And here I am once again. Hi!

Disclaimer: If I did… greh, the list of changes would be too long to put here. So there.

SIAPNIAN: This would be my birthday present to the wonderful and talented Brona19. GO GIVE HIM A HUG.

-BAD WOLF-

She wasn't smug. There was no possible way she could be smug, after all. There was a faint glow somewhere in the back of her cranium, but even Daleks could feel triumph at the capture of prey.

She switched off her cloaking device and whirred towards the timeship. Her compatriots were off searching elsewhere; she was the only one who had thought to patrol the Rift. …Of course, this was partially because she hadn't actually told her superiors about this idea; rather, in every free moment (which was a lot of the time-- her brethren preferred to leave most of the more important search attempts to those who were naturally Dalek), she slipped over to bask in the radiation and wait for him.

Her reasons for wanting to catch him on her own were perfectly clear and logical. Her fellow Daleks didn't trust her-- and, although that unmistakably nagged at her, she understood. Her background was far from pure; the only biological mutations she had undergone were so superficial as to be ignored, and she had never had the chance to prove that the psychological alterations ran deeper than the surface level. This was her chance, therefore. Catch the Doctor, betray the creature her impure self had loved more than most people could possibly imagine, and they would finally know she was just like them.

She shivered in anticipation as she approached the TARDIS, her machinery shifting as she brushed the circuits with a thought; she wanted to capture him on her own, but she should at least inform her superiors she'd found him. As soon as the signal was echoing across the universe, she spoke.

"Doctor…" she called, just as soon as she was in earshot. Her voice annoyed her; despite the fact that it was twisted and distorted from the speech system, it still came from her vocal cords and it still sounded female.

Oh well. Perhaps the novelty of it would bring him out more quickly.

She let her built-in chronometer click the seconds impassively away, trying not to count them, trying not to let herself grow impatient. She wasn't human anymore; there was no use for such an emotion. The Doctor would come out when he was-- ah, there he was. Stepping calmly outside the TARDIS, coat swishing around his ankles, a vague disinterestedness carefully constructed about the way he carried himself. She saw through it.

"The Daleks aren't coming," he told her, matter-of-factly.

She paused. She hadn't been expecting that.

"You think an entire fleet of Daleks can come swooping in out of the Void looking for me and committing random acts of destruction and I won't notice?" His eyebrows were raised in a superior kind of incredulity. "I may not be the most observant person to travel the Universe, but really." He sniffed. "Soon as I saw you'd started it, I blocked the signal. You're the only one here."

Daleks did not seethe.

"You lie," she informed him, but she heard the faint uncertainty in her own voice. If she had miscalculated, this could be devastating.

"Nope, I really don't," he said, twisting his lips upwards in what was probably meant to be a grin. So he was afraid of her. Good.

When the movement came, it was too quick for thought; she saw him tense, and a scant half-second later there was a quick ripping sound and she felt a good deal less mobile than usual.

She backed away as soon as her head cleared; the Doctor so rarely demonstrated his own spatiotemporal powers, she had forgotten he could move that quickly. She needed to be more careful-- but what had he done? She couldn't see; she tried to move her gun arm, then her manipulator, but they shifted just barely and then froze, stuck. Instinctively, she heated the lens on her eyestalk, trying to scorch away whatever was covering it, but it resisted. What was this?

"What have you done to me?" she demanded of him, shaking her eyestalk furiously up and down to try to clear the obstruction, but it remained firm.

"Well," the Time Lord said from somewhere behind her, "it used to be duct tape. I might have played with it a bit."

No. Dark hatred swelled in her chest, her shell vibrating slightly from the conflicting thought patterns stabbing through her. This… He was toying with her. Orders be damned-- as soon as she could see him, get a clear shot, he was dead. Davros was a fool if he thought to keep alive a creature that treated them with such disdain--

Her shell moved forward without her command. Disoriented, she lurched, trying to resist, but a momentary diagnostic identified it as some kind of miniature gravity field. Well, she thought bitterly, at least he wasn't trying to push her anywhere with his foot. Furiously, she wiggled her gun arm. It was uniquely humiliating, being thus restrained by duct tape of all things; but although it might have been ridiculous, it was also effective.

Damn him.

"Now," he said, voice slipping into a tone of disturbing levity, "let's see why you sound like a girl, shall we?"

