Notes: My Ten-voice is probably shaky. I'd list the qualities I think it lacks, but it would come dangerously close to sounding like "I don't think I made him enough of a jerk," so I'll refrain. Not that I think Ten is a jerk. I'm giving him more time. But let's just say he's got a little bit of ground to make up with me...
(-)
Then she lit up a candle
"Rose?"
The Doctor blinked, and it was him again, staring at her through the smoke-- her second him, looking lost. It was a very strange look on him.
"Doctor," she said.
"What are you doing here? This is..."
"All in your head, yeah," said Rose, nodding.
"Oh, is it?" He looked around, blinking. "I suppose it'd have to be, wouldn't it? Given that it's already happened. Or-- well, technically that's not true, but I know you don't want to hear about nonlinear time."
That stung, at this point, after all the 'stupid peasant' comments and all the conversations she'd been carefully left out of. "Why d'you think that?"
"'Cos you can't really understand it. It's like how your mathematicians can understand that there are more than four dimensions, but they can't really comprehend what it's actually like. It's not your fault. You're four-dimensional creatures; you've had to be, just to survive. D'you know, most of the work your brains do is just editing stuff out? It just has to be. You can't focus on so many things at once."
"An' you can, I bet," Rose said, still faintly sour about it.
"I can do a lot of things. But no, not that. Even with a time machine, experience goes in a straight line. I can understand the theory, of course, but I can't experience the nonlinear any more than you could. Is that what you're here to remind me?"
"I'm here to get your sorry arse out of this place," Rose snapped. "Do me a favor and remind me of why."
He laughed. "Would I know?"
Rose cursed at herself; the last thing she needed to do was be angry at him. There was more than enough blame in this place already; that was the whole problem. "Look, I'm sorry. I shouldn't've snapped at you. I just need you to start thinking and get us out of here."
He blinked. "Look, it isn't going to work, you know."
She restrained the urge to do something foolish. "Yeah. Keep hearin' that. Not usually from you, though. Guess you have changed."
"I'm just saying, I know how this game is played. The calm before the storm. The reprieve before another..."
"What the hell are you on about?" She shook her head, wondering if maybe she should've brought her cricket bat. "I'm trying to tell you we've got to get out of here. This is a prison, like. In your head. An' it's been showin' you all the terrible things that've happened in your past, right? An' that-- hasn't been fun. But we can get out of here, if you just..."
"Pull your head out of whatever crevice you've stuck it in and start thinking?"
Rose started, staring at the flickering figure of her first Doctor standing behind her second. "What-- you're here too?"
"Yeah. He supercedes me." He grimaced, glowering at his future self. "I knewyou'd be pretty."
"Oh, wonderful," the Doctor said, putting his head in his hands. "Just what I needed. Are you bringing the rest along, too? Show them all the mess we made?"
"Oi. Listen to me. I know something you haven't figured out yet, 'cos you won't let it get into your head. She's not an illusion, Boy Wonder. She's here, and so am I, and if you don't take her advice and start thinking, we're all doomed. Literally, really. Don't we want thistemporal paradox on our head?"
Rose was thinking, furiously, because she couldn't afford to mess this up-- for all their sakes. "Hang on, you thought I wasn't real? You thought I was all in your head, didn't you? You thought I was just somethin' else that was gonna start torturin' you."
Her first Doctor smiled at her before he flickered away.
"...I think I can be forgiven for being cautious," the Doctor said, staring warily at the place his past self had been.
"Yeah. This is a bad place. But I need you to break out of it, Doctor. I need you to come home."
"You don't understand," he said. "This isn't the sort of thing you can escape."
--the place where they were held, because Daleks, unlike Time Lords, understood the necessity of good intel. Had perhaps even learned the lesson from that fiasco at the beginning of their history. Ah, the legendary stupidity of it. "Doctor," they'd told him, "this is where the Daleks came from. Go fix that." No details on how it had happened, no details on the current state of affairs, not even a "Oh, yes, the city ought to be that way, across the minefield". Six hours before the first Dalek became autonomous, a mile and a minefield away from where it would happen. Doomed from the beginning, and now he could never go back.
Would he, if he could?
Screaming from the next room, a bag around his head, walls lined with broken glass. The way Amanda had looked when they'd misjudged it, pale and bloated and blood coming from everywhere it could and a few places he'd thought it couldn't-- in a heartbeat he would do it-- if only he'd ever truly had the chance--
--hauled up and out and toward the room where--
"WAKE UP, YOU FOOL! SHE'S HERE!!"
The dream broke and she tumbled and which was she and where and--
Gold light, catching her.
"ROSE! My god, she's here, she's-- ROSE!"
One hurdle gone, at least, she thought, trying to clear her vision. He'd figured out she was real.
One hurdle, but god, the marathon ahead of her...
(-)
