"Trust me."
That's what he said.
Behind her, she could hear it getting closer. Buildings that had stood for thousands of years collapsed and crumbled to dust. The mountains were cracking. The ground shook. The peaceful river was boiling away into nothing. Behind her was nothing but chaos and destruction.
But before her . . .
"Rose."
Before her was an enormous stone gate, carved into the side of a mountain that reached through the clouds. And through the gate was an impossible darkness. It drank the light eagerly and she could feel the weight of it, even where she stood. There wasn't even darkness in there. There was nothing in there. Nothing. Not a breath of movement. Not a whisper of sound. And yet, the longer she gazed into it, the more she felt that something was staring back.
Somehow, in the prefect loneliness, there was an overwhelming presence. Somehow, in the eternal silence, there was a never ending howling.
It was impossible.
Even with a world disintegrating around her, how could she ever step through?
She turned to look at him, to tell him that she couldn't do it, but the words caught in her throat when she met his eyes. He was looking back at her, absolutely terrified.
He looked so much younger.
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and he held out his hand. For just a fraction of a second, the fear left her, but it was enough time to take his hand.
"Run."
As she stepped forward, the nothingness came rushing up to greet her. She was crushed under the weight of a thousand black oceans and drifted like a feather on a breeze. Her body twisted into impossible shapes, squeezed down to a pin point and stretched out to encompass a world. For a moment, she was everywhere. For a moment, she didn't exist. She felt consumed by fear and all around her was howling, howling, howling.
Something touched her and, even in all that chaos and howling, she felt comforted.
Run, she reminded herself.
She didn't really know how. There was no ground or gravity or direction or time. There was nothing. But, as long as she held onto his hand, he would show her what to do.
She glimpsed a planet of molten rock—a new world being forged in seas of fire. She gazed down at a field of tall green grasses, waving in the winds like a tide. She saw an old woman in a hospital bed with flowers all around her, closing her eyes for the last time. She saw a little boy crying desperately and running for comfort. She saw a million ships raging against one another before the glow of a vast, purple nebula. She saw a man swinging by his neck from a tree with mud on his boots and a flower in his shirt pocket. The ruins of a forgotten city, half buried in sand. A little girl with six horns curling around her head feeding a flock of small, hairless animals. An endless ocean with tiny red flowers floating on its surface as far as the eye could see. She even saw herself, with the mountains cracking behind her, too afraid to step forward. A thousand worlds in only a moment, and it all spun around her faster and faster.
She almost didn't notice when it stopped.
"Get up."
Hands were grabbing at her arms and pulling at her. She was on her knees on the hard ground. One of her fingers had landed in someone's gum and she hurriedly yanked her hand back.
"Rose, get up now!"
He was pulling at her again and she scrambled to her feet. She held his hand tightly and ran into one of the densest crowds she'd ever seen. Bodies pressed in all around her and no one seemed to notice that they had just appeared from nowhere. She looked back, eyes searching, and was only barely able to detect a tiny sign of the gateway they had just come through—a faint ripple in the air, much like the appearance of heat rising.
They were so many lights that it took her a moment to realize that it was night and there was so much noise that it took her a moment to realize there was music. There were children laughing and the air was full of delicious smells. This was a happy place, she realized.
And she ran.
A white door with a sign that read "Out of Order" on it appeared before her but she was shoved through it before she had a chance to see what it was. Once she was inside though, she knew.
It was cool and peaceful and alive. It might have looked different, but it was unmistakable. It felt like home again.
The TARDIS.
She turned to look at him, thinking that he must have felt the immediate welcome of that loving old machine, but he was ghostly white, his face drawn and exhausted. He was breathing hard and reaching for the center console, hoping to balance himself before she noticed.
She opened her mouth to say something, but he cut her off. "We don't have long," he managed to say between shallow breaths, his voice raspy. "The TARDIS will hide us for a little while but it might only be minutes. We need to find a way to hide you and then I'll leave a false trail—draw it away."
"What, and leave me here?" she asked incredulously.
"We don't have a choice."
"How are you going to make it without me?" she demanded, suddenly angry. "Look at you, you can barely breathe!"
"I'll manage," he answered sternly.
"Like hell you—"
"Rose, it's not after me!"
The doors rattled in their frame suddenly, causing them both to jump. Without a word, they both darted for the door that led to the depths of the TARDIS. They left it open just a crack, pressing their eyes to the thin strip of light, watching.
