Held in Trust: Chapter 20
Title: Held in Trust (20/?)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
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 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19
The halls of the Proprietor's residence were cool and dark, and the doorways Crede and the Doctor moved quietly through began to require Crede to stoop down in order to avoid banging his head. This was a part of the building designed for terrestrial-born human occupation and comfort, with no nods toward the existence of the spindly microgravity-born sub-castes. The Doctor felt the push and pull of both a desire to meet one of these so-called Proprietors in order to give them an extensive piece of his mind, and the throbbing drumbeat reminder that timelines were dangerously in flux and the sooner that was sorted, the better for everyone.
It also wouldn't be long before the guards put two and two together regarding this stranger who'd shown up in their midst and then promptly gone missing. Rounding a corner, Crede tapped him on the shoulder from behind and gestured silently to a soft blue glow emanating from under a heavy dark wood door. The Doctor nodded and approached, putting his ear to it before trying the handle.
The hinges were a little squeaky and Crede winced at how the sound seemed to echo around the hall and become amplified, but the Doctor took no notice. The room they entered was unoccupied, and furnished comfortably with the same fur-upholstered chairs and sofas as they'd seen previously. Crede gave these a rather wide berth, but the Doctor focused on the central feature of this seeming salon. Coming down from the ceiling in the middle of the room, with the furniture arranged so that it would indeed be the focal point for anyone occupying the space, was an enormous structure like a chandelier. Like a chandelier, but several times larger than appropriate for the size of the room, and filled with tiny pin-points of blue light running throughout its crystalline structure. It hung so low that the Doctor could examine it at eye-level, which he did with great interest.
"Fascinating," he muttered, reaching out with a finger to touch it, but then pulling back again suddenly as the tiny blue lights began to course through the crystals at a much faster rate, then gathered in great numbers at the bottom tip of each faceted stalactite, before pouring out to form a shimmering blue-tinged hologram in the air below. The image was of a human head, with somewhat patrician features, mustachioed, and wearing a beret. The Doctor's heart skipped a beat instinctively, even though this was quite obviously a conglomeration of photons that resembled Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, and not the genuine article. There was a very human-feeling tug deep in his chest, rather in spite of his brain.
The Doctor looked sidelong at the image and squinted suspiciously. "Well that's unsettling. How are you doing that?"
Crede, who had been standing off to the side, now moved closer to the Doctor and came up behind him, looking down at the base of his neck pointedly.
"It's interfacing with your translator. You're blinking yellow-must be having trouble... Wait, there it goes. You're green."
"So do I just...talk to it... Him... It?" the Doctor rubbed the back of his neck, running his finger over the translator disc, which sent an involuntary shudder right down his spine and made his legs wobble for a moment.
Crede was standing behind him still, and partially obscured by the low light in the room, but the Doctor thought he could hear the boy roll his eyes.
"Blimey, it was just a question," the Doctor shrugged and turned back to the shimmering blue image hovering before him. "All right then, distractingly eerie computer, I'd like to know if any indentures have gone missing from this work unit in the past, oh, let's say three standard months."
The hologram blinked, which struck the Doctor as just silly-why would a hologram even need to blink? Who wrote this daft program? "Access denied," it said, moving it's mouth in what was almost in time with the words, but was just a fraction of a second off.
"Oh, now that just totally ruins the illusion, that does. Access denied?" The Doctor reached in to his inside pocket and pulled out the sonic probe, inspecting it carefully before twirling a knob and pointing it up at the main structure of the computer. "How about now?"
"No records found," the blue hologram intoned, in a voice that was a little bit like the Brigadier's, but not really.
The Doctor scratched his head and shifted on his feet, taking a half-step backwards. His shins hit the furry sofa behind him and before he could re-balance himself, the sofa moved forward, cut him off at the knee, and he went tumbling down on to it. Crede jumped out of the way and again took up a spot in the shadows in a far corner of the room.
"I hate those things," Crede said, wrinkling his nose. "I've never been able to get used to them, moving about like that and...massaging you. Ugh," he shuddered.
The Doctor just sat, perplexed and looking down at the floor and his own feet. "Is this...is this thing alive?"
