Held in Trust: Chapter 18
Title: Held in Trust (18/?)
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
Beta: ladychi [It's ladychi 's birthday today and all she's getting from me is this chapter which she put the hard work of betaing in to. Alas.]
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 | Chapter 17
The Doctor waved the proffered long-fingered hand away and sat up on the metal catwalk.
"Hold on just a tick," he said, checking his pockets and running a hand vigorously through his dripping hair.
"I'm sorry, but we need to go...now." Crede's brow furrowed with worry and he kept his arm outstretched towards the Doctor.
There was a loud click from somewhere deep in the bowels of the machinery, and another alarm bell rang.
"Now," the boy repeated urgently.
Without requiring any further explanation, the Doctor took his hand and was first propelled to standing and then tugged at a rapid clip down the gangway, to the bottom of a narrow ladder.
Crede pulled him forward and placed him bodily against the rungs, and urged the Doctor to ascend. Every few rungs he could feel the boy's hands brush against his feet, as his much longer limbs climbed more efficiently. Climbing up in to darkness, the Doctor was just beginning to wonder whether there'd be some sort of door or hatch that they'd come to, when his skull cracked sickeningly against riveted metal and he almost lost his footing.
"Pull the handle on the left," Crede called from below.
The Doctor fumbled above his head, suppressing the urge to rub the lump forming under his hair, and did find a handle, though pulling it accomplished nothing.
"Must be locked," he grunted back, trying to get leverage at this awkward angle.
Below there was a hissing sound and a rising chemical astringency in the air. The Doctor didn't need Time Lord senses to know that the entire chamber was about to be filled with choking, toxic gases as the next stage of the laundering process began. The hot, moist air that the chemicals were born on was rising quickly to the upper reaches, where he and Crede clung to the ladder like a couple of insects trying to escape a puddle.
"Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on!" he gritted out between clenched teeth as he clung to the ladder with one hand, the other searching through his pockets.
"What are you doing?" Crede cried, panic rising in his voice and all pretences towards politeness now dropped. "Pull it harder!"
"Ha!" the Doctor hooted, holding something small and metallic aloft for a brief second, as he flashed a grin. That grin faded instantly however, as he fumbled, still clinging to the ladder with one arm looped through a rung, head at a crooked angle due to the proximity of the ceiling, and the little pen-like object fell from his hand.
Faster than the Doctor could even register, Crede's hand plucked it out of the air deftly and handed it back up with an arm so long that he didn't even need to try and stoop down in order to receive it. He did, however, catch the concerned and increasingly panicked look on the boy's face.
"Sonic probe!" he shouted over the hiss and the groan of the machinery below, over-enunciating and brandishing the device perhaps a little more triumphantly than the occasion really called for. "If I can just figure out the settings I should be able to release the lock." He squinted at it and spun a couple of the dials experimentally, muttering to himself.
"Doctor!" Crede shouted, hanging off the ladder one-handed and staring back towards the source of the noise and odour.
"Just one more second! These things aren't really meant for this without a bit of...customisation. There!" He pressed a button on the probe and the tip glowed red. "Oh, brilliant, it's already got a red setting!"
There was a sharp series of clicks and a blast of hot, dry, and most importantly, fresh air from above. The Doctor scampered up the last few rungs, the sonic probe clutched between his teeth, and within seconds they had both emerged on to the flat roof of the laundry building where each collapsed with relief and the after-effects of too much adrenaline.
After a few moments, the Doctor sat up and began to peel his sodden jacket off. "Ladders, certain death, at some point becoming sopping wet. The more things change, as they say. Blimey...."
He trailed off, looking up at the sky where the two suns were nearing their daily conjunction, and realised that he'd actually forgotten the puzzling fact of his current location for a time. He felt a keen sense of having betrayed the memories of his home once again, and for the thousandth time in his life, by so easily relegating it it to just another planet, just another time, just another adventure. It wasn't, and he'd known he'd not be able to leave until he solved this mystery as well. His chest constricted around his heart and all at once he felt the urgency of all of his missions here, each piling one on top of the next. He'd have no home at all, future, past or any combination thereof, if he failed in this task.
