A/N: I'm really sorry about how long this took to post, and if there's any mistakes in this chapter. Really, I'm sorry. I didn't want to go out tonight but I have to. Got to run!
Uhm, yes. Madame de Pompadour.

xxx xxx

The snow fell harder.

Rose's face was numb from the stinging cold, her hands felt like blocks of ice. There was an icy crust on her knees, and it slipped her up as she crawled through the snow.

Meet Rose Tyler, time travelling popsicle.

"Doctor," she muttered.

The snowy path passed as a blur beneath her. Hand over hand, retracing her steps.

"Why would you leave me?"

How far had she come? She'd been crawling for fifteen minutes, maybe. An hour, maybe. Days, maybe. The path never seemed to change, but the blizzard picked up, forcing her against the cliff face, burying her alive in the snow.

As much as she tried, Rose couldn't stop thinking about the Doctor. Or more specifically, his history with women.

Sarah-Jane Smith. Dropped of in England and never spoken of again. Left to dream about him for what, twenty, thirty years? She would have quite gladly been left forever.

Madame de Pompadour. The Doctor had been all smiles and heroic actions for her. For a while, it even seemed as the mistress would accompany them on the TARDIS. But no.

In the Doctor's own words, Madame de Pompadour had been one of the most significant women in the history of earth. And, as far as Rose could determine, he'd ditched her.

"What chance did I have?" Rose whispered bitterly.

Head down, shoulders set like a bull in the charge, Rose crawled on. She might have been left, like all the others. But unlike the others, she wasn't going to take it lying down.

xxx

"Transparent exodermis, creature apparently terminated when this is damaged."

The Doctor glanced over his shoulder, to a spot a hundred yards away. Of the two creatures that had died at the bottom of the ravine, only the one that had fallen was visible. The other had been half buried under the falling snow.

"Possible causes of death; exposure, suffocation."

He tried to think back to the creature's skin in his hand, to remember what it felt like. Warm, soft, a little damp. Like sticking your fingers into a pudding.

"Possible sign of amphibia." He said, trying to keep his voice level.

He knew that he was missing something, something obvious, something vital. But the pain in his ribs was intense, almost nauseating. He could hardly think for the effort it took just to walk.

It wouldn't do to let his guard down, not even to himself. He was all too aware that there were more creatures, at least three more, somewhere ahead of him in the ravine. The question was where.

How fast they would move, if they would stop to rest, if he would be able to see them, he didn't know.

"Three rows of serrated-"

The Doctor paused mid-sentence. There was something moving in the shadows of the base of the ravine wall, about twenty feet in front of him.

As silently as he could in his squelching sneakers, the Doctor moved closer to the gnarled bracken that hugged the cliff. It offered little cover, being nothing more than the brittle skeleton of a large briar bush, but he pressed closer to it anyway.

Minutes went by, and nothing stirred. The wail of wind through the gully, the soft hiss of snow, and the slow grind of water moving under the river's glacial crust, provided all there was to see and hear.

"Come on, I know you're there." The Doctor whispered, his gaze steady.

A sudden flicker of silver in the shadows made him take a step back. He groped though the bracken, searching for a viable weapon. His hand found a branch, probably too short and too fragile to be of much use, but it was better than nothing.

Armed with the branch, the Doctor moved out of the bracken, and towards the shadows.

As he drew closer, he began to make out details on the cliff face. The black rock was seeded with holes, hundreds and hundred of them, each one the size and shape of a large dinner plate. Caves.

There was something crawling across them.

Slowly, with the branch tucked under one arm, the Doctor reached out to touch the cliff face. The rock was moving enough to appear liquid. There was an awful lot of… something… up there.

"That's odd." The Doctor frowned, his hand held up to what little light the bald, half-exposed moon provided.

His hand was covered in fine, silver powder. The Doctor looked up again. His frown deepened.

"Moths?"

The cliff face exploded.

xxx

Rose stalked along the path on all fours, grunting and growling like a lioness.

"Bloody Doctor thinking he can bleedin' leave me." she muttered, "We'll just see about that!"

The cold no longer bothered her. She hardly noticed the wind's increasing pitch, nor the pummeling snow. She felt hot, boiling even, warmed by the heat of her anger.

"We'll see who leaves who in the cold to die."

