Hahaha, remember when I said this story was a humour fic? Man, what happened? I wish I could get some consistency in my writing.
IT'S SO LATE I KNOW I deserve to be hung drawn and quartered. OTOH, this chapter is just in time to celebrate the beginning of the new season! Glorious! Though I'll remind you that in NZ we don't get the new season until August, so feel free to expostulate its glory without spoiling. And no, I'm not going to go and watch it on YouTube, because shrinking the Doctor down to that size is cruel.
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Prior to certain life-altering encounters with aliens, Rose Tyler had never looked forward to being a mother. Not even a little bit. She had never seen the appeal in training and caring for a needy, noisy, stupid miniature of oneself. But trailing after the Doctor for months on end had awoken fragments of her hibernating maternal instincts. Maybe it was the low survival probability that made her want to procreate – maybe Cassandra was right and she just liked his bum in pinstripes. Either way, unconsciously or just secretly, compatible plumbing or no, Rose Tyler had begun to rather fancy the idea of babies.
Now, faced with an actual needy, noisy, stupid miniature of herself, Rose remembered just why she'd hated the idea in the first place.
As the doppelganger's words were processed by her already-exhausted brain, Rose felt the blood drain from her face and wished she'd had a chance to put on makeup this morning.
"What else has she told you?" she croaked. "Tell me! Did your grandmother tell you who killed your mother?"
The doppelganger shook its Rose-faced head. The real Rose, who felt as if concrete was pumping through her arteries and solidifying her limbs, relaxed a little.
Why had she reacted like that? It wasn't her. How could it be? She hadn't killed – well, alright, she had, she had killed someone, but they had been human. The alien had escaped. Unless… no, the escaping glow-creature had definitely been alive… oh, God, this was insane, she didn't know anything about alien physiology. How was it that she could have killed an alien without realising? She needed the Doctor, or a good intergalactic encyclopaedia.
The shapeshifter's voice cut into her thoughts. The girl was rubbing the tears from her eyes as she said, "Grandmother says to tell you that," she gave a hiccough-squeak, "To tell you 'a mother for a mother.'"
An eye for an eye. A life for a life.
Jackie.
There was a pause. A heavy bell tolled once in Rose's brain. She shouldn't have said that, Rose said to herself. I was just beginning to calm down.
"What does she mean?" The doppelganger asked, her watery eyes wide and glinting like an animal's – Rose's eyes, right down to a heavy layer of mascara, but so much younger and stranger.
Rose didn't answer. She grabbed the girl's arm and dragged her out of the wardrobe room. The shapeshifter didn't try to pull out of her grasp, but stumbled and cried for Rose to slow down. I'm going to be a terrible mother, Rose thought. But I don't want to be a terrible daughter.
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In the console room, the Doctor shot upright when Rose stormed through. He saw the doppelganger and his jaw dropped – if they'd been in a state for conversation, Rose would have told him not to be such a drama-queen.
"It's y-you!" whispered the not-human girl. "The Time Lord! Grandmother said you were real. No one believed her!" She strained towards the Doctor, but he shrunk away from her, a look of disbelief on his face. This didn't seem to deter the girl: it took all of Rose's strength to keep her from jumping on him.
"Rose!" the Doctor gulped, pointing at the other alien. He made an expression which said, very clearly, I know what that is, and I hope you have a really good explanation as to why it's on my ship.
She glanced at him and without letting go of the shapeshifter pulled the TARDIS key from around her neck. She mimed turning it in a keyhole. "You," she snapped at him. "Stay here. Stay. I'm locking the door so no one can get in."
He shook his head in confusion and pointed at the doppelganger again.
Rose jabbed her finger at the door. "Jackie," she said. "I have to get Jackie."
She jerked on the doppelganger's arm and strode down the gangway towards the door.
"I can't go outside," the doppelganger moaned. "Mum said I had to stay on the ship no matter what. Please, let me go!"
Rose felt her anger and fear ebb and slow. She turned and loosened her grip on the girl's arm. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "But I need you to help me save my mum."
The doppelganger wiped her nose with the back of her hand, gullible and oblivious to Rose's identity and intention. "W-what's going to happen to her?"
"Someone… is going to hurt her," Rose tried to explain. "Like your mother got hurt."
