Disclaimer: I don't own it.
Spoilers: Obvious spoilers for 4X06, general for the rest of S4 (including the finale but nothing specific).
A/N: This is fic is finished apart from a bit of editing, so hopefully it will be updated every other day. I'm a bit nervous about posting it, so please let me know what you think!! Enjoy :)
The room is sparsely furnished to say the least. A bed, a chair, a table. The table and chair are made out of wood, and both are chained to the floor. The bed frame appears to be some sort of welded metal, and the white sheets covering the mattress look more flimsy than a butterfly wing. The single window is too high for her to reach without being able to move the chair, and what little light it lets in is dimmed by the thick, black, wrought-iron bars crossing it at regular intervals. The door is made of sturdy metal, and locks from the outside. The hinges are on the other side, too, so no hope there. No cameras though, which is good. It wouldn't do for the men who caught her to catch her on their cameras tearing apart their jail cell and trying to escape. She learned that one the hard way.
She thinks that her best bet for escape probably lies in the bed frame: if she could somehow dismantle it then she might be able to flatten out one of the tubular legs and get to work on finding a weakness in the door frame by using it as a lever. Failing that, she could use the metal pipe to hit the next person who comes into the cell, and then tie them up with the bed covers before making a run for it. She really hopes it won't come to that.
Sighing in temporary defeat, Jenny sinks down heavily on the bed. It creaks noisily under her weight, swinging a little to one side as she shifts to get as comfortable as she can on a mattress that can't be more than two centimetres thick. She can feel the springs that support her weight, and hopes that she won't be here long enough to need to sleep. She doesn't fancy adding chronic backache to her already fairly lengthy list of problems.
She scuffs the toes of her shoes against the flagstone floor, hands gripping the edge of the bed until her knuckles turn white with the strain. She feels terribly confined in here – constricted, as though time and space and oxygen are limited, even though she's never been claustrophobic before. She blames the feeling on the rapid nature with which everything went so wrong when she had been having such a lovely time only a few short hours ago. That, and the fact that she has been feeling increasingly lonely inside her head ever since she ran away from Messaline, a space in her mind that feels as though it ought to be filled with something though she isn't entirely sure what.
And now she's stuck, alone in a cell, unable to help any of the people that had been in trouble when she was unceremoniously hauled away. She isn't even sure if she can help herself.
I've got to get out of here, she tells herself firmly. She feels a strange compulsion to right the wrongs that have been taking place on this planet, no matter what the cost, and she knows that the people have no other hope but her.
Jenny takes a moment for a few deep, calming breaths to try and soothe her racing mind and hearts pounding frantically in her chest. She knows it will do her no good to be so worked up she's shaking and unable to do what needs to be done to save the planet. Its infrastructure is collapsing and she has precious little time to stop the release of a virus that will kill the entire population, and it really won't help if she ends up shivering in a corner trying to get a handle on her rather easily distracted, mind-of-its-own mind. Ooh, when did she start rambling so much? She isn't sure.
Course of action decided, she opens her eyes and drops to her knees beside the bed. She studies the construction of the frame: the legs are bolted and welded to the main part of the frame, but the construction looks pretty flimsy. She's sure she can get it apart if she tries. Reaching up, she tears a strip of fabric from one of the sheets. It rips easily. She then wraps it around one of the bolts, gripping as hard as she can and twisting it violently. The force of the action flings her hand upwards into the metal frame. It clangs off her watch (she likes being able to see time – it makes it easier to bear when she can feel it moving around her in ways she hasn't yet learned to understand) and she muffles a cry as her fingers throb from the collision.
Deciding that a softly-softly approach may be more effective, if only to minimise personal injury and avoid alerting her captors to her intent, she ignores the pain in her hand and grips the fabric-covered bolt once again, this time pushing her weight behind it and using that to try and twist it out of its anchor. It doesn't work, but it does loosen some. She decides that she'll have to get herself a device that can do this sort of thing for her more easily. Sighing, Jenny rests for a minute, trying to ignore the growing pressure behind her forehead. The room feels smaller than it should, and she's cold and scared and could really do with a good cry right about now.
But she has no time. Pushing all thoughts other than dismantling the bed out of her mind, she takes a deep breath, and tries again.
-8-8-8-
The Doctor straightens his tie, pulls down the sleeves of his jacket, and then steps out of the TARDIS into warm sunshine. He locks the door behind him and then turns, pulling out his sonic screwdriver. The landscape surrounding him makes him pause a moment; this wasn't what he had been expecting. He'd been expecting concrete and metal and lots of beige and brown and grey, not… not green and blue and grass and sky. This wasn't part of his plan.
His plan had been so simple. Step one: find the galactic coordinates of the distress signal the TARDIS had picked up when he'd been drinking tea, the sudden beep from the console causing him to spill milky free radicals and tannin all over his shirt. Step two: set the coordinates (and change shirt). Step three: end up on a predictably devastated planet indistinguishable from all the others he's been to this week, find the source of the distress signal, save/help it, back in time for tea. Lush green grass and flowers weren't part of the plan.
He decides not to let the unexpected prettiness throw a spanner in the works - partly because he thinks it's rather nice to have a change of scenery, and partly because throwing a spanner in the works is always really rather impractical. Causes all sorts of problems, problems that aren't even necessary. Ooh, but he does like a good problem. Bit of a riddle, something to reason out.
No, that's not why he's here. Distress signal. Right.
