Ok, so this is my first ever attempt at a Doctor Who fic and I'm coming fresh off the show. However, having seen it all only once I may make some character mistakes, so please bear with me while I attempt to keep everyone true to form as much as possible. That said, I hope you enjoy the story! J
~OOO~
-Chapter One-
Shwiiiiiiiiing! Thunk.
"Duck!"
"You could have said that a second earlier! That one nearly got me!" I dropped down behind a rust-colored rock, the top half of which was already crushed from some previous assault, bending over to rest my hands on my knees and try to catch my breath. Seconds later a tall, thin, man in a blue suit and long brown overcoat dove in beside me and I turned to glare at him. "This is your fault, you know."
"My fault?" he gasped out, pulling a thin cylinder with a glowing blue top from the inside of his suit jacket, then lifting it an inch over the top of our temporary shield to buzz it at the charging aliens closing in on us.
"Yes, your fault!" I snapped, finally pulling in enough air to get my bearings. "If you hadn't wondered off to inspect the—what did you call it again?"
"The Thoryxis Polarium," the Doctor put in, turning around and peeking over the top of the rock with the sonic screwdriver clutched in his hand, "which is perfectly harmless and on display to the general public, including visiting dignitaries, which I am!"
"If you say so," I muttered, moving up beside him to see what was going on. About a dozen semi-humanoid creatures with red skin and scales, pushing seven feet tall and armed with bows and arrows that looked liable to sheer body parts off in a single arc, were blocking our path to the TARDIS. I slid back down behind the rock. "But visiting dignitary or not, you just haaaaaaaad to touch it, didn't you?"
The Doctor turned back to me with a sheepish grin on his face. "You know me, Rose Tyler, flashy lights, mysterious ticking noise? Moth and flame, as you humans like to say."
I rolled my eyes at him but felt a smile tug at my lips despite my annoyance. He was right; I really should have expected it.
Shwiiiiiing! Thwack!
The Doctor yanked his head back behind the rock just as the top half exploded in a shower of pulverized pebbles and dust. I shrieked and the Doctor turned wide eyes on me.
"Right. We'd best be going now, Rose. I'll send an apology note to their Queen later." With that, the Doctor grabbed my hand, pulled me to my feet and dashed out from behind the crumbling stone, sonic screwdriver held out in front of us as we emerged.
"Doctor…." I said warningly as the crowd of red-scaled warriors, thrown off for a split second at the pure stupidity of our two-person suicide charge into the heart of their battalion, gathered their senses and started to aim. "Maybe you should have thought this through a little longer—eeek!" An arrow narrowly missed my left shoulder and I nearly lost it. "Doctor!"
"Nearly there, Rose," he called over his shoulder, pulling me behind him at a steady run. "I can see the TARDIS right behind that big one!"
"Which 'big one'?" I demanded, stumbling as I tried to keep up. "They're all three feet taller than us."
The arrows continued to fly at us, but none hit their mark. That probably had something to do with the sonic waves saturating the air around us, tilting their trajectory off though. Once we cleared the 'big one' in our path the Doctor yanked on the TARDIS door, pulling it wide. I bolted past him, tumbling into the police box and racing for the stairs that led up to the console. I paused at a bang behind me, turning back to see the Doctor skid into the TARDIS and slam the door closed, quickly securing the lock.
"I said I was sorry!" he yelled through the window, panting for breath. His apology was met with a smattering of thuds as the warriors loosed a volley of arrows into the TARDIS' front door. The Doctor turned to face me, looking a bit ruffled. "Highly sensitive race, the Galgori are; probably shouldn't visit for a while."
I couldn't help it. I burst into laughter. After a moment the Doctor did too, and I grinned at him as he hurried up the ramp to join me at the console. "It's never just a quiet excursion with you, is it?" I giggled, and he raised an eyebrow at me as he started up the TARDIS, pausing with his hand on a lever.
"Now, Rose Tyler, where would the fun in that be?"
