[Fic] Into the Dark (1/2)
Title: Into the Dark (1/2)
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,592
Characters: Rose Tyler
Summary: Rose Tyler disappeared from St. Edelweiss asylum for ten days. This is what happened to her.
Notes: Written as off-screen canon for stedelweiss.
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, that's for the BBC to deal with.
It started in the library.
Rose had gone to the library to see if there was anything worth reading, and secretly hoping to find a copy of Pride and Prejudice. It was quiet, being a library, and Rose had been mostly ignored by the staffer acting as librarian that day. Free time was probably almost over, but she might be able to take a book back with her.
Or smuggle it back. She wasn't sure what the rules were on books, exactly
Still, she had to find a book first, and that was proving difficult. She sighed, and walked up to a bookshelf, taking her just out of sight of the librarian.
She frowned and looked down. There was a rug over the floor, but she could've sworn she heard something... She backed up a step, and then forward again. Yes, there it was, a faint change in sound from one step to the next, like there was something hollow under the rug.
Rose risked a peek back around - no one in the library to see her, the librarian possibly asleep or engrossed in whatever he was reading. She crouched down and lifted the rug up a little bit, so she could see where she'd been standing. Her eyes widened a little when she realised she was looking at a trapdoor. A trapdoor that might lead out of here.
She was a bit hesitant to open it - it could make it harder for the Doctor to find her if she left. And even if it didn't, she should probably tell some of the others about this - Rin and Zack and Fanny, at least.
But then, who knew if she would ever get another chance like this. It had only been a few days and she already felt like she was going mad. She took a deep breath, reached out, and gently tugged on the trap door, starting to assume that it wouldn't open, or would be too heavy or loud.
It wasn't. It opened relatively easily, quietly. Some people in the hallway started speaking loudly, maybe arguing, maybe just exuberant - she didn't care. She peeked into the hole and saw the hint of a ladder, and the reflection of a puddle not too far down. No light, and the air coming up was chilly, and smelled dank, but how hard could it be to find her way out of an underground tunnel, even in the dark? She turned, holding the trapdoor up as little as possible so the rug wouldn't slide off, and wiggled her way in, blindly flailing around with her feet until she found the ladder's rungs. She got most of the way in, head still peeking up, one hand holding the trap door open, and hesitated again. Maybe this was a bad idea - she had no idea what was going to be down here, and it's not like she was prepared for trekking through the woods of Switzerland.
There was a noise in the doorway, on the other side of the table - she was blocked from view, on the floor, but that wouldn't last long if whoever it was actually came in. She ducked down quickly and lowered the trap door as quietly as she could, hoping the rug would cover it enough that no one would notice and come investigating.
She hung, frozen, on the ladder, listening for the sound of anyone coming to apprehend her. There was an unnerving thump as someone walked over the trap door, inches above her head...
And then nothing. They hadn't noticed. Rose let out a deep sigh of relief, and looked down to see where her feet and the rungs were.
Somehow, she'd failed to notice until just now that it was absolutely, positively pitch black. She swallowed hard. You can do this, Rose Tyler, she thought to herself. Just put one foot down until you feel the next rung. This wasn't so hard. She could make it to the ground like this, if cautiously. Another rung down. Listening carefully, she thought she could hear faint echoes down the tunnel - or what she assumed was a tunnel. She hoped briefly that there weren't any rats, moved her foot down to catch the next rung--
And nearly fell off the ladder. There wasn't a rung where she'd expected one, and she'd put her weight down - her stomach had dropped, just like when she'd step off the kerb by accident, or miss a step at the bottom of a staircase. It got her heart pounding, in any case, and for a moment she could do nothing but clutch the rungs in front of her and remember to breathe. After a few seconds, she cautiously began to swing her leg around, feeling for ANY part of the ladder, and came up with nothing. It must've broken off part-way down, and she didn't know how far down it was, exactly. She'd have to drop and risk a twisted ankle or a jammed knee, despite the fact that thinking about it made her a bit queasy. But she'd come this far, and had she'd probably get caught if she tried to get out so she could try later. She wished she had a torch - electric or otherwise - but there was nothing for it. She counted to three in a whisper, and dropped.
