A/N: after watching a History channel special on Stonehenge and the unique acoustics of the site I came up with idea. The interesting bit was when they described that it is possible that shaman used the acoustics of Stonehenge to go into a trance by having drummers drum at a certain frequency that turns Stonehenge essentially into a giant singing water glass. The sounds that these drummers could maintain at these frequencies are sort of like a mental lubricant allowing the mind to easily slip into a trance state. Anyway if anyone really wants to know the particulars they can contact me and I'd be glad to tell them. I'd been mulling over ideas for the bump in the night ficathon for a few days so when this dawned on me as I watched the program, I was all too happy to let the muse work it out. And now on with the story.
The Doctor was so excited about their newest destination that he was physically bouncing as he led Rose down the ramp to the doors of the TARDIS. He was guiding her gently by her hands as a handkerchief had been tied around her eyes like a blindfold to keep their location a surprise until the Doctor deemed the view worthy enough for a big reveal.
"You're going to love this Rose! Absolutely love it!" He said for the ninth time since Rose had appeared in the consol room asking where they were off to next.
"Can I see yet?" Rose asked as she stumbled over yet another dip in the ground. It felt as though they were walking over a field of some kind.
"Not yet."
They walked for a few more yards until the Doctor finally deemed this view as the best, the most breathtaking, or simply where he had meant to take her.
"Ta da!" The doctor cried and tugged on the knot in the handkerchief around Rose's head revealing their location with a pomp that only the Doctor could accomplish.
Rose had to admit, Stonehenge was pretty impressive whole and unbroken.
The Doctor had led her to the outer ring of stones and stood her so that she had to crane her neck to see the tops, she felt positively dwarfed by the size and solemnity of the blue-grey rock.
"Rose Tyler I have taken you to a time and a place that archaeologists would be killing themselves for the opportunity to see. It is the year 2387 B.C. or B.C.E. depending on who you ask. And the place you know as Stonehenge is a fully operating religious center, and tonight we are going to have the unique opportunity of seeing one of the rituals performed here."
Rose looked up at the Doctor sharply. "I heard on the telly once that there were human sacrifices and stuff like that here."
"Well, yes, there was the occasional animal sacrifice and even rarer still; human sacrifice, but that's not what we're seeing tonight. Tonight the local shaman and religious leaders are gathering for a communal with the dead. The thing is Stonehenge is like a giant fancy wine glass. When you run your finger over the rim of those wine glasses at a certain speed your finger sends out sound waves and the glass starts to sing."
Rose made an excited noise that meant she was following the Doctor's train of thought for once. They moved into the ring of stones and took a seat near the ring of smaller blue stones.
"Well, Stonehenge can be used the same way. When the drummers near the edges of the circle start drumming at a certain frequency the stones begin to vibrate and hum. It turns out that this frequency is also the same frequency at which the human mind starts to produce alpha waves. And alpha waves are the waves the human brain produces when they are in a state of relaxation but not quite REM sleep. The torches around the inside of the ring also begin to dance when the stones begin to vibrate leading the locals to believe that the gods and spirits are present. It should be quite an experience."
"You've never done this before?" Rose asked when a flare of trepidation suddenly rose in her chest.
"Nope!" The Doctor said cheerfully. "Isn't that brilliant? I've been meaning to do this for quite some time and it's just one of those things that never seemed to happen."
"But Doctor, how do you know that this won't affect you differently than it would a human?"
"I don't." He reached over and squeezed Rose's hand reassuringly. "Nothing bad's going to happen Rose, I promise."
Rose managed to give a weak smile before the nervous feeling in her gut washed it from her face once again.
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As night fell, more and more people filed into the giant ring of stones, soon the place was full and the ceremony was begun. First the shaman walked up to the altar stone and motioned for the torches to be lit. Next the drummers were called in and Rose watched as they made a circle behind the people in the gap between the inner ring and outer ring. Then slowly the drummers began to beat out a pattern.
The Doctor reached for Rose's hand again and squeezed it with an excited grin. The nervous feeling hadn't left her yet so she pulled the Doctor's hand into her lap and laced their fingers together before cupping her free hand around their joined hands.
"It's okay," he whispered to her. "Just watch the flames and let your mind wander a little. This will be over in an hour or so."
