Beta: natural-blues
Chapter 7
Detonation
Forty minutes before Jamie McCrimmon was potentially torn to shreds four corridors down, Sarah Jane was stumbling down her own corridor in — to her annoyance — her only pair of two-inch, designer heels. As her ankle twisted for what had to be the bazillionth time, nearly sending her flying into the wall, she sank her teeth down into her lower lip to keep her from shrieking out a curse, tears stinging her eyes. It was just her effing luck— after she'd discovered the Doctor had dropped her off in the wrong country, let alone the wrong city, she'd had to scrounge together what little money she had in the bottom of her trunk to buy a train ticket back into England, and ended up having to change her clothing in the station's loo. She'd also ended up stepping in a murky puddle outside the station, which had forced her to change from her colourful converse into her only other pair of shoes— in hindsight she truly regretted not keeping her sullied but stable shoes.
She cried out for the first time when her ankle twisted again, finally snapping the heel on her right shoe and nearly sent her flying towards an honest-to-goodness flamethrower. A pair of footsteps she hadn't even known were there stopped in the background, and what she recognised as Clara Oswald's voice called out, "Are you all right?"
"Fine," choked out Sarah Jane, even though that was far from the truth. Leaning against the wall for leverage (and eyeing the flamethrower warily) she leaned down with one hand and picked up the broken piece of her heel. "Heel broke."
"You're wearing heels?" Clara exclaimed in astonishment.
Sarah Jane laughed shrilly and mirthlessly before positively shrieking, "Well it's not like I expected to be kidnapped and forced to run an obstacle course!"
Clara was quiet for a moment, before saying meekly, "Sorry."
Sarah Jane's lower lip trembled with guilt, and to vent her frustration she hurled the broken heel towards the flamethrower, which fired up at once at the object's proximity and incinerated it on the spot. "No, I'm sorry," she said, kicking both of her shoes off so she could stand properly. "We're both in the same predicament, after all."
"'Cept I'm not wearing heels," Clara supplied, and Sarah Jane chuckled weakly.
"I just…" Sarah Jane gave her shoes one last regretful glance before festering on barefoot, ducking for a moment to avoid the wrath of the flamethrower. "He leaves me behind to go home, and he tells me not to forget him and I see a room full of future assistants to the Doctor. It just makes me think…"
"What?" Clara egged, when she trailed off.
"That he's not coming back."
The words whooshed out of her on a single breath, making the idea seem too real.
"What makes you think that?" said Clara gently.
Sarah Jane snorted. "I noticed everyone's looks. Rose reacted strangely when I told her he'd dropped me off in Aberdeen, and that Martha lady didn't look too ignorant about it either. And I wouldn't put it past him," she added, voice bitter.
"I could never imagine the Doctor leaving me— or any of us," Clara said, before chuckling to herself. "Even after he regenerated into a crotchety old grump, he still cares about me. Plus we all know he's a terrible driver—" They both shared a laugh over that, "— so that's probably why he landed you in Scotland instead."
Sarah Jane shrugged, even though she knew full well Clara couldn't see it. "Still… why else would Rose suddenly look like she's seen the Ghost of Christmas Past?"
Clara snorted at the quip, and now it was her turn for her voice to turn bitter. "Mrs. Doctor seems like she's seen more ghosts than a gravedigger. I wouldn't take it to heart."
Sarah Jane frowned, glancing at the wall that Clara was behind. "Are you in love with him?"
A huffed sigh was heard, more forlorn that frustrated. "No. I mean, not anymore. I was, though."
"What changed?"
"He did," Clara scoffed. "Before he regenerated he was sweet, and childish. And younger," she admitted, and Sarah Jane giggled. "When he changed the first thing he told me was that he wasn't my boyfriend, and never would be." Her tone was grudging again, muttering to herself, "Never said I thought he was."
"Then why don't you seem to like that Rose Tyler woman?" Sarah Jane asked. "She seems nice enough."
"I know, I just…" As her voice trailed off for the briefest moment, Sarah Jane had the feeling like Clara was about to go into full-on rant mode, which was confirmed when she continued, "I met River Song once, and that was hard enough. But he actually made a something-crisis human clone of himself and moved to another universe so that he could be with her. What exactly makes her so special that he'd make himself human just to be with her?"
"I dunno," Sarah Jane replied lamely, because she had a feeling that was the kind of answer Clara was looking for.
"And what makes it worse is that he even told her about having a granddaughter!" Clara huffed, and Sarah Jane pictured her with her arms crossed in a corridor identical to hers. "Never said anything to me about it, but he'll tell her."
"I'm getting the feeling this is less about Rose and more about something else," Sarah Jane supplied.