The landing wasn't quite as jarring as she'd expected, but it was cold - so cold she almost shouted, and only just managed to bite her tongue in time. She'd landed in ankle-deep water that soaked through her trainers and crept up the legs of her trousers, cold enough that she almost started shivering, and while she hoped it was a puddle, the sound of moving water sloshing against the walls rippled down far enough that she realised the passage must be flooded. Rose groaned softly - this was not going to be a fun escape attempt.
But what she needed to do wasn't complain silently about how cold her feet were, or how much she wished she had wellies, or that it actually smelled a lot danker than she'd thought up above. She needed to actually get out, so her feet could dry and maybe even one day warm. She reached cautiously out in front of her, until her hand bumped the ladder - directly in front of her, lowest rung about chest height. She groped around it to find the wall, which was cold and felt like it might have a light coating of mold covering the old bricks, and started to inch along it, one hand held out in front of her, the other on the wall next to her. She came up a dead end in only a few paces, and followed that wall to the other side of the passageway. It was comfortably wide, and she couldn't feel the top above my head, no matter how high she stretched up, so she took comfort in the thought that she hopefully wouldn't be stuck in any tight crawl spaces. If she was lucky.
She set off down the passageway, one hand on the wall despite the vaguely slimy feeling, sloshing slowly through the water. The water wasn't cold enough to give her frostbite or whatever the water-caused equivalent would be, but it was cold enough that her feet went slightly numb after five or six minutes. She couldn't help be glad she was wearing a jacket, even if it was just a light zip-up hoodie that was more for looking cute than anything else. She was starting to think there would be no end or turn to the passage when she felt something brush up against her ankle. She yelped and jerked her foot out of the water without thinking, breathing hard. It couldn't have been a rat, the rats made noise as they skittered around - she could hear them off in the distance, though none were near her. She stood there, balanced precariously on one foot, trying to keep from falling by leaning against the wall, and weighed the likelihood that it was something that would attack her hand if she tried to touch it to find out what it was. Eventually she came to the conclusion that if it was something that would attack her, it would've a) done so already, and b) made some noise when it bumped into her. She carefully lowered her foot, then crouched so she could feel around for it. When she finally found it, floating a little ways behind her, it took her a moment to figure out what it was - it was somewhat squishy and it felt like there was a covering of some sort that slid around a bit on the inner frame. A sort of... hand-shaped frame. With what felt like a bone sticking out of the bottom of it.
Rose flung the dismembered hand away from her into the darkness, and tried to ignore the splash from where it landed. She dipped her hands in the water and then scrubbed them furiously on her trousers, trying to get any imagined bits of dead body off of her skin. She hadn't screamed, but her heart was pounding up in her throat and she felt vaguely like she might be sick.
If there was a dismembered hand in the passageway, the rest of the body might be here, too.
Once she was finished flailing, she crouched again, hugging her knees while trying to keep everything but her feet out of the water. She was getting uncomfortably cold, and it smelled disgusting, and there were dead body parts, all with no end or exit in sight. She considered turning around and going back, giving some excuse for how she'd got her shoes soaked while in the library, but decided against it.
After all, she might as well keep going. No telling what they might do to her back there, and she'd rather risk dying of exposure to that. She stood, and started walking again, determined not to turn back even if she found the body that the hand had belonged to.
That's when the ground dropped away beneath her foot, and her hand slipped on the mold's slime, sending her tumbling head-first into the water. Painfully cold water, that made her chest tighten painfully, and she sucked in a mouthful of water, nearly panicking when she realised she'd breathed it in, trying not to choke until her head was above water. She managed to get her feet underneath her and stood, retching and coughing, and fought her way back a few feet to where the path rose and the water was shallower, and doubled over on her hands and knees while her body fought to expel the water she'd inhaled.
Now, hacking up vile-tasting water and being soaked from head to toe in an already-cold tunnel seemed like a couple of points towards going back, but Rose was not so easily deterred. She was a Tyler, and she was the Doctor's companion. She'd survived the end of the world, Slitheen (twice!), a Dalek, Satellite Five, gas-mask zombies, dangling from a barrage balloon in the middle of a German air raid, and being dumped by Jimmy Stone.
She could survive being cold and damp in a tunnel.
Once she could breathe more or less normally, she wiped her face on her (sopping wet) sleeve, shivered, and began inching her way into the water. The temperature was still almost painfully cold, and as she submerged, she started shivering rather violently. It wasn't freezing, but it was still plenty cold, and by the time the ground evened out, she was in water up to her chest, holding both arms above the water so that she could keep as much of herself relatively warm as she could. As long as the tunnel didn't end up going completely under water, she could manage, and there seemed no reason why it would go completely under water.
