Chapter 6: Child Language Acquisition
The Doctor was getting very tired of people trying to separate him and Rose.
He tried to be a gentle man, really, he did. It was often hard. His travels took him to the darkest corners of the Universe. Oh, he wanted to keep to the bright, shining wonders, the places that would bring a smile to Rose's face. The ones she would excitedly tell her mother about, the ones that might make Jackie look at him with something approaching approval. But, the TARDIS always seemed to have a different idea about where they should be going and more often than not they ended up having to run for it.
More often than he was comfortable with, their foes thought they might gain an advantage against him through Rose.
They were always sorely mistaken.
He tried to be a gentle man. He really did. More than that, he tried to be a gentleman, to offer people the chance to solve things peacefully, to talk it out, find some solution that made everyone involved happy, or at least not dead.
But, he had no tolerance for those who would hurt his friends.
For those who would hurt Rose.
There was a storm in his mind, a raging gale that reminded him of the way the winds would rip across the foothills surrounding the Lethe. They tore away at the sparse trees, ripping silver leaves into violent, shining vortexes. Beautiful and dangerous, the winds could desiccate any living being who was unlucky enough to be caught in them. He knew it was wrong to be the way he was, but there was no one left to temper that feeling.
Or.
There was no one.
Before last week, before the Game Station and the Daleks and the Bad Wolf, he'd been happy. He had friends by his side who understood him and who did not mind when he needed some time because the wind was raging just a little too violently for polite company. Better than that, it seemed like the storm calmed when he was around them. He would remember the feel of the button beneath his hands, the weight of the entire universe balanced against every single member of his family, every child who would ever be born on Gallifrey. He would start to shake, start to sink into the clouds and the winds and-
Jack would laugh.
Jack was loud and brash and overly forward with both Rose and the Doctor. But, he'd been a soldier of a sort and he had an uncanny ability to know just when to break out his raunchiest jokes. He could incite the Doctor into benign annoyance so fast he hadn't even realized his hands stopped shaking and the winds died away for another day.
He'd left Jack behind.
Alone, newly immortal, and hundreds, thousands of years from home. The thought twirled up through the storm. It hurt to even think of Jack for many reasons, physically, his brain rebelled against a walking, talking fixed point, spiritually, his hearts hurt to think he'd abandoned a friend. Worse than that, there was no solution he could think of. In his haste to get away from the Game Station before he regenerated, he allowed himself a moment of weakness and now there was no way of knowing where and when in the wide universe Jack was.
All he had now was Rose.
Rose who was even better than Jack at noticing when his moods started to sour. She did not tell jokes or prod him into healthier anger. Instead, she linked her arm in his and asked where to find the best apple pie in the universe, where the biggest star was located, why the Felgrinian people were green when they ate only orange food. She asked questions and forced him to think of logical things and by the time he had set the TARDIS to take them to where the answer to her question was located he had forgotten he was angry at all.
It was a precious gift, to be able to forget even for a moment why he was so angry all the time.
And someone had taken that, had taken her away from him.
Again.
It would not be allowed. The Universe needed to know that Rose Tyler was untouchable .
He whipped out his sonic screwdriver and began scanning the ground she had been seated upon before she fell.
The readings came back indicating soil and rock and organic matter. No technology at all, at least not within the range of the screwdriver. He spun in a frustrated circle, scanning the area around them.
Nothing.
It was as if the planet had never been inhabited at all, there weren't even the small blips of electrical energy that would indicate small birds or reptiles.
He... He didn't know what to do. If nothing technological registered with the sonic there was nothing he could manipulate to try and find Rose. The TARDIS would never let him back in while she was repairing herself. There was no one around for miles and miles. He was at a complete and total loss.
The impotent fury fizzled itself out, settling into the sort of lassitude that can only come from heightened emotions with no release. He threw himself onto the ground beside the spot Rose had been pulled under and started clicking through each and every setting on the sonic.
He had just clicked past 356a (nothing, not even a shiver of a response) when he heard it.
There was a low buzzing sweeping through the trees. It started off so quiet he couldn't really be sure when he had actually begun hearing it at all, but it was rapidly growing in volume. He leapt to his feet and pulled himself up into the closest tree, trying to get high enough to have a vantage point for what was approaching. Just at the edge of his vision, the trees were shaking. Not just a few, he realized, all of the trees were shaking. It was as if a planet sized wave was crashing and he was on the shore.
Rose had been taken below ground, he thought, there were tunnels for a reason. The buzzing was growing louder as the shaking approached. It did not sound right, not natural at all. He jumped down from the tree and then shouted in surprise and stumbled back. There was a child sitting directly below him.
They looked up at him and smiled a very reptilian smile, all teeth and saliva and bright yellow eyes. He smiled back.
"Hello there," he said, "Who are you?" He looked around, hoping for a parent to appear. "Better question," he continued, "What are you? I've never seen a reptiliform quite like you before." Their skin was covered in the wrong type of scales for a young Ice Warrior (to say nothing of their apparent comfort in the temperate climate of the planet. In fact, the fine scales resembled more of an Earth-type snake than anything else. Their eyes were wrong for a Foamasi, they peered straight forward and did not protrude far enough to indicate any sort of control beyond the standard bipedal species. Nor were they obviously silurian, though that was a harder judgement to make since the silurians comprised multiple subspecies. He circled the child, scanning them with the sonic, but, to his surprise, they did not produce any readings at all.
