CHAPTER 19. Steel Catwalks and Metal Pipes: 3 November 2010

In the days and weeks afterwards, neither Amy nor Rory would be entirely sure just how long they spent clinging to each other, tears streaming down their faces as they let go of the life they had hoped to share one day. When, finally, they had no more tears left to shed, they let go of each other, losing themselves in the other's eyes one last time. Eventually, Amy felt a gentle, soft hand on her back and a little psychic nudge, pulling her back to reality. She had a job to do.

"I'll see you back at the TARDIS," she said, trying to infuse some life and warmth back into her voice.

"Take care of yourself, will you?"

"I'll try my best."

He squeezed her hand and walked out, back towards the first rooms of the network from whence they had come. Jack and Katherine were waiting patiently a few rooms from where they'd run into Amy and the Doctor. They both took one look at his face and instantly knew what had happened.

"Will you be OK?" Katherine asked, concern and sympathy written on her blonde-curtained face.

He had no idea how, but a ghost of a smile found its way onto his face. "I will be."

After Rory had left, Amy had simply stood there, staring at the space where he once was. Her face was completely expressionless, her emerald eyes bereft of their usual flicker. A stray lock of her shining red hair had fallen into her mouth, but she didn't seem to notice.

Trembling, unsure if he should, the Doctor reached a hand up to her face and brushed the hair out of her mouth. His touch seemed to awaken her and her eyes, still disconcertingly lifeless, moved to his.

"Are you OK?" He asked as gently as he possibly could. She didn't respond, or move. She just continued to stare, her beautiful face totally blank, reminiscent of someone whose life had simply vanished from their body – a phenomenon the Doctor had seen multiple times.

"Amelia, are you OK?" He hesitated, then decided to enter her mind again. As he'd expected, there was absolutely no resistance to his entry, and he immersed himself in her consciousness.

Pain. Regret. Pain. Pain. Loneliness. Loss. Grief. Pain.

He flinched, withdrawing himself from her mind. "Amelia... I'm sorry. I'm so, so, sorry. I know you probably don't want anything to do with me now, but if there's anything-"

"Doctor," she spoke up suddenly, the fire returning to her eyes without warning. "Didn't I just tell you never to apologise?"

He smiled, relieved that she hadn't, in the short term, become too emotionally damaged to help. "Welcome back, Amy Pond."

"Hi to you too," she grumbled. "Now, don't we have a job to do?"

Of course, it had been the Doctor's entry into her mind that had triggered her ascent out of her wallowing in her own sorrow and remorse. She'd felt it as soon as she'd entered, and unbidden, a wave of fury built up inside her, and was rapidly approaching its crest when he'd exited of his own accord. He saw his reaction, saw the guilt, saw her pain become his, and she smothered the wave of anger out of existence. It wouldn't do to hurt the only person she truly had remaining in her life when they were only trying to help her.

She then remembered that she was indeed here for a reason, and that she was supposed to be helping him – not having him pity her. She dealt with it the only way she knew how – she manufactured psychic barriers on the whim of a thought and hammered them down all over her mind, shutting out her grief for now. There'd be time to deal with it later – and as a Time Lady, she had a lot of that.

The Doctor began to speak. Oh gods, she groaned internally, he's apologising again. That stupid, wonderful man – doesn't he ever listen? Probably not.

"Doctor, didn't I just tell you never to apologise?"

They returned back to the room where Amy had discovered the truth from the Doctor, Amy seemingly having completely reverted to her normal self. Whilst unsurprising, this deeply unnerved the Doctor, that this should be her one and only defence mechanism – compartmentalisation on a scarcely believable scale. No wonder that she's bottled up something so traumatic as to render her psychically unstable, he mused.

He made a mental note that one day he'd have to deal with that with her – although he suspected she already knew what the consequences of trapping such dangerous, destabilising thoughts could be. That frightened him even more, that she was willing to risk that to avoid facing whatever trauma she'd experienced in whatever that white expanse was...

He shook his head, clearing it of the distraction. Amy was right – they did have a job to do.

"OK, so we're here – now what?" Amy asked as they found themselves standing in front of the same array of levers and switches the Doctor had been working on beforehand.

"Now I work out what everything does and try to set up that seismic pulse thingy," he replied, running his sonic over the panel.

"Aaaand... do you know how to set up this seismic pulse thingy?"

"What was that rule about stupid questions, Pond?"

Amy groaned. "Couldn't you actually go in with a proper plan for a change?"

"Where's the fun in that?"

