DISCLAIMER: I don't own Doctor Who. (Shocking, isn't it?)
Thankyouthankyouthankyou all you wonderfull people who faveourited this story and added it your alerts and reveiwed. It means such a lot to me, and gives me the confidence to keep writing. =] Snow'sLuckyCat BellsAndRoses novacancymind txgirl , thankyou.
Right, well, it's time for Chapter 3....

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Scarlett lay in bed that night, fizzing with energy. It didn't matter that the bed was lumpy, the blanket ineffectual and her bed partner (none other than Charlotte Bronte herself) had cold feet, for she had just read passages from Angria and Gondal, about the Little Men, the toy soldiers that the children had created lives for. The work was obviously written by the young Bronte's, as the hand was childish and at times tedious, but now and then lines and phrases had jumped off the page to her, and she had seen the genius that would come to write 7 best-selling novels. Scarlett was having considerable trouble understanding this was true, and she would not wake up tomorrow with coursework due in and a headache from dreaming too deeply. She wanted to scream because she was the only person alive who had read that and she wanted to cry because tomorrow she would be lying in her own bed, with nothing like this to look forward to again.

Scarlett rolled over to stare at the young author. She had dark brown hair very similar to her own, (although it was thin whereas Scarlett's was thick) her eyes were blue and she was slim and neat with clear skin. It was true she was no beauty, but there was something interesting about her, and the look of rapture that graced her face when she wrote or spoke to her brother of Angria transformed her. Scarlett could see why she would lose her sight in the future, the words she wrote were so small, and the candlelight so weak that her own eyes ached. Perhaps they were playing tricks on her, for she was sure she had just seen a strange light hovering just above Charlotte's face. There it was again, glowing and pearlescent. Scarlett blinked, and it was gone, and she was just about to dismiss it as imagining when Charlotte's eyes glowed like the light had. Her mouth opened and a substance like coloured air swirled from her lips.

Scarlett jumped back in fear and alarm. She edged out of the bed and fled from the chamber, running straight through the door of the room which had been allocated to the Doctor, too frightened to think of knocking. He was asleep, the candle snuffed out and the windows open.

"Doctor," she whimpered. "Doctor please wake up, I'm really, really scared. Please!" She shook his arm warily.

Out of the blue he sat straight upright. "Rose...." He sighed, as if dreaming, and Scarlett thought that perhaps he was, as a second later he was shaking himself and staring at her questioningly.

"Doctor, I think I saw what your cosmic corkscrew thing picked up." He saw she was shaking and immediately lit the candle and made room for her to sit on the edge of the bed.

"Here, have my jacket, you're freezing." He offered it to her, and she draped it round her shoulders, stoking the satin lining with her thumb. "And it's a sonic screwdriver, not a cosmic corkscrew."

"Whatever. How are you so damn skinny? I couldn't fit into this if I starved myself for a month. Thankyou, though."

The Doctor felt like someone had kicked him. That could have been Donna, Donna on her wedding day. "What did you see?"

"I was just lying there, and I thought I saw something in the air, like a light beam from one of those silly little laser pens. Then it went, and came back just above Charlotte's face. I looked away for just a second, not even that, and then it went into her eyes, and they were glowing from... from the inside." She shivered again. "And then all this, smoke-y stuff came trailing out of her mouth as she breathed. It was horrible. Doctor, I'm scared."

Of course she was scared. She was a 15 year old girl for goodness sake, he shouldn't have brought her here, and he should have taken her back home right at the beginning. He should do it right now; he could do it right now, except..... except she had dreamed about Harry Saxon. Except now he felt a duty to history to make sure that nothing untoward was happening to the Bronte's. If she asked to go home, The Doctor decided, he would take her at once.

"We have to stay; we have to find out what's going on." Scarlett said firmly, her face resolute. "What if something really terrible happens to them, and they never write their books? It could be like the butterfly effect couldn't it, I mean, if they don't write these books Britain might not win the war, or I might not be born or JFK might never have been able to stop the USSR from attacking America and the world might have ended, you just don't know!" Her voice was high-pitched and she was talking very fast, nodding with her green eyes wide, and The Doctor could see what she had looked like as a 5-year-old. "So we have to stay, don't we?"

So, she hadn't asked to go home. That cleared that one up. "Yes. We have to stay."

"And I can sleep in this room tonight, can't I? I don't mind sleeping on the floor but I'm not going back in there, it might get me too." Scarlett turned a pleading gaze on him, and his resolve weakened.

"Do you not think the Parson might think it slightly strange that we slept in the same room?"

"Tell him I have nightmares and didn't want to trouble his daughter. That's true, anyway. I do have nightmares. Please?"

The Doctor sighed gustily. "Stay. Of course you can stay. But, I'll take the floor; the woman should have the bed."

"Chauvinist." She shot, but took the bed gratefully, although she insisted he have both the pillow and blanket, borrowing his jacket for a cushion and coat for her cover. "They smell like books." She murmured sleepily, burrowing into the mattress.

"Is that a compliment or an insult?" He chuckled.

"I like books, so it's a compliment. They smell like paper, and imagi- imagi- "She yawned widely. "Imagination and adventure. Perhaps you're just a book, and I'll wake up tomorrow and it'll all have been a dream. What a crap ending that would be."

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