Held in Trust: Chapter 8
Title: Held in Trust (8/?)
Characters/Pairings:Duplicate Doctor/Rose, Alt!Donna, the Tyler clan, and lots of OC's.
Rating: Teen
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure!
Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine.Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Rose wondered whether anyone else at the party was noticing the frequency with which the Doctor kept checking his mobile. She watched out of the corner of her eye as he chatted with the head of the Vitex corporate giving program, reaching in to his pocket as he spoke, pulling his phone half way out, glancing down, and then dropping it back in to his pocket again. Every forty-eight seconds. Every forty-eight seconds exactly (Rose timed him by the second hand on the clock in the hallway right behind him).
The formal living room was crowded with executives, circling and cackling like birds of prey and waiting for an opportunity to approach the woman of the hour, to congratulate her on a job well done. Rose silently snorted to herself, a job not even half-done yet but Pete had proclaimed her plans for the roll out of the new Vitex flavour a resounding success already and worthy of a company fete.
And the Doctor checked his phone again.
Rose felt distressingly on-display, and knew she wasn't mistaken in that feeling. This party wasn't for Holly Berry Blast ("Feel the holiday spirit from the inside out!"), it was for her, to show the entire company Pete's confidence in her abilities, and to formally anoint her as his successor should the need arise. Vitex staff whom just two months previous had condescended to her at every available opportunity now lined up to flatter and gurn and generally act as if they hadn't been hoping and praying for the past three months that she'd fail miserably.
Forty-eight seconds. Pocket, phone, glance, back in pocket.
Rose clung tightly to her mother as cocktails circulated on silver trays carried by men in cheap rented tuxes and young women in black dresses. The irony was not lost on her, nor she suspected on the Doctor, though they hadn't spoken much since they arrived. This was in fact one of his first real society affairs, and he seemed to be impressing nearly everyone with his ease and charm. Until, that is, someone would ask him about his job and he'd speak just slightly too enthusiastically on the topic of his favourite set of spanners. Ah well, thought Rose, even if noblesse oblige takes the first battle, snobbery always wins the war. The circle of guests around him once again began to fracture and peel off in slow motion.
And then he checked his phone.
***
"This is totally up to you," Rose cut in to the Doctor's protracted preamble. "I mean, the Doctor was just about to get to that part, about how it's totally up to you. Weren't you, Doctor?"
He moved his glasses a bit down his nose as he turned his head to respond. "Quite. This is where the rubber meets the road, Donna Mott. Friction. Could get a little warm."
"Wait, are we talking about taking a Sunday drive or about going under cover." The words "going under cover" flew off of Donna's tongue a little too easily, made her sound over-eager. She willed herself to act natural, stop trying so hard.
"If you don't want to do it, if you want to take a nice relaxing holiday on Mallorca, we wouldn't blame you at all. We'd just find another way in." Rose smiled warmly, making Donna wonder for the thousandth time what was really behind that smile.
"Of course we would," the Doctor sniffed. "No problemo, molto bene, we'd just...er, well, I don't know what we'd do. But we'd do something!" He tugged on his ear and raised his eyebrows hopefully.
"Of course I'll do it, you numbskulls!" Donna barked, pointing an index finger at both of them as she did so. "Mallorca's got nothing on a time machine!"
Darkness.
Was this darkness caused by an actual lack of light, or was she blindfolded? With her hands tied behind her back and unable to feel her face, it was surprisingly difficult to tell. Donna scrunched her nose and blinked her eyes several times, finally feeling the resistance of fabric against her skin, and ticking that particular question off of her list.
Blindfolded, hands tied, laying on what felt like a wooden floor.
Alone?
She strained her ears to hear any sign of life. Breathing, talking, coughing, anything at all, but there was nothing but the sound of foxes crying in the distance. So, night time.
Her arms hurt from being in the same position for so long and she shifted around trying to find a more comfortable way to lay. Finding none, she struggled to a sitting position and started to refile all of the bits of memory that seemed to have gotten scattered all over the floor of her mind, out of order and strewn over a large area. She had a distinct impression that there was something very important among them, if only she could remember it, find it, put it back where it belonged.
"You there!"
The call came around the corner of the building and she couldn't work out how she'd been seen until she saw her own reflection in the glass of a nearby car parked on the grounds of the compound.
