Text Key
"Audible speech."
'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'
Tooth And Claw
Chapter 9 - Torchwood Blooms
The wolf pounded a fist against the glass of the skylight, sending a spider web of cracks splintering through it. It was a testament to its workmanship that the damage was as minimal as it was, but would only take one or two more good strikes like that before the whole thing came raining down on our heads.
Plenty of time for us to start running for our lives.
The Doctor and I were already to the door, throwing the various pieces of our makeshift barricade aside. As the wolf finally broke through the glass, we were already through the door, slamming them shut on its face.
"To the astronomy room!" the Doctor yelled. "Quickly!"
Ignoring the massive smear of blood on the carpet – was that a hand lying there, divorced of the arm it was originally attached to? –, we ran back towards the staircase.
I should have stayed out there. It didn't matter that I couldn't use my magic, I still had my subspace link to my warehouse and the arsenal within. A bevy of silver bayonets like the one I'd introduced into the werewolf's brain – did it even have a centralized brain or was silver a learned weakness like the mistletoe? – would have done more to slow it down than a simple revolver.
'You keep doing this,' one of my other selves murmured. Which one, I didn't care to pick out. For all I knew, it was my own guilty conscience.
Shut up.
'Just blame yourself for every one that dies. Yeah, that's healthy behavior.'
I grit my teeth as we turned a corner. The wolf was right on our heels, despite every bit of momentum it lost on the corners. I'd be amused by its inability to turn corners and make quick stops when those failures actually backfired on it.
Rose abruptly failed to make a corner herself, slamming into the wood paneling with enough force to send a nearby mirror rattling. She turned around, staring up at the wolf as it started to loom down over her –
Only for me to pull her out of the way as something hot and faintly noxious splashed over the creature, sending it scrambling back down the hall with a whimpering scream.
Lady Isobel and a few of her maids glared after the wolf, a heavy iron cauldron in their hands. The same smell – boiled-down mistletoe – lay heavy around it, even as faintly green soup dripped down onto the fine carpet.
"Isobel!" Sir Robert gasped before taking his wife into a tight embrace and kissing her. "Please," he murmured into her cheek. "Take the maids, get to safety."
"What about you?"
"Don't worry about me," he replied, letting his hand slide down the side of her face. "Keep yourself safe."
I looked up as the sound of scrabbling claws returned from down the hall. "It's coming back!"
Lady Isobel threw one more look at her husband – did she sense that he could be the next to die? – before running off with the rest of the maids. The rest of us ran in the opposite direction and up the stairs towards the astronomy room.
The sound of scrabbling claws just a story below us was plenty of motivation to keep running at top speed.
As we burst into the astronomy room, Sir Robert hesitated, only to stumble over his own feet as I pulled him into the room by his lapel. Almost as an afterthought, I pulled a pair of decorative swords off of the wall immediately outside the doors. Near useless as weapons, but they would bar the door for a moment.
And once those were gone, I'd be waiting.
The wolf rounded the last corner, snarling through a still-scalded snout as I kicked the door shut. The sound of a whimper and a series of thuds and bangs as it apparently fell all the way back down to the bottom of the stairwell brought an unfriendly smile to my face as I set the cheap swords through the door handles.
Get fucked, fuzzball.
"Rose, Delaine, Robert!" the Doctor called over from the 'telescope'. He was climbing all over the thing, twisting different focuses as a small spot of weakly reflected moonlight fluttered on the floor, brightening and dimming as the Time Lord tried to get the focus on it right. "Help me get this into position!"
"A fine time for stargazing!" Rose snapped before I latched myself onto the main gear that would raise the angle of the telescope. It resisted, which was no surprise given how long it had been left to gather dust, but with the correct application of force in the right places…
"It's not a telescope, it's a light chamber!" the Doctor said as he fell into place beside me and Robert. "Capturing and focusing light to a laser point! If we can get it concentrated enough –"
There was a heavy thud as a large body slammed against the door. The Queen scuttled back a bit at that, clutching at her necklace; a jet cross.
