A/N: I hope this chapter is alright. Sorry if it's not. It's certainly long. Eek. Hope you like it!
xxx xxx
That day, the Doctor dreamed.
A city burned. Stone buildings smouldered, skyscrapers were hundred metre high pillars of roaring fire. Still more were just charred black skeletons, threatening to topple in the evening breeze.
The sky was a noxious nicotine yellow, seething with writhing orange smoke plumes.
Somewhere deep in his head, the Doctor knew that the ground his feet trod was sand. But when he looked down to confirm this, he saw not sand but a city sidewalk, littered with debris and the dead.
His city burned.
His head was filled with the screams of the warheads, banshee howling from the yellow sky, dropping all around him. Mortar bombs exploded before and beside him, chipping away at his flesh, but he walked on.
No one was alive. This was the twenty-first hour of the final battle for Gallifrey, and those last few souls who dared defend it were long since dead.
The Daleks had holed them in like rats; a wall of fire, mortar and electron bombs lined the city boundaries. The dark shadow of a time-space neutraliser hovered high over the city centre, rendering all TARDIS's useless.
And with no escape, and no way to defend themselves, his people died.
It wasn't the last battle.
It was just the one he remembered.
The Doctor made his way up a hill near Gallifrey's utmost boundary. He paused to watch the dying city.
Most of the buildings had fallen by then. The scream of the warheads was dwindling, as the Daleks realised that there was nothing lest for them to destroy.
The Doctor took one last look at the rubble, mountains of ash and twisted metal frames, high piles of collapsed stone, arms and legs and torsos littered everywhere. All of it burning.
"My home." He said.
Then the image wavered, and he found himself back in the desert. Unharmed.
There was still along way to go before the ocean.
xxx
"Don't tell me you're dead, too."
Rose awoke with a start.
"Bleedin' hell!" she yelped, flattening herself against the sand dune.
His face mere inches from hers, the Doctor grinned. Despite his cheery demeanour, the dark smudges under his eyes told Rose he was exhausted.
"I thought you might be heading this way," the Doctor said, standing. He offered a hand-up to Rose, "Do you want a drink?"
"Not right now." Rose refused the proffered hand with a shake of her head, and climbed warily to her feet. She craned her neck to see behind the Doctor.
"Odjya's dead," he said, noting Rose's suspicious expression, "Don't bother looking for her."
Rose stared at him dumbly for a minute until his words sunk in. Odjya was dead?
"W-what happened?" she stammered, wondering if it was too soon to punch the air in triumph. "When?"
The Doctor gave a short, harsh laugh. His expression was bitter, unlike any Rose had seen him wear before. "A desert worm ripped her apart. All I found of her was an arm."
"But I- I just saw her. Just hours ago." Rose chewed her lip. Definitely too soon for a victory dance. "Just hours- she was… she was so alive."
In truth, Odjya was the last person Rose would have expected to be torn apart by the worms. The woman had looked as easy to uproot from her life as the average barnacle is from its rock.
"Are you sure?" she added, "You time lords can heal, right? Maybe loosing an arm wouldn't even kill her."
The Doctor shrugged. Images of the burning city haunted his thoughts. He turned away from Rose, and she thought she caught a glimmer of dampness on his face.
"Doctor, I'm sorry, I just-"
"Don't be sorry." The Doctor's words were hissed, spoken through clenched teeth, "She's dead. It's no one's fault. No one at all except my idiot people!"
He took a big step back from Rose, and hurled the canteen he carried to the ground. The canteen slid across the ground for a few feet before stopping, and the Doctor glared at it. Anger radiated off him. Rose shifted further back into the shadows.
When next he spoke, his voice was low and fast. Rose had to strain her ears to hear him.
"I'd go back, you know. I'd go back, and I'd save them all. I never thought of doing it, never even thought it was possible." The Doctor turned on Rose, and his eyes were wide and shinning, his teeth bared in what was almost a snarl, "But if I could do it now, I would. Save Odjya, my family, my people, and damn the rest."
He took a sudden step forwards and lashed out at the canteen. His bare foot connected, and the canteen sailed out across the dunes.
Rose forced herself out from the safety of the dunes. Her voice was timid, "Doctor, you have to calm down. Think about what you're doing."
"They shouldn't have died. Odjya shouldn't have died. I should have stopped it."
As quickly as it had come, the Doctor's anger evaporated. With the tension gone, he seemed deflated, defeated. His shoulders sagged, and he glanced at Rose with weary eyes.
