Chapter 3: Consequences
Sometime later, Mickey went out for some fresh air. As he went to stare at the fountain, he became aware of Rose stood behind him.
"Blinkin' freezing out here." Said Rose. "How do you stand it?"
"Better than in there." Mickey nodded towards the TARDIS. He shook himself off. "She does deserve it though, she's a Slitheen, and a killer. It's just... Unnerving."
"You know." Rose smiled suggestively. "I didn't really need that passport."
"Didn't think you did." Mickey grinned, though it didn't reach his eyes. He'd guessed right from the start what Rose was after. It had been a flimsy excuse anyway. "I've been thinking, we could... go out somewhere, for a drink. Or a pizza. Just you and me. Maybe... Check into a hotel, or something..."
"Yeah, that would be good." Rose said.
"You need to tell him?"
Rose looked at the TARDIS for a moment, then decided against it. "None of his business."
The Doctor watched on the scanner as Rose took Mickey's arm and led him away.
Jack couldn't see the screen, but could tell the Doctor was watching something. "What's on?"
He quickly flipped the image off. "Nothing!"
He and Jack were tinkering with the console, determinedly not looking in the corner where Margret had placed herself, nor responding to her occasional comments.
"It's not always like this, is it Doctor?" She said. "You never have to wait. You're usually the first to fly off, never mind the consequences." The Doctor remained silent. "But not this time. Now you've got consequences." He continued to treat her like a low background noise. "You butchered my family, ran off to the stars."
"I didn't butcher them." The Doctor said, finally.
"Don't answer her, it's what she wants." Said Jack.
"I didn't though! What about you? You had that teleport. Didn't think of taking them with you?"
"It only carries one." She snapped. "Didn't even have time to programme it properly. Ended up in a skip in the Isle of Dogs."
"The Doctor and Jack burst out laughing.
"It isn't funny!" She shouted.
"Sorry." The Doctor calmed himself with a huge effort, but burst out laughing again. "It is a bit funny."
Margret smiled. "I suppose it is rather." She pondered for a moment. "Do I get a last request?"
"Depends what it is." The Doctor replied. He half expected her to make a last request for a gun and a TARDIS operator's handbook.
"I got quite fond of my human life. All the little rituals. The brushing of the teeth and the complicated way they cook things. There's a little restaurant by the bay I quite like, if you could take me there?"
The Doctor put his tools aside and went to talk to her. "Is that what you want? A last meal?"
"Don't I have rights?" She shrugged.
"Oh, like she's not gonna try to escape." Jack laughed.
"Except I can never escape from the Doctor, so where's the danger! Could you do it Doctor? Sit and eat with someone you're about to kill? I've seen you fight your enemies. Now dine with them."
The Doctor seriously considered her words for a while. Clearly, this was her way of forcing him into more awkward conversation. "You won't change my mind." He assured her.
"Are you prepared to put that to the test?"
"There's people out there. If you slip away, just for one second, they'll be in danger."
Jack had a sudden idea. "Except she can't, 'cos you'll be wearing these." He pulled a couple of bracelets from his pocket. "If she moves more than ten feet from you, she gets zapped by 10,000 volts of electricity!"
The Doctor took the bracelets from him, deciding not to question why he was keeping them in his pocket, at the ready. "Margret, would you like to come out to dinner with me? My treat."
She smiled manically. "Dinner in bondage. My pleasure."
To the people of Cardiff, the Doctor and Margret looked like any other couple out for a romantic evening. The waitress even offered to put them in the corner before the Doctor insisted that he'd prefer something in the centre of the room.
"Here we are, on a date." Said Margret, as the Doctor buried himself behind the menu. And you never even asked for my name."
"It's not a date." The Doctor sighed. "What's your name?"
"Blon." She replied. "Blon Fel Fotch Pasemea Dai Slitheen. At least that's what it will say on my death certificate."
The Doctor continued reading the menu, as he said. "Nice to meet you Blon."
Noticing something through the glass wall behind him, Margret pointed. "That's where I was living these past few months. Tiny place, top floor. Next to the one with the light on it." As the Doctor turned to look, she flipped open her ring and poured knock out powder into the Doctor's wine.
The Doctor shrugged at the sight of the flat, before swapping his and Margret's glasses around.
"Thank you." She said.
"Pleasure."
"So tell me Doctor, what do you know of our species?"
"Only what I've seen." He buried himself in the menu again.
"Do you know, for example, in extreme circumstances, when her life is in danger, the female Raxacoricofallapatorian can manufacture a poisoned dart within her own finger?"
She shot a dart at the Doctor, who casually caught it between his thumb and forefinger, before tossing it aside. "Yeah, I did actually."
"Just checking." She beamed, then paused for a moment. "And between you and me..." She looked cautiously around then leaned in closer. The Doctor followed suit, hearing her whisper: "As a last resort, the excess poison can be exhaled through the lungs."
As she let out a puff of poison vapour, the Doctor sprayed some breath freshener down her throat, effectively neutralising it. "Much better." he returned to the menu. "Steak looks good. Steak and chips I think." He'd given up on vegetarianism a couple of centuries back.
Margret fumed and picked up her own menu. She supposed telling everyone the Doctor had passed out, then carrying him across the plass in this weak, human body would have been too difficult anyway.
Rose and Mickey had already eaten by this point and gone for a walk along the waterfront, despite the cold breeze.
Rose was talking animatedly about her adventures in the TARDIS, making Mickey feel increasingly inadequate. "The Doctor took me to this planet, much colder than this, called Woman Wept. The planet was actually called Woman Wept! 'cos if you looked from above, there's this continent which, sort of, looks like a woman bent over, you know, weeping. We went to this beach there, beautiful scenery and no people! And one night the whole sea just froze, in a second, all the way to the horizon, right in the middle of a storm! Midnight right, we go out and walk through these waves a hundred feet tall..."