"Shit," she hissed, and put her phone away again, trying to discreetly tuck it inside her shirt, turning her back on the car where she'd been reflected.
"Hey!" the voice called again and the caller then came in to view. "What are you doing out here, we're supposed to be going in for supper." He looked nervously over her shoulder--he was a rather nervous chap just all around--and then took her arm gently and came in close to whisper. "I saw you with a phone."
"It's my old granddad," Donna whispered back. "He's been ill and I just wanted to see if there were any messages about how he's doing. You won't tell anyone, will you?"
She held her breath, watching the balding man with the long lank hair thinking it over. He'd seemed kind, if a bit of a lost soul, and had patiently helped her learn some of the routines around the compound. He didn't seem like a bad guy.
"It's just that I think what Gliese says is important, to make a clean break. You know, worrying about your granddad's health and all, you're just concentrating your energy on one individual. Come on, we're going to miss supper and being late doesn't really look good."
He seemed genuinely concerned for her well-being and Donna promised herself that whatever happened here, she'd make sure that he stayed far clear of any danger.
Her phone of course was gone now, but if she could figure out the time, how long it had been since she last sent the Doctor a message, she might now how long she'd have to wait before he and Rose missed her usual check-in and came to rescue her. They would come, of course. They had planned for this eventuality, though if she was honest she really had not been expecting it. Everyone on the compound seemed so nice, if a little dotty and out-to-lunch, and the assignment wasn't to cause any trouble, just to gather information.
There was a commotion suddenly that sounded like it was coming from outside the room she was in and her heart immediately leaped up in to her throat. They had come, apparently she'd been out cold for hours, and she was about to be rescued.
She heard a latch turn and heavy footsteps not indicative of someone wearing trainers, but rather heavy boots. She sat up, vainly turning her head this way and that, tilting it back to try and see out the bottom of the blindfold.
"Expecting someone?"
Gliese. She recognised his voice from the recordings that the Church members listened to while they ate their meals. Heavily accented, but not in a way that Donna could place (and no questions from her about where he was from, originally, were ever answered), but with a large vocabulary and calm, measured tones.
Donna shook her head mutely, searching for the right reactions to this situation--the response that would buy her time to wait for the cavalry. "Nah, it's just I can't see anything is all. You startled me."
"The time is now twenty-one hundred hours," Gliese said calmly, shutting the door behind him again. "Your accomplice, you phone him every day around this hour. A debriefing, am I right? This Doctor fellow, he seems to like sending young ladies in to do the dangerous bits for him. You're the second one, did you know that?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Donna replied. That's what you were supposed to say when tied up and interrogated, right? That's what people at the cinema always said.
"There was another, just a couple of weeks ago. Younger than you. Blond. Quite a fast runner but clumsy with dropping her tech. Did he not tell you?"
Despite the danger of the situation, or perhaps because of it, Donna felt a welling up of laughter from deep in the pit of her stomach. He was trying to make her jealous! Of Rose! He apparently thought the Doctor was some sort of intergalactic James Bond, and the image was just beyond ludicrous.
"Ha!" Donna finally barked. "Nice try, really. But next time, make sure there's actually something to be jealous of before trying to play that game with me. Though don't tell him you thought that, he's got a big enough head as it is."
There was a long pause and the swishing of fabric--a coat, some gloves perhaps, definitely outerwear of some kind. Donna filed that information away quite earnestly before realising that she was grasping at straws, that she was experiencing the beginning stages of panic, and that her heart had begun to pound so loud that it threatened to drown out the very sounds that she'd been so carefully attending to.
"Call him," Gliese finally ordered, sternly, yet calmly.
"What?"
"Your accomplice. I want you to call him, as if everything were fine."
Donna bit her bottom lip and waves of hot fear roved through her body, first one limb, then another, then encircling her chest and squeezing. If she called in, that would be another twenty-four hours, certainly time enough for the Church members to do any number of things to her. If the Doctor didn't hear from her, he and Rose could be here in the matter of a couple of hours. She'd seen how fast that little car could go, seemingly defying all laws of aerodynamics.
"No," she spat out, her tongue dry and thick in her mouth. "No I don't think I will, thank you. And for future reference, tying ladies up and blindfolding them is really not the way to get them to do what you want. You might try saying please--it is the magic word, you know."