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The Doctor had been right, with the drummers beating out a fast pace and making the stones thrum and the ground shake and flames flicker, it was easy to slip into a trance and feel like a sort of presence was all around you. After a while Rose began to feel a bit disconnected from her body save for the tingling in her fingers where the Doctor's hand was still clutched between her own.
Rose was however glad when it was over without her nervousness coming to fruition even though she had enjoyed the experience after all.
People had begun to leave and mingle amongst themselves when Rose pulled herself from her trance.
"Time to go I think Doctor." Rose said starting to pull on their still-linked hands and get up.
He didn't budge.
There was a sinking feeling in Rose's chest and she had to force herself to turn and look at the Doctor.
His eyes were open Bambi wide but had a glazed-over look to them, like he wasn't seeing what was right in front of him.
"Doctor?" she called, shaking him gently with her free hand as she didn't yet have the heart to pull apart. She did notice that his fingers were limp in her own.
"Doctor?" she said a bit more frantically, snapping in front of his eyes, gently tapping his cheeks with the flat of her palm.
Rose's pleas for him to wake up got more and more desperate until she resigned to playing dirty. Rose leaned forward and sealed her lips over his in a bruising kiss, and cupped his crotch with her hand and squeezed with pressure that surely would have hurt, hoping that the shock or pain might wake him.
The Doctor didn't move or even blink.
Rose sat back on her heels and tried not to panic.
She was ecstatic however when the Doctor gasped for breath and blinked furiously.
"Respiratory bypass… forgot how much it hurts when you start breathing again." He said in between gasps for air.
The Doctor then turned to his right with a smile and Rose watched as panic spread over his face.
"Rose?" He called.
"I'm right here." Rose replied, but he was either ignoring her, or hadn't heard her at all.
"Rose? Are you alright?"
Rose finally followed his eyes to one really big thing that she had missed. She saw herself, collapsed on the grass next to the Doctor, his hand still clutched tightly in her own. Rose looked down with horror to discover that though she could feel the Doctor's hands in hers, the hands in front of her face, the hands connected to her body, were empty.
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Rose followed the Doctor as he carried her physical self back to the TARDIS and into the infirmary.
On the way there Rose had discovered that she was entirely invisible, and inaudible to the world around her. However, there was one way in which she could communicate; touch. She could grip and move and use physical things as long as she looked at what she was doing because she couldn't feel any of it. She still had emotions and stuff like that but the only way for her to feel the world around her was for her to feel it on her physical body.
Rose could only guess that the same was true for the rest of her senses as well. She couldn't smell anything, or taste anything but that of the inside of her own mouth as usual. She could hear, but with her body so close to all of the sounds she was hearing (i.e. the Doctor's hearts thumping wildly in his chest and his steady breathing) she guessed that what she was hearing was being picked up by her physical ears as well. Sight, she could only guess was a convenient breaking of what seemed to be the rule. She could see the Doctor's expression was one that she only saw when he was getting ready to do the impossible or otherwise break every single one of his rules.
He set her down gently on the examination table and Rose felt a tug on her heartstrings as she watched him stroke her hair and cup her cheek for a moment with a heartbroken expression on his face. Then he turned away and pulled a machine on a trolley over to the table and pulled a camera-esque device from the ceiling and situated it to hover over her face. Pressing a few buttons on the machine, it powered up and the camera-thing began to scan down her body with a bright red light.
A holographic image appeared floating above her body and the Doctor put on his specs to examine it.
The image was a perfect rendering of her in the nude but maintained her dignity by blurring over those areas that she wasn't too sure she wanted the Doctor to see… well not without some kissing first, at least…
"That's not good." The Doctor said when the scan finished.
"What? What is it?" Rose cried a little panicked, forgetting for a moment that he couldn't hear her.
However the Doctor continued as if he had heard. "Rose Tyler, you appear to be all but brain dead… Everything in your body has shut down, all the major organs, everything… except for your brain. Your brain is going haywire…"
And indeed when Rose looked to the head of the hologram, the brain could be seen flickering and flashing like a London nightclub.
"You seem producing alpha waves like you're still in a trance," the Doctor continued, "but you're also producing the sorts of frequencies as when you're awake… What? But that's impossible!" The Doctor cried ruffling his hair into disarray. "You can't be completely aware of everything around you and completely unaware at the same time! That's a paradox and negates itself a hundred times over…"
Rose looked down at herself looking pale and small on the examination table.
"Oh Rose." The Doctor sighed. He knelt by the table and took her hand. "I'm sorry this happened to you. Whatever 'this' is. I really am."
