WARNING: is the same as the last chapter, plus a bit of swearing. I promise this is the last nasty one though, so stick with it!
A/N: Thanks for all the support and reviews so far! This chapter is another angsty/torturous/death-ridden one, but it starts to get better soon. I promise! Only four chapters to go after this… :D
'What do you mean, you just ended up here?' Maurice tormented her, malice in his voice and absolutely no sign that he felt anything about the fact that he had just killed a man who was supposed to be his friend.
Rose shook her head, not knowing what she was supposed to say but knowing that anything she did say would most likely end up resulting in pain of some kind. 'We just did,' she said, biting on the inside of her cheek. She had been determined not to cry, but the tears were stinging at her eyes and threatening to fall at any moment.
'Do you admit that you and your Doctor friend are responsible for causing this uprising?' He laid his hands on either side of her head, staring into her face and making her squirm.
She stayed silent; she knew that she couldn't afford to implicate the Doctor in any way. She would never forgive herself if he was captured and hurt because of something she had said.
Maurice nodded after a couple of minutes of intensely uncomfortable silence. 'All right then,' he said. 'We'll do this the hard way.'
Rose knew better than to ask what he meant by the "hard way", although it seemed pretty obvious that it wasn't going to be good. Her eyes locked on the door- the only way in or out of the room- and she imagined the Doctor bursting through it, eyes blazing and adrenaline fuelling him to deal with Maurice so that he couldn't hurt anyone ever again. Her wishes failed to come true as Maurice walked away from her to pick up a large knife from the table in the corner. He came to stand in front of her and methodically cut off her thin jacket, her new coat already having being discarded somewhere in the corridor outside. The material dropped to the floor in tatters, along with a few streaks of her blood as the man failed to take enough care and accidentally or otherwise cut her skin with the blade of the knife.
She shivered in the cold. 'Stop it,' she whispered, hating herself for resorting to begging but she knew that the Doctor wouldn't forgive her if he thought she had just given up and let her fate come to her without her doing anything to try and stop it. And then more firmly, she said, 'Leave me alone.'
Maurice laughed as though it was a great joke. 'Oh sweetheart,' he chuckled, wiping his eyes after chucking the knife back on the table. 'How can I do that when you won't talk to me? You're the one making this so difficult.' He wandered back over to the table, putting his back to her and fiddling with the instruments laid out ready for use. His tone dropped to a more casual, conversational level. 'How did you know where to go to get the support for a revolution?' he asked. 'Surely that would have been hard if you'd only just arrived here?'
She faltered, not knowing what to say and hating the fact that she couldn't see what he was doing properly. She decided to keep her mouth shut, deciding that there was consistency in her silence. Better than making up a load of lies but then forgetting what she had said if he re-examined her. She was fast coming to put a lot of faith in the phrase "silence is golden".
'Sweetheart?' Maurice said. 'Are you going to tell me or am I going to have to beat it out of you?' He turned back to her, holding a small bat in one hand. 'Hmmm?'
Rose sucked in a breath at the sight of the thick block of wood that she was sure would make a very good weapon in the current circumstances.
'Rose,' he continued, and she felt sick as he used her name. 'Are you going to tell me?'
She wondered how he could be so casual about this whole thing when he was clearly doing something that was so wrong on any civilised planet. Something that until just a couple of hours ago she had thought he would loathe the idea of. But then, she hadn't anticipated him killing his friend, either. Apparently she had stayed silent for too long, because Maurice slammed the bat into her stomach, hard enough to hurt and to bruise but not hard enough to cause lasting damage. She supposed that it meant she was too important to kill. Maybe that counts for something, she thought, clamping her mouth shut and shaking her head when he tapped her with the bat in an attempt to prompt her to speak.
If only she could hold out long enough, then surely the Doctor would come. There was only so much pain a person could be expected to withstand before the cavalry came to save them.
