Held in Trust: Chapter 10
Title: Held in Trust (10/?)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Most chapters Teen (Adult chapters noted as such)
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
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. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
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.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9
Additional A/N: Sorry guys wow that took a long time to get up. There was a hiatus for the writing of Xenohorticulture but 10 days between chapters is just unforgivable. I beg your pardon, everyone!
"Well it's a good thing we're doing this now rather than after Christmas. We'd neither of us fit through there after mum's pudding!" Rose took the measure of a narrow hole in the chain link that she presumed both she and the Doctor were supposed to pass through and in to the compound of the Church of the Final Singularity.
"It's the only gap Donna could find," the Doctor muttered as he rubbed the back of his head and angled his body this way and that experimentally. "Right where she said it would be though."
"Here, you pull this bit back for me and I'll do it for you when I get through." She indicated the sharp, jagged edge of the fence where it seemed to have at some point been cut with wire-cutters.
They both looked around furtively before performing the operation, which involved a lot of sotto voce cursing, inconveniently-timed snagging of fabric, and sucking-in of stomachs. The Doctor wound up putting a hole in the leg of his suit, which he lamented the entire time they spent darting from shadow to shadow around the outbuildings of the compound.
They stopped to crouch behind a small shed that just seemed to contain a lot of farming equipment spare parts. "Right," the Doctor whispered, "I reckon you can go and find Donna, whatever's become of her, and I'll take a closer look at what these folks are hiding. We can meet back at that hole in the fence and decide where to go from there, providing we don't raise the alarm in the process."
"And if we do?"
The Doctor shrugged. "Run for your lives?"
Rose smiled, nodded, and kissed him gently on the lips before moving silently off in to the shadow of the next building, and then further off in to the night. He took a moment to settle his mind and poke a bit more at the hole in his trousers, before creeping around to the other side of the building to peer in a window. Nothing inside seemed to be any more alien or futuristic than a rusty old ploughshare and he concluded that this was not the building full of alien tech that Donna had spoken of.
He hugged the wall of the little shed and looked towards the few lights that seemed to be on in the more populated areas of the compound. Now that he was here in person, he could tell something wasn't right. Well, not right in the way that anything was necessarily "right" or "not right", meaning, relatively speaking, something was not playing fair with the other timelines on the playground. There was a tickle in his parietal lobe, a funny little hiccup that he hadn't felt in a very long time indeed. It made him want to scratch his head, it was such a visceral itch.
He closed his eyes, thinking this would be the moment to separate the men from the half-human Time Lords. Where was the kink in the hose, the rock in the stream that was diverting the flow of time around it? Overlaying the temporal map on to the spatial should have been easy, but he was woefully out of practise. With no TARDIS constantly lighting his senses up like a Christmas tree just by her mere existence in the universe, he feared they were beginning to atrophy.
Finally he felt a compulsion to move in a particular direction, which surprised him in its sudden urgency. As he scurried--hunched over, though upon reflection it was just as likely that he'd be spotted as a three-foot intruder as a six-foot one--the temporal tickle began to bleed over in to his more mundane senses. Unseen hands stroked his skin, going from a flutter to unpleasant grappling as he moved across the compound. The edges of his vision wobbled as if made of gelatin, though if he turned his head and looked, everything was as firm as it ought to be. He thought he heard voices, muttering and keening in the distance, but knew he was, so far, still alone and the night around him was silent.
Once upon a time, these spikes of sensation were par for the course, welcome even at times when dull grief or pale uncertainty fell heavy on him. It had, however, been so long since he'd been around a serious disturbance in time--maybe not long in linear time, but in the reckoning of his one lonely heart--it was now both thrilling and terrifying.
He kept up his pace and even began to smell the burning, taste the bitterness in his mouth of time gone out of sequence. Like the metallic taste of a penny, certainly there was a paradox in the offing here. He quailed, and felt the blood drain from his face.
Paradox. The notion sickened him, physically. He gulped back the rising bile and rounded the side of a darkened outbuilding, made of cinder blocks with just one window at the back. This was the source of his discomfiture, he was sure of it even before looking through the window and seeing what was housed inside.
***
Rose scurried from shadow to shadow as well, trying to keep herself alert to any sound or movement while at the same time playing in her mind with the possibilities. Perhaps Donna's mobile had just run out of juice, or she'd lost it, or dropped it in the loo. Could be there was some gathering she was attending that she couldn't quite get away from in order to make her call. It had been two hours now since the appointed time and they hadn't heard from her on their drive, but that didn't necessarily mean she was in trouble.
Or she could be. At the thought, an unmistakable feeling of guilt rose in her throat such that she had to push it back down to think clearly again.
She heard voices and approaching footfalls and ducked behind a heating oil tank. The appearance of the two men she saw walking towards her through the gloom at first didn't cause her any overt shock, and she had to remind herself that actual non-humans really were not something she should be seeing on a converted farmstead in Somerset.
