…I actually have an excuse this time? Sort of. I lost my notes and clinical depression hit me hard sometime in April. It took me until the last couple of weeks of December to actually get on antidepressants; I kept just waiting for it to go away, which… it didn't. Anyway, it crippled me hardcore, and everything that I didn't absolutely have to do went undone, and I am so, so sorry. I'm not 100% now, I'm on medication for the depression and the OCD that kicked it into existence and the meds are kind of working but we're still trying to figure out dosages. Anyway, the fact that you people have stuck with me through all of this crap is incredible and so, so humbling to me. Thank you for existing.

Special thanks: All of you. I mean it.

WARNING: This is the UNBETA-ED version. I wanted to post it as soon as possible. ^_^ If my betas get back with me and have any problems with it, I'll repost. Hell, if any of you guys find something wrong with it, I'll repost. So yeah.

Onwards.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose shoved herself off of the surface, stumbled a little on the landing, and started running. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Doctor dropping his burden and falling into step beside her, brown eyes wide as they searched for the source of the disturbance.

The scream cut off suddenly and they powered forward with renewed speed, rounding an outcropping of rubbish to see a struggling figure—human, by the look of it, but it was hard to tell this far forward—being dragged by his head into an absolute wreck of a spaceship. If its interior hadn't been lit by a flickering light, Rose would have mistaken it for just another extension of the detritus all around. The hulk looked like it didn't have an original part left on it and there were entire chunks torn out of the hull—burned through, it looked like, by any number of weapons—patched up haphazardly or just given their own airlocks. Rose frankly wondered how it was even habitable, or what kind of creature could survive such a ship.

Said inhabitants didn't look much better than their craft—bandaged and limping even as they pulled their struggling captive into the airlock. She thought she caught flashes of metal at their joints, hiding beneath the scraps of cloth and scraps of flesh, and something crawled inside her with frightened curiosity.

The Doctor reflexively reached for his suit pocket for his screwdriver. Rose's heart dropped through the ground as they simultaneously remembered where it was: in the jacket currently discarded on one of the broken ships.

"Rosegetthe—"

"On it," she replied, and turned on her heels to start running the other way. She could hear the Doctor shouting—presumably figuring out if he could stop the robot-people-things from kidnapping the kid just by yelling at them for a little bit—but she didn't listen to the words.

"This would be a hell of a lot easier if you'd actually finished my screwdriver," Rose shouted over her shoulder at him.

"I can barely remember what I did the last time!" The Time Lord's voice was almost comically petulant. "Cut a man some slack!"

Rose skidded to her old seat in a cloud of oily dust, snatched both coat and jacket from the rusted hull, and dashed back to the other ship as quickly as her legs would carry her.

The cyborgs and their captive had vanished inside the airlock already; the Doctor was rapidly running up the ramp after them.

Rose growled in frustration, her trainers digging into the sun-baked dirt with faster and longer strides as she tried to catch up.

The ship began to take off.

The Doctor vanished inside the dirty, rusted airlock.

Rose would have growled in frustration if she hadn't been saving all of her breath for her running. She didn't even particularly think—not that she had time—; as the boarding ramp left the ground, she made a frantic leap for it.

Her upper body crunched on the unforgiving metal and she wheezed out a breath, trying to scrabble with her jacket-laden fingers to pull her way all the way into the ship, but the ramp helpfully started closing, tilting slowly upwards. Awkwardly, she manoeuvred her legs sideways, wincing as the rough corners dug into her hip, until she finally clawed her way inside the airlock.

Rose tried to turn around so she would slide gracefully down the tilting surface instead of plummeting head-first, but she couldn't quite make it; her trainer lost its traction on the dusty metal and she rolled, a mess of coat and jacket and blonde hair, coming to a bruising stop on the ground.

"Urgh," she said, as quietly as she could manage. She wanted to rest, or at least to lie there and figure out how bad her injuries were, but the ship lurched again and there was the suspicious sound of hissing from the door behind her. If they entered space with her still outside the ship proper…

Ignoring the pain, Rose shoved herself to her feet, panting, her blonde hair flashing around her face as she looked about as quickly as she could.

The airlock was very… airlocky. The door ramp thing at her back was the most interesting feature of the entire room, at least having the added decoration of hydraulic pumps to push it open and shut. The room was about ten or twelve feet tall, she estimated, and about half as wide and deep. Scuffles on the textured floor showed that it was… some sort of metal, but Rose couldn't see anything particularly special about it besides the dirt ground firmly in between the patterned ridges.

Traction, she guessed. That was nice. Could be useful if she needed to run anywhere in this ship.

The walls were, curiously enough, covered with the same roughened texture. The odd scratch and gouge in the surface showed that the entire room had once been a gleaming silver, but even the ceiling was rusted and filthy.