"Doctor I think I found something, finally," she whispered in to the phone as she slipped through the shadows in a lesser-used portion of the compound.
"Oh good girl, Donna!" the Doctor enthused.
"Good what?"
"Sorry. I mean, well done, you. What have you got for us?"
Donna looked around furtively in the dark and crouched low to the ground behind a pile of firewood.
"I found where they're keeping all of...I dunno, all of the like alien doo-dads and stuff. You'd go mental if you saw all those little gadgets and wires and things."
The Doctor hummed pensively on his end of the line. "Well, at least we know for sure now they're more than just a weird cult. Do they really talk about aliens coming down to save you lot when the world ends? I mean, they all really believe it?"
Donna rolled her eyes. "Don't get a big ego, space man. They'd love you though. All life in the Universe, they're very big on that, the alien species--even though no one here has ever met an actual alien. We're supposed to put our energy out for all life in the Universe, because our little Earth is on the outs, no doubt about it."
"You must confess they've got a point there. I mean, I'm kind of cheating 'cos I read the last pages first, but this is not a good time for the home planet of the homo sapiens. You'll get through it all right though, that's a promise."
Donna laughed softly at the Doctor's utterly casual presumption. "You sound just like that Gliese bloke. You'll be best mates by the end of this, you mark my words."
***
To Rose's horror, Pete Tyler really did take a cocktail fork and tap on a crystal wine glass. The response was terrifyingly immediate, as if everyone in the room had just been waiting for this moment. She got the distinct impression that everyone else knew something she did not.
She looked around for the Doctor who just moments earlier had been speaking with the head of information security (and checking his phone) just a few feet away. She was going to absolutely murder him if something mortifying happened right now and he wasn't there to help her through it.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Pete began, and Jackie moved closer to her daughter. "I'd like to thank you all for coming out tonight, not just for the company, but for me personally.Vitex is now and will always be a family business, and I do consider you all to be family."
There was a polite smattering of applause and Pete raised his hand up modestly.
"Tonight has great significance to me both as a businessman and as a father," he continued. Rose felt the colour rising in her cheeks and looked about nervously, not really focusing her eyes in any particular place. That is, until she saw the rather unmistakable top of the Doctor's head bouncing up and down behind the sea of staid faces all now looking directly at her, all smiling limp, patronising smiles.
"Many of you have had the pleasure of working closely with my daughter Rose these past few months, as she learns the family trade. I would like to thank everyone here for being so welcoming, and so supportive."
At that Rose had to make a Herculean effort not to burst out laughing. Her father had no idea of the politics that raged outside his corner office door. Meanwhile, the Doctor's head had disappeared again and Rose moved on to studying the tops of her shoes very carefully.
"I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Rose for all of her hard work. I know it hasn't been easy coming in to the office with your old dad, but I'm so proud of you."
Rose felt the grip of familiar fingers on her wrist where held on to a door frame behind her back to keep from dying of parental mortification. Pete was now raising a glass of wine in a toast, people were applauding and also raising their glasses, and everyone--every single person, even the staff--was staring right at her. The Doctor began to tug her around the door in to the next room even as it became clear that all of the held-aloft wine glasses were waiting for her to acknowledge her father's speech and perhaps even make one of her own.
She raised her glass hastily and tried to smile her biggest, toothiest grin, willing the edges of her mouth up even as she tried to wrest her hand from the unseen Doctor on the other side of the door.
"I'm not really one for speeches," she said, catching the embarrassing quaver in her own voice. "I much prefer to just, you know, get things done. So, hooray and all that, dad. It's been a...it's been a time! Please just everyone enjoy the party. Cheers!"
Before she could even bring her own glass to her lips, she was tugged around the corner quite forcefully and brought face to face with the Doctor again.
"Oi, what was that all about? You were supposed to rescue me before I had to do anything like that, not during," she hissed, looking around to see if anyone had actually noticed her hasty exit.
"We have to go," the Doctor said matter-of-factly. "Now."
"I don't think we're allowed to yet."
The Doctor held his mobile up for her inspection. "Donna hasn't rung and it has now been twenty-five hours, sixteen minutes and--"
"Forty-eight seconds?"
He nodded.
"I'll get my coat," she whispered, ducking down behind a cabinet and pulling him down with her as the door opened a crack and her mother peered in.
"I'll meet you at the car."
