Aliens are ugly as fuck. Only thing you need to know about aliens. Well, guaranteed, of course they wouldn't fit the human standard of beauty because they're not human, but then why make the Doctor all human-y and the others all alien-y? This show was nonsense.
James is almost beheaded by the whip the Alien from the Nonsense Show waves around, and then it's a quick moment until she realizes nonsense can be dangerous, under certain presumptions, such as that the nonsense can wield a fiery whip.
She wants to leave very, very badly.
"You could have taken someone's eye out with that!" The Doctor says loudly, and James roll her eyes, looking at him wagging his finger. "Now, you wait, I'm busy."
His gaze skims over Mickey. Harriet Jones. Rose. He grins, but it's sort of restrained. Not what James remembers from the episode. And then he turns to her and she thinks, oh, yeah, I'm really here.
"Tea," he says. "How on Gallifrey did you know that would do the trick?"
She is thinking about her English classes, all of a sudden. She could not, at all, write with detail. She didn't care about what was going on in the world of her characters, she only cared about what she felt. She cared about emotions, dialogue. That faint residue feelings that are always left in her heart.
And that's so much clearer when she's actually in another world. Her mind is focused on her confusion, her fear. Not about the ridiculousness of any of this.
"Because I watched this all happen," she says, wonders why she said that, and then its all overwhelmed by the alien yelling and swinging something out of the corner of her eyes. Then there's a growing sense of impending doom in her heart as it sinks, along with her body, and she's lying on the ground and there's a blazing pain from her head.
She blacks out.
Aliens, and their staffs swinging and face snarling. The Doctor, features blank. Dreams, dark and shrouded.
The embarrassment hits her first, before the cool agony. She got hit by an Alien. Not hit on, at least. She scoffs, mentally. Finding puns in these situations? What was wrong with her? Probably the loss of brain cells, she thinks, then that makes some instinctual part of her open her eyes.
She's in a room. An alien room, because the lights are clearly not that of Earth. She's in a bed, in an alien room, probably on some other planet, and she winces, reaches for her head and realizes her hands are strapped down to the bed. Oh, yeah, her feet too. Somebody was not happy with her.
Strangely, the situation doesn't bother her that much. She feels as if she has reached a certain point in life where nothing was going to startle her anymore. Being in Doctor Who? Meeting the Doctor? Getting tied up to a bed? Why the fuck not. She strains her head, trying to look around.
The room is not decorated, but there's few other beds just like the one she's in, scattered around. Curtains hang, all un-drawn. Everything is white or blue. Infirmary, she decides, and sighs.
"Hello?" She calls. Her voice echoes, and she waits a couple of seconds, but nothing. "Fuck this," she says out loud. "I am not into bondage. I want to go to the bathroom. Fuck you, aliens. Fuc-"
She hears footsteps, and shuts up pretty quickly. The Doctor hesitantly steps in the room, alone, and she rolls her eyes at the ceiling.
"Hello," she mocks with a fake British accent. "Wass up?"
"Hello," he responds, voice pointedly careful. "How are you feeling?"
Many many answers come to her mind, most prominently swear words, but she breathes out and reigns in her temper. It won't do any good to start passive-aggressively trash-talking the Time Lord who's tied her to a bed. And not in a kinky way too. Not that if it was in a kinky way, she would've liked it. God, this was pointless.
"Not very good," she tugs her arms in the leather straps. "Someone's tied me up." The sarcasm is heavy in her tone, and she's proud of how unwavering it is. It would be a complete lie if she said the situation didn't scare her. Sure, the Doctor could have been waving around a gun and she wouldn't have been afraid of it, but losing control over your body? That was a different matter.
"I'm sorry," he replies, not sounding very sorry. "I had to. Rose is on board, and we have no idea who you are."
"Didn't she tell you?" She spits. "I'm from fucking Sacramento. I'm not a fucking alien."
He walks closer, and she doesn't bother to look up at him, just staring at the white ceiling. This really isn't how she thought her first proper conversation with the Doctor would go. After all, this was a family show, wasn't it? Even if it tended to feature genocide quite heavily? She thought he would crack a few jokes, ask her a few questions, and send her on her way. Not tie her up to a bed. (She's still quite hung over that.)