Or at least, one non-human. The man on the left appeared normal enough, sandy-haired and ruddy-faced, and talking quite a bit with his hands. The man on the right, however, was firmly in the "other" column. Humanoid, to be sure, but all sort of stretched out like he'd been grasped at either end and pulled. He towered over the other man by a good two feet, but did not posses the characteristic bulk of the abnormally tall. He was slight, slender, even beautiful, and moved gracefully.
"What do you want to do with her?" the shorter man asked, walking briskly and trying to keep up with the long, fluid strides of the other.
"She refused to call her accomplices, but that doesn't really matter now. It's almost time, and I'd rather concentrate on greater matters. Do what you think is best, Eridani." The tall man had an accent that Rose couldn't quite place, though it was clear to her that they were discussing Donna.
The sandy-haired man nodded deferentially and they both continued walking together towards another cluster of buildings on the other side of the compound.
So, they had Donna detained somehow, and had tried to get her to call in, which means they knew she'd been calling all along. Rose stood again and surveyed her immediate area for any other pedestrians before heading in the direction the two men had come from. The tall humanoid had seemed almost bored by the question of what to do with her, and Rose wondered what it was almost time for. Perhaps the rest of his people were about to invade--this struck her as a likely possibility and probably more of a job for Torchwood rather than a rogue former agent, her half-human lover, and his best mate, the temp from Chiswick.
There was a light bulb dangling on the end of a wire that Rose could see clearly through a window in a squat clapboard building. If that didn't take the cake for most stereotypical holding cell ever, she didn't know what would, and she approached warily, ready for guards, or perhaps more aliens, to be inside.
Peeking in the window however, there was nothing of the sort. The building was empty and seemed to contain two rooms, with a shut and locked door between them. Looking in on the room with the hanging light bulb, there was no one. Just a couple old wooden chairs and a naff-looking Formica table. She crept over to the other side and raised her head up to look in another window, to find a darkened room with just a sliver of light coming in from under the door.
Donna Mott sat against one wall, blindfolded, hands tied behind her back. Rose felt an anger rise in her that she hadn't really been prepared for. She'd known since getting in the car at her parents' house that this mission would likely involve rescuing Donna from a circumstance such as this, but now seeing her treated like a criminal, Rose became furious--the kind of fury that usually serves to shout over other more uncomfortable emotions. Tie the Doctor up, she thought, he usually deserved it, but Donna was an innocent, sent here just to gather information harmlessly.
Rose scrambled back around to the front door of the little building, her trainers not as quiet as she'd have liked them to be on the wooden stairs, and entered. The room that held Donna was locked only with a single deadbolt, which Rose slid with rusty-sounding scrape. Donna looked around blindly as Rose entered, and she immediately began to talk defiantly.
"Yeah, I've given some thought to it, Gliese, and I don't really think I fancy your vision. You do think big though, I'll give you that."
"Donna," Rose whispered. "Donna, it's me."
"Rose?" Donna continued to swivel her head about, and even with the blindfold on, Rose could see the proud expression on Donna's face begin to slide off like a mask.
"Yeah."
Rose marched over and pulled the blindfold off before getting to work on the plastic tie that held Donna's wrists together behind her back.
"Is the Doctor here too?" Donna asked, now looking through the aperture of the door in to the other room.
"He's here, but we've split up. Bugger this plastic, I'll need to get something sharp." Rose stood again and moved in to the doorway to scan the other room for any possible implements that might do as a cutting tool.
"We have to stop him," Donna said quickly, jumbling her words together. When Rose looked back she saw that her chest was rising and falling rapidly, the beginning stages of panic.
"Stop who? That tall bloke is it?" Rose remained calm, jaunty even. She knew, one way to make a panicking person panic even more was to get anxious right along with them.
"I never saw him so I dunno, but Gliese, the leader. I remembered what I was going to call you and tell you tonight."
Rose located a rusty file with a bit of a sharpened edge and came back to begin sawing at Donna's bonds.
"What's that?" Rose grunted as she began to consider that she might melt the plastic rather than cut it, given all the friction being created--and lack of actual cutting.
"The Church of the Final Singularity. The Doctor said a singularity can mean a lot of things, like a change in technology or something like that, yeah? And when I got here I thought that's what the name must mean, they're so keen on aliens coming down and bringing peace or whatever, and they have all those alien gizmos all stored up. But--"
Rose finally managed to get the file through the tie, and Donna brought her arms forward again with a groan.
"But?" Rose enquired as Donna took a moment to rub her reddened wrists.
"But that's not what it is at all. What Gliese wants, it's not a metaphorical singularity or something to do with maths on a page, Rose, it's literal." Donna's breathing was shallow, her eyes wide and staring. "He means to make a black hole."