"Of course!" he shouted, smacking himself on the forehead, "There's something here blocking my scans! You can't have a forest without bugs, oh I am so slow!"
The child scooted away from him as he yelled, tucking themself back against the tree in obvious fear.
"Oh, oh," he said, "No, I'm nice! That wasn't at you!" Then, remembering the situation he had been living with for the last few days he groaned. "And of course! Now I'm scaring a kid and I can't even tell them I'm not a monster."
He cast around for something that might reassure a child. There was nothing around them save for rocks and fallen leaves which were beginning to vibrate and the buzzing sound drew ever closer. It set his teeth on edge, rattling through him and leaving him feeling shaky and afraid.
"Okay," he said as he slowly shifted and reached towards the ground, ensuring the child could see each and every movement he made. "I've got a fun little trick to show you, yeah? Kids everywhere like magic tricks. Well, not everywhere, I did get chased out of this little town in Massachusetts once, but there were extenuating circumstances." He found a good rock, small and brightly colored and missing any jagged edges the child might hurt themselves on.
He held up the rock, waving it back and forth to make sure the kid was watching and then, with a twist of his fingers, tucked it away where they could no longer see it. The child's mouth opened in awe, releasing a little gasp of wonder. The Doctor smiled. He reached out and, borrowing from the street magicians on most planets in the galaxy, made the stone reappear from behind their ear. The child clapped, grabbing at the stone and clearly no longer afraid of him.
It was nice, he thought, that he could still make a child feel safe even without his words. He might not be doing much else right so far this regeneration, but at least he could still do that.
The buzzing ramped up again and now it had begun to hurt. He grimaced against the pressing agony at the back of his head. There was something not right here, beyond Rose being taken and a child in the middle of the woods without any parents around. Something that danced along the edge of his senses, teasing him. He should know it, he thought, he'd felt it before. But, the buzzing drove away all other thoughts.
Suddenly, the child looked up from the colorful rock and around at the woods as if just noticing where they were. They turned to the Doctor and grabbed his hand, pulling him along as they stood and darted towards the cliff-face on the opposite side of the clearing the TARDIS was situated in.
As they passed, he saw the light atop the TARDIS flicker on for a picosecond before going out again. Some of the tension he hadn't even realized he'd been carrying faded away. She was healing and she wanted him to know it would be okay. He pushed a wave of affection her way and enjoyed the bubbling, gleeful sensation of her own in return.
Then, they were at the rock face and the child was looking at him expectantly.
"What am I supposed to do?" he asked. He ran the sonic over it once, rapidly but it was the same as before, no readings. He had just leaned towards the rock, planning to lick it to determine its composition when the shouting broke out. He whirled in place, grabbing the child by their shoulder and shoving them behind him, between him and the rock where they might be just a bit more protected.
From the opposite side of the clearing, there were three more reptiliform individuals racing towards them. They looked panicked with wild gestures and clearly angry shouts, but the Doctor was more interested in the way the trees at the edge of the clearing had begun to vibrate, shaking so violently that their leaves fell off in great clumps. The vibrating continued to increase even as the buzzing ramped up to ear-splitting levels. At his side the child yanked on his hand and said something. Their voice was high-pitched and terrified.
The others had reached the halfway point in the clearing when the buzzing touched them. They immediately froze, shrieking out in agony. As he stood, paralyzed by what he was witnessing the pain in the back of his head coalesced into a sharp stab and he realized what he was seeing.
The trees began to come apart at the seams, their very molecules peeling away from each other into spiraling plumes of matter that rose to meet those coming from the trees and now the Doctor could see that the entire forest was being unwritten from the world.
The child was screaming now, pulling on him harder. He wanted to look down, to comfort them, but the vibrating had just reached the TARDIS and he couldn't- He couldn't lose her too.
The TARDIS shook for a moment, rattling against the hard soil, and then settled, clearly having shaken off whatever this was. The sudden release of tension from his muscles was enough for the child's next insistent yank on his hand to send him stumbling backwards. He reached out with his free hand to steady himself against the wall.
Except there was no wall there. He fell to the ground with a grunt of surprise and pain, pulling the child down after him. He could still see the clearing and the decomposed matter of the other people and the trees floating up into the sky. But, the terrible buzzing had ceased.
The child pulled their hand free from his, darting away into the darkness that stretched behind them.
"Wait!" He called, "No don't run off, why do people always run off?" His words echoed against the bare walls and he shuddered.
They were clearly safe in here from whatever that had been, he would have to assume that the same was true for Rose and wherever she had ended up below the ground.
He refused to accept anything less as the truth.
With a sigh, he pulled himself to his feet and clicked the sonic over to light-emitting mode. It lit the chamber with characteristic pale-green light, revealing unnaturally smooth walls and a long hallway that gently sloped downward.
"Down," he said, "I guess that's the way I'm going." He spared one final glance back at the TARDIS. "Be safe, old girl!" he called, "No falling to atoms before I'm back." He forced away the memory of the reptiliforms agonized faces as they died. There was nothing he could do for them, but maybe he could find some answers by finding the child who apparently knew enough to not only survive but save his life as well.
He started down the tunnel.