"Right!" He peered over the edge of the low wall surrounding the roof and surveyed the compound, aware of Crede making tentative, anxious faces behind him but resolved to not acknowledge the boy's reticence. He'd never gotten very far by giving in to the mundane, every-day concerns of his companions, and who was he to start messing with a heretofore successful formula now?
"So, that'll be the dormitory, yeah?" the Doctor continued, gesturing to a long, low building to the west. "And that's the kitchen, but no mess hall, so I presume you lot eat at your bunks."
Crede's look of concern morphed in to a quizzical, or perhaps merely sceptical expression.
"You're wanting to know how I would know that if I've never been here before. Simple enough: they're clearly concerned about the lower castes revolting--you'll pardon my expression, but that is what you've got going on here: a caste system. The armed guards, the fences, splitting you in to two separate classes so you'll spend all your energy hating each other instead of the people in charge. It's like they read the handbook...." He trailed off, laying his jacket out to dry.
"But--" Crede stammered, pointing over to the building the Doctor had identified, apparently correctly, as the dormitory.
"Sorry, lost my train of thought. Gross injustice tends to have that effect to me." He spanned his brow with his fingers, affecting a pained look, as if explaining all of this to Crede might actually cause him physical harm.
"Since these Proprietors are so concerned about having a possible revolution on their hands, you'd need to be housed in such a way as to keep you from easily dividing up and spending a lot of time talking amongst yourselves. One long building with nothing but a row of beds, no separate rooms, no privacy, no way for groups to easily form and make elaborate plans. Really, it is all in the handbook -- I've read it. Well, I say read. I burned it. But I flipped through it a bit beforehand."
Crede simply gawped at him for a moment before finding his voice again. "There's...there's a handbook?"
The Doctor ignored him and continued on with his impromptu guided tour.
"And that's clearly the kitchen over there--any idiot could tell that from the rubbish piled up out back. But it's not big enough to also house a place to take your meals, so you must eat them either at your workstations or your bunks." He smirked pompously, knowing that all of his inferences were correct, and ran another hand through his hair. It stuck up as if he'd put his finger in an electrical socket, though if he noticed, he didn't care.
"And that," he pointed to a multistory building to the east, "will be the Proprietors' residence, which I'm sure is full to the brim with loads of useful information -- information that they keep well away from their slaves, as per the handbook of course. Looks lovely. I bet they have ice cream."
Crede shook his head slowly and moved his gaze down to stare intently at the top button of his coveralls.
The Doctor began to chuckle nervously as he squinted off at the structure in question. "No, that has to be the Proprietors' residence. Just look at it! More than one floor, all those big windows, and it hasn't any fence around it, but I reckon those little knobby things I see on the ground are something much deadlier than just a fence. If that's not what that building is, then I'm a Slitheen."
Crede's voice was clear, but he still didn't meet the Doctor's eyes. "That is the Proprietors' residence, but you can't go there. It's completely off-limits."
"I'm sure it is. But over there is where all the information is, and over here is where all the information isn't. Hence my pressing need to get from here," he jabbed a finger towards the ground impatiently, "to there."
"I'm sorry, but I can't help you. I wouldn't know how to get in anyway, I'm just a laundry worker. I'm just an indenture. It's almost time for the second meal," Crede said, getting to his knees and peering back down through the hatch they'd come up from. "I'll be missed if I don't show for it and it'll mean a penalty." He said the word penalty as if it were a euphemism for something much worse than a loss of house points and trip to the headmaster's office. "I'm sorry, really. I have to go report in now."
The Doctor gritted his teeth and directed a very dark look directly at the boy, who froze in his preparations to leave.
