temporal failsafe and it can be disarmed safely. He can come back now." She suddenly broke into a massive, toothy grin that made her nose wrinkle. "If there's one thing I know about the Doctor, it's that he doesn't stick around long after he's done saving the world. He's coming back, and he might need all the help Torchwood can provide."
***
"What the hell is that thing?" Theris stood a few feet away from the pod that the Doctor had originally arrived in, scratching his chin and squinting in the dim light of the cavern.
"Well, it's a lot of things, potentially," the Doctor said, stroking the smooth sides of the coffin-like pod he'd arrived on Cassiel in. This was the moment he'd been putting off thinking about. It was so easy to just focus on the short-term; he'd been doing so for most of his life. Save this one life, defuse this bomb, stop this invasion, and then... what? Find the next thing, run away, on to the next adventure.
"It's a time ship," Elpis noted, eyeing it suspiciously. She looked tired, ruffled. The Doctor realised, observing how wearily slumping against a boulder, that they were all in desperate need of food, water, and rest.
"Of a sort."
Theris, easily the least fatigued of the entire party, reached out a hand to touch it, shaking his head. "A time ship? On Cassiel? Now I know you're full of it," he snorted.
"It's true," said Crede, folding his long legs under him and sitting on the dusty ground. "Can it take you back home, Doctor?"
The Doctor's breath hitched, and for a terrifying moment his still-unfamiliar single heart seemed to stop beating.
Home. As Crede said the word, the image that sprung instantly before the Doctor's eyes was not of Gallifrey, or its shadow in the form of the planet he stood upon now, but of a little North London house with a garden that wanted weeding and a garage filled with half-disassembled cars.
And how he'd love to go back, right now. Have a hot shower, the greasiest fry-up imaginable, fall into the downy pleasures of Rose's bed, share a pint and a laugh with Donna. If he was completely human, that's exactly what he'd do, and a part of him had already planned all of those activities, down to the minute. Would the other Doctor happily cling to whatever broken wreckage of Gallifrey he could find, rather than yearning for Earth and Rose and axle grease under his nails? Had he changed so much from the man he was?
"I'm not going home," he said, and the words came out flat, dry as dirt.
No one else spoke for several pregnant seconds. Crede and Elpis shared a concerned look, but Theris, missing the meaning completely, stood dumbly scratching his scalp and staring at the capsule.
"But I thought all of this was to save your home," Crede said. "And now you're not going back?"
"It was to save everyone's home." The Doctor swallowed hard and reached deep, trying to find a well that would allow him to continue on this course without succumbing to the shameful temptation to leave this planet to its system of slavery and debasement-a state of affairs that was, in a manner of speaking, his fault. "But that means that nothing here changes, and I'm not having that."
He'd run history off its rails by destroying Gallifrey and marooning the slices of the multiverse away from the watchful eyes of those who could guide events towards favourable outcomes. But, he was here now. Several millennia too late, it would seem, but there was nothing that could be done about that, with a ship that only stopped at two timepoints.
"We've had rebellions before," Theris said. "They never amount to anything."
"I'm not talking about a rebellion." He felt for the latches that opened the capsule, releasing each in turn, to punctuate his words. "Who needs rebellion when you can just have a do-over? Sort of like... once more, with Time Lords." The pod opened with a hiss, revealing a tangle of wiring, faintly blinking lights, glowing digital read-outs, and enough space for one vaguely Doctor-shaped occupant.
"Neat," Crede said, sounding for once like the young boy he was-or would have been if he'd been allowed to have a real childhood.
"It's not quite operating on full power yet. It'll take a little while for me to get her up and running again."
"So you can go home," Crede remarked, still not quite getting it. The Doctor didn't have the energy to explain again how he was planning to give up a world he'd only just begun to grow comfortable in, and the first real family he'd had in centuries.
Instead, he turned to Theris. "You look like a man who's well-prepared for anything." He smiled, Theris's mask of rough scepticism slipped a bit. "I bet you've got some sort of nutritional supplement in that little pack of yours. I think it's time for a nice, friendly dinner for four."
***
"He can't stay," Elpis said, her voice low with both secrecy and fatigue.
Crede took another bite of the tasteless nutrition bar that Theris had passed around. "Why not? He says he wants to help us, and then maybe after that he can go home."
