Held in Trust: Chapter 17
Title: Held in Trust (17/?)
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 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16
For the first time in his brief existence as a human, the Doctor was glad to have the blunted olfactory sense of the homo sapiens. He had landed with a soft thwack on top of a mountain of dirty laundry--and not just dirty laundry but the dirty laundry of three dozen different species of manual labourers. A full Time Lord would have been able to identify every single one of them by their body odour, whether he'd wanted to or not.
As it was, the smell stuck in the back of his throat and made him gag as he buried himself among the dun-coloured coveralls (with varying numbers of arms and legs and in a dizzying array of sizes). He could well believe that toxic chemicals and radiation might indeed be the only ways to deal with a stench of this calibre.
He spent some time being tossed about in the lorry as it negotiated the unpaved road in to the fenced-in compound of squat industrial buildings that Crede had referred to as his work unit, before it came to a rather jarring halt and began to move in reverse. Voices rang out on either side--various calls and responses that made little sense out of context--and he clutched several of the larger garments around him, waiting somewhat nervously for whatever it was that would happen next.
It was not a long wait before the world began to pitch up and forward and the Doctor found himself tumbling down an ever-increasing incline. His impulse was to flail his limbs and look for purchase to keep himself from sliding, but he knew that would merely serve to reveal himself as the clothes were dumped out and one extremely flustered half-human/half-Time Lord was left clinging to the inside of the lorry bed by his fingernails. So, he curled himself in to a ball as best as he could and, against all the frenzied advice that his hind-brain was giving him, let himself roll and fall, as if he were no different from the rest of the cargo.
The flat surface that he and the reeking coveralls landed upon was itself curiously moving, that much he could tell without risking unburying himself and looking around. The sound of heavy machinery and the voices of operators having to shout to one another over the din grew ever closer and he began to wonder--just an idle thought, really--what if Crede didn't come through? What if he'd been held up or gotten in to some sort of trouble?
This was cut short, however, by a sudden and brief free-fall, followed by a struggle to claw his way out from under the crushing weight of the clothes that had piled down on top of him after he landed. What an undignified way to go, he mused, suffocated by someone's dirty underpants.
Resting in another hamper of some sort now, he risked a peek over the edge to find that he was suspended a good forty feet over the floor of the laundry building, where he had a bird's eye view of the coverall-clad humans working below. All of them were spindly and abnormally tall like Crede, and all toiling to bundle and lift heavy parcels, or operating the wheezing machinery in an oppressive, moist heat. His new friend, however, was not amongst them that he was able to see, and he ducked back down again as the hamper began to make its way slowly from one end of the building to the other.
His options would seem to be quite limited, as there was little possibility that he'd walk away unharmed from a jump, and there were people all over the place at any rate. He'd be seen for sure and blending in with this lot was unlikely. Without psychic paper and the moxie that comes with knowing that there's an extremely limited number of methods to kill you, he felt rather at the whim of random chance, and it was not a comfortable sensation.
The conveyor line to which his hamper was attached squeaked and swayed slightly as it stopped in mid-air. Now what? He peered over the side again and looked behind him to see an unending line of similar large metal baskets hanging and rocking back and forth, and then below to the workers who didn't seem at all fussed with the hold-up. Must be part of the system, he thought, and he made his way carefully around to the front to look ahead.
He found himself staring in to the maw of a huge contraption, so close that he saw each rivet in its hull clearly, and each fleck of rust. The sounds emerging from it indicated that something was happening to the baskets as they entered, though it was dark and he strained to see what it could be. There was nowhere to go but down, or forward in to the belly of this beast. Still Crede was missing among the sweating, shouting workers on the floor below.
The choice seemed clear: be laundered like so many soiled nappies, or jump.
It wasn't just the suffocating heat and humidity that were making him sweat now. He clenched his jaw, looked around frantically, worrying much less about being noticed or causing too much movement in the hamper and much more about finding anything to grab hold of. He was just calculating the force needed to propel himself 20 feet to the nearest raised gangway when, with a lurch, the conveyor line began to move again and he was plunged in to darkness. Ahead, he heard sounds of splashing, and of grinding of metal against metal. Behind him, the wan light of the main floor of the laundry hung like a picture in a frame.