A young man hurried through the doors, showing signs of obvious nervousness. She glanced to the man at her side, asking a silent question, but his brows locked together in confusion and he shook his head.
The young man stepped up to the console and set a communicator down. "It looks really weird in here, guys."
The communicator crackled and another man's voice spoke. "It doesn't matter what it looks like as long as it works. Hurry up."
The man took a deep breath, and patted the console. "Give me a little help, Nana."
Suddenly, a woman's voice came through the communicator. "The lock for creation programming is almost always near the center and should have some kind of biometric scanner. You want corridor 107-H2-994."
They sat and listened for a while as the young man worked. Often, one of the other two voices would speak through the communicator, reporting something or giving reminders. Then, quite suddenly, Rose was pulled away from the door and they were running again.
"Who is that?" she asked.
"I don't know," came the answer. "But he's building a room. A room that, as far as I know, is completely impenetrable. It's the most secure room on the TARDIS, which might make it the most secure room in the universe."
"You think we can use it?"
"That boy is young and clearly doesn't fully understand the ship's programming. Before he locks it down, I think I can hijack it."
They found an empty stretch of hallway but, even as she looked, Rose could see a doorway forming in the wall. A room hollowed out behind the doorway and she could see wiring growing through the walls like roots, oddly coloured liquid oozed up from the floor and began to take forms.
"If I jump in when he's making the security system, it'll just look like a glitch in the programming. He won't know we're here."
She waited, watching the room take shape. A bed, a table that sunk into the floor, medical supplies. Whatever this room was meant for, it looked like a bomb shelter.
"Here we go," he muttered quietly.
He slipped on his glasses and then his hands went to work. His fingers flew furiously over the small console in the wall, his tongue pressing against his teeth as he shifted into his deepest levels of concentration.
"I'm creating a hidden space for you inside," he spoke quickly as he worked. "I'm giving it a separate time stream so that, no matter how much time passes, it will only feel like a moment."
She didn't like the sound of that. "What if I'm in there forever?"
"You won't be," he promised. "This door will open eventually. If I'm not there when it does, find the Doctor. He'll help you."
"I can't go in there," she protested. "You can't ask me to leave you on your own, especially not now. Who's going to take care of you? What if—?"
He suddenly let go of the console and grabbed her arms tightly, making her look up at him. "We don't have a choice. The only plan B we have is dying. Do you understand that?"
She smiled weakly. "At least we'd be together."
She hurt him when she said that, she could tell. It took him a second to compose himself before he could answer, his voice stronger and full of conviction.
"No," he said firmly. "I promise you, I will do everything in my power to come back. We don't give up today."
There had to be something she could do. There must have been something. But, before she could think of the answer, he'd taken her hand and he was leading her inside.
He explained in a soft voice that he had to make sure she couldn't let herself out, in case she had been touched. She shivered at the thought and didn't argue when he secured the metal cuffs around her wrists. She could see the muscles in his neck and jaw straining; he was trying not to cough. He didn't want her to worry. That made her worry more.
"Find the Doctor," he reminded her once she was secured. He looked into her eyes for a long moment, his lips parted slightly with all the words he wouldn't allow himself to say. Finally, he placed a hand on either side of her face and planted a long kiss on her forehead.
"For as long as I live, I'll look for you."
It was the best promise he could give.
He closed the door. The second he did, she realized that the restraints weren't there in case she had been touched. They were there because he knew that she would change her mind the moment he left her.
She screamed at him to come back. She fought the metal cuffs, pulling with such force that she knew her wrists would bruise underneath. In the back of her mind, she counted the seconds and knew that he had already been gone for years.
He might have already been dead for years.
And then the door opened.
The man who stood before her did not wear a face that she knew, but that didn't mean he was unfamiliar.
"Are you the Doctor?" she asked quickly, still fighting her bonds. "Did your face change again?"
The young man shook his head, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging wider. "No. But I, uh . . . know where to find him."
A new travelling companion then. Probably still new from how shocked he looked.
"I need the Doctor," she told him seriously. "I need to find him before it knows where I am! It's coming!"
For all she knew, it had found the correct universe only moments after they stepped through the gate. It might have found him just after he locked her away to hide. It might have touched him and learned where she was. It might have waited patiently for that door to open again.
It might have killed him years ago.