The Doctor pulled himself up into a sitting position, leaning his back against the bench near the entrance of the rose garden where he and Rose had sat earlier in the day as they waited for the revolution to start. He wished that he could turn time back to that very moment and run away with her whilst they'd still had the chance. Damien stalked towards him once again, and he braced himself for the blow.
It never came. The other man came to a stop inches in front of where the Doctor was sprawled, blocking out the little warmth that was offered by the weakening sunlight as the day began to draw to a close. The Doctor failed to suppress a shiver, and he told himself it was because he was cold rather than the menacing way in which Damien's hands were balled into fists at his side and the way his lip was curled in anger. He heaved himself up further to sit on the bench, collapsing backwards to lean his head on the wood and look up into Damien's face, trying to give the impression that he wasn't scared. He was scared, but not for himself. He was scared of what he had done; both to this man and his lover, and also to the planet as a whole. He wondered if perhaps in some cases, there might be something to be said in favour of dictatorship over revolution. The sounds still coming from a mile away in the district of government and finance didn't offer him much comfort that things were going all that well.
'She's dead because of you,' Damien said. His eyes were rimmed with red, partly from the cold and partly from the pain of the death of his lover. Because she would be dead by now, they both knew.
Even though they had left Airlia before she had taken her last breath, there was no way she could have lasted this long on her own in a cold chamber beneath Hansley Bridge. It must have been horrible for her to die in that way, the Doctor thought. Everyone was her enemy; there wasn't anyone that she could trust, apart from Damien. But he had loved her too much to stay and watch her die. The man's actions reminded the Doctor somewhat of himself, and so he couldn't blame him. 'I know she is,' he replied eventually. 'And I am so sorry. She didn't deserve to die.'
The anger flared up in Damien again, his eyes flashing. The Doctor didn't bother trying to stop the man when his hand lashed out and he slammed a fist into his ribs. He heard his bones crack in protest, and he made a mental note to check that nothing was broken as soon as he had the chance. He sucked in a breath. 'I know you're angry,' the Doctor said, holding up his hand when it looked like Damien was going to hit him again. 'And you have every right to be, but please, can we put this off for a little while? I understand if you want to beat me to a pulp; really, I do.' He shifted on the bench and felt the evidence of a good few bruises he knew he didn't have earlier. 'But Rose might be in trouble. I sent her off on her own, and now I need to go and make sure that she's safe.'
Damien looked thoughtful, but the anger still remained. 'Perhaps it will teach you a lesson,' he snarled.
The Doctor stared him in the eye, unfazed and doing everything he could to ignore the pain currently shooting outwards from his ribs. 'I don't think you really mean that,' he said, deciding to take a chance.
'But I do,' Damien retorted. 'My lover is gone because of you. At least your girl is still alive.'
He hoped like hell that she was. The Doctor knew that Rose would more than likely be okay at Ganjud's bar; it had lots of rooms that she could hide in if anything went wrong and Ganjud and Maurice would be there to protect her, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up in the way that they always did when there was trouble and he had a sickening feeling that Rose needed him. He decided that he wasn't beyond begging. 'Please,' he said. 'You can beat me up later. Just let me go and see if she's all right.'
Damien wavered. 'It wouldn't change anything.'
The Doctor nodded. 'I know that.'
'I still want to beat you to death for not being able to save Airlia when you promised me that you would.'
'Understood.' He nodded again. There was a pause then as Damien failed to move or say anything, the two men instead watching each other carefully and neither wanting to be the first to move in case the other tried something. 'Please,' the Doctor said. 'I know it sounds selfish, but I don't want to end up like you.'
'What?' Damien frowned, his fists clenching once more as he digested the Doctor's words. He wasn't entirely sure what he meant by them, but he was pretty sure that they were in some way derogatory.
The Doctor sighed. 'I don't want to have to kill anybody because they killed Rose,' he explained. 'I can't go back to the bar to find that she's dead. Please, I need to know.' When the other man still failed to move out of the way or make a move of any kind, the Doctor decided that it was time to resort to low and desperate measures. He hated himself before the words even left his mouth. 'If it was Airlia, you would want to go to her, wouldn't you?'
