The Doctor and Rose backtracked and headed the same way Daisy had just a few moments earlier.
Entering the old building they were immediately accosted by someone Rose took to be the librarian.
"Who are you? The Library is off limits to visitors and tourists I'm afraid," she screeched, glaring at them over the top of bifocal glasses.
"Oh we're um, research fellows…" Rose began their cover story when the old woman interrupted her
"I haven't been told about any research fellows. The University has a very strict policy on who can come and when, and I'm always informed!" The woman looked nearly out of her mind when a small but confident voice piped up from behind her
"It's okay, Agatha. I've seen their documentation."
Agatha the librarian span around, then visibly relaxed when she saw Daisy standing there, an oversized volume in her arms. Rose couldn't help but notice how much more serious she looked, even more so than before, her hair scraped back and a pair of round framed black glasses perched on her nose.
"Oh, Daisy. It's just that it's most unusual for research fellows to come to the library on a Saturday, and without me being warned of them…"
They'd landed on a Saturday then, the Doctor and Rose thought simultaneously. Rose would never get used to the jumping around in time. The Doctor was just glad he'd skipped another Tuesday.
"Hang on, Saturday?" Rose crinkled her nose in confusion. Not that the Doctor noticed it. Or the slight hair toss that accompanied it. He coughed slightly.
"Yes, I'm Doctor Smith and this is Ms. Tyler. We're from…"
"Nottingham." Daisy supplied for him, looking at him, he could have sworn, with a knowing look in her eye. "Listen, put them under my name if you have to."
"Right. Okay…" Agatha, looking severely disconcerted, bustled off back behind her desk.
Daisy began to walk away. Rose hurried after her, allowing the Doctor to become severely disconcerted with the image of her –ahem– shorts.
"Wait. Daisy is it?"
"Yes." She looked at the blonde girl in confusion, wondering why she was following her.
"It's just… it's a Saturday afternoon. Shouldn't you be out, like, asleep or something? Not in the library?"
Daisy stopped dead in her tracks and looked directly at Rose.
"You're in the library too."
"Yeah, well, that's only because of nerdy over here." She thumbed towards the Doctor, who was catching up with them.
"I resent that!" he smiled at her.
Daisy rolled her eyes in exasperation at the both of them, and continued to head towards the basement of the library, the Special Collections suite. To her annoyance, the chav girl and her vaguely tolerable boyfriend followed her.
"But Rose has a point. Not only is it Saturday, but by my calculations, it should be your Easter break around now, shouldn't it."
Daisy remained silent for a moment as she took a pair of white silk gloves from a box, put them on, and headed for one of the manuscripts. Gingerly, she took it from the shelf, and laid it delicately on a cloth covered table.
"This," she replied, in almost a whisper "Is the Cotton Vitellius manuscript. It contains the only remaining manuscript of the most important Old English text in the world, Beowulf. It belongs to the British Library but they've had it temporarily moved here so I can conduct my research on patriarchal coding in language. Yes, it's the holidays. But what language student could resist looking at this?" She gestured to the page in front of her, which the Doctor was already inspecting.
"It is fantastic. It's beautiful." He grinned up at the student in front of him. "And they moved this here for you? You must be something special, to get them to spend that much."
"Nothing overly important, just passionate about language and good at persuading people."
"So you're giving up on a gorgeous day like this, to sit in the basement and look at dusty old books?" Rose still didn't quite grasp what the girl could possibly find that interesting about some old words that didn't even look like English.
The girl glared up at her, taking in her denim shorts and pink hoodie.
"I don't expect you to understand…" She touched her forehead as though in pain. "Sorry, I don't know where that came from. But yes, I love languages. In any case, I aim to speak as many fluently as I can."
"How many can you speak fluently?" Rose challenged, somewhat ruffled by the insult, despite Daisy's immediate retraction.
"English, obviously, and French, Spanish, German, Italian, Afrikaans, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese."
"And how old are you?" The Doctor had peered over the top of his glasses at her.
"Twenty. I'm in my second year, but I was an early entrance applicant."
"Oxford doesn't take early entrance applicants."
Daisy smiled for one of the first times that day and Rose noticed a pretty girl underneath the seriousness. She wondered if the Doctor had also seen, and worried. Daisy was smart. Incredibly, stupidly, Doctor smart. And pretty, too, no doubt, if she relaxed. What if she was more the Doctor's kind of girl than she was? Rose felt an unwelcome sense of dislike and then immediately banished it to the back of her mind.
"They allowed a temporary change in the rules. It's just for me."
"So you like, study languages?" Rose queried, peering over the manuscript in an attempt to convince both the Doctor and Daisy that she knew exactly what they were looking at.
"Well, I study English language. The others I do sort of on the side. I'm currently learning to read Arabic and speak Greek."
"What are you, some kind of genius?" Rose snorted.
"Yes."
"Well, modesty will get you nowhere, love." Rose turned to the Doctor for back up, only to see him still gazing intently at Daisy.
"I was accepted into MENSA when I was thirteen with an IQ of 187. It hasn't diminished with age. I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm not being modest. But it's true."
"Right…"
"Anyway." Daisy suddenly stood up straight and looked at the Doctor and Rose even more sternly than before. "When precisely where you going to tell me who you actually are?"
The Doctor and Rose glanced at each other, worried.
"Your paper wasn't documentation from any kind of University, let alone Nottingham."
"R..really?" The Doctor pulled out the psychic paper and stared at it for a while. "What…um… what did it say?"
Daisy glanced at Rose, who was looking nervously at the Doctor.
"It said something you clearly can't say out loud. And I'm not going to say it for you."
Rose immediately turned to Daisy, not daring to wonder.
"What did it say?"
"Ask him that, not me. You're right to be scared of words, Doctor 'Smith'. Words are the most powerful thing that this world has. And the most dangerous. But, I believe, you shouldn't be scared of those words. Not this time, anyway."
Daisy began to intensely scrutinise the manuscript in front of her, isolating herself from the sentimental scene no doubt about to emerge in front of her, and from the throbbing pain just behind her eyes that had started up again.
The Doctor looked at Rose, who looked inquiringly back at him.
"What did it say? Doctor? What did it say?"
The Doctor twitched his collar and scratched his face before replying.
"It…um… I… Well, you see… Rose… Rose… I um… It's just… well…Silly thing, psychic paper, it can always…um… Rose I l…"
Unfortunately, just as the Doctor was on the brink of spitting out the psychic paper's message, the pain in Daisy Trinder's head reached breaking point. She screamed in pain, and when the Doctor and Rose looked round in shock, she was slumped over her precious manuscript.
She had blacked out.