Rose moved towards him. She placed a hand on his arm, "It's not your fault. Stop blaming yourself."
When he didn't reply, she continued. "Besides, there could still be others here. We haven't checked the beach yet."
The Doctor shook his head. The ache he'd hidden for a hundred years was still as raw as the day he'd first concealed it. There was no escaping it, now.
"There's no one, Rose." He told her, "They're all dead. I really am the last one left."
She tightened her grip on his arm, squeezing harder and harder until he looked at her. Rose caught his gaze and forced him to keep hers.
"You don't know that. You can't know that." She said firmly, "You're just being morbid."
"We tried to genetically modify the desert worms to survive whatever wiped them out in previous attempts." The Doctor said, watching Rose closely to gauge her reaction, "We could have eliminated our own race, or infested thousands of other worlds with those worms, just for a chance to defeat the Daleks. We were so, so stupid."
Rose agreed that it was reckless, but understandable. Was it really so bad to risk everything else just to save what you love? Selfish, yes, but not stupid. And even that last-ditch effort had failed.
"It's worse than that, Rose."
For a moment, the Doctor looked lost for words. He swallowed, flicked his gaze off her, frowned slightly. Rose watched him and wished that the entire fiasco was over. Then she could have her old Doctor back, and no longer have to be witness to that terrible pain in his expression.
"I don't know if anything we produced would actually survive a meteorite, or a flood or drought or plague or whatever happens to them. But they can survive here now. They hatch, they grow up. And they're very hungry."
"You mean…" Rose let the sentence fall. She didn't have to finish it.
"Yes. They hatched. They were hungry. And they devoured everything around them."
Rose considered this. From what she'd seen of the desert worms, it seemed likely enough.
"But still," she said, "How do you know?"
The Doctor told her about the nest, the eggs, the bits of Gallifryan skeleton. He was convinced that the same fate had befallen any other surviving time lords on Beta, too.
At last, when he was done telling her these awful things, he added, "Do you have the same feeling about this that I do?"
He hadn't been at the last battle for Gallifrey. He couldn't have been, because no one survived it. But there it was, the entire thing, playing out in digital picture quality in his head. A memory that wasn't his.
"That it's all bloody horrible?" Rose guessed.
"There's that." The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her, "And there's something else. Something doesn't seem right about all this."
Rose thought there was nothing right about any of it. She shrugged.
"What're we going to do, anyway?" she wondered, "Are we going back to the TARDIS?"
She hoped the answer was yes. Things could go back to normal there, or at least as normal as they ever were around the Doctor. Rose smiled to herself. First she would be mad at him for making out with the wicked witch of time, then she would forgive him. He did say he loved her, after all. At last!
The Doctor was looking thoughtful. He chewed on an already stub fingernail, sorely missing his spectacles. He didn't bother replying to Rose's query.
"You're going to hit bone soon," she told him, half laughing, "What're you thinking about?"
Yep. She certainly was looking forward to going home. Maybe then she could show the man how to kiss properly; he'd looked damn awkward in the oasis with Odjya.
Her question earned her another raised eyebrow. "Odjya had an awful lot of scars, didn't she?"
"So do I." Rose pointed out a long white scar on the underside of her arm, where she'd slipped and cut herself while slicing her own birthday cake, "So do you, probably."
"No, I don't." the Doctor shook his head.
He showed Rose the smooth, now slightly tanned, skin on his arms. He lifted his grimy shirt, and his stomach was just as smooth. Days earlier, the flesh had been ragged and red from his injuries.
Rose smiled. She liked that flat, hard stomach. It was definitely much easier on the eye than the Doctor's expression of frenzied revelation.
"Earth to Rose," the Doctor called. He tapped her head sharply, "Anyone home in there?"
"Um, sorry. Did you say something?" Rose asked, blushing furiously.
The Doctor gave her a Look. "I just said, I heal. No scars. The healing process is too fast for scars."
"So what?" Rose gave a nonchalant shrug, "Maybe she's just not a fast healer."
"She was an excellent healer. She even healed me, when my hands were burnt." The Doctor held up his hands, palms out, "See? No scars."
Burning buildings, black smoke. People screaming as they were torn apart by unseen forces. Devoured by invisible monsters. There was definitely something out of place about the scene.
"Then maybe she had a lot of big injuries, that she couldn't heal fast." Rose said. She was growing agitated at the waste of time. They could have been well on their way back to Gymnophiona by now.
