Disclaimer: I do not own the Doctor, or Ace, or the TARDIS – if I did, I wouldn't have killed 7 with a hospital. That all belongs to the BBC, Sylvester McCoy, and Sophie Aldred. No copyright infringement intended, no profit made.
Handful of Dust
"Ah, there you are. Do you have any preference as to our next destination?" The Doctor, seemingly absorbed in checking various dials and gauges on the central console, did not look up as his young pyromaniac companion strolled into the room. She had disappeared immediately upon entering the TARDIS, presumably to get rid of the much-hated frock she had been forced to wear and find something more comfortably durable. Ace leaned against the console and watched him.
"Anywhere without haunted manor houses, ta." She replied, a touch sulkily. "Or any other connection to my personal history." She still hadn't quite forgiven him for his latest stunt, well-intentioned as it might have been. She hadn't liked that house when she torched it all those years ago, and she likes it even less now that she knows what evil lived in it.
"Hmm…" Hurriedly he moved to another panel, changed a few dials, and tapped a readout screen distractedly. Ace mused that even though the Doctor was supposedly an old hand at flying the TARDIS, he always seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown every time they were going somewhere. A few more dials were set, a lever or two was switched, and the rotor began moving smoothly. They were off, it seemed.
"So where are we going?" She asked curiously after a few minutes of silence from the Doctor. She didn't have a preference as to location, but it was nice to know. Just in case she should get her vaccinations updated, or make sure she had a decent supply of nitro-9 on hand. The harried Time Lord looked up at her, and gave her a slight, amused smile.
"You'll see when we get there."
"Professor!" Exasperation, as can truly only be expressed by a barely twenty-year-old delinquent, flavored Ace's voice.
"Patience, Ace. You'll like it, trust me!" She couldn't protest in the face of those pleading eyes. Therefore, resignedly, she turned and headed off for the kitchens. Where-ever they were going, a decent cup of tea would probably help.
She had gotten so used to the TARDIS' hum that she could tell, by the pitch, when they were rematerializing. Hastily she gulped the last of her tea (black, two sugars, no cream) and carrying the last of her sandwich (marmite and peanut butter) she headed towards the control room, her heavily decorated jacket hastily donned and her knapsack over one shoulder.
Doctor had enthusiastically swung the door open, which opened to a wide-open and seemingly empty land. Red, rocky, gently rolling hills stretched out to the horizon, decorated with short scrubby pine trees, even shorter, tough-looking bushes and patches of grass long ago gone to seed. It was all-over covered in a fragile dusting of snow, and the grey skies above promised more in spades.
"Come along, Ace." The young pyro stood in the door of the TARDIS, a mulishly obstinate look on her face. The Doctor paused just outside the door, countering her sour look with a pleading expression, urging her to join him in this land that looked so empty and lonely. She wasn't having any of it. She wanted to be someplace warm, with people about, normal people who weren't interested in taking over the world or destroying all life as they know it.
"Where's your sense of adventure?" The Doctor goaded, his expression changing to a cheery grin, his dark eyes shining.
"In Java." She scowled back, not moving an inch. She didn't want another adventure just yet, not while she could still remember the details of their last jaunt with terrible clarity. Besides all that, the sun was near to setting, and she had no desire to be out-of-doors when the storm hit. Determined, she crossed her arms over her chest and glowered.
"Can't we go someplace warm and sunny? There are places in the universe like that, yeah? I'm tired of it being dark and gloomy and wet all the time." She sulked petulantly.
"Don't tell me you'd rather sit on some beach somewhere, drinking something noxiously fruity out of a coconut." He snorted disdainfully, leaning on his umbrella.
"Why not?" He reached out and affectionately tapped her nose. She couldn't help but smile at that, as much as she was trying to keep a stern face. The Doctor knew her entirely too well.
"You, my dear, would be bored." Ace was silent in the face of the Doctor's triumphant grin for some minutes. She really couldn't argue with that… especially since there were a few canisters of home-made nitro-9 in her knapsack.
For any unexpected emergencies, of course. She was sure there was no use for it here.
The Doctor smiled, that odd, singularly sweet smile that means he knows something and isn't sharing, and turned to wander off into the bush.
"Doctor." No answer. "Doctor!" He could have been deaf for all the reply he gave. Faced with either trailing after her irritating, beloved companion or waiting for him to return, Ace sighed, pulled her leather jacket a bit closer, and set off in the Doctor's footsteps, locking the TARDIS after herself. The brittle covering of ice on the ground crunched under her boots as she stalked in the Doctor's wake.
She kept her silence for quite a while, thinking he only meant to look around for a bit, but minutes stretched away and he kept walking, seemingly on an aimless course. The scenery was just as wild, untamed, and utterly boring as it was when they first stepped out of the TARDIS. It was decidedly colder, however, and her jacket just wasn't cutting it. She could feel the cold just as if she hadn't anything on at all.