Rose looked down at the hand by her side as the hand the Doctor was holding on her body tingled and grew warm by her hip. This was quite possibly the weirdest thing that had ever happened to her in her travels with the Doctor, and that included taking into account the times she'd lost her face, been possessed by a bitchy trampoline, and turned to stone.
"I'm going to have to put you in a preserver for a while, until I can figure out a way to revive you. That's a bit like a freezer and will prevent your body from doing any unsavory things like decomposing."
"It's okay Doctor," she said, "Just do what you can, I understand." She brushed her fingers over the back of his neck and the Doctor shook his head and rolled his shoulders as if he'd felt her.
Suddenly there was a blooping sound and the heart of the hologram turned red for an instant, the red then traveled to all parts of her body and faded.
The Doctor had his best solving-the-mystery face on when Rose's eyes turned back to him.
"Oh yes!" He cried and stood suddenly. "You're still alive Rose! Oh you brilliant girl! You're brain's not dead and neither is the rest of you, it's just slowed itself down so that it just keeps you alive! Oh, that's the best news I've had in a long time!" He kissed her body on the forehead and Rose couldn't help but smile.
"You've figured it out?" She knew he couldn't hear her, but she also couldn't bring herself to care when the Doctor was in this type of state.
"I've figured it out Rose! You're still in a trance, for some reason you couldn't break it when the drumming stopped and the circle was broken. But why not? The beat induces a trance… a trance in which people feel like they're communing with spirits or… or…" a smile spread over the Doctor's face. "Oh, now that is brilliant… that would explain all that little stuff going on with the hairs on the back of my neck. I thought it was just static or something slightly timey-wimey but no, it's Rose, has to be… Rose?" He called out to her now rather than babbled to himself. "Rose if you can hear me… you can't move anything can you?"
Rose looked around quickly for something not too-fragile to fling across the room. The Doctor's eye jumped to a trolley when it was hit by a flying jar of dermal repair gel.
"Oi! Careful with that Rose, it's hard to find that stuff anymore… Well, for people without time machines… But you're here. You're in the room with me. If I can just locate…"
The Doctor closed his eyes and concentrated very hard. Rose watched as his hand extended and he walked toward her.
The Doctor stopped when the hairs on the back of his hand stood up from static.
"Hello Rose Tyler." The Doctor grinned. "You're just your consciousness right now, brainwaves, nothing really solid, but I can still feel it when I touch you, all prickly like all over my hand."
Rose stared at the hand coming out of her ribs with something akin to disgust.
"Oooh, what's that… your mood just shifted. Oh, oh, sorry then! I must be prodding you somewhere rather unmentionable aren't I?" The Doctor withdrew his hand from her chest and put both hands palms-up in front of him.
"Better let you come to me then… Rose, would you put your hands in mine?"
She did so.
"There you are Rose." He said with a grin. "Barely there at all, but there all the same. Another ghost on the TARDIS. Now Rose I need you to do something for me, I need you to believe that I'm going to fix this. Can you do that?"
Rose squeezed his hands as tightly as she could in reply.
"Oh, you're brilliant you are." He said affectionately, but then pulled away.
With that the Doctor lifted Rose's body from the examination table and dashed through the corridors of the TARDIS.
"Allonz-y!" he shouted over his shoulder.
Rose dashed after him and back out into Stonehenge where the shaman and a few other people were still lingering after their communal.
"Erm, excuse me but I have a bit of a crisis." The Doctor said making his way over to the shaman.
The shaman turned away from the group of people he was speaking to and looked at the Doctor a little unimpressed.
"The faith healings take place tomorrow night. Please come back then." He said with the wave of his hand.
"No, you don't understand, this just happened to her tonight, during the communal ceremony."
"Oh," the shaman said, "That is a bit different… place her on the altar stone."
The Doctor did so.
"This does happen sometimes when the person is inexperienced with the power of the stones. However, it is rather easy to reverse. We will play the drums and you must slip into a trance and go to find her. She is having an out-of-body experience and may be a long way from here."
"I very much doubt that." The Doctor replied, "Very partial to me." He said when the shaman gave him a look. Rose slapped him on the arm and he grinned in her general direction.
"When you find her bring her back and both of you must reenter the trance state sitting in your respective bodies. Then when we cease to play, you will wake up and remember nothing of the experience overall. Some do remember a bit but that is a very rare occurrence."