"I can't stop you from going back to your work," the Doctor said, his voice lower and rougher than it had been before. "I can't stop you, and I wouldn't I want to. You're a free person, contrary to popular belief. And maybe I'll muddle through without your help, or maybe I'll die trying. If I fail, though, it means the end of everything. Everything that's good, everything that's bad,there'll be no picking and choosing. But if I succeed, then I promise I won't leave here before every creature on this planet is free."
After these words, he found himself frowning, breathing rather heavily, and feeling quite righteously indignant. It was the sort of lofty speech he'd felt eminently justified to give as the timeless, boundless creature he'd once been, and it tumbled out with little thought now as to how he'd back those words up. All he knew was that he'd never be able to look Rose in the eye again if he returned to her while leaving these people here to suffer under this system. A system that he was, in the back of his magnificent mind, already discerning the terrible origins of. He would end it because he was, at least in part, the cause of it.
"How do you think that sounds? No more being ordered around, no more penalties, no more being trapped on just this planet, even -- you could go anywhere you liked, see the stars. You've got my promise. You could save the entire human race, and then help me make it worth saving.Whad'ya say?" The Doctor held a hand out, his face arranged as an open, honest invitation.
"Are you really here to save the whole human race?" Crede asked. "I mean, I'm sorry Doctor but how can something threaten an entire species all at once?"
The Doctor dropped his hand to his side again and let loose with a face-cracking grin. "An excellent question! And if you don't mind skipping a meal and waiting on this roof with me for those suns to go down, I will tell you all about it. Look, I might even have some sweets in one of my pockets -- though probably a bit wet at this point. Not much of a meal, but we can share."
He reached in to a pocket of his trousers, seemingly up to the elbow -- which Crede put down to a trick of the dual-sunlight and the confusing shadows created at this hour -- and came back out with a sad, sodden little packet. Unwrapping it, the Doctor noted that Crede had ceased his preparations for leaving.
"Here, try a Jelly Baby. I promise, you'll love it."
(To Chapter 19)
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
Beta: ladychi [It's ladychi 's birthday today and all she's getting from me is this chapter which she put the hard work of betaing in to. Alas.]
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 | Chapter 17
The Doctor waved the proffered long-fingered hand away and sat up on the metal catwalk.
"Hold on just a tick," he said, checking his pockets and running a hand vigorously through his dripping hair.
"I'm sorry, but we need to go...now." Crede's brow furrowed with worry and he kept his arm outstretched towards the Doctor.
There was a loud click from somewhere deep in the bowels of the machinery, and another alarm bell rang.
"Now," the boy repeated urgently.
Without requiring any further explanation, the Doctor took his hand and was first propelled to standing and then tugged at a rapid clip down the gangway, to the bottom of a narrow ladder.
Crede pulled him forward and placed him bodily against the rungs, and urged the Doctor to ascend. Every few rungs he could feel the boy's hands brush against his feet, as his much longer limbs climbed more efficiently. Climbing up in to darkness, the Doctor was just beginning to wonder whether there'd be some sort of door or hatch that they'd come to, when his skull cracked sickeningly against riveted metal and he almost lost his footing.
"Pull the handle on the left," Crede called from below.
The Doctor fumbled above his head, suppressing the urge to rub the lump forming under his hair, and did find a handle, though pulling it accomplished nothing.
"Must be locked," he grunted back, trying to get leverage at this awkward angle.
Below there was a hissing sound and a rising chemical astringency in the air. The Doctor didn't need Time Lord senses to know that the entire chamber was about to be filled with choking, toxic gases as the next stage of the laundering process began. The hot, moist air that the chemicals were born on was rising quickly to the upper reaches, where he and Crede clung to the ladder like a couple of insects trying to escape a puddle.
"Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on!" he gritted out between clenched teeth as he clung to the ladder with one hand, the other searching through his pockets.
"What are you doing?" Crede cried, panic rising in his voice and all pretences towards politeness now dropped. "Pull it harder!"