Perhaps if she had been just a little more focused on the situation at hand, Rose could have avoided the next of her indignities. Oh, well.

Her hand struck down on something hard. Rose powered on, ignoring it. Her knee hit the same something, covered with a light veneer of fresh snow. Again, she ignored it, pushing her other knee against a considerably lower patch of ground.

The spot of higher ground began to slide. Rose shrieked.

"Blimey!" she shouted, feeling herself being pulled along with the higher ground, slipping down the descending path.

With her right foot, the one still on stagnant earth, Rose kicked out. Her foot hooked around something solid, and she was dragged off the moving ground, and sent sprawling face-first into the snow.

"Ugh," said Rose, through a mouthful of snow and dirt.

She looked up, confused as to what had happened. Some sort of personal landslide, maybe?

Then again, maybe not. Rose's heart leapt to see the toboggan, coloured white under the dusting of snow, slide to a halt only yards in front of her. The Doctor must have left it on the path when the creatures attacked.

"Oh, toboggan," Rose clambered towards it, hot tears welling at the corners of her eyes, "He abandoned you, too."

She kissed the freezing metal frame.

Far away, muffled by the falling snow, someone screamed.

xxx

"Moths." Huffed the Doctor.

The ravine was coming to an end. The rock walls on either side were now only shoulder high, and they soon flattened out into a wide, shallow basin. In the middle of the basin, a few hundred feet away, sat the lake.

Ordinarily, the Doctor would have been fascinated by the lake's muddy shores, and by the halo of yellow cloud that floated a hundred feet above it. That night, he hardly even saw it.

"Moths." He repeated.

The moths. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them had poured from the cliff face caves, as silent and silver as fog. They were huge, too, the size of footballs. Fluffy white flying footballs.

Blindly, they had ploughed into him, knocking him off his feet. The branch had been useless, and soon discarded. So the Doctor had kicked and fought his way out of the centre of the swarm, only to find that the moths weren't the slightest bit interested in him.

They had risen up in a cloud of fur and wings, swept up by the wind and bashed against the cliff face, but always rising. Although the Doctor had craned his head up to watch them, they were well camouflaged against the snowy sky, and he soon lost sight of them.

"Bloody moths." He scowled.

There were big, round holes in his jacket and pants legs where a few peckish moths had stopped to snack. His clothes and hair were coated with the silver dust from their wings. His ribs ached. He wanted to go back to the TARDIS. Even Time Lords have their bad days.

"Lepidoptera notodontidea cerura vinula," he said, regarding his jacket dismally, "The giant puss moth."

He continued trudging through the snow. When the rock wall was only waist height, he climbed carefully onto it, then stopped to rest. Once he got back to the TARDIS, it would be alright. Then he could rest properly, and heal. No more broken ribs, no more moth eaten clothes. No more squashed bananas.

The Doctor sighed, and said to himself, "I must be getting old."

After a few minutes, the throbbing in his ribs subsided. He found himself thinking about Rose, though he wasn't sure why. He suspected it was because he really, really, really needed a cup of tea. And though he'd never admit it to her, her cups of tea were capital.

Hot stuff.

The Doctor grinned to himself. Even the thought of hot tea restored him a little. Still grinning, he climbed to his feet.

And then promptly fell back down.

Baffled, the Doctor rose up on his hands and knees, and stared down the mountain slope. Fifty feet away and fast retreating, there was a low black object rocketing through the snow.

Above the soft crush of falling powder, there was a faint, distance cry. Almost a whoop.

The Doctor struggled to his feet. He stared after the fast disappearing object for a moment longer, then shrugged. Who knew?

He turned away from it, and started up the mountain slope. There were already two too many life forms on Beta, not including himself and Rose. The last thing anyone needed was for those life forms to learn tobogganing.

What would be next? Time travel?

The Doctor scoffed at his own joke. Whatever its illegitimate life forms, Beta was still in the Dark Ages. So imagine that. Tobogganing, time travelling primitives. He snorted. Why, that would be like humans-

"Rose!"

With hurricane force, the Doctor whipped around to face down the slope. The speeding object was barely visible in the distance.

That would be like humans alright, thought the Doctor as he broke into a run. And one human in particular.