(To Chapter 9: A dependable companion)
Characters/Pairings:Duplicate Doctor/Rose, Alt!Donna, the Tyler clan, and lots of OC's.
Rating: Teen
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure!
Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine.Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Rose wondered whether anyone else at the party was noticing the frequency with which the Doctor kept checking his mobile. She watched out of the corner of her eye as he chatted with the head of the Vitex corporate giving program, reaching in to his pocket as he spoke, pulling his phone half way out, glancing down, and then dropping it back in to his pocket again. Every forty-eight seconds. Every forty-eight seconds exactly (Rose timed him by the second hand on the clock in the hallway right behind him).
The formal living room was crowded with executives, circling and cackling like birds of prey and waiting for an opportunity to approach the woman of the hour, to congratulate her on a job well done. Rose silently snorted to herself, a job not even half-done yet but Pete had proclaimed her plans for the roll out of the new Vitex flavour a resounding success already and worthy of a company fete.
And the Doctor checked his phone again.
Rose felt distressingly on-display, and knew she wasn't mistaken in that feeling. This party wasn't for Holly Berry Blast ("Feel the holiday spirit from the inside out!"), it was for her, to show the entire company Pete's confidence in her abilities, and to formally anoint her as his successor should the need arise. Vitex staff whom just two months previous had condescended to her at every available opportunity now lined up to flatter and gurn and generally act as if they hadn't been hoping and praying for the past three months that she'd fail miserably.
Forty-eight seconds. Pocket, phone, glance, back in pocket.
Rose clung tightly to her mother as cocktails circulated on silver trays carried by men in cheap rented tuxes and young women in black dresses. The irony was not lost on her, nor she suspected on the Doctor, though they hadn't spoken much since they arrived. This was in fact one of his first real society affairs, and he seemed to be impressing nearly everyone with his ease and charm. Until, that is, someone would ask him about his job and he'd speak just slightly too enthusiastically on the topic of his favourite set of spanners. Ah well, thought Rose, even if noblesse oblige takes the first battle, snobbery always wins the war. The circle of guests around him once again began to fracture and peel off in slow motion.
And then he checked his phone.
***
"This is totally up to you," Rose cut in to the Doctor's protracted preamble. "I mean, the Doctor was just about to get to that part, about how it's totally up to you. Weren't you, Doctor?"
He moved his glasses a bit down his nose as he turned his head to respond. "Quite. This is where the rubber meets the road, Donna Mott. Friction. Could get a little warm."
"Wait, are we talking about taking a Sunday drive or about going under cover." The words "going under cover" flew off of Donna's tongue a little too easily, made her sound over-eager. She willed herself to act natural, stop trying so hard.
"If you don't want to do it, if you want to take a nice relaxing holiday on Mallorca, we wouldn't blame you at all. We'd just find another way in." Rose smiled warmly, making Donna wonder for the thousandth time what was really behind that smile.
"Of course we would," the Doctor sniffed. "No problemo, molto bene, we'd just...er, well, I don't know what we'd do. But we'd do something!" He tugged on his ear and raised his eyebrows hopefully.
"Of course I'll do it, you numbskulls!" Donna barked, pointing an index finger at both of them as she did so. "Mallorca's got nothing on a time machine!"
Darkness.
Was this darkness caused by an actual lack of light, or was she blindfolded? With her hands tied behind her back and unable to feel her face, it was surprisingly difficult to tell. Donna scrunched her nose and blinked her eyes several times, finally feeling the resistance of fabric against her skin, and ticking that particular question off of her list.
Blindfolded, hands tied, laying on what felt like a wooden floor.
Alone?
She strained her ears to hear any sign of life. Breathing, talking, coughing, anything at all, but there was nothing but the sound of foxes crying in the distance. So, night time.
Her arms hurt from being in the same position for so long and she shifted around trying to find a more comfortable way to lay. Finding none, she struggled to a sitting position and started to refile all of the bits of memory that seemed to have gotten scattered all over the floor of her mind, out of order and strewn over a large area. She had a distinct impression that there was something very important among them, if only she could remember it, find it, put it back where it belonged.
"You there!"
The call came around the corner of the building and she couldn't work out how she'd been seen until she saw her own reflection in the glass of a nearby car parked on the grounds of the compound.