She was wondering if the tunnel would go up again when she bumped into the first dead body. She didn't know for certain that's what it was, but given the earlier hand, she was willing to bet this large thing she'd run into was the owner, and she screamed and pushed it away and herself back as best as she could, fighting against the water's drag.
Another one bumped into her from behind, at a bit of an angle, and she twisted, nearly going under again as she lost her footing, kicking to propel herself away.
And right into the arms of a third corpse. She got tangled in this one, enough to know for certain that it was, indeed, a person, or had been before it had ended up down here. She didn't really notice the whimpers and yelps coming from her mouth, she just wanted to get away.
This was too much. She couldn't deal with corpses, not on this scale. She'd turn around, go back, find an excuse or a torch. Yeah, she could wait at the base of the ladder until night-time, and then see if she could find a torch of some sort so she could at least see where the corpses were. She stopped trying to walk through the water and dog paddled as quickly as she could in the direction she thought she'd come from. It felt like she was swimming through a sea of corpses, her hands getting tangled in their hair, her arms obstructed by their limbs. Sometimes some of their scalp came away when she tried to get the hair off of her hands, and she fought back the urge to be sick.
And then she stopped running into as many of them, and then the ground sloped up and she was back to ankle-deep water, and the only thing she could do was lean over and vomit. Eventually, there was nothing left in her stomach, and she was left trembling from the fear and the cold. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and then stepped away to rinse her hand off in vaguely cleaner water, but the sour taste in her mouth lingered.
She didn't even consider rinsing her mouth out with the water in the tunnel, after those bodies.
After a few minutes trying to pull herself together, she decided that the best thing to do would be to walk back, warm herself up a bit, maybe dry out. As cold as it was, she decided that once she reached the ladder, she'd give all her clothes a good wring-out so hopefully they'd be mostly dry by the time she climbed back up. They'd probably still be dirty and smelly, but she could handle that for a few days, until laundry day.
God, she was actually looking forward to laundry day.
The ground dropped again, only a foot or so, and Rose stumbled in surprise - the ground had been even between the ladder and the pool with the bodies. Which meant that she must've got turned around when she was dealing with the corpses. She groaned, and pinched the bridge of her nose. It made sense, now that she wasn't panicking and swimming through cold water - there had been so many bodies, and she hadn't run into them initially. But in the complete darkness, it was kind of hard to tell.
She took a few more steps, and the wall she'd been trailing her hand on disappeared. A turn. That was something new, at any rate. Rose took a few deep breaths, despite her lungs still burning from the inhaled water. She could go back the way she'd come, wait for dark, and probably not get in much trouble at all. Or she could go down the tunnel, trusting that it would lead somewhere outside, and possibly get in a lot of trouble if it just led to a different part of the building.
She imagined what the Doctor or Jack would do in this position, and grinned despite the cold and the bodies and the wet. Of course they would keep going - it's not the most fun, but it's an adventure either way, and if there's a chance of getting out, they'd take it. So she would, too.
It didn't occur to her until she'd been walking (slowly) for a couple of hours, wading through various depths of water, tripping over the odd body or two, and taking more turns than she could remember, that this might not be a straightforward tunnel. She'd been operating under the assumption that there was only one way to go every time she felt the tunnel turn, and going that way. There was no way she could remember all the turns that she'd taken, and she'd switched walls once or twice to give her fingers a chance to dry out after trailing along the damp, mouldy walls. But when she tripped over a body and fell, sliding into a corner where the tunnel branched, she realised two things. The first was that her initial assumption was very wrong. The second was that she was going to have a really nasty bruise on her ribs.
Grimacing, she got back to her feet, one hand pressed to her side. A few cautious prods reassured her that while it smarted, there was nothing broken, and she turned her attention to the fact that she was apparently lost in a labyrinth with no light, no food, no heat, and no way of knowing which way would lead out.
She fished her TARDIS key out from under her shirt and clutched it tightly in one hand, for courage, and started off down one of the passages.
# # #
The darkness made everything seem vaguely unreal.
Rose wandered for a long time under the asylum. She wasn't sure how long. She'd slept a few times, curled up against the wall in the shallower stretches, waking up stiff and numb and shivering. Her mouth had got painfully dry at some point, and she'd finally given in and started drinking the water she was sloshing through, trying not to think about the possibility of bugs or rats or dead bodies being nearby. It tasted disgusting and scummy, but it was water, and she'd been grateful for it.
