A/N: I know it seems like I say this at every chapter, and I know it's boring but really - thank you to my lovely reviewers! I love hearing what you have to say, and it really does make a difference :) Now, a little note about this chapter - it may seem a little 'out there', but don't worry. I have a plan and I know exactly what I'm doing ;) So don't worry!
Warning: Chapter Rating has changed to T. It deals with some adult themes that may not be suitable for younger readers. Oh, and there's some minor swearing too. Just thought I'd let you know...
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Chapter VII - TroubleThe second Doctor was in trouble. The flower attached to his arm had been giving him beady little looks all the way down this corridor, and right now, he had had just about enough of it.
"There's no need to keep quite that strong a grip on my arm, you know," he said. The flower didn't answer. "It's not like I'm going anywhere," he tried again.
"Got that right," barked the flower, pushing him further down the corridor. "Now shut it."
"Charming. Tell me, are all of your race this amiable?"
He could have sworn he heard the plant actually growl. It was astounding.
The corridor, as narrow as it was, now had wooden doors set in to it. On the front, etched in to white name-tag-like slabs, were numbers. But other than that, there were no other indications as to what might lie behind them. So far, they had taken another right at the last fork and the middle out of a choice at three at the next. It was all very confusing when one was trying to remember the way out, and the Doctor felt vaguely like he was trapped in the labyrinth. But where was the Minotaur? Perhaps he would find out soon enough.
"I'll tell you what," the Doctor said as they rounded a sharp corner that he hadn't even seen. "You tell me what's going on and where we're going, and I'll let you live when we get out of here."
The flower laughed, but other than that, made no reaction. Great, the Doctor thought. This was like talking to a wall. He may as well go outside and talk to a blade of grass for all the good this was doing him. But suddenly, they stopped. They were outside a red door. It was thinner than the others and looked more solid. The Doctor frowned.
The flower reached up to his head with his free hand. He rustled about in the petals for a moment or two and then produced a credit-card device. He slipped this in to a slim slot by the door, which beeped recognition and clicked open.
"Get in," he ordered gruffly, giving the Doctor a shove. This corridor was ridiculously narrow – it couldn't have been more than a metre wide. In he went, closely followed by the flower. This was getting more and more complicated, like a gigantic rabbit warren. There were doors every two metres along, door after door after heavy, metal door. At the speed they were walking, it was almost enough to make you sick.
"Ah," the flower said at last, stopping abruptly. The Doctor practically tripped over him. The flower slipped the card in to a slot and dialled a complicated combination on to the keypad. The thin, metal door slid open sideways. The Doctor looked inquisitively behind it and found... nothing. Three blank, steely, smooth walls. And before he knew it, he was being shoved inside harshly. He turned as quickly as he could – the walls were so close together that it was very difficult to turn abruptly – and saw with dismay that the door was sliding back shut. It hit the wall again with a 'click'. He found himself looking at yet another steely, smooth, blank wall.
Suddenly, before he even had time to think, the voice of the flower came echoing in to the room. It was impossible to tell from where – it just sort of... floated down.
"You will wait there until we find someone suitable enough to collect you. Until then, welcome to the Coalition of Rare and Exceptional Alien Phenomenon, or the CREAP. You will be kitted out with a working schedule soon enough. Enjoy your stay."
The voice laughed and died away. The Doctor felt his breath catch in his throat. CREAP? Sounded more like 'creep' to him. He was trapped in a room that was half a metre square with no way out. His shoulders hit each wall with no effort, and just breathing seemed to take tremendous effort. All the walls were the same. There were no marks, nothing. It was like he was stuck in a shaft. His feet were on solid metal, the same material and feel of the walls. That left only one direction – up.
He gave a casual glance towards the ceiling. About ten metres up he saw something attached to the wall, a little white box. It moved to follow him as his head moved. A camera. Right at the top of the shaft, what must have been at least twenty metres up, was the ceiling. He peered at it. Glass, showing the world outside. Well, at least that was something – he wasn't too far underground.
The Doctor stood with a growing frown on his face. This certainly couldn't be good. He turned again, his shoulders bashing roughly against the solid walls as he did so; but he couldn't even tell which wall had had the door, let alone how to open it and escape. What sort of prison was this? He remembered that the corridor had been filled with masses of these doors – did they all lead to a shaft-like cell? Were there other prisoners? Could he call for help? Would it do him any good?