The Doctor grinned. "Exactly. And you see her head? Lot's of scars. Massive trauma. Probably enough to require regeneration."
Rose frowned. "You know, now that you mention it, a lot of those scars looked new. Last few months. None were faded, or anything."
"Rose," the Doctor stared at her, "You're a genius."
"Yeah, I know. Why's that again?"
"Odjya must have been on her last regeneration, otherwise that head trauma would have given her a new face." The Doctor licked his lips, "And from her scars, we know she regenerated a few months ago."
"What are you thinking?" Rose queried, beginning to catch on.
"She told me that all the Gallifryans on Beta died a hundred years ago, but there was no way that she could have known that. Unless she'd already been to the ocean lab." He mused.
Rose agreed. "She was very sure of where it was."
"When we found that nest, I could tell the bones were Gallifryan. But I couldn't recognise the smell exactly. The smell of rotting flesh drowned it out."
"Flesh doesn't rot for a hundred years." Rose said.
The Doctor gulped. "I don't think Odjya is dead. I think those bones were hers. She's on her last regeneration now, but a severed arm wouldn't kill her. And there were no other bits there to prove that the worm ate her."
"She didn't want us to know that she lived. She would have looked for us." Rose said. Despite the heat, a cold sweat prickled at the back of her neck.
"I'll bet you two weeks on planet Florida that she's gone back to the TARDIS." The Doctor patted his pockets, shirt and pants. The TARDIS key was gone. "All along, she told us that the Rax and the Sycorax were her plan to exterminate the Daleks."
"She lied."
When he really thought about it, the Doctor wasn't sure if there had been a last battle for Gallifrey. The city had fallen, of course. But not in one big hit. And what were those things, swimming just outside his vision? Monsters that destroyed everything in their path, more lethal than the bombs and falling buildings combined. Consuming people, ripping them limb from limb.
Surely that wasn't Dalek technology. Was it?
"This is all wrong," the Doctor groaned, "Things are out of order. This has been what Odjya wanted all along; the Rax and the Sycorax, they're just food. The desert worms are the real weapon."
"What do you think she's doing?" Rose asked, then answered her own question, "She'll have the eggs, and she can get more on her way back. And obviously she needs the TARDIS…"
Amphibians are primitive creatures. They don't judge the time of year by falling leaves or rising temperatures. But a little moisture in the air will send thousand of frogs and newts on a pilgrimage back to their home ponds, to fulfil the need to reproduce.
Their eggs are much the same. Eggs of a Corroborre frog can be lain at any time through the year, but they will never hatch until the Winter wet season, when their nest becomes flooded. Behaviour like this, as foreign as it is to most mammals, is common amongst amphibians.
Certainly common enough to be tampered with.
"In a thousand years or so, there will be a disaster on Beta that will destroy all life." The Doctor said, "Odjya will be going there. Meet the conditions, and the eggs will hatch. If they survive the disaster, they'll grow up big and strong. They'll breed, and eat each other, and breed again. They'll extinguish all life that isn't their own."
"Won't Odjya be killed, though? She won't survive a meteorite." Rose frowned.
The Doctor smiled. "No. And she won't need to. If her plan works, Odjya will be born again on Gallifrey, in six million years from now. And if she's right, and this is the Dalek's home world, there won't ever be a time war."
"Uh huh." Rose nodded. "Is that good, or bad?"
"I don't know. Anyway, Odjya has a whole day's travel on us, now. We won't catch up to her."
Invisible monsters. The Betian Sycorax had a layer of jelly-like skin that reflected light and rendered them invisible. Only by being extremely close to them could you see the muscular black body and gleaming white bone that lay beneath. And usually, if you were close enough to see that, you were dead.
But the Sycorax wouldn't survive a meteorite, or a drought. They weren't adapted to any conditions other than the snow capped mountains. So…
"Doctor, are you alright?"
Rose's face was very close to his. Her eyes were wide, face concerned. Almost frightened.
"Yeah, fine."
"You're looking a little pale, that's all." She was watching him carefully. "Is something the matter?"
But if you were going to make a monster, you wouldn't just give it teeth and claws. Especially not when you could splice and dice its genetic material with other monsters, with other weapons.
The invisible monsters attacking his city were desert worms. Maybe Odjya was right, and the Daleks originated on Beta. But they were never going to be devoured by the worms. They were going to tame them. Weapons of war.
"We have to stop her!" the Doctor cried.
"What?"
If the tone in his voice hadn't been so urgent, Rose might have argued. She also might have cranked a finger around her ear and called him crazy. As it was, she was all ears.
