Well...here it is, then. 'The Hungry Earth'/'Cold Blood' - and I think we all know what this means, don't we? Better get ready for a certain amount of feels toward the end.
But first and foremost, there is going to be a little twist in the way these parts of the story are going to go down - read on to find out what! :/
Eaten by the Ground…
"Behold – RIO!" the Doctor announced grandly…only to be confronted by a sight that was the furthest thing on Earth from Rio. And this could hardly go unnoticed by his companions as they proceeded out of the TARDIS – Romana, Amy and Rory, one-by-one, in that respective order.
"Nah," Amy shook her head through the cool air, keenly felt through her warm-weather clothes – Raggedy Man had gotten the flight wrong again. Good thing she was wearing a leather jacket, or it'd probably be a lot worse.
"Not really getting the Sunshine Carnival vibe," Rory added his tuppence to the conversation.
"Course you aren't," Romana deadpanned in a playful tone. "This isn't Rio, a State in Brazil – this is Cwmtaff, a village in Wales. We're on the wrong Continent! Nice going, Doctor – don't expect to see the swimsuit anytime soon."
"What about a swimsuit?" Amy, curious as ever, had to ask.
"Let's not go there," Rory groaned – first the Sonic jokes and now the swimsuit that Romana apparently had.
"I was expecting Rio!" the Time Lady defended her choice in what went underneath her normal clothes this trip…before realising that something was wrong with what was going on beneath her feet. "And on a complete non-sequitur, why does the ground feel weird?" She jumped on the spot to feel a trembling sensation through the bottom of her orange sandals.
"Wait – that's weird!" her fiancé told them, running over to a patch of oddly coloured grass that one wouldn't expect to find on Earth…not in this Time Period, at least.
"What's weird?"
"Doctor, stop trying to distract us," Amy called after him as Romana went to join in his examination. "We're in the wrong place. Doctor, it's freezing and I've dressed for Rio. We're not stopping here-"
"Says who, exactly?" Romana gave the other ginger a pointed stare as she replied. "Something curious has come up and caught the Doctor's attention, Amelia – why not take a good look?" She gestured to the patch of oddly coloured grass. Amy was quiet for a few moments before speaking again.
"But that's…"
"Blue grass?" the Time Lady continued, getting a nod by way of reply. "Yep – something that shouldn't really happen…with patches all over this Graveyard…"
"So…Earth, 2020-ish, ten years in your future," the Doctor cut in. "Wrong Continent for Rio, I'll admit…but it's not a massive overshoot." Romana made a sound that was somewhere between an amused chuckle and a disbelieving snort, leaving him to glare playfully at her.
"Why are those people waving at us?" Amy pointed out two figures on the far side of the valley. Something was vaguely familiar about their clothing…something that reminded them of…
"Can't be…" the Doctor breathed in complete shock.
"It is…" Romana confirmed with a whisper – there they were, Amy and Rory from the Future…waving at the TARDIS Crew as if to give their love to long ago. She caught sight of their Rory waving back in her peripheral vision…until one word from Amy stopped him.
"It is! It's our Ponds!" the older Time Lord exclaimed, having used a pair of binoculars to determine who the waving couple were for certain.
"No, we're here. How can we be up there?" Rory asked, utterly confused by what he was both seeing and hearing.
"Time Travel, Rory," Romana reminded the poor Nurse. While this incarnation may have liked Humans more than any of her previous incarnations – though Romana II may have been a close second when it came to fondness for the Doctor's favourite species – she still sometimes felt they were slow on the uptake. However, having already told their companions that she would have been as proud to call them foster parents as the Doctor would have been to call Wilf his father…she sometimes felt that she was a child – and in many ways, she could be analogised to an older teenager verging on the beginning of true adulthood – showing her parents a favourite hobby or toy…with them offering guidance if things got out of hand. "And before you ask, no – we can't go and chat." That would be her telling them what wasn't possible, then.
"No, best not – really best not, these things get complicated very quickly, and-" the Doctor stopped when he saw a nearby Mine. "Oh, look – Big Mining Thing! Who doesn't love a Big Mining Thing?"
"How about someone who ended up forced to clear rocks after her 1st regeneration, before faking her death to escape?" his fiancé commented with a wry smile…and surprisingly, no bitterness toward her past in her voice. Maybe she was beginning to let go, after all.
"Right…sorry…"
"That's OK…it's not the worst thing that could have happened," she commented more than a little facetiously. She could relish the fact that she'd once played the Daleks for fools and come out alive, at least – almost nobody got that chance…besides the Doctor, of course.