When the movement of the basket stopped again, he was in a large, open inner chamber, which was the source of the splashing. That peculiar combination of echoing and sound-absorption that comes with swimming pools told him all he needed to know about what he was being suspended over.
He realised what was about to happen a mere fraction of a second before it did, and had time only to grasp the lip of the hamper with one hand before the bottom swung open like a trap-door and he found himself dangling over a large cistern as the clothing he'd been sharing the ride with vanished in to the darkness below, sending up limp splashes and sucking sounds.
"Bollocks!" he groaned as he tried to swing his dangling arm up to catch hold of the edge of the hamper, no longer caring about being heard, and trying hard to overcome the creeping pain in his shoulders and fingers as he hung there.
Amid the clanking and the squeaking and the splashing now another sound faintly could be heard above the pounding blood in his ears. Someone speaking, someone shouting, really, to be heard above the din. "Jump!"
He looked down at his feet and saw one of his trainers illuminated periodically by the light of a torch, and the voice came again: "Jump!"
"What?" he called, the effort to yell back making his lungs burn. Jump in to a pool of toxic chemicals? Not bloody likely.
"It's just water! You have to jump!"
The torchlight now moved down to the pool below and he saw, in little one-foot-square increments, a large chamber filled with floating clothes like so many dead bodies, which he would have shuddered at the thought of had he not been on the edge of panic. The wielder of the torch and, of course, the source of the voice was Crede, and there was really nothing for it but to take the boy's advice. The basket began to lurch forward once again and in a second the Doctor wouldn't be over a pool of water but a hard floor. He took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut and let go, first one hand, then the other....
The water was lukewarm and deep--even after a plunge from that height he did not touch bottom as he sank. The clothes it was filled with, however, clutched and grabbed at him as if they wanted to pull him down and keep him there. He flailed his arms about trying to clear a way to reach the air again, kicking out madly with his feet. Even as he sensed that he'd come up to the surface, a heavy, wet membrane lay between his face and the open air, and it seemed to cling to him no matter how he pulled at it.
His lungs were nearly empty and for a split-second he relaxed a little and waited for respiratory bypass to kick in before realising with a jolt that it wouldn't and if he didn't get free of this blasted tangle, he really would die via drowning by dirty underwear. Rose wouldn't be best pleased to put that on his tomb, he knew for sure, and he dove down under the water again in a last effort to come up free of wet denim. He could hear the muffled words of Crede somewhere off to the side, inaudible as he gasped and coughed, and his legs began to burn from the effort of treading both water and entangling clothing while his own shoes and trousers became heavy with water.
"Take the rope!" Crede cried from a gangway a few feet above the lip of the pool, waving his torch around and blinding the Doctor with it every few seconds.
The Doctor looked around in the gloom and finally saw the rope that the boy was referring to, snaking over the lip of the cistern and floating languidly on top of the water. He grasped at it and kicked and pulled himself over to the side, looking up at the several feet he'd have to scale in order to come clear of the walls of the tank. Giving the rope a tentative tug, he set to ignoring how much heavier he was when soaking wet, and how boneless and limp his arms were feeling after his near-miss with drowning, making his way hand over hand to the edge of the tank. Coming finally to straddle himself across the edge, he stood and them climbed on to the gangway next to Crede.
Where he promptly sat down, then laid down, looking up at Crede and panting, his breath coming in unfamiliar-sounding heaves and wheezes.
"I think...you have a bit...to learn about...rescues," the Doctor gasped.
"This is the only area that isn't monitored," Crede answered sympathetically. "Sorry."
Further conversation was cut short by a deafening alarm bell and the sound of the water being drained from that giant tank.
"Oh I could have just waited!" the Doctor said as the last gurgles of water faded away, but immediately the tank began to shudder and there was a bone-jarring sound of metal scraping against metal as it began to spin, faster and faster until a warm wind came up from it on to their faces. "Or, maybe not."
Crede looked down at him and for a brief moment the Doctor saw the true boy behind the mask of servitude. And that boy was thinking, "What an idiot."