That did it. Damien's resolve broke and he nodded, tears slipping out of his eyes and spilling down his cheeks as he collapsed to his knees and began to sob. The Doctor wondered if perhaps he had just inadvertently managed to kill somebody else.
Rose sucked in a shaky breath, her ribs hurting from where Maurice had just hit her with a heavy chain, having decided that the wooden bat was no longer doing the job. He still had not stopped asking her questions, and she had still not told him anything that he considered useful. She wasn't sure she could stand this anymore, and decided that the next question he asked she would answer in any way she could. Just to make the pain stop.
Seconds later, Maurice let the chain in his hand hang down by his side. He showed no signs of exertion, and no signs of stopping or slowing down. It was clear that he wanted to pin this revolution on someone, and it was clear that "someone" was more than likely going to be Rose and the Doctor, if he ever showed up. 'Who is responsible for this revolt?' he asked, swinging the chain so that it grated along the floor threateningly. Rose could still hear the sound it made when it had cracked over her, the free end smashing into the wall with a sickening clang.
She sighed, knowing that it was now or never. 'The Alliance,' she said, surprised at how husky and dry her voice sounded. It hurt her throat to speak.
Maurice smiled and slowed his swinging of the metal chain, obviously thinking that he had broken her. 'What Alliance?' he questioned her.
'Umm,' she said, trying to act as though she had to think about it. She decided that the dumber she played it, the better it would be for her. At least she was speaking now, even though less than half an hour ago she had pledged not to say another word to this man unless it was to profess her hate to him once the Doctor had come to save her. But the Doctor still hadn't come, and so Rose had reached the conclusion that enough was enough. 'The Liberal Rights Alliance, I think they were called,' she said.
'And how did you know where to find them?'
She thought about it. She knew that she couldn't tell Maurice about Sadie; the old woman wouldn't last three minutes in his company without going insane. And she doubted that Oscar would be pleased if he ever discovered that she had reamed out his mother. 'A leaflet,' she said instead, and then clamped her mouth shut so that she wouldn't be tempted to give anything else away.
'Right,' Maurice nodded. He chucked the chain back on the table and turned to face Rose with a glint in his eye. Obviously it was time to try yet another new tactic with his difficult prisoner. 'Let me tell you a story,' he said.
Rose frowned, unsure of where this little diversion was heading. But then, she decided, as long as it didn't involve finding strange and creative ways of hurting her then she didn't particularly care. Story time would give the Doctor some extra time to get his arse into gear and get here. Surely it couldn't have taken this long to rescue the president's daughter, she mused.
'Two years ago,' Maurice started, walking to lean casually against the wall opposite Rose. 'Two years ago, I hated everything that the government did. I was proud to say that I hadn't been one of the fools who voted them into office and then regretted it ever since. I didn't even vote in that last election. I was a member of an opposition group- a slightly more militant organisation than the Liberal Rights Alliance, though. I was responsible for the closure of Hansley Bridge on more than one occasion, and you can imagine the disruption that would cause. Everything descends into madness when the main trade route out of Valtallahan is closed off. The markets went into freefall a couple of times.'
He trailed off, and Rose found herself willing him to continue, wanting to know where this story was going. She had to remind herself not to get too caught up in Maurice's words; she didn't want to be so distracted that she didn't see something coming.
'But then one time,' Maurice continued, false confidence suddenly evident in his voice. 'I got careless. Me and a mate of mine were caught by the guards and hauled into custody. They killed him within hours; he was leader of the organisation and they knew that he was dangerous. He had friends everywhere and they couldn't risk keeping him alive in case somebody came to get him out. They killed him in front of me, just like that.' He snapped his fingers to prove his point. 'But they obviously decided that they wanted to keep me alive for something.'
'What happened?' Rose asked quietly, in spite of her decision not to get caught up in the story.
