CHAPTER SIX

Death by Proxy

Warmth. She could feel the warm, soft caress of his hands on her. Across her collarbone, between her breasts, lower still until her legs parted naturally, hips pressing up toward him. The smell of him, warm and alive and salty. The taste of his tongue and the way he pulled at her lower lip. She could feel her whole body moving with her labored breaths. Push and pull, him and her, fingers and teeth and tongue. She arched her back as she moaned. Closer... Please... Her body was aching.

She gasped as she opened her eyes. Alone in the room, lying on her side with both hands under her head and... trembling. Her eyes widened in surprise as she recognized the feeling, the spasms between her thighs and in her womb, and she sat up, pushing a hand through her hair.

"What the hell?"

Alone in her room, asleep with her hands under her head... she'd just had an orgasm.

"Okay, now that's weird."

There was no one to answer her. Even so, she looked around her, staring at the walls of the Tardis. "Are you doing this?" she asked. "Are you getting in my head?"

She hadn't been expecting an answer this time. There was no surprise when she didn't get one.

Five...

The thought, so random and yet so strong, caught her off guard. It was so crystal clear, it was nearly audible. "Five," she repeated, confused. "Five what?"

Four...

She sat up and put her feet on the floor. What was this, a countdown? But who was counting?

Five...

Okay, scratch the countdown. She stood slowly, and walked slowly to the door. The instant her hand touched it, she did hear a voice, so real it made her jump.

"Find him."

Wide eyed, she spun around, looking for the source of the whisper. But nothing moved. Everything around her was still and silent. Taking a slow breath - was she dreaming? - she stood up straighter. "Find who?"

Her first thought was the Doctor. But that thought was her own. There was no answer from the strange, disembodied voice as she stepped out into the hallway and looked towards the dim control room. "Doctor?"

No answer.

Find him...

"Find who?" she asked again.

As she looked down the hallway, she could swear the walls were glowing faintly, as if illuminating her path.

Five...

*X*X*X*

The Doctor's eyes opened suddenly and for a long, confused moment, he had no idea where he was. Tardis. Cool. Door open. Wait... door open? He sat up, blinking away the disorientation, and stared out the door at the vast emptiness of beautiful space outside. Asleep on the floor of the control room. How had he ended up there?

"Rose?"

No answer. But he hadn't opened those doors. A moment of panic - the Tardis doors should not just be open and unattended - and he sprang to his feet. It only took him a few steps to get to them, and he leaned outside to make sure there was nothing around them before closing up the Tardis. Console. Scanner. How long had those doors been open? Was he dreaming? Maybe he was dreaming. He had to be dreaming. Drifting in empty space with the Tardis doors open? Definitely a dream.

It was several minutes later - several minutes of real time that progressed much more slowly than a dream should, he was sure - that he determined he wasn't asleep. They were in orbit around the Ryculian Sun, right where he'd left them the night before. No warnings, no danger. Nothing odd except...

"Wait a minute..." He stepped back and took a harder look at his surroundings - the white walls and tile floor. The console in the center of it all was a perfect hexagon, with a control panel he hadn't seen in ages. "This isn't right."

This wasn't his control room. This room was vacant, sealed off. There was no way it could be operational. He was dreaming. More importantly, he was suddenly completely aware of it. That meant it wasn't an ordinary dream.

"But why?" He looked around for clues, anything that might explain why he'd been drawn back to this point in time. What was familiar? What was noticeable? Something must have suggested this setting, but he couldn't think of what.

"Doctor!"

Startled awake, the dream was gone in a flash. "Rose?"

"Doctor, help me!"

He was on his feet and had grabbed his robe before he was even fully conscious. The lights on the walls slowly drew up to full power as he bounded the few steps to the door. Out of his bedroom and down the hall to her room with its open door. She wasn't inside.

"Where are you?"

"Doctor! Doctor help me!"

Her voice wasn't coming from any one direction, but his eyes were drawn to the shadows at the end of the hall, the places he never went. Not that there was any particular reason not to. He just had no desire, on a normal day, to visit past lives. Not only that, it was far too easy to get disoriented - lost - back there.