"Then kindly explain to me how you knew about the sonic screwdriver? That tea would help me?" He leans into her line of sight, and it's impossible to ignore those piercing brown eyes. She stares up at him, managing to seem unimpressed and bored and tired of life, all at the same time. It's what she excels at, the insolent teenager type of thing.
"I think the point you're missing," she says patiently, "is that I saved your asses multiple times. The Christmas tree would have decapitated your precious Rose. Who knows what the Sycorax would have done?" She scowls. "So why don't you like, un-tie me from the bed and let me go?"
He appraises her with a dark gaze, and she feels like she would have been swooning if this had been any other situation. But it's not. And even if he was seriously pretty, she needed to get the hell out of here. She had to get back, even though her finals were just around the corner and-well, actually, staying here might not be a bad idea.
But still. Her family. Her friends.
After a pause, he opens his mouth slowly. "How do we know you're not going to...try anything?"
He says try like she's going to grab an axe and go murderer on them. She scoffs.
"You're a centuries-old literal last of the Time Lords, and I'm a fucking teenager. I'm pretty sure you can stop whatever I'd plan to do."
The Doctor flinches in the midst of that sentence, and she doesn't know if it's at the last of the Time Lords part of the fucking teenager part. But either way, he goes to work on the straps and releases her, his hand brushing against her cold skin. She shivers at the touch, shakes her hand quite aggressively to cover it.
When he had been with Rose and the others, he'd at least tried to put on a bright front. Now that he was with her, all she felt was suspicion and cold cold distrust. She didn't mind much, but there's a pang in her chest from how disappointed her twelve-year-old self would be. She had really been obsessed with Doctor Who, she recalls. She'd wanted to marry the Doctor, or Rose, or River Song, or Jack Harkness. Her ongoing bisexual panic had started around then.
Maybe she should have been nicer, a voice thinks, and she immediately feels ridiculous, like what? What benefit would niceness give her in this situation? Should she have looked at the Doctor with hearts in her eyes, like Rose does, and faint in his arms?
Well, she did faint. Admittedly not her best moment.
When he's undone the ones on her feet, she swings her legs to the side and stands, ignoring the hand the Doctor's reached out. He takes it back slowly, like he's been insulted. "I can't let you leave," he tells her.
"Why not?"
"Because I still don't know how you know these things."
"Why do you have to know?" She asks, annoyed. "Why can't you just stay out of everyone's business for once?"
He takes a step forward, and it takes a moment for her to register it as a threat and step back accordingly. Her veins go cold, her heartbeat stuttering. Maybe she took it a step too far. Maybe-
"Because," he says, almost a growl, "there are only three possibilities to explain you. One, you're hiding your true genes so that even the TARDIS can't detect it, which is very very unlikely. You're most definitely who you say you are, a human, so two, you're a time traveler." His eyes search her face, like he thinks the answer is just hidden in the tilt of her lips, the glint of her eyes. It's silent, very very so, the tension a thin string connecting them two.
James decides to cut it.
"What's number three then?"
The Doctor's face contorts, but it's slight, and she wonders if it was just a trick of the light, played on her tired eyes.
"You're time sensitive," he says heavily, and all the fight seems to leave him, his body sagging. "In which case, I would have to report you to the High Council, and leave you to their judgement. But since Gallifrey is no more..." He trails off, mind lost in twisted memories. She frowns.
"Since it's no more...?"
"I will have to decide your fate."
She doesn't understand, at first, but then realization creeps in between the edges of her conscious. "Ah." She lets out. "You'll kill me."
"Essentially, yes." He sounds like he's spelling out his own demise. "And-"
"And you don't really want to kill people. Got it." She smiles at him, and it's probably convincing, judging by how his lips tilt upwards instinctively. "Well, it's a lucky thing for you that I do not possess even an ounce of time sensitivity, is it?"
He smile-frowns, like are you sure about that, and she stops him before he can get out another word.
"I'm enjoying this very...enlightening conversation, but now I really need to use the bathroom. Which way?"
He blinks, like he's surprised by her show of something so human, and points to the left. "Past two doors, turn right. It'll be on your left."
"Great," she mutters, and follows his instruction. At least now she'll be threatened with death with an empty bladder. Better that than else.