"Shall we go and have a look, my Lady Romana?" the Doctor asked, eager to get off the subject of their pasts – he had a fair few bad days to forget. Maybe he really was the Man Who Forgets…
"We shall, my Lord Doctor," Romana acquiesced – surely, one inspection of a Mine couldn't hurt – before she turned to the other TARDIS Travellers. "Would you and Rory mind keeping an eye on the blue grass, Amy? I have a feeling that it's connected to the tremor in the ground."
"You and the Doctor are onto something," Amy stated – it wasn't a question.
"Please?" the Time Lady implored – she was a little wary of Mines…and Excavation Sites. Both because of what happened when she'd first landed on Skaro…and because of her jaunt onto Chloris.
"Alright then…young lady," the Human ginger muttered with a fond smile.
"Thank you," Romana said as she gave Amy a hug, proceeding to give one to Rory when she was done. "Let me know if you find anything!" With that, she set off to join the Doctor, who was waiting to head off to the Mine…
*DW* the Ponds' POV… *DW*
"If the Doctor can't get us to Rio, how's he ever gonna get us back home?" Rory had to ask – granted, TARDIS Travel was nothing short of amazing, but it would be nice to get home for a bit.
"Did you not see over there?" Amy pointed over to where their future selves had been. "It all works out fine!"
"After everything thing we've seen, we just drop back into our old lives? The Nurse and the Kissogram?" Even though he might want to get back sometime…Rory was always the more grounded of the two of them, and he had to admit that it sounded almost impossible to give up.
"I guess," the ginger Scotswoman replied with a fairly casual shrug. "Let's have a peek!"
"Hang on!" Rory stopped her before they could move any further around the Graveyard. "What are you doing with that?" He gestured down to the jewellery that was currently on Amy's ring finger.
"Engagement Ring. I though you liked me wearing that!"
"Amy, you could lose it! Cost…a lot of money, that."
"Hmm – spoilsport!" muttered Amy – honestly, one would think a man would be glad that their fiancé was wearing their Engagement Ring. She'd not failed to notice an alien necklace of some kind around Romana's neck – was that a Time Lord equivalent? "Back in a minute!" With that, she went to put the Engagement Ring back in the TARDIS…
*DW* later… *DW*
Once she came back out again, however, she was faced with two strangers standing in front of Rory. One of the strangers was a woman in a dark pink raincoat…and the other was a boy who was clearly her son.
"Well, that was quick!" said the woman in the pink raincoat, by way of greetings to Amy.
"Oh?" Amy was confused…until Rory mouthed the following explanation;
We're Police Officers, apparently…
"It's great that you came!"
"Bit retro," the boy remarked as he took a look at the exterior of the TARDIS. "What is it, Portable Crime Lab?"
"Sort of," Rory answered – well, he supposed the Doctor was a bit like Sherlock Holmes.
"Who are you?" Amy asked them.
"Ambrose Northover," the woman answered her query. "I was the one who called. I run the meals on wheels for the whole valley. This is my son, Elliot." She gestured down to the boy they now new to be Elliot.
"Where're your uniforms?"
"Don't be cheeky, Elliot, they're plain clothes," Ambrose scolded him. "CID, is it? Anyway, it's over here." With that, she led them over to another area of the Graveyard…where they would be confronted by a very strange mystery…
*DW* Romana's POV…at the Mine gates… *DW*
"'Restricted Access,'" the Doctor was quoting the sign on the gates in front of him and Romana. "'No unauthorised personnel.' Hmmm…" Without any further musing or mumble, he pointed his Sonic Screwdriver at the lock and activated it.
"Breaking and entering again, hm?" Romana smirked as the padlock came undone…though there was a slightly feigned disapproving quality to the smirk.
"What did I break? That's Sonicking and entering – totally different!" he protested as they proceeded inside.
"You're lucky that this isn't one of those places where unauthorised entry is punishable by matter dispersion…" she trailed off with a grimly humorous remark…
*DW* the Ponds' POV…in the Graveyard… *DW*
"It's a family plot, see," Ambrose was explaining to the two Earthly TARDIS Travellers as they stood near an open grave. "My Aunt Gladys died six years ago. Her husband, Alun, died a few weeks back – he lived in the house two doors down. There's not many of us left up here now."
"Mum, they don't care about that – they want to know about the dead bodies!" Elliot reminded his mother to get back onto the issue at hand.
"Yes – sorry," she apologised to Amy and Rory. "Well, they always wanted to be buried in the same plot, together. But when we went to bury Uncle Alun, Gladys wasn't there. Gone – body, coffin, everything."