"Shit," she hissed, and put her phone away again, trying to discreetly tuck it inside her shirt, turning her back on the car where she'd been reflected.
"Hey!" the voice called again and the caller then came in to view. "What are you doing out here, we're supposed to be going in for supper." He looked nervously over her shoulder--he was a rather nervous chap just all around--and then took her arm gently and came in close to whisper. "I saw you with a phone."
"It's my old granddad," Donna whispered back. "He's been ill and I just wanted to see if there were any messages about how he's doing. You won't tell anyone, will you?"
She held her breath, watching the balding man with the long lank hair thinking it over. He'd seemed kind, if a bit of a lost soul, and had patiently helped her learn some of the routines around the compound. He didn't seem like a bad guy.
"It's just that I think what Gliese says is important, to make a clean break. You know, worrying about your granddad's health and all, you're just concentrating your energy on one individual. Come on, we're going to miss supper and being late doesn't really look good."
He seemed genuinely concerned for her well-being and Donna promised herself that whatever happened here, she'd make sure that he stayed far clear of any danger.
Her phone of course was gone now, but if she could figure out the time, how long it had been since she last sent the Doctor a message, she might now how long she'd have to wait before he and Rose missed her usual check-in and came to rescue her. They would come, of course. They had planned for this eventuality, though if she was honest she really had not been expecting it. Everyone on the compound seemed so nice, if a little dotty and out-to-lunch, and the assignment wasn't to cause any trouble, just to gather information.
There was a commotion suddenly that sounded like it was coming from outside the room she was in and her heart immediately leaped up in to her throat. They had come, apparently she'd been out cold for hours, and she was about to be rescued.
She heard a latch turn and heavy footsteps not indicative of someone wearing trainers, but rather heavy boots. She sat up, vainly turning her head this way and that, tilting it back to try and see out the bottom of the blindfold.
"Expecting someone?"
Gliese. She recognised his voice from the recordings that the Church members listened to while they ate their meals. Heavily accented, but not in a way that Donna could place (and no questions from her about where he was from, originally, were ever answered), but with a large vocabulary and calm, measured tones.
Donna shook her head mutely, searching for the right reactions to this situation--the response that would buy her time to wait for the cavalry. "Nah, it's just I can't see anything is all. You startled me."
"The time is now twenty-one hundred hours," Gliese said calmly, shutting the door behind him again. "Your accomplice, you phone him every day around this hour. A debriefing, am I right? This Doctor fellow, he seems to like sending young ladies in to do the dangerous bits for him. You're the second one, did you know that?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Donna replied. That's what you were supposed to say when tied up and interrogated, right? That's what people at the cinema always said.
"There was another, just a couple of weeks ago. Younger than you. Blond. Quite a fast runner but clumsy with dropping her tech. Did he not tell you?"
Despite the danger of the situation, or perhaps because of it, Donna felt a welling up of laughter from deep in the pit of her stomach. He was trying to make her jealous! Of Rose! He apparently thought the Doctor was some sort of intergalactic James Bond, and the image was just beyond ludicrous.
"Ha!" Donna finally barked. "Nice try, really. But next time, make sure there's actually something to be jealous of before trying to play that game with me. Though don't tell him you thought that, he's got a big enough head as it is."
There was a long pause and the swishing of fabric--a coat, some gloves perhaps, definitely outerwear of some kind. Donna filed that information away quite earnestly before realising that she was grasping at straws, that she was experiencing the beginning stages of panic, and that her heart had begun to pound so loud that it threatened to drown out the very sounds that she'd been so carefully attending to.
"Call him," Gliese finally ordered, sternly, yet calmly.
"What?"
"Your accomplice. I want you to call him, as if everything were fine."
Donna bit her bottom lip and waves of hot fear roved through her body, first one limb, then another, then encircling her chest and squeezing. If she called in, that would be another twenty-four hours, certainly time enough for the Church members to do any number of things to her. If the Doctor didn't hear from her, he and Rose could be here in the matter of a couple of hours. She'd seen how fast that little car could go, seemingly defying all laws of aerodynamics.
"No," she spat out, her tongue dry and thick in her mouth. "No I don't think I will, thank you. And for future reference, tying ladies up and blindfolding them is really not the way to get them to do what you want. You might try saying please--it is the magic word, you know."
"Doctor I think I found something, finally," she whispered in to the phone as she slipped through the shadows in a lesser-used portion of the compound.