Ah, so that was it.

"Doctor! Help!"

Why did she sound so panicked?

Ultimately, it didn't matter why. That sound was enough to elicit an instinctive response. He took off at full speed down the hallway to the first intersection. Five directions - which was the way to her? "Rose, keep shouting! I'll have to follow the sound of your voice."

"Doctor!"

That shout qualified as a scream. Just as importantly, he couldn't tell what direction it was coming from. The adrenaline was racing now, making it hard to think. He had to think. Where would she go? Where would she be? Where would be dangerous? It wasn't like Rose to panic. He'd never heard her sound so scared.

He spun on his heel with a frustrated growl, paced a few steps back, hands in his hair. "Come on, think! Think!"

It took only seconds for his mind to run through a thousand scenarios, but none of them stood out more than any of the others. Suddenly, he remembered. "The dream. The dream! No. Wait." He paused in his first step of running towards that control room as he realized he wasn't entirely sure where it even was. So many years since he'd been back here...

Schematics. No. Wouldn't work. An upgraded Tardis deleted all reference points to previous command consoles. But it didn't overwrite them... The Doctor spun, racing to the control room as fast as his feet could carry him. Grabbing the monitor, he spun it to face him and worked fast. Data retrieval had never been his strongest suit, but at the moment, he was going through the motions even faster than his mind could keep up.

"Come on, come on. Tell me you're still in there... Ha!"

He realized, as he took off down the hallway again - this time with an idea of where he was going - that he was following a plan built on a hunch that he didn't even know for certain meant anything at all. If she wasn't in that room, and he couldn't follow her voice, he couldn't begin to guess which of these hallways she might be lost down.

He wasn't sure where the screaming was coming from until he stood directly in front of the door. No words now, just pain. It was everything he could do to stay calm. That panicking scream, the sound of excruciating pain, was only a half step away from death. He'd heard it before...

Sealed. Locked. Screwdriver. Shit! He wasn't dressed. Old fashioned way, then. Password. Oh, the hell with the password. Hands on the door, he pictured it opening, pictured himself walking inside, pictured Rose on the other side of it.

You are going to let me in this room. Now!

It wasn't a question.

The doors parted. Rose fell through them. She would've ended up on her knees if he hadn't caught her. She was panicked, wide-eyed gasping and still screaming as he pulled her close, wrapping both arms around her. He had no chance to check her for injury. There was no blood, and she was still screaming.

"Rose! Rose, it's okay! It's okay. I've got you."

She stopped screaming, collapsing instead into sobs. Her whole body was shaking violently.

"It's okay. I'm here. You're safe."

She was gasping for air as if she'd nearly run out of oxygen in there. He looked back toward the silent, empty, completely still room. No... plenty of oxygen. He could smell it.

"We can't go back! There's no time! We have to seal it off!"

"Seal what off?"

"Doctor!" She pulled back and grabbed his shirt with both fists, eyes wide and panicked. "You have to leave him!"

Confused, he looked from her, to the empty room, back to her again. "Rose, you're dreaming." It was a shot in the dark, but it was all he had.

"I am not dreaming! Look at -"

She shoved him back and raised her hands and suddenly stopped cold, eyes widening to the size of saucers as she stared at them. Still gasping for breath, she spun to look at the quiet control room behind her. He waited, watching her, prepared for anything.

Finally, with a look of confusion, breathing still labored, tears streaming from her eyes, she looked back at him. "Didn't you see it?" she asked shakily.

"See what? What did you see?"

She stared, not moving, confusion and fear playing through her eyes as she tried to come to terms with the fact that whatever she'd been seeing, he didn't see it. He was almost ready to ask again when the relief flooded her and she spun to him, throwing her arms around his neck and clinging onto him for dear life. She was still shaking - adrenaline-induced, loud sobs of relief and confusion at the same time.

He hugged her back gently, and waited until she'd settled before easing her away a little. Whatever she'd seen, it must have been incredibly vivid to affect her like this. "Rose?"

"I... It..." It took her a few tries to make words. Still trembling, still trying to slow her breathing, she turned and looked again at the room, but didn't move away from him in the least. "It was on fire. All of it. But it was... The flames were white... Bright white. And then I was thinking... Oh, Doctor, I'm so confused!"