I preferred to rely on things I knew where there. Right now, that category was limited to myself, the door, and the makeshift door bar I'd set on it. The swords were holding for now, but for how long would they last?
The Doctor picked up on the urgency as well, twisting harder at the various controls before pulling the Koh-i-Noor from his pocket. "Everything else is in place except for this," he said, holding the diamond in his hand. His eyes fixed on Rose's, Robert's, and then mine. "If this doesn't work…"
"…can you just put it in already? We don't exactly have time for dramatic speeches."
The Doctor swallowed, breaking his gaze away from us as the wolf thudded against the door again. The Koh-i-Noor disappeared into a slot on the telescope and the flickering little spot of focused moonlight suddenly intensified, becoming an inch-thick circle of burning silver light centered right on the double doors.
With the third thud, the swords finally broke apart, shattering into fragments of gilded iron as the doors shattered open behind them. The wolf lunged into the room only to get a face full of focused moonlight directly to the head for its trouble.
It stumbled back with a bewildered expression as the pink burns on its face knitted themselves up, the raw flesh quickly being replaced with fur.
"Doctor, I don't think–" Rose started only for the Doctor to shush her.
"Let it take it," he said as he twisted on one of the prism controls, intensifying the stream of moonlight from a broad beam to a pinprick laser point. The wolf was still trying to move, but there was something sluggish about its movement and the increasingly silver sheen of its fur that didn't entirely jive with the current angle of the moon.
I knew where this was going and the werewolf apparently had realized it too. It lunged to the side, towards Victoria and out of the line of fire. One last attempt at realizing its goal and not enough time for us to realign the laser.
Too bad it would fail. Even as Sir Robert threw himself bodily between the Queen and the wolf, I pulled another silver blade through subspace and into my hand. I threw it at the wall where the point of light was now focused.
I didn't miss.
The bayonet caught the moonlight laser perfectly, reflecting it back at the wolf and striking it squarely in the back. It froze as the silvery sheen that had taken over its fur intensified, brightening enough to rival the sun and it let loose one more frightful howl before it exploded.
Instead of blood, bone, and meaty chunks like I'd expected, bits of silvery ectoplasm splattered all over the room with chunks of proper flesh and fur caught in them. These soon started evaporating at an accelerated rate, leaving wet stains and then nothing at all behind but a faint silver shimmer like spilled glitter.
A soft contrast to the horrible creature that had produced it.
Where the werewolf's main body had been, however, was something less whimsical. A withered, milk-white corpse lay on the floor, naked and twisted. One arm was stretched out towards the Queen, only six inches away from the hem of her dress.
The Queen finally seemed to relax, only to step back as the 'corpse' raised its head. Dark eyes, barely visible in the sunken sockets of its face, looked up at her with an emotion I could only describe as relief before it collapsed, its tenuous grip on life finally released.
"What a pitiable creature," Victoria murmured as she released her death grip on her jet cross.
"Are you alright, You Majesty?" Sir Robert asked.
"Fine, fine…" she murmured, finally tearing her eyes away from the corpse. "I am uninjured."
Somehow, that didn't feel like that was the intent of the question.
The Doctor waited, watching the moon – oh what a lovely, terrible thing the moon was, particularly after tonight – slowly make its way across the sky. He could have slept. It only would have wasted an hour or two but somehow he just couldn't find it in himself to relax.
They could have died.
How many times had he had that thought before? There was always that one adventure after a regeneration where fate took it upon itself to remind the Doctor's latest personality that reality still applied to him and those he surrounded himself with.
Usually it didn't come with the additional risk of the destruction of history, but there was one that came to mind. Sutekh. Oh, the werewolf had been nowhere near the Osiran's level, but it could have destroyed the future just as easily just by dint of knocking a vital point in the web of time out of line. Without Victoria… well. It didn't do to dwell on timelines averted. Fussing over those led down dark roads, the sort that resulted in Celestial Intervention Agencies and people who got ideas about 'optimizing' the universe.