Crede made a face and shuddered again. "Yeah, sort of. If you want to call just hanging around a room waiting for someone to sit on you a life."
The Doctor was momentarily caught between wanting to have nothing to do with this living furniture and at the same time not wanting to offend said furniture. Maybe it liked being sat on? He felt a low rumble from below his posterior and was about to be quite embarrassed when it struck him that the sofa seemed to be purring. That settled that, then, and he put his feet up on an ottoman that had inched within range.
"Right," he drawled, considering. "Anyway... Computer, how many work units are on this planet Cassiel?"
The hologram answered immediately: "Three-thousand two-hundred and eighty-two."
"Ouch," the Doctor sighed. "That's a lot of data, even for me. How many work units in the twenty square kilometres around this one?"
"Thirty-seven."
The Doctor looked over at Crede, who nodded in corroboration. "It's a very aritanium-rich area."
"All right. And of those thirty-seven work units, have any indentures gone missing in the past three months?"
The blue lights of the computer whizzed around its structure for a moment before the hologram answered sympathetically: "I'm sorry, your access level does not permit me to deliver that information."
"Access level? Bugger." The Doctor looked at the sonic probe again and shook it, as if to dislodge whatever it was that hadn't broken him in to the computer at a high enough level. "Okay, okay... That's okay, we can work with this. Just let me think. What would indicate a loss of an indenture but would seem innocuous enough-"
He stood up again, as he'd always felt that standing helped him think better. Crede looked concerned and began to inch towards the door of the room, indicating through his posture that he was getting anxious about being discovered.
"A-ha!" the Doctor cried, a bit too loudly to really be appropriate for a breaking-and-entering sort of situation. "Can you show me the food expenditures over the past three standard months for this work unit?"
"Displaying now," the hologram said, and a view-screen set in to a coffee-table blinked to life.
The Doctor mused to himself as he inspected the columns and rows of figures, not speaking clearly enough for Crede to catch any particular words.
"Did you find what you were looking for?" the boy ventured to ask after a few moments had passed. He was shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot and continued to cast frequent glances over to the door.
"It's what I didn't find, young man, that is important," the Doctor finally said, looking back to the hologram. "Show me the food expenditures over the past three standard months for all work units within twenty square kilometres of here. Just the totals, no need to break it down to meat and veg and pudding."
"Why, what's that going to show?" Crede asked tentatively as the Doctor bent over the view-screen again.
"Well, here's the thing: Hardly anyone just oppresses people because they like oppressing people. It's always about something else. Money, power, resources, things like that. And I'd wager that the mining operations here are about the money. Slave labour is cheap, but you do have to feed them, unfortunately. So in order to make sure you're making the most possible money, you feed them the bare minimum. Everything calculated down to the last calorie, for maximum profit margin."
He jabbed a finger towards the screen and motioned with his other hand for Crede to come forward and look as well. "There!" he yelped. "Right there, last month, work unit number thirty-two starts spending less on food. Just a little bit less, but less. What does that tell you?"
"That there's fewer people to feed?" Crede ventured.
"Precisely!" the Doctor enthused, and clapped him on the back. "Food expenditures remain exactly the same for all other work units during that time, except for that one. That one right there. How far from here is work unit thirty-two?"
Crede began to answer, but so did the hologram, in its eerie, disembodied not-quite-right voice. "Three point eight-nine kilometres."
"Not far at all, then. I was probably tumbling about with their washing earlier!" the Doctor grinned. He turned to leave, but turned back again, much to Crede's consternation. "And computer...can you tell me the galactic coordinates of the planet Cassiel?"
The Doctor could have sworn that for a fraction of a second, the blue hologram of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart gave him a pitying look, before opening its mouth and intoning, "Ten-zero-eleven-zero-zero by zero-two from galactic zero centre."
***
"Are you ever going to tell me where you came from, Doctor?" Crede whispered hoarsely as they picked their way across a dark plain dotted with bits of scrub grass. With the suns gone down it was cold, and the Doctor's shoes still squished with every step. Each time they stopped to get their bearings, he could feel his muscles begin to tighten and protest.
"Is it really that important?"
"I've forfeited my indenture because you needed my help, and I don't even know who you are or where you're from, so yeah, it's important."