"Ha!" the Doctor hooted, holding something small and metallic aloft for a brief second, as he flashed a grin. That grin faded instantly however, as he fumbled, still clinging to the ladder with one arm looped through a rung, head at a crooked angle due to the proximity of the ceiling, and the little pen-like object fell from his hand.
Faster than the Doctor could even register, Crede's hand plucked it out of the air deftly and handed it back up with an arm so long that he didn't even need to try and stoop down in order to receive it. He did, however, catch the concerned and increasingly panicked look on the boy's face.
"Sonic probe!" he shouted over the hiss and the groan of the machinery below, over-enunciating and brandishing the device perhaps a little more triumphantly than the occasion really called for. "If I can just figure out the settings I should be able to release the lock." He squinted at it and spun a couple of the dials experimentally, muttering to himself.
"Doctor!" Crede shouted, hanging off the ladder one-handed and staring back towards the source of the noise and odour.
"Just one more second! These things aren't really meant for this without a bit of...customisation. There!" He pressed a button on the probe and the tip glowed red. "Oh, brilliant, it's already got a red setting!"
There was a sharp series of clicks and a blast of hot, dry, and most importantly, fresh air from above. The Doctor scampered up the last few rungs, the sonic probe clutched between his teeth, and within seconds they had both emerged on to the flat roof of the laundry building where each collapsed with relief and the after-effects of too much adrenaline.
After a few moments, the Doctor sat up and began to peel his sodden jacket off. "Ladders, certain death, at some point becoming sopping wet. The more things change, as they say. Blimey...."
He trailed off, looking up at the sky where the two suns were nearing their daily conjunction, and realised that he'd actually forgotten the puzzling fact of his current location for a time. He felt a keen sense of having betrayed the memories of his home once again, and for the thousandth time in his life, by so easily relegating it it to just another planet, just another time, just another adventure. It wasn't, and he'd known he'd not be able to leave until he solved this mystery as well. His chest constricted around his heart and all at once he felt the urgency of all of his missions here, each piling one on top of the next. He'd have no home at all, future, past or any combination thereof, if he failed in this task.
"Right!" He peered over the edge of the low wall surrounding the roof and surveyed the compound, aware of Crede making tentative, anxious faces behind him but resolved to not acknowledge the boy's reticence. He'd never gotten very far by giving in to the mundane, every-day concerns of his companions, and who was he to start messing with a heretofore successful formula now?
"So, that'll be the dormitory, yeah?" the Doctor continued, gesturing to a long, low building to the west. "And that's the kitchen, but no mess hall, so I presume you lot eat at your bunks."
Crede's look of concern morphed in to a quizzical, or perhaps merely sceptical expression.
"You're wanting to know how I would know that if I've never been here before. Simple enough: they're clearly concerned about the lower castes revolting--you'll pardon my expression, but that is what you've got going on here: a caste system. The armed guards, the fences, splitting you in to two separate classes so you'll spend all your energy hating each other instead of the people in charge. It's like they read the handbook...." He trailed off, laying his jacket out to dry.
"But--" Crede stammered, pointing over to the building the Doctor had identified, apparently correctly, as the dormitory.
"Sorry, lost my train of thought. Gross injustice tends to have that effect to me." He spanned his brow with his fingers, affecting a pained look, as if explaining all of this to Crede might actually cause him physical harm.
"Since these Proprietors are so concerned about having a possible revolution on their hands, you'd need to be housed in such a way as to keep you from easily dividing up and spending a lot of time talking amongst yourselves. One long building with nothing but a row of beds, no separate rooms, no privacy, no way for groups to easily form and make elaborate plans. Really, it is all in the handbook -- I've read it. Well, I say read. I burned it. But I flipped through it a bit beforehand."
Crede simply gawped at him for a moment before finding his voice again. "There's...there's a handbook?"