The Doctor sighed, stepping away from the window to pace around the room. At least the situation had very nearly resolved itself. If Sir Robert's father had told his son of the plan or kept a detailed journal, it would have.
In the absence of that, a man had lost their life to buy them a bit of time to puzzle out what should have been obvious.
Time. For a Time Lord. There was some unfriendly humor in that.
If not for Victoria just happening to have the Koh-i-Noor on her person, how many others would have died to buy him more time? Sir Robert had almost done it, if not for Delaine making the choice for him. In another timeline – no, more than a few, every single one where he hadn't grabbed onto her arm –, the Doctor could see her attempting to fight it off herself. Heh, she'd be like another Leela, slashing around with that silver knife against what should count as impossible odds.
The Doctor couldn't quite bring himself to bet against her, though he knew quite well that no ordinary human could have stood up to that werewolf in a straight fight.
'Somehow, I suspect she's anything but ordinary,' his Fourth murmured.
The Doctor smirked. 'If you existed anywhere but in my personal Matrix, Four, I'd almost be worried about you poaching my companion.'
'With my charm, you know it wouldn't be hard.'
He rolled his eyes, brushing the thought aside as he sat down on the bed. Delaine was his companion, just as much as Rose was. Maybe even more so, since Delaine didn't have another model in her memory to measure this one up against.
'Why so concerned?' another of his selves asked. Seven? It was hard to pick out sometimes when he wasn't paying direct attention to them.
'Because –,' the Doctor couldn't finish the thought. There was no tangible reason for him to be worried about her leaving. She'd made no sign of wanting to go and they… didn't…
There was an uncomfortable feeling in the space between his hearts.
No, he couldn't accuse them of being best friends. Friends, maybe, but not 'best' friends. Not with only two adventures in a span of twenty-four hours. But something about her felt important. Like he couldn't afford to lose her.
Why? Did she remind him of someone? Of something?
The Doctor rubbed the bridge of his nose. Maybe some sleep was what he needed after all, even if it was just to take a break from the questions buzzing around his head. Let his subconscious pick apart his problems and let him deal with whatever came after in the light of day.
I didn't sleep.
Without my limiter dragging me down to human limits, I technically didn't need to sleep, eat, or drink. If I wanted to, I could even go without breathing. Even walls would be mere suggestions at that point. I made a point to keep doing those things. Muscle memory was part of it, but losing the stimulation… no, there were advantages to those things.
Advantages like sanity and perspective.
Still, just because I still indulged in things like sleep didn't mean I had to. And right now, I had questions that needed answering more than I needed extraneous Z's.
The question was this; why the fuck was there no magic? I'd tried to transmute a candlestick into a proper bludgeon and got exactly what I had started out with; an unbalanced candlestick.
And it wasn't a fluke. I hadn't incorrectly cast a spell in a thousand years or more, and not something as simple as turning one kind of stick into another kind of stick. It couldn't have been some induced error either, because my 'patron' would have rubbed it in long before now.
So that left me with some error in the metaphysics.
This required a little scientific exploration.
I summoned one of my notebooks and a teddy bear, flipping the book open to a blank page. When I wanted them to be full of the information I'd put down years, if not centuries ago, it would be there, but for now it was a blank page quickly filling up with my thoughts.
Easier than using a pen and it kept my hands free to test the boundaries.
I set the bear down on a chair across the room.
Goal; knock the bear over without actually touching it.
I burned through my options quickly. I didn't need anything big or fancy; I was trying to achieve the same small effect of levitating a teddy bear with every single power I had. Those that weren't that flexible or would have just made a huge mess in achieving the same goal, I just tried to shift into the visible spectrum.