The Doctor increased his pace to catch up with Crede's long, loping strides and felt quite uncharacteristically honest-so much so that it was slightly disorienting.
"I'm from another universe-an alternate universe, actually," he began but by the dim light of a far-off moon he caught Crede's incredulous look. "There's an infinite number of universes, all laying on top of one another, like a deck of cards, yeah? Some of them are very similar to this one, some of them quite different. And every now and then, some...things happen and make it possible to go from one to another."
"And what we're doing, it'll let you get back to your other universe?"
The Doctor chuckled. "No, I'm afraid I'm in this one for the long haul. But that's okay. I've gone through some...changes I guess you could say, and I sort of like it here."
"I don't know what's to like about here," Crede snorted derisively.
"Well, maybe not here here. Being displaced in time and space and in a whole other universe besides, it is a little confusing. But a long time ago, so long ago you couldn't even begin to comprehend it, I've been to this planet before."
"Then why do you need me to show you around?"
"Like I said, sometimes universes are similar and sometimes they're very different. This planet, that you call Cassiel...it was my home." He swallowed hard and even surprised himself with his candour with this young boy. There had been a time when he'd blatantly lied to even those he cared about to get out of mentioning his lost planet and his people. "It was my home, and all my people. But they're all gone now, from this universe, from every universe. It's like they never even existed."
Crede slowed his pace and then came to a stop alongside the Doctor, whose eyes were large and shining in light of the familiar constellations above. "I'm sorry," he said, clearly not really understanding what the Doctor meant, but working on the evidence before him of a man so full of regret and sadness that he was willing to risk everything in order to do just one good thing.
"Without them and without me..." He trailed off and ran a hand nervously through his hair, as if trying to erase the heaviness from his mind. "Anyway. Is it much farther, d'you think? The first sun'll be up again soon."
Crede shook his head slowly, looking unnerved by the Doctor's words and quick change of subject. He was trying to think of something to say-to comfort, or to probe, or clarify-when they both turned suddenly at the wet, sickening sound of one carbon-based life-form beating the hell out of another, followed quickly by a strangled scream of pain.
To Chapter 21
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
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 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19
The halls of the Proprietor's residence were cool and dark, and the doorways Crede and the Doctor moved quietly through began to require Crede to stoop down in order to avoid banging his head. This was a part of the building designed for terrestrial-born human occupation and comfort, with no nods toward the existence of the spindly microgravity-born sub-castes. The Doctor felt the push and pull of both a desire to meet one of these so-called Proprietors in order to give them an extensive piece of his mind, and the throbbing drumbeat reminder that timelines were dangerously in flux and the sooner that was sorted, the better for everyone.
It also wouldn't be long before the guards put two and two together regarding this stranger who'd shown up in their midst and then promptly gone missing. Rounding a corner, Crede tapped him on the shoulder from behind and gestured silently to a soft blue glow emanating from under a heavy dark wood door. The Doctor nodded and approached, putting his ear to it before trying the handle.
The hinges were a little squeaky and Crede winced at how the sound seemed to echo around the hall and become amplified, but the Doctor took no notice. The room they entered was unoccupied, and furnished comfortably with the same fur-upholstered chairs and sofas as they'd seen previously. Crede gave these a rather wide berth, but the Doctor focused on the central feature of this seeming salon. Coming down from the ceiling in the middle of the room, with the furniture arranged so that it would indeed be the focal point for anyone occupying the space, was an enormous structure like a chandelier. Like a chandelier, but several times larger than appropriate for the size of the room, and filled with tiny pin-points of blue light running throughout its crystalline structure. It hung so low that the Doctor could examine it at eye-level, which he did with great interest.
"Fascinating," he muttered, reaching out with a finger to touch it, but then pulling back again suddenly as the tiny blue lights began to course through the crystals at a much faster rate, then gathered in great numbers at the bottom tip of each faceted stalactite, before pouring out to form a shimmering blue-tinged hologram in the air below. The image was of a human head, with somewhat patrician features, mustachioed, and wearing a beret. The Doctor's heart skipped a beat instinctively, even though this was quite obviously a conglomeration of photons that resembled Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, and not the genuine article. There was a very human-feeling tug deep in his chest, rather in spite of his brain.
