Doctor Who fic - Chapter One
Decided to post this here as well as on OSA. Tenth Doctor and Rose fic, set after The Satan Pit
A/N - This story takes place, for the Tenth Doctor and Rose, directly after The Satan Pit and for the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan, between Arc of Infinity and Snakedance, and contains spoilers for those episodes, The Trial of a Timelord and The Five Doctors. I have placed it in ‘Alternate Universes’ as this contains some theories on the Time War, as mentioned in the new series. All characters belong to their respective copyright owners, and no profit is made or intended to be made from this story.
Sometimes Rose found it hard to believe the landscape in front of her belonged to another world. The rolling hills, dusted with bronzed leaves from the skeletal trees and the silvery, overcast sky could well have lain just a few miles away from her home in London; the damp weather smelled the same and the birds sounded like ordinary birds. It was only when she glimpsed the carvings on the crumbling ruins around her that she remembered this place was alien, that the buildings, whatever they were, had been abandoned before her species grew legs and crawled out of the ocean, and that she was one of only two people on the planet. All the others were dead, perished so long ago that their name had been forgotten, or so the Doctor had told her.
The lost girl, so far away from home; the valiant child who will die in battle so very soon.
Although she promised herself she wouldn’t think about the Sanctuary Base or dwell on what was said and done there, she found the idea resounding in her mind once again. It had never really occurred to her before, despite the many perils she had faced. When she travelled with the Doctor, people they encountered died. Death was creeping closer to her, no longer just a shadow other people talked about or something so far in the future that she couldn’t picture it. Even on this planet, which the Doctor claimed would be an ideal spot to rest, come to grips with everything, gather their strength for the next adventure, she could feel it all around her. She tried pressing the headphones of her MP3 player deeper into her ears, hoping the music would cut out her own thoughts and let her enjoy the planet’s serene atmosphere, but met with no success.
In the end she got up off the damp patch of stone and grass on which she’d been sitting for the last twenty minutes and sighed. This was not working. No amount of tranquil breezes and Snow Patrol songs would shake off this mood. She needed people, proper noise and, above all, food to take her mind off things. After dusting off the seat of her jeans, she glanced about and sought out the blue police box nestled amongst the bare trees just over the hill.
The TARDIS door lay ajar, which didn’t surprise Rose, as the Doctor had been pottering in his machine ever since they arrived, several hours earlier. She asked him once what he was doing, but didn’t understand a word of his reply. She suspected, in fact, that he made most of it up because all he was really doing was making a mess. Sometimes he reminded her of a suburban dad, tinkering in the shed every weekend but never actually fixing or producing anything. Oddly though, as she wandered inside, there were no clanks and clatters from the console room. The chamber, far larger than the outer shell of the TARDIS, thanks to some trans-dimensional engineering, was littered with equipment, clumps of wires, tools ranging from high tech lasers to a claw hammer and lump of blue-tack, but the Doctor himself stood completely motionless by the multi-sided central console. He leaned against the instrument panel, frowning deeply and gazing at one of the many small screens.
She considered speaking to him about the future again, but in the end decided not to bother. She had already asked him several times if there was anything in this ‘prophecy’, but each time he dismissed her concerns. She knew he was trying to console her. He might even have been telling the truth, but somehow no matter how many times he said there was nothing to worry about, this time she didn’t quite believe him.
‘It’s gonna rain,’ she announced instead, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Honestly, Doctor, how about a planet with warm weather for a change, only one that’s not about to blow up or be eaten by giant ants or something?’ She laughed mirthlessly, shaking her head, though as she headed around the outside of the chamber, on her way to the door that would lead into the bowels of the ship, she noticed that the Doctor hadn’t moved. ‘What’s up? Doctor?’
She came to his side and glanced over his shoulder at the screen. ‘What is it?’