(To Chapter 11: Better safe than sorry)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Most chapters Teen (Adult chapters noted as such)
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
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. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
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.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9
Additional A/N: Sorry guys wow that took a long time to get up. There was a hiatus for the writing of Xenohorticulture but 10 days between chapters is just unforgivable. I beg your pardon, everyone!
"Well it's a good thing we're doing this now rather than after Christmas. We'd neither of us fit through there after mum's pudding!" Rose took the measure of a narrow hole in the chain link that she presumed both she and the Doctor were supposed to pass through and in to the compound of the Church of the Final Singularity.
"It's the only gap Donna could find," the Doctor muttered as he rubbed the back of his head and angled his body this way and that experimentally. "Right where she said it would be though."
"Here, you pull this bit back for me and I'll do it for you when I get through." She indicated the sharp, jagged edge of the fence where it seemed to have at some point been cut with wire-cutters.
They both looked around furtively before performing the operation, which involved a lot of sotto voce cursing, inconveniently-timed snagging of fabric, and sucking-in of stomachs. The Doctor wound up putting a hole in the leg of his suit, which he lamented the entire time they spent darting from shadow to shadow around the outbuildings of the compound.
They stopped to crouch behind a small shed that just seemed to contain a lot of farming equipment spare parts. "Right," the Doctor whispered, "I reckon you can go and find Donna, whatever's become of her, and I'll take a closer look at what these folks are hiding. We can meet back at that hole in the fence and decide where to go from there, providing we don't raise the alarm in the process."
"And if we do?"
The Doctor shrugged. "Run for your lives?"
Rose smiled, nodded, and kissed him gently on the lips before moving silently off in to the shadow of the next building, and then further off in to the night. He took a moment to settle his mind and poke a bit more at the hole in his trousers, before creeping around to the other side of the building to peer in a window. Nothing inside seemed to be any more alien or futuristic than a rusty old ploughshare and he concluded that this was not the building full of alien tech that Donna had spoken of.
He hugged the wall of the little shed and looked towards the few lights that seemed to be on in the more populated areas of the compound. Now that he was here in person, he could tell something wasn't right. Well, not right in the way that anything was necessarily "right" or "not right", meaning, relatively speaking, something was not playing fair with the other timelines on the playground. There was a tickle in his parietal lobe, a funny little hiccup that he hadn't felt in a very long time indeed. It made him want to scratch his head, it was such a visceral itch.
He closed his eyes, thinking this would be the moment to separate the men from the half-human Time Lords. Where was the kink in the hose, the rock in the stream that was diverting the flow of time around it? Overlaying the temporal map on to the spatial should have been easy, but he was woefully out of practise. With no TARDIS constantly lighting his senses up like a Christmas tree just by her mere existence in the universe, he feared they were beginning to atrophy.
Finally he felt a compulsion to move in a particular direction, which surprised him in its sudden urgency. As he scurried--hunched over, though upon reflection it was just as likely that he'd be spotted as a three-foot intruder as a six-foot one--the temporal tickle began to bleed over in to his more mundane senses. Unseen hands stroked his skin, going from a flutter to unpleasant grappling as he moved across the compound. The edges of his vision wobbled as if made of gelatin, though if he turned his head and looked, everything was as firm as it ought to be. He thought he heard voices, muttering and keening in the distance, but knew he was, so far, still alone and the night around him was silent.
Once upon a time, these spikes of sensation were par for the course, welcome even at times when dull grief or pale uncertainty fell heavy on him. It had, however, been so long since he'd been around a serious disturbance in time--maybe not long in linear time, but in the reckoning of his one lonely heart--it was now both thrilling and terrifying.
He kept up his pace and even began to smell the burning, taste the bitterness in his mouth of time gone out of sequence. Like the metallic taste of a penny, certainly there was a paradox in the offing here. He quailed, and felt the blood drain from his face.
Paradox. The notion sickened him, physically. He gulped back the rising bile and rounded the side of a darkened outbuilding, made of cinder blocks with just one window at the back. This was the source of his discomfiture, he was sure of it even before looking through the window and seeing what was housed inside.
***
Rose scurried from shadow to shadow as well, trying to keep herself alert to any sound or movement while at the same time playing in her mind with the possibilities. Perhaps Donna's mobile had just run out of juice, or she'd lost it, or dropped it in the loo. Could be there was some gathering she was attending that she couldn't quite get away from in order to make her call. It had been two hours now since the appointed time and they hadn't heard from her on their drive, but that didn't necessarily mean she was in trouble.
Or she could be. At the thought, an unmistakable feeling of guilt rose in her throat such that she had to push it back down to think clearly again.
She heard voices and approaching footfalls and ducked behind a heating oil tank. The appearance of the two men she saw walking towards her through the gloom at first didn't cause her any overt shock, and she had to remind herself that actual non-humans really were not something she should be seeing on a converted farmstead in Somerset.