"Dad!" the man shouted.
"What are you calling your dad for?" she snapped irritably. "Help me out of this thing and get me to the Doctor! You don't understand—"
"DAD!"
She couldn't believe it. A full grown man screaming in terror for his dad at the sight of a restrained woman half his size. She suddenly remembered Mickey clinging to her legs and whimpering in fear the day she left with the Doctor. She suspected that this one had only been allowed to tag along because he had also come along with someone else.
She heard some movement and then he was standing before her. He looked at her with wide eyes and a face that was a cross between absolute shock and absolute joy. She felt herself bursting with relief at the sight of him. She was so happy that it took her a moment to realize that he looked too young.
"Doctor," she made herself say aloud. She had to remember that he was the Doctor.
She had to remember that he was someone else.
But he smiled with such beautiful familiarity and she remembered a thousand fond moments in the dark of night when he answered softly, "Rose."
She yanked on her cuffs again, which gave the Doctor all the signal he needed to kneel before her and work on releasing her, and frantically began to ask questions. "Is it here? Does it know where we are? How long has it been? Has anyone been touched?"
"Rose, slow down," the Doctor answered.
"Don't let her out."
The voice that spoke was hard and cold and unfamiliar. She looked over the Doctor's shoulders to see a man standing outside the room, beside the one she who had opened the door.
This man looked down on her with eyes like dark stones, his jaw set hard. There was a forceful presence about him and the way he held himself told her that he was not a man to be easily led. If the man who opened the door was the small fish following the shark, she had no doubt that this man was the shark.
The Doctor turned to look at the other man and she noticed that, even though he was already on his knees, he seemed to shrink a little lower to the floor. "Harry?" he said with uncertainty.
"Ganbri, go close the door," Harry ordered, his eyes never leaving Rose's face. "We have no idea who she actually is yet, but she seems to think something's coming. We can't have any kind of signals coming through until we know what we're dealing with."
"I can tell you everything," she assured them as the younger man hurried off. "Please, tell me how long it's been."
"What's your mother's name?" the man asked.
"Jackie," she answered hurriedly. "Jackie Tyler."
The Doctor smiled up at her, nodding slightly in encouragement. He looked nervous and that frightened her more than the other man's intimidating voice. Why was the Doctor nervous? What would that man do if she got the questions wrong?
"Where'd you meet the Doctor?"
"In the basement of the shop I worked at. There were these—"
"Has he aged since then? Does he look older?"
He was talking quickly and it was beginning to frustrate her. "I don't know. He looked completely different then!"
"What colour shirt were you wearing when you met?"
"How the hell am I supposed to remember that, mate?" she snapped.
It didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. "How about his shirt?"
"Are you being serious?"
The Doctor turned to look at the other man again. "Harry," he complained quietly.
The man actually held his hand up to silence the Doctor. She couldn't believe it when it actually worked.
"What colour were his eyes?" he continued.
"Blue."
"Are you sure?"
"Definitely."
"How about your eyes?"
She scrunched her face up at him frowning. "Brown. What the hell is this?"
His eyes narrowed slightly, his mouth tensing, but he nodded his head as though he were satisfied. "Fine," he said gruffly before turning and walking away. Rose hadn't noticed the feeling of pressure building up in her head until it abruptly vanished, causing her to gasp in surprise.
She looked down at the Doctor at a loss for words. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled apologetically, returning his attention to the cuffs around her wrists.
"He's a lot nicer once you get to know him," he said, though he didn't really sound like he believed his own words.
"Did he say that signals can't get into this room?" she asked eagerly.
"Nothing can get through. I spent centuries trying to open that door or learn something about what was inside it. The TARDIS itself is pretty hard to scan or get information from, but this room . . . she pulled out all the stops for this one."
For the first time in a long time, Rose felt like she could breathe. They had managed to find shelter before that was able to keep them hidden and it was nothing as sophisticated as the TARDIS. She felt confident that she was safe here.
"He's not human," she muttered quietly, searching the Doctor's face for information. "Is he?"
"No."
"It felt like he was in my head somehow."
"Um, yes . . . that's sort of his specialty. He was only making sure that you were who you said you were."
He was avoiding something. He didn't want to tell her about his mysterious non-human friend.
"Who is he, Doctor?"