Clara was silent for the briefest of moments. "I met somebody."
Sarah Jane frowned, confused at the change of topic. "Who?"
"An ex-military sergeant turned maths teacher at my school. His name's Danny." She paused again, and when she did speak again her voice sounded nervous. "Was a bit awkward at first, but now we're properly together. I've been thinking about… leaving the Doctor to stay with him."
Sarah Jane let out a loud, continuous 'ohh', Clara's heated rant finally making sense. "And you think being angry with him will make it easier to leave without feeling guilty."
"Maybe," Clara admitted in a tiny voice. "Since he's changed, I've really been wondering if I should be around him."
"Why?"
"He's… been so merciless. Frightened me half to death sometimes."
"He can be a little scary on occasion," Sarah Jane admitted, pausing for a moment to inch past a carefully placed tile of needles that would have pierced through her shoes, had she been wearing any. Perfect bloody timing. "Anyone as smart and powerful as him would be. Just give it a bit of time and see if you still want to leave."
"If I even get out of this alive," Clara reminded her darkly.
Sarah Jane cringed when she realised she'd almost forgotten their dire predicament during their almost normal conversation. "True." After turning a sharp corner, she halted in her tracks with a loud gasp at the sight of an honest-to-goodness maze of knives, the hilts having been soldered to the wall in varying lengths, starting from the height of her neck down to the floor. It would be a definite miracle if she didn't come out as grated cheese on the other side. "Oh, you must be joking."
"What?" Clara said worriedly.
Sarah Jane directed her glaring gaze towards yet another one of the cameras lining the wall, this one placed directly beside where the knife maze began. "Oh, nothing, really."
Bracing herself against the possibility of the knives not staying put and happily digging their way into her organs, Sarah Jane tossed one last regretful glance at her bare feet and began worming her way through the maze, sucking in her stomach and arching her back in an effort to become as thin as a toothpick. Both sleeves of her blouse and the hem of her skirt were shredded in seconds, and every time the fabric caught on the knives Sarah Jane's heart nearly leapt out of her throat. The maze wasn't long, thankfully, and after a few minutes that felt more like eons Sarah Jane could see a knife-less stretch of corridor from beyond the silver blades coming precariously close to her throat. Despite herself, she quickened her pace, wincing as she nicked her arm a couple of times in her haste. When she reached the last few flurry of daggers, she half-hurled herself towards open air, only to feel the burning slice of a blade digging from her ankle up her calf to the back of her knee. She shrieked out in pain, instinctively hurling herself away from the source of her injury and past the end of the maze.
Instead of the floor being there to catch her fall, her gaze was met with a hollowed-out pit full of metal spikes.
As Martha was tentatively sidestepping a net, camouflaged to blend in with the colour of the floor, she nearly jumped out of her boots when she heard a woman's loud shriek of terror. Before she could open her mouth she heard Rose's voice — which, to her slight discomfort, sounded significantly farther away than it had been a few minutes ago — shout out, "Is everyone all right?" and Clara's voice wail out concurrently, "Sarah Jane?!"
There was a moment of tightly coiled anticipation, before Sarah Jane's weak voice called out, "I'm fine!" Martha let loose the breath she hadn't known she'd been holding, up until Sarah Jane's terrified but relieved voice choked out, "Blimey, that was close…"
"What happened?" Martha asked.
She could have sworn Sarah Jane snorted. "Well, I was manoeuvring through a maze of knives—" Martha spared an annoyed look at the umpteenth camera, sarcastically praising Beratt in her mind for his imagination, "— and I got cut at the end of it, but when I tried to get out he'd put a pit full of spikes at the end—"
"WHAT?" Rose, Martha and Clara all echoed at the same time.
"— but I managed to grab onto a bar on the wall," Sarah Jane finished, and again Martha exhaled with relief.
"Well at least he sor' of wants us to survive," Rose said faintly, and Martha snorted in agreement. "Are you hurt bad?"
A brief pause, before she said tentatively, "I'm not certain. I can walk, but it looks a bit deep."
Martha's mind briefly flickered through the many medical textbooks she'd devoured over the years, but when she opened her mouth to give Sarah Jane instructions on how to bandage her wound, Rose beat her to it, to her surprise.
"Tear off the longest bit of fabric you have an' bind your injury as tight as you can," she said as loudly as she could, apparently also aware that her corridor had, as Beratt had promised, started to curve away from everyone else's. "An' make sure it's clean," she added quickly, before saying sarcastically, "No use getting' an infection while you're fightin' for your life."