~OOO~
That was how life was with the Doctor. A blaze of excitement, rashness, danger and opportunities that I wouldn't trade for the world. Back home I had Mum and our flat, and Mickey, though how those two put up with me when I disappeared for weeks on end was beyond me. I knew it had put a strain on Mickey and my romantic relationship, so a few months back when I'd returned home for a visit and Mickey had shown up for our coffee catch-up date with a girl from work in tow, I hadn't been completely surprised. He'd walked me home that evening after putting Jessa in a cab, and explained that he just couldn't wait around for me to remember his existence any more. He'd moved on.
I'd wanted to be hurt, to cry and rage at him for not even having had the decency to wait to break up with me when I was on the same planet as him, but I knew it wasn't fair. I didn't have a right to a broken heart over this when it was my fault we were over.
So now I had mum at home and the Doctor as my best friend. Mickey and I were slowly becoming mates again, but the same closeness wasn't there. We were friendly, but it felt more like an acquaintanceship than a friendship. Still, I thought I might look him up when the Doctor dropped me home this time.
I was still pondering my complicated life when there was a resounding BOOOOM and the TARDIS jolted unexpectedly to the left. With a yelp, I tumbled off the jump seat, hitting the floor and rolling across it into the base of the console. The TARDIS was shuddering around me, shaking so hard I had the absurd feeling of being trapped in an earthquake—which was supremely discomforting when one remembered that we were currently hurtling through space. Recovering my senses, I reached up and latched on to a strut that jutted out from under the console proper, holding on with both hands so that I wasn't flung across the floor and over the edge of the landing when the ship lurched brutally to the opposite side and then twirled like a top for several long seconds.
Somewhere in the background I could hear the Doctor shouting "What? WHAT?!" in total surprise as he skidded back and forth in front of me, his long arms smacking at buttons and levers every time he passed within reaching distance of the console.
"Doctor?" I managed, my legs swinging across the floor like a pendulum while I clung to the strut. "What's going on?"
"Nothing's going on!" he shouted back at me as he sailed past, slamming into the railing and then flinging himself forward onto the console and clinging to a pair of levers with both hands.
"What?" I echoed back up at him, now swinging back the opposite way and nearly sweeping the Doctor's feet out from under him as I passed. "What do you mean, 'nothing'? Did we intercept a space hurricane or something?"
If he could have managed to roll his eyes at me amidst the current chaos I think he might have. Instead there was a chorus of beeps as the Doctor smashed various buttons and the TARDIS shuddered again.
"I mean NOTHING!" he yelled back at me. "We're in the middle of the Beta 5 Nebula; no one lives in the Beta 5 Nebula. You pass through the Beta 5 Nebula. You fly around the Beta 5 Nebula. And you want to know why—?"
Despite rocketing back and forth beneath the console I still managed to roll my eyes. I'd forgotten that the Doctor became repetitive when he was agitated. Above me, the Doctor was finishing his rant.
"—because there is NOTHING IN THE BETA 5 NEBULA!"
And then the TARDIS stopped moving.
With a yelp of surprise I lost my grip on the strut and slid out from under the console just as the Doctor finally looked at me. From my place on the floor by his feet, I shot him a saucy grin. "Well somebody's out there. Let's go say hello."
For two seconds the Doctor just stared down at me, and then his face split into a wide grin. "Rose Tyler, you took the words right out of my mouth."
~OOO~
I climbed to my feet and shook out my limbs, checking to make sure I hadn't injured anything during the TARDIS' tantrum. The Doctor was already halfway to the doors by the time I'd assessed no permanent damage, sonic screwdriver held aloft. I hurried to join him and together we opened the doors and slowly stepped outside.
We'd arrived, or perhaps more aptly, crash-landed, on some sort of planet or asteroid made of a purplish rock with little vegetation. Mostly our surroundings looked like a desolate wasteland of half-eroded mountains. The atmosphere must have had a certain percentage of oxygen in it, since I could breathe, but the air felt heavier than it did on Earth.