He smiled sadly, the first really and truly human emotion that was evident in him since he had first revealed his true identity back in Ganjud's bar. Rose's stomach lurched as she thought of the man's lifeless body on the floor only a few metres away from her, the smell of death evident in the air. 'They convinced me that I was wrong. They convinced me that they were right. They convinced me that life with them would be better than life against them. They convinced me to join them. And you know what, sweetheart?'
She shook her head. 'What?' she asked when the man failed to continue on.
'It was the best decision I ever made,' he said eventually. 'The things I did were wrong. The things you've done are wrong. You need to be punished for them. But I'm not going to kill you,' he told her. 'And do you know why?'
She said nothing and shook her head, although she was terrified that she already knew the answer to Maurice's question. However, admitting that would be tantamount to submitting herself to him and admitting that he had won.
'Because I'm going to convince you that you're wrong and that I'm right,' he clarified for her. 'I'm going to convince you that life with me and the regime will be better than life with that renegade Doctor of yours. I'm going to convince you to join us. And it's going to be the best decision you ever made.'
Rose shivered, but not because of the cold room. She suddenly felt sick and faint, and she hoped that her mind was as strong as she wanted it to be. She couldn't let herself be taken in by Maurice's words and the promise of a better life. Because, she thought, what could be better than a life with the Doctor? There was nothing that this man could offer her that she should be tempted by.
Maurice nodded over to the table filled with implements ideal for maiming and torturing a human being. 'All of those things were pretty good at convincing me,' he said. He grinned widely. 'And besides, if you can't beat them then join them, eh?' He laughed at his own sick joke before kicking away from the wall, a thoughtful expression spreading over his face. He walked over to Rose and studied her intently. 'You're still not speaking properly,' he said, and then the thoughtful expression entered his tone of voice. He said, cryptically, as he turned away and headed back towards the door, 'We need some ice.'
Damien and the Doctor sat side by side on the bench, both leaning forwards with their elbows resting on their knees. Neither of them had spoken in long minutes, both of them knowing that the only reason one of them hadn't killed the other yet was because of two women that were very dear to them, and from which both of them were currently separated- and one of those separations was permanent.
'Please,' the Doctor whispered, scared that if he spoke any louder then Damien would break out of his current quiet reverie and start pummelling him again. 'Please. I need to go to her. Don't let anyone else die because of a stupid mistake I made.'
The other man sighed. 'Airlia was the best thing that ever happened to me,' he said. 'I loved her from the moment I saw her, right here in this park. She was reading a book.' A smile passed over his face momentarily, but it was gone again as soon as it had appeared. 'She was always so young, and so beautiful. She was perfect.' His expression dropped. 'And now she's gone.'
The Doctor rested a hand on his shoulder, unsure of whether the small comfort would be welcome or not. 'I'm sorry,' he said once more. 'I really am, Damien. But please, I don't want Rose to be gone as well.' His voice faltered and cracked as he finally voiced feelings that he had kept to himself since the day he and Rose had met. 'Because how you felt about Airlia,' he said. 'That's how I feel about Rose. Please don't let me lose her.'
A look of reluctant understanding passed over Damien's face and he stood up on shaky legs, prompting the Doctor to do the same. 'All right,' he said quietly. 'Let's go and find her.'
Icy water dripped down her arms in rivulets as Maurice held an ice cube just below the sleeve of her t-shirt. Apparently he was now attempting to freeze her half to death in his attempts to make her give herself up. She knew now that he would never break her though. In telling her his story, he had also made her confident that she would never join the ranks of the government's regime, no matter what this man did to her. It had been stupid of him to tell her what he was doing, and it had made her angry that he thought he would be able to garner her support. Rose Tyler was nobodies fool.
'What you gonna do if the government gets overthrown?' she stuttered out, her teeth clattering together as Maurice lifted the hem of her shirt and pressed ice into her stomach. 'And watch where you're putting your hands!' she snapped at him.