The metal cuffs suddenly opened and the Doctor cried out in delight. He stood, simply beaming at her, and made up some stupid lie about learning how to get out of cuffs from Harry Houdini, then he held his arms out in expectation.
The look in his eyes . . . it was like she never left. To him, it was like she had been there just last week, and this was not any stranger than any of the other many predicaments that they rescued each other from. It shocked her. Still, she stepped into the hug just the same.
"How long has it been?" she asked as he squeezed her tight. "For you?"
He took a deep breath, long and slow, thinking before answering.
"Twenty-eight years."
It felt like her heart stopped for a second. Twenty-eight years and he didn't look a day older. There were no dark circles beneath his eyes and no grey in his hair. He was so young. An odd feeling washed over her as his arms grew a little tighter and his chin rested on her head.
Twenty-eight years.
Twenty-eight years.
She looked past his arm to catch a glimpse of the two other men in the room, keeping their distance and standing by the door. The blond one was watching them through the corner of his eye, his facial expression simply dripping with contempt. The other one beside him looked curious, eager, and very, very nervous.
"Oh God," she said aloud, eyes widening with realization as she quickly pulled free from the Doctor's hold.
"What?" he asked, but the way he asked it told her that he already knew.
"It's been twenty-eight years," she said and raised her hand, pointing a finger at the dark haired man. "He was calling his dad."
He looked to be in his mid to late-twenties and now that she looked at him . . . oh, he looked like him! The hair, the freckles, the eyes. She shot a glance back at the Doctor to be sure and her eyes instinctually looked down. He was actually wearing a wedding ring.
"He was calling you."
"Yeah . . ." The Doctor ran his hand through his hair, suddenly looking very nervous. "Rose, I think you and I should have a little talk in private."
"What for?" She grinned at him as though she thought he was silly, trying to hide the shock from her face. "You've got a kid. That's great. I mean, twenty-eight years—blimey, it'd be weird if things hadn't changed." She turned her attention to the boy instead and smiled warmly. "I'm Rose," she said, holding out her hand.
The boy smiled at her a little awkwardly, glancing at both other men before stepping forward. He took her hand and, to her surprise, bent down and kissed the back of it.
"Ganbri," he said.
"Nice to meet you, Ganbri." She glanced back at the Doctor, who looked to have gone several shades paler. "Alright," she said. "I've seen the kid. I've seen the ring. Where's the wife?"
"Husband."
The harshness in the voice told her immediately who had spoken, but she whipped her head around anyway. And there he was. That rough, scowly, scary looking man, was holding up his left hand so that she could clearly see his golden ring, gleaming away.
Her breathing stopped for a moment while she simply blinked in surprise at him. "You-you're the Doctor's husband? You two are married?"
The Doctor's mouth flattened out into a straight line, his hands alternating between his pockets and his hair. "Yes," he said slowly. "We're married."
She found herself nodding her head and quickly remembered to smile. "Okay." She looked back at the other man and held her hand out to him as well. "Sorry. Harry, was it?"
His eyes didn't soften, but he did shake her hand. "Professor Harold Mott."
Oh God, he hated her. He hated her.
"Ohh, Professor. That's nice," she said, still forcing a smile. "Professor of what?"
"Everything," Harry answered.
"Oh, like how the Doctor's a doctor of everything?" She thought that might make him at least crack a smile. It didn't.
Ganbri cleared his throat. "Dad teaches cellular bioengineering at Oxford."
"Oh, nice." She could feel her smile starting to falter under the intensity of those eyes. Why was he looking at her like that? She cleared her throat and gestured towards Ganbri. "So, twenty-eight years together by the looks of it. Do you have any other kids, Harry?"
She never would have thought that he could look at her liked he hated her any more than he was before but his eyes suddenly darkened. The muscles around his mouth tensed as if in anger, and the muscles around his eyes changed too, but they didn't look angry . . .
"I have a daughter," the Doctor answered quickly, touching her elbow to get her attention. She looked at him only because she felt that she should, but she saw Ganbri put a hand on Harry's arm out of the corner of her eye. "Her name is Jenny. I think you'd really like her."
"How about we skip the chitchat?" Harry said irritably. "An ordinary human has somehow crossed the void between universes and hidden herself away in a room that was perfectly sealed for centuries and you want to catch up on the small talk? How about you tell us how you got here and what the fuck is going on?"