"No, too many questions," the Doctor scolded himself aloud. At least the sound of his own voice was a comfort. He'd never tell Rose that yes, she was right, he did talk to himself when he was in a tricky situation. If he ever saw her again, that was.
The Doctor sucked his teeth thoughtfully. It was becoming quite a habit. He looked up to the ceiling again. If he could just get up there, maybe he could escape. But what good would being on the planet's surface do? It was the centre of it he wanted to get to.
"Think, you idiot," the Doctor told himself, putting his thumb and middle finger to his temples, shielding his vision with the palm of his hand. "What would Rose do?"
Part of him said that Rose would sit here and wait it out; but another, less rational, part of him – the part that usually ran out weaponless to a battle – told him that Rose would be shouting, kicking and screaming, begging for help at the top of her lungs. Causing a scene. And what had the Doctor done? Stood and thought for a while.
He knocked tentatively on one of the walls with his knuckles, then pressed his ear up against it. There was no sound.
"Hello?" he called casually. No answer. "Hello!"
This was useless, he realised. Even if there were other prisoners, they would be trapped, just like him. He needed another way, one that didn't rely on anybody else.
"Guess that leaves only one way," he contemplated thoughtfully, craning his neck upwards for a last time. Whatever lay up there, it was surely better than being trapped here for all eternity just waiting.
Slowly, the Doctor relaxed his shoulders and brought his hands up, so the palms faced outwards and his arms were bent back against themselves, sandwiched between the upper part of his chest and the wall. He touched at opposite walls with his hands. He could feel that the walls were not so smooth that he couldn't put his wait on them. Maybe he could shinny up.
The Doctor tightened his grip on the wall. Carefully, he hoisted himself into the air, until his feet weren't touching the ground. Success! He kicked his feet out to support his weight, thankful that he had chosen durable rubber-soled shoes. He repositioned his hands, this time stretching them a little above his head. The Doctor found a good grip and heaved. His body rose further into the air as easily as a pendant hanging on a chain. Okay, so he had only gone about two feet up so far – but it was a start. That was two feet closer to escape.
"I really have to stop thinking like that," he muttered as he hauled himself up further still. "In fact, I should just stop thinking all together. Less messy that way."
He continued on silently, carefully, making sure that his hands were in a comfortable place before raising himself up more and being extra careful to make sure that his feet had his entire weight. Once, he almost lost his footing completely. That would have been a nasty fall back down to reality. But he kept on, like a determined soldier, until he was half way up. He came up to eye line with the camera, which stared blankly back at him, its little black lens focusing on him like a solitary eye. He saw his own reflection looking back at him. Not bad, he thought briefly. But then he scolded himself for checking himself out when there were more important things at hand. Still, he looked better than his last incarnation.
Of course, nothing can go well forever. He was a few feet up past the camera when he was suddenly aware of tiny cylindrical holes in the walls, spaced evenly and symmetrically apart. They were no bigger than his little finger – not that he really fancied sticking his finger in to any of them in the first place. The Doctor got a strange tingling sensation travelling down his spine. He was in danger.
Shaking it off as fear, perhaps of heights, he kept on going up. But with every centimetre he was gaining, he was suddenly aware of a horrible crunching sound, like ancient gears and cogs working against each other. He stopped, if only to listen to the sound.
It was then that he was aware of movement. He caught it out of the corner of his eyes, at first, but when he looked it was quite obvious what was happening. Protruding out of the little, round holes were what looked like spearheads. Tiny, sharp and pointed triangles of metal. For now, they had stopped moving. Only their tips were showing through the holes. But there was one in every hole – how many had he seen whilst he was climbing? A hundred? Five hundred? It was impossible to tell. But it dawned on the Doctor that his climbing was somehow connected to the mechanism that made these spearheads get closer and closer to him; and he was only just over half way up the shaft. He tested his theory. The Doctor climbed up half a foot. He watched as the spearheads edged a little further out of their holes towards him. It was too narrow a shaft – much further, and they would be penetrating his skin.
"Ah," the Doctor said with worry. "That might be a problem."
He took in a breath of air, supported his weight on to his two feet and one hand, and put his right arm out to touch the blade of the spearhead. Perhaps they weren't as sharp as they looked.
