Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who. I wouldn't know what to do with it anyway.
The Almost People – Part Three
Amy's eyes widened at the dark tone of the Corsair's voice; then the Time Lord let her go and she stepped away, rubbing her arm. What was all that about? She wondered. The voice of the shuttle pilot came over the comm. "This is the shuttle. We're right above you, but we can't get low enough. Gamma static could fry our nav-controls. Sit tight. We'll get to you. Just"- his voice cut off in a crackle of feedback. Behind her back, the Doctor surreptitiously scanned Cleaves with his sonic screwdriver. She'd kept rubbing her temple and he wanted to know what was wrong.
"Hello? Can you hear me?" Jimmy called into the comm., trying to regain contact with the shuttle. Amy's distress got the better of her; she headed for the door, saying "I can't find Rory. I'm going out there". The Corsair strode forward and grabbed her by the arm again. "Let go of me! Cor"- he cut her off, saying "There'll be acid leaks everywhere, and you've got no way of tracking him down".
"We could use the sonic to track him. Humans and Gangers give off slightly different signals. The sonic needs to tell the difference" the Doctor said helpfully; or not so helpfully, depending on one's opinion. Amy raised an eyebrow. "Oh, so the sonic knows Gangers are different. The other Doctor is different" she said firmly, pleased to have concrete proof at last.
The Doctor told her, "He is the Doctor", nodding at his Ganger, but Amy remained stubborn as ever. "Not to me. I can tell" she insisted. "Sure you're not prejudiced?" the Doctor asked lightly. Amy frowned at him. "Nice try, but I know, okay? We've been through too much. You're my Doctor. End of".
Over by the wall, the two Time Ladies talked in hushed voices. "What do you suppose the Corsair meant?" wondered Flavia. The burly Time Lord was leaning by the door, arms folded, as if he were guarding it. "I've no idea…perhaps it's something from the…from the War" answered Romana. "Are you alright?" she asked Flavia, who blinked and forced a smile. "As well as I can be" she replied.
Romana raised an eyebrow. "So, not really?" she asked sarcastically. Flavia eyed her, and Romana shrugged. "You're not the only one who's a bad liar" she admitted, nodding over to where the Doctor and Amy were arguing about the trustworthiness of his ganger. Flavia sighed, and admitted "Very well, I am…frustrated. And yourself?" she inquired. Romana didn't answer. "Romana?"
The other Time Lady blinked and started. "Huh? Oh, sorry. Did you say something?" she asked, blushing slightly. "I was asking if you were alright" repeated Flavia. "Oh, I'm fine...just got lost in thought for a bit there" she shrugged with a fake smile of her own. Flavia glanced from her to the Doctor, and wondered, Yes, but lost in thought about what…or whom?
She was brought out of her thoughts by the voice of someone she'd be happy to see the last of when they finally managed to leave. "Hey, there's a camera up" said Buzzer, "We've got a visual". Amy ran right over, spotting two people straight away. "That's Rory and Jennifer" she pointed, hoping that it was the real Jennifer with her husband and not her Ganger. Little did she know that Flavia was thinking the same thing.
"They're heading for the thermostatic room" said Cleaves. "Let's go get them" urged Amy; not even the Corsair would stop her getting Rory back, not when she'd lost him so many times. The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver from his pocket and tossed it over to his ganger. "Hang on" Amy said warily. Her unvoiced worries were spoken aloud by Cleaves. "We can't let him go, are you crazy?" she asked the Doctor.
"Am I crazy, Doctor?" he asked his ganger, who thought for a moment and replied "Well, you did want to plumb your brain into the core of an entire planet just to halt its orbit and win a bet". Romana just barely resisted the urge to face-palm at that. How had the Doctor even survived before he met her…or afterwards, for that matter?
Amy wasn't having any of it; if things hadn't been so dire the Time Lords would have rather admired her tenacity. "He can't go rescue them. I'm going" she asserted. The Doctor stared her down. "Do you know, I want him to go; and I'm rather adamant" he told Amy firmly, letting his voice just hang on the edge of being threatening.
"Well then, he'll need company, right boss?" asked Buzzer. "It's fine, I'll handle it" he added when Cleaves gave him a look. Handle what? Flavia wondered suspiciously. "Thank you, Buzzer" the Ganger Doctor said lightly, adding to Amy, "It'll be alright. I'll find him". She didn't respond; Buzzer and the Ganger Doctor left the tower, and the Doctor got Amy's attention again. "I can't explain it to you now, but I need you to trust him. Can you do that for me, Amy?" he asked her.