"Weird," Rose mumbled to herself. But not important in the end—or, at least, not important right now. What was important right now was the door opposite her.

It was less of a door, really, and more of an entire wall divided in quarters with neat lines. There was no singular opening mechanism she could see—must be a wireless thing, she thought, or maybe the entire thing was controlled from the inside.

Rose dug into the Doctor's jacket pocket and casually flipped the sonic screwdriver in the air. No problem.

The hissing grew louder. Rose paled a little, trying to breathe as slowly and evenly as she could, and flicked the screwdriver to the basic "unlock" setting.

No dice.

She tried another one, and another, modifying them with almost as much skill as the Doctor himself. Still nothing.

Okay. Different approach. Swallowing nervously, she modified the sound, trying to hit the general technological override frequencies. The door's programming probably defaulted to "closed", but if she could at least get it to glitch for a little bit first—

It wheezed and started groaning open.

Rose didn't hesitate a second. She ran towards it, squeezing through the crack as soon as it got wide enough for her frame, praying that she could get all the way through before the door figured out what was going on and snapped shut again.

She could definitely do without getting crushed to death. It wasn't even noon yet.

With a cry of mingled effort, pain, and triumph, she squeezed through the opening to half-collapse into the wall on the other side. Somewhat anticlimactically, the door kept opening. Slightly less anticlimactically, the ship finally realised that something wasn't quite right somewhere, and the wail of a malfunctioning alarm started wheeze-screaming through the halls.

Rose didn't worry too much about that. She was fairly used to it. Instead, she pocketed the screwdriver and started looking around to see if there was any trace of where her Time Lord had run off to.

The hall she was standing in was curiously shaped, splitting off into three directions. The entire layout reminded her of nothing so much as an office, the perfectly square cubicles extending from floor to ceiling, everything laid out in a grid and illuminated with thin strips of uninterrupted lights at each intersection of wall to ceiling or floor. The lights held their steady, thin white glow despite the clear panic going on, which made Rose feel a little bit better; the scarlet illumination of red alerts always made it so terribly hard to see.

For lack of anything better to do, she picked a direction, started running, and prayed they weren't already inside one of the cubicles. There were so many of them it would be impossible to search them all before she was caught.

Instead, she stuck to the wall, looking right every time she passed an "aisle" between the stacks of rooms. The ship couldn't be too big; if she could just catch a glimpse, even, she could probably catch up with the Doctor before—

So focussed was she on her search, she didn't notice that she was lightening until her feet actually left the ground. Squeaking, startled, she scrabbled at the floor for a few seconds, but only managed to push herself closer to the ceiling.

Exasperated, Rose stilled, floating lazily upwards and a little bit sideways. She crossed her arms and huffed a wayward strand of hair out of her face.

"What the hell kind of ship doesn't even have artificial gravity?" she snapped at no one in particular. Crumpling the Doctor's clothing between her knees, she fumbled in her own pocket for a hairband and pulled her hair back into a messy ponytail.

There. It could float where it liked now.

Rose let out a slow breath, taking stock of her surroundings again. The sirens sputtered and went out, but she highly doubted the cyborg things had actually stopped looking for her. Either it was a trick to make her relax or the sirens had just… broken.

God, how was this ship even flying?

The whole antigravity thing was going to make searching for the Doctor a hell of a lot harder, but what else was she supposed to do? He was running off who knew where with absolutely no plan and sure, while that did work for him a lot of the time, it didn't mean he didn't need backup. At the very least, she wanted to be let in on whatever crazy "plan" he'd come up with this time so she could be crazy with him. That was what she'd signed up for, wasn't it?

With a fresh determination, Rose toe-kicked herself towards the nearest cubicle. Maybe this was why all of the surfaces had the same texture, she thought; if the art-grav wasn't working, or hadn't even been built in, they'd have to resort to the old magnetic-boots method—

…Oh.

Rose clung to the side of the cubicle-tower and took a cautious peek around the corner. The cyborgs wouldn't be affected. The cyborgs could walk in this.

…She didn't need to worry about that just yet. Putting the Doctor's clothes on so she wouldn't have to worry about holding them (they smelled like him, even under the dirt and the heat and the rust, and just that little fact slowed her heartbeat enough to think clearly), she kicked herself off of the one tower and grabbed onto the next.

Not in that aisle. Nor the next. Nor the next. She could hear sounds, the muted clunk of metallic footsteps, but she couldn't make out the noises of a struggle; either the cyborgs had silenced their captive somehow and the Doctor was just trying to be sneaky, or—

She couldn't let herself think about that. Licking her lips, Rose took a steady breath and stopped worrying. The hall she was following took a turn to the right only two aisles away; she could search the rest of the ship, just circling around and around, if she needed to. She had a system now.