Or at least, one non-human. The man on the left appeared normal enough, sandy-haired and ruddy-faced, and talking quite a bit with his hands. The man on the right, however, was firmly in the "other" column. Humanoid, to be sure, but all sort of stretched out like he'd been grasped at either end and pulled. He towered over the other man by a good two feet, but did not posses the characteristic bulk of the abnormally tall. He was slight, slender, even beautiful, and moved gracefully.
"What do you want to do with her?" the shorter man asked, walking briskly and trying to keep up with the long, fluid strides of the other.
"She refused to call her accomplices, but that doesn't really matter now. It's almost time, and I'd rather concentrate on greater matters. Do what you think is best, Eridani." The tall man had an accent that Rose couldn't quite place, though it was clear to her that they were discussing Donna.
The sandy-haired man nodded deferentially and they both continued walking together towards another cluster of buildings on the other side of the compound.
So, they had Donna detained somehow, and had tried to get her to call in, which means they knew she'd been calling all along. Rose stood again and surveyed her immediate area for any other pedestrians before heading in the direction the two men had come from. The tall humanoid had seemed almost bored by the question of what to do with her, and Rose wondered what it was almost time for. Perhaps the rest of his people were about to invade--this struck her as a likely possibility and probably more of a job for Torchwood rather than a rogue former agent, her half-human lover, and his best mate, the temp from Chiswick.
There was a light bulb dangling on the end of a wire that Rose could see clearly through a window in a squat clapboard building. If that didn't take the cake for most stereotypical holding cell ever, she didn't know what would, and she approached warily, ready for guards, or perhaps more aliens, to be inside.
Peeking in the window however, there was nothing of the sort. The building was empty and seemed to contain two rooms, with a shut and locked door between them. Looking in on the room with the hanging light bulb, there was no one. Just a couple old wooden chairs and a naff-looking Formica table. She crept over to the other side and raised her head up to look in another window, to find a darkened room with just a sliver of light coming in from under the door.
Donna Mott sat against one wall, blindfolded, hands tied behind her back. Rose felt an anger rise in her that she hadn't really been prepared for. She'd known since getting in the car at her parents' house that this mission would likely involve rescuing Donna from a circumstance such as this, but now seeing her treated like a criminal, Rose became furious--the kind of fury that usually serves to shout over other more uncomfortable emotions. Tie the Doctor up, she thought, he usually deserved it, but Donna was an innocent, sent here just to gather information harmlessly.
Rose scrambled back around to the front door of the little building, her trainers not as quiet as she'd have liked them to be on the wooden stairs, and entered. The room that held Donna was locked only with a single deadbolt, which Rose slid with rusty-sounding scrape. Donna looked around blindly as Rose entered, and she immediately began to talk defiantly.
"Yeah, I've given some thought to it, Gliese, and I don't really think I fancy your vision. You do think big though, I'll give you that."
"Donna," Rose whispered. "Donna, it's me."
"Rose?" Donna continued to swivel her head about, and even with the blindfold on, Rose could see the proud expression on Donna's face begin to slide off like a mask.
"Yeah."
Rose marched over and pulled the blindfold off before getting to work on the plastic tie that held Donna's wrists together behind her back.
"Is the Doctor here too?" Donna asked, now looking through the aperture of the door in to the other room.
"He's here, but we've split up. Bugger this plastic, I'll need to get something sharp." Rose stood again and moved in to the doorway to scan the other room for any possible implements that might do as a cutting tool.
"We have to stop him," Donna said quickly, jumbling her words together. When Rose looked back she saw that her chest was rising and falling rapidly, the beginning stages of panic.
"Stop who? That tall bloke is it?" Rose remained calm, jaunty even. She knew, one way to make a panicking person panic even more was to get anxious right along with them.
"I never saw him so I dunno, but Gliese, the leader. I remembered what I was going to call you and tell you tonight."
Rose located a rusty file with a bit of a sharpened edge and came back to begin sawing at Donna's bonds.
"What's that?" Rose grunted as she began to consider that she might melt the plastic rather than cut it, given all the friction being created--and lack of actual cutting.
"The Church of the Final Singularity. The Doctor said a singularity can mean a lot of things, like a change in technology or something like that, yeah? And when I got here I thought that's what the name must mean, they're so keen on aliens coming down and bringing peace or whatever, and they have all those alien gizmos all stored up. But--"
Rose finally managed to get the file through the tie, and Donna brought her arms forward again with a groan.
"But?" Rose enquired as Donna took a moment to rub her reddened wrists.
"But that's not what it is at all. What Gliese wants, it's not a metaphorical singularity or something to do with maths on a page, Rose, it's literal." Donna's breathing was shallow, her eyes wide and staring. "He means to make a black hole."
(To Chapter 11: Better safe than sorry)