She almost cracked when she said that. A murderer of mothers and a deceiver of children. This was the most iniquitous day she'd had in her life. Is this how he felt? When he told the Nestene Consciousness to leave Earth? When the Gelth begged him to save them? When the Dalek told him they were one and the same? Is this how it feels to be a killer consorting with your victim?
She sighed, suddenly remembering a geyser of gold and a dying friend who had smiled without regret in the last moment before the conflagration consumed him. She'd always thought that smile had been intended for her. Now she thought, no wonder he changed to escape it.
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Harriet Jones left the rugby club, but didn't go far. She had the car drive around the corner and then park in a particularly shadowy part of the street. Leaning back against the exquisite leather seat, she put one hand to her mouth for a moment and then quickly sat up straight and composed herself. A decision had to be made.
"Would you like a drink there, ma'am?" the driver asked over his shoulder. "Just a small one. ˇThey keep some very good stuff in this car, for diplomats and the like."
"That's very good to know, but no thank you, Hamish," the Prime Minister replied.
She had not sat twiddling her thumbs between the Doctor's visits. Becoming Prime Minister took up a lot of time, but there were always moments to spare on the secret of code 9. She had found the old UNIT files, kept in locked darkness with no one alive who knew the password to the archives. She'd read about this Doctor in more detail then he probably remembered himself.
"Samson called while you were away from the car, by the way," the driver continued amicably. "Things are piling up back at the office, but he wants you to know he's on top of it."
That makes one of us, Harriet Jones thought. "He's a reliable fellow. Better give him a call," she said briskly, picking up the receiver of the satellite phone set into the doorhandle of the car. She dialled her own extension and Samson's voice answered cheerily.
"Hello, ma'am!" he cried when she greeted him. "Thank God you're coming back, people are starting to comment on the length of your afternoon tea."
There was a simple rule of thumb for the Doctor's arrival: danger. The UNIT files never said so directly, like a party host too polite to comment on a guest arriving drunk, but Harriet Jones could hear the warning bursting from between the lines. It trickled ahead of him and trailed in his wake and crashed like a tsunami after the quiet shudder of the earth. If the Doctor was on their planet, so was something else.
"Samson, I need you to break the seal and call the emergency numbers."
The cheer evaporated. Harriet Jones' assistant did exactly what she had hired him for and turned instantaneously from docile receptionist to someone more likely to be found at the head of MI5. "Is there some trouble? Don't worry Ms Jones, I've had a car tailing you from the moment you left Downing Street. Just stay silent and I'll know to send in the troops, we'll extract you in a jiffy-"
"No, no, Samson I'm not in any trouble," Harriet Jones cut him off with the images of her self being 'extracted' from a violent fire-fight leaping to the forefront of her mind. "In fact, I don't know for certain if there's any threat at all. I simply – well, let's just say I've just discovered one of Earth's most unorthodox lines of defence has been put out of action and I do not want to be caught off my guard."
Samson paused. "Earth's lines of defence, ma'am?"
"I know I'm not making much sense. I just need to you to call Torchwood and tell them that… tell them that the Doctor is in but he's sick. They're to look for the source of the illness and be ready when I call them again. If they can't do anything with that, they don't deserve what we're paying them."
"Prime Minister, you sound like M!"
"I beg your pardon?"
"From James Bond, ma'am, you know… never mind."
"Quite. I'll be back in a short while, so…"
Harriet Jones jumped and almost dropped the receiver as a body thumped against the window and looked in at her, grinning.
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Dr Mitchell sat on the back steps of the rugby club, staring at the crumpled bonnet of his car. He played with the clasps of his briefcase and periodically rubbed his mouth and chin, dearly craving the cigarettes that he hadn't touched for over fifteen years. Rose had abandoned him out here, he knew with bitter certainty. At this very moment, she was probably whisking away on a large, black motorbike, heading for either another spree of criminal activity or further covert operations in the service of whichever world power employed her. Dr Mitchell had not decided yet whether Rose was a secret agent or a liar, but he suspected both.
His gaze roamed over his mutilated car and seemed to pierce the boot, visualising the corpse crumpled inside. Dr Mitchell felt another wave of nausea. He should drive straight to the nearest police station and tell them everything he had seen, heard and learned. Yet here he sat. Out of fear of arrest? Out of loyalty to Rose? He would have gladly admitted either, but he was too strait-laced to lie to himself. It was curiosity that kept him here.
