Title: Don't fight it if you don't know what it is!
Summary: --
Disclaimer: I don't own Dr Who, durrr!
The girl held the box in her hands, staring it down as if it were the most troublesome thing that she had ever seen. "Mum," She said, and her voice was hoarse, and trembled worringly as she started to speak again, and the emotion was clearly audible behind her tone, and her eyes were unnaturally bright, as if the tears lingered just behind her hazel eyes. "Why couldn't you get one everyone liked?!" Why did trivial little things like this matter, when she had spent the last three hours on the side of the motorway, watching helplessly as the bloody corpses of two adults and a small child were cut from the steaming, twisted wreck of a BMW and placed into an ambulance?
She looked down at the coconut sponge cake, her hand quivering and, she sighed.
* * * * *
She sat in the old red Volvo, her head rested against the cool steering wheel as if she were sleeping on it, her hair plastered over her forehead and the steam rising from her old plastic mac. Her breathing was quiet, one regular swoosh of breath after the other in the stillness of the car, oblivious to what was raging on in front of the wind-screen where she remained one of the only stationary cars in the car park. That was, at least, until a horrible screech of metal-on-metal and the hasty slamming of her car door and subsequent strangely comforting presence in the passenger seat. Normally, she would have had something scathing come straight to her lips, in self-defence of course, but there was nothing except for silent shock. Half at the boy- man, really- who was sitting in her passenger seat, holding what looked like some kind of futuristic pen with a glowing blue tip and a metal contraption, that looked horribly fragile and rather like it was apt at giving electric shocks, what with odd wires poking out at every possible oppurtunity.
"If I can just..."
She stared at him, her eyes wide, wondering why she wasn't making some attempt to get the stranger out of her car. The metal beast cavorting around the car park might have had something to do with it.
When a long, awkward silence- at least on her part, he on the other hand, was mumbling quite happily away to himself, obviously frustrated with his little toy. She coughed, a demure little clearing of her throat that only served to try and grasp his attention. It didn't seem to work.
"What is that?!" She pointed a long finger at the strange, rather large thingamabob ripping a lampost from the pavement, her voice exasperated and dry and her throat was raspy, as if it hadn't been in use for a good while. Only then did she get his attention, and he looked up at the girl whose car his had comandeered for his sanctuary with raised eyebrows, and then back down to continue working on the machine. She felt as though she was going to scream- how hard could it possibly be to attract attention when you were sitting a mere six inches from the person who needed attracting?!
And then it hit her. Perhaps he didn't know. She wasn't quite sure why she had possibly thought he had. Was she dreaming? Perhaps she'd been playing on the PlayStation for too long and her dreams had turned into some kind of weird hallucination. And just as she had opened her mouth to say something else, possibly something along the lines of- 'Who the bloody hell are you?' when his voice boomed around the little car, surprisingly strong, and she found herself drawing some comfort from it.
"Hnm, I think it might be a linear combination of atomic orbitals Berkelium and Deilantykar, but the abnormal orbital wavefunctio-"
And he was stopped by the heavy feeling of her wide-eyed stare, the furrowing of her eyebrows, and her voice, which was horribly dry, in the manner of the Sahara desert when she said, "So, basically, you don't know."
"Hnm," He considered it, biting his bottom lip and narrowing his eyes in the process. "Yep, I s'pose!"
"Right."
She nodded slowly, mulling over the thought that she could turn the keys and slam the little red volvo into reverse. Except then she would be driving around bloody Cliddesden with a crazy man in her passenger seat. There must be some way to get out of this situation, after all, she'd managed to get into it.
"I don't suppose you'd like to get out of my car?"
"If it's all the same, I'd rather not. Don't fancy having to fight it out with that-" And he pointed at the metal monster.
"Right." She nodded. It was a completely rational explanation for jumping into a random persons car. She might have been a serial killer! He was still fiddling with his machine while she considered this, and she unconciously leaned her head back against the head rest. "So- are you, er, planning to call the police, or something?"
He looked at her incredulously, both eyebrows raised, and then looked back down to the machine, which he was still prodding with the blue glowy stick that she realized was making a sort of whirring noise. She hoped he wasn't trying to make a bomb. That might turn out a little nasty. "No. I doubt they would be of any use- ah, VOILA!" And he suddenly jumped upright, and she noticed how he was actually quite tall he was when he wasn't slumping over a bomb.
"Is that a bomb?" She asked, her voice a little timid and nervous, until she looked most affronted when he laughed at her. "What! You do look like someone who would make a bomb." And she crossed her arms, staring stubbornly down at one lightly freckled forearm, that suddenly seemed awfully white on the overcast English day. "So, are you going to do something? You seem to know an awful lot about... orbital wavefunctions."
"This thing," And he smacked the little machine he was holding against the dashboard, making her jump upright a bit. "is going to invert the wavefunctions so that it's just a big hunk of, not entirely useless, metal. Maybe they'll use it in a new car park, or, er, something." He grinned at her, and she stared back, not quite sure was happening. "Are you coming?"
It was turning into a very strange dream.
She looked at him, aghast. "Why would I come?"
"I dunno, a bit 'o fun, maybe?" And he shrugged his shoulders, before wrenching the door open and just as quickly as he swung his legs around and jumped out, slammed it shut. She considered something for a while, her head cocked sweetly to one side, then pulled the keys out of the ignition and followed him.
"Wait for meee!"
To be continued ~