So naive, Elpis thought. She'd already seen the Doctor's face fall into grim resignation; had seen it hours and miles ago, back at the chamber full of weapons and explosives. Even when he smiled, there was regret behind it. She watched the back of his dusty blue suit as he poked in among the wires of the pod and ignored Theris's wholely unhelpful suggestions.
"He can't just wave a wand and free us, just like that."
"Well, I don't mind him staying. I like him." Crede paused, took another bite, and looked like he was considering something very carefully. "Are you afraid?" he asked, finally.
"Afraid?" Elpis couldn't think of a time in her life when she wasn't afraid. Afraid of the Proprietors and guards, afraid of a mining accident, afraid on behalf of her friends and loved-ones.
"Yeah. Afraid of fighting."
Elpis allowed herself a little half-smile; that was the one thing she wasn't afraid of.
"You know something," Crede stated matter-of-factly. "Tell me."
"I know he can't stay. I know we're on our own. And I know you'd better finish eating that or I'm going to take it from you." She made a playful grab towards him and he shoved the rest of the bar into his mouth, his eyes bulging and watering as he choked it down. It felt like the first time she'd laughed in years. And if she found that her hand had come to rest for just a second too long on Crede's leg... well what if it had?
[ To Chapter 28 ]
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: A Ten II action/adventure fic, with sci-fi, a bit of romance, and alt!Donna. The Doctor, Rose and Donna investigate an apocalyptic death cult, with a whole boatload of unforeseen consequences, including time travel, a mysterious planet with burnt-orange sky, and a human empire gone horribly wrong.
A/N: Are everyone's loins girded for tomorrow? Ten II and the gang will return for the final chapters after the dust from Elevensplosion clears.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23| Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26
Both suns were reaching their respective apexes in the burnt orange sky. Four figures of comically disparate heights were picking their way across ground covered with sharp, purple-veined scree. Hugging the edge of a rocky outcropping kept them in shadow, but didn't protect them from the view of anyone on the plains below the plateau around which they travelled.
"Do you think it worked?" Crede's eyes darted over to Theris, who looked just as uncomfortable with the situation.
"I don't even know what I'm doing," he grumbled, not really answering Crede's question.
"You're an outlaw!" the Doctor chirped. "Better than being an inlaw, believe me."
"We're still alive," Elpis said quietly, "so I'd say that's at least a tentative yes."
"Indeed we are," the Doctor mused. The two of them-Elpis and the Doctor-seemed to have formed some kind of grim bond. In the moments between the closing of the temporal failsafe and Theris dispatching a decoy distress beacon, Elpis had grown pensive. The Doctor also seemed to be talking less, as well, and had lost a certain spring in his step.
"You've saved our lives," Crede said to Theris.
"There's been a lot of that going around," the Doctor said.
"But I don't understand what's going on here," Theris said, kicking a small stone off the ledge they were walking across. It broke into several jagged pieces as soon as it hit the rocks below and the entire party hewed a bit closer to the stone wall behind them. "Who are you?"
The Doctor opened his mouth to speak, but Crede interrupted: "You should talk," he said. "I thought I'd never see you again. Your indenture was complete, but apparently you've been a guard this whole time. Why? Why would you want to stay on this gods-forsaken planet?"
Theris laughed coldly, a single, mirthless ha! "Stupid kid. You think we have a choice?"
"But... you were freed. I saw the ceremony myself. You said you were going off-world, to start a new life. You talked about it so much, no one could stand to listen to you any more."
"Turns out I was mistaken," Theris said, without emotion.
"Mistaken?" Crede asked.
"You and I were born to serve, you got that? Do you understand what that means?" Theris's voice grew louder and more gruff. "That's our whole point; it's why we exist. We're a resource, and that's all. You're no different than the aritanium this little sixer mines."
"Hey!" Elpis protested. "I've got a name."
Theris ignored her. "The day you see one of us actually living a free life will be the day the Proprietors start giving aritanium away. And at least I'm not sweating away in the laundry any more."
"No, you're lording it about the place, are you? Enjoying your extra rations and getting the indentures to fetch and carry for you? How many of them have you beaten for not shining your shoes the right way?"
"We're not all like that," Theris said, refusing to meet Crede's eye. "You wouldn't understand."
Both Crede and Elpis appeared to take a long breath of air in preparation for really giving Theris a piece of their minds, but the Doctor interrupted before they could begin.