He straightened suddenly, as if he only then realised she was in the room at all. ‘All done? Bit damp out there, isn’t it. Fine rain, gets right through you. Worst kind. Right, then we’ll be off.’ He darted to the opposite side of the console and manipulated the controls.
‘Off? Off where? Thought you wanted to hang about a bit, chill out?’ He didn’t answer. When she saw him yank the levers around the console and heard the TARDIS’s engines whine, she knew they were leaving the damp, empty planet behind. ‘Where we going now then?’
‘Bit of a detour,’ muttered the Doctor at last. ‘Something’s come up.’
‘Like what? Good something, bad something?’
‘Depends.’
He tapped the console thoughtfully and trailed off into another stare. Rose ventured nearer but then just observed him for a while. He seemed so strange, so unlike ‘her’ doctor, in this mood and that worried her more than anything some possessed aliens could say to her. ‘Doctor, what’s wrong?’
She went around to the screen that had captivated him when she first came in and glanced down at the stream of text and figures there. ‘What is this? ‘Incoming transmission’? Who’s calling us?’
‘Something that shouldn’t exist,’ he answered, again breaking from his thoughts to look at her. This time, however, he smiled and his wide, dark eyes regained a little of their customary shine. ‘Looks like it’s the season for impossible things. What’s that now, six before breakfast?’
‘What shouldn’t exist?’
‘Back in a minute,’ he called, then hurried across the console room and disappeared through one of the doors before Rose could protest. Infuriating though it was to be kept out of things, she had to admit her mind was off the Ood and the Beast and black holes for the moment. She studied the monitor screen again, brushing her hair behind her ear in concentration, and tried to make sense of the message. All she could make out, however, were a string of numbers that were supposedly co-ordinates, and four flashing words; ‘URGENT - CONCERNS THE CELLAE’. Made about as much sense as things normally did on board the Doctor’s time and space machine, she supposed. Yet there were no alarms, no klaxons wailing in her ears. Wherever the TARDIS was headed, they were approaching in a sedate, almost cautious manner.
Usually Rose enjoyed the last few minutes of their flights, the little bubble of anticipation before the doors opened and she stepped out onto a completely new terrain, and the thought that while others were trudging to work or slogging into college or watching Trisha, she was off, not necessarily enjoying herself all the time, but certainly free and seeing things most people never even imagined. She wanted that feeling back again, and fought hard to shake off the sense of doom creeping up on her again as the TARDIS came to a halt. Once they landed, however, everything seemed to fall extremely silent, and the Doctor had not as yet returned.
Something was out there, she thought, something that summoned them and was waiting. When the Doctor finally returned, moreover, Rose saw something dark in his eyes. He looked almost afraid as he approached the console and, after a moment’s consideration, laid his hand on the switch that would open the doors.
‘Rose, I want you to stay here,’ he said before he operated the control.
‘No chance,’ Rose replied. If there was something out there that he didn’t fancy meeting, then he shouldn’t be facing it alone, should he?
‘I’m serious.’
‘Why, what’s out there? Come on, I’ve never ran away from nothing so far, have I? Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than Daleks or Cybermen or Slitheen, and I did all right with them, didn’t I? Why’s this different?’ ‘Why’s this bothering you so much’ was the question she really wanted to ask.
He mulled the matter over for a long while before he finally opened the doors. ‘All right, but if we do meet anything, and to be honest, it’s unlikely we will meet anything because this is probably a trap, but if we do meet any creature or being out there, don’t listen to it. Don’t believe a thing he says.’
‘Who says?’ Rose asked, but the Doctor had dashed out of the TARDIS already and by then Rose was used to his selective responses.
She caught up with him in a long beige-walled corridor with grey floors and the occasional bit of decoration made from box steel in geometric patterns. The air smelled stale with a faint sting of disinfectant, and she sensed a gentle hum of machinery pulsing through the floor and walls, though there were no other sounds. It was unnaturally quiet, the sort of silence that hissed in her ears, and the Doctor regarded it all with a deep wariness. Rose started to watch the different angles of the corridor, half expecting something nasty to leap out, but as they wandered through, all she found was the same dreary architecture.
‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,’ she remarked. But then, the Doctor said he didn’t expect to meet anyone. This was a trap of some sort, Rose thought with a shiver. ‘Where are we, anyway?’
‘Space station,’ the Doctor replied.
‘How d’you know?’ She touched the walls, trying to see if there was something in the vibrations that would give the place away. ‘Engines or machines or something, recycled air?’
‘I’ve been here before,’ said the Doctor.
‘Oh, right. So, if this is a trap, what sort of thing would it be? I mean, what should we look out for?’
‘Could be anything. But if I were setting it, I’d want us to know why it was being set and by whom, with a bit of gloating in there for good measure. You can’t set a trap for someone and not have a bit of a gloat when they wander into it. So whatever it is, it won’t be quick. Not the sort of Indiana Jones, quick blast of wind then a big disc chops your head off sort of trap.’
‘Good to know,’ Rose muttered. ‘Why would this person, this thing want to kill us though?’
‘Well, thing is, a lot of people I meet end up wanting to kill me. It’s a sort of occupational hazard.’
‘Noticed, yeah. So why come here, if you know this geezer’s going to try something?’
The Doctor drew in a deep breath and looked around as if getting his bearings, then he veered off down another passageway that led off the main corridor. ‘Because I thought he was destroyed.’
‘Take it,’ Rose began, wandering after him, ‘you had something to do with that?’
He didn’t answer, but Rose knew she was right all the same. Overthrowing evil, toppling dictators, pushing back invasion forces, you were bound to make enemies, she reasoned. She still didn’t like the Doctor’s manner, however. He looked far too anxious, with none of the ‘right, let’s go beat this thing’ attitude she would have expected if some old adversary had surfaced again.
Finally, they came to the end of the corridor, to a wider space with a set of bronze-coloured doors at the top of a flight of steps, and with a strip of glowing stained glass, the first real colour Rose had seen in the place, on the wall opposite. Rose drifted up to the door and listened for a while, but there were no sounds of movement or life inside.
‘Is there anyone here?’ she called down to the Doctor, who was prowling around, examining the details of the glass panel.
‘No one,’ he answered.
‘So whose station is it then? Why would they just leave it here?’
‘There’s no one left. It’s abandoned, useless. Has been for a long time.’
‘But there’s power,’ said Rose. ‘There’s still air, there’s gravity…’
‘Self renewing power sources, like the TARDIS. No one’s told the place there’s no one left to use it, so it just keeps going, keeps waiting.’
‘So the people who built it are dead? All of them?’
The Doctor swept up past her and gave her an odd look before he opened the doors and stepped through into the next room, but a shiver ran up Rose’s spine, realisation dawning over her.
‘Doctor,’ she began as she followed him in, ‘was this…did this belong to your people?’
They had come into what, to Rose, looked like a courtroom. It had been partially dismantled, with decorated panels stacked against the walls, equipment and bouquets of coloured wire abandoned on the floor. She could still, however, make out the judge’s seat, with benches for the jury or the public behind, three separate areas, one the dock, one for witnesses and the other for the lawyers to speak from, she supposed, and at the very back, a large, dead screen. The lights were dimmed, leaving grey shadows everywhere, and once or twice Rose almost thought she saw movement in the corner of her eye, especially on the far side of the chamber, where another set of doors lay ajar. She looked to the Doctor, waiting for a cue from him, or some clue in his reaction, but he stood with his gaze fixed on the screen, his jaw set in a stern expression.
‘Whatever you want,’ he called out suddenly, ‘Rose has nothing to do with it. We’ll get that straight right now. You can try what you want with me, but leave her out of it, or I warn you, you will see a nasty streak in me that even you won’t be able to live up to.’
Something laughed in the darkness, a rich, deep voice coming from the shadows by the doors.
