Sahara had to admit, she was impressed.
She stared into the gurgling water as it poured out of the gleaming silver nozzle and cascaded into the porcelain basin, fascinated as the little bubbles sparkled ephemerally before popping and rolling into the bathtub.
Not only was she abysmal at interpersonal relationships, but she was also crap at intra-alien relationships.
She stuck a toe into the hot water, searching for a not-too-hot spot to climb in.
She'd had a row with the Doctor. Flaming row. Blood and puffin feathers everywhere.
She wasn't sure where it came from, but it started along the lines of:
"What the BLANK (she wasn't the kind of person who swore, or at least, tried not to admit that she had… at least in retrospect) are you thinking? What the Not-A-Swear-Word-Beginning-with-F were you thinking? You just happen to be hanging around the world's largest volcano waiting for it to erupt? Who does that? Why the hell were we just lounging around a puffin abattoir for? You knew it was coming, I know it, I just know it! You wanted to be there!"
At which point, all busy with dials and knobs, the Doctor had muttered something about "just be glad we weren't near the water."
Death wish, Sahara decided as she sank her feet into the tub, the water still gushing out of the tap. The bastard has a death wish, and I'm along for the ride.
If she wasn't dead already, infected with Bloom- but she knew she wasn't. She known that when she collapsed against the console, exhausted from running, from shouting at the Doctor, her skin bleeding wounds from the avian nightmares driven by the Bloom. The second she started wondering about why her skin wasn't boiling and tearing from an infection, the moment it finally dawned on her that she'd never been sick a day in her entire life, never broken a single bone, never- the console room began to morph and flash from silvery white space age to teak libraries with candles and panels and back again- never been ill, yet never met the Doctor which must mean that he'd done something to her mother- flashing back and forth from teak to silver and back again- distracting her, the ship was distracting her, the Doctor said it was alive, uncertain and changing, but definitely alive, the mother fucking ship was trying to mess with her mind.
The Doctor had remained silent under her barrage of insults and finally, sick of him and his flickering time ship, Sahara had flipped off the Doctor, and the console, and went looking for a bathroom.
Which, she had to admit, was absolutely fabulous. She sat in the tub now and stretched her legs out, wiggling her feet, watching her steaming toes wriggle: the far end was at least five feet away. She'd wrapped her hair up atop her head and sank against the headrest (soft and cushiony) and wondered what the hell she was going to do when she got back to her own time, her own place.
Extinction Level Event.
That's what the Doctor had said. Or near enough. He was probably exaggerating a little.Only a billion would survive, human wise at least, would either be lucky enough to escape the Bloom or have a mutation to defend against. If they were lucky. But Sahara hadn't seen many lucky puffins.
Watching the Doctor fiddling with his device on the cliff and going on about temporal-spatio crap confirmed what she'd known all along: the Doctor had no interest in saving anyone from the Bloom… that wasn't why he was here. He was killing time.
Sahara only knew that because she'd been doing exactly the same thing for five years now. Killing time. Waiting to die. A job was a job and whether it was working under cover or serving coffee, she really didn't care. It didn't matter. People came and went out of her life; lately, they went, either by choice or by death. Leaving her, young as she was, wondering why she should even crawl out of bed in the morning. Standing before her mirror, unable to meet her own hollow gaze. She'd seen the same look in the Doctor's eyes.
It terrified her. That someone so alien, so powerful, felt just as helpless as she did. That he could know, could be pulled under, the same sinking pull of a life she wasn't interested in living, and just carried on out force of habit.
Sahara sank into the water until just her lips were beneath the water line and started to blow bubbles.
It had taken her a while to find the bathroom; the corridors were immense, whether they were gray and white or stained-wood. She'd found many rooms, bedrooms littered with magazines, old boots, unmade beds and clothes draped about as if the occupants had left quickly, assuming they'd be back soon to tidy up. Room after room. And photographs. Mainly of woman, some teenagers, another with bright bushy red hair, some middle-aged woman in a pith helmet appeared quite frequently, and once, a somber, almost angry looking black woman. And one man appeared several times, huge, blond and smiling. All the photographs looked out of dusty, framed cells into empty darkened rooms.
Sahara sank in further so that her ears began to fill with water, flub, flub, pop, pop, and then all she could hear was the echoing emptiness of the bathtub.
One man in a ship so big. One depressed man. One not particularly nice man. Completely unlike what her mother had told her.
He wasn't about to save the world.
Sahara's toe traced a button in the tub marked with a symbol of a bubble.
If anything, Sahara thought as she depressed the button, he was the one who needed saving.
She let out a yelp as the tub exploded in a flurry of bubbles, slamming her head against the porcelain. Cursing, she pulled herself out of the tub and groped for a towel.
She wanted off the suicide train...