"What?" Rory blurted out in utter bewilderment – even morons knew that bodies buried in graves didn't just vanish overnight.
"The mad thing is, on the surface, the grave was untouched," Ambrose continued her summary of the problem that was plaguing the area. "No signs of it having been messed with."
"What, none at all? Not a trace?" Amy asked for her to spell it out again to make sure she hadn't misheard.
"Nobody has touched the grave since my aunt was buried. But when they dug it open, the body was gone. How is that possible?" With such a succinctly summarised and mysterious problem on their hands, perhaps it was a good thing the TARDIS Crew stayed…
*DW* Romana's POV… *DW*
"Did you feel that, Romana?" the Doctor questioned right after stopping them within a tunnel to feel a tremor in the ground beneath their feet.
"Yes, Doctor – the ground doesn't feel like it should," she replied quietly so as not to alert anyone to their presence immediately. "Why do I have a strange feeling of having done something like this before?"
"Perhaps we have – I don't know, I lose track," her fiancé waved off – they were trying to move on from their pasts, after all. Whatever either of them had been about to say next never materialised…due to the fact that there was a sound coming from further down the tunnel. "Drill in Start-up Mode?" he suggested.
"Quite possibly – shall we take a look…right before you think about eating any of that blue grass?" Romana cheekily asked, holding her hand out to stop him from eating it. With a sigh, he handed it over for her to keep in her pocket, away from his mouth, before both Time Lords proceeded to the source of the sound…
"Hello!" the Doctor announced to all who were present in the Store Room – this amounted to a lone middle-aged woman.
"Who are you?" the woman demanded of the Time Lord duo. "What are you doing here? And what are you wearing?" her last question was directed at the Time Lady, clearly thinking her clothes to be weird…especially the orange trousers.
"Pray tell, what's wrong with it?" Romana replied with an affronted scowl – velvet was brilliant! It had flair, style…panache!
"Ministry of Drills, Earth & Science," the older Time Lord declared, showing the wallet of psychic paper for both to see as his fiancé moved to get a look at the computers. "New Ministry, quite big, just merged. It's a lot of responsibility on our shoulders – don't like to talk about it. What are you doing?"
"None of your business," the woman waved off, trying to get them to leave.
"Try again – where are these readings coming from?" the Time Lady pressed for information about the readings displayed on the Screen – they were some serious seismic readings that were being displayed.
"Under the soil."
"The drill's up and running again," another voice carried through as an old man entered the room, dumbfounded when he saw the Doctor and Romana. "What's going on? Who are these people?!"
"I'm the Doctor, that's Romana," the Doctor told him, making the appropriate gestures of identification. "We're just taking a look at this setup, aren't we, Romana?"
"Indeed we are, Doctor, so perhaps they'll be so kind to tell us why there's a big patch of soil in the floor?" Romana affirmed, adding in a question of her own for good measure and pointing out said patch of soil. "Or did it just appear there overnight?"
"…Yes," the woman replied in confusion. "How did you know?"
"I was only joking!" the Time Lady held up her hands. "Now let's get out of here, double-time."
"Why?"
"What are your names?" Romana asked the two Humans.
"Nasreen Chaudhry," the woman answered.
"Tony Mack," the old man gave his name.
"Well, Nasreen, Tony, take a good look at the seismic readings," Romana told them, pointing to the Screen as the Doctor took a look for himself. It was only a few moments before he told them anyway.
"It's moving," he deadpanned, deciding to take a closer look at the patch of soil, holding his head against it as if to hear. When steam began rising out from the soil, he pulled up, not quite pulling away from the area…when the ground rumbled. "I'm guessing that's not good…"
"When is it ever?" his fiancé sighed, almost knowing something was going to happen as Tony began taking a look at it for himself.
"So, the ground, the soil, the earth, moving," the Doctor quickly rambled over what the two Time Lords had just learned. "But how, why?"
"What's going on?" Tony asked, more to himself than expecting any real answer as the ground continued rumbling. "Can't be an Earthquake, can it?"
"Shouldn't think so, it's only in this room," Romana told him, answering whether he expected one or not. Suddenly, two fresh holes appeared in the floor, followed by another three. "Whatever's happening, it knows we're here."
"This isn't possible!" Nasreen breathed in disbelief, unable to comprehend what was happening beneath her very feet.
"Apparently, it is! Now how about we scram?!" the Time Lady practically ordered everyone out, brooking no argument. They began trying to head away from the patch of soil…when Tony was caught by the foot, and began sinking into the very substance of Planet Earth.
