A/N: Today I was old enough to VOTE! Woo! It was exciting. Marking crosses in boxes. Very exciting.
Chapter 9 - Goo
The Doctor, Rose, Martha and Jack were all gathered in the console room, the Doctor at the helm as he always had been before. Due to his left arm he had all three of them helping him to pilot, and they were being very gleeful about it too. This was just like when they put the Earth back. Even with the Doctor's illness hampering their happiness it was still fun and a moment not to be forgotten, no doubt about it.
With the flawless teamwork they landed nice and smoothly in a familiar attic in Ealing. Within seconds there was a knock on the door and it opened to reveal Luke Smith, Sarah's teenage son, staring around the console room with the same shock and awe as he had before.
"Hey Luke," the Doctor greeted enthusiastically, waving his hand. "Shut the door would you? Don't want a draft."
Luke could only nod once, quickly hopping inside and shutting the door behind him.
Martha, Jack and Rose all looked at him with small smiles as he continued to stare around the interior. He'd been here before of course, but even knowing what it looked like never actually prepared you for standing in it a second time.
"Where to now?" Rose asked, looking at the Doctor.
He seemed to fall silent for a moment, looking at her sadly. "Canary Wharf," was all he said. The look Rose gave him he decided not to acknowledge as he started programming.
It was freezing cold when they stepped out of the TARDIS into the broken tower in the middle of London. Rose was the last out, shivering in the cold chill and pulling her coat a little tighter around her as she gazed around their surroundings. Not that she could see much – it was shrouded in complete darkness.
Seconds later the Doctor pulled out a pencil torch from his inside jacket pocket, flicking it on. The bright beam of light cut through the darkness to reveal the destruction they were standing in. But was the tower just abandoned since the battle? Or maybe it had been taken over and destroyed by something else entirely...
The Doctor moved forward and raised the torch to a scald mark on the wall – he tentatively licked it – it was the work of a Cyberman. He looked back to the four humans following him, Jack now also having a torch in hand and swinging it around the room to reveal the shine of long since dried blood on the floor.
"Doctor..." Martha suddenly said.
He shone the torch on her to reveal she was looking at the ceiling between them in complete terror. He swung the torch up to where she was looking... and frowned.
"What is that?" Rose asked in a whisper.
The Doctor didn't have an answer for her. On the ceiling between them was a patch of black gooey substance, dripping quietly down into a small puddle on the floor just below. For a moment the Doctor was tempted to plunge his finger in and have a taste – but that did not seem like a good idea at all.
"I really don't think we should touch that, whatever it is," the Doctor replied in a murmur.
All four of them looked at him with wide eyes. He didn't know what it was?
"Maybe it's from the Howling Halls?" Rose asked, remembering the incident with Elton's Mum what seemed like forever ago.
The Doctor shook his head. "No. It's some kind of... Oh I dunno. It's not a living shadow, it's a lot more... alive than that. I've never seen anything like it."
"Where's Mum?" Luke suddenly asked, looking pleadingly at the Doctor.
The Time Lord nodded, shoving the sonic back in his pocket and retaking the pencil torch. "I'm going to take a guess that she went upstairs to find the origin... and I really hope I'm wrong."
They strategically stepped around the puddle of goo still dripping from ceiling to floor, and moved to the stairwell. They had landed halfway up the building so they only needed to go up five floors... but to everyone's alarm the Doctor had to stop several times to catch his breath.
The infection was continuing to spread through his lungs, not to mention the fact only one heart was beating meant his entire internal system was being put under an immense amount of strain. By the time they reached the top floor he was coughing chestily, leant on the railing heavily. Thankfully Martha had thought to bring the TARDIS' emergency medical kit and she quickly held an oxygen mask to his face, coaxing him to breathe deeply.
Frankly, it made all of them terrified.
When he had regained his breath he batted Martha away, straightening up to face the lever room door before he stepped forwards, and pushed it open.
Light was streaming in from the large window at the end of the room, illuminating the scene perfectly for them the moment they stepped in. It was the vague shape of a person standing frozen in the middle of a black puddle, the substance covering them from head to toe...
The Doctor grimaced.
"Sarah?" Martha gasped, hand over mouth.
"Mum?" Luke yelled, running forward... but was quickly stopped in his tracked by the Doctor's arm.
"Don't touch it," he said, pointing at the five foot long crack in the far wall currently seeping out the goo.
"Is that..." Jack began, but was completely lost for words.
The Doctor looked back at them, and nodded. "It's coming out of the void. It's a living being that's coming from the void..."
Nobody had a comment for that.
The Doctor moved towards the figure, avoiding the puddles as he finally reached to be within a metre of the person, leaning forward to shed some light on their face. The expression was twisted and warped... but it was unmistakably a scream of pure, undivided terror. He couldn't tell from the face alone, but a quick glance at the sonic lipstick in her left hand and the handbag over her shoulder denoted that this was indeed Sarah Jane Smith.