She'd never been cold before this, or tired, or hungry. It took every bit of her concentration just to keep going. In the darkness, sometimes she wondered if she wasn't walking in place while the ground changed under her feet to make her think she was moving.
She felt as if she'd been underground for weeks.
Finally, as she turned a corner down a new passageway, she found something new. Or, more specifically, she tripped over and fell onto something new.
Stairs.
She was tired and hungry and felt like shit and like she might fall over without something to lean on, but that didn't stop her from scrambling up the stairs as fast as she could, almost ramming her head into the metal door at the top and laughing weakly at herself for it. There was a handle, and though the door seemed to be hanging partially off its hinges, it opened when she pulled. Whatever room was in front of her was as dark as the tunnel had been, but it was dry, and the tiniest bit warmer. She debated trying to follow the wall, but rooms tended to have things up against the walls, and she wasn't sure how much longer she could stay standing. So she got down on her hands and knees, and crawled straight ahead.
She felt papers under her hands, and ran into a few toppled chairs and what might've been a small table or nightstand on her way, but eventually she hit the far wall. And a wooden door. She pulled herself to her feet and tugged the door. It didn't move. She changed tactics and pushed. Same thing.
"No no no," she whimpered, and turned to lean against the wall next to the door. "Ow!" That plan got vetoed rather quickly when something poked her in the back. She groped around and found what felt like a light switch.
There was no way it would work. She wasn't that lucky.
She had to try, though, and held her breath, flipping the switch. When the one light bulb in the centre of the room flickered to light, Rose almost cried - as much from the sudden pain of the light hitting her eyes as from relief. The room was, she saw after she'd given her eyes a chance to adjust, clearly a dormitory of some sort, though it looked like a tornado had come through. She didn't care - she went to the nearest mattress and dragged it off of the ruined bed frame. It was dusty and had more than a few spiderwebs on it, but she calmly shook it as best she could in her current state, dropped it to the ground, and collapsed on it.
She was still cold and wet and hungry, but sleep seemed like the best plan for now. She had just enough presence of mind to kick her trainers off before she fell into a deep sleep.
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,592
Characters: Rose Tyler
Summary: Rose Tyler disappeared from St. Edelweiss asylum for ten days. This is what happened to her.
Notes: Written as off-screen canon for stedelweiss.
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, that's for the BBC to deal with.
It started in the library.
Rose had gone to the library to see if there was anything worth reading, and secretly hoping to find a copy of Pride and Prejudice. It was quiet, being a library, and Rose had been mostly ignored by the staffer acting as librarian that day. Free time was probably almost over, but she might be able to take a book back with her.
Or smuggle it back. She wasn't sure what the rules were on books, exactly
Still, she had to find a book first, and that was proving difficult. She sighed, and walked up to a bookshelf, taking her just out of sight of the librarian.
She frowned and looked down. There was a rug over the floor, but she could've sworn she heard something... She backed up a step, and then forward again. Yes, there it was, a faint change in sound from one step to the next, like there was something hollow under the rug.
Rose risked a peek back around - no one in the library to see her, the librarian possibly asleep or engrossed in whatever he was reading. She crouched down and lifted the rug up a little bit, so she could see where she'd been standing. Her eyes widened a little when she realised she was looking at a trapdoor. A trapdoor that might lead out of here.
She was a bit hesitant to open it - it could make it harder for the Doctor to find her if she left. And even if it didn't, she should probably tell some of the others about this - Rin and Zack and Fanny, at least.
But then, who knew if she would ever get another chance like this. It had only been a few days and she already felt like she was going mad. She took a deep breath, reached out, and gently tugged on the trap door, starting to assume that it wouldn't open, or would be too heavy or loud.
It wasn't. It opened relatively easily, quietly. Some people in the hallway started speaking loudly, maybe arguing, maybe just exuberant - she didn't care. She peeked into the hole and saw the hint of a ladder, and the reflection of a puddle not too far down. No light, and the air coming up was chilly, and smelled dank, but how hard could it be to find her way out of an underground tunnel, even in the dark? She turned, holding the trapdoor up as little as possible so the rug wouldn't slide off, and wiggled her way in, blindly flailing around with her feet until she found the ladder's rungs. She got most of the way in, head still peeking up, one hand holding the trap door open, and hesitated again. Maybe this was a bad idea - she had no idea what was going to be down here, and it's not like she was prepared for trekking through the woods of Switzerland.