Rose found herself fighting back a yawn. Her limbs started feeling heavy again. Had she forgotten to sleep again…?

The human bounced into the corner, turned, and found that she didn't have the time to worry about her sleep schedule.

Just around the corner, right where she had been about to propel herself, there stood half a dozen cyborg things, marching towards her with unmatched strides. One limped, scarlet flushing between the metal plates welded onto its leg, and the unexpected humanity of it chilled her to the bone.

Frantically, heart in her throat, Rose shoved herself off the wall the way she had come—but the corner was angled, and she bounced into one of the towers, and she whimpered with the unexpected flare of pain.

(That shouldn't even have bruised. It definitely shouldn't have distracted her. What the hell was going on?)

Desperate, she kicked herself on, zigzagging as quickly as she could—tower, wall, tower, wall, amassing tiny pains with each impact. A quick look behind showed that the cyborgs had fanned out, one on the ceiling and floor and four walking seemingly sideways on the walls. She was tired, and she was frightened, and she didn't understand why, and she had to keep moving.

Turned a corner, hoping to lose them in the maze. More approached her, another half-dozen marching out from around a corner, and Rose suddenly worried that she was only working her way towards the ship's bridge.

But they'd clearly already thought to search the corners.

Her brain blurred, fuzzing, and she swallowed and kicked off of her closest perch as hard as she could. One of the new pursuers made a grab for her ankle as she flew past, but thankfully only managed to get a tug at her shoelace in.

A tug at her shoelace that slowed her motion and sent her plummeting a few degrees farther downward than she had intended, completely missing her next target and leaving her floating gently, slowly, almost imperceptibly, towards the wall. With quick, even steps, one of the cyborgs stepped calmly up the wall and caught her, holding her like they were on the cover of one of those trashy romance novels Rose would never admit she read. Well, except that she was struggling as hard as she could to get away and he—she—they were almost mummified in cloth and metal and smelled very strongly of decaying flesh and battery fluid.

The exhaustion increased tenfold with the contact. Rose pushed, kicking viciously at every weak spot she could think of, but the cyborg only tightened its grip. She pushed away with all of her might and only found herself being held from behind, her hands clenched at her shoulders in an exceedingly uncomfortable kind of way.

But her feet were free, so she kicked out at the thing's shins, spiralling up in a perfect half-circle until she was doing a kind of handstand on top of the cyborg's arms, then continuing to whirl until she could get her legs about its waist, crossing her arms across its throat and trying to strangle it with its own hands.

The cyborg's jaw creaked open and did not move again, but words fell from its motionless lips all the same, crackling with static, alternating between a terrifyingly familiar bass rumble and the ear-splitting wail of a broken radio.

"PlEEEEEEAAAAAse do not rEEEEEEsist," it said.

Rose's response may have been less than polite. Finger by finger, she managed to yank one of her hands away from the cyborg's grip, and she wasted no time digging her fingernails into the thing's mouth and pulling—

She wasn't expecting it to give so easily. She wasn't expecting it to give at all. But bandage and flesh both gave way in her hand, a ragged strip of putrid skin and once-white cotton, revealing a toothless expanse of a mouth, rife with sores, the ragged throat stuffed with a crude speaker.

Terror, deep and primal, screamed in the back of her head and she started tearing at the monstrosity. Whatever might have been human of this… this… thing, it would be better off dead than transformed into this.

The other cyborgs stepped to their comrade's side. With the last free movement she had, Rose gripped the handle-like protrusion on her captive's head and yanked as hard as she could.

The cyborg screamed.

The others held her by the legs, by the waist, by the throat, but she held onto that little pole of metal with all her strength, tendons screaming, but it budged. It didn't break—she didn't expect it to—but it dislodged, jerking out of the creature's ear and bouncing against its temple, leaving dripping streams of artificial nerves behind it.

Artificial nerves.

The little knob inserted in the ear, the C inscribed on its bloodied surface.

The familiarity of that malfunctioning voice.

"Oh God," Rose whispered, before something sharp and cold jabbed into her neck and the world went black.

-BAD WOLF-

…so… yeah! There it is! I did it! Yay!

I think this one's a little shorter than usual—I'm really sorry about that, by the way. I'm also sorry that it was just from Rose's perspective this time, but she's going to be pretty much out of commission for a while, so her perspective is gonna be pretty boring for the next couple of chapters. XD I'm making up for the overdose of Doctor and Wolfie.

I hope all of you had a wonderful year (ugh, has it seriously been a year since I last updated, sldkfj;lfljflfjk) and that this one will be even better.

And that I actually update on a regular basis this time.

Love you guys. Honestly do.

Be well.