The Doctor raised the sonic and bleeped it at various rocks and the air in general, pausing now and then to frown at something or other before moving on to inspect something else. I followed behind him more slowly, casting my gaze around the jutting rocks and wondering if we were really as alone here as it seemed.
Almost as soon as I'd given thought to the idea, there was a commotion on a rocky crag in front of us. The Doctor looked up immediately, eyes alert, and then slipped the sonic into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and he strode quickly to my side.
As we watched, a pair of what I assumed to be guards, emerged from somewhere behind the bluff and began to make their way toward us. I eyed them as they drew closer. They looked almost human, which happened in many places the Doctor and I visited and I'd ceased to find it as disconcerting as I once had. The Doctor had once explained to me that over millennia interspecies genetic warping had caused many spacial races to resemble human beings, despite their inner structures and the mechanics of their bodies being far from it. He'd also told me that that was one was one of the reasons that Time Lords looked so human; more so than most non-earth races. It was, he'd said, due to their natural and constant ability to interact with the human race in all its various states of existence that had caused their genes to evolve until they resembled us in nearly every way, two hearts and superior intelligence aside.
The two guards had nearly reached us now and I flickered a glance at the Doctor beside me. As usual he was standing perfectly at ease, eyes watchful. When the guards were about ten feet away they finally halted and simply stared at us. Of course the Doctor took that as his cue to introduce us.
"Hello! I'm the Doctor and this is Rose. We seem to have taken a minor, rather unplanned, field trip to your planet. Very nice planet, if I do say so myself, and I have seen a few of them in my time. But that said we don't know where we are exactly, so if you'd be so kind as to enlighten us?"
I watched him flash that manic grin he always got when faced with something new and unknown, and had to smile in spite of myself. The guards frowned at us.
"You are the Doctor?" the one on the right asked, his large hand moving to rest casually on the hilt of what appeared to be a huge machete, thrust through the belt at his waist. He narrowed his eyes at us.
I wondered briefly at the lack of laser guns and similar weapons that the Doctor and I usually encountered on our journeys, and had to question their prominence in sci-fi culture back on Earth. Perhaps the creators of those stories had only run across certain types of aliens? At that thought I nearly laughed out loud. Only two years ago I'd have called anyone who'd claimed to have met an alien completely mad; now I was lumping myself in with them.
"Yes, I'm the Doctor. Have you heard of me? Brilliant!" he grinned, hands stuffed into his pockets as he rocked back on his heels. "Now that we're all friends, why don't you invite Rose and me in? We've just been admiring your rock collection, but, you know what they say, once you've seen one, you've seen them all…"
The guards exchanged a look and the one who hadn't spoken yet gave a slight nod.
"Come with us," the first man said, narrowing slanted yellow eyes at the Doctor. "The Compound is on the other side of the mountain."
The Doctor grinned again and marched forward, falling into step behind the guards without turning to see if I was following. That was completely like him though, getting caught up in the excitement of a possible adventure without pausing to think through the potential dangers it might involve. With an affectionate huff at his childishness I hurried after the group.
~OOO~
The compound wasn't just on the other side of the mountain that we'd just trudged over, arriving at the top feeling distinctly sweaty and rather less fit than previously thought (or maybe that was just me, seeing as I'd rarely seen the Doctor out of breath or looking anything other than exhilarated after running about various terrains or ships), it was inside the mountain. There was a pair of solid-looking doors set into the side of the mountain in front of us, made out of what appeared to be a type of heavy metal similar to iron but probably full of mad, space-y properties that humans couldn't pronounce.
The guards led us halfway down the opposite side of the huge rock pile that we'd just traversed and halted outside the doors. I hovered nervously next to the Doctor, wondering for the zillionth time how he could always look so calm when walking into the unknown.
"Doctor, are you sure we should go in there? How do you know it's safe?" I whispered into his ear, stretching up on my tiptoes to make sure he heard me. He glanced down at me curiously.
"How will we know if it's dangerous if we don't go inside?" he parried my question with a wink.
"Always the danger-is-fun spiel with you, isn't it?" I hissed back, then realized the guards had wrangled the giant doors open and were staring at us, waiting for us to follow them into the black abyss beyond.
