Title: Into the Woods (10/20)
Pairing: TenII/Rose
Rating: PG
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.
Authors Note: Half way there, granted I've added an interlude and an epilogue...not sure if I should change the numbering for the whole story though.

Thank you to my amazing beta mik109 who is made of epic!win.

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Time seemed to stand still or maybe her brain didn't want to make sense of what was going on because it was just so unbelievably wrong. The three Cybermen stood in the doorway. Their fronts lost in the shadows of the full midday sun beaming in behind them. Their eyes cast off an eerie red glow that played off the angles of their masks making them even more frightening than normal.

Rose stared at the Cybermen for what felt like forever though it couldn't have been more than a few seconds before her eyes darted back to the Doctor, who stood frozen to the spot in front of her. She lunged forward as the Cybermen raised their arms up ready to fire into the room, her hand latching onto his.

The Doctor's head snapped towards her at the contact, his fingers clenching around hers so tightly it almost hurt. "Run," he told her in a worried whisper, the contact enough to snap him out of his stupor before he looked around the rest of the room. "Run! Everyone run!" he shouted needlessly as the others continued to scramble and pound on the locked doors on the far side of the entryway.

Jackie rushed towards a door just to her left as one of the Cybermen shot at the group in the back. "It's locked!" she shouted over her shoulder as she continued to pull uselessly on the handle.

The Doctor pointed the sonic at the door handle. He pushed Rose in front of him, aiming her towards the now unlocked doorway. The three barreled through the door as fast as they could move. The Cybermen closest to them turned to take aim at the Doctor as he spun around to slam the door shut behind them.

He quickly relocked the door before spinning back towards Rose and Jackie. "We need to keep moving," he said as he pushed past them, making sure to school his features against the sound of blasts and screams that was coming from the other side of the door. There was nothing any of them could do for the group now. They were lucky to have escaped themselves.

Rose stood rigidly. Her eyes fixed on the door they had just come through. She had been forced to do a lot of hard things in her time working for Torchwood. She'd made mistakes and decisions that had cost people their lives. She hadn't been fast enough or smart enough to save everyone and she knew that sometimes the only thing that can be done is to save oneself. That never made it any easier though.

The sound of metal smashing against wood echoed through the hallway they had locked themselves in and broke Rose out of her thoughts. The door shuddered and began to shake violently as the Cybermen who had taken aim at them began to bash it down. Rose jumped back at the sound as the buzz of the sonic screwdriver joined the sound of smashing wood.

Rose turned to find the Doctor quickly ushering Jackie though another door he had just unlocked.

"Come on! The more doors we put between us and them the better!"

She nodded absentmindedly as she followed her mother into the next room. The new door quickly shut behind the Doctor just as the first glimpse of the Cyberman's fist began to appear in the previous door.

"What are Cybermen doing here?" Jackie asked frantically as she stared at the door. "I thought they were all destroyed, pulled into the void along with the Daleks back at Canary Warf!" she shouted flinching with each strike of the Cyberman's fists as they continued to beat down the door.

"Those weren't Cybermen," the Doctor said as finished locking the door to the room with the sonic screwdriver. He spun around and quickly began looking for a way out that wouldn't take them right back into danger.

"What do you mean those weren't Cybermen? Course they were Cybermen! I know what Cybermen look like an' that was them!" Jackie shouted angrily as the Doctor frantically flitted about the room.

Rose shook her head as she turned away from the door to look at her mother. "Their eyes, I've never seen that before… they had red eyes. What does that mean?" she asked the Doctor.

He fixed her with a hard stare. "I don't know," he sighed and ran a hand through his hair angrily. "Cybermen don't have red eyes…oh those thing might look and sound and act like Cybermen but they aren't."

"How can that be?" Rose asked again, her eyes moving back to the door.

The Doctor shook his head, even though Rose wouldn't see the gesture, before pushing himself away from the wall angrily. Not a window or a door in the entire room. Not even a large vent they could crawl through. He fought back the urge to growl because that wouldn't reassure anyone, least of all one of the Tyler women, that he would be able to save them.

He was seconds away from viciously kicking the wall. It wasn't fair to get her back after all of that time only to lose her again so soon…especially to them, whatever they were. He whipped around to glare at the door. Lock or no lock the wood of that door would prove a poor barrier when that Cyberman reached it.

The sounds of the Cyberman's approach were getting too close to ignore any longer. He stepped forward so that when it finally broke down the door he could try to convince it that they were willing to upgrade. So what if that plan hadn't worked the last time he'd been cornered by Cybermen, and he didn't have a slowly recharging TARDIS power cell to save the day this time. He still had to try.

He exhaled furiously. Desperately pleading with himself to think up something brilliant, he kicked the floor which was when he noticed the carpet wasn't actually a carpet. The Doctor spun in place eagerly noting that the carpet didn't reach any of the walls, which meant it was merely a large area rug.

"Oh, please, let me be that lucky," he muttered to himself as he crouched down and pulled back on one of its edges. "HA!" he shouted triumphantly causing Rose and Jackie to spin towards him as he tugged the rug back even further revealing a trapdoor, a very old and seemingly forgotten trapdoor.