‘At last, Doctor,’ said the voice. ‘I was beginning to think you had lost yourself….again.’
TBC
A/N - This story takes place, for the Tenth Doctor and Rose, directly after The Satan Pit and for the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan, between Arc of Infinity and Snakedance, and contains spoilers for those episodes, The Trial of a Timelord and The Five Doctors. I have placed it in ‘Alternate Universes’ as this contains some theories on the Time War, as mentioned in the new series. All characters belong to their respective copyright owners, and no profit is made or intended to be made from this story.
Sometimes Rose found it hard to believe the landscape in front of her belonged to another world. The rolling hills, dusted with bronzed leaves from the skeletal trees and the silvery, overcast sky could well have lain just a few miles away from her home in London; the damp weather smelled the same and the birds sounded like ordinary birds. It was only when she glimpsed the carvings on the crumbling ruins around her that she remembered this place was alien, that the buildings, whatever they were, had been abandoned before her species grew legs and crawled out of the ocean, and that she was one of only two people on the planet. All the others were dead, perished so long ago that their name had been forgotten, or so the Doctor had told her.
The lost girl, so far away from home; the valiant child who will die in battle so very soon.
Although she promised herself she wouldn’t think about the Sanctuary Base or dwell on what was said and done there, she found the idea resounding in her mind once again. It had never really occurred to her before, despite the many perils she had faced. When she travelled with the Doctor, people they encountered died. Death was creeping closer to her, no longer just a shadow other people talked about or something so far in the future that she couldn’t picture it. Even on this planet, which the Doctor claimed would be an ideal spot to rest, come to grips with everything, gather their strength for the next adventure, she could feel it all around her. She tried pressing the headphones of her MP3 player deeper into her ears, hoping the music would cut out her own thoughts and let her enjoy the planet’s serene atmosphere, but met with no success.
In the end she got up off the damp patch of stone and grass on which she’d been sitting for the last twenty minutes and sighed. This was not working. No amount of tranquil breezes and Snow Patrol songs would shake off this mood. She needed people, proper noise and, above all, food to take her mind off things. After dusting off the seat of her jeans, she glanced about and sought out the blue police box nestled amongst the bare trees just over the hill.
The TARDIS door lay ajar, which didn’t surprise Rose, as the Doctor had been pottering in his machine ever since they arrived, several hours earlier. She asked him once what he was doing, but didn’t understand a word of his reply. She suspected, in fact, that he made most of it up because all he was really doing was making a mess. Sometimes he reminded her of a suburban dad, tinkering in the shed every weekend but never actually fixing or producing anything. Oddly though, as she wandered inside, there were no clanks and clatters from the console room. The chamber, far larger than the outer shell of the TARDIS, thanks to some trans-dimensional engineering, was littered with equipment, clumps of wires, tools ranging from high tech lasers to a claw hammer and lump of blue-tack, but the Doctor himself stood completely motionless by the multi-sided central console. He leaned against the instrument panel, frowning deeply and gazing at one of the many small screens.
She considered speaking to him about the future again, but in the end decided not to bother. She had already asked him several times if there was anything in this ‘prophecy’, but each time he dismissed her concerns. She knew he was trying to console her. He might even have been telling the truth, but somehow no matter how many times he said there was nothing to worry about, this time she didn’t quite believe him.
‘It’s gonna rain,’ she announced instead, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Honestly, Doctor, how about a planet with warm weather for a change, only one that’s not about to blow up or be eaten by giant ants or something?’ She laughed mirthlessly, shaking her head, though as she headed around the outside of the chamber, on her way to the door that would lead into the bowels of the ship, she noticed that the Doctor hadn’t moved. ‘What’s up? Doctor?’
She came to his side and glanced over his shoulder at the screen. ‘What is it?’
He straightened suddenly, as if he only then realised she was in the room at all. ‘All done? Bit damp out there, isn’t it. Fine rain, gets right through you. Worst kind. Right, then we’ll be off.’ He darted to the opposite side of the console and manipulated the controls.