"And what if you're wrong?" she asked in turn. Rather than answer her, the Doctor posed another question. "Remember back when we first started travelling, and we ended up on the Byzantium with Weeping Angels. What did I tell you back then?" he inquired. Amy sighed and rolled her eyes. "You said if you always told me the truth, you wouldn't need me to trust you...look, I'm not saying I trust him. But if you say he's okay, I'll trust you" she relented. The Doctor smiled and kissed her forehead.
"Thank you, Pond. Oh, and don't forget what I said earlier, to"-
"Breathe, I know. Pretty sure I've got that covered, thanks".
"These temperature gauges are rising. Jennifer and Rory must have shut off the underground cooling vents" said Cleaves, much to everyone's alarm. "Why do that? They'll kill us" asked Dicken. "I think it's rather obvious" said Flavia, "Rory is with Jennifer's ganger, and she's tricked him into helping her. I wouldn't be surprised if she needed a human to work the controls" she explained. Jimmy nodded. "She's right, the uh, controls don't work for Gangers – not those ones anyway" he confirmed.
"There's a million gallons of boiling acid under our feet" Cleaves pointed out, and the Doctor just had to add, "And now it's heating up the whole island. How long till it blows?" As if in answer, an ominous rumble echoed through the room. "Gangers or no gangers, we need to get the hell out of here" Dicken insisted. Cleaves made contact with the shuttle again. "Shuttle, we need evac. Where are you? Can you hear me? Can you-aah!" she cried out in pain, clutching her head.
"Cleaves? Cleaves? Cleaves, sit down" the Doctor helped her into a chair. Cleaves waved him off. "I'm fine" she lied, wincing. "I'm waiting for results, so let it go" she said, trying to get him to drop the subject. "It's a very deep parietal clot" the Doctor told her, having gleaned that much from his scan. "How can you possibly…?" she began, but trailed off. It wasn't important. "Inoperable?"
"On Earth, yes" the Doctor answered. "Well, seeing as Earth's all that's on offer… Hmm. I'm no healthy spring chicken, and you're no weatherman, right?" Cleaves asked rhetorically. There was another, more violent rumble. "Something just cracked, I heard it" Amy said in alarm. "Doctor, we should go" said the Corsair. "He's right" Jimmy agreed, "let's shift".
Cleaves tried to contact the shuttle one more time. "Cleaves to shuttle, respond. We need to move, and we can't be collected from the Evac tower" she called into the comm. "Give us the code word" replied the pilot. "The code word is"- she began, when a third tremor and a bang set alarms off and disconnected the line. "Cleaves? Cleaves, it's dead. It's dead. We need to get out of here. We need to get back downstairs and get those vents back on. Come on" the Doctor urged her, pulling the woman away from the comm.
They hurried from the room and into a passageway, with the eyes of old Gangers staring at them from the walls. "Ah, the eyes have it" said the Doctor, pausing and staring back at them. "Why are they here?" asked Amy, eyeing the…well, eyes, nervously. "To accuse us" the Doctor replied. Cleaves strode past the eyes, not looking at them a moment longer. "Ignore them. It's not far".
They made it to the thermo-static room, and Cleaves and the Doctor fiddled with the controls, but it was too late. "It's a chemical chain reaction now. I can't stop it. This place is going to blow sky high" the Doctor said. When Cleaves asked how long they had to get out, he anxiously replied, "An hour? Five second? Err, something in between". A warning klaxon began to wail loudly. "Out!" the Doctor cried, ushering them back down the passageway.
They saw Rory coming the other way; he ran up to meet them. "Thank God. Alright?" he asked Amy as she hugged him tightly. "Oh, Rory, oh Rory" she gasped in relief, clinging to him. "There's a way out" Rory told them all. "Jennifer found it. A secret tunnel under the crypt".
"The crypt? It's not on the schematics" Cleaves said suspiciously, recalling what Flavia had said about the Jennifer with Rory being the Ganger. "It runs right out of the monastery. Maybe even under the TARDIS, Doctor. Follow me" Rory encouraged, leading them along.
/
When they reached the acid room, Jimmy paused as he remembered something, or rather someone. "We can't leave without Buzzer" he reminded Cleaves. Part of Flavia was tempted to suggest that perhaps they could. Stop that, he might be an…well, an annoying twit, but we still can't let him die she scolded herself. "I'll go back for him" said Cleaves.
"Err, Doctor, look. I'd better tell you. I haven't been quite straight with you" Rory began nervously, when Ganger Jennifer appeared, slamming the door shut and locking the others in. "Rory!" yelled the Doctor, banging on the door. Outside, they could hear him talking to Ganger Jennifer. "Hang on, Jen. We don't need to lock them up. We should just show them what we've found" he told her earnestly.
The Doctor tried to open the door again. "Rory Pond, Roranicus Pondicus!" he shouted in frustration. "Rory, what the hell are you playing at?" Amy demanded through the door. "They've been throwing away old Flesh and leaving it to rot. Alive. I think the world should see that" Rory told the Doctor and Amy through the door.