The Doctor looked sidelong at the image and squinted suspiciously. "Well that's unsettling. How are you doing that?"
Crede, who had been standing off to the side, now moved closer to the Doctor and came up behind him, looking down at the base of his neck pointedly.
"It's interfacing with your translator. You're blinking yellow-must be having trouble... Wait, there it goes. You're green."
"So do I just...talk to it... Him... It?" the Doctor rubbed the back of his neck, running his finger over the translator disc, which sent an involuntary shudder right down his spine and made his legs wobble for a moment.
Crede was standing behind him still, and partially obscured by the low light in the room, but the Doctor thought he could hear the boy roll his eyes.
"Blimey, it was just a question," the Doctor shrugged and turned back to the shimmering blue image hovering before him. "All right then, distractingly eerie computer, I'd like to know if any indentures have gone missing from this work unit in the past, oh, let's say three standard months."
The hologram blinked, which struck the Doctor as just silly-why would a hologram even need to blink? Who wrote this daft program? "Access denied," it said, moving it's mouth in what was almost in time with the words, but was just a fraction of a second off.
"Oh, now that just totally ruins the illusion, that does. Access denied?" The Doctor reached in to his inside pocket and pulled out the sonic probe, inspecting it carefully before twirling a knob and pointing it up at the main structure of the computer. "How about now?"
"No records found," the blue hologram intoned, in a voice that was a little bit like the Brigadier's, but not really.
The Doctor scratched his head and shifted on his feet, taking a half-step backwards. His shins hit the furry sofa behind him and before he could re-balance himself, the sofa moved forward, cut him off at the knee, and he went tumbling down on to it. Crede jumped out of the way and again took up a spot in the shadows in a far corner of the room.
"I hate those things," Crede said, wrinkling his nose. "I've never been able to get used to them, moving about like that and...massaging you. Ugh," he shuddered.
The Doctor just sat, perplexed and looking down at the floor and his own feet. "Is this...is this thing alive?"
Crede made a face and shuddered again. "Yeah, sort of. If you want to call just hanging around a room waiting for someone to sit on you a life."
The Doctor was momentarily caught between wanting to have nothing to do with this living furniture and at the same time not wanting to offend said furniture. Maybe it liked being sat on? He felt a low rumble from below his posterior and was about to be quite embarrassed when it struck him that the sofa seemed to be purring. That settled that, then, and he put his feet up on an ottoman that had inched within range.
"Right," he drawled, considering. "Anyway... Computer, how many work units are on this planet Cassiel?"
The hologram answered immediately: "Three-thousand two-hundred and eighty-two."
"Ouch," the Doctor sighed. "That's a lot of data, even for me. How many work units in the twenty square kilometres around this one?"
"Thirty-seven."
The Doctor looked over at Crede, who nodded in corroboration. "It's a very aritanium-rich area."
"All right. And of those thirty-seven work units, have any indentures gone missing in the past three months?"
The blue lights of the computer whizzed around its structure for a moment before the hologram answered sympathetically: "I'm sorry, your access level does not permit me to deliver that information."
"Access level? Bugger." The Doctor looked at the sonic probe again and shook it, as if to dislodge whatever it was that hadn't broken him in to the computer at a high enough level. "Okay, okay... That's okay, we can work with this. Just let me think. What would indicate a loss of an indenture but would seem innocuous enough-"
He stood up again, as he'd always felt that standing helped him think better. Crede looked concerned and began to inch towards the door of the room, indicating through his posture that he was getting anxious about being discovered.
"A-ha!" the Doctor cried, a bit too loudly to really be appropriate for a breaking-and-entering sort of situation. "Can you show me the food expenditures over the past three standard months for this work unit?"
"Displaying now," the hologram said, and a view-screen set in to a coffee-table blinked to life.
The Doctor mused to himself as he inspected the columns and rows of figures, not speaking clearly enough for Crede to catch any particular words.
"Did you find what you were looking for?" the boy ventured to ask after a few moments had passed. He was shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot and continued to cast frequent glances over to the door.
