It was kind of funny how wrong it felt to be standing there, not really sure why she was doing it. What had made sense with the adrenaline flooding her system as they ran, what had seemed perfectly logical is ridiculously insane, seemed, well, crazy. Seemed too impossible to actually exist, seemed too far-out to trust herself with. To trust that she had any idea of what to do, to trust that she was making the right decision. That she was siding with the right person in all this.
So she knocked on his door, asked to be let in, because there was no other way, because she'd made a decision outside and she couldn't back out now. Or, maybe it was precisely because she could back out, that she could change her mind, even right now or ten minutes from now, and it would be over and she would be back in her normal life. And she couldn't let herself do that, couldn't bear the idea of letting go now and forever not knowing. And somehow, she couldn't say for sure or whether she was simply being crazy, she felt like the stranger knew, felt like he had an idea that she wasn't about to let herself back out, and that was why he'd let her take point, as it were, even if the idea of that mysterious, unflappable man knowing how very shaken up and confused she was would have killed her. Because the obvious weakness of indecision, that fluff, it was exactly the sort of thing that she abhorred.
Of course, this was all running through her head in an incoherent and tumbling rush in the approximately thirty seconds it took for him to respond to the knock and open the door, shattered by his voice as he exclaimed, so very surprised, so very casually, "Cat?" as if it wasn't a miracle of physics that he was even there ahead of her, like it wasn't supremely obvious that something, something crazy was going on.
"You left me!" She didn't shout, but it was a near thing, that what she had planned to wait to say bursting out of her in an edged snap, before she had any breath for pleasantries. Shoving through the door he seemed suddenly unwilling to let her through, she stared accusingly into his face, half-registering his barely concealed panic, the half-packed chaos as he'd been readying an escape.
"I-" He started, the lies as obvious as the freckles standing out against dead white.
"Don't." She finished, in that one word, giving up on everything that she'd thought they might have been, everything that she thought he was. Because lies weren't what she needed, or what she wanted, or what she could have handled. Turning away from him, not quite in disgust but with a shortness that belied how very done she was with him, done with the fact that he could have left her there knowing exactly what was coming after them, exactly what she would have run into – it was all there on his face, the way his eyes had darted as he'd tried to think of an explanation. And if he didn't already have one, than it wasn't one that she cared to hear, she turned towards the stranger. "Now what?" she asked, voice deceptively steady, arms crossed as she kept her back to Nick.
He didn't answer immediately, a pair of glasses sliding out of seemingly nowhere to perch on his nose, as he unceremoniously rifled through what was strewn about the bed, half-packed and chaotic. "It would have to be something particularly valuable and definitely stolen. We'd be talking something like-" Mid example he paused, having unearthed a particularly dingy little box, hardly something that someone who didn't know what they were looking for would have found. "This."
At her raised eyebrow, he continued, with an eye towards the flustered Nick, who didn't seem to be sure how exactly to take a possible/sometimes/maybe girlfriend and some random guy appearing and completely blowing his cover. "Late third great and bountiful human empire if I know what I'm talking about, which I can assure you I do. Conversion of energy streams, and from the markings-" He squinted through what, had Cat not been so terribly confused by this third-great-and-whatever, she would have registered were a particularly foxy pair of glasses "-I'm thinking a primarily nuclear based transmitter, with a primarily hydrogen based receptor?"
Nick, his complacency showing in how very shocked he was at being found out, simply nodded, goggling.
Cat opened her mouth to ask some sort of badly phrased question that would have only revealed how very, very lost she was, was rather thankfully interrupted by a more explanation-like explanation.
"Converts water into energy. Fuel."
She had a feeling that it wasn't quite as simple as that, but she let it go, happy enough to at least comprehend what was going on.
He continued, sliding the glasses off and into one of what seemed to be never-ending pockets. "You stole it," he concluded with a disapproving sort of air, gesturing towards the dingy little box he was still holding. "And as you couldn't possibly sell this sort of thing here, you have to either be very determined to scavenge the parts and clever enough to make it work, which judging from your rather clumsy little escape plan, you aren't, or you're lost, which would make a great deal more sense, even if it doesn't explain quite why you're still here. Unless…" He paused for a moment, ignoring Nick's rather indignant little start at being called less than clever, before reaching out and grabbing at his wrist, revealing what looked like a particularly elaborate wrist watch.
