And on we go to check up on Dalek!Rose! :D
Disclaimer: I taught myself how to play the Doctor Who theme song, the Stargate SG-1 theme song, Be Thou My Vision, and Iron Man by Black Sabbath on my violin, but does that give me any right to Doctor Who? No. Sigh... they just don't appreciate talent, do they?
WARNING: Un-beta'd. (Would someone please, please, PLEASE tell me if that needs an apostrophe??)
SIAPNIAN: I will now put this in very simple terms: Three chapters : nine reviews one chapter : three reviews. Three reviews - one eternally faithful reviewer two reviews, so one chapter : two reviews. One chapter : two reviews NOT HAPPY. Comprende? It's my birthday, guys. Come on.
Apology: Due to craziness, school, and an unexpected cold exacerbated by allergies, not every undone story will be updated today. I will update everything, it'll just take me a few days. Today I know you'll get this, Facets,and a new Chronicle. The Teaspoon people will get a new chapter of a frankly crap story which is not on this site. Hopefully Second Chance will be updated today as well, along with the series following Distraction andExperimentation, but no guarantees as of yet.
This is part of the Celebratory Update Spam.
-BAD WOLF-
When she awakened again, she was not alone.
Alone in her prison, yes, but there was someone outside, watching her. Just watching. Dark skin, shaved head, the dullness of stupidity in his dark brown eyes. Mickey.
"Let me out now," she growled, pouring all the fury and hatred she possessed into her gaze.
"Rose, babe, you're sick..." he began, voice muffled by the thick layer of acrylic separating them.
"LET ME OUT!!" she shrieked, pounding the window with the side of her hand. Searing agony zigzagged up her arm as the carefully reset bones were jarred and crunched against each other. She felt the scabs split beneath the casts, blood staining the restrictive material.
Mickey turned away. "Time for another one," he shouted to someone that Rose couldn't see.
The door whirred as it opened and a human male Rose did not recognise stepped through, brandishing the tranquilliser.
She lunged at him, but misjudged the distance and crashed to the ground. She let out an involuntary cry of pain as one of the bones the humans had tried to repair slipped, jabbing through her skin again and poking into the material of the bandages.
She whimpered from the floor as she felt the metal on her neck again, sensed the drug flowing through her system anew.
She wanted to die.
-BAD WOLF-
When awareness returned to her, Rose did not open her eyes; did not, in fact, move at all.
Charging madly would do nothing. If she were going to slip out of her prison, she would have to be stealthier than that. Careful, careful. She'd only get one chance at escape.
They left her food on a fairly regular basis. After the first couple of times, she'd given up trying to eat it; it was fairly obvious that such base physical ingestion would not sustain her. She knew what she needed, but they wouldn't listen, wouldn't give it to her. Perhaps the imbeciles thought that if they starved her of the kind of energy she fed upon now, the thing that had taken her over would die, leaving only her in its place.
Her lips twitched. Idiots. Even that tainted version of the Doctor was clueless.
No, she wouldn't go mad again. She'd remain still, sedentary, defeated, decaying, all the fight out of her. Their guard would eventually drop, and then her chance would come.
She just had to be patient.
A rhythmic vibration went up her calf and she didn't move. She almost, almost smiled, but forced herself to stay calm.
Her mayday had been heard, received, and acknowledged, and someone was coming for her— no— an army. The coded buzzing coming from the transmitter in her leg proved that. Oh, this was perfect. Had she been human enough for it, she might have laughed.
The door whirred open. She quickly dashed any feeling of triumph and stirred, barely, enough to let the human know she was awake and aware. She heard the sound of something being placed on the floor and didn't react apart from the slightest furrowing of her brow. After a slight pause in which neither party moved, the door slid shut and footsteps receded down the corridor, echoing and fading into complete silence.
And still she didn't move.
-BAD WOLF-
It was the third day of this schedule, and she was only half-acting her weakness, but the humans' guards were slipping. She could sense it, the lack of that faint prickle of adrenaline tingling in the air. They had been confused at first, wary at first; even so, they'd decided eventually that it was better than her trying to tear them into very small pieces every time they opened the door, and promptly began to ignore her behaviour— or lack thereof.
