Aww. What's wrong, you guys? You're acting like someone died or something.

SIAPNIAN: In case you hadn't noticed, I am a huge buttface. I'm sorry you had to find out like this.

...Nah, I lied. You finding out like this is great. :D

-BAD WOLF-

"Rose?" Liam tapped on her drawer. "Rose, can you hear me? I'm out. I made it out."

The metal box was silent. He couldn't even hear her breathing anymore-

Don't think about that, Liam. Just don't.

"I, uh..." Damn, but these controls were stupid. And by "stupid", he meant "barely even there". He could see the faint glow of a touch-panel, but it just beeped angrily when he tried to do anything with it. It made sense, he guessed. You didn't want just anybody popping dying people out of stasis. But right now it was just...

He fought the urge to kick the panel.

"I'm not sure how but I'll... I'll get you out, okay? I'll figure something out." Liam licked his lips. "I pro—"

The door slammed open.

Liam bit his tongue to keep from screaming, diving down and to the side, cursing himself for not looking harder at the room, not trying to find a hiding spot, and he slipped and his elbow banged into the door and pain zinged up his arm and he crashed hard on his shoulder and scrambled towards a corner—

"HAAAaaaaaaaaaalt!"

Liam froze despite himself. Maybe they wouldn't—maybe they'd just put him back in the machine and maybe—

There were four Cybermen arrayed in a diamond just beyond the door, the gaping holes of their half-installed eyes pinning the boy where he was. They didn't seem to be armed, but Liam—Liam knew that that wouldn't stop them from killing him if they felt like it. He'd—he'd had friends once who found that out for him.

Liam let out a tiny breath, unconsciously trying to squeeze himself as far into the corner as he could get. He tried to look around him without really seeming like he was, his eyes flicking from the Cybermen to the doorframe to the floor back to the Cybermen, but the room was stupidly practical. The walls had been stripped of all their medical equipment, leaving shiny gouges on the metal where the screws had been. The three walls that didn't hold the only door were lined floor-to-ceiling with the closed stasis pods, with no indication of how many of them were occupied. The only furniture in the room was a single table bolted to the floor—once a surgical table, probably, but stripped of bedding, looking for all the world like a sacrificial altar of gleaming, scarred steel.

And that was it. That was his situation. One thing to hide behind and they could literally take three steps forward and corner him again.

"Hello!"

Cybermen didn't move much. They didn't need to breathe anymore, necrosis delayed by a noxious marinade of who-knew-what pumped through what was left of their flesh, but they wavered sometimes like they weren't quite sure how to balance. Liam'd seen at least one of them shifting from foot to foot after a raid, the remnants of neurochemicals from a half-arsed conversion. But he realised then that he'd never actually seen one go completely still.

Not until they heard that voice.

"I'd introduce myself," the voice continued, "but you already know who I am and you aren't... well, anyone anymore, so let's skip that part."

The Cybermen turned as one. Liam licked his lips and took advantage of their distraction to hide behind the table. It was better than nothing.

"Normally I don't bother threatening Cybermen because it never works, but you lot are an endangered species right now, aren't you? So. This is an EMP generator. Doesn't have too much of a range normally, but I don't like to tether myself. And judging by what the airlock sounds like, we're right in the heart of Mondas, aren't we? Wouldn't need much of a range anyway to do a nice bit of harm."

"WhYYYYYyyyyyyyyy do you NNNnnnoooot use it?"

"Frankly, because I don't feel like searching an entire space station for my friends, and I know for a fact that at least one of them is in this room." A slow, steady inhalation. "Escaped, am I right? Rose or the other one?"

Friend? "The—the other one," Liam piped up hesitantly. "And Rose. She's in one of these things."

"Oh, really?" A brown-and-blue-clad figure pushed his way past the Cybermen and slipped into the room, his steps light and almost bouncy. "That saves me a lot of trouble, then."

"ThEEeeeee BAAAAAATtery—"

"'The battery' is my partner," interrupted the brown-haired man, voice hardening. "And I'd like to have a word with her, if you don't mind. I'd also like to secure transport before I knock the entire station out, and I'm sure you'd like some time to talk to your central systems as well. So how about we just point this on hold for a second so I don't have to spend the next three years getting back to my ship?"

-BAD WOLF-

she

sshe won't shine why isn't shhe shining wh

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she can'can't she can'tshe c an 't

-BAD WOLF-

"I can't believe that worked," the teenager whispered when the metal footsteps finally faded away.

The Time Lord sniffed. "I'm glad it did," he said. "Thing's an amplification disk stuck to a spatial bubbler."

Liam looked at him blankly.