‘Off? Off where? Thought you wanted to hang about a bit, chill out?’ He didn’t answer. When she saw him yank the levers around the console and heard the TARDIS’s engines whine, she knew they were leaving the damp, empty planet behind. ‘Where we going now then?’
‘Bit of a detour,’ muttered the Doctor at last. ‘Something’s come up.’
‘Like what? Good something, bad something?’
‘Depends.’
He tapped the console thoughtfully and trailed off into another stare. Rose ventured nearer but then just observed him for a while. He seemed so strange, so unlike ‘her’ doctor, in this mood and that worried her more than anything some possessed aliens could say to her. ‘Doctor, what’s wrong?’
She went around to the screen that had captivated him when she first came in and glanced down at the stream of text and figures there. ‘What is this? ‘Incoming transmission’? Who’s calling us?’
‘Something that shouldn’t exist,’ he answered, again breaking from his thoughts to look at her. This time, however, he smiled and his wide, dark eyes regained a little of their customary shine. ‘Looks like it’s the season for impossible things. What’s that now, six before breakfast?’
‘What shouldn’t exist?’
‘Back in a minute,’ he called, then hurried across the console room and disappeared through one of the doors before Rose could protest. Infuriating though it was to be kept out of things, she had to admit her mind was off the Ood and the Beast and black holes for the moment. She studied the monitor screen again, brushing her hair behind her ear in concentration, and tried to make sense of the message. All she could make out, however, were a string of numbers that were supposedly co-ordinates, and four flashing words; ‘URGENT - CONCERNS THE CELLAE’. Made about as much sense as things normally did on board the Doctor’s time and space machine, she supposed. Yet there were no alarms, no klaxons wailing in her ears. Wherever the TARDIS was headed, they were approaching in a sedate, almost cautious manner.
Usually Rose enjoyed the last few minutes of their flights, the little bubble of anticipation before the doors opened and she stepped out onto a completely new terrain, and the thought that while others were trudging to work or slogging into college or watching Trisha, she was off, not necessarily enjoying herself all the time, but certainly free and seeing things most people never even imagined. She wanted that feeling back again, and fought hard to shake off the sense of doom creeping up on her again as the TARDIS came to a halt. Once they landed, however, everything seemed to fall extremely silent, and the Doctor had not as yet returned.
Something was out there, she thought, something that summoned them and was waiting. When the Doctor finally returned, moreover, Rose saw something dark in his eyes. He looked almost afraid as he approached the console and, after a moment’s consideration, laid his hand on the switch that would open the doors.
‘Rose, I want you to stay here,’ he said before he operated the control.
‘No chance,’ Rose replied. If there was something out there that he didn’t fancy meeting, then he shouldn’t be facing it alone, should he?
‘I’m serious.’
‘Why, what’s out there? Come on, I’ve never ran away from nothing so far, have I? Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than Daleks or Cybermen or Slitheen, and I did all right with them, didn’t I? Why’s this different?’ ‘Why’s this bothering you so much’ was the question she really wanted to ask.
He mulled the matter over for a long while before he finally opened the doors. ‘All right, but if we do meet anything, and to be honest, it’s unlikely we will meet anything because this is probably a trap, but if we do meet any creature or being out there, don’t listen to it. Don’t believe a thing he says.’
‘Who says?’ Rose asked, but the Doctor had dashed out of the TARDIS already and by then Rose was used to his selective responses.
She caught up with him in a long beige-walled corridor with grey floors and the occasional bit of decoration made from box steel in geometric patterns. The air smelled stale with a faint sting of disinfectant, and she sensed a gentle hum of machinery pulsing through the floor and walls, though there were no other sounds. It was unnaturally quiet, the sort of silence that hissed in her ears, and the Doctor regarded it all with a deep wariness. Rose started to watch the different angles of the corridor, half expecting something nasty to leap out, but as they wandered through, all she found was the same dreary architecture.
‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,’ she remarked. But then, the Doctor said he didn’t expect to meet anyone. This was a trap of some sort, Rose thought with a shiver. ‘Where are we, anyway?’
‘Space station,’ the Doctor replied.
‘How d’you know?’ She touched the walls, trying to see if there was something in the vibrations that would give the place away. ‘Engines or machines or something, recycled air?’
‘I’ve been here before,’ said the Doctor.
‘Oh, right. So, if this is a trap, what sort of thing would it be? I mean, what should we look out for?’
‘Could be anything. But if I were setting it, I’d want us to know why it was being set and by whom, with a bit of gloating in there for good measure. You can’t set a trap for someone and not have a bit of a gloat when they wander into it. So whatever it is, it won’t be quick. Not the sort of Indiana Jones, quick blast of wind then a big disc chops your head off sort of trap.’
‘Good to know,’ Rose muttered. ‘Why would this person, this thing want to kill us though?’
‘Well, thing is, a lot of people I meet end up wanting to kill me. It’s a sort of occupational hazard.’
‘Noticed, yeah. So why come here, if you know this geezer’s going to try something?’
The Doctor drew in a deep breath and looked around as if getting his bearings, then he veered off down another passageway that led off the main corridor. ‘Because I thought he was destroyed.’
‘Take it,’ Rose began, wandering after him, ‘you had something to do with that?’
He didn’t answer, but Rose knew she was right all the same. Overthrowing evil, toppling dictators, pushing back invasion forces, you were bound to make enemies, she reasoned. She still didn’t like the Doctor’s manner, however. He looked far too anxious, with none of the ‘right, let’s go beat this thing’ attitude she would have expected if some old adversary had surfaced again.
Finally, they came to the end of the corridor, to a wider space with a set of bronze-coloured doors at the top of a flight of steps, and with a strip of glowing stained glass, the first real colour Rose had seen in the place, on the wall opposite. Rose drifted up to the door and listened for a while, but there were no sounds of movement or life inside.
‘Is there anyone here?’ she called down to the Doctor, who was prowling around, examining the details of the glass panel.
‘No one,’ he answered.
‘So whose station is it then? Why would they just leave it here?’
‘There’s no one left. It’s abandoned, useless. Has been for a long time.’
‘But there’s power,’ said Rose. ‘There’s still air, there’s gravity…’
‘Self renewing power sources, like the TARDIS. No one’s told the place there’s no one left to use it, so it just keeps going, keeps waiting.’
‘So the people who built it are dead? All of them?’
The Doctor swept up past her and gave her an odd look before he opened the doors and stepped through into the next room, but a shiver ran up Rose’s spine, realisation dawning over her.
‘Doctor,’ she began as she followed him in, ‘was this…did this belong to your people?’
They had come into what, to Rose, looked like a courtroom. It had been partially dismantled, with decorated panels stacked against the walls, equipment and bouquets of coloured wire abandoned on the floor. She could still, however, make out the judge’s seat, with benches for the jury or the public behind, three separate areas, one the dock, one for witnesses and the other for the lawyers to speak from, she supposed, and at the very back, a large, dead screen. The lights were dimmed, leaving grey shadows everywhere, and once or twice Rose almost thought she saw movement in the corner of her eye, especially on the far side of the chamber, where another set of doors lay ajar. She looked to the Doctor, waiting for a cue from him, or some clue in his reaction, but he stood with his gaze fixed on the screen, his jaw set in a stern expression.
‘Whatever you want,’ he called out suddenly, ‘Rose has nothing to do with it. We’ll get that straight right now. You can try what you want with me, but leave her out of it, or I warn you, you will see a nasty streak in me that even you won’t be able to live up to.’
Something laughed in the darkness, a rich, deep voice coming from the shadows by the doors.
‘At last, Doctor,’ said the voice. ‘I was beginning to think you had lost yourself….again.’
TBC