He had to know how a man's face could change from young to old when you hit him at forty miles an hour. How anyone could survive with two hearts and a brain like no animal on earth. What the origin was of that mangled thing that had been attacking Rose when he'd entered his office, the thing now scraped into the wastepaper bin and dumped in the boot of his car.
It wasn't that he hated not knowing – it was just that the scent of knowledge was overwhelming all his good sense.
The more he thought about the mysteries, the more Dr Mitchell's bitterness faded. He began to ponder the paradoxes presented to him.
First, the body in the car was the body of the real Michael Zellaby, he knew, since he had gotten a good look at the corpse when he'd been squashing it into the boot. Yet when that body had been alive, every inch of it had been the body of a young American man (and here Dr Mitchell recalled Rose's initial reaction to Zellaby, in the hospital, and the name she'd given him – "Jack.") And, during unconsciousness, the body's shimmering face had somehow been both Zellaby and Jack.
Secondly, the impossible physiology of Rose's boyfriend Peter Harkness. Rose obviously knew the truth about his abnormalities, yet refused to reveal it – instead she had fed the neurosurgeon a pack of nonsense. So, if Dr Mitchell assumed that everything she had told him was a lie, all he had to do was remove all the possibilities she had given and see what was left.
She had said he was the result of government experiments – so he wasn't. She had said that it was all the result of natural mutation – so it couldn't be. At one point she'd even claimed that he was a patchwork of complex surgery like Frankenstein's monster – so Dr Mitchell could rule out organ transplantation as well. What options did that leave? There was simply no possible medical explanation for such strange anatomy in any living human being, which meant…
Dr Mitchell shook his head and thought about the next mystery.
Thirdly, there were the seven identical murders and the face of their killer captured on film: Peter Harkness again – despite the fact that the last two deaths had occurred while Peter Harkness was supposed to be detained in hospital. At first Dr Mitchell's deductive reason told him that Peter Harkness had killed those final two victims after he had locked himself in his room on that first night and when he had escaped the next night.
But Rose's dogmatic insistence of his innocence made Mitchell think twice. The sixth victim had been found a few hours outside of London, dead for several hours prior to that – how had Peter Harkness killed her and returned to central London in time to fall victim to the stroke that had drawn Mitchell into this whole mess? And how, mere hours after escaping hospital and with his face on the front page of every newspaper, had he walked into a secure police station and murdered the school caretaker under the noses of dozens of cops?
Rose had to be right. Peter Harkness was, at the least, innocent of the two most recent murders and had nothing to link him to the other five. Dr Mitchell pulled open his briefcase and lifted on his copy of the front page with the infamous photograph of the "murderer". So how had Harkness' face gotten in front of that camera? It was clearly his face, albeit slightly blurred and (weirdly) wearing his victim's clothing…
Dr Mitchell felt his brain leap from the logical into the insane.
And there was Dr Zellaby – well, Jack's – slanderous efforts to prevent the police interviewing Peter Harkness – Rose's claim that he had even kidnapped Harkness right before the caretaker's death – whoever the man was, he was desperate to pin the deed on Harkness, yet Rose had said "I'm not letting them get their hands on Peter". Conspiracy, kidnapping, nameless men, murder… but not… no, that was ridiculous…
Dr Mitchell snapped his briefcase shut, rocketed to his feet and bolted into the rugby club. "Rose!" He cried. "Rose!"
She was just coming into the foyer; he careened past two burly students heading off to their hotel and grabbed Rose's shoulders.
"Are they aliens?" he panted. "Please, tell me I'm insane, but I can't see how this could be human technology – are they aliens?"
She raised one eyebrow and he briefly considered whether he had gone insane, but she answered, "You took your time figuring it out. Duh."
"And they're shapeshifters, am I right? All except your Peter?" he asked, voice quivering, holding her gaze steady.
Now she was surprised. "Yeah. That's right."
"And – in the wastepaper basket – that was one as well, wasn't it?"
Rose lips parted. She glanced over her shoulder, back into the hallway at something Dr Mitchell couldn't see. Then she leaned through, said to someone out of sight, "Stay there for one minute, got that?" and pulled the door shut. When she turned back to him, her face was terrified.
"That's it," she whispered, leaning against the door. "That's what I killed."
She slid down the door, her hoodie bunching up against her back, staring vacantly at a rugby trophy on the far wall. Dr Mitchell, his elation at having solved the riddle wilting, stood awkwardly to one side, too nervous to touch her.