-BAD WOLF-

Prying open its-- her-- shell was much harder than it looked, to the Doctor's displeasure. His mind buzzed with a thousand questions--what was Davros up to? Whether Daleks still had genders wasn't something he cared to know, but why did this one suddenly sound different? What was going on?--, and the longer the Dalekanium remained firm the longer he had to suffer with them unanswered. The easiest way would be to get the creature to open it up herself, but somehow he doubted that was particularly likely. She sat, and she shook; every now and then, she tried to burn or wriggle or tear his enhanced duct tape, but past that she wasn't doing much. She hadn't even tried to shoot anything, despite the fact that her gun arm couldn't move. He'd stepped in its way more than once, and she hadn't even tried to fire. What was wrong with her? Why wasn't she trying to kill him?

Why was she a she?

He glared at her, and she sat there impassively and stared at the tape obstructing her vision. Clearly, nothing of what he was doing was going to work, and she wasn't about to just open up and let him have a look at her; but there had to be something…

His eyes lit unexpectedly on her gun, taped pointing harmlessly downwards, and a faint glow of an idea started up in his chest.

Not much could cut through Dalek armour.

Not much could stop a Dalek ray.

Oh, she was so not going to like this, he thought, grinning, and ran to find something to reflect the blast.

-BAD WOLF-

The device was ready, the calculations complete, and he'd managed to extract a promise from an oddly-reluctant TARDIS that she'd nudge the ray if the Dalek didn't quite shoot straight. Normally, he would have questioned the timeship on her recalcitrance-- it made no sense; normally she'd be annoyed that he was trying to keep the thing alive, not his methods of getting the casing open. He supposed it might be part of her ever-present disinclination to manipulate spacetime for any reason other than carting him through it, but… still, it didn't quite make sense.

Oh well. He'd be able to ask the old girl what was wrong after he got the casing open, he supposed. He was fairly bouncing with excitement; very, very soon, if all went well-- and of course it would-- he would finally be able to answer all the questions that had been bugging him since this little Dalek had shown up on the Rift, waiting for him.

"Hello," he told her cheerfully. Her eyestalk swiveled instinctively, blindly following his voice.

"Doctor," she growled.

"Oh, don't worry, you'll get the chance to kill me soon enough." He had to keep talking, had to keep her tracking his movements. It was okay if she missed him a little bit, but anything else would be useless.

Her eyestalk instinctively followed him in a jerking pattern, blindly marking his position. Good. He readied the sheet of phlebotinum he'd managed to scavenge, held his breath-- and ripped the modified duct tape off of the creature's gun.

It went even better than he had dared to hope. The TARDIS didn't even need to interfere; as soon as the weapon was freed, its owner instinctively whipped it up and fired between the Doctor's hearts. In a microsecond he calculated the precise angle of the shot, and with blurring speed held up the phlebotinum accordingly; the deadly ray struck the Dalek's side, and a good bit of the shell there was obliterated in the blast.

Unsurprisingly, things didn't continue to go that well for very long.

An anguished, semi-mechanical shriek rent the air, and the Doctor's blood froze in his veins. What he'd just done couldn't have been pleasant, he knew-- he'd been expecting a scream, but…

Tattered memories flitted across his brain, trying to tell him why the noise had so affected him, but the smoke was starting to clear and he pushed them away. It was no use chasing after ghosts, when--

--wait--

What was that? That wasn't Dalek skin--

Shaking for reasons he didn't even want to think about, the Time Lord stepped round for a better look. The blast was well-aimed; it had shorn off a huge chunk of the armour that sheathed the creature, leaving it-- her-- fully exposed.

He knelt beside the cage, breath ceasing. A human woman, naked save for the wires that connected her to her shell, was cradled inside the metal. He couldn't see her face-- curled in a foetal position, her forearms and knees obstructed his view-- but he knew. He knew every curve in her body, the delicate shape of her, every bone in her skeleton and every hollow where they met. Even grey from darkness and sickness, painfully thin from malnourishment, scorched from the reflected ray, skin full of jagged rips from the wires stabbing into her flesh, he knew her.

"Rose," he whispered, voice choked. She flinched at the sound of her name, trying to get as far away from him as her shell would allow. She raised her head and glared at him, pupils so massive from the dark of her cage that her irises were hardly visible.

"Release me," she snapped. Her lips moved, her voice hissed along the air-- barely audible above the rasping croak that emanated from the machine. "Doctor. You will release me!"

The Doctor had never been sorrier to have a question answered.

-BAD WOLF-

Gotta love Doctor!torture, really. Poor thing. -gives him a hug-

Remember, I'm in the Support Stacie April Author Auction. Along with a lot of people who are much better than me. You know you want toooooooo… :)

And, again-- HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRONA19. You are wonderful.