Cat blinked, unsure of why Nick still looked vaguely guilty and exposed, and to why The Doctor seemed to think that this was some sort of big reveal, but sure that it would all make sense in time, as much as anything else had.
"Fried the wrist unit, didn't you, with that big a jump?" Out had come that funny little buzzing flashlight, as though it would shed any more light on what was going on, "which was really rather stupid of you. You'd have been better off taking smaller steps here, but you didn't – I see now, you were trying to throw them off, try to lie low centuries early than was useful for you, and wait until they gave up the hunt. Now that's almost clever, but you should have known that they don't ever stop looking once you've taken something important from them." He was almost talking to himself, the way he phrased things, less like an actual conversation where others gave actual input. "Of course, now they've caught up to you and you don't have a way out, which makes thing that much more difficult."
"I'm not completely grounded," Nick protested, shaking him off and dropping his sleeve down to cover the 'wrist unit' again, as if it was sore, "and I've finally got the equipment set up to recalibrate, not that it's any business of yours." He turned towards Cat, as though finally remembering that she existed. "Where the hell did you find him, anyway?" he demanded, as though he had any right to know, any right to make demands in this situation. Like he mattered.
It bothered her, got under her skin the way he acted like the stranger, (the Doctor, she reminded herself, he did have a name, if an odd one) the one who'd actually taken the time to save her, rather than dump her behind like it didn't matter what happened to her, was the one who was intruding. It actually kind of hurt, in a way, not that she'd really had feelings that were all that strong for him, but the fact was she had trusted him in her way, in the way you'd trust anyone you were trying to get close to, and he obviously hadn't been worth it. As it were, she hardly recognized him, had never seen those charming eyes so hard. "He was a decent enough person to actually come warn me about the crazy hunter tracker thing you have after you, unlike someone else here," She snarled, jabbing an accusatory finger in his general direction. "And you are going to fix this, do you hear me?" It was a sort of naiveté, really, to assume that this was something that could be fixed, that her world could be sealed back up and made right again, foundation back in place. That things would make sense again.
"I'm going to get the hell out of here, do you hear me?" One didn't become even a moderately successful rouge element without nerves, without balls, and that was one thing he had in spades. A certain amount of callousness never hurt either. "And there's nothing you can do about it." He knew perfectly well, better than she did at least, what happened when hunters missed their quarry, and frankly my dear, he didn't give a damn.
She opened her mouth to respond just as angrily, the Doctor all but forgotten, when she was so rudely interrupted by someone suddenly standing in the doorway. There wasn't any fanfare or wind or anything really, to herald his arrival, but for his slow, drawling voice that chilled her up and down in exactly the way that awful chuckling had.
"Why, hello there." It was funny in a particularly sick way how menacing those really rather innocuous words were. What was funnier, that is, if anything at the moment was really funny, was the immediate chaos his appearance threw the room into.
Nick had gone literally dead white, blanching the point where any impartial observer might have been worried about his health, looking, oddly enough, far more like a panicked university student caught at something he shouldn't than any self-styled criminal element. Cat had had an almost visceral reaction to the voice, that dreadful voice, along with a helping dose of fear of what she didn't understand. Only the Doctor seemed not to react as violently, if anything, he seemed to perk up, in a way, as though it was the manic dashing about and the danger that he thrived on, rather than the quiet muddling through bits.
"I've really got to thank you, really," the voice continued, as he so very lazily rolled up the sleeves of an anachronistically old military-style jacket, turning almost frighteningly light eyes towards Cat and the Doctor. "Took me almost four months to cross all the time tracks he'd jumped, and look! You lead me right to him." The smile (if anything quite as cold as that could be called a smile) that unfolded was just as lazy and casually menacing as the voice. "That is, unless I figure that you've been helping him hide. Then I might have to-"
She never did quite figure out what it is that he was going to do to her, as Nick made a sudden movement to her side, distracting her. She hadn't understood most of the discussion concerning the wrist unit, but she'd managed to glean that it was directly related to the 'short range teleportation', and the large button-esque apparatus had seemed, well, like it was most likely a button. So when she saw him reach for it, especially with that almost manic purpose in his eyes, she could grasp what he was trying to do.
"Oh, hell no," was the only thing that ran through her head, or would have, had she not been flinging herself roughly at him, grabbing a hold of his arm before he'd managed to activate the thing. Dimly, she was aware of a hand just managing to grab at her shoulder, before everything dissolved.