"Rory, there is no time, the factory's about to explode" the Doctor told him, and Rory turned to Ganger Jennifer. "Are you sure about this?" he asked her, "because I'm not. Let them out" he ordered, but Ganger Jennifer just smiled at him. "The little girl got strong" she said, much to his bewilderment. "What?"
"The little girl lost on the moors in her red wellies, looking for a way home? Well, she got strong, Rory. I told you, remember?" she reminded him. Rory blinked, confused. "But that wasn't… It was the other Jennifer that told me about being a little girl" he protested. Ganger Jennifer tilted her head to the side. "Oh? What other Jennifer?" she asked all too innocently.
Rory stammered, "Well, the, the err – wait, you tricked me?" he realised. Then he made to open the door, but she grabbed him and held him back, surprisingly strong. "Let me go. I'm opening the door, let me…I'm sorry!" he called out to the others as Ganger Jennifer dragged him away. "No!" cried Amy, desperately trying to shove open the door.
The Doctor pulled her away, and Cleaves looked out of the window in the door to see her Ganger staring at her. "We have to be free" her Ganger insisted. After everything that had happened, and her apparently imminent demise, Cleaves no longer wanted to destroy the Gangers, and odds were none of them would survive this. "I'm sorry too, Miranda" she told herself, "Of all the humans in the world, you had to pick the one with the clot. But hey, them's the breaks. Welcome to the human race".
Ganger Cleaves ignored this olive branch, instead walking away back to her team. How is my Ganger more loyal than I am? Cleaves wondered briefly, when her thoughts were interrupted by a peculiar humming noise. The Doctor was scanning the acid vat with his sonic screwdriver. "I thought you gave your sonic to your Ganger?" a puzzled Romana pointed out. "I've got a spare" he replied shortly, checking the results. "This is going to overheat and fill the room with acid, just as a point of interest".
"And we can't stop it?" asked Cleaves. The Doctor looked at her and replied, "Just as a point of interest? No".
Dicken strode up. "Doesn't mean we can't try" he said firmly, gesturing to Jimmy to help him close the lid down on the vat. "It'll never hold her" said Jimmy, even as he pressed the lid down as hard as he could. "If you have a better plan, I'm all ears. In fact, if you have a better plan, I'll take you to a planet where everyone is all ears" the Doctor said sarcastically. "I bet they're really good listeners" Romana commented lightly, making him smile.
Despite the attempts at jokes, nobody was really in the mood for humour. "I think I'll just stay in the TARDIS next time" Flavia muttered to no-one in particular, but the Corsair overheard her. "C'mon, Flavia, where's your sense of adventure?" he asked with a grin. Flavia scowled at him and snapped, "You're as bad as the Doctor, treating everything like its one big game".
The Corsair held his hands up in mock surrender. "Whoa, okay. Sorry…ah, wait. I know why you're in a bad mood. You're worried about Rory, aren't you?" he guessed with a confident smirk. "And myself" she answered curtly, "…but yes, I am concerned for Amy's husband. He's a good man" Flavia admitted. The Corsair was still smiling that infuriating smile, so in exasperation, Flavia said "Why don't you go comfort Amy herself? She looks like she needs it", gesturing over to where Amy was staring at the door as if willing it to open.
She jumped when the Corsair touched her shoulder, eyes wide in shock. "Hello, Scottie" he grinned down at her. Amy relaxed, and asked, "Do you have to call me that? I'm not a dog" she huffed. "You're cute as one" the Corsair smiled, making Amy roll her eyes at the cheesy comment. She couldn't help but blush a little though; it was nice to be complimented, sort of, albeit in a joking, teasing kind of way. "Okay, smartass, from now on I'll call you a dog name…like Corgi".
"No, you can't call me that. If you're gonna give me a nickname, then at least choose one that suits me" the Corsair pretended to complain. He chose his nicknames very carefully; well, most of the time, he didn't really know this Doctor or Flavia all that well but 'Flop Hair' and 'Stiffy' seemed to fit them pretty well. Then there was Romana, back at the Academy he'd been friends with a friend of a cousin of a friend of hers and learned that she was apparently a bit of a teacher's pet; hence the moniker 'Smarty Pants'.
He came out of his musings when he realised Amy was talking to him. "…so, I'm sorry, about what I said earlier. I'm obviously no good at making up nicknames either, but…I'd still like to give you one, even if we are going to die. Um…how about…Cory?" she shrugged. The Corsair stroked his chin with aam exaggeratedly thoughtful expression, making her laugh in spite of everything. "Cory…it's better than the first one, I suppose" he sniffed. Amy swatted him on the arm; "Yeah, well get used to it!" she grinned.