The Doctor shrugged, then held out his arm to me like and old-fashioned gentleman. "Shall we, Miss Tyler?"
Feeling a familiar, somewhat exasperated, smile tug at the corners of my lips, I slipped my hand into the crock of his elbow. "Don't we always?"
And we stepped into the darkness.
~OOO~
We followed the guards down a long corridor carved out of the stone. Countless halls branched off the sides, and each of those hallways seemed to be lined with doors. Some of the windows set into them glowed with a bright light while others were dark with disuse. The hallways themselves were a pristine white: tiled floors, painted walls, faintly buzzing lights. It gave me the feeling of being in an operating room, all overly-sterile and sanitized. I felt goosebumps break out along my arms and stepped slightly closer to the Doctor.
After walking down the main tunnel for several minutes we reached another set of doors, equally daunting, that looked to be made of some sort of wood and secured with heavy metal hinges and bolts. Our escorts parted company and pulled them open before us, leaving the Doctor and me standing in the entryway alone.
"Inside," said the quiet guard, speaking for the first time.
"Inside?" repeated the Doctor, raising an eyebrow at him.
"Everything you need to know is inside the Sanctuary," clarified the second guard, gesturing for us to enter.
The Doctor frowned a little at that, then moved forward into the room without further questions. I hurried to keep pace, casting my gaze around our new surroundings as I stepped over the threshold.
BOOOOM!
I squeaked and jumped a little, grabbing at the Doctor's arm and twisting around to see what had happened behind us.
The huge doors had closed, sealing us into the room.
"Doctor…" I said warningly. "I'm not overly fond of closed doors. Closed doors mean no exits."
The Doctor spun around, producing the sonic and advancing on the doors. A quick wave of it up and down our exit route revealed that we were most definitely locked in.
"Ah, well, that's most unfortunate," the Doctor muttered, looking a bit put out. "Not very neighborly of them, now is it?"
"Isn't that thing supposed to open anything?" I demanded, coming to stand next to him at the doors.
"Yes, well, the thing is, that this," he scrubbed the back of his head with one hand and gestured at the doors with the other, still running the sonic over them, "isn't exactly 'anything'."
"What is it then?"
"Er, it's wood."
"The sonic doesn't work on wood." I repeated, stating the obvious. "It can fry the security system on a spaceship twelve galaxies away from Earth, but it doesn't affect wood."
The Doctor turned to face me then and I raised my eyebrows at him, planting my hands on my hips and waiting. The Doctor gave me a Look.
"Come now, Rose," the Doctor chided. "When one door closes, what do you do?"
"Break a window?" I suggested brightly, possibly slightly sarcastic given that our current surroundings broadcast no other exits beyond the one behind us, and the cavernous room in front of us stretched off into darkness. The Doctor only gave me a patient smile.
"Only one thing to do now, Rose Tyler."
I eyed him and watched as his face melted into his trademark excitement.
"Let's go exploring!"
I stared at him nonplussed for a moment, then cracked and shook my head at him, laughing. His excitement was infectious. "You win, Doctor. Let's go!"
"That's more like it!" He grinned at me and strode forward toward the middle of the room, sonic bleeping away.
~OOO~
We walked about fifty feet into the gloom before the sonic perked up like a dog on point. The small device had been relatively quiet as we'd prowled the cavern, letting out an occasional beep like an underwater sonar system, but now it was full-on crazy. The Doctor swung the screwdriver back and forth in front of us for a few seconds, looking confused, then his gaze settled on something in the dark and he clicked off the sonic, tucking it into his jacket.
"What is it?" I whispered; something about the darkness made me feel like I had to be quiet, as if my voice might disturb something that lurked in the shadows. "What did you see?"
"There's something ahead," the Doctor replied, eyes locked on whatever it was, and as I crept forward beside him I silently cursed my non-Time Lord vision.
We'd only gone a few paces further when I felt the Doctor go still beside me. I was about to ask him what was wrong again when he took a step backward and started to mutter to himself, shaking his head back and forth.