He clicks on the sonic screwdriver, smiling as it lights up in his hand. He's close to whatever it is he's here to find. Very close. Pretty much right on top of it, in fact.
The smile drops off his face. That can't be right, surely. There's nothing around apart from him and the TARDIS and so much nature, certainly nothing that could be emitting a distress signal powerful enough to alert the attention of his magnificent ship. He wonders briefly if it's perhaps nothing more than a transdimensional blip, before deciding that the TARDIS would not have alerted him to that. Blips happened all the time. Full volume beeping from the console didn't.
The Doctor begins to wander, both in body and mind as he looks around for a Likely Suspect. He can still smell the tea he spilt, can still taste the remnants of it on his tongue, and his teeth feel a bit fuzzy because he let it brew for too long before drinking. It's only when he feels the muscles in his legs begin to pull that he realises he has crested a hill, and it's only when he looks up from the blue glow of the sonic screwdriver that he realises what is now in front of him.
The landscape in front of him is different to that behind him. In front of him there is a fence, and then beyond the fence the grass disappears to be replaced by dirt and rubble leading down a slope, and the blue sky fades into roiling grey clouds that must be full of dust and pollution. In front of him are his concrete and metal and beige and brown and grey. He refuses to let himself dwell on the state of his nature as he uses the sonic screwdriver to cut through the unattended chain link fence and thinks to himself, now this is more like it. He crosses over to the other side.
-8-8-8-
The room is immaculate. She has straightened the chair and the desk and the edge of the bed sheets hang parallel to the floor. There is no evidence of her tampering, apart from a few scratches on the door where she tried to lever it open (and failed).
Jenny sits on the floor opposite the bed, the door to her left. She is watching it carefully while trying to give the impression of being nonchalant. She feels that time has slowed down around her, but inside, she's racing. She can feel the rush of blood in her veins, and if she closes her eyes she can almost see the neurons firing in her brain and sense the ebb and flow of the universe. She wonders sometimes if she may be crazy. No one else she's met in her short life has any idea of what she's talking about when she's suddenly overtaken by a wave of nausea because time has changed suddenly, irrevocably, or the way her head hurts when she's caught up in the middle of something that's wrong, so wrong, and she doesn't have any idea of how to fix it because no one ever showed her how.
There's a whole universe worth of running out there for her to explore, and still it feels limited to her. She wants to be able to run in time as well. She loves the running, wants to run as far and wide as possible, doesn't understand why most people don't. She doesn't understand why she's different to everyone else, but the one person she could ask about it thinks she's dead, gone, didn't even really want her in the first place. She wishes that he had wanted her, that she could have gone with him and his friends. She could have asked him why her head feels so empty when it's full of so much knowledge.
A clanging sound comes from somewhere outside her cell, further down the corridor but it's coming closer quickly. A man, she thinks. A large man walking with heavy boots on. Heavy boots with laces that can be tied together so he'll trip over if he tries to chase her. He'll probably have a weapon, she thinks. A knife or a truncheon or both, because he thinks she's dangerous. She'll have to act carefully, quickly. She lays both palms flat on the floor, bracing herself.
The man stops outside her door and she hears him breathing heavily and rattling keys. Then a key slides into the lock, metal on metal. She hears the tumblers turn, can picture what they look like in her head based on how they fall. Then the key is pulled back and the door is being pulled open and light streams into the small room, creating a silhouette in the doorframe. Jenny is sitting in the shadows, and she takes advantage of her position.
She waits until the man steps into the cell and turns slightly to close the door behind him before she makes her move. He obviously thinks he's keeping her in by shutting the door; it makes her want to laugh. She lunges forward and pulls the metal bed leg out from its loose anchor, jumping to her feet as she does so and in one fluid movement swings her arm out to hit the man in the side with her weapon. The tray of food he had been carrying is flung to the bed as he doubles over. She makes the most of the upper hand and the element of surprise, grabbing onto the man's arm while kicking his feet out from under him.
He falls to the ground with a soft thud before he even knows what's hit him, and she's busy gagging him with a bed sheet by the time he thinks to shout out, his yell muffled by the linen and thick walls of the cell. He kicks out at her as she binds his arms with another sheet, ready torn into strips for just this purpose. When she'd failed to get the door open earlier she decided that she ought to be prepared. Arms bound, and then comes her favourite part of the plan. The man is face down and she sits on his legs while she reaches down and unties his shoe laces before tying them up together.
She stands and then with some difficulty lifts one side of the table, rearranging it so that one of the wooden legs is placed between the man's own. She hopes it will buy her some time. She is more than aware that her solution is temporary, and decides that she will have to learn some new jailbreaking techniques. Maybe when she gets a device to open doors and make mundane tasks easier, she could add a stun setting. That might work.
Once the man is restrained as well as she can manage, she reaches down and searches through his clothes, finding a small truncheon but no other weapon. She takes it just in case, as well as stealing his keys, before walking over to the door.
The door is open and she's just about to walk through it before she thinks to stop and turn back, looking at the man with regret. "I'm sorry," she says, meaning it, and remorse fills up inside her. It's a sign, she thinks, that she is definitely a product of pacifist stock. She hates violence now.
All the same, she leaves the man where he is, knowing that there are more important things right now. She has to stop the people he works for releasing the virus that would kill a billion innocent people, and make sure they can't do it again. Then she can come back and make sure the man is okay.
With one last look behind her, Jenny leaves the cell, locking the door as she goes.