He glanced into the console room. Nothing was wrong.

"I'm so confused," she sobbed. "I don't know how... I don't even know... It's like there were a half dozen different people in my head! And I..."

As she finally took a shaky step back, clinging to the wall, he stepped inside. Still nothing. He stuck his head back out into the hallway. "Rose, I don't -" He pulled his head back in and looked around, listening to the Tardis. Could it be something wrong with her? "But she's fine! She's in my head, she's working fine!"

"I..." She shook her head, stammering, tears still streaming. But no words came.

He turned away again, looking over the dead console. A Tardis was not like a car that could be rebuilt out of melted down scrap metal. It was sentient. It was alive, and it was as much a part of him as he was of her - a mutual exchange of artron energy that imprinted them on each other. But there was nothing wrong with her. Nothing out of the ordinary. The room was completely silent and still.

"These rooms have passwords... These rooms have passwords Rose, how did you get in?"

"I... I don't know."

"What?" He turned back to the control room. "What?" And back to Rose again. "I need my screwdriver."

"No, no!" She was clinging to him again, with a death grip, the moment he came within range. "Don't leave me!"

He frowned. Something was very wrong here. But getting her calmed down had to be his first priority. "Okay," he agreed. "Okay, I'm not going anywhere."

She fell back against the wall, fingers still clenched so tightly on his arm that her knuckles were white. She didn't let go even as she slid to the floor, and he followed her, sitting beside her.

"It was just a dream, Rose."

"It wasn't a dream," she answered, her voice weak and shaking. "I could feel it."

He raised a brow as he looked at her. "What do you mean, feel it?"

"I mean I felt it. I could feel my skin burning. My scalp, when my hair caught fire. My lungs burning from the inside out."

He stared, eyes wide. That didn't sound like a dream. But this room was, for all intents and purposes, stone cold. The controls hadn't been used in well over a century. Probably longer than that, if he cared to think about it. Which he didn't. No obvious energy signatures except what it took to illuminate the room, just enough to see. He wanted his screwdriver to do a thorough check, but it seemed to him like the Tardis was fully functional, exactly where it needed to be. Even if it wasn't, what did that have to do with this room? This room was collecting dust, in a figurative sense. It was so cold and empty, he wasn't even sure that it was really a part of the Tardis now. It was like a dead limb that had just never been cut off.

Rose was watching him. The fading adrenaline left her with a blank, exhausted look, but still worried. "Doctor, I felt it. I felt it burning..."

"I believe you," he answered quietly. "I'm just not sure how. Whatever it is, must be powerful, though. Psychic pollen? Maybe. But it's not affecting me and that would. Unless you were exposed to it somewhere else. Dormant maybe? Can psychic pollen do that? For all I know, you might've picked it up in here. But that still doesn't explain how you got through the door."

"Doctor?"

"Hmm?"

Her eyes slid closed. "My head hurts."

"Come on." He stood and offered a hand down to her. "I'll help you."

She only made it a few steps before she collapsed. He carried her the rest of the way. Empty rooms could wait; Rose needed attention now. As he laid her carefully down in her bed, she drew in a shaky breath and stared up at him with half-lidded eyes.

"Doctor, what's wrong with me?" she asked quietly, weakly.

"I'm not sure there's anything wrong with you." But he was damn sure going to find out if it was anything that would register on a full medical screen before he went back to sleep. "It could be something with the Tardis."

"These dreams... They can't be real. But I keep having them. Keep feeling them."

"You mean this has happened before?"

"Not like this..."

He sat down beside her, brushing her hair back from her forehead. "Get some rest. I've got a few things I can check while you sleep."

"So tired..."

"Good. Sleep." The tests would work that much better if he could catch her during a REM sleep cycle. "You'll be alright."

He watched her for a moment, and her expression did not change. Carefully, he stood and crossed the room, heading to the control room and the console sleeping quietly in the center of it. Stepping closer, he sighed as he looked up and murmured softly, "Alright, so you've got my attention. Now what the hell was all that about?"