Doodeedoodeedooooooooo~
SIAPNIAN: Comics may be the most insidious genre I've ever gotten into. The last time I checked I literally had three trade paperbacks and now I'm in currently-running titles and there are comics all over my desk and I actually know where the nearest shop is and I honestly have no idea when this happened I mean I remember buying all of these but I DID NOT THINK THERE EWRE THIS MANHY WHAT HAPENENSGF
Warning: Un-betaed. Err, again. . In my defence, I've been working a weird nameless shift between third and first and neither of my betas are awake for the first half of my days off. XD
-BAD WOLF-
The Doctor was a lot better at moving in zero gravity than most people. Unfortunately, that didn't really mean he was particularly fast or graceful about it.
He really should have seen the gravity situation coming. The way the ship was built, the material used to make it, the way all of the airlocks reached from floor to ceiling… He internally cursed himself for being so daft, but that wouldn't exactly help now.
Thankfully, he had managed to get himself in a corner fairly early on and keep himself there while he tried to figure out what to do.
Problem: He'd lost sight of the captured kid while trying to get into the corner in the first place.
Problem: He'd lost sight of Rose when he took after the kid in the first place.
Problem: He didn't even know if she was in the ship at all.
Problem: She might never have gotten through the airlock.
His blood started trying to escape through his toenails at the last thought and he shut it down as quickly as he could. She was a clever girl, she had the screwdriver, she could get herself out of a situation like that. Nothing to worry about. She was fine.
The sirens started wailing and the Doctor grinned fiercely. Oh, she was most definitely fine.
"That's my Rose," he informed no one in particular, easing himself into midair. If he could find her before the Cybermen did, today might not be so bad after all.
-BAD WOLF-
That's not your Rose, idiot. You never had one.
Yeah, I'm still here. What did you think happened to me? Just because I have a lot of things I could be doing doesn't mean I'm going to do them.
Besides, something's wrong. Not the thing that was already wrong, but there's something wrong there in that ship and I don't like it.
I guess I'll just fix it later. It's not like I haven't done that before. What could it hurt, anyway?
-BAD WOLF-
Rose awoke with a surprising lack of ropes, chains, plastic bands, rubber bands, hair bands, bands actually made of hair, or whatever other of the thousands of restrains she'd previously woken up in. That was a little worrying on its own, honestly, but she pushed her freedom of movement to the back of her mind to deal with later.
A long time ago, she'd gotten into the habit of waking up pretending not to be on edge. She kept her muscles relaxed, her eyelids slack; she funnelled all of her tension into curling her toes, the motion unnoticeable through her trainers. And she listened.
The sound of the engines was the same, a kind of hiccupping whirr that could only come from a ship held together with duct tape and willpower. She hadn't moved ships, then; the pattern of the halting jerks was the same as before.
Good. That made things a little less complicated.
She couldn't hear any of the Cybermen clomping about or speaking. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing was yet to be determined. Before she opened her eyes, she carefully—so carefully—tensed her left shoulder.
The sonic screwdriver reassuringly poked her in the armpit.
Rose let out a long, slow breath, part sigh of relief and part furthering of the I Haven't Been Awake For Five Minutes Already No Sir act.
She sniffed idly and cracked her eyelids open.
"…well, this is sorta boring," she mumbled, frowning at the shadowed wall-ceiling-floor-whatever.
She was pretty much in a small, lightless box. Okay, come to think of it, maybe it was a little more like a coffin, but as far as those went she'd definitely been in worse. Wouldn't have complained if this one smelled like cedar instead of the acrid, bloody tang of shorn metal.
…And actual blood.
There was a faint crack of a light source behind her head, barely enough to see her own hand by at first. As her eyes adjusted, though, she could definitely see darkened, panicked smudges on the surfaces around her. Fingertips, claws, what looked sometimes to be pawmarks… didn't seem to matter, really; lots of things had been in here, and they'd been scared.
Rose contemplatively chewed on her lower lip, her heartbeat starting to pick up. Okay. That was a little worrying.
Rose bit her lip. Well, it wasn't as if the situation could get much worse.
"Hello?" she called into the darkness.