He was scared, she realized. This was a man who hid his fear behind anger. If there was anything in the world that she could spot in a man now, it was that. For whatever reason, her appearance was upsetting to him and he was trying to control the situation in the only way he knew how. She chose to speak to Harry directly, instead of to the Doctor, and answered his question as best she could.
"When I traveled with the Doctor," she began, being sure to look Harry in the eye. "There was a time when a lot of people were in danger. I looked into the heart of the TARDIS and—"
"I know the story," Harry interrupted, though his voice was a little less sharp.
She swallowed. "Then you know what the Bad Wolf is?"
Ganbri's brows locked together. "That's what made Uncle Jack immortal, isn't it?"
"That's right," Rose answered quickly. She felt another odd rush of relief when she heard that. She hadn't thought of Jack in a long time.
"But the Bad Wolf doesn't exist anymore," the Doctor spoke now, but his eyes showed her that he didn't believe his own words. "Once the vortex was brought out of you, you just became you again. The Bad Wolf is gone."
Rose shook her head quickly, her heart suddenly beating faster at just the thought of it. "It's back," she said, with a quiver to her voice that she didn't intend. "When you took the vortex from me, the Bad Wolf didn't just stop existing. It left me and went into you. When you regenerated, you scattered its energy. That's why . . . that's why you were so ill afterwards. It was still in you, poisoning you. You didn't wake up until it had all gone. But it was out there, in pieces, trying to put itself back together."
For once, they were quiet. Harry's fierce eyes bore into her and the Doctor's face had worry written all over it but neither of them spoke. She had kind of hoped that this was where she'd get interrupted.
"It wants . . . it wants its body back," she stammered out, shifting from foot to foot. "It wants me."
The Doctor looked at her as though she had just put the world on his shoulders. "Rose, I . . . You saw what it can do. I don't know if we can stop an entity with that kind of power."
"It's weak," she answered. "Well, weaker. Without a body to contain it, its energy just dissipates. It's tried other bodies, but they don't work. It was born to live in me. It needs me."
"And you brought it here, you stupid girl?" Harry finally snapped. "You want to go running across the universes with this thing chasing you, taking bodies as it goes? What happens to the 'bodies' it takes when they don't work, I wonder? How many people has it killed while you run away to save your own skin?"
"Look, would you shut it for one second?" she barked back, holding her hand up to silence him. "Maybe if you let me finish my story, you'd know why and we could all stop wasting our bloody time, mate. Now, do you want to keep yelling at me or do you want to know how my running away has been saving your skin too?"
Harry stepped forward and Rose barely resisted the immediate urge to step back. Ganbri's hand shot out and landed on Harry's chest. The boy didn't even turn to look at him but Rose could tell from the way his eyes seemed to lose focus that he was doing something she couldn't perceive. Harry didn't come any closer.
"The Bad Wolf thinks it's a god," she continued, trying to pretend that her heart hadn't leapt up into her throat a moment before. "God of all time and space. It wanted to tear down the barriers that separate them so that it can exist, and rule, in all of it at once. Every moment in time in every universe pressed into a single point."
"A reverse Big Bang," Ganbri said, his eyes suddenly wide with wonder.
"The Big Implosion," the Doctor added.
"We'd all fucking die," Harry finished.
"Right," Rose agreed. "So it's not been as easy as just giving myself up, yeah?"
Harry sighed heavily, bringing up a hand to rub the space between his eyebrows. "Well, shit, then this is our problem." He sighed again. "Fine. How did you cross over and how did you get in the TARDIS?"
"The technology humans have developed so far is too unstable. We found an abandoned outpost of Gallifrey, left over from the War. There was a Gate there—broken, of course, but we were able to hide until James was able to fix it."
One of Harry's eyebrows shot up. "James?"
"He's—uh, my—he has all of the Doctor's memories, but—"
"The biological metacrisis?"
Oh good, he knew. "Yes," Rose answered and found herself avoiding eye contact with the Doctor when she said next, "He doesn't call himself the Doctor anymore though, just James."
"Okay. I'm lost," Ganbri suddenly piped up. "Does that mean what I think it means?"
"We came through the Gate at the last moment," Rose carried on, hoping to keep the attention away from James. She didn't want to answer questions about him just now. She didn't want to think about him. If she thought about him, she'd have to remember that he might be dead.