He laughed as though she amused him. Ignoring her second comment as he continuously danced the frozen block of water over her abdomen, he told her, 'It doesn't matter if the current government gets overthrown. Their ideology will live on even if they do not.'
'You planning on carrying on with that then, yeah?' She suppressed a shiver, and was absurdly glad that the cold was numbing the pain in her wrists and shoulders where she was hanging awkwardly in chains, the metal cuffs cutting into her skin as she shifted. She wouldn't be surprised if her shoulders suddenly gave under the strain and dislocated. She wondered if she could somehow con Maurice into freeing her hands or, at the very least, lengthening the chains so that her arms weren't under so much pressure.
Maurice nodded. 'I intend to do exactly that,' he informed her. 'The revolutionaries will never be able to kill every single one of the government's supporters and employees. Their legacy will live on long after they are gone.'
Rose shivered, unable to keep her teeth from chattering uncontrollably. She was so cold. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be truly warm over the last few hours. As silence fell in the room, she imagined being back in bed with the Doctor, his arms around her holding on to her tightly and keeping her safe, his warm embrace spreading gorgeous heat through her, his life melding with hers.
'What are you thinking about?'
She snapped back to reality at Maurice's words, her mouth opening and closing as she tried to come up with something to say. No words left her mouth.
'I think I know,' the man continued on. 'You were thinking about your Doctor, weren't you sweetheart? Or John Smith as he called himself, as if we were ever going to fall for that.' He pulled his hands away from her then, dropping the half-melted ice cubes to the floor and Rose breathed a sigh of relief. His expression hardened. 'Is he a good fuck?'
'What?' she cried, the crude obscenity making her blush. She contemplated lying and saying that she had slept with the Doctor, just to see what Maurice's reaction would be. But no, she decided. Her relationship with the Doctor was nobody else's business, and it especially wasn't the business of an evil man who tormented and tortured people for a living. She shivered again, but not exclusively because of the cold.
He chuckled. 'I was asking you if he's good in bed.'
Rose cringed, bile rising in her throat.
'Answer me sweetheart, or I'll have to just assume that he's useless. And then maybe I could show you myself how it's supposed to be done.'
She spat in his face, a glob of saliva making its way slowly down the side of Maurice's face. He look startled for barely a second before he let out an enraged yell and his hand connected with her cheek, slapping her so hard that her bottom lip split open and a thin line of blood tricked out. He leaned close to her face. 'I don't appreciate that kind of behaviour,' he told her coldly. Her heart was pounding madly as his eyes flicked down to the blood at her mouth. He touched her lip with one finger, pulling it away to see it covered in red. He grinned. 'Let me kiss it better for you,' he said.
Oh God. Rose felt her stomach lurch and the blood rush from her head as Maurice's lips crashed down onto hers, pulling her split lip in between both of his and sucking it clean of blood. She tried to pull away, but only succeeded in smacking her head back against the wall behind her. The chains binding her wrists creaked as she tried to swing away from the man who was sucking at her face like a leech. Not a millisecond too soon, he pulled back. His lips were coated in her blood as he grinned at her.
Rose heaved as soon as she was free from his grasp, but nothing entered her mouth apart from the taste of a small amount of bile and a stranger's saliva on her lips. Her stomach growled as though it had only just realised she was hungry and her head felt woozy. She slumped back against the wall as Maurice whirled away from her to stand in front of the table, fiddling with something he found there. She realised suddenly that this was no longer a game to him; this was business, and he had just taken things to a whole new level.
The Doctor and Damien finally reached Ganjud's bar after five minutes of all-out sprinting from the rose garden in the park of Valtallahan. The Doctor first knew that something was terribly wrong when he tried to push the door open and it wouldn't budge. He knew he didn't have time to analyse the situation however, as he pulled out the sonic screwdriver and made quick work of the lock, not caring as it blew apart a lot more savagely than these things usually did.