"It's what I didn't find, young man, that is important," the Doctor finally said, looking back to the hologram. "Show me the food expenditures over the past three standard months for all work units within twenty square kilometres of here. Just the totals, no need to break it down to meat and veg and pudding."
"Why, what's that going to show?" Crede asked tentatively as the Doctor bent over the view-screen again.
"Well, here's the thing: Hardly anyone just oppresses people because they like oppressing people. It's always about something else. Money, power, resources, things like that. And I'd wager that the mining operations here are about the money. Slave labour is cheap, but you do have to feed them, unfortunately. So in order to make sure you're making the most possible money, you feed them the bare minimum. Everything calculated down to the last calorie, for maximum profit margin."
He jabbed a finger towards the screen and motioned with his other hand for Crede to come forward and look as well. "There!" he yelped. "Right there, last month, work unit number thirty-two starts spending less on food. Just a little bit less, but less. What does that tell you?"
"That there's fewer people to feed?" Crede ventured.
"Precisely!" the Doctor enthused, and clapped him on the back. "Food expenditures remain exactly the same for all other work units during that time, except for that one. That one right there. How far from here is work unit thirty-two?"
Crede began to answer, but so did the hologram, in its eerie, disembodied not-quite-right voice. "Three point eight-nine kilometres."
"Not far at all, then. I was probably tumbling about with their washing earlier!" the Doctor grinned. He turned to leave, but turned back again, much to Crede's consternation. "And computer...can you tell me the galactic coordinates of the planet Cassiel?"
The Doctor could have sworn that for a fraction of a second, the blue hologram of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart gave him a pitying look, before opening its mouth and intoning, "Ten-zero-eleven-zero-zero by zero-two from galactic zero centre."
***
"Are you ever going to tell me where you came from, Doctor?" Crede whispered hoarsely as they picked their way across a dark plain dotted with bits of scrub grass. With the suns gone down it was cold, and the Doctor's shoes still squished with every step. Each time they stopped to get their bearings, he could feel his muscles begin to tighten and protest.
"Is it really that important?"
"I've forfeited my indenture because you needed my help, and I don't even know who you are or where you're from, so yeah, it's important."
The Doctor increased his pace to catch up with Crede's long, loping strides and felt quite uncharacteristically honest-so much so that it was slightly disorienting.
"I'm from another universe-an alternate universe, actually," he began but by the dim light of a far-off moon he caught Crede's incredulous look. "There's an infinite number of universes, all laying on top of one another, like a deck of cards, yeah? Some of them are very similar to this one, some of them quite different. And every now and then, some...things happen and make it possible to go from one to another."
"And what we're doing, it'll let you get back to your other universe?"
The Doctor chuckled. "No, I'm afraid I'm in this one for the long haul. But that's okay. I've gone through some...changes I guess you could say, and I sort of like it here."
"I don't know what's to like about here," Crede snorted derisively.
"Well, maybe not here here. Being displaced in time and space and in a whole other universe besides, it is a little confusing. But a long time ago, so long ago you couldn't even begin to comprehend it, I've been to this planet before."
"Then why do you need me to show you around?"
"Like I said, sometimes universes are similar and sometimes they're very different. This planet, that you call Cassiel...it was my home." He swallowed hard and even surprised himself with his candour with this young boy. There had been a time when he'd blatantly lied to even those he cared about to get out of mentioning his lost planet and his people. "It was my home, and all my people. But they're all gone now, from this universe, from every universe. It's like they never even existed."
Crede slowed his pace and then came to a stop alongside the Doctor, whose eyes were large and shining in light of the familiar constellations above. "I'm sorry," he said, clearly not really understanding what the Doctor meant, but working on the evidence before him of a man so full of regret and sadness that he was willing to risk everything in order to do just one good thing.
"Without them and without me..." He trailed off and ran a hand nervously through his hair, as if trying to erase the heaviness from his mind. "Anyway. Is it much farther, d'you think? The first sun'll be up again soon."
Crede shook his head slowly, looking unnerved by the Doctor's words and quick change of subject. He was trying to think of something to say-to comfort, or to probe, or clarify-when they both turned suddenly at the wet, sickening sound of one carbon-based life-form beating the hell out of another, followed quickly by a strangled scream of pain.
To Chapter 21