(To Chapter 18: The handbook)
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 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16
For the first time in his brief existence as a human, the Doctor was glad to have the blunted olfactory sense of the homo sapiens. He had landed with a soft thwack on top of a mountain of dirty laundry--and not just dirty laundry but the dirty laundry of three dozen different species of manual labourers. A full Time Lord would have been able to identify every single one of them by their body odour, whether he'd wanted to or not.
As it was, the smell stuck in the back of his throat and made him gag as he buried himself among the dun-coloured coveralls (with varying numbers of arms and legs and in a dizzying array of sizes). He could well believe that toxic chemicals and radiation might indeed be the only ways to deal with a stench of this calibre.
He spent some time being tossed about in the lorry as it negotiated the unpaved road in to the fenced-in compound of squat industrial buildings that Crede had referred to as his work unit, before it came to a rather jarring halt and began to move in reverse. Voices rang out on either side--various calls and responses that made little sense out of context--and he clutched several of the larger garments around him, waiting somewhat nervously for whatever it was that would happen next.
It was not a long wait before the world began to pitch up and forward and the Doctor found himself tumbling down an ever-increasing incline. His impulse was to flail his limbs and look for purchase to keep himself from sliding, but he knew that would merely serve to reveal himself as the clothes were dumped out and one extremely flustered half-human/half-Time Lord was left clinging to the inside of the lorry bed by his fingernails. So, he curled himself in to a ball as best as he could and, against all the frenzied advice that his hind-brain was giving him, let himself roll and fall, as if he were no different from the rest of the cargo.
The flat surface that he and the reeking coveralls landed upon was itself curiously moving, that much he could tell without risking unburying himself and looking around. The sound of heavy machinery and the voices of operators having to shout to one another over the din grew ever closer and he began to wonder--just an idle thought, really--what if Crede didn't come through? What if he'd been held up or gotten in to some sort of trouble?
This was cut short, however, by a sudden and brief free-fall, followed by a struggle to claw his way out from under the crushing weight of the clothes that had piled down on top of him after he landed. What an undignified way to go, he mused, suffocated by someone's dirty underpants.
Resting in another hamper of some sort now, he risked a peek over the edge to find that he was suspended a good forty feet over the floor of the laundry building, where he had a bird's eye view of the coverall-clad humans working below. All of them were spindly and abnormally tall like Crede, and all toiling to bundle and lift heavy parcels, or operating the wheezing machinery in an oppressive, moist heat. His new friend, however, was not amongst them that he was able to see, and he ducked back down again as the hamper began to make its way slowly from one end of the building to the other.
His options would seem to be quite limited, as there was little possibility that he'd walk away unharmed from a jump, and there were people all over the place at any rate. He'd be seen for sure and blending in with this lot was unlikely. Without psychic paper and the moxie that comes with knowing that there's an extremely limited number of methods to kill you, he felt rather at the whim of random chance, and it was not a comfortable sensation.
The conveyor line to which his hamper was attached squeaked and swayed slightly as it stopped in mid-air. Now what? He peered over the side again and looked behind him to see an unending line of similar large metal baskets hanging and rocking back and forth, and then below to the workers who didn't seem at all fussed with the hold-up. Must be part of the system, he thought, and he made his way carefully around to the front to look ahead.
He found himself staring in to the maw of a huge contraption, so close that he saw each rivet in its hull clearly, and each fleck of rust. The sounds emerging from it indicated that something was happening to the baskets as they entered, though it was dark and he strained to see what it could be. There was nowhere to go but down, or forward in to the belly of this beast. Still Crede was missing among the sweating, shouting workers on the floor below.
The choice seemed clear: be laundered like so many soiled nappies, or jump.
It wasn't just the suffocating heat and humidity that were making him sweat now. He clenched his jaw, looked around frantically, worrying much less about being noticed or causing too much movement in the hamper and much more about finding anything to grab hold of. He was just calculating the force needed to propel himself 20 feet to the nearest raised gangway when, with a lurch, the conveyor line began to move again and he was plunged in to darkness. Ahead, he heard sounds of splashing, and of grinding of metal against metal. Behind him, the wan light of the main floor of the laundry hung like a picture in a frame.