"We have to stop Odjya. Those worms won't stop the time war. They'll end it," he met her eyes, "And we're going to loose."
Rose had the sudden, horrifying image of a million Dalek fleets, exalted after their victory over the time lords, setting off across the universe. Everything would be…exterminated.
"What're we waiting for then?" she cried, "There must be a TARDIS or two a the lab. Let's get over there and stop that bitch!"
A city burned.
xxx
Drag me off, before I set my world on fire
Out and gone, the sun will never set tonight
xxx
Evening zephyrs tossed small waves against the shore of an otherwise peaceful beach. The white sand was littered with driftwood and seaweed, spiral shells and black pebbles, marking the line of the tide.
A few small crabs scuttled about, watching the intruders curiously with swivelling stalk eyes.
The intruders, however, had no time for crabs or shells or waves.
"Hurry up!"
The Doctor hit the beach a second ahead of Rose. To his left, a low dome building hugged the sand. The dome, once smooth and perfectly round, was now badly eroded on the ocean facing side, worn away by the constant wind.
"Slow down, will you?" Rose cried, trying frantically to keep her shoes from slipping off her shoulder.
It didn't help that she had been given both water canteens, the compass, and a large hunting knife to carry. The Doctor had loaded her up with them on the grounds that he didn't want his hands full if a desert worm attacked.
Rose had just rolled her eyes and agreed.
"Come on!"
Like an igloo, the dome structure had a short arch passage that led to the interior. For whatever reason, the passage stuck out towards the sea, the most audacious of the high tide waves lapping against the thick white columns that held up the arched roof.
The Doctor sprinted around the outside of the dome, hair and shirt tails flying. Wet sand sucked at his feet, small waves crashed around his toes. To Rose, he almost looked as though he was running on water.
"I said wait!" she shouted, struggling to keep up.
He glanced back at her for a second, grinning like a madman, then ducked out of sight into the passage.
Rose slowed to a walk, following him at her own pace. She picked her way carefully around the sharp bits of shell that the waves left behind.
When they'd first seen the dome, it was just a gleaming white speck on the horizon. As they drew ever closer to it and the light was sucked from the sky, the dome became more and more impressive. It almost looked new.
Now that she could see it up close, the structure was forsaken. Molluscs and barnacles clung to the sides. Clumps of beach grass sprouted from cracks, and a weird sort of ivy enveloped most of the low passage way.
"Hello! Anybody home?" Rose shouted, leaning into the passage.
Inside was cool and damp. Limpets and lichen mottled the inner walls black. The Doctor was no where in sight.
"Doctor? You in there?"
Rose could see that the passage stretched out for maybe ten yards, before it became totally obscured in the murky light. The evening sun provided little light.
"This isn't funny, you know!" she shouted, wrinkling her nose, "Where are you?"
No answer. Damn it. With one hand tracing the wall to her left, Rose made her way slowly up the passage. She was betting the Doctor had ran all the way.
"Rose? You want some light?"
"Of course I want some bloody light!" Rose fumed, "I'm not a bleedin' vampire, you know!"
There was the sound of someone laughing softly, muffled by the darkness. Rose squinted, straining to see. It was no use.
"Hold on a minute."
A deafening 'CRACK' rang out in the dome. Rose yelped, then clamped her hands over her mouth in shame. She almost screamed again when light flooded into the room.
Woom, woom, woom. One by one, huge round ceiling lights buzzed into life. Rose found herself cringing against the wall of the passageway, standing barefoot in inch-deep seaweed.
"That better?"
The Doctor stuck his head around the end of the passageway and grinned at her. Behind him, Rose could make out piles of rusted science equipment lining the dome's far wall.
"Much better, thanks." She gave him a quick smiled, "What's all that stuff in there?"
"Come and have a look." The Doctor said, and disappeared back into the dome. Moments later, Rose heard the small hum of the sonic screwdriver.
"I thought you left that behind." She said, gingerly picking her way through the seaweed.
"Nope."
Rose wasn't sure what she had been expecting the lab to look like, but it certainly wasn't this. This was a catastrophe. Computers, hulking steel gauges, benches and metal cabinets were strewn everywhere, bent and twisted and ripped in half.
Everything was ruined, everything was rusted. Most of the destroyed equipment was piled up into conical towers. Glass, metal and timbre, there was no real order to the piles. They reminded Rose a little of a modern art exhibition she'd seen in the London gallery.
