PATTERNS
by ardavenport
~~O~~O~~ Part 2
"Ow," Sitting in a kitchen chair, Sarah nursed a bruised ankle and the sore spot on her arm where Steel had grabbed her. "Thanks for the help." 'I think,' she added to herself.
"What were you doing down there?" he asked her.
"It's what they were doing down there that was the problem."
"We could see what they were doing," Sapphire said sympathetically. She sat down in a chair next to Sarah. "But why would they pick you?"
"Just lucky I suppose." Sarah concentrated on her ankle, not looking at her two benefactors.
"What happened to you in that hallway?" Steel asked abruptly.
Surprised, Sarah jumped. "What?"
"Earlier we saw something happen to you. During the tour when you walked through the hallway with the mosaic floor, you stumbled." Sapphire tried to take the edge off Steel's demand.
"Just clumsy, I suppose."
"No, it was more than that; something made you stumble, pulled at you from the floor."
Sarah swallowed, aghast at the depth of Sapphire's observation. "Who are you two? What are you? Psychics or something?"
"Something." Sapphire didn't explain further. "Can you walk?' Sapphire asked.
"Why?"
"We might find out what happened to you in the hallway."
She stared at one and then the other. "Why not?" Sarah sighed, giving in. She placed both feet on the floor and stood.
The three left the kitchen area and were soon in the hallway.
"Don't step on the mosaic." Sapphire instructed. Sarah stood back from the circular pattern.
"Now what are you going to do?"
"We're going to try to recreate what happened," Steel told her.
Sapphire stepped to the edge of the pattern and lifted her head; her eyes glowed an eerie blue. Sarah gasped when she saw the change but Steel saw nothing unusual.
An image of the room shifted. A shadow of Sarah Jane Smith appeared and crossed the floor. She paused. The colored tiles reached up as if to make the woman an extension of the floor. She freed herself, continued on and disappeared.
The real Sarah backed away from the edge of the mosaic. The uprooted section of floor stayed where it was. It moved, fluctuated and caused other nodules to appear. The voice of a crowd drifted up in the air. The image of Sarah replayed over again and again while the distortion of the floor continued. Some of the colors that tried to hold her gradually formed into a pair of hands while others lifted off the floor like leaves in a wind.
"What's happening?" Sarah asked but Steel apparently didn't hear her in the increasing wind, or he wasn't listening. She continued to back away from rising storm.
Suddenly, a pair of hands reached from the edge of the pattern and whisked Sapphire to the center of the floor. She reached for support but did not lose her balance. Then strangely, she quieted and straightened. Stray bits of color swam about her, the center of a forming cyclone. Sarah saw her eyes widen, their glow intensifying, attentive to some unseen call.
"Sapphire!" Steel plunged forward but was dashed back by the winds. He searched for a way around the chaos, but couldn't even set a foot on the floor pattern. The room boiled with swirling mists and stray triangles of color.
"Steel!" Sapphire reached for him but the howling wind pushed her back to the eye of the storm. Then a pillar of air thickened in front of her. Suddenly a man formed and focused. He held Sapphire's outstretched hands and pulled her out of their center of calm and into the gale. The wind died down, the floor settled but the two still had to struggle to get to a blue police box that had appeared at the edge of the mosaic at the same time as the man. The mist and colors pulled at Sapphire's dress and hair, at the man's frock coat and the long trailing ends of his scarf. Steel followed around the edges of the pattern. Behind him, Miss Smith paused in surprise and then fought the wind to follow. She grabbed on to Steel and he was forced to drag her along. The man with the scarf plowed onward, grabbing the handle of the door to the box and holding a disoriented Sapphire with the other arm, he pushed the door open, thrust Sapphire inside and followed. Steel caught the door before it closed.
The maelstrom was gone. Steel entered a large white room. It's only furnishings were a coat rack and a hexagonal control console. The man from the floor slumped across the controls.
/Sapphire./ Steel approached her from behind and put his hands on her upper arms. She didn't move.
/Steel!/ He sensed terror in her communication. /Steel. We're out of Time!/
/What?/
Behind him Miss Smith recovered from the storm outside. She put her hands to the sides of her head and blinked in the white light.