There was a noise in the doorway, on the other side of the table - she was blocked from view, on the floor, but that wouldn't last long if whoever it was actually came in. She ducked down quickly and lowered the trap door as quietly as she could, hoping the rug would cover it enough that no one would notice and come investigating.
She hung, frozen, on the ladder, listening for the sound of anyone coming to apprehend her. There was an unnerving thump as someone walked over the trap door, inches above her head...
And then nothing. They hadn't noticed. Rose let out a deep sigh of relief, and looked down to see where her feet and the rungs were.
Somehow, she'd failed to notice until just now that it was absolutely, positively pitch black. She swallowed hard. You can do this, Rose Tyler, she thought to herself. Just put one foot down until you feel the next rung. This wasn't so hard. She could make it to the ground like this, if cautiously. Another rung down. Listening carefully, she thought she could hear faint echoes down the tunnel - or what she assumed was a tunnel. She hoped briefly that there weren't any rats, moved her foot down to catch the next rung--
And nearly fell off the ladder. There wasn't a rung where she'd expected one, and she'd put her weight down - her stomach had dropped, just like when she'd step off the kerb by accident, or miss a step at the bottom of a staircase. It got her heart pounding, in any case, and for a moment she could do nothing but clutch the rungs in front of her and remember to breathe. After a few seconds, she cautiously began to swing her leg around, feeling for ANY part of the ladder, and came up with nothing. It must've broken off part-way down, and she didn't know how far down it was, exactly. She'd have to drop and risk a twisted ankle or a jammed knee, despite the fact that thinking about it made her a bit queasy. But she'd come this far, and had she'd probably get caught if she tried to get out so she could try later. She wished she had a torch - electric or otherwise - but there was nothing for it. She counted to three in a whisper, and dropped.
The landing wasn't quite as jarring as she'd expected, but it was cold - so cold she almost shouted, and only just managed to bite her tongue in time. She'd landed in ankle-deep water that soaked through her trainers and crept up the legs of her trousers, cold enough that she almost started shivering, and while she hoped it was a puddle, the sound of moving water sloshing against the walls rippled down far enough that she realised the passage must be flooded. Rose groaned softly - this was not going to be a fun escape attempt.
But what she needed to do wasn't complain silently about how cold her feet were, or how much she wished she had wellies, or that it actually smelled a lot danker than she'd thought up above. She needed to actually get out, so her feet could dry and maybe even one day warm. She reached cautiously out in front of her, until her hand bumped the ladder - directly in front of her, lowest rung about chest height. She groped around it to find the wall, which was cold and felt like it might have a light coating of mold covering the old bricks, and started to inch along it, one hand held out in front of her, the other on the wall next to her. She came up a dead end in only a few paces, and followed that wall to the other side of the passageway. It was comfortably wide, and she couldn't feel the top above my head, no matter how high she stretched up, so she took comfort in the thought that she hopefully wouldn't be stuck in any tight crawl spaces. If she was lucky.
She set off down the passageway, one hand on the wall despite the vaguely slimy feeling, sloshing slowly through the water. The water wasn't cold enough to give her frostbite or whatever the water-caused equivalent would be, but it was cold enough that her feet went slightly numb after five or six minutes. She couldn't help be glad she was wearing a jacket, even if it was just a light zip-up hoodie that was more for looking cute than anything else. She was starting to think there would be no end or turn to the passage when she felt something brush up against her ankle. She yelped and jerked her foot out of the water without thinking, breathing hard. It couldn't have been a rat, the rats made noise as they skittered around - she could hear them off in the distance, though none were near her. She stood there, balanced precariously on one foot, trying to keep from falling by leaning against the wall, and weighed the likelihood that it was something that would attack her hand if she tried to touch it to find out what it was. Eventually she came to the conclusion that if it was something that would attack her, it would've a) done so already, and b) made some noise when it bumped into her. She carefully lowered her foot, then crouched so she could feel around for it. When she finally found it, floating a little ways behind her, it took her a moment to figure out what it was - it was somewhat squishy and it felt like there was a covering of some sort that slid around a bit on the inner frame. A sort of... hand-shaped frame. With what felt like a bone sticking out of the bottom of it.