Amy punched him in the arm. "Could you please stop answering my questions with more questions?"

He grinned, flipping the sonic up to inspect. "Hypocrite."

"Idiot."

"Ha. Says the girl who can't tell a beach from an active volcano when flying the TARDIS. Anyway, it looks like these panels have been remotely locked. So we're wasting our time here."

She rolled her eyes. "Typical," she muttered. "OK. Where to, then?"

"Up."

"Watch it now," Katherine warned, reaching out a hand to stop Rory walking headlong into a jet of scalding steam. "Don't really feel like cooked nurse for dinner."

Rory shook his head. "Thanks," he muttered. It was the fifth time either Jack or Katherine had had to intervene to stop him accidentally doing something stupid in his absent-mindedness. No matter how hard he tried, that final image of Amy's beautiful but totally blank, dead-looking face haunted him. Intellectually, he knew she could pull through – she'd gotten through worse, much worse, in the past, but it still tore at him to see her hurt like that. His own pain was irrelevant in comparison.

As for the Doctor... that was a ball of emotions he didn't could even begin to untangle. Irrational anger at what he did to her inadvertently. Jealousy over how he had – again, inadvertently – stolen her from him. Sympathy for the obvious anguish and guilt that he could see written in every line of the Doctor's falsely young face. Hope and expectation that he could give her what she wanted, what she needed, since he was the only one who could.

Unravel THAT.

"Rory!" Jack shouted, gripping his arm to pull him back from walking in front of another superheated jet. He had gotten distracted again.

"When you said up I didn't think you meant literally," Amy grumbled as she gripped the Doctor's ankles, allowing him to balance himself on her shoulders. "Please tell me you're finished now, I can feel myself getting shorter my the second. I like being tall, if you didn't notice."

"Don't worry," the Doctor's slightly muffled voice called out from above. "I like you being tall too."

"Yeah, well, you're going to be sorely disappointed if you don't get off my bloody shoulders soon. You're stupid heavy, ya know that?"

Thankfully, the Doctor quickly finished his inspection of the space above the ceiling, and apparently finding nothing potentially unpleasant there, hauled himself through the hole he'd made with a grunt. He flipped himself around, dangling head-first out of the hole, and pulled the Time Lady into the ceiling.

"Right. That was ridiculous," Amy declared, brushing dust off her shirt where it had accumulated when she'd been dragged into the cavernous space above, lined with metal pipes. But for the lack of metal catwalks, it looked more or less the same as the rest of the tower's interior aside from the rooms from which they had ascended. "So where are we?"

"In a ceiling, obviously."

As anyone but him could have predicted, Amy was none too impressed with this answer, and let him know this in the usual way. "Could you stop doing that?" he snapped, rubbing his arm furiously.

"When you start giving straight answers, maybe."

"Why would I do that? But to answer your question, this is a service area. We need to find the main power conduits to the drill so I can manually control the drill that way. Simple enough."

"In theory."

It was now becoming quite painfully clear to Jack that how ever much he wanted to be, and however much he'd tried to pass himself of as being as-good-as, he'd never be the Doctor.

The Doctor, for one thing, wouldn't have got them all lost in a colossal drilling structure. He hadn't meant to, of course, but all these walkways looked exactly the goddamned same, and at one three-way juncture, his memory had failed him. With absolutely no distinguishing features between the three choices whatsoever, he'd decided to go left, hoping that sheer dumb luck was on his side.

Half an hour later, it became blatantly obvious that it wasn't.

"We really, really should just turn back," Katherine suggested.

"What, and get lost again?" Rory rebuked, ever the voice of reason. "Let's at least try to find out where the hell we are first." Jack had passed over effective control of the group over to the young, level-headed man, knowing it probably wouldn't be the best look to be taking command when he'd had such an embarrassing blue. Now knowing that he was responsible for other lives, Rory put his own emotions to one side – being a nurse, it was something he did on a daily basis.

They moved down what Katherine suspected was at least the twentieth metal ramp, and found themselves staring at a wall identical to the one they had run into earlier.

"Looks the same... another perception filter, I'm guessing," Jack said shrewdly.

"Probably. This isn't where we want to be, though, we should go back."

Katherine, however, wasn't having a bar of it. "I'll bet a thousand pounds there's something interesting behind this 'wall'. And if I put my hand here, like he did..." She ran her palm down the wall, apparently looking for some spot on the wall. Seemingly finding it, she turned, palm still fixed to the wall. "Can I borrow a gun, Jack?"