When the movement of the basket stopped again, he was in a large, open inner chamber, which was the source of the splashing. That peculiar combination of echoing and sound-absorption that comes with swimming pools told him all he needed to know about what he was being suspended over.
He realised what was about to happen a mere fraction of a second before it did, and had time only to grasp the lip of the hamper with one hand before the bottom swung open like a trap-door and he found himself dangling over a large cistern as the clothing he'd been sharing the ride with vanished in to the darkness below, sending up limp splashes and sucking sounds.
"Bollocks!" he groaned as he tried to swing his dangling arm up to catch hold of the edge of the hamper, no longer caring about being heard, and trying hard to overcome the creeping pain in his shoulders and fingers as he hung there.
Amid the clanking and the squeaking and the splashing now another sound faintly could be heard above the pounding blood in his ears. Someone speaking, someone shouting, really, to be heard above the din. "Jump!"
He looked down at his feet and saw one of his trainers illuminated periodically by the light of a torch, and the voice came again: "Jump!"
"What?" he called, the effort to yell back making his lungs burn. Jump in to a pool of toxic chemicals? Not bloody likely.
"It's just water! You have to jump!"
The torchlight now moved down to the pool below and he saw, in little one-foot-square increments, a large chamber filled with floating clothes like so many dead bodies, which he would have shuddered at the thought of had he not been on the edge of panic. The wielder of the torch and, of course, the source of the voice was Crede, and there was really nothing for it but to take the boy's advice. The basket began to lurch forward once again and in a second the Doctor wouldn't be over a pool of water but a hard floor. He took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut and let go, first one hand, then the other....
The water was lukewarm and deep--even after a plunge from that height he did not touch bottom as he sank. The clothes it was filled with, however, clutched and grabbed at him as if they wanted to pull him down and keep him there. He flailed his arms about trying to clear a way to reach the air again, kicking out madly with his feet. Even as he sensed that he'd come up to the surface, a heavy, wet membrane lay between his face and the open air, and it seemed to cling to him no matter how he pulled at it.
His lungs were nearly empty and for a split-second he relaxed a little and waited for respiratory bypass to kick in before realising with a jolt that it wouldn't and if he didn't get free of this blasted tangle, he really would die via drowning by dirty underwear. Rose wouldn't be best pleased to put that on his tomb, he knew for sure, and he dove down under the water again in a last effort to come up free of wet denim. He could hear the muffled words of Crede somewhere off to the side, inaudible as he gasped and coughed, and his legs began to burn from the effort of treading both water and entangling clothing while his own shoes and trousers became heavy with water.
"Take the rope!" Crede cried from a gangway a few feet above the lip of the pool, waving his torch around and blinding the Doctor with it every few seconds.
The Doctor looked around in the gloom and finally saw the rope that the boy was referring to, snaking over the lip of the cistern and floating languidly on top of the water. He grasped at it and kicked and pulled himself over to the side, looking up at the several feet he'd have to scale in order to come clear of the walls of the tank. Giving the rope a tentative tug, he set to ignoring how much heavier he was when soaking wet, and how boneless and limp his arms were feeling after his near-miss with drowning, making his way hand over hand to the edge of the tank. Coming finally to straddle himself across the edge, he stood and them climbed on to the gangway next to Crede.
Where he promptly sat down, then laid down, looking up at Crede and panting, his breath coming in unfamiliar-sounding heaves and wheezes.
"I think...you have a bit...to learn about...rescues," the Doctor gasped.
"This is the only area that isn't monitored," Crede answered sympathetically. "Sorry."
Further conversation was cut short by a deafening alarm bell and the sound of the water being drained from that giant tank.
"Oh I could have just waited!" the Doctor said as the last gurgles of water faded away, but immediately the tank began to shudder and there was a bone-jarring sound of metal scraping against metal as it began to spin, faster and faster until a warm wind came up from it on to their faces. "Or, maybe not."
Crede looked down at him and for a brief moment the Doctor saw the true boy behind the mask of servitude. And that boy was thinking, "What an idiot."
(To Chapter 18: The handbook)