"It's a teleport," the taller man explained, overly patiently. "Horrible one, too. Not even worth the energy to make it go even if I had it. I'm the Doctor, by the way," he added, pocketing the not-a-generator.

"Liam." Liam licked his lips, dragging his sandy hair away from his face. "How-how did you know I was here? Are you Rose's friend?"

The Doctor's pulse quickened a little. He knew where she was? She was nearby? "Yeah. Yeah, I am. And I was just... poking around, happened to spot a power surge, figured it probably wasn't intentional.

-BAD WOLF-

you ccan't you can't look in there it's nnot its not real until you look

-BAD WOLF-

The stasis pod was pretty much broken. It would have been a hell of a lot easier with the sonic, but with luck he was going to get it back very soon, provided Rose hadn't up and rescued herself from a locked steel coffin. Again. Somehow. He was pretty sure that she could out-Houdini Houdini.

Come to think of it, they should go see him. She might like that.

The Doctor nibbled on the tip of his tongue thoughtfully, his slender fingers brushing the touch-panel with fluid efficiency. He was sure it looked very impressive from the outside, but he was pretty much just trying to confuse the thing into-

ERROR: NO OCCUPANT

"Damn it, Rose," the Time Lord muttered. "Can't even stay put if you're in a stasis chamber..."

PREVIOUS OCCUPANT: HUMAN, FEMALE, 23

TIME OF DEATH: 19:48 6 JUNE 5462

CAUSE OF DEATH: UNKNOWN

"What's wrong? What's it say?"

The Doctor couldn't answer. If there wasn't a living-if it didn't think there was an occupant, that would explain why it was so intent on not letting him get through its security protocols; the defences wouldn't be up if there wasn't anything to defend. In which case it was a simple task of telling the pod that there was a new occupant, and-

...oh.

So this was what it felt like to suffocate.

-BAD WOLF-

no

-BAD WOLF-

She was cold. She was cold, and still, and there wasn't... there wasn't anything from her, from any sense, from any-there wasn't even a frayed timeline, not a single snapped probability hovering around her absence, a spiderweb dangling from its squashed creator. She was never meant to be in his universe, so his universe did not mourn her.

Her body was heavy and limp in his arms as he dragged her out of the capsule. Rose's head lolled against his shoulder, her golden hair fanning across his shirt, and with her face hidden he could almost think that she was alive if she hadn't felt so... so...

"Oh God," Liam whispered. "Oh God, that was supposed to be me-"

The sonic screwdriver dropped out of her sleeve and clattered to the floor.

The Doctor wanted to say something. Beautiful and angry and somehow a fitting tribute for the fallen creature he held. But there was nothing.

"I'll have to tell Jackie," he said instead, barely audible even to himself, and he was almost startled at how empty his voice sounded.

He could remember the War, now. It wasn't the same pain, less encompassing and less breaking but just as overwhelming. She'd patched him up but she'd taken the plasters with her when she... when she left, all the old wounds ripped open again.

He hadn't felt alone since she...

An alarm tore through the air.

-BAD WOLF-

Liam actually jumped when the Doctor moved again. The tall man didn't look up, didn't look to the doorway, didn't even seem to notice the sirens at all. He just turned, slowly lowered Rose's body onto the surgical table. Brushed a strand of hair out of her sightless eyes, gently pushed them closed. She didn't look graceful, half-sprawled over the table like that, but Liam privately thought that she would have looked deader if she had. With her limbs askew and untidy, she looked like she was just catching a quick nap, that she would jump up and be ready to go any second now.

Or she would have looked that way if, you know, there was any blood to her skin.

The Doctor's hand lingered against hers for just a second before he turned again-quick bursts of spastic movement, a marionette with an inexperienced puppeteer, and he snatched the little silver tube thing from the ground.

"So Liam," he said, his voice unnervingly calm. "What can you do?"

"...uh?"

"You. We all do something. Know something. Doesn't need to be impressive because everything's impressive if you think about it, just might help if I knew what it was." The man seemed to say all of that in just one breath, rooting the generator out of his pocket and pressing the blue end of the silver tube thing against it.

"Not-not much," Liam said, his eyes awkwardly darting to Rose's still form. (He'd seen corpses before, hard not to living in the black these days, but he'd never seen one that should have been his.) "I fix shuttles a little, I guess."

"Brilliant." The Doctor shot him what was probably supposed to be a smile. "Mashups, right? That's why you were in the scrapyard?"

"Y-yeah."

"Perfect. If you got in the walls, could you find your way around this place?"

Liam bit his lip. He didn't want to get electrocuted again, but... "I think so?"

"Could you find a connection to the main power? Any connection?"