"Oh good girl, Donna!" the Doctor enthused.
"Good what?"
"Sorry. I mean, well done, you. What have you got for us?"
Donna looked around furtively in the dark and crouched low to the ground behind a pile of firewood.
"I found where they're keeping all of...I dunno, all of the like alien doo-dads and stuff. You'd go mental if you saw all those little gadgets and wires and things."
The Doctor hummed pensively on his end of the line. "Well, at least we know for sure now they're more than just a weird cult. Do they really talk about aliens coming down to save you lot when the world ends? I mean, they all really believe it?"
Donna rolled her eyes. "Don't get a big ego, space man. They'd love you though. All life in the Universe, they're very big on that, the alien species--even though no one here has ever met an actual alien. We're supposed to put our energy out for all life in the Universe, because our little Earth is on the outs, no doubt about it."
"You must confess they've got a point there. I mean, I'm kind of cheating 'cos I read the last pages first, but this is not a good time for the home planet of the homo sapiens. You'll get through it all right though, that's a promise."
Donna laughed softly at the Doctor's utterly casual presumption. "You sound just like that Gliese bloke. You'll be best mates by the end of this, you mark my words."
***
To Rose's horror, Pete Tyler really did take a cocktail fork and tap on a crystal wine glass. The response was terrifyingly immediate, as if everyone in the room had just been waiting for this moment. She got the distinct impression that everyone else knew something she did not.
She looked around for the Doctor who just moments earlier had been speaking with the head of information security (and checking his phone) just a few feet away. She was going to absolutely murder him if something mortifying happened right now and he wasn't there to help her through it.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Pete began, and Jackie moved closer to her daughter. "I'd like to thank you all for coming out tonight, not just for the company, but for me personally.Vitex is now and will always be a family business, and I do consider you all to be family."
There was a polite smattering of applause and Pete raised his hand up modestly.
"Tonight has great significance to me both as a businessman and as a father," he continued. Rose felt the colour rising in her cheeks and looked about nervously, not really focusing her eyes in any particular place. That is, until she saw the rather unmistakable top of the Doctor's head bouncing up and down behind the sea of staid faces all now looking directly at her, all smiling limp, patronising smiles.
"Many of you have had the pleasure of working closely with my daughter Rose these past few months, as she learns the family trade. I would like to thank everyone here for being so welcoming, and so supportive."
At that Rose had to make a Herculean effort not to burst out laughing. Her father had no idea of the politics that raged outside his corner office door. Meanwhile, the Doctor's head had disappeared again and Rose moved on to studying the tops of her shoes very carefully.
"I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Rose for all of her hard work. I know it hasn't been easy coming in to the office with your old dad, but I'm so proud of you."
Rose felt the grip of familiar fingers on her wrist where held on to a door frame behind her back to keep from dying of parental mortification. Pete was now raising a glass of wine in a toast, people were applauding and also raising their glasses, and everyone--every single person, even the staff--was staring right at her. The Doctor began to tug her around the door in to the next room even as it became clear that all of the held-aloft wine glasses were waiting for her to acknowledge her father's speech and perhaps even make one of her own.
She raised her glass hastily and tried to smile her biggest, toothiest grin, willing the edges of her mouth up even as she tried to wrest her hand from the unseen Doctor on the other side of the door.
"I'm not really one for speeches," she said, catching the embarrassing quaver in her own voice. "I much prefer to just, you know, get things done. So, hooray and all that, dad. It's been a...it's been a time! Please just everyone enjoy the party. Cheers!"
Before she could even bring her own glass to her lips, she was tugged around the corner quite forcefully and brought face to face with the Doctor again.
"Oi, what was that all about? You were supposed to rescue me before I had to do anything like that, not during," she hissed, looking around to see if anyone had actually noticed her hasty exit.
"We have to go," the Doctor said matter-of-factly. "Now."
"I don't think we're allowed to yet."
The Doctor held his mobile up for her inspection. "Donna hasn't rung and it has now been twenty-five hours, sixteen minutes and--"
"Forty-eight seconds?"
He nodded.
"I'll get my coat," she whispered, ducking down behind a cabinet and pulling him down with her as the door opened a crack and her mother peered in.
"I'll meet you at the car."
(To Chapter 9: A dependable companion)