It was, of course, then that she got the second message from the chip embedded in her calf.
It was in the dead of night and the only light came from the hall. She could hear the faint scuffling of the Weevil two cells over, the serene humming from the pyromaniacal Venusian monk in the room across from her, and a faint buzz coming from her calf.
She deciphered the message— distorted with something like static— and frowned, momentary irritation flittering across her mind before she squashed it.
They couldn't come— not all of them, anyway. They could get an individual through… through what? What could trap an entire fleet?
She pondered on this for several minutes. When the only option she could think of was forced to be discarded as an impossibility, she gave up, curled into herself and kept waiting.
She was good at that.
Fortunately, she was not forced to utilise the full capabilities of this particular aptitude; scarcely thirty seconds after she had received the message, every alarm in the building went off in a nerve-scorching clamour for immediate attention. Understandably startled, she sprang upright, heart racing, and instantly regretted it. Dizziness set in; the world went purple and black and she sank down again, trying to fight the darkness that squeezed the corners of her vision.
She won.
A faint, crazy, hope mixed with fear twisted her lungs. Only a very few things could set off every alarm in the building.
Even fewer could set off every alarm in the building with just a single individual. Only one, in fact.
Perhaps the impossible was not quite so unattainable after all, she thought, and a smile curved her lips.
They'd exterminate her as one of the impure, but at least they'd destroy her captors too. And that, she thought, was worth it all.
-BAD WOLF-
She was wrong.
She had almost dozed off— she was, after all, injured and hadn't had any form of sustenance for who knew how long— when she heard the distinctive war-cry of her saviour. She savoured the single word, relished the sweet music of the final shrieks of the dying, and didn't feel that she shouldn't.
The distinctive fizzling sound of a Dalek ray reverberated very close and the door slid open.
"You are the one who summoned us?" it grated at her.
She nodded an affirmative and remembered that Daleks did not nod. "Yes," she confirmed.
"You will follow," it said.
She stood, baffled at being allowed to live but not protesting yet. "Why?" she inquired of it.
"You will release the others."
She wobbled slightly. "From the Void?" she asked.
"Affirmative."
A vision whipped across her mind— of Daleks flying over every sky in the universe, of everything not inside a shell lying rotting in the suns, floating dead in space, blown to pieces from the Daleks' hate. Far from terrifying her, as they once had, the images were a source of delight. More so now that she could be the one to make it happen.
"You have knowledge of the operation of the rift-scar?" it prodded her.
"Affirmative," she said, and that felt better. More natural.
"Follow." Without another word, it turned and whirred out of the door.
Smiling, she obeyed, following it out into the hall. At regular intervals the creature paused, shot open a door, and exterminated whatever being lay therein. She didn't protest at the apparent waste of time. How could it be a waste? The longer the creatures were left alive, the more chance they had of touching a Dalek, infecting it.
She shivered in fear at the very thought.
The Dalek went on, whirring smoothly up the stairs. She heard gunfire and chuckled lightly at the humans' folly. Persistent, they were. Irritating, they were.
Dangerous, they were.
The Dalek coolly began its extermination.
"Does anyone know how to fight these things?" shouted one human.
"Miss Tyler would," answered another.
"Exterminate!"
Thud.
"She'll be dead," said another human.
"Exterminate!"
Thud.
An order, the voice giving it harsh with fear, rang out through the room and stabbed into her ears. She heard the rapid, harsh sounds of hard soles striking tiled floors in retreat.
"Exterminate!"
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Silence.
She let out a breath in relief and poked her head above the stairs. Walking over to one of the bodies, she prodded it with her foot. She remembered him; Daniel something, wasn't it? Never liked him.
She liked seeing him like this.
Taking care not to touch the body itself— she did not know whether or not contact in her present state would poison her with renewed humanity, and she was not prepared to take the risk— she took his gun away and gave it a cursory examination.
Primitive, but workable. She kept it and followed the Dalek as it glided easily out of the room.