"Tony!" Nasreen cried in panic.
"Hold on!" the Doctor headed over to Tony in an effort to help the poor man, his conscience forbidding the Time Lord to leave him, managing to pull him to safety out of the soil…only for the unthinkable to happen…
"DOCTOR!" Romana screamed as a hole opened beneath her fiancé's very feet, pulling him into the crust of the Earth itself. "Nasreen, get Tony and switch off the drill! Do it now!" she almost growled the last three words. Nasreen got into action at once, pulling Tony away from the scene and heading with him to the Control Room. Romana, meanwhile, was busying herself trying to free the Doctor from whatever was pulling him beneath the surface.
"Romana, get back!" the Doctor shouted, not wanting the ground to take her as well.
"No, I'm not letting this happen!" she refused – she couldn't bear to think what would happen if he was taken down to wherever the soil would lead down to. She'd almost lost the Doctor once in the Time War – and it had left her almost completely hollow to know that her other half died, however short a period of Time that was. The agony that resulted from a Union if one of the United died – whether complete or not – was an unbearable dull ache, ever present unless the bond was closed down…and she didn't think this incarnation could do that after 37 years of being a Human.
"Romana, listen – if I go down, I could-" the Doctor tried to salvage the situation, almost certain that he wouldn't make it out of the soil.
"No, Doctor! You are not going anywhere!" she snapped, tears beginning to form as panic threatened to overwhelm her. "KEEP HOLD OF MY HAND!" She was struggling to hold onto his hand as the soil began pulling him still deeper.
"Romana, please-" he tried again, but he was cut off again.
"NO! I CAN'T!" Romana yelled hysterically, before looking him in the eyes. "Don't you understand? I can't lose you, Theta," she cried in Gallifreyan. "I lost you once in the Time War…I can't do that again. Quite aside from the agony…I'd end up being where you did, Theta. It'll be too much to bear…" Then and there, she admitted it – she couldn't bear to become the last of her kind. And in all honesty…maybe she loved him too much. But the Doctor was showing no signs of trying to get out – if anything, he seemed to be accepting it.
"It's not going to let me go, Romana," her Theta told her sadly – it was paining him to do this…for he could recall clearly the time when he'd practically begged the Master, of all people, to regenerate, with his oldest foe dying just to spite him. "Please, trust me," he implored her, wishing her to understand that he wasn't doing this out of disregard for her emotional well-being…but because he could see no other way. "I love you, my Romanadvoratrelundar," he whispered, right before he placed a kiss on her lips.
"I love you, my Theta," she choked as the tears fell freely. A bittersweet smile formed across his face as he loosened his hold on Romana's hand and allowed himself to be pulled in. "No…" she whimpered brokenly as he sank. "No…please, no…no, no…NO!" she cried, her tears falling freely as she became overwhelmed. "THETA!" Romana let out a Gallifreyan scream that conveyed her many different emotions – terror, heartbreak, sorrow, and finally, despair – before she curled up on the stone floor and sobbed…
*DW* Nasreen's POV… *DW*
When Nasreen returned to the Store Room, she found one of the most poignant, pitiable sights in the known Universe waiting for her – and what she saw sent twinges of suspense and despair surging through, though she was almost certain the emotions did not come from within her own heart. She was almost certain that what she was feeling was Romana's despair as the strange woman whimpered away in a language that she had never once heard before in her life…
Then it changed…and not for the better, either. The waves of despair were quickly changing into much darker emotions – fury, rage, and even vengeance. Again, she was certain that they were Romana's…and Nasreen had to almost force the words out to be able to speak…
*DW* Romana's POV… *DW*
"Where is he?" Nasreen asked, her voice a fearful whisper…and the reply did nothing to help it.
"They took him…" Romana whispered, her voice deadly serious, lethal, and dark. Previous dark instances were uncontrolled fits of anger…but this? No…this was something far more precise…more ruthless…more vengeful…and altogether more deadly. She had now approached a point in her life that she'd hoped never to revisit. The unthinkable had occurred…and there was nothing to stop it, save for the safety of her future husband.
The War Queen…a woman born in grief, despair, rage and hate, dying only from her war-weariness…a Demon survived by the Last Time Lady in the Universe…had been awakened. And it was going to take a lot to stop her from doing something that the Doctor would not, under any circumstances, want…
A/N: So...how do you think this went? We've got a bit of angry Romana coming up in this story...as well as a look into the nature of some of the deeds she committed during the Time War. Be ready!