"Oh, Sarah," he whispered, almost wanting to reach up and touch her. "I'm so sorry."
She didn't reply. Not that the Doctor had ever thought she would. He quickly put the pencil torch between his teeth and rummaged one-handed in his inside pocket to bring out the sonic, flicking it on and holding it up to the black goo that coated her aged but eternally beautiful face.
Suddenly the goo surged towards him, wrapping around the sonic and completely immobolising it. Before he even had a chance to react the goo had already welded his thumb to the switch of the sonic to put it permanently on, the low buzzing sound lost in the thickness of black...
"Doctor!" all the companions instinctively yelled, wanting to help him but what the hell could they do?
The black goo was travelling fast up his arm, the limb completely frozen as if encased in concrete. The Doctor was panicking slightly, trying desperately to pull his arm free but he knew it wasn't about to happen. It spread out up his shoulder and wrapped itself around his chest, squeezing tightly...
"Sarah?" Rose's voice suddenly yelled from the side of him and he looked to find Sarah only being held up by goo around her legs, her eyes shut.
Whatever it was, was moving off of Sarah and covering him instead, leaving her unconscious... or perhaps dead? He couldn't even tell. It was travelling down his legs now and up his neck...
"It's attracted by sonic waves!" the Doctor yelled through gritted teeth, struggling to keep his head aloft. "You need to..."
Then it spread up over his mouth, leaving him frozen in mid-sentence.
"Need to what?" Jack yelled, eyes wide. "What do we need to do?"
Frantically the Doctor's eyes darted around, his voicebox humming but no words were coming out. All the goo in the room was sliding towards him – towards the sonic – jumping up onto his hand, spreading across his limbs and face. With a thud Sarah collapsed to the floor as the substance completely left her, the people who weren't staring in horror at what was happening to the Doctor efficiently moving to check she was alive.
The Doctor's legs were completely consumed in black now, and then his eyes stopped moving, suddenly frozen in place beneath the goo as all that remained was his left arm dangling paralysed by his side, but the goo was moving to take that as well.
Out of nowhere Luke suddenly dived forward through the hysterical companions, wrenching his mother's sonic lipstick from her grip. With a quick pull he wrenched off the housing and jammed it on, the lipstick exploding into huge sonic life. Instantly the goo jumped towards him, but he was ready. He dived into a roll and landed on his feet, dodging the goo completely.
Before it could turn around to have another go he pulled back his arm and threw the lipstick straight through the crack in the wall and into the void.
Without any hesitation the goo followed through the crack, leaving absolutely no trace of it ever being there before. The seriousness of the situation that they'd just escaped didn't register for a moment, not until the Doctor quietly collapsed in front of them, the sonic he had been holding finally shutting off and rolling out of his limp hand across the floor.
"Doctor!" Rose yelled and leapt forward to check him, very quickly joined by Jack. She checked his right heart – it was going. She could fell him exhaling on her hand when she hovered it above his mouth too. He was fine, just unconscious, it seemed.
"Sarah's okay," Martha announced after a few short moments, and collectively they sighed a great sigh of relief. "Get them both back to the TARDIS."
"What the hell was that?" Rose asked, staring at the crack in the wall as if expecting the strange creature to suddenly leap back out and smother her...
"I think the more important question here is how long until it comes back out of the void?" Jack pointed out as he stooped to pick up the Doctor's unconscious form, though his eyes were firmly fixed on the crack.
"What's the void anyway?" Martha asked.
"The Doctor said... it's the space between dimensions," Rose muttered, still trying to work things out in her head. "There's just nothin' there... he said there was no up or down or space or light or time or matter..."
"Nothing can live there," Jack surmised quietly.
"But... That thing came out of the void," Luke croaked.
All four humans looked at each other, and swallowed.
A/N: Chapter 10 – It's A Four Thing
"It doesn't hurt," Don told her, staring up at her with wide eyes. "It doesn't hurt anymore."
She laughed joyously and kissed him again, holding him tightly. This would probably take a while for him to order his thoughts... and for it to sink in. For him and for her. "Yeah he fixed you."
He pushed himself to sit up and instinctively held Rose in return, only to find Martha and Jack staring at him with smiles on their faces. "What's the occasion?" he wondered.
Rose just laughed, and kissed him yet again. He was enjoying this. Then he caught sight of the brown suit through the crowd of people on the next bed. It could really only be one person... He jumped to his feet, rushing over to lean over the Time Lord.
"What happened?" he asked, staring at the unconscious Doctor.
"Long story," Jack muttered, still gazing at Don. Was he about to freak out?