The darkness gave a tiny squeak and thumped against the wall to her right.
Her heart sped up a bit, excited. "Is there someone else in here?"
"Y-" Shuffling. Another thump. "Y-yeah."
"Let me guess, you're stuck in a little metal box too, yeah?"
"M-mmhmm."
Rose rolled onto her side, pressing a hand against the wall as if her fellow prisoner could feel it. "I'm Rose," she said softly. "What's your name?"
"...Liam."
"Liam. Nice to meet you, Liam." She bit her lip thoughtfully. "Tell you what, you and me, we're gonna get out of here, yeah?"
Liam gave a tiny, manic laugh. "How? Even if we got out of these things, we're in space, there's nowhere to go, and-"
"And I've got a friend on the outside. He can help. Trust me."
"A friend." The two syllables held a universe of disbelief.
Rose grinned. "Believe me, you wouldn't be worried either if you'd met him."
Awkward, uncomfortable shuffling. "Even if-" More shuffling. "...I hope he gets here fast."
She sniggered. "Wouldn't worry about that either if I were you. He always seems to show up j—"
Outside, a door slipped open and Rose snapped her mouth shut. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still, just in case, and she listened.
Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.
Static. "ThEEEEEEeeeeee readings-are-cOMplete."
Rose shuddered a little. As if the Cybers' voices hadn't been creepy enough when they weren't glitching. What the hell had happened to them, anyway? They didn't exactly look like a victorious army, but why would they still exist this far forward if they hadn't won the war back on Earth?
"AAaaand?" She could only assume that that was a second voice because it was just a little more staticky than the first one. Probably over a comm system, she guessed, but with the state of these guys she couldn't tell.
"The MALe is IIIIIRRELEvant," proclaimed the first. There was a tiny, shaking sigh of choked relief from Rose's right.
She tensed her jaw, waiting. If there was one thing that she could count on, it was that she had enough markers both from the Void and the Vortex that there wasn't a species in the universe that didn't find her at least a little interesting. Falling between universes and controlling Time for a few minutes had a tendency to light up every sensor anyone could possibly wave at her.
It made stealth missions really, really suck.
"And the FEEEmale?"
Silence. A clicking, grinding noise. Rose almost wondered if that particular Cyberman had scavenged parts from the '95 desktop her mum'd kept for ten years.
"UNNNKNown," the first finally replied. "CompaaaAAAAAaaa—"static—"aatible. PoweR UNKnown. Limiiiits unkNOOOWWn."
Rose bit her lip. Damn it. She fingered the screwdriver in the pocket of her hoodie, half-tempted to just sonic her way out of there and make a break for it.
…somehow. The damn gravity still wasn't on, if the ship even had it, and the walls were too dirty for her trainers to get much purchase.
"OOOrders received," the second voice announced, crackling. "WeeEEEEE REEturn to MONdas. ActivaaAAAte hEER chAMBer in the mEEEAAAANtime."
She didn't react. She didn't have time.
-BAD WOLF-
The Doctor abruptly dropped out of the air. He yelped as he fell, a tangle of limbs twisting in a frantic attempt to land on his feet.
He ended up on his chest instead.
The Time Lord winced in pain, digging his fingernails into his palms as he struggled with his diaphragm. After a few seconds of that argument, he finally managed to gasp a breath, and then another.
Okay. Good. Now, to figure out what was going on. The ship was originally a 22nd century human-made vessel and a fairly basic one at that. It definitely hadn't been designed with gravity generators in mind; those had been added later. Why and by whom was another question, but also one that he didn't need to deal with right now.
The Doctor pushed himself to his feet, frowning down the hallway. He probably still had some kind of magnetic climb-y thing in his trouser pockets, so getting around the ship wasn't the problem. The problem was why the gravity was on in the first place. If they'd always had enough power to run it—and they felt like running it at all—there was no reason for it to have been off.
If they hadn't had enough power before, they'd found another source. A big one, probably, to reassure them to the point of convenience as well as raw function.
The Time Lord took a few experimental steps. He wasn't dizzy. He wasn't weak. It wasn't him.