"No," the Doctor whispered, and I stopped walking too. He began to back up faster, his voice rising. "It can't be. It CAN'T be."
It was the way his voice shook that pulled me up short. I'd rarely heard the Doctor sound truly afraid of something during my time with him. It had only ever been the Daleks that brought about that mix of terror and defiance in his words. I spun around, feeling trepidation speed my heart as I searched for signs of the emotionless, death-bent species.
I peered harder into the darkness ahead and thought I could make out something glowing faintly in the distance. "What are you going on about, Doctor?"
He ignored me, backing up faster now, wide eyes reflecting the light of the thing, the presence, that was pulsing slowly up ahead. I glanced over my shoulder at the light again, but despite moving a few more steps toward it, couldn't make out much more than what looked like a swirling column of blue vapor, pulsing brighter the closer I got to it.
Something about the glittering blue mist seemed to draw me toward it. I felt a curiosity so overwhelming about what it was, what it might do, how I might be changed if only I could touch it, that a haze seemed to settle over my vision. The sound of the Doctor's footsteps and muttered denials fell away behind me and I began to walk toward the light, hand outstretched like Aurora to the spindle…
"NO!"
The voice was loud and harsh in my ear and a hand clamped down hard on my shoulder, fingers digging brutally into my flesh as someone spun me around and then yanked me forward so roughly I stumbled and nearly fell to my knees. My eyes burned in the sudden darkness with an after-image of the glowing smoke, and for a long moment I couldn't see anything. Then the hands on me gentled, catching my upper arms and holding me up. I shook my head to clear it of the strange fogginess that had overtaken my senses and raised my eyes to the person gripping my arms. I blinked hard, trying to force my vision back into focus, not liking the combination of blindness and some unknown entity grabbing at me in the dark.
"Oi!" I cried, squeezing my eyes shut and throwing my arms up to knock my captor's hold loose. Once free, I took a hasty step backward. "What's the big idea?"
Then my vision finally adjusted to the dimness of the room and my searching eyes settled on a face I knew. Pale in the dim light, with wide brown eyes and dark eyebrows pinched in concern, the Doctor raised his hands in the air, palms out toward me.
"Rose," he said carefully, eyes holding mine. "It's just me, alright?"
"Oh!" I felt a blush rush to my cheeks and was suddenly grateful for the darkness. "God, I'm so sorry, Doctor, I—I didn't realize…" I trailed off, feeling confused again. Of course it was him. There was no one else in this stupid, great cavern besides the pair of us. The guards had locked us in and were, presumably, living up to their profession on the opposite side of the ridiculous sonic-proof wooden door.
Something nudged at the back of my mind as my thoughts caught up to the present, and I started to turn back toward the shifting blue column of light. I was seized with the desire to go back to it. I wanted to inspect it, learn about it, know it on some deeper level. The Doctor's hands immediately became like iron on my arms, refusing to let my body twist in the opposite direction.
"Don't look at it, Rose," he said urgently. "Don't go any closer." He moved his body then, so that he was standing next to me, and put an arm around my waist to guide me. Then he began to march us quickly toward the doors we'd come through, propelling me alongside him with an arm firmly around my waist, holding me against his side.
I allowed the Doctor to manhandle me back across the room without much protest. The closer we got to the exit, blocked as it was, and further from the undulating blue mist, the more my mind cleared. I felt a chill rock through my body when we finally reached the far side of the room and the blue light was lost to darkness once more. Abruptly I felt sick.
I swayed without warning, lurching out of the Doctor's slackening grip, and stumbled drunkenly forward against the doors. I managed to catch myself before I slumped sideways completely though, and sank down to the floor of the cavern with gasping sigh.
"Rose?!" The Doctor's voice was sharp, but it felt like it came from far away, and distantly I was aware that I was on the precipice of fainting dead away. I forced myself to draw in deep, steadying breaths, vaguely conscious of the beeping of the sonic as the Doctor yanked it out and waved it up and down my body.