"There's a few bones about. No signs of anything living here for years." The Doctor turned away from whatever he was doing to look at Rose. "My guess is that the desert worms hatched here, destroyed everything, and ate what they could. That might have been a hundred years ago."
"Uh huh." Rose nodded. She felt numb.
Despite what the Doctor had told her, she had held firmly to the belief that there could be someone left alive in the lab. Well, that was one theory out the window. The odd gleam of bone amongst the piles more than proved that.
"Try not to think about it, alright?" the Doctor said, regarding her carefully, "I want you to do something for me."
"What's that, then?"
Was that a skull? Rose gulped.
"Have a look around. All the electronic records are destroyed, but there should be a hard copy. Maybe a log book, a journal, anything. We have to figure out where Odjya is going."
"Okay. Um, Doctor?"
The Doctor looked up once again from his work. "Everything alright?"
"What's stopping those worms from coming back?" Rose asked, glancing around anxiously.
"Ah, well. That's simple." The Doctor paused.
Rose looked at him expectantly. "Yes?"
"Yeah. They're not here. Simple."
There was seaweed on the ground here, too, but it was dry and brittle. Rose disregarded what the Doctor had said, and came up with her own explanation. The desert worms needed to keep moist to breath. That explained the seaweed all over the floor; if it was wet, it would keep the worms wet.
But since it was dry, they probably wouldn't come back. This was just an old nest, right?
"Right." Rose told herself. She busied herself with looking for the logbook, to keep herself from picking holes in her theory.
Half an hour later, a cry of; "Eureka!" rang out from where the Doctor was working.
"What? What is it?" Rose demanded, hurrying over to him.
He grinned broadly. "We have a TARDIS."
Rose peered curiously at the object in his hands. It was no more than a wooden box, inscribed with the label '100 Myok Grown Oranges'.
"So what? It's a box of oranges."
"Ah-hah!" the Doctor laughed, "You can read it!"
"I did go to school, you know." Rose scolded.
Then she realised what he was talking about, and slapped a hand against her head. Duh. They didn't teach Gallifryan in school. Only a TARDIS could be translating.
"As soon as you find that logbook, we can get out of here." The Doctor said, beaming. "I'm just going to see if I can reconfigure this thing so that we can get in."
"Why can't you help me look for it?" Rose protested, "You can recon-whatsit that later!"
The Doctor frowned at her. "Don't be ridiculous, Rose. What if those worms come back? We'll need this," he thumped the side of the orange box, "To make a quick escape."
Rose rolled her eyes. It figured.
After another hour's work, Rose was still empty-handed. Finished with the orange crate, which was now twice its original size, the Doctor had decided to help her.
"Check under those cabinets." He instructed, from his perch on the crate.
"I already have! I've checked everywhere!"
"Not thoroughly, obviously. Check under the cabinets again."
Rose let out a frustrated sigh, and ducked down to check under the cabinets. Just like the last three times she'd checked there, there was nothing.
"All clear, boss." She grumbled, getting back to her feet.
Fifteen minutes later, Rose was about to explode.
"There. Is. No. Book." She growled, claws at the ready.
"Just check beside the-"
"There's no flippin' book!" Rose exclaimed, throwing her hands in the air. "No log book, o diary, no flippin' read-out chart! Nothing!"
The Doctor had the decency to look sheepish. "Um, actually, Rose-"
"I'm not checking under the bleeding cabinets again!" she snapped.
"No, it's just, " The Doctor scratched his head. "Uh, well. Just behind you, there."
Exasperated, Rose spun on her heel. The line of steel cabinets was behind her. And there, with pride of place on top, was a log book.
"How- what- why- how-" she stammered, mouth agape, "What's that doing there?"
"There all along, I expect." The Doctor said, careful to avoid any eye contact.
"I've checked these cabinets a million times. Under them, in them, on top of-" Rose paused. She hadn't actually bothered to look on top of them, had she? She sighed.
"We better get going. Give us a look at that book." The Doctor said, approaching her.
Rose handed him the logbook. It was unimpressive, just a thick, battered book wrapped in blue leather. The pages were dog-eared and stained, and the gentle arc shape of the volume suggested it was used to be crammed into someone's pocket.
"That's odd." The Doctor said, squinting at the book, "They were recording seismic activity."
"What's so odd about that?" Rose wondered, peering over his shoulder.
"That they found the seismic activity strange enough to record it." The Doctor flicked the book open. He barely glanced at the first page of tall columns, all filled with scrawled numbers and short-hand notes, before flicking to the next page.