He retracted his hand with pain. He looked at his index finger, now oozing blood like the Nile River. It dribbled down his hand. Ouch. Apparently, they were sharp: he had barely even touched it.
Never one to be put off by the threat of death, the Doctor found another grip for his hands. It was getting increasingly difficult, as not only was he trying to make sure he wouldn't fall, but now there was the risk of impaling his skin on to hundreds of little, tiny spikes. Still, he managed, and hauled himself up further.
The spikes rolled threateningly out further still. They must have stood out by about an inch. He could already feel a couple of pricks on his legs and arms. Much more, and he would be impaled upon them with no way back. The Doctor suddenly wondered how many prisoners had tried to escape and had ended up corpses in the air. What an unpleasant thought. Now he had a choice: he could continue up, risk being speared through like a chicken and left for God knows how long. Or he could make his way slowly and painfully back down to think of another plan. Neither option seemed favourable.
But then something happened that took that choice away. The shaft echoed with a loud, rumbling noise that sounded like a boulder rolling down a hill. Not being able to tell where it was coming from, the Doctor looked down.
Oh, how he wished he hadn't. He wasn't sure of it at first – but as he watched, he could definitely see the floor of the shaft getting closer and closer to him. Covered with long, sharp spikes that looked ready to kill. It was rising up of its own free will, like a menacing zombie. Not fast, not slow – just steady.
"Perfect," the Doctor muttered, shaking his head. So, either way it seemed, he would turn into Doctor-on-a-stick. He looked up to ceiling in aggravation and swore. "Couldn't have taken any more ideas from Indiana Jones, could they?" he mumbled, indecision in his hearts. It was too late to head back down, so that only left up. With more spikes. Oh joy. This, he realised with some dismay, was turning in to quite a life-threatening adventure.
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Samuel's grip on his arm loosened. At last, the first Doctor thought. He was getting somewhere!
"So, come on then," he challenged as they sat in a long, long queue. They'd left the corridor long ago, and it had expanded in to masses and masses of rooms, all connected to each other and leading off to others. Some were dusty and dirty, like the one they had first seen. And some were smooth and clean and advanced, like the illusionary room the TARDIS had let them in to. Oh yes, the TARDIS – the sudden thought of it made the Doctor's stomach muscles clenched. But he kept talking, if only to keep Samuel distracted. "Tell me," he continued. "Tell me what it is about this place that makes you want to submit to slavery here."
"I'm not a slave," grumbled Samuel in protest. He would never admit to it, but as smug as this prisoner was, he was fairly good company. At least he could hold up an interesting conversation and, for once, wasn't scared to death. Yet.
"No, you just do what you're told and don't ask questions. That about sum it up?"
Silence.
"I'll take that as a yes."
They were talking quietly. All sorts of odd-looking alien shapes occupied the bench running up along the side of the long room they were sitting in. All of them, the Doctor noted, were accompanied by an orange man like Samuel. Most others were sitting in silence, receiving glares if they even so much as dared to talk. Fantastic, the Doctor thought – already he was standing out.
The prisoners looked like they had all been randomly bought at a pick-and-mix store. There was one that looked like a cross between a man and a hawk, his beak clicking in annoyance at the forceful hand around his ruffled wing.
"You just keep your head down and stay out of trouble," Samuel said quietly to the Doctor. "We wouldn't want any 'accidents'."
The Doctor suppressed a laugh: this guy couldn't pull off intimidating if he were covered with tattoos, an eye missing and had the planet's most deadly weapon at his disposal.
"Oh, and what if I don't? What if I cause a ruckus and there's no one around to stop me?"
His eyes were daring, but his face was calm.
"I don't believe you'd do that, Doct – er – prisoner #6-7-8-3," sighed Samuel, pretending he hadn't made a mistake at the captive's name. That had never happened before; usually, he didn't even know the name to begin with. But the Doctor had caught on, and smiled.
"Why not? I'm more dangerous than any of the other individuals here, believe me."
One or two shot him a look. Specifically a pink overgrown rat that was speckled with pulsating green spots and something that looked like a puddle with eyes.
"Sorry," the Doctor added quickly, his eyes apologetic. "No offence meant."
"Because," Samuel reasoned. "You're too smart."