Rose flung the dismembered hand away from her into the darkness, and tried to ignore the splash from where it landed. She dipped her hands in the water and then scrubbed them furiously on her trousers, trying to get any imagined bits of dead body off of her skin. She hadn't screamed, but her heart was pounding up in her throat and she felt vaguely like she might be sick.
If there was a dismembered hand in the passageway, the rest of the body might be here, too.
Once she was finished flailing, she crouched again, hugging her knees while trying to keep everything but her feet out of the water. She was getting uncomfortably cold, and it smelled disgusting, and there were dead body parts, all with no end or exit in sight. She considered turning around and going back, giving some excuse for how she'd got her shoes soaked while in the library, but decided against it.
After all, she might as well keep going. No telling what they might do to her back there, and she'd rather risk dying of exposure to that. She stood, and started walking again, determined not to turn back even if she found the body that the hand had belonged to.
That's when the ground dropped away beneath her foot, and her hand slipped on the mold's slime, sending her tumbling head-first into the water. Painfully cold water, that made her chest tighten painfully, and she sucked in a mouthful of water, nearly panicking when she realised she'd breathed it in, trying not to choke until her head was above water. She managed to get her feet underneath her and stood, retching and coughing, and fought her way back a few feet to where the path rose and the water was shallower, and doubled over on her hands and knees while her body fought to expel the water she'd inhaled.
Now, hacking up vile-tasting water and being soaked from head to toe in an already-cold tunnel seemed like a couple of points towards going back, but Rose was not so easily deterred. She was a Tyler, and she was the Doctor's companion. She'd survived the end of the world, Slitheen (twice!), a Dalek, Satellite Five, gas-mask zombies, dangling from a barrage balloon in the middle of a German air raid, and being dumped by Jimmy Stone.
She could survive being cold and damp in a tunnel.
Once she could breathe more or less normally, she wiped her face on her (sopping wet) sleeve, shivered, and began inching her way into the water. The temperature was still almost painfully cold, and as she submerged, she started shivering rather violently. It wasn't freezing, but it was still plenty cold, and by the time the ground evened out, she was in water up to her chest, holding both arms above the water so that she could keep as much of herself relatively warm as she could. As long as the tunnel didn't end up going completely under water, she could manage, and there seemed no reason why it would go completely under water.
She was wondering if the tunnel would go up again when she bumped into the first dead body. She didn't know for certain that's what it was, but given the earlier hand, she was willing to bet this large thing she'd run into was the owner, and she screamed and pushed it away and herself back as best as she could, fighting against the water's drag.
Another one bumped into her from behind, at a bit of an angle, and she twisted, nearly going under again as she lost her footing, kicking to propel herself away.
And right into the arms of a third corpse. She got tangled in this one, enough to know for certain that it was, indeed, a person, or had been before it had ended up down here. She didn't really notice the whimpers and yelps coming from her mouth, she just wanted to get away.
This was too much. She couldn't deal with corpses, not on this scale. She'd turn around, go back, find an excuse or a torch. Yeah, she could wait at the base of the ladder until night-time, and then see if she could find a torch of some sort so she could at least see where the corpses were. She stopped trying to walk through the water and dog paddled as quickly as she could in the direction she thought she'd come from. It felt like she was swimming through a sea of corpses, her hands getting tangled in their hair, her arms obstructed by their limbs. Sometimes some of their scalp came away when she tried to get the hair off of her hands, and she fought back the urge to be sick.
And then she stopped running into as many of them, and then the ground sloped up and she was back to ankle-deep water, and the only thing she could do was lean over and vomit. Eventually, there was nothing left in her stomach, and she was left trembling from the fear and the cold. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and then stepped away to rinse her hand off in vaguely cleaner water, but the sour taste in her mouth lingered.
She didn't even consider rinsing her mouth out with the water in the tunnel, after those bodies.
After a few minutes trying to pull herself together, she decided that the best thing to do would be to walk back, warm herself up a bit, maybe dry out. As cold as it was, she decided that once she reached the ladder, she'd give all her clothes a good wring-out so hopefully they'd be mostly dry by the time she climbed back up. They'd probably still be dirty and smelly, but she could handle that for a few days, until laundry day.
God, she was actually looking forward to laundry day.