Psychic powers such as the Force or Esper based abilities were fine, but I'd already expected that. It was well-established in the canon and I'd used them all in the three days I'd been in this universe. All the different flavors of straight kinesis, even the more spiritually based elemental bending, worked as well.
Magic, on the other hand, flat-out didn't work. I wasn't terribly surprised by the most heavily ritualized spells; they were finicky at the best of times due to calling on powers that didn't always exist in a certain universe, but not even the most basic swish-and-flick wanted to work.
"So Block-Transfer Computations are fine, but Wingardium Leviosa is going out of line?" I asked the teddy bear softly. It was like someone had gone back to the beginning of the Doctor's universe and beat the concept of magic like it was their unwanted step-child until it died.
I ran through the last set of 'spells'; the ones that weren't quite hard magic, but not quite anything else. Aura, Ki-energy, Chakra, Kido. They – against anything I might have called common sense – worked, though the more ritualized ones felt slightly more muffled than before. The words meant nothing, but the intent and focus did. Hm. Maybe it was because they weren't pulling the bulk of their energy from an outside source or from the concept of 'magic' itself. But at least they were still there. And the common factor between them was that they were all based in different energies than straight 'magic'. No, they drew their power from the constants of 'life' and 'soul'.
So, no magic in the Doctor's 'verse, but souls were good. Huh. At least the 'life' energy made sense; it would probably be somewhere on the same level as a Time Lord's regenerative energy, except less explosive.
I drummed my fingers along the line of my jaw. So why had the Termina Masks worked while other magic didn't?
A phantom hand scribbled in my notebook 'Not As Magic As Initially Assumed, Tie To 'Soul' Power?' The question was abruptly followed up by more question marks, all bunched up and in different sizes as to best represent abject confusion.
…still, even if I didn't understand shit about what was going on, I could work with what I had. It limited me a bit, but it what did a 'bit' count for when I already had an array of powers that made Silver-Age Superman look bland? Besides, it wasn't like I was one of the magic-minded incarnations.
'I like how not having access to 50% of our non-lethal applications counts as 'a bit'.'
'It'll make things a bit trickier, but I'd hardly call it impossible.'
'So long as she avoids doing anything like her last rounds in control.'
The voices began to blur together as arguments and jokes started flying at speeds I couldn't really be bothered to follow.
'Shush,' I hissed at them. The peanut gallery was getting out of control. Besides, it hadn't been roadkill. 'New universe, no magic. Any thoughts?'
There was the sensation of someone raising a finger and taking a breath that would soon turn into a stupid question.
'Besides cracks about me and reckless behavior,' I amended quickly.
The imaginary finger dropped and a soft cough seemed to echo in the expanse of my mind.
"Thought so," I muttered as I closed the notebook and sent it and the bear back to my warehouse. Casting a glance at the window and the first traces of dawn beginning to crawl across the sky, I leaned back where I sat and slipped into a light doze.
The next morning saw us kneeling before a Queen. Victoria stood in front of us, a purse clutched in one hand while the other held a sword. There was a joke in there somewhere. An extradimentional transhuman abomination, a renegade Time Lord, and a chav rescue the Queen of England –
"By the power invested in me by the Church and the State," Queen Victoria intoned, lifting the sword above our heads before descending on the Doctor's shoulders. "I dub thee; Sir Doctor."
The sword turned towards the blonde. "Dame Rose."
"And Sir Delaine."
Oh. The Doctor had yelled my name in the tower. The fact that the other half of the secret identity equation had gone unsolved was kind of funny, but at least Clint Eastwood wasn't getting a knighthood fifty years before he was born, so far be it from me to correct the nomenclature.
"You may stand."
We rose together, Rose barely able to contain her grin while the Doctor just settled for looking slightly smug. Well, knighthoods didn't come around all that often, even if one had the advantages of immortality and time travel.
"Many thanks, your Majesty," the Doctor murmured.
"Nobody back at the estates is ever going to believe this," Rose said, almost bouncing in place.