(Flicker of ancient, remembered pain from his first death. He'd know if it was. It wasn't a feeling he could forget.)
The teenager they'd kidnapped was, as far as he could tell at first glance, just a teenager. Which left them with two options: either they had another source and they decided to take some extra ones anyway, or…
The comm system crackled online. "DestIIIiiination AALLtered. ArrIIIiival at MONDaaaas in 2.4 houUUUrs."
The Doctor tugged his fingers through his hair. It wasn't a big ship, but without his screwdriver it would take a hell of a lot longer to search. If he could find a mainframe, he might be able to locate the energy nets through that, but he'd have to crack it manually and who knew how the system was built and he didn't have time for this—
Half-growling in frustrated worry, he picked a direction and started running. The engines had gotten louder, but maybe—just maybe—he could follow the subtler sounds, find the power source.
Maybe.
-BAD WOLF-
It was dark. Everything was dark. Rose couldn't see, couldn't feel, couldn't hear or taste or smell. The only reason she knew she still had a body was how much it hurt. She thought she was still breathing, probably. Her chest throbbed with exhaustion every few seconds and she wanted to stop, needed to stop, but she didn't have a choice not really she was Rose Tyler and she didn't just give up. Never.
It wasn't even pain, she mused, in the flickers of moments that she could focus enough to think. It was… running for an hour and knowing you're only halfway home. Weakness. Shaking, screaming weakness, turning every muscle into lead.
Her mind hurt. She thought she could probably scream if she tried. She was too tired. Screaming took too much effort. She was better off quiet.
They hadn't moved her. Hadn't even touched her. One moment she was just sitting in the box doing nothing and then she was sitting in the box doing nothing some more but liking it a hell of a lot less.
Liam. They weren't doing this to him too, were they? They hadn't said they would, but…
He was just a kid. He couldn't…
(she felt like a kid, still the nineteen-year-old nothing trying to make something of her life somewhen else, the years and the hardness peeling away and leaving her a wreck and she hated it she hated it)
The Doctor would come for her. He always came for her. Sometimes he came a little too late to be convenient and sometimes he came and ended up in trouble himself but he always—he always—
She couldn't feel her fingers. She might have been cold. She felt like she should have been cold. She didn't know.
There was a strength, a will hidden inside her that she fell back on when everything else was lost.
Something cold and mechanical tore it open and drank its fill.
-BAD WOLF-
The Doctor rounded a corner at full speed and just barely avoided slipping on a lump of stringy whitish goop. Skidding to a stop with an uncanny grace, he whirled on it, crouching down and frowning. The ship was hardly clean by any standards, but this looked like…
He reached out, pinching one of the gooey bands between his fingers and raising it to his nose.
Artificial nervous system. Slight tang of metal, little bits of torn wires woven through the flesh. The Cyberman it had belonged to wasn't in sight; didn't necessarily mean it had survived, of course, just that it wasn't there anymore and no one had bothered to clean up past that.
He would have noticed a while ago if the shipmates had started attacking each other, so whoever'd done this was either Rose or one of the other captives. Which meant that if he could track them…
The Time Lord rose to his feet, looking around at walls and ceiling and floor, frowning, searching for something—anything—that he could follow. Smudges on one of the walls, scuffling footsteps, but the metal refused to give any specific clues as to direction either way.
And then, there. A tiny clean spot, as if something had bumped against the wall in motion, incidentally wiping a bit of dust from the surface. Another a few feet forward. And then another on the other side.
Jogging over to the spot closest to eye level, the Doctor squinted at it, hoping—
…well, it certainly looked like it had been made with fabric. And not the rough, dirtied gauze that peeked through wherever the Cybermen were unarmoured. Probably.
Okay, it could have been his imagination and it could have been completely natural circumstance and it could have been one of the captives bumbling about before being brought to wherever they were brought to and it could have been
…It could have been a lot. But it was all he had, really, short of getting himself captured too. Besides, maybe he'd run into something a little more useful on this path.
Maybe.
The Doctor took a breath, forced his worries into the back of his mind, and started following the trail.
-BAD WOLF-
mews quietly into the distance
falls asleep quietly into the distance
loves you guys loudly into the distance