Sarah Jane let out a hollow chuckle as she complied, and Martha frowned at the wall, wondering what exactly Rose had been doing in the other universe. As she opened her mouth to ask, a loud male scream was heard, and a split second later, before anybody could react to the scream beyond chilly horror turning their insides to ice, a near-deafening explosion rocked the floors and knocked all of them onto their arses.
"What the hell was that?" Martha shrieked.
Ten minutes earlier, Ace was storming down the corridor like a herd of rampaging elephants, a scowl on her face and steam practically pouring through her ears. As annoying as it was to be ripped away from her life and wake in a cramped room full of know-it-all blondes (who married the biggest know-it-all in the universe), she'd then discovered that the arsehat who'd kidnapped her had also raided her pockets and taken away all of her explosives.
When she got out of here, she was going to take them all back, stick one or seven in ear, blow up his head and use his brains for Christmas decorations.
She hadn't encountered any obstacles save for the occasional pathetic thing like a gigantic blade that had tried its very best to decapitate her where she stood, hadn't bothered answering any of the other companions little role-check calls and, when Captain Nutjob had announced that two people had already died, she hadn't exactly paused to weep for them. Some might call it heartless, but stopping to mourn for people Ace hadn't wanted to know even existed wasn't exactly going to get her out of there quicker. Besides, she really wanted to blow up his head— the sooner the better.
While Ace stomped down the corridor, boots making loud thudding noises with every step, she mentally took an inventory of what he'd stolen— two bound packages of Nitro-9 along with several boxes of matches from the pockets of her bomber jacket; some kind of alien dynamite with an extremely short fuse that she'd found on an asteroid bazaar, which had 'inadvertently' ended up in her trousers pocket; and a whole pack of regular dynamite.
Something occurred to her, making her pause in her tracks. She hadn't checked one place. Grinning to herself and tossing a quick glance at the camera, she turned her body out of view before reaching down into her boots, letting out a triumphant whoop when her fingers closed around a spare box of matches. Apparently Captain Nutjob had forgotten to check inside her shoes— which also meant, she mused with a grin as she plopped down onto her rear and took off both of her boots, he'd had no reason to check her soles either. Along with the alien explosives she's stolen, she'd also been ecstatic to discover a pair of boots that had soles large and thick enough to hollow out and hide one stick of dynamite per shoe, without it being uncomfortable as hell (like all her other attempts). The Professor hadn't been pleased when he'd initially found out, up until Ace had used one to break them out of a prison cell made of solid stone, so he'd let it slide in the end.
Pulling out both sticks of dynamite and yanking her boots back on, Ace scrambled off the floor with a smirk and immediately began searching for somewhere to stick it. Her initial thought was to put it in a crack in the wall so she could blow her way out of there, but as the walls were made of solid steel she was out of luck on that idea. Huffing out her slight annoyance and gripping the dynamite tighter for comfort, she glanced around some more only to have her eyes fall on the camera and speaker duo. Another smirk grew on her face, and she idly shoved the dynamite into her pocket for the time being before standing on tiptoe, wrapping her hands around the speaker and trying to yank it out of the wall.
To her surprise it gave way at once— and it was heavy. She stumbled back, slamming down onto the unforgiving floor and grunting out in pain when the speaker landed atop her and practically caved in her chest. Ace shoved it off with annoyance, massaging her chest and trying to catch her breath for a moment before sitting up with a wince and regarding the gigantic hole in the wall she'd created, full of severed, sparking wires. Grabbing the matchbox and the two sticks of dynamite out of her pocket, she idly lit them both and tossed them into the mess of wires.
Yet just as she prepared to dart down the corridor to safety, not noticing the faint scream of terror from somewhere in the background, to her astonishment it exploded within seconds, sending metal and wires whipping in all directions and tossing her backwards like a rag doll. She was allowed the briefest moment of thought, in which she vaguely realised she'd used the alien dynamite instead of the regular kind, before her head slammed hard against the opposite wall and she was unconscious at once.
A/N:Sorry this is a bit late o: This is now the eleventh day in a row I've had a headache... sufficed to say I'm going in for a CT scan soon. Anyhoo, show of hands... who thought Sarah Jane was going to be the next to snuff it? :3 On a more sombre note, it was Ace :( Sorry... Thanks go to MirrorFlower and DarkWind, alias093001, hawkerin, craving-bravery, Firedreamer12, Infinities Lover, moviemaniac217, Nova, Showmesomestars, shvartzit, Hediru, Hummelberry94, Miral-Romanov, pbarker1, TardisBlueismynewfavoritecolor, DeepBlue-sama, crossovermania, Kathryn Hart, IWantColoredRain, a Guest and an EpicGuest. We've crossed 100 reviews! (you guys rule!)