"Your Majesty," the Doctor said. "You said last night about receiving no message from the great beyond. I think your husband cut that diamond to save your life. He's protecting you even now, Ma'am, from beyond the grave."
She almost blinked. Almost. "Indeed. Then you may think on this also. That I am not amused."
Oh. Here we go.
The Doctor looked like he'd been slapped with a fish. Not a particularly large one, but maybe a smelt. "Eh, sorry?"
"You consort with the subjects of stars and magic as if they are trivial things, Doctor. You change your face as easily as men would change a suit," Victoria continued. "I don't know what you are or where you are from, but it is clear that you are not of this world. So I bar you from it. Your world is steeped in terror, blasphemy, death, and darkness, and I can only hope that by banishing you from mine that it will not be touched by the forces you dabble with."
She cast her eyes towards the door. "You have your reward. Now leave my world, Doctor, and never return."
Fucking – The wolf was here long before the Doctor showed up. There was no cause, no logic to this decision. This was purely reactionary, the product of fear mingled with ancient superstition. Forget 'fair for its day', this was pure ingratitude.
And this was the seed from which would spring Torchwood.
Hah.
The Doctor swallowed, giving a small bow before turning towards the door. Rose and I moved to follow him.
"Sir Delaine, if you would remain –"
I stopped, pivoting around on my heel. "I would, your Majesty," I said coolly, stretching out the spaces between each word. "But, alas, I am banished."
With that, I followed the Doctor out of the Torchwood Estate.
'Oh, that was good. Should take that moment and frame it on the wall.'
'I'd call it stupid if we didn't have access to a time machine.'
'Please, like Victoria could ever touch us. After all, we have the–'
"Are you alright?" the Doctor asked as we stepped out of the main gate.
I unclenched my hand and let go of the breath I was holding. "I'm always alright," I replied. The words came out stiffer than I would have liked.
He didn't look entirely convinced, but Rose cut off any other question. "I can't believe she banished us for helping," she muttered.
"Different era, different approach to the strange and unusual," the Doctor said with a shrug as we started walking along the road. It wasn't a bad distance to the TARDIS from here – maybe three hours walking at a slow pace–, but just enough to be annoying. "A couple thousand years back, they might have considered us messengers of the gods sent to rescue them from supernatural malefactors. A couple thousand in the future, we're just experts in our given field."
"Stopping monsters?" Rose asked right as I threw out, "Causing trouble?"
The Doctor grinned. "Oh, bit of Column A, bit of Column B."
The road wasn't particularly rough, but we were still grateful when a passing farmer let us ride along in the back of his cart for the rest of the trip. The conversation naturally had to turn to less era-specific gripes and Rose's relative nakedness had been brought up and summarily dismissed, but it did shorten our travel time significantly.
As the familiar blue box came into view and then drew level with the cart, we hopped off, giving the farmer our thanks – his reply was a succinct 'you fuck right on off' – and started walking again.
The Doctor was the first to reach the TARDIS, quickly unlocking the doors.
He turned around to look at us, walking backwards into the TARDIS as he went. "So. Where would you like to go next? Just to be safe, I wouldn't make an attempt at Ian Dury just yet. The TARDIS gets finicky about places she doesn't want to go just yet. Learned my lesson on that one a long time ago."
Really? Was it the Eye of Orion, Metebelis Three, or Heathrow Airport where you realized that it was a bad idea?
Regardless of my thoughts about the pilot, it was nice to be inside the TARDIS again. Unlike the tight and claustrophobic hallways of the Torchwood Estate – would it turn into a headquarters for the agency? Would Sir Robert be executed for his 'treason'? There were too many uncomfortable questions there –, the TARDIS was the definition of breathing room. Maybe it was just her transcendental nature, but the mundane fact that I didn't have a chance of knocking into a wall unless I deliberately threw myself at one was a sort of reassurance.
Rose turned to look at me.
I blinked. "What?"