"It found us and we wouldn't be able to close the Gate in time. James took me through and found this place where the TARDIS was. When we got inside, we had to hide because someone else came in—a young bloke—and he started programming this room, so—"
"No fucking way!" Ganbri interrupted loudly. "You hijacked the programming when I was building the security system. I knew something weird was going on."
"No, it was someone else. Shorter and with darker hair."
Ganbri shook his head. She saw that he tried to flash a grin, but it faltered and the last second and he only manage a smile. "New face," he said. "Time Lords can do that."
Time Lord. She couldn't help staring at him. He looked her age. He looked human. He looked like James. A new Time Lord, when the Doctor was meant to be the last. He hadn't just restarted his life; he'd restarted his family—his species.
James would kill him.
She realized that she had been staring and suddenly tried to pretend that she hadn't been. "Uh, listen, I've been in that room for a few hundred years. Could someone point me in the direction of the bathroom?" Maybe it was a stupid thing to do, but her gut told her to do it. "Harry?"
The Doctor and Ganbri shot not-so-subtle nervous glances to each other, but Harry's eyes were steady. With little more than a grunt of acknowledgement, he opened the door behind him that led out into the TARDIS halls. She knew there was a small bathroom where they were—she could see it off to the side—Harry could have simply called her a moron and pointed to the door. But he didn't. That gave her some hope.
She turned to signal to James to hang back before she slipped through the door but, when she looked back, she remembered that it wasn't him. James wasn't there at all. She remembered how pale he had looked and forced her thoughts to turn away. She wasn't brave enough to think about where he was just yet.
Harry only walked to the next hall intersection before he stopped, crossed his arms over, and turned to face her.
She smiled at him. "I know you don't like me," she started.
"I don't like you," he confirmed.
"That's okay. You don't have to like me. I don't have to like you either."
"That would make it easier for me to not like you."
She wasn't sure if he had meant it to be funny, but it made her chuckle a little. She almost missed it, it was such a small change, but his eyes softened ever so slightly when she chuckled.
"Look, mate, I don't know what you're worried about. We were never really . . . you know. There were feelings and things but I was never really more than just his friend."
"You were enough," Harry answered gruffly.
She blinked and let a smile twitch at the corners of her mouth. "That's probably the nicest thing anyone's said to me in a long time. You're not very good at this whole not-liking-me business, eh?"
She had hoped it would amuse him, even if only a little. It didn't. He suddenly looked irritated and he seemed to inflate a little, looking a little taller and a little more intimidating.
"Listen to me. Just listen," he hissed quietly at her. "You seem like a nice person and I don't know what you were expecting to find here but I need you to understand that the Doctor doesn't belong to you anymore. This is my family and you don't want to know what I have done–what I am still willing to do–to keep it. And before you ask if that's a threat, the answer is yes."
She felt her face tense and her lips purse. "Right," she said, crossing her arms and looking defiantly into those dark eyes. "So what you're saying is that I don't belong here, yeah?"
"Correct."
"Right. Right," she said, nodding her head as if she were in agreement. "Can you tell me where the TARDIS is parked right now?"
She could tell by the way he glared at her that he knew what she would say, but he answered anyway. "Chiswick."
"Chiswick. Right. Well, listen, Harry," she reached out and landed her hand lightly on his chest, leaning forward a little as though she were going to tell him a secret, and she easily felt the muscle tense beneath her fingers. "You seem like not such a nice person and I don't know what you were expecting but I'm not the sort of girl to tuck tail and run just because some bloke can frown at me really well. I was born and grew up about ten miles from here. I lived in a flat and went to school and worked in the shops, all in London. This is my home—so I absolutely belong here—and you have no idea what I am willing to do to save my home, even if it means finding ways to keep ridiculously insecure men out of my way. And before you ask if that's a threat, the answer is you bet your ass it is."
His eyes narrowed. "You have no idea—"
"I don't need to," she interrupted. "Because the reality is that, no matter who you are or what you can do, you need me to keep your perfect little world spinning. All I have to do to ruin your entire life is get caught or die, so what can you possibly do to me?"
His eyes were so dark. He was so angry. Leave, she thought to herself. He was the sort of man that looked that he might just be mad enough to throw everything into the fire before admitting defeat. He scared her, that much was true without question, but that didn't mean she'd kneel at his feet to gain favour.
She stood tall and smiled in as friendly a manner as she could. "Save it for the enemy, mate. You and I are friends now, whether you like it or not."