Monsters and aliens alike were filling up the benches that ran both sides of the large room. It was a little surreal. But at the end of the room there was a door, bright white, with two guards outside it. They looked slightly reptilian and hadn't moved or talked. They just stood. Rather like the guards outside London's Buckingham Palace, the Doctor noted.
However, this door now opened a crack and a thin, nervous looking woman peered out. She had a thin face and a long nose as well as greasy hair and peering, beady little dark eyes. But at least she was human. She was also the first female the Doctor had seen on this planet.
The woman caught the eye of Samuel, nodded and beckoned. The grip on the Doctor's arm loosened completely, and he was pushed to his feet.
"Go on, then," Samuel laughed pitifully. "It's time for you to see where cheek gets you."
"I suppose you're not coming in with me, then," the Doctor shrugged. His voice was a tad too hopeful for Samuel's liking, and he ignored it. The Doctor didn't hang around. He walked confidently past the rows of monsters who, he noted with some disdain, were all glaring at him. However the order system worked around here, it could do with a decent revamp.
"Prisoner #6-7-3-8? You are to come with me," sniffed the thin, scrawny woman.
"Oh good. And that's 'the Doctor', by the way. I never cared much for numbers."
"I'm sure," she replied coldly, bustling herself. "Come along."
She led him in to another room. But this was furnished properly, like an office. The carpet on the floor was a ghastly shade of puce and the walls were a dirty, dusty lilac. In the corner of the windowless room there was what seemed to be a secretary's desk. It was bare. On the other side, opposite the door the Doctor and his escort had just come through, there was a single, closed door. She led him up to it and then told him to knock. He did so.
"All a bit formal, all this," the Doctor observed as he waited for a reply from behind the door. "Can't you just clap me in irons and leave me to the dogs?"
The secretary looked at him – he was grinning. What an odd fellow. Still, The Room would quickly sort him out. No wonder Samuel had been worried.
"It's just through that door," she said instead.
"What is?"
Her eyes flashed dangerously. "You'll see."
The Doctor shrugged. Bunch of psychos, the lot of them. And it was up to him to end it all. God alone only knew what was going on around here. He wondered what had happened to Rose and the other Doctor. And how much trouble they had got themselves into.
This door had a handle, he noticed. Carefully, he stretched out his hand and turned. It was almost like there was a shift in gravity, the way he stumbled into the room. This was larger than the previous room; but still, the puce carpet and lilac walls. On the far side of the room there stood a huge, brown desk. A large, sweeping leather seat sat at it, but its back was turned towards the door – whoever was sitting in it was looking out of the window, which made up the last of the four walls.
Wait. A window? In the middle of an underground planet? Bizarre. But it was too far away to see anything of any interest out of it. It looked like a sheet of reflective glass.
"Hello," said the Doctor in his casual, bright way. The voice that greeted him was rasping and tired. It sounded familiar, somehow, but it was thickly disguised – as if the speaker were speaking through a pit of gravel.
"We've been expecting you, Doctor," it greeted coarsely.
"Oh, no numbers then?" the Doctor asked, stepping forward into the room. The door slammed shut tight behind him, and he jumped. Something very strange was going on. "Who's this 'we', then?" he asked, turning back. The chair didn't turn.
"You already know," it chuckled.
"Well, if I did, I wouldn't be asking. Who are you? I'm guessing you're the head of the operations going on around here."
"Something like," the voice replied, somewhat wistfully. The Doctor leaned casually to his side to try and see around the chair, but to no avail; he couldn't see past it.
"And I suppose you just expect me to stand here and talk to the back of a chair?" he asked persistently.
"Of course not," the voice laughed, though the leather chair didn't move. "Sit."
Within the second of this command, the Doctor found himself sitting down in a chair, as if someone had just come up behind him and pushed the damned thing forcefully behind his knees. He stumbled backwards into the chair as his knees buckled and felt cushions beneath him. His arms hit solid wooden supports as his head hit the hard, uncomfortable back. Metal bands came up over his wrists and legs and he found himself stuck. The chair seemed to be wedged in to the floor, despite the fact that it had not been there a second before.
The Doctor strained against the restraints, but rather than breaking them, he seemed only to make them tighter against his skin.
He relaxed after a little while, panting with the effort. The voice from the chair ahead of him laughed malevolently, ricocheting around the entire room.
"What do you want?" the Doctor demanded. He could feel his hearts beginning to race, but he sucked in a cool breath of air.