/This room, Steel. It's out of Time. We're outside Time!/
Steel stood away from her and scanned the room and the closed doors behind him carefully. Then he swung back to the man at the console.
"A Time Lord," he stated coldly. Behind him the human looked up from the controls. "I should have known."
The man shifted his position on the console, his head lifted but his eyes wandered the room without seeing.
/Steel...?/ Sapphire's eyes followed her partner, her initial panic giving way to Steel's calm.
"Doctor!" The woman crossed to the console. He lost his grip and slid off his perch to the floor. Steel glared down at him.
/Steel, do you know what he is? Where we are?/
Miss Smith frantically tried to revive him. She lifted his head to her lap, and getting no response, pleaded to Steel for help.
"He's alive. He doesn't need my help," he snapped back.
/Steel, where are we? What is a Time Lord?/
"But he's hurt!"
Steel stood where he was, offering no assistance. "He'll recover, though he quite probably brought this on himself."
/You're enjoying this, aren't you?/ Sapphire concluded.
"What kind of person are you? He could be dying!"
/You know what this is all about, and I don't./
"Time Lord's don't die. They just regroup into more dangerous forms."
Sapphire, tired of being ignored, took a step toward Steel and nudged him.
"Steel," she persisted.
"He hasn't done anything to you."
"What about the damage he's done here? To Time?"
"He didn't cause this," Sarah retorted.
"How did you get involved with him?" Steel abruptly changed the subject.
"I'm not about to tell you, now am I?"
The Doctor moaned and stirred. His eyes sprang open, wide and unfocused. They shut and opened, blinked. He conspicuously prodded his face with first one hand, then the other.
"It worked," He grinned and tried to rise.
"Doctor!" Sarah caught him when he fell back.
"Sarah!" he exclaimed. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," she responded, relieved by his recovery. With Sarah's help he managed to get up and stand. "What are you doing here? What happened to you?"
"Yes, we'd all like to hear." Steel glared down at the Time Lord.
"Ah, you're Steel." The Doctor glanced at him and then away.
"I think an explanation of why you used my partner is called for," Steel insisted, no patience in his voice or manner.
"Steel; you know that's a very good name for you." The Doctor evaded, his head still resting in Sarah's lap. "Don't you think so, Sarah?"
"Are you the cause of all the havoc outside?" Steel demanded.
"Not exactly." The Doctor brushed him off again and looked up at his old companion. "Are you sure you're alright?" Steel continued to glare, obviously furious at being ignored.
/Steel./ Sapphire called. /He isn't responsible for what we saw outside. He's a victim of it./
/How do you know?/
"I'm fine, Doctor," Sarah insisted. "But what happened to you? Where did you come from?" She helped him sit up on his own.
/Because I helped him escape from it./
/You helped him?/ Sapphire almost cringed from the reproach she felt. /Why?/
"I've been here all along. I just needed a hand from our two friends here." He rubbed his neck.
/He needed it./
Steel turned his anger back on the Doctor.
"Why are you here?" Steel demanded again. When the Doctor didn't answer immediately he added, "Sapphire helped you, I think that entitles us at least to an explanation."
"There's something rather nasty outside," the Doctor told him seriously.
"We know that, but we don't know what it is," Steel answered.
"Helix energy; it's called the Mandragora."
'The Mandragora,' Sarah repeated to herself. Her thoughts fled to the past, when she and the Doctor had confronted the Mandragora.
'You know the worse things are the worse your jokes get?' she had accused. Then when she'd realized what she'd said, 'Things are bad aren't they?'
'Yes, desperately bad,' he'd answered, deadly serious.
The tone of his voice now sounded frighteningly similar.
"That doesn't tell us anything." Unsatisfied, Steel pressed further. "What is this Mandragora?"
"Astral energy, if you like, concentrated into an intelligent malevolence."
"Astral energy? Then it uses the positions of the stars and planets for its energy source?" Sapphire asked.
"For the most part, but it's more complicated than that."
"Undoubtedly. What is it doing here?" Steel queried.