The ground dropped again, only a foot or so, and Rose stumbled in surprise - the ground had been even between the ladder and the pool with the bodies. Which meant that she must've got turned around when she was dealing with the corpses. She groaned, and pinched the bridge of her nose. It made sense, now that she wasn't panicking and swimming through cold water - there had been so many bodies, and she hadn't run into them initially. But in the complete darkness, it was kind of hard to tell.
She took a few more steps, and the wall she'd been trailing her hand on disappeared. A turn. That was something new, at any rate. Rose took a few deep breaths, despite her lungs still burning from the inhaled water. She could go back the way she'd come, wait for dark, and probably not get in much trouble at all. Or she could go down the tunnel, trusting that it would lead somewhere outside, and possibly get in a lot of trouble if it just led to a different part of the building.
She imagined what the Doctor or Jack would do in this position, and grinned despite the cold and the bodies and the wet. Of course they would keep going - it's not the most fun, but it's an adventure either way, and if there's a chance of getting out, they'd take it. So she would, too.
It didn't occur to her until she'd been walking (slowly) for a couple of hours, wading through various depths of water, tripping over the odd body or two, and taking more turns than she could remember, that this might not be a straightforward tunnel. She'd been operating under the assumption that there was only one way to go every time she felt the tunnel turn, and going that way. There was no way she could remember all the turns that she'd taken, and she'd switched walls once or twice to give her fingers a chance to dry out after trailing along the damp, mouldy walls. But when she tripped over a body and fell, sliding into a corner where the tunnel branched, she realised two things. The first was that her initial assumption was very wrong. The second was that she was going to have a really nasty bruise on her ribs.
Grimacing, she got back to her feet, one hand pressed to her side. A few cautious prods reassured her that while it smarted, there was nothing broken, and she turned her attention to the fact that she was apparently lost in a labyrinth with no light, no food, no heat, and no way of knowing which way would lead out.
She fished her TARDIS key out from under her shirt and clutched it tightly in one hand, for courage, and started off down one of the passages.
# # #
The darkness made everything seem vaguely unreal.
Rose wandered for a long time under the asylum. She wasn't sure how long. She'd slept a few times, curled up against the wall in the shallower stretches, waking up stiff and numb and shivering. Her mouth had got painfully dry at some point, and she'd finally given in and started drinking the water she was sloshing through, trying not to think about the possibility of bugs or rats or dead bodies being nearby. It tasted disgusting and scummy, but it was water, and she'd been grateful for it.
She'd never been cold before this, or tired, or hungry. It took every bit of her concentration just to keep going. In the darkness, sometimes she wondered if she wasn't walking in place while the ground changed under her feet to make her think she was moving.
She felt as if she'd been underground for weeks.
Finally, as she turned a corner down a new passageway, she found something new. Or, more specifically, she tripped over and fell onto something new.
Stairs.
She was tired and hungry and felt like shit and like she might fall over without something to lean on, but that didn't stop her from scrambling up the stairs as fast as she could, almost ramming her head into the metal door at the top and laughing weakly at herself for it. There was a handle, and though the door seemed to be hanging partially off its hinges, it opened when she pulled. Whatever room was in front of her was as dark as the tunnel had been, but it was dry, and the tiniest bit warmer. She debated trying to follow the wall, but rooms tended to have things up against the walls, and she wasn't sure how much longer she could stay standing. So she got down on her hands and knees, and crawled straight ahead.
She felt papers under her hands, and ran into a few toppled chairs and what might've been a small table or nightstand on her way, but eventually she hit the far wall. And a wooden door. She pulled herself to her feet and tugged the door. It didn't move. She changed tactics and pushed. Same thing.
"No no no," she whimpered, and turned to lean against the wall next to the door. "Ow!" That plan got vetoed rather quickly when something poked her in the back. She groped around and found what felt like a light switch.
There was no way it would work. She wasn't that lucky.
She had to try, though, and held her breath, flipping the switch. When the one light bulb in the centre of the room flickered to light, Rose almost cried - as much from the sudden pain of the light hitting her eyes as from relief. The room was, she saw after she'd given her eyes a chance to adjust, clearly a dormitory of some sort, though it looked like a tornado had come through. She didn't care - she went to the nearest mattress and dragged it off of the ruined bed frame. It was dusty and had more than a few spiderwebs on it, but she calmly shook it as best she could in her current state, dropped it to the ground, and collapsed on it.
She was still cold and wet and hungry, but sleep seemed like the best plan for now. She had just enough presence of mind to kick her trainers off before she fell into a deep sleep.