"You are in no place to be making demands, Doctor," the rasping voice sneered. It paused, contemplating things for a while, until it decided to speak again. "Do you know why I brought you here?"
"Couldn't imagine," the Doctor shrugged. "Maybe you thought I would make another addition to your collection of slaves. Or maybe it's just because I'm pretty."
There was silence for a moment or two. And then an outburst of hysterical laughter that sounded like the rumbling of a thunderstorm. It laughed and laughed and even when the creature spoke it was in between choked cries of more laughter.
"Oh, that's rich Doctor. I thank you – it has been a while since I have been able to laugh like that."
"Not surprising if you spend all your time cooped up in here," the Doctor quipped, giving up on trying to break the restrains by force. Perhaps if he could relax and wiggle his wrist out...
"There's no point in trying to get out of that chair. I assure you, it's quite secure."
Bollocks. But it was still worth a try.
"You didn't answer my question," the Doctor said bluntly. The metal around his wrists began to dig in to his skin; it felt as though his blood circulation was being cut off. But he ignored it.
"There was no need. It doesn't matter what I want. All that matters is that you listen to what I have to say."
"All right," the Doctor replied, relaxing. "I'm listening. So talk."
"Patience, Doctor, patience," replied the voice mockingly. "All in good time. You'll hear what I have to say soon enough. In the meantime... why not come over to this window? I assure you, the view is quite lovely."
"No thanks," he scoffed. "I would, but I seem to be stuck in a chair. Maybe some other time."
"Oh, you seem to misunderstand me. You don't have a choice."
There came the sound of what could have been the clicking of fingers – though, it sounded more like sellotape being ripped from a parcel – and then, the chair began to slide across the floor. The Doctor couldn't see how, as there was no mechanical device, but the next thing he knew, he was sat beside the leather armchair in sight of the window.
What he saw made his blood churn and his skin crawl. They must have been up a few storeys up, for the window was looking out over a wide, expansive room that stretched hundreds of yards both up and down. The walls all shared the same bland metallic shimmer, like a blank canvas of colourless paper. The room beyond must have been several hundred metres long, and just as wide. From the rafters at the very tiptop of the ceiling there hung thick, metal cords, coiling their way down the room. At about half way down – conveniently at perfect eye line from the mirror – they stopped.
And as the Doctor looked ahead of him, his eyes searching the hundreds of thousands of cords, he felt sick. Hanging from the end of each of the heavy-duty cords was a body. Masses and masses of thousands of different types of alien life forms. Their necks were broken and their heads lolled out unnaturally. There was an eerie stillness that came with the whole room. Everything was silent – except for one thing. It sounded like the steady drip, drip, drip of a leaking tap. The Doctor recognised it, as a similar noise had taken the TARDIS not so long ago. But that had been a tap.
This was much more horrifying. The Doctor's eyes widened as he watched. Trickling slowly from the deep wounds in the necks that the thick, metal wires had caused was the steady drip of blood. It trickled sorrowfully down the lifeless, empty shells of the bodies, like a thin stream. Where the bodies came to an end the air, hung eerily like ghosts, the blood was dripping away, falling silently and obediently to the ground. It collected in a massive vat. A sea of blood raged below the thousands of bodies and it seemed to be flowing. There were open pockets in the walls, letting the blood filter out slowly. It was horrifying.
The Doctor couldn't speak. His throat was closed but his eyes wide. He could only watch, his eyes darting helplessly from one body to the next, looking pointlessly for life in any of the eyes that stared emptily back at him. But all he saw was death.
All around there were aliens. Some of them he'd never seen before. Many of them were familiar – the Doctor recognised them as relations to those in the corridor outside. But most were those he had seen and met before. Those he had come across in the past for whatever reason; they were here. All of them. Every single one, every race, species, mutation... he could name them all. And the most of them, suspended unnaturally by their necks, hung to death, were humans. People from the planet Earth, the planet he had come to call a second home. They were hung.
The Doctor's blue eyes burned with tears of rage. His hands were shaking and he felt as if every bone in his body was screaming at him to look away from the massacre. But he couldn't. He was hypnotised by it.
"What do you think?" whispered the voice maliciously from beside him. "Do you like it?"