"Doctor?" This time he did look back and look at her as she hurried along in his wake. He didn't even pause, however, continuing along a sort of trail that was probably just the path carved by water on the rare occasions it rained around here.
"Yes Ace?" He sounded curious, but didn't give up any information as to where they were, where they might be going, and when, if ever, they were going to start heading back. To be quite honest, Ace was only really interested in the last of those options.
"When are we going back? M'toes are freezing off." The Doctor tsked at her impatient tone.
"We will have to walk faster then, won't we? Come on, a little fresh air will do you good." He admonished her cheerfully, and then set off again through the brush. Ace looked behind her wistfully, seeing the flashing light of the TARDIS in the distance, and sighed.
For what seemed an inordinately long time to Ace, they wandered aimlessly, as the sky grew darker and more threatening and the temperature plummeted. She was about to beg, for the nth time, to turn around and return to the welcome warmth of the TARDIS when the Doctor made a pleased sound and stopped.
"What do you think of that, hmm?" He asked Ace as she came to a stop beside him, his hands holding his lapels and looking terribly smug. Ace stared. It was a house, if four walls of rusting corrugated sheet metal and a roof of the same could be called a house. Several run-down pick-up trucks and a pair of snowmobiles that looked as if they'd all been there from the previous winter were clustered around the door. A light, glowing brightly in the gathering gloom showed through the open door.
"Doesn't look very interesting to me." Ace replied sulkily, annoyed at being dragged all this way to look at a run-down shack. "Looks dead." As if responding to Ace's contrary mood, a man, or what looked like a man, heavily swathed in cold-weather gear, stepped outside. A spark of light flared between the man's cupped hands – smoke break, Ace guessed, but from where they stood she couldn't tell if it was tobacco or something with more of an entertainment value that the man was smoking.
"Let's go back to the TARDIS, Professor." Ace pleaded, a restraining hand on his arm. "It's just some old hut, s'not important. Come on…" However, her protests died as she looked at him. He was looking at her with that calm, patient expression that meant he would listen to her for as long as she wanted to protest… and then do whatever it was he wanted to do in the first place anyway. The wind, which had been picking up steadily since they arrived, cut through her coat and made her shiver. The Doctor seemed impervious as always, his dark eyes steady as he watched her fumble. Then, as if the make her defeat final, the storm that had been looming overhead finally broke. It spat out just a few fat, lazy snowflakes at first, but soon the snow was coming down thick and heavy., turning the world into a dizzying white blur.
"No time, Ace, come on!" The Time Lord urged, pulling her towards the lonely outpost. She only put up a token fight, too cold to argue about getting into any sort of shelter.
All Tommy wanted was to make enough money to live the big life – fast cars, lots of women, and a place fancy enough to make Donald Trump look like a miser. He had gotten into drug-running by way of his now-dead cousin Fredrick, who had promised it as a way to get rich, and quick – people were dying for the stuff, weren't they? It was worth a lot to them, and they'd pay alright, no worries about that.
What Fredrick forgot to mention is that the drugs never came cheaply either. Sure they could grow good marijuana, and meth could be cooked, but if they wanted cocaine, the good stuff… that had to be smuggled in, and that meant kow-towing to an outsider for as long as you sold their stuff… which was, it turned out, the rest of your life.
Just last week he and his boys had gotten orders to head out to the wilds of Utah, to wait for a shipment… and some guests. No one had been too enthusiastic about leaving their home base in Salt Lake City, but Tommy couldn't very well refuse, seeing as he was already over his head in debt to that particular cartel. To refuse would be to ask for a bullet in the back of the head. So, despite the grumbling and arguments he had gotten, and despite warnings from the local weather service that there were nasty winter storms approaching, he had managed to get his crew to the abandoned and rusting shack of a hideout he had been ordered to in plenty of time.
They had come in the middle of the night, four black vans with darkly tinted windows. There had been enough cocaine in the first two to bring Tommy out of debt, provided he could get it all into the city without being caught.
In the last two vans, however…
Six dark-garbed men had spent the remainder of the night and pre-dawn hours moving all sorts of odd, highly technological equipment into the shack, transforming the empty storehouse into a lab or technological base of some sort. The men never spoke to them unless it was to demand something. At first, Tommy and his men had refused to help… but that was before young Jose was killed, ruthlessly, with a single fluid motion that Tommy still couldn't remember seeing properly.
They were odd, these men. They never took off their many layers of clothing, even when they were inside with all the space heaters turned up full blast. They spoke in odd, distinctly monotonous voices that sounded strangely fake to Tommy, though he couldn't pinpoint why he thought that, exactly.
Besides that, they never seemed to sleep, or even eat. They were always working away, and Tommy got the feeling that when they were done with whatever it was that brought them out here, they weren't going to want to leave behind any witnesses.