"You know what I think?" He didn't wait for a response. "I think that we've all demonstrated to each other that there's more that connects us than divides us. Arguing with one another is what the Proprieters want, and it's why they keep this caste system in place. You really want to be free?"
The three of them looked either up or down at the Doctor with gobsmacked expressions. Elpis began to slowly nod, followed by the two humans, looking rather more sceptical.
"Then come with me. I've got a plan."
***
"You weren't lying when you said these readings were going mental," Rose said, casting her eyes over a series of computer monitors. "Any idea what it means?"
"We were hoping you could shed some light on that, " the young lab assistant said.
"I'm not really the expert on the theoretical stuff," Rose said. She cast a glance over to Donna, who was sporting an ugly Torchwood 'Visitor' badge and a smug look left-over from an encounter with one of her admirers on the security team.
"We're really more ladies of action," Donna confirmed.
"I'm sure you have a theory, though, yeah? Clever guy like you." Rose smiled, a little flirtatiously.
Paul Wilshire stood a little straighter and pushed his glasses up. "Yeah, loads. But they're all just guesses, really."
"Well, let's hear 'em," Rose said, and sat down on a nearby lab stool. Donna did the same.
Paul cast a glance over to the centre of the room, where the device still sat, along with Donna's old wristwatch, inside the faintly glowing blue circle of the time lock.
"Okay," Paul said, tentatively. "I think it's something to do with the device, and not the time lock. Dr. Chaudhry thinks that maybe the lock is failing-the fact that it worked at all is a miracle in the first place. But, if you look here," he pointed to print-out on a clipboard, "you can see that not all the readings are fluctuating. It's just this set here, while these others stay constant. From the beginning, we've had a hard time sorting out what forms of energy are coming from where, given that both a working time lock and the device inside are unprecedented But, if I had to guess-which, as a scientist, I'm only doing because you asked-my guess would be that something about the device inside the time lock has changed, while the lock itself is holding."
Donna looked at him and pursed her lips. "Changed-good, or changed-bad?" she asked.
"How do you mean?"
"I mean," Donna continued, a little impatiently, "are we all about to die?"
"Oh." Paul fiddled with the splitting edges of his own ID badge. "Well, that's not really something I have enough data to speculate on."
"Call Dr. Chaudhry," Rose said, or rather, ordered.
"Well, I don't think she'd have much more-"
"Just do it." Rose said with a steely tone in her voice that made Paul take a step backwards. "Please."
Donna stood and moved next to her friend, placing a hand on her shoulder. "I think what Ms. Tyler means to say is that you should just do it, please. Did I get that right?"
Rose nodded. "Yeah, that's about the size of it."
Paul hurried to a bank of phones across the room, casting furtive glances over his shoulder along the way.
"So, why is it so important to call in the big guns?" Donna whispered out of the corner of her mouth. "I mean, it is important, right? I didn't just back you up because you have a pressing need to ask Dr. Chaudhry where she gets her suits tailored."
"I think the Doctor's coming back."
Donna tilted her head. "Because of that stuff that Paul was talking about?"
"Other way around. The change in the device has to mean just one thing: the Doctor has disabled the temporal failsafe and it can be disarmed safely. He can come back now." She suddenly broke into a massive, toothy grin that made her nose wrinkle. "If there's one thing I know about the Doctor, it's that he doesn't stick around long after he's done saving the world. He's coming back, and he might need all the help Torchwood can provide."
***
"What the hell is that thing?" Theris stood a few feet away from the pod that the Doctor had originally arrived in, scratching his chin and squinting in the dim light of the cavern.
"Well, it's a lot of things, potentially," the Doctor said, stroking the smooth sides of the coffin-like pod he'd arrived on Cassiel in. This was the moment he'd been putting off thinking about. It was so easy to just focus on the short-term; he'd been doing so for most of his life. Save this one life, defuse this bomb, stop this invasion, and then... what? Find the next thing, run away, on to the next adventure.
"It's a time ship," Elpis noted, eyeing it suspiciously. She looked tired, ruffled. The Doctor realised, observing how wearily slumping against a boulder, that they were all in desperate need of food, water, and rest.
"Of a sort."
Theris, easily the least fatigued of the entire party, reached out a hand to touch it, shaking his head. "A time ship? On Cassiel? Now I know you're full of it," he snorted.