"We're trying to stop it. To prevent it from doing any more harm." Sapphire entreated when he didn't answer.
"I know." With Sarah's help, the Doctor climbed to his feet.
Sapphire seemed uncomfortable under his gaze as if the Doctor had acquired more information about her than she liked when she had aided him. Steel's glare intensified.
"It was waiting for me," the Time Lord admitted.
Steel began to circle the Doctor.
"Waiting? How long has it been here?"
The Doctor ran a hand through his tangled hair. He faced Sapphire when he answered. "Since the fifteenth century. The Mandragora's followers shipped the whole works up from Italy just to catch me here in England."
"How did it get to Earth?" Sapphire asked.
The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck again and squinted at Sapphire as if she were a bright light. "My TARDIS."
"You brought it here!" Steel accused. "Then you are responsible."
"Yes!" The Doctor whirled and faced off with him.
"Then you left it festering here for five centuries," Steel continued.
"Yes!"
"That was you pulling on Miss Smith here when she crossed that floor for the first time, wasn't it? Trying to drag her in with you?"
"He didn't mean to do that!" Sarah defended, seeing the Doctor being verbally attacked.
"Didn't mean to!" Steel snapped. "And how will that fix the damage he's caused?"
"He's done a lot more good than you seem to be capable of!"
"Good? Is that maelstrom out there a new version of good?" Steel waved an arm demonstratively.
"Listen, are you going to keep arguing with my friend here or do something about our problem?" the Doctor inquired, his attitude clicking into a more cheerful vein.
"Now that we know the cause of all this, we can leave and get on with fixing it." Steel looked about the room and zeroed in on the door. "I presume you have enough control of our present situation to open this."
"I don't think - - "
"You don't think very much, do you?"
"You haven't dealt with the Mandragora before. You don't understand, You'll need my help - -"
"We don't need your help. You've caused enough damage." Steel paused long enough to let his words sink in. Sapphire watched her partner carefully.
The Doctor went to the console and rested a hand on its cool, smooth edge.
"Open this door." Steel demanded.
The Time Lord pulled the proper lever. The doors parted, breaching the walls and dimensions of the console room.
"Come on, Sapphire."
She hesitated, then followed him to the open portal. Just before they reached it, they both faded and vanished. The door closed behind them.
Sarah watched their vanishing exit.
"What are they?" she whispered.
No answer. The Doctor still frowned down at the TARDIS controls.
"Doctor?"
"Hmm? Did you say something?"
"Yes, I said something. What are they?"
"Who?"
"Those two who just left. That Sapphire and Mr. Steel. They just disappeared."
"Oh, they're elementals. I wonder where they got their names?" he puzzled. "Sapphire and steel aren't elements."
Sarah ignored his idle speculations. "But what are they?"
"Time police, if you like. They sort of travel around parts of their time stream, fixing things they find wrong."
"You mean like the TARDIS?"
"Oh no. They don't travel in vortex. Elementals are a bit linear, especially in the way they think. There's not much point in arguing with elementals once they've made up their minds what needs to be done."
"That doesn't tell me very much. What are they doing here?"
"They were probably sent to do something about the Mandragora."
"By who?"
"Oh, that's not important." He brushed the question aside. "The real problem is how I'm going to do anything about the Mandragora with them about."
"We, if you don't mind."
"We?"
Sarah nodded positively.
"You're not going on without me."
"It's very dangerous, Sarah," he told her, sincerely hoping that she would let him handle it alone.
"Not any more than it was the last time. Besides I've just been dragged into this, by you. You're not leaving me out of this now."
"I wasn't responsible for bringing you here in the first place. The Mandragora has a long memory. That whole press conference and the business with opening the house was all made up to get you here." He turned away from her, back to the TARDIS controls. He did not want her there at all, but didn't know how to get her away to safety.
"A trap?" Sarah wondered. "For me? But how do you know that?" Sarah waited for an answer. The Doctor didn't look up at her, didn't move at all. In fact, he seemed frozen, rigid and tensed. Sarah put a hand on his arm. He neither yielded nor reacted to her touch.
"Doctor?"
~~O~~O~~ End Part 2