"Er... what for?"

"Pretty please?" She pouted in the way she knew men – especially men like Jack – wouldn't be able to resist. And she was right. "Thank you," she intoned sweetly as Jack handed over a silver, futuristic hand gun to her. Before Jack could ask her what she planned to do, she had taken her palm off the wall, flipped the pistol so she was holding the barrel, and smashed the handle against the spot where her hand had been.

The two men watched, mouths agape, as the wall flickered haphazardly through the spectrum of colours and then vanished, revealing a steel-lined circular room with a long, thin metal device fixed to the centre of the floor.

"Easy as pie," she remarked, handing back the gun, smugness creeping into her voice.

"So what the hell is this thing?" Rory asked, moving cautiously into the room. The walls, he could see, were covered in little glowing green or red nodes, sticking out of the wall as if some special plug was required to activate them.

"Looks like a transmitter of some kind... and it's active, obviously," Jack added, inspecting the ten foot high device at the centre of the room.

"Shouldn't we shut it off, then?"

"What, and tell everyone we're here? Don't think so."

"Guys, look at this," Katherine called out from the opposite side of the room from Rory. She was frowning, inspecting a switch. "I've found a node that says 'Alarm system' above it."

"Really?" Rory moved over to her, seeing that she was right –the node she was staring at was definitely labelled 'Alarm System'. "Well. So it is. Maybe this is some kind of secondary control room."

"Well, first things first, how come I can read it? Or does everyone speak English in the future?"

"That'd be the TARDIS translating it for you. She puts a matrix in your head, you can read and speak almost every language ever invented now."

"Handy."

"It is a bit." He turned his attention back to the node, which was glowing red. "Seems disabled... that's strange."

"Yeah, that's the other weird thing. It's not just this one, it's this whole panel of alarms and stuff, all set to 'disabled'. No wonder we got in so easily, it's almost as if they threw out the welcoming mat for us," she mused.

"Sorry," Jack called out behind them suddenly. They turned, and were surprised to see his face shorn of all colour, his eyes wide. "But what did you just say?"

She opened her mouth to explain, but whatever words came out were drowned out by the sudden blaring of alarms that erupted all around them. At the same moment, a massive tremor ran through the floor, knocking the three off their feet.

"The hell's going on?" Rory yelled in the chaos as the shaking began to intensify.

"We have to get out of here!" Jack screamed, his voice barely audible over the groaning and screeching of metal twisting and shearing audible above them. "Now!"

"I'm seriously starting to have second thoughts about this now, you know." Amy remarked as they hauled themselves upwards using a network of horizontal pipes, supporting their backs on the side of the narrow shaft they were in.

"Oh, quit your whining, Pond. You could always go back to the TARDIS with Rory if you wanted," the Doctor rebuked.

It was the wrong thing to say. He felt a wave of guilt emanate from her through the psychic field, and he paused to look down at her. Her face had taken on that terrible blank expression again. He closed his eyes and banged his head softly against a metal pipe, a sick, twisted feeling in his stomach. "That was stupid of me, Amelia, I-"

"Doctor, for the last bloody time, I don't want your bloody pity, got it?" Her voice was razor-sharp, red-hot steel, penetrating to his core. If he had been feeling guilty and somewhat nauseous before, the sensation was exponentially greater now.

Below him, Amy closed her eyes, flinching. "I shouldn't have said that. I didn't mean to say that. I know you'd only ever try to help me. Sorry, Doctor."

He smiled gently at her. "There's nothing to apologise for, Amelia. I know this is hard, so hard for you. By rights, you should hate me right now."

"Why the hell would I hate you?" She opened her eyes again, a bemused expression on her face. "You're all I have now. Come on. Let's just keep moving."

They continued to climb, but an awkward tension had fallen over the pair – there was none of the flirty banter, the exchange of slicing witticisms between the two now. It was a relief when they finally reached the service area at top of the shaft, not only because they could stop climbing (Amy's arms were now very, very sore), but because the change of setting gave them a convenient icebreaker.

"So. Right place?"

"Yep. Just a bit down that way," The Doctor said, gesturing down a pipe-lined hallway – although it was clear that it wasn't designed as such, given how the passage narrowed and widened seemingly at random. The pair had to squeeze themselves through some parts sideways to get through. A few minutes later, and one comment from Amy about how her chest would never be the same after this which made the Doctor's cheeks go beetroot-red, they reached a large box, from which a series of multicoloured cables could be seen trailing.

"This it?"