The Doctor nodded and sat next to Rose's body on the altar stone. The drumming started again and soon the Doctor felt the power of the singing stones and slipped into a trance much like before. Then something different happened, his body seemed to fall away and lie next to hers on the stone but a sort of translucent shape of the Doctor remained sitting upright.
The Doctor blinked a few times and looked around.
"Are you sure this worked?" he asked the Shaman.
The Shaman didn't reply.
"They can't hear you." Rose said, hoping beyond hope that this time he would hear her as she could hear him.
The Doctor's head whipped around and a huge grin split his face when he saw her. "Rose!" he cried and she smiled back.
He hopped off the stone and took several huge steps toward her until he could wrap her in the biggest hug he could muster.
They traveled right through each other.
Rose looked behind her where the Doctor had stepped through her and caught his equally amazed and horrified expression.
"Right, no touch then." He said.
"You can feel when someone touches your body though. An' you can touch things that are real, like solid real, s' the first thing I did when I woke up this way… tried to get you to wake up too cause I thought you were stuck or something." Rose said, "Not that that really makes it any better…"
"Right…" the Doctor nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets. "The sooner we're back in our bodies the better, yeah?"
"Yeah."
The Doctor and Rose lay down on the altar stone, mimicking the positions of their corporeal bodies, "I assume you could hear what the Shaman said about how we get out of this?"
"I did, yeah." Rose nodded. "I'm not going to remember this at all when I wake up."
"Neither am I." the Doctor said.
There was a long pause before he swallowed hard and said, "Since that's the case I'm going to do something that I'm too much of a coward to do when I'm awake…"
Rose felt her heart flutter a little. "What's that?" she whispered.
"This." The Doctor leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the lips of her unconscious body. Rose felt warmth bloom over her incorporeal mouth and she wished desperately to kiss him back.
She hated him a little in those moments that he finally did something she'd always wanted, and Rose would never remember it, and what might be worse, he wouldn't remember doing it either. Then again, the only reason he kissed her in the first place was because he knew that she would never know that he finally crossed the line between good friends and… well really good friends.
"In that case," Rose said when he pulled back. "I'm going to do something that I've always been too afraid to do when we're awake…"
"What's that?" he asked leaning instinctively toward her mouth.
Since the Doctor had fallen on his side when his consciousness slipped out of his body she reached around and goosed him hard on the bum, then sealed her lips over his to silence the indignant yelp of surprise and finished off by combing her fingers through his gorgeous hair.
"You, Rose Tyler, don't play fair!" The Doctor panted a little as he spoke.
"Neither do you." She pointed out, and then added. "We should work on that whole getting back into our bodies thing now."
"Yeah, yeah we should." The Doctor replied his face showing only a little of the disappointment and shame he felt for taking advantage of her like he had.
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Rose's eyes fluttered open and she saw the shapes of people standing over her.
When her eyes focused it was the Doctor's huge grin that greeted her.
"Hello." He said in that special way he sometimes did.
"Hello." She replied and she couldn't help the grin that spread over her face.
Before she knew it she was being held tightly to the Doctor as he buried his face in her neck.
"Hey?" she said, "Everything's alright yeah?"
"Well, sort of." The Doctor admitted letting her go.
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"So I had an out-of-body experience?" Rose asked on the way back to the TARDIS.
"Yup." The Doctor replied, but there was something in his voice that was sad.
"I don't remember any of it." She said.
"The shaman said you wouldn't."
"You had to go after me you said… do you remember anything?"
The Doctor took a little too long to respond. "No, I don't."
Rose knew that translated to "I remember everything." But didn't push him on the matter, trusting him to tell her without prodding when the time was right.
Although in doing so, never being told was a possibility too.
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A/N: I ended it there for a specific reason, while my little shipper heart keeps saying: "Keep going! You have to have some sentimental mushy stuff to end it properly!" The rest of me is going, that wasn't the purpose of this fic, and while I did add in the kisses and everything because of how freakin' OTP those two are, that isn't the appropriate time or place for it to be addressed. I dunno, adding more about him sharing feelings and stuff just didn't seem like the right way to end it.
Please review! Let me know if this is anywhere near as up to expectations! Having lots of people say they can't wait to see how this ends is a lot of pressure! This was a lot of fun to write though so I'm glad people enjoyed it as much as I did.