Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters contained herein, I merely make them dance in what I hope is true to their rhythm.
Chapter 1
What Sean Found
Sean awoke with a start. He sat up and wiped his brow. His hand came away, slick with sweat.
"That was a hell of a dream," he said out loud. He got up and went to the mirror in his bathroom. Looking into it at himself, he saw the circles under his eyes. The eyes themselves were bloodshot. He had cried again. He sighed and splashed some water on his face.
The dreams weren't getting better. He knew that what he had been dreaming had really happened. His subconscious imagination was intensifying many things, and his own guilt was not least among them.
After dematerializing in front of Martha at the two thousand and eight Drum Corps International World Championships, he had arrived back home. It was where he wanted to go. He couldn't bring himself to face what he knew he had to do. Or at least try to do. But he didn't even know where to start.
He rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. It was 3:33 in the morning. The dreams had to stop. He wasn't getting any sleep, and it was showing up in his work. He had gone back to work for the past few days, but more and more of his coworkers were noticing that he was slipping. Not just in his performance, but in all of his dealings with everyone. He couldn't hold a conversation for more than a couple of minutes, and he kept excusing himself from all of the awkward situations he was finding himself in, which were many.
He knew that the only way to really stop the dreams was to move forward in the mission he had set for himself upon leaving the Doctor and Martha.
He went to the window and looked up into the sky, wondering where they might be, and if they had made any progress on stopping the homunculi, or finding the Hope that was supposedly out there. He sighed and looked at the vortex manipulator that was still on his bedside table.
"I don't even know where to go!" he shouted to nobody.
This wasn't entirely true. He had thought he knew where to go when he arrived at home. His encounter with the Master, the man that he had thought was named Thompson, had made that clear to him.
He looked from the sky to the shell of a house that belonged to his next-door neighbor, who was, apparently, an alien. Nothing strange had been seen from it since the glow the night he had opened the box.
He rubbed his eyes. The damn box. The homunculi had to go back into it. He didn't know how they would manage it. Looking at the house, he knew that he had to start somewhere, and maybe he would find some clues in that house. The basement would be a fine place to begin looking.
"Well, I won't be getting back to sleep tonight," he muttered. He stepped away from the window and sniffed himself. "I should shower," he said. His hygiene had been slipping too.
He spent probably more time than was necessary in the shower, letting the hot water run over his body. He lathered up, making sure to get all the nooks and crannies of his body clean. When he finally stepped out, he toweled off and put on a comfortable tee shirt and a pair of blue jeans. There was no sense being uncomfortable if he was going to be going through his neighbor's things. If there was a trap of some sort, he wanted to be able to move with plenty of ease.
He grabbed a flashlight and put the vortex manipulator on his wrist for good measure. He programmed the coordinates for his bedroom if he needed to make a quick getaway.
He stole outside silently and crept over to the nearby wreck of a house. It appeared to be just as he had left it when he climbed out of the hole in the basement. "It's weird that it hasn't been blocked off at all," he thought. The hair of the back of his neck was standing up, and he was glad he had brought the vortex manipulator with him. It definitely had all the makings of a trap. He clambered down the pile of rubble carefully, not wanting to sprain his ankle again. He didn't have Martha here to fix a splint for him.
When he reached the basement floor, he turned on the flashlight and looked carefully around. Nothing seemed different.
He stepped gingerly towards the table that the box had been placed on. It was bare except for a couple scraps of paper. He leafed through them and didn't see anything of note. Still, he pocketed them. He never knew if something innocuous could mean something of great importance. He would show the Doctor all of his findings later, if he ever saw him again.
He walked around the edge of the basement, scanning each shelf. There were many fantastic looking things, but he knew he couldn't take all of them with him. He settled instead for taking pictures of the whole room, and of each individual item. Something would have to strike a chord with his Time Lord friend.
He found the door that led from the basement up to the ground level behind a bulletin board that he had to take off the wall. He took a picture of the post-it notes and papers that were tacked to it before opening the door.
He held his breath, expecting some sort of alarm to go off, but he was safe. He let out the breath gratefully.
He crept up the stairs slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible. He reached the upper landing where there was another door. It was unlocked, so he stepped through it. A second later, there was a flash of gray on the floor streaking toward him. Without warning, it leaped up and planted its front legs on his chest, as if trying to knock Sean back down the stairs. He was fortunate that the creature was light. The shock alone nearly sent him teetering over the edge.
As it was, the cat (which he realized it must be), was clawing the front of his shirt, trying to grip enough so it could climb up to attack his face. The claws were doing a good deal of damage to his chest through the shirt.
He spun around quickly, trying to dislodge the cat. Its back legs swung out behind it, and its body smacked into the door frame. This jarred it enough so that it yowled and let go with its claws, and it hit the stairs hard. It lay there, still.