Within five minutes, he was done with the book. He didn't look happy.
"What, did they have an earthquake or something?" Rose wondered.
"Not yet. They recorded seismic disturbance once every month for six years." The Doctor showed her the first page, which was totally illegible, "After that, there was a disturbance every two weeks. This continued for fifty years."
"And?"
"And after that, it was every week. Then every day. If this is anything to go by, there should be small earth tremors here a few times a day." The Doctor glanced at Rose, "Have you felt anything?"
"Nope."
"Hm. Probably still not intense enough." The Doctor scratched his chin. "But in a thousand years…"
"I don't believe this." Rose shook her head, "Since when does an earthquake kill everything on the entire planet?"
"It doesn't. But say it triggers one of the largest active volcanoes in the universe. Then you'd have a problem." He grinned. "I think I know where we're going."
"Where?" Rose asked. She had a familiar sinking feeling.
The Doctor's grin only broadened. "Ilium Neocort. Looks like we were right in the first place."
xxx
Planet Beta was surrounded by an altered time-space sphere, designed and coded by time lords to keep out unwanted visitors. Without knowing the entire code, there was only four possible times that a TARDIS could travel to.
Each time was a thousand years apart, and each one was a gamble. Three were times of calm, of quiet and small, sparsely placed life forms. The other was a time of death, mayhem, and utter destruction.
"Odjya was here a thousand years before us," the Doctor mused, "And we know Ilium Neocort hasn't erupted yet."
They were sitting in the orange crate TARDIS, wondering what co-ordinates to punch into the machine's central console.
"Well, it didn't blow up on us." Rose shrugged. "So that's two times down."
The Doctor glanced at her. "I came here once before. There was no life here. There was a rumour that nothing could survive on Beta, and I had to see for myself."
"Did a meteorite drop on your head, or something? Did you drown in lava?" Rose wondered.
"Not that I recall." The Doctor laughed. "So that's it, then. The third time is the one we want."
To be honest, there was things that Rose would have rather done right then. Eat dirt, for instance. Have all her teeth pulled. Invite Odjya over for a slumber party.
"You ready?" the Doctor wondered, giving her a curious look.
"I suppose I have to be."
He smiled at her, patted her hand. "You'll be alright."
Rose watched him walk over to the console. He typed in the co-ordinates as if it was just any ordinary planet. Any normal adventure. Not the extermination of the last chance he would ever have to save his people.
"Are you alright?" she asked, feeling the question was awfully inadequate.
For a moment, he was silent. Then he laughed softly. "Wouldn't mind a banana daiquiri."
The room trembled to life, and the familiar sound of a TARDIS taking off echoed around them. Walls throbbed, lights flickered, much more dramatic than the Doctor's own machine.
As suddenly as it had started, the noise subsided. The TARDIS shook a little, sign of a rough landing.
"This is it."
Without looking at Rose, without bothering to check that the TARDIS was stable, the Doctor strode out through the door. He supposed it must have looked bizarre, a man climbing out of an orange crate, but any light-hearted thoughts left him as soon as he stepped outside.
They were on the slopes of Ilium Neocort, facing down towards the lake. There was no snow, no ice, no sky. The lake was a red pit of bubbling larva, billowing black smoke. All around the land was striped bare, exposing glossy black rock.
"You might want to stay inside, Rose." The Doctor warned.
It was too late. Rose was already out, standing beside him. Her hand curled around his.
"Where is she?"
Rose barely managed to finish the sentence before an earth-splitting roar rose up from the ground. The rock beneath their feet seemed to turned to liquid, and it poured down the mountain, carrying Rose and the Doctor with it.
"Hold on, Rose!"
The Doctor grabbed hold of her wrist, then braced himself against the sucking tide of rocks. By some miracle chance, they hadn't been dragged under.
"Doctor!"
What? The Doctor glanced down. Rose was metres away from him, and rapidly being dragged further down the slope.
He swore. He didn't have hold of her at all!
"Just hold on!" he shouted, treading rocks to stay on top of them, "Just wait!"
God, he needed more time. How had this happened? She was right there, then-
"Rose, no!"
The Doctor stared in horror as Rose lost her balance. She tumbled head first into the river of moving rock and was sucked beneath it.
She didn't come back up.
"Oh God, no."
Rose was gone.
xxx xxx
Rose dies?! Agh! What kind of sicko am I???
Last chapter up next weekend. Eep. See if the Doctor can save Rose!