The Doctor ignored him and continued on with his impromptu guided tour.
"And that's clearly the kitchen over there--any idiot could tell that from the rubbish piled up out back. But it's not big enough to also house a place to take your meals, so you must eat them either at your workstations or your bunks." He smirked pompously, knowing that all of his inferences were correct, and ran another hand through his hair. It stuck up as if he'd put his finger in an electrical socket, though if he noticed, he didn't care.
"And that," he pointed to a multistory building to the east, "will be the Proprietors' residence, which I'm sure is full to the brim with loads of useful information -- information that they keep well away from their slaves, as per the handbook of course. Looks lovely. I bet they have ice cream."
Crede shook his head slowly and moved his gaze down to stare intently at the top button of his coveralls.
The Doctor began to chuckle nervously as he squinted off at the structure in question. "No, that has to be the Proprietors' residence. Just look at it! More than one floor, all those big windows, and it hasn't any fence around it, but I reckon those little knobby things I see on the ground are something much deadlier than just a fence. If that's not what that building is, then I'm a Slitheen."
Crede's voice was clear, but he still didn't meet the Doctor's eyes. "That is the Proprietors' residence, but you can't go there. It's completely off-limits."
"I'm sure it is. But over there is where all the information is, and over here is where all the information isn't. Hence my pressing need to get from here," he jabbed a finger towards the ground impatiently, "to there."
"I'm sorry, but I can't help you. I wouldn't know how to get in anyway, I'm just a laundry worker. I'm just an indenture. It's almost time for the second meal," Crede said, getting to his knees and peering back down through the hatch they'd come up from. "I'll be missed if I don't show for it and it'll mean a penalty." He said the word penalty as if it were a euphemism for something much worse than a loss of house points and trip to the headmaster's office. "I'm sorry, really. I have to go report in now."
The Doctor gritted his teeth and directed a very dark look directly at the boy, who froze in his preparations to leave.
"I can't stop you from going back to your work," the Doctor said, his voice lower and rougher than it had been before. "I can't stop you, and I wouldn't I want to. You're a free person, contrary to popular belief. And maybe I'll muddle through without your help, or maybe I'll die trying. If I fail, though, it means the end of everything. Everything that's good, everything that's bad,there'll be no picking and choosing. But if I succeed, then I promise I won't leave here before every creature on this planet is free."
After these words, he found himself frowning, breathing rather heavily, and feeling quite righteously indignant. It was the sort of lofty speech he'd felt eminently justified to give as the timeless, boundless creature he'd once been, and it tumbled out with little thought now as to how he'd back those words up. All he knew was that he'd never be able to look Rose in the eye again if he returned to her while leaving these people here to suffer under this system. A system that he was, in the back of his magnificent mind, already discerning the terrible origins of. He would end it because he was, at least in part, the cause of it.
"How do you think that sounds? No more being ordered around, no more penalties, no more being trapped on just this planet, even -- you could go anywhere you liked, see the stars. You've got my promise. You could save the entire human race, and then help me make it worth saving.Whad'ya say?" The Doctor held a hand out, his face arranged as an open, honest invitation.
"Are you really here to save the whole human race?" Crede asked. "I mean, I'm sorry Doctor but how can something threaten an entire species all at once?"
The Doctor dropped his hand to his side again and let loose with a face-cracking grin. "An excellent question! And if you don't mind skipping a meal and waiting on this roof with me for those suns to go down, I will tell you all about it. Look, I might even have some sweets in one of my pockets -- though probably a bit wet at this point. Not much of a meal, but we can share."
He reached in to a pocket of his trousers, seemingly up to the elbow -- which Crede put down to a trick of the dual-sunlight and the confusing shadows created at this hour -- and came back out with a sad, sodden little packet. Unwrapping it, the Doctor noted that Crede had ceased his preparations for leaving.
"Here, try a Jelly Baby. I promise, you'll love it."
(To Chapter 19)