"I'm going out with Tricia Delaney." Mickey blurted out. He had to say it now or never.
Rose stood stunned for a few minutes. He'd left her. Had this whole evening been his attempt to lessen the blow? Or worse, was he testing the water to decide which girl he preferred? "Tricia from the shop?" Was all she could think to say.
"Yeah, Rob Delaney's sister."
She thought for a moment. "Well... good for you. She's nice. Little on the heavy side..."
"She's lost weight... You've been away." He took a breath. "So, tell me more about this planet then,"
She discretely turned away. "That's all there is really."
Margret could tell that her words were at least affecting the Doctor. "Public execution is a slow death." She said. "They prepare a specially thin ascetic acid, and boil me. The acidity is just right to strip off skin and organs. I become soup. And still alive. Still screaming."
"I don't make the law." The Doctor sighed.
"You deliver it though!" She said, glad to finally have a foothold somewhere. "Will you stay to watch?"
"What else can I do?"
"The Slitheen family is vast, scattered off world. Take me to them. Take me somewhere safe."
He chuckled at that. "I can't let you go. You'll just start again, with some other world somewhere."
"I promise I won't."
"You've been in that skin suit too long. You've forgotten. There used to be a real Margret Blaine. You killed her, stripped her insides out and used the skin. You're pleading for mercy from a dead woman's lips."
"Perhaps I have got used to it. This human life. That's all I ask. An ordinary life. I can change."
"I don't believe you."
Mickey was sat on a bench by the seafront, while Rose leaned on the railings, deliberately not looking at him. "What do you want to do now?" He asked.
"Don't mind." She said shortly.
"Could look at hotels..."
Rose scowled at that suggestion. "What would Tricia Delaney say?"
"S'pose you're right." He thought for a moment. "There's a bar over there with a Spanish name..."
"You don't even like Tricia Delaney!" Rose shouted at last.
"Oh, and how would you know?"
"Because I know you, and I know her, and I know it's never gonna work! So who do you think you're kidding?"
"At least I know where she is!"
Rose huffed. "That's what it's about then. It's not about her, is it. I'm not around for you all the time so you go off with someone else to get back at me!"
"What, so it's ok for you to run off with some random man, but I can't look at other women?"
"Mickey, I've always wanted to go travelling. This is my chance, you're supposed to be supportive!"
"You left me Rose!" He shouted. "We were nice, and you treated me like I was nothing! I was a murder suspect 'cos of you. You were gone for a year and then you just disappeared again without a second's thought! And you just expect me to wait for you. I can't even go out with a girl from the shop 'cos you pick up the phone and I have to come running. Is that what I am Rose, standby? Am I supposed to just sit here and wait for you for the rest of my life Rose, 'cos I will!"
Rose didn't know what to say to that. "I'm sorry." Was all she could manage.
Mickey sighed and leaned against the railing himself. Rose tried to put a reassuring hand of his arm but he snatched it away.
In a slightly less frosty part of town, Margret was trying every approach she could think of to break down the Doctor, and it was working. It's easy to deal with monsters when they're rampaging around destroying worlds. But when they're diplomatic and pleading for their life it introduces a whole new moral dilemma.
"I am getting better Doctor." She said. "There was a girl, earlier today. She was a threat, got too close to what I was doing. As the family taught me, I was ready to kill without a thought. But then... she told me about her family. I felt remorse for her. She's alive now because I can change! Of course I can't prove it at the moment..."
"I believe you." The Doctor shrugged.
"Then you know I can be a better person?"
He shook his head. "It doesn't change anything. Once in a while, a little victim gets spared. Because they have family... Because they cried... Because they have freckles... It's how you live with yourself. How you slaughter millions. Once in a while, if the wind's in the right direction, you let some of them go."
"Is that how you live with yourself, Doctor?" She smiled. "It takes one killer to know another. I know your ways. Playing with so many lives like that, you may as well be a god. You never stop to think about what you've done, you just move on, because you can never look back. You just sail away, leaving death and destruction in your wake. And you're right. Sometimes you do let them go. Let me go, Doctor. Please?"
The Doctor didn't respond. His look alone told her that wasn't going to happen.
Rose and Mickey had calmed down and taken each other by the hand. Like the Doctor and Margret, they had a complicated problem they needed to talk through nicely.
"I wouldn't ask you to leave him, 'cos I know that's not fair." Said Mickey, as a low rumble sounded from across the city. "I just want some guarantee that when you do come back, you're coming back for me. 'cos I don't know..."
"Is that thunder?" Rose interrupted, as another rumble sounded.
"Rose, does it matter? 'cos what I'm saying is..."
"That's not thunder!"
Margret was getting desperate. She'd thought she'd come close to convincing the Doctor a few times, but he always retreated behind his distant, aloof facade. She was trying one last approach. "In the family Slitheen, we have no choice. I was made to cary out my first kill at thirteen! If I'd refused, my dad would have had me fed to the benning grubs!" She paused and waited for the Doctor to make some smug comment in response, but none came. "Doctor, are you listening to me?"
"Can you hear that?" He said.
"I'm begging for my life!"
"Shh. Listen..."
The rumbling noise in the distance didn't fade away, it got progressively louder. Meanwhile the floor began to shake, rattling the tables and shaking their wine glasses. Seconds later, the whole ground convulsed, shattering all the windows and tripping up anyone standing. Looking out the window, the Doctor could see that the whole of Cardiff was shaking violently.