The Doctor was panting. The emotions that hit him were overwhelming him, there was no doubt about it; his head felt as if it might explode. His face was contorted and twisted with appalled horror. His mouth hung open in despair.
"What have you done to them?" he managed to choke, barely being able to move his mouth to form the words. The sickness began to rise from his stomach like a tsunami wave.
"Me?" questioned the voice, the tinge of a laugh on its edges. "Me? Doctor, you are mistaken if you think that I was the one who slaughtered all these victims."
"Who?" the Doctor demanded, his voice raising with every letter. His blood was boiling. His mind was racing. Every muscle in his body was shaking with anger. "Tell me who did it!" he shouted.
"Always so quick to judge," sneered the voice with a chuckle. "What do you intend to do?"
The Doctor chanced a glance to the chair beside him. The tall, leather back of the chair hooked around, obscuring his vision.
"Who," he ordered again. It was a command, not a question.
"Are you telling me, Doctor, that that tiny, insignificant brain of yours can't figure it out? You don't realise why you recognise every single one of those bodies in there?"
He fought desperately against the restraints.
"This is sick!" he shouted. "Sick and wrong and I'm going to put it right!"
"Oh?"
"Yeah," he shouted. The metal restraint on his right arm began to loosen. "I'm going to find who did this," he spat, fighting still – the bodiless voice seemed to have forgotten about the chair. "I'm going to hunt them and kill them, and then, I'm going to blow this entire planet out of the heavens!" At last, his wrist broke free. He flexed his arm. As if this weakened the entire circuit, his left wrist and ankles were set free. The restraints disappeared. "And you know what?" The Doctor stood up and kicked out at the chair, which buckled and shattered under his newfound strength.
"What's that, Doctor?" hissed the voice, seemingly not even bothered by his escape.
The Doctor cast a last, sad look at the death through the window before him.
"No one's gonna stop me," he said defiantly. "Not you, not Samuel, not your workers. Not anyone. I'm gonna find Rose, find my friend and the three of us are gonna walk out of here alive. We'll save it all."
"But Doctor," the voice said quite calmly, grating against his ears. It made the hairs on the back of the Doctor's neck stand on end. "How can you save this planet when you cannot save yourself?"
"I've had enough of this," the Doctor barked. He turned on his heel and began to walk, staring at where the door used to be. But it was gone. He turned. No doors, nothing. The room was cut off from everywhere.
"But don't you want to see who's behind it all?" the voice asked, in mock horror. "Don't you want to know?"
"I don't have a choice, do I?" the Doctor spat. "Enough games. Tell me who you are!"
"See for yourself."
The chair turned, slowly. It pivoted around until it turned to face the Doctor. And the Doctor's blood ran cold.
"No," he cried, stumbling backwards. His eyes widened in fear, in panic and his hearts raced as if he had been running from this his entire life. "No! It's impossible!"
The figure in the chair grinned sardonically. It leaned back and steepled its fingers, never letting that malicious glint leave its bright eyes for a second.
"The Room never lies, Doctor," it laughed, the rasping voice in its voice receding. All of a sudden, the voice became horribly, spine-chillingly familiar. Slower, deeper, but still the same. "This," said the figure, turning the chair and indicating to the massacre outside, "Is the result of your meddling."
"No!"
"Oh, yes!" countered the voice. Slowly at first, but ever so surely, it adopted a soft, Northern taint. "You," the Doctor's voice spoke back at him. "You are responsible for these deaths Doctor. The destruction you bring in your path – it's no surprise that you see yourself sitting in this chair!"
The colour drained from the Doctor's face. His brain had kicked in to overdrive but all logical thought had left his mind. He couldn't think, he couldn't feel: he could only see.
"But..." he stammered. Then, he put a hand up to his eyes. "It's a trick," he muttered, looking away and trying to regain some logical thinking. "A trap. There's something going on here." Then he looked up again, and pointed to the dead. "They were innocent!" he shouted. "Innocent! You killed them all! And for what? You didn't do all this just to prove a point!"
"War kills," the voice said simply. "Everywhere you go, Time Lord, everything you do, it affects more than you possibly know. These are the victims of your war, of your everyday battle for survival. So look at them, Doctor; look into their empty, dead eyes and tell me – was it worth it? Was the death of a thousand citizens worth your life?"