Oh, that he knew. "Yeah."

"Even more perfect." The Doctor turned, rifling through the side pocket of Rose's overlong brown coat until he fished out something that looked suspiciously like an antique power coil stuck to a very skinny Slinky using a couple of hair pins. He stuck the hair pin end into the teleport, looping the power coil away so it dangled from the Slinkylike tether, and tossed the coil to Liam. "When you find sit put this on it, all right? Doesn't matter where as long as it goes directly to the core, not to an auxiliary, so you'll have to do a bit of crawling. Got it?"

"Um-"

The Doctor was looking more than a little manic now, his breaths quick and sharp and uneven although his eyes were still dry. "Right, yes! Of course!" Jammed a hand into his left trouser pocket, pulled out a slim black laser cutter, and threw it to Liam as well. "You'll probably need this unless you can chew through metal, eh?"

Liam awkwardly juggled the sudden abundance of machinery, frantically clinging on to the one coherent thought that managed to claw its way out of his mouth. "You're using the teleport?"

"Yes."

"You're running away?"

"Yes."

"But-" No. He'd talked to himself about this. No crying. Not even a little bit of angry tearing up. No. "But they killed Rose! Shouldn't-"

The Doctor cracked. For a single terrifying instant Liam could see something huge and dark and horribly, horribly angry behind those mahogany eyes-and then the Time Lord clenched his jaw and it was gone. "Yes," he said, all of his fake-cheerful lilt gone, his voice a cheese-grater scraping along Liam's skin. "Yes, I should. But I can't. Not for another minus-seven-hundred-and-forty years." A slight note of desperation melted into his features. "So yes," he continued, voice starting to shake. "I am running away. But I never said that they would consider it a victory."

-BAD WOLF-

Something was crawling beneath Mondas's skin. She had no sensation, of course, but she had connection, and she could feel those connections being snipped, a neat... little... pattern. Barely a hesitation, barely a question, somehow understanding her insides better than anyone had any right to, heading straight for-

But that was why she had her emergency defence mechanisms. Her children didn't need to breathe, after all. Most of the things that would want to harm her did.

-BAD WOLF-

It started with a weird smell. It wasn't a bad, ship-about-to-explode kind of smell, though, and Liam had been doing a lot of damage with the laser, so he ignored it.

And then his fingertips started to go numb. Little sparking sensations darted down his nerves with no cause, leaving terrifying stings of nothingness as they went. And then Liam started to panic a little bit.

The lines he was following were getting thicker, the connections twisting into each other and braiding and merging. He was pretty close, he knew, but he didn't know how close, and he didn't know what was happening, and if he was being poisoned how long did he have left was it seconds or minutes and oh God what if the toxin had always been in the ship and he was just now showing the effects and he was going to-

Liam kept going.

The numbness wasn't the only thing, he realised. His fingers weren't... working, not quite. He had really steady hands-his mother'd always said so-but when he had to cut his way through a tight space the laser-scars were wobbly, crooked, some of them zigzagging a little bit. He slipped, just barely caught himself, accidentally jammed his knee into a twisted piece of steel. He could see blood through the new hole in his trousers, but he didn't feel... hurt.

Liam kept going.

It was getting hard to think. He was going half by instinct now, fumbling, only managing not to make wrong turns because there were no wrong turns to make.

Liam kept going.

It was getting hard to see too.

Liam kept going.

He only found the line for the power core because he fell on top of it. Heartbeat fluttery, every breath making him dizzier, he gripped the coil and rammed it into the thick vein.

Somewhere, machinery screamed.

Just before he passed out altogether, Liam felt sunlight on his face.

-BAD WOLF-

Half of a twisted, barely-operable spaceship fizzled into painful existence on top of a pile of scrap.

The Doctor dropped the teleport-burnt out and useless, now.

A section of Mondas went horribly numb. Hull breach, shrieked the warnings, as dozens of her children spun crazily into the vacuum. She slammed the airlocks shut.

The last Time Lord in the universe picked through the piles of gutted machinery. He found a completely ordinary human boy, unconscious, just a few feet inside the teleport's range.

Lucky boy.

The Doctor picked Liam up. The TARDIS wasn't far away; she could sort out the neurotoxin Mondas had flooded the ship with. Might take a couple of hours, but then Rose wasn't going anywhere.

-BAD WOLF-

NO

-BAD WOLF-

Blood flushed through sunken capillaries, a heart forced into beating again. A frantic gasp in aching lungs.

Rose's eyes shot open and the universe splintered.

-BAD WOLF-

ENOUGH.

-BAD WOLF-

...I love you guyssssssssssssss :33333