I took a long moment to compose myself, taking deep breaths as my rolling stomach calmed, and the throbbing in my head faded, then I raised my head to look at the Doctor. He was standing a few feet back from me, hands clenched at his sides and his normally unruffled posture looking pinched with anxiety.
"How do you feel?" he asked as soon as I opened my mouth to speak.
"Dizzy," I mumbled. "What happened? What was that…light?"
"The Acumen," the Doctor answered at once, casting a glance back into the darkness as if he couldn't help himself.
"The Acu-wha'?" I repeated from my place on the ground, never having heard the word before. My head felt almost back to normal now, but I didn't trust my trembling legs enough to try standing just yet.
"The Acumen," the Doctor said again, dropping down to kneel next to me and press the fingers of his left hand against the side of my head. "Do you have a headache?"
"It's fading," I mumbled. "Sorry I took a turn like that. I just, I dunno, felt sick all of a sudden."
"That's natural with the Acumen, especially for a human. Your brains aren't meant to handle that kind of invasive power. You're just lucky you didn't touch it." He was gently prodding the other side of my head now, and his cool fingers felt good against my flushed skin.
"Why?" I murmured in response, his hands felt really good and I suddenly felt dizzy for an entirely different reason. I raised my eyes to the Doctor's face but his gaze was narrowed and analytical as he focused on examining my temples. Apparently I was alone in my sudden mood swing.
The Doctor dropped his hands from my head then, and sat back to study my face. "The Acumen is an unstable, intelligent force. It means, in human words, something like "wisdom" or "canniness". It's an ever-changing, ever-evolving power that feeds off the thoughts and memories of others."
My headache had retreated into nonexistence now and my heart rate had slowed, but at the Doctor's words I felt a chill skitter down my spine. "What do you mean?"
"Those men who locked us in here," the Doctor nodded his head at the doors, indicating the guards outside. "They're Acuites. They traffic in stolen memories. The smarter or more experienced a being is, the more energy, for lack of a better word, they can siphon off to feed the Acumen. That blue, foggy thing behind us." He clarified at my continued blank expression.
"What happens to them after the Acuites are done with them?" I asked, feeling the words stick in my throat as my vast travels and experiences with the Doctor helped my mind fill in colorful and terrifying possibilities.
"If they manage to escape," he emphasized the first word with a bleakness that seemed so at odds with his usual overzealous optimism, "most people aren't the same. Some never recover from what was stolen from them."
He got to his feet then, and held out a hand to help me to mine. When I was standing again the Doctor began to pace back forth in front of the doors.
"I don't understand how they managed to hide it though. A sensory-overloading force like the Acumen isn't exactly low-profile…" He continued to pace, talking out his various theories to himself as I hovered next to the door, biting my lip.
While the Doctor rambled, I found my gaze drawn back toward the darkness across the room, and suddenly a short conversation that had taken place between the guards and the Doctor outside floated back to me. The Doctor hadn't had a clue where the TARDIS had crashed and yet the guards hadn't shown a flicker of surprise at hearing the Doctor's name. In fact, he, himself, had been pleased that the men had seemed know who he was at the mention of his name. I glanced at the Doctor as he strode past, waving his arms in the air as he muttered to himself, and realization clicked into place with an almost audible snap.
"Doctor!" I cried, stepping into his path and forcing him to stop moving. "Don't you get it? Haven't you realized the danger you're in?"
He paused in front of me. "Me?" He blinked a little. "Hardly, Rose. I'm a Time Lord, you're a human. I can handle some minor intellectual probing without turning into a zombie like you humans apparently do. If anyone's in trouble here, it's you. But with that blasted door being wood and thusly allergic to the sonic, and my apparently being too thick to think of a way out of here—"
"Doctor." I cut him off with a wide-eyed look of my own. "They knew who you were. Outside, when we left the TARDIS and met those guys with the swords out on the rocks, they knew your name. They knew you."
I waited for him to catch on. The Doctor was constantly going on about how clever he was, but, it seemed to me, that cleverness didn't seem to apply when the situation was directly related to himself.