Both men were almost on autopilot as they entered the bar, the door slamming back to crack against the wall. The room was empty, but there were signs of a struggle that had to have happened at least an hour ago, if not more. One table was overturned and a chair was demolished next to it. A half-packed bag of clothes and documents had been slung in the corner. The Doctor wandered over to the long wooden bar and he knew immediately that Rose had been here. He could smell her presence as he ran his hand over the smooth wood, and he imagined that he could feel her fear. What had happened here?
A muffled thumping coupled with quiet sobs was coming from upstairs, in the room above the main bar. Ganjud had pointed it out as his own bedroom on the first night that the Doctor and Rose had stayed here. 'Let me out,' the sobbing voice said, the words barely distinguishable through tears and an insulated ceiling. 'Please.'
The Doctor turned to Damien, everything starting to click into place but he didn't think he liked what he was realising. 'Go and help the woman upstairs,' he said. 'Her name is Heather; she's Ganjud's fiancée. I'm going to find Rose.'
Damien nodded, and then frowned. 'How do you know that Rose isn't here?' he asked.
It was a good question, one that the Doctor didn't really have a proper answer to. 'I just do,' he said. 'I'd feel it if she was here. I think she's close by though.' And he could tell that she wasn't far away even without seeing proof. His heightened sense of smell was telling him that her scent got stronger behind the bar. He walked around to the serving area and found that he had been proven correct; there was an open trapdoor in the floor, with a ladder leading down into a narrow stone corridor. This wasn't good at all. He turned back to Damien. 'Go and get Heather,' he said. 'Wait for us here, okay? Don't go anywhere. And don't follow me.'
The other man only hesitated for a moment before he nodded and disappeared towards the back of the bar. The Doctor heard him move a chair before opening the door that led upstairs, his footsteps gradually fading away as he ascended the long staircase.
Turning back to the matter at hand, the Doctor knew that he couldn't waste any time in getting to Rose. She had to be in trouble. There wasn't any other possibility now. There wasn't even the possibility that Ganjud and Maurice had taken her through the trapdoor to hide; Ganjud never would have left Heather alone upstairs if there had been any sign of trouble from outside.
This was all his fault, he knew. He never should have told Rose to go off on her own; he should have foreseen that it could only end in disaster, just like everything else seemed to on Eustance. The only positive thing that had happened since arriving here had been the rather rapid development in the intimacy of his relationship with Rose. He hoped that it was something they would still be able to keep up once they were back in less intense circumstances. And they would get back to less intense circumstances, he decided. Even if it meant leaving this place with the job still not completely done, he had to get them both away from here because he knew that it was slowly killing them. They should have found the doorway back to Earth when they were in the back room of the bakers' shop and left this place far behind, regardless of the circumstances. Because, the Doctor decided, it was okay to be selfish sometimes. Even if he was the last Time Lord in the universe, he still deserved a little self-indulgence occasionally. Especially if that self-indulgence would save Rose's life.
He dropped down through the trapdoor and into the corridor below, landing as quietly as a cat. It was a one-way path, leading away from the bar and back in the direction of Hansley Bridge. Using the sonic screwdriver as a torch, the Doctor carefully walked down the corridor. He stopped after only a few short metres, spotting something bunched up on the floor. He reached down to pull up the coat Rose had bought yesterday at the shop. It was dirtier than it had been when he last saw her and one of the sleeves was slightly ripped, but it was definitely her coat. She was down here somewhere. And someone was going to be on the receiving end of a lecture on the importance of not giving Rose frostbite and hypothermia by taking her coat when it was absolutely bloody freezing.
He started walking again, feeling sweat break out on his forehead despite the cold atmosphere. A faint moan could be heard from around fifty metres ahead, and he picked up his pace at the sound until he was practically sprinting.
The Doctor came to a stop outside a metal door, breathing heavily. The moan came again, this time much louder and clearer and filled with pain. His hearts slammed to a stop. Rose. Without hesitating, he kicked the door dead in the centre, not in the mood for niceties of knocking or sonic screwdrivers. The door swung open, banging against the wall behind it.
The sight before him made his blood run cold