"I just thought it was a sort of thing. A plant or a fleshy machine or something," Rose murmured, as if to herself. "And it was somebody's mother."
"Well, look, I don't know if we can presume that much…" Dr Mitchell said earnestly, in his best cheering-up-terminally-ill-patients voice.
"It was," she ran her fingers through her fringe. "I've met the daughter. Jesus Christ, I orphaned somebody."
Dr Mitchell leaned down and took hold of her arm. "It was going to kill you," he said.
Rose looked up at him. Dr Mitchell could see that she wasn't any sort of secret agent. She wasn't a criminal either. She was probably the only human in this mess. Well, he'd be damned if he left a fellow human fighting the good fight alone in an interplanetary war.
"Come on," he grunted, pulling her to her feet. "You've got to tell me what to do next."
This snapped Rose back to life. "My mum!" she snarled at him. "You said you knew where she was, didn't you? That's who it's going after. It wants revenge."
Then she did something rather unexpected. She opened the door, reached back into the hallway and pulled out a small, tear-stained identical twin of herself. This was a rather impressive conjuring trick. Dr Mitchell was speechless.
"We need your car," Rose said, dragging him and the small twin by their sleeves towards the door of the rugby club.
"The bumper fell off," Dr Mitchell protested weakly.
"Trust me, I've been in worse situations," she snapped.
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Rose decided the doppelganger should sit in the front seat and she took the back. It was not so much for security reasons and more that she wanted the girl as far as possible from the boot wherein lay the unceremonially discarded body of her mother.
"Right," she said firmly, as they pulled out of the gravel driveway and Dr Mitchell's car clattered onto the road. She leaned forward to get the doppelganger's attention. "You're going to tell me everything you know about how you and your grandmother got to this planet. And what the Doc- the Time Lord has to do with it, yeah?"
The girl leaned against the window and fiddled with her seatbelt. "We came 'cos everyone got sick," she shrugged.
"Aliens. This is incredible. Are they relatives of that ship at Christmas? Are they?" Dr Mitchell muttered feverishly.
Rose ignored him and focused on the doppelganger. "Who's everyone? Your family? Your country?" Rose pressed.
Her twin shrugged again.
"Think hard! How did you get here?" Rose ordered.
"Hush up," Dr Mitchell frowned at her. "You'd make an awful doctor."
"Thanks," Rose said with heavy sarcasm.
Dr Mitchell glanced at the young shapeshifter. "What's your name?" he asked.
The look of affection the doppelganger gave him made Rose cringe. She hadn't meant to be so rude. She wasn't normally like this, was she? It was the Doctor's job to be rude. Rose did the soothing and fraternising with frightened civilians and household servants. Normally.
"You can't say it with these organs," the girl said. "Rose calls me 'doppelganger'. I don't know what it means but it sounds ok."
"I've never called you doppelganger!" Rose said indignantly.
"In your head," the girl replied.
Rose felt shock ripple through her. "You can read my mind?" But then surely the girl would know what she had done…
The doppelganger shrugged again. "No. Just bits. Those are the only two words I could pick up. Also that you call the Time Lord 'Doctor' and you know that he's going to die unless you can fix what's wrong with him."
Rose stared at her, but her twin was still absent-mindedly pulling the seatbelt in and out of its cradle. She hadn't thought that consciously. "Hey," she grabbed the girl's arm. "He's not gonna die. Why would he die?"
"He needs his ship. It's killing him to be separate from her. You know that. I saw it in your head," the girl said, shaking off Rose's hand.
Dr Mitchell cleared his throat. "So, er, young lady. Rose tells me you're a shapeshifter?"
He must have figured this out himself, as Rose hadn't said any such thing.
The doppelganger beamed proudly. "That's why I look like Rose and not like me. I'm prettier like me. There weren't many others like me… I mean, the sickness makes people look ugly. My cousins got it and they looked ugly and died. And Mum," her smile vanished and she mumbled. "Mum too. Gran's still pretty."
Dr Mitchell nodded sagely, but when his eyes met Rose's they were grim. "Rose, can you think of any ugly or pretty things we've seen recently? In my wastepaper basket, or on the street under my car?"
Rose realised what he was on about, and with exaggerated confusion, replied, "No, Dr Mitchell, I don't think we've seen anything like that."
