Disclaimer: I don't own "Doctor Who" or "Twilight", and the essential details of the original concept of this fic came from a video posted on YouTube by heroesdwtw- which has unfortunately now been taken off YouTube- and is used with their permission
Feedback: Much appreciated
AN: This takes place a few hours after the last chapter; I'll explain what happened immediately after Bella, Cuttin' Edge and Koral arrived in the mines quickly enough, but I felt that this was the better way to explore Bella's thoughts about what's happening to her
Prisoner of the Daleks
If I'd ever harboured even a passing thought about a career in mining, the last few hours had quickly suppressed it; even the knowledge that the Daleks were pushing us this because of some sadistic sense of pleasure- as much as anything that was meant to have abandoned all emotion could feel pleasure, anyway- didn't change the fact that the work was exhausting and repetitive even when you started out liking it, and that definitely wasn't the case here.
The conditions we were working in didn't exactly help matters that much either, of course. Not only did we have to work in a boiling hot cavern that was surrounded by black granite and lava- I might have actually appreciated the visual spectacle if it wasn't for the fact that we were being forced to work in it-, but we were using simple pickaxes to hack away at rock that was probably at least as hard as the Cullens' skin, for no other reason than that the Daleks wanted us to do this...
There was no way we could do this kind of work faster than anything the Daleks could construct to do the same job for themselves, and they were still making us work just to rub their status as the 'supreme beings' in our faces.
Remembering what the Doctor had told me about their philosophy in the past, I had to restrain my 'inner Emmett'- possibly inspired by the Doctor's confidence- from making some kind of joke about how they could consider themselves the supreme beings when they didn't have hands and were so wide fitting through some areas would practically impossible for them to accomplish; with the memory of what those 'tasers' that some of them had acquired in place of suckers could do to people, I wasn't in the mood for suffering any more damage than I had to.
I wasn't sure if the chains we had to wear or the potential threat of the tasers were worse. The tasers hurt, but that was only if we actually tried to escape and 'forced' the Daleks to use them. Given that we were stuck on a shattered planet light-years away from anyone else with nobody aware of where we were or what our situation was, the chains did nothing but reinforce the idea that we were only alive as long as the Daleks wanted us to be.
Not that I was likely to forget that part of this whole mess, of course; the eleven-year-old girl working alongside us was enough proof of that. Work groups were apparently divided into groups of four, with a few other prisoners off to the side, most likely to allow the Daleks to create a new group after they exterminated a previous one for failing to work to their 'standards'. With a group having been exterminated shortly before our arrival, the Daleks had swiftly 'assigned' Koral, Cuttin' Edge and I to take the previous group's place, and, since we were one person short, this little girl, Kuli, had been dragged out from the waiting prisoners and left with us...
I tried not to feel sick at the memory of what the Daleks had done to her mother simply for wanting to stay with her child, but I still acknowledged to myself that it was only what I'd seen when James and Laurent had been killed that really allowed me to keep what little food I'd eaten recently down. The sight of that little girl, struggling to hold back her tears as she found herself stuck with nothing but strangers for company while her mother's body lay only a short distance away from us...
God, if the Daleks thought that emotions made us weak, I only had to look at Kuli and know that they were talking crap; that little girl struggling to hold on to her control even after such a devastating loss was all the proof I needed.
Of course, Cuttin' Edge wasn't doing too badly either; as much as the older man had gotten on my nerves on the Wayfarer, I had to admire his strength. He still had some trouble maintaining his balance after the damage the Daleks had caused to his legs in their earlier attack after he'd protested when they'd killed Scrum, but he had so far managed to keep standing without obviously leaning on any of us for support. Even if Koral occasionally had to grab his shoulder to stop him from tipping over, he still refused to give in to his pain simply because of what the Daleks would do to all of us if he showed any kind of weakness.
As my pickaxe dug into the granite in front of me for what felt like the millionth time, I wished that I could just take this axe and ram it into a Dalek shell instead; if it weren't for those damn forcefields making them almost tougher than vampires, I'd have taken a swing at them already just to have the satisfaction of doing something to them...
Even with the best will in the world, however, I knew that we weren't going to last much longer; even if Cuttin' Edge wasn't trying to show his weakness, the heat and the chains had definitely pushed us to our limits, and Kuli in particular was clearly scared to death at what might be about to happen to us.
"Don't give in now," Koral said grimly.
"You know..." I panted, as I tried to weakly raise my axe for another blow, "just because... you're... tough enough... to cope... doesn't mean... we all are..."
"I don't want to die!" Kuli said, shaking with sobs. "I don't want to die!"
"Sssh..." I said, pausing to reach awkwardly over to give Kuli an affectionate pat on the arm. "Just... just keep it up; we'll be fine..."
I couldn't help but wish that Esme was here; she might not have been able to do anything about the fact that we were almost certainly about to get killed (Although her vampire strength would have allowed us to make more progress than what we had so far), but she could have probably offered Kuli a lot more comfort at a time like this than I ever could...
Despite the weakness of the attempted comfort, Kuli nevertheless smiled over at me with a tearful smile.
"Thank you," she said awkwardly.
"No," Cuttin' Edge said, his teeth gritted in resolution. "You helped me. I could hardly stand and you kept me goin'. All of you."
"It's not over yet," Koral said resolutely.
"It is now," Cuttin' Edge said, glancing grimly over at a cloud of sulphur in the distance.
I didn't see what he was looking at in the cloud at first, but then I saw two Daleks emerging from that cloud- Cuttin' Edge must have noticed them earlier because of his military training-, and realised what was coming.
"WORK UNIT DELTA!" one of the Daleks said, looking directly at us. "STEP FORWARD!"
Only the fact that we were nowhere near the time when the Daleks would give the order to execute the least productive team allowed me to even remotely relax, and that was poor comfort considering what the Doctor and the Wayfarer crew had told me about the Daleks so far.