"They knew you!" I insisted again, and the Doctor raised an eyebrow at me and gave me a look.
"I'm a Time Lord, Rose," he began patiently. "I'm over 900 years old and I've been to more solar systems, planets and galaxies than I can remember. My name has bound to get around to a few people."
I matched his look with one of my own. One I used when explaining things to small, slightly dim, children. "You're…the…Doctor," I started, and he frowned at me.
"And you're Rose."
I threw up my hands and looked skyward. "You just said it, Doctor. You've been to more places, had more experiences then probably anyone outside of your own race. You've seen, heard, learned more about the universe than probably anyone alive. You were there at its beginning and present at its end. Doctor," I leaned forward and poked him hard in the chest. "Don't you see?"
"What are you talking about, Rose?" the Doctor asked, glancing down at my pointer finger pressing into his tie, before meeting my gaze once more.
"You're it, Doctor. They knew who you were the second we landed. In fact, the Acuites were probably the reason the TARDIS crashed on this stupid rock in the first place. They knew you. You're the prize, Doctor, the golden boy. Who else has more to give to the Acumen than you?"
"I know."
I blinked at him for a moment, caught off guard at his statement. "What?"
"I know I'm the one they want," he went on. He suddenly looked deflated, as if his bluster and confidence in his own invisibility had ground to an abrupt and lurching halt. "I didn't recognize the Acuites when we first encountered them due to a finely-honed perception filter catered to their bodies, but when I saw the light on the other side of this room I knew who they were. The Acumen can hide its presence in small quantities, but the closer you get to it the more overwhelming it is."
"That's why you started to back away before," I recalled, remembering the Doctor's reaction in the dark before I my human eyes had been able to register the light.
"I could feel it pulling at me," he whispered, a haunted look in his eyes, and I raised my hand to place it on his arm. "I still can. And I waltzed us in here without a care in the world. Stupid, stupid—" He broke off and cast an agonized look down at me. "I'm sorry, Rose. I'm so, so sorry. I don't know how to get you out of this—"
I met his eyes with a fierce look. "Get us out of this, you mean." He just gave me a self-deprecating look. "'Cause we are gonna get out of this, Doctor. We always do, right?"
When he didn't answer immediately I had the urge to shake him. Then I thought better of it and turned to face the door. Before the Doctor had a chance to stop me I raised my fists and began to pound them against the wood.
"Oi!" I shouted, slamming my fists on the door again and again. "Oi! You lot in the hallway! Something's happening to my friend. He's, I dunno, convulsing or something. I don't know what to do. Help me, please!"
"Rose, what are you—?" the Doctor started, his expression twisting from defeated to alarmed. I whirled on him with a glare, jabbing my finger into his face in a gesture of 'shut up before you mess up my plan!' The Doctor gaped at me in confusion, but stopped speaking for the time being. I resumed beating on the wood, ignoring the throbbing jolts of pain that jarred up my arms with each connection.
"Anyone?" I cried again, the sob of terror in my voice not entirely faked. "He's…he's not moving now…I don't know what to do!"
There was the sound of running feet from further down the hall, drawing closer to the doors now, and I stopped yelling to turn back to the Doctor. He raised an eyebrow at me.
"And when they open the door and there's an army blocking our escape?" he questioned, turning my logic from earlier against me.
"Shut up," I muttered fondly. "This is a plan in progress."
The Doctor grinned at me, looking more like his old self as the grinding of bolts and groaning of hinges filled the air. The doors began to open and I bit my lip, feeling adrenaline replace the odd hollow-feeling in my body. Beside me, the Doctor pulled the sonic out of his jacket pocket and held it aloft, and with the other hand reached out and took hold of mine.
"Rose Tyler," he said around a cheeky grin, "I like the way you think."
~OOO~
Ok, so how was that for a beginning? J I hope I kept everyone in-character enough. I had so much fun writing the Doctor, his personality is epic! Chapter two to follow. If you can spare it, please leave a review in the box. Thank-you! ;)