"Oh. We'll just have to keep looking," the doctor answered, leaning across to pat the doppelganger's shoulder reassuringly. He glared at Rose as he did it.
"What?" she snapped.
"Nothing," he grumbled.
She stuck her head between the two forward seats in order to confront him. "This isn't my fault!"
"I'm thinking of me, actually," he said icily. "And what shame I'm bringing to the medical profession." His knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. "We're going to rescue your mother, understand, Rose? No more deaths."
"You think I want that?" she could only resist the urge to smack him by reminding herself that he was driving.
"What? Why are you both so guilty?" the doppelganger asked. Rose wondered if she'd picked that up with her telepathy.
"Nothing, sweetie," Rose said without taking her eyes of Dr Mitchell.
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"Prime Minister? Are you alright? Hold on, ma'am, I'm sending in my men…"
Harriet Jones was trying to tell her driver to get back into the car and take his gun away from the Doctor's head. She whipped the phone back to her ear and snapped, "Stop that, Samson, I'm perfectly alright. I'll see you in a few minutes."
"…Yes, ma'am."
"And Samson? Next time I tell you my trip is confidential, don't have me followed or I will have to take some rather harsh punitive action."
"Fair cop, ma'am."
The Doctor (a few moments prior) had appeared out of the shadows by the road and, like a puppy seeing its owner arrive home, had bounded over to the tinted-glass window – apparently tinted glass had no effect on him and he was looking straight through it at Harriet Jones. He waited, grinning, for the prime minister to sort out the bristling armed driver.
"Hamish, it's fine, it's fine," she called, putting the phone back on its hook and pushing the door open.
The driver glared at the eccentrically dressed maniac but holstered his weapon and stepped back. The Doctor had obviously been waiting for this, because he broke into chatter instantaneously. Harriet Jones made out the word 'Rose' and a gesture that seemed to mean 'nailed my foot to the floor'. He continued in his charades for almost a minute without any sign of slowing down. The Prime Minister, who felt as if she was listening to Lassie barking out that Timmy was trapped down the old mine shaft, could only decipher a sense of impending danger from the babble.
"Stop it," she snapped at last. The Doctor fell silent. Harriet Jones got back into the car. "Come on. Get in."
He gave her another Lassie-reminiscent smile and climbed into the car after her.
"Downing Street, Hamish. Whatever he has to tell us, I'm not going to figure it all out on my own. But can we do our best not to be seen?"
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Rose, Dr Mitchell and the Doppelganger sat in the car, watching the police station from half a block away.
"Have you called her cellphone?" Dr Mitchell asked.
"Twice. It's turned off," Rose replied.
"Why can't your species listen for each other's thoughts?" The doppelganger asked.
"Because it's rude, yeah?" Rose hissed at her.
"Don't snap at her, Rose. And I'm not driving any closer," the doctor declared. "I don't need my number plate to be associated with you."
"I think it fell off miles back," Rose told him. "Are you absolutely sure this is the right station?"
"Of course not. They could have taken her somewhere else. But it was the right station last night when they took your mum into custody."
The headlights of a car swept around the corner and the three of them ducked down until it was gone.
"Alright, I'm just going to go in there and ask them if they're holding her," Rose sighed.
'I'm not coming in," Dr Mitchell said at once, like a child yelling 'bags not!' when asked by a teacher to complete a particularly distasteful task.
"I know, I know. Just drive round the block or something, okay? I'll call you when I need you to pick us up."
She got out of the car, shivering in the chill air. Dr Mitchell leaned across and grabbed her sleeve. His voice was strained. "Rose, be careful. That thing could be waiting for you. You don't even have a weapon."
"The Doctor never needs one," Rose shrugged. "You keep driving. Remember that it might be able to outrun your car."
"Oh, yes, because I'd totally forgotten that particular constituent of our mortal peril," he answered sarcastically. A laugh bubbled out of Rose and she hurried off before Dr Mitchell could think she was actually getting used to his company.
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In hindsight, it hadn't been one of Rose's best ideas to walk straight into the station and announce herself as Jackie Tyler's daughter.
It wasn't that she'd forgotten about the murders. She'd just sort of assumed that someone would believe her when she said she had nothing to do with them and explained that her mother was in danger and had to be taken to safety.
They didn't. They arrested her on the spot, handcuffed her, sat her down in the office with a dozen officers (some of who were obviously rather over-excited at the prospect of making headway in the mystery) and started questioning her.