"Rose!"

xxx

From the muddy border where the snow met the lake, Rose heard her name being called.

"Huh?"

She was still reeling from the thrilling trip down the mountain path, and then down the slope. She had kept close to the edge, finding it faster and easier to navigate than the inner part of the track. And much more dangerous, of course, but Rose was used to danger.

"Rose!"

Her name again. Rose turned to look up the slope. There was something, barely visible against the broad grey body of the mountain. It looked to be some kind of small avalanche.

Seeing the avalanche was headed for her, Rose hopped off the toboggan, and dragged it aside. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of rotten cabbage permeating from the lake.

As the mass of snow and dirt approached, she thought she could make out an arm, maybe a leg.

She frowned. "Doctor?"

If it was him, tumbling down the slope, more snowball than man, he had no chance of hearing her. Rose took a few more steps back, just in case.

"Rose!" the avalanche screamed.

The ground trembled in its wake. Rose watched, eyebrows raised, as it roared passed her. A second later, with an audible SLOSH, the avalanche hit the water line, and exploded.

Rose stared at it, stunned. Tense seconds passed. The crumbled mass of snow began to melt in the lake water.

"Is that you, Doctor?" Rose said aloud, when an arm, black with waterlog and laced with bite-sized holes, jerked up out of the mud.

"Argh." Said the figure attached to the arm.

Without another word, Rose trotted over to him. The Doctor (who else?) was on his back, half buried in snow, and slowly sinking into the lake mud.

"Rose, Rose, listen." He mumbled to her, as she struggled to help him up, "I have to tell you something."

Rose's heart skipped a beat. "Wh-what?" she stammered.

"Rose, I-" he stared up at her, "-I really, really, sincerely, with all my heart, totally and completely, absolutely,"

He stopped speaking, and just gazed up at her, as though she could read his mind. Rose finished pulling him out of the mud, and sat him on the relatively solid ground beside the toboggan. Smiling, she brushed the soaking strands of his hair back, out of his eyes.

"What?" she said, as kindly and patiently as she could without screaming first.

The Doctor smiled faintly back, and said; "I want a cup of tea."

Rose stared at him.

At last, when she had completely suppressed the urge to strangle him, she spoke.

"I thought you left me," she said, "I thought you abandoned me. It's been hours since those monsters attacked us. What- where have you been? The TARDIS is gone."

The Doctor stared up at the sky. The clouds were brown, and they broiled, frothing and bubbling and throwing out long tendrils of lightning. They hung low over the mountains, slicing their bulging bellies open on the craggy peaks.

The Doctor turned his attention away from the clouds, and onto the lake. The snow drift he'd brought down with him was all but gone. The fogginess in his mind dissipated.

"Rose," he said, inclining his head towards her, "Did you see anything strange up there, on the mountain path? When you were coming back down?"

Rose jerked away from the Doctor as though he'd just announced he had the plague.

"I don't believe this!" she cried, scrambling to her feet, "The bleedin' TARDIS is missing, there's flipping monsters everywhere, we're stranded on this," she spat the next words with a vehemence that surprised the Doctor, "planet, and all you can think about is sight seeing!"

"It doesn't help to dwell on things, Rose." He said to her, "Did you see anything strange, or not?"

She stared at him a moment longer. He looked up at her, face placid, from the mud. Rose let out a strangled sigh, and muttered something incomprehensible.

"The lake looked to be on fire." She said, not looking at him, "Obviously it isn't." she added hastily, "But it looked like it was. Lots of orange flames."

"Rose Tyler," the Doctor grinned at her, "You just saved our lives."

"What do you mean?" Rose frowned, but the Doctor was already on his feet and dragging her towards the lake.

Thunder rumbled overhead. Snow whipped around their faces, almost blinding them. The mud sucked around their ankles, and soon water sloshed to their knees. Rose was surprised at how warm it was.

"Have you gone completely bonkers? What in God's name are you doing?" she shouted, trying to pull away from him.

She'd survived monsters, caves, crippling hunger, freezing cold and nearly asphyxiating. And now the Doctor was trying to drown her.

"Rose, look." He replied.

Rose looked to where he was pointing. She stopped struggling.

xxx xxx

Sorry again. Please review if you don't think it sucks. Next chapter should be up soon.

It's called the Lake of Fire.