"It's true," said Crede, folding his long legs under him and sitting on the dusty ground. "Can it take you back home, Doctor?"
The Doctor's breath hitched, and for a terrifying moment his still-unfamiliar single heart seemed to stop beating.
Home. As Crede said the word, the image that sprung instantly before the Doctor's eyes was not of Gallifrey, or its shadow in the form of the planet he stood upon now, but of a little North London house with a garden that wanted weeding and a garage filled with half-disassembled cars.
And how he'd love to go back, right now. Have a hot shower, the greasiest fry-up imaginable, fall into the downy pleasures of Rose's bed, share a pint and a laugh with Donna. If he was completely human, that's exactly what he'd do, and a part of him had already planned all of those activities, down to the minute. Would the other Doctor happily cling to whatever broken wreckage of Gallifrey he could find, rather than yearning for Earth and Rose and axle grease under his nails? Had he changed so much from the man he was?
"I'm not going home," he said, and the words came out flat, dry as dirt.
No one else spoke for several pregnant seconds. Crede and Elpis shared a concerned look, but Theris, missing the meaning completely, stood dumbly scratching his scalp and staring at the capsule.
"But I thought all of this was to save your home," Crede said. "And now you're not going back?"
"It was to save everyone's home." The Doctor swallowed hard and reached deep, trying to find a well that would allow him to continue on this course without succumbing to the shameful temptation to leave this planet to its system of slavery and debasement-a state of affairs that was, in a manner of speaking, his fault. "But that means that nothing here changes, and I'm not having that."
He'd run history off its rails by destroying Gallifrey and marooning the slices of the multiverse away from the watchful eyes of those who could guide events towards favourable outcomes. But, he was here now. Several millennia too late, it would seem, but there was nothing that could be done about that, with a ship that only stopped at two timepoints.
"We've had rebellions before," Theris said. "They never amount to anything."
"I'm not talking about a rebellion." He felt for the latches that opened the capsule, releasing each in turn, to punctuate his words. "Who needs rebellion when you can just have a do-over? Sort of like... once more, with Time Lords." The pod opened with a hiss, revealing a tangle of wiring, faintly blinking lights, glowing digital read-outs, and enough space for one vaguely Doctor-shaped occupant.
"Neat," Crede said, sounding for once like the young boy he was-or would have been if he'd been allowed to have a real childhood.
"It's not quite operating on full power yet. It'll take a little while for me to get her up and running again."
"So you can go home," Crede remarked, still not quite getting it. The Doctor didn't have the energy to explain again how he was planning to give up a world he'd only just begun to grow comfortable in, and the first real family he'd had in centuries.
Instead, he turned to Theris. "You look like a man who's well-prepared for anything." He smiled, Theris's mask of rough scepticism slipped a bit. "I bet you've got some sort of nutritional supplement in that little pack of yours. I think it's time for a nice, friendly dinner for four."
***
"He can't stay," Elpis said, her voice low with both secrecy and fatigue.
Crede took another bite of the tasteless nutrition bar that Theris had passed around. "Why not? He says he wants to help us, and then maybe after that he can go home."
So naive, Elpis thought. She'd already seen the Doctor's face fall into grim resignation; had seen it hours and miles ago, back at the chamber full of weapons and explosives. Even when he smiled, there was regret behind it. She watched the back of his dusty blue suit as he poked in among the wires of the pod and ignored Theris's wholely unhelpful suggestions.
"He can't just wave a wand and free us, just like that."
"Well, I don't mind him staying. I like him." Crede paused, took another bite, and looked like he was considering something very carefully. "Are you afraid?" he asked, finally.
"Afraid?" Elpis couldn't think of a time in her life when she wasn't afraid. Afraid of the Proprietors and guards, afraid of a mining accident, afraid on behalf of her friends and loved-ones.
"Yeah. Afraid of fighting."
Elpis allowed herself a little half-smile; that was the one thing she wasn't afraid of.
"You know something," Crede stated matter-of-factly. "Tell me."
"I know he can't stay. I know we're on our own. And I know you'd better finish eating that or I'm going to take it from you." She made a playful grab towards him and he shoved the rest of the bar into his mouth, his eyes bulging and watering as he choked it down. It felt like the first time she'd laughed in years. And if she found that her hand had come to rest for just a second too long on Crede's leg... well what if it had?
[ To Chapter 28 ]