All this happened in a matter of about three seconds. Sean was breathing heavily, trying to come to grips with what had just happened.
He crept down to where the cat laid a few stairs below, and put his hand on it. It was still breathing, so it must have just been knocked out.
Sean smiled. He liked animals as a rule, and cats were no exception. He hadn't wanted to hurt it at all. It was good that it was going to be okay.
He went back up the stairs, still breathing a little hard, and found himself in what seemed to be the kitchen. He shone the light around, and saw through a doorway the hole that he had descended into to get to the basement. He made a mental note to skirt around that hole when he went through there.
There was nothing of note in the kitchen, so he moved on into the living room, giving the hole a wide berth. Now that he wasn't down there, it was black down there and went into the pits of hell if he hadn't known any better. He crept around the living room, and found himself looking up another staircase.
He frowned. There should be another room on the lower floor of the house. The outside structure implied that there was at least an office or something near the front of the house. He thought about it, still shining the light around the room, and found what he was looking for when his eyes moved away from a certain spot on the wall of their own accord.
Unfortunately, this wall was right above the pit, leaving just a few inches of floor right next to it.
"Damn," said Sean under his breath. He focused the light on the stretch of wall, and found that if he trained his eyes just to the left of the center of the beam, he could make out a door in his peripherals.
He was sure that he needed to get into that room if the Master was going to work that hard to keep people from knowing it was there. He thought for a moment, and then remembered a ladder he had seen in the basement. It made a lot more sense than trying edge out onto that tiny ledge of floor and wind up in the basement anyway.
He rushed down to the basement, taking care to step over the prone cat on his way down the stairs, and set the ladder up where he remembered the door being.
He climbed up carefully, and reached to where the knob would be. His hand closed around it, and he tried to turn it.
"Damn," he said again as it clicked back and forth. All at once, however, the weight of himself and the ladder against the wall/ door became too much for it, and it burst in.
Sean cried out in surprise despite himself, and leaped up the last few rungs into the room. The ladder, of course, stopped when it hit the room's floor.
He held his breath. That had created more noise than he had yet all night. He waited a few minutes to make sure that nobody was coming down to see what all of the racket was. When nobody did, including pets, he let his breath out. He was indeed alone in the house.
He looked around, still just using the flashlight. He frowned, then turned it off, and turned the light on in the room. If someone was looking at the house, seeing a flashlight in the window would look a lot more suspicious then seeing a main light on in the room. As he looked, he smiled. There wasn't a window to see it through anyway, except through the living room.
He pulled the ladder up into the room, to make sure that he could still get out when he needed to, and closed the door as best he could. Now there wouldn't be any way for someone to see the light on, and he could have a proper look around.
He looked at the door. The lock on it was clearly broken, which made him wonder why it was so made as flimsy as it was that it had broken under just a little bit of pressure. He supposed it didn't matter that much.
He turned and observed the room he was now in. There were no other doors leading out from it. It was a very plain room, in fact. There was a desk with a chair at it, and it had a pencil and a writing pad.
Sean was flummoxed. Why go through the trouble of hiding the room if it only had this inside it? He flipped through the writing pad, but there was nothing in it. He was struck by a thought, and pulled out the sheets of paper he had pocketed from the basement.
Grinning, he realized that the papers had come from this writing pad. He grabbed the pencil and pad for good measure and turned off the light. He was about to open the door when he noticed something else in the corner of the room.
Something was glowing faintly. He hadn't noticed it when the light was on, it was too dim. Now that it was dark in the room, the glow was pulsing a slow rhythm, almost like a heart beating. He turned the light back on, still gazing at the spot.
Yes! He could still just make it out. The glow was coming from the wall itself. He went to it and pressed against it carefully. A shock went through his system, and he fell to the floor.
Shaking his head to clear it, he sat up. The shock had only startled him, not enough to knock him out.
He got up gingerly, rubbing his hip where it had hit the floor. His vision cleared quickly, and now when he looked around the room, there was a lot more than just a desk and chair. Now there were gadgets and gizmos to rival that of the Doctor's TARDIS. He gazed around in awe. One button had dropped the illusion. He supposed it was a hologram of some sort.
He took out the pad of paper he had pocketed to see if any change had come over it. There was none.
The desk and chair were still in the same position, but now there was some kind of computer monitor. It was blank at the moment, but when he stepped in front of it, the screen came on, showing a picture of the Doctor.
"What?" Sean breathed. He looked around for a keyboard or mouse, but he couldn't see anything. He gazed at the computer screen, his brow furrowed. Surely not...
He touched the picture of the Doctor. Instantly, the picture went away and revealed a basic desktop. His eyes widened.
"No," he said. "No, it can't be!"