"You're lying!" the Doctor yelled, his eyes and voice equally fierce. "I don't hurt people! I save them, and I put a stop to sadistic killers like you."
The creature in the chair – for it certainly wasn't that Doctor – cocked its head.
"Deal with your past, Doctor," it advised. "You are no saviour to the races. For with you comes Death, and there is no worse crime than that. And, before I go, there is... one other thing. Your little girlfriend – you might want to think about your next action carefully, otherwise she'll die. Like the rest of them. She'll be just another corpse."
"What are you talking about?" demanded the Doctor bitterly. He marched over to the desk, his eyes flashing with rage. "What have you done with Rose!"
The voice's owner smiled.
"See for yourself."
Despite everything in his body telling him not to, the Doctor couldn't help but move towards the window. He had happened to give it a chance glance, but now, he was transfixed. He pushed himself up to the glass, his palms against it, his eyes scouring the ceiling. Being lowered down slowly from the ceiling on a platform was another of those orange slaves. And next to him was –
"Rose!"
The Doctor's voice called out in vain; the glass was too thick, she couldn't hear him. Rose stood next to the warden on the platform, her face red and raw with tears. Her hands were tied behind her back and around her neck there was a thick, metal cord. Identical to the hundreds of others in the room.
The Doctor hammered on the glass with his fists.
"Rose!" he shouted at the top of his voice. "Rose! ROSE!"
Why wasn't she fighting? Why was she just standing there with tears streaming down her face?
And suddenly, a new sound came in to the room. It was the sound of a nineteen year old Londoner crying.
"Doctor..." she cried. It was her all right – the Doctor was watching her lips move. Tears were collecting in his eyes and spilling down his cheeks. But he wiped them away.
He pounded on the window again, harder, but she couldn't hear him. She kept talking.
"Doctor, how could you?" asked the bitter voice, floating eerily into the room. "How could you kill all these people?"
"No..." the Doctor found himself replying, his voice soft. "No, I didn't – it's a trick – Rose, I..."
"You left them to die. You forget them. And now you've forgotten me."
"Rose, I could never – "
But his voice was caught in his throat. The Doctor watched in horror as he watched Rose take a tentative step towards the edge of the platform: of her own free will. And he suddenly realised what was going on.
"NO!" he bellowed through the glass. His throat was hoarse, but he kept shouting. "NO, ROSE, DON'T YOU DARE JUMP!"
The Doctor heard her sniff and choke and watched as she looked to the ceiling and closed her eyes. She hovered a foot over the edge of the platform.
"I loved you, Doctor," she cried quietly. "I loved you and you let me go. You never came back for me."
The Doctor rounded on the chair, which was turned away from him.
"What have you done to her!" he screamed, not caring that the tears were burning like rivers of fire as they ran down his cheeks. "She's innocent! What have you told her!"
There was no answer. He grabbed at the leather chair and swung it to look directly over the figure in the chair... but it was empty. He stared in shock, but only for a moment. Rose's voice through the air snapped him back to window.
"Goodbye, Doctor," she called mournfully in to the distance.
"NO!" The Doctor shouted, but it was all in vain. He hammered on the glass, again and again, shouting for her, yelling at her to stop, that he was right there, that he could never forget her, that he was right there and that he had always, always loved her. But it made no difference. With one final heart-breaking cry she stepped over the side of the platform.
Her body fell. He watched it fall gracefully, like a diver jumping into a swimming pool. It was if he were watching it happen in slow motion, practically feeling the nanoseconds of her life draining away. And he was helpless. Doomed to stand there and watch her die.
An ear splitting crack filled the room as Rose's body stopped suddenly and hung lifeless in the air. The cord cut in to her skin and a warm trickle of blood began to ooze from the cut.
It took a second or two to register. She couldn't really be gone. She was his. His. They'd promised they would always be together. He wasn't really watching her body dangle in midair, swinging with a life that had been snatched from her within the millionth of a second. But the noise of it reverberated around his head. In that same second that Rose's neck had snapped, his hearts had broken and shattered into hundreds of millions of irreparable, irreplaceable shards. And now, he knew: she was gone. And an eerie silence began to descend on the empty room.
And then, there was a new sound. It was a harsh, gut-wrenching, spine-chilling and heart-breaking cry, a mournful scream of despair that rang out to all corners of the universe. It was the sound of the last Time Lord crying for his lost love.