"Let's make our exit, shall we?" he grinned at Rose as he trained the sonic screwdriver on the latch of the door. The buzz of the sonic filled the room yet the door remained stubbornly stuck in place.

"What? Why didn't that work?" he asked crouching down so he could get a closer look at the door. "Right, well then," he said to himself glaring at the offending latch that did very little to keep the door shut since it also didn't do anything to open it. He glanced up as the sound of the Cyberman's footsteps grew closer and closer.

He aimed the sonic back down at the trap door, this time pointing at one of the two rusted over hinges. The resultant metallic ting went unnoticed by everyone but him. He jumped up and grabbed Rose's wrist. "Come on," he muttered to her, gently pulling her until she stood on the piece of wood that made up the trapdoor. "You too, Jackie," he barked as he trained the sonic on the remaining hinge.

"Wait, Doctor, where's this gonna take us?" Jackie asked as she came to stand next to the pair already on top of the trapdoor, the final hinge groaning at the weight of them all.

"Down," he answered as he flipped the sonic on.

The sound of wood beginning to splinter under the weight of metal fists, a second quiet ting from the remaining hinge and Jackie's question of 'Down where?' all mixed together as the trapdoor dropped open. The three fell through the now gaping hole in the floor of the room with a startled yelp and some vulgar shouting.

The door finally relented under the weight of the Cyberman above as the three collided rather unceremoniously with the ground a floor beneath their previous location.

The Doctor waved a hand in front of him, trying to clear away some of the dust that had been kicked into the air thanks to their quick decent and very hard landing. He looked up into the room they had just left to make sure the Cyberman wasn't planning on following them down, not that he expected it too.

Once sufficiently certain the Cyberman had decided to move along, the Doctor turned to look around the room they had fallen into. It was a simple room, if a bit austere. The entire room was made up of old stone bricks and a crude mortar that definitely worked with the currently evolving medieval theme of the outside of the building.

There were six walls total, the four that made up the bulk of the room and a narrow portion that jutted out from it just behind him. A narrow staircase filled that extra section leading up to the main floor of the building. He took a small step back to glance up the staircase, an uneasy breath of air huffing out when he saw a thick wooden door at the top of the stairway still firmly latched shut. He took a moment to flick the sonic towards it, the firm sound of the lock sliding into place relaxing him even further.

He turned back towards his companions. "Everyone alright?" he called out as he tried to make out which lump on the floor was Rose and which was Jackie in the darkness.

"I'm fine," Jackie said with a small cough. "No thanks to you…'down'," she mocked as she tried to clean off some of the dust that had collected on her trousers.

"Fine," Rose added as she shook her hand to try and get rid of the annoying new stinging sensation. She sighed quietly to herself; leave it to the Doctor to land completely unscathed while she landed in a load of rubbish in a basement successfully smashing her hand in the process.

The Doctor nodded at them both before returning to his inspection of the small dark room they had fallen into. There had to be some other way out. Jackie groaned quietly as she rubbed her wrist. Rose finally righted herself but she shook her head a little and leaned back to brace herself against a wall as her vision swam and the whole room started to spin before her.

"Well, we're definitely in the basement…" the Doctor stated as he took in the mostly bare walls, their only light source cast from the trapdoor above them. "Are there any fairytales that involve a basement? Most of them take place in castles or cottages…sometimes caves."

Jackie did what any sensible person in her position would do at a time like this, which was to completely ignore the Doctor. She had more important things to do than listen to him prattle on about basements. First, she needed to check on her daughter, who was currently a great deal less sturdy on her feet than she had been just moments before. "Rose? Are you alright?" she asked quietly as she began to move towards her.

"Just…just give me a mo, yeah?"

Jackie's face scrunched up in worry as she appraised her daughter. "What's wrong, sweetheart?"

Rose shook her head again as she leaned of her weight even more on the wall behind her. Everything was swimming and her mother's words sounded like they were coming from another planet instead of right next to her. "I…my head…"

"Doctor!"

The Doctor stopped going on about the lack of basements in medieval Germany and thus the lack of their presence in fairytales and turned to look at Jackie. "What?" he asked before glancing at Rose. The instant his eyes landed on her his mouth snapped shut and he started to rush towards her with worry, confusion and just a hint of the good ole Oncoming Storm brewing in his eyes. "Rose? What is it? What's wrong?"

"Doctor…" she began, her voice sounding muffled and weak even to her. Before she could finish whatever she had been planning on saying, she began to collapse.

The Doctor caught her as she began to fall forwards. "Rose! Rose…No, no, no, no, no," he gently lowered her to the ground, cradling her upper body against his. "Rose?"

"I don't feel so good," she whispered as she stared up into his frantic eyes.

"What happened?" he asked her, his words whispered and shaky. He had just gotten her back. He was going to get to spend forever with her. He couldn't lose forever with her before he had even had a chance to enjoy it.

She gave him another one of her adorably confused faces as her eyes slowly started to shut. "No! Rose, stay with me," he practically screamed at her as he shook her slightly making her eyes snap back open. "Rose, you have to tell me what happened. You have to tell me so I can fix it," he begged her, almost on the verge of tears. Rose gave him a small hum of understanding as she closed her eyes once again. "Rose…no!" he shook her body once again but her eyes stayed firmly shut.

"Rose!"

~TBC