"It's your first… well, third trip in the TARDIS. Figured you should get to pick where we go next," she explained. "He does take suggestions, sometimes."
Really. I turned towards the Doctor, my raised eyebrow all the question he needed.
"You don't think I'd do that?" he asked back.
I know for a fact you don't do that. Oh, you might take a suggestion, but the odds of actually getting there…
"Surprise me," I said, throwing my hand up in the air. No room for disappointment if I didn't have expectations in the first place.
The Doctor smiled as he started fiddling with the console.
"But somewhere outside of the 1800's, please," I added.
"Oh," he said. "That was a given."
Author's Notes
Don't sweat the swears, Arashi. I say 'fuck' all the time – not to mention some other choice words –, don't worry about it.
Yes, as a general rule, Time Lords are dicks (to be fair, they're generally the kind of dicks that you're your life inconvenient rather than the douche who pushes you off a cliff). Rassilon is merely the douchiest dick of them all and very on-board with the cliff-pushing and kitten punting.
Sutekh was the main villain of Pyramids of Mars. Effectively a god in the ancient (and modern) understanding of such, his whole thing was being totally evil bastard and being powerful enough that him getting out of his ancient prison means the destruction of Earth, period.
A werewolf is a bit of a step down from that, isn't it?
It is also canon that, while magic doesn't work in the Doctor's Universe, psionics do. I merely broadened the definition a bit to include things like 'ki' and 'aura' since there are fair counterparts to that in canon already (regeneration energy, anyone?).
The power nerfing is just… to kind of play with the established rules of 'canon', so much as Doctor Who actually has canon. I've already mentioned that the Doctor Who universe does not have magic, though some stories say that in the wake of the Time War, magic started to come back.
I'm not following that idea, though it does bring a few ideas to mind...
Block-Transfer Computations. Think magic math that can rewrite reality. Generally a bad idea to use because only bad things happen if you get distracted while being a godlike nerd. Occasionally good for cheap tricks.
Fixed an oversight I'd made in the original version of the story with Delaine's lack of banishment. This time, the Queen didn't banish Delaine herself, but our main took the banishment upon herself as a sort of combination defiance/gesture of solidarity with Team TARDIS.
Or maybe it was just a gesture of 'good job being not awful, please don't leave me with these people'.
Also corrected a problem with the knighting ceremony itself as was pointed out by the Discontinuity Guide, which I am referencing for both the novels and episodes (until they stopped reviewing towards the end of Series 3).
Metebelis Three was a planet that the Third Doctor really wanted to visit thanks to its reputed beauty, eventually getting his wish after literally hardwiring the coordinates into the TARDIS. Unfortunately, it really should have had a reputation for giant body-jacking spiders.
The Eye of Orion… is generally not a terrible place but considering that the one time the Fifth Doctor managed to get there ended up with him and his companions getting whisked away to a place called The Death Zone (which I believe I mentioned during the Highlights of Rassilon) and he kept trying (and usually failing) to go there after that. Too good not to mention.
The Doctor's inability to get to Heathrow Airport is (almost) the entire reason Tegan Jovanka, a companion to the Fourth Doctor (for approximately two hours before he fell off a building and died) and the Fifth Doctor, was a companion in the first place. The first time he (sort of) succeeds, they end up being three hundred years early for her flight.
Also the Master stole an airplane. For slave labor in the Jurassic Period, because he needed to dig up some alien that would give him supreme power or some shit. Why he couldn't have just hypnotized a dinosaur or something…
Other Universes/Jumps I've explicitly referenced Delaine having visited already so far include:
The Marvel Cinematic Universe
Hellblazer
Legend Of Zelda
Harry Potter
The Elder Scrolls
Star Wars
DC Comics
Fallout
There are quite a lot more I've got written down or powers and experiences displayed that may have come from other sources, but I'll only name them more specifically when they show up.
Anyway, this will probably be the last of the rapid updates to make up for lost time, because after this I still have a lot of writing to complete.