"Just the one. Could you give us a mo?" He asked, sonicing the box open and pulling out several discarded cables that he had found along the way. "Got some rewiring to do."

"Don't electrocute yourself now."

"That's the plan."

She wandered around, inspecting the service area around them. The space had opened up, transitioning to the steel catwalk again, although the area covered by the catwalk was considerably larger than what they had encountered before. The floor beneath the box the Doctor was busy at work on was perfectly insulated stone, presumably to prevent any possibility of the power from the cables shorting into the grated steel, with the obvious bad consequences of several thousand amps of electricity running through the floor. A red cable beneath the floor caught Amy's eye through the gaps in the grating. She bent down to read the labelling.

Teleporter power supply... but why would a mining drill need a teleporter? And why would there be a teleporter right here? What was it all for?

It hit her. She gasped, jerking upright, fear flooding through her. Oh no. No no no no. That can't be.

"Okay!" The Doctor called out behind her. "Rewiring's all done. All I have to do is divert the power through my little thing here, and kaboom! No more drills, anywhere on Kappamarine. It'll take a few million years, but the planet will recover again."

"Doctor, wait!" Amy cried out, running over to the box to stop him connecting the final wire. "Don't do it. If you divert the power, we'll all be killed. Please, please, wait."

He frowned. "Amy, what do you mean?"

"It's a trap. It has to be. There's a teleporter here. Right here. As soon as you connect it, they'll know, and they'll come, and we'll both be dead." His expression didn't change. Amy stared at him, astonished at his apparent lack of comprehension, then she realised.

"You knew." She began, quietly. "You knew all along. All this time, you knew we were walking into a trap."

The Doctor's eyes widened, sensing what was coming. "Amy, I-"

"You lied to me. Again!" Spit flew out of her mouth as she screamed the last word. He gripped her hands, gazing intently at her emerald eyes which were burning with indignation.

"Amy, yes, I did, and I shouldn't have. I'm sorry. But you know that I would never let you into in a situation I knew we couldn't get out of. You know how much you mean to me, I would never, ever let that happen. Right now, Amy Pond, I need you to trust me. I know I don't deserve it. Not after everything I've done to you. But just this once, can you trust me?"

She looked at him. Stared at his young-old face. The enigmatic sky-blue eyes. The man who had promised to be back in five minutes, and returned twelve years later, leaving her twisted, bitter, and broken along the way, subject to torment beyond imagining. Looked at the man who had returned, then inadvertently wiped away her humanity and caused the disintegration of her engagement to the one and only person who had truly stood with her for her entire life. Looked at the man who had lied to her again and again, been the cause of so much sorrow and pain. Looked at the man who kept flaunting her one sacred rule, kept violating the sanctity of her mind.

And nodded.

He smiled, pulling her into an all-encompassing hug, resting her fiery head in the crook of his neck, breathing in her scent, kissing her temple. "Thank you," he whispered into her ear. She broke off, meeting his eyes, steeling herself. "Ready?" He asked gently.

"Ready."

"Get your sonic, and be ready to run when I give the signal. Clear?"

"Crystal." She turned around, back pressed against the cold stone wall, her knuckles white from gripping the sonic phone so hard.

The Doctor moved his attention, sonic in hand, back to the box. He took in one, last, deep breath, and connected the final cable.

At that instant, two things happened.

First, an enormous jolt ran through the steel floor as the drill changed frequency and intensity, the programmed power surge the Doctor had built into to his makeshift circuit causing the magnetic fields controlling it to automatically realign. The Doctor had to cling onto Amy to make sure she didn't lose her balance and fall face-first onto the cheese-grater-like metal floor that surrounding the piece of stone they were standing on.

The brief shift in the drill's operation caused a powerful tremor to shoot from the base of the drill and into the ground, propagating at several miles a second through the blasted surface of the planet. As the Doctor had intended, the precise frequencies of the pulse were tuned to induce a resonance effect in the drills. As the pulse propagated through the planet's interior, the drills began to oscillate wildly, their natural modes of operation amplifying their motions, shearing the steel beams that held the drills to the massive structures supporting them. Within ten seconds of being hit by the seismic pulse, regardless of location, each and every drill had quite literally shaken itself to pieces.

More immediate to the Doctor and Amy, however, was the sudden whooshing of air that announced the arrival of the drills' owners. Five of them surrounded the Time Lord and Lady, arranged in a tight semicircle, leaving no room for escape. The trap had shut.

"Exterminate!"

I believe the common turn of phrase is cliffhanger.