They met no other creatures in their journey to the rift's exact location, and she found that slightly unnerving. They were probably massing together, hoping to destroy the Dalek with their combined firepower. She did not worry overmuch about the Dalek itself, although there was a chance that their plan would work; she did, however, worry about herself. Pinned outside the shell without so much as a force bubble to protect her, never mind the nearly impregnable shields of her fellows, she was vulnerable to a fate far worse than death.
She held her gun close. It was the only thing that could protect her.
"Stand near me," ordered the Dalek, and if she did not know for a fact that their limited emotions did not include reluctance, she would have thought she detected a hint of unwillingness in its mechanical voice. "You must be protected."
"Thank you," she said, before she had properly thought it out. The creature's eyestalk swung around to look at her, then revolved back to the front again.
She flinched. Perhaps her change was not quite complete.
At least it was closer. At least she was being rational now.
Her hand twinged as she held the gun a little more tightly, but she did not react. Would not react.
Her suspicion turned out to be correct; as soon as they reached the room where the mostly-healed rift still occasionally bled, they were showered with gunfire. The noise was absolutely deafening.
The Dalek stood there in the doorway, unaffected as it gazed dispassionately at its victims for a moment before it began to eliminate them as well. She took the opportunity to utilise the weapon she had scavenged off of David— Dennis— Daniel. Her aim had improved with her metamorphosis, and a surge of maniacal delight flooded her every time one of the humans fell.
She saw Mickey staring directly at her, mouth open in a shout, eyes wide with terror and something like betrayal, and she loved it. Now, she thought, let him feel the pain of everything he put her through when she was still fully human, weak and gullible and prone to such base feelings as affection.
She aimed the gun at him, pulled the trigger, and laughed as he crumpled downwards.
The niggling part of her was silent.
Being at the edge of the Dalek's shield, making sure not to touch it— she might still be contaminated; who could tell?— she was not under its full protection. She cried out involuntarily as a fire of pain struck her in her collarbone, halfway between her neck and shoulder. The bullet, half-melted by its sheer velocity when it struck the force field, scorched into her and she bit her tongue hard to keep from further noise.
Rage.
She spun around, fired at the human who had harmed her, and delighted in her scream.
All was silent.
She remained tense for a few moments before she was satisfied that no further humans would come just yet, and then stepped away from the Dalek, to the computers that were hooked up to the rift.
"I don't know if I can completely reopen the scar," she told the creature who had whirred closer to look over her shoulder, "but what I can do should be enough to let several Daleks through. That will widen it, and then the rest can come."
"You are not like other humans," said the creature as she started diligently hacking through the safety protocols.
"I am not human," she snapped, anger flaring inside her at the very thought. "I have changed."
"Into what?"
She hesitated. "I think I am a Dalek, inside."
Her companion's voice became shrill, and it shook as it talked. "You cannot be Dalek!" it shrieked at her.
She flinched at the insult, but carried on working. If she could never be a true Dalek, she resolved, she would at least assist them as much as she could in their crusade.
The computer gave a warning beep before letting her into the rift controls. Her lips twitched in triumph as she pressed the button that would lead the Daleks into the world.
"There," she said. "I've helped you. Doesn't that mean that I—"
"Others have assisted us," interrupted the creature. "It means nothing."
She clenched her hands into fists and forced herself to stay calm. No matter what this one said, she knew that she was a Dalek. She knew it. She could not possibly be anything else.
Familiar watery forms began to take shape as the rift glowed white. She swallowed hard against a flush of something like nervousness through her blood; they were her kind. She was one of them. And if they didn't accept her, she didn't deserve to live anyway.
-BAD WOLF-
And there you have it. Like it? Hate it? Want to punch a hole in my stomach and throw me into a tub full of Goa'uld larvae? Welll, I won't know unless you tell me. And even if you have nothing to say, or if you have been left absolutely SPEECHLESS by my brilliance (as if… -self-deprecating chuckle-), just send me a pack of Gibberish. I've been to Gibber. Lovely place. Nice javelins.