'Looking, this is bloody mad, it wasn't me," Rose protested for the sixteenth time.
"We'll make that call in court, Miss Tyler," the sergeant said sourly, leaning forward in an intimidating manner, as if he practised his intimidation techniques in front of the mirror in the morning. "For one, I believe you. Nice girl like you doesn't go around poisoning people until their brains leak out their ears. But nice girls do get caught up with bad men sometimes – we understand how these things happen. So tell us where we can find your boyfriend and we'll let you see your mother, alright?"
It took all of Rose's willpower not to screech like a banshee. "Firstly, he's not even my boyfriend, he's just – a guy I travel with, and secondly, I told you, he's got nothing to do with those deaths. He was inebriated in hospital, for chrissake!"
The sergeant raised one eyebrow, again as if he had been practising. "The same hospital that he escaped from on the night of the latest murder? Right after we arrived to take him into custody?"
"He was kidnapped!" Rose replied, wilting a little at how unconvincing this sounded. One of the officers at the back of the room stifled a snigger. Rose felt her eye twitch.
"Look, let me – let me call Dr Mitchell, yeah?" she asked desperately, leaning forward and holding out her hands, still cuffed together. "You know he's not in on this – he tipped you guys off in the first place! I'll bring him in here and he'll tell you I'm not lying."
The sergeant shook his head. "You can call him later, Miss Tyler. If your boyfriend really is innocent, what's the harm of bringing him in to have a chat with us? I'm sure we can sort this whole mess out."
"I don't know where he is," Rose said through gritted teeth, avoiding the sergent's eyes because of an innate fear that he could tell she was lying. "He could be any…" as her gaze wandered across the room it fell on a television at the other end of the office. The sound was turned off but Rose could see the logo of the late-night news. The presenter's face appeared and then the screen switched to a wobbly camera shot of a building.
Rose flung her arms up and pointed to the screen. "That's Downing Street!"
The sergeant gave her a very patronising look. "Well done, Miss Tyler."
"Turn it up, please!" Rose begged.
The sergeant shook his head again, but the officer nearest the TV curiously switched on the volume.
"…footage captured about half an hour ago outside the Prime Minister's office. We remind viewers that the identity of the man accompanying the Prime Minister has not yet been confirmed, and the office bluntly refused to comment when contacted a few minutes ago. However…"
Rose didn't hear the rest. She felt the blood washed from her cheeks and her lower lip tremble a little as she watched a loop of Harriet Jones getting out of a long black car and hurrying up several steps to a back entrance of the building. Right behind her, ducking his head under a Burberry cap, was the figure of a man who, just as the two of them vanished into the doorway, looked up. His sideburn-clad face glowed on the screen for a moment and was gone.
"Oi? Was that…?" one of the officers squawked, grabbing the cigarette out of his mouth. Everyone in the room followed his gaze towards the back wall of the office, where the newspaper photo and freeze-frames from the schoolyard security camera had been plastered on wide glossy paper.
"Jesus, no, must be a media prank," the sergeant muttered, eyes boggling at the screen.
"Sergent, they… surely they wouldn't… unless they were totally sure…?"
The sergeant rubbed his mouth and mumbled something about what "constituted as ridiculous nowadays".
Rose looked from the television screen to the wall covered in clippings and photographs of the suspect. The Doctor's face stared back at her from dozens of angles. Copies amid copies: twists amid twists.
"It's not him," Rose croaked. "I… I fell for her trick…"
None of them were listening. The sergeant was barking at his men as fevered discussion broke out among the officers.
Rose buried her head in her chained hands. "I fell for it. Stupid ape. Mum was never in danger. She just wanted me out of the way. She was following the Prime Minister. And I didn't even warn Harriet Jones about the shapeshifters. Stupid ape!"
Her phone had been confiscated and locked up somewhere as evidence. That phone had her only record of the Prime Minister's extension number. She would have to reach Dr Mitchell, and if they drove really, really, fast, Harriet Jones might still be alive when they got there.
Rose looked up at the bickering officers. No one was even looking at her. She stood up and waited for someone to glance in her direction. No one did.
The door was right here. Rose sidled casually towards it, twisted the doorknob with both hands, slipped out into the corridor and, holding her manacled hands against her stomach, started to run.
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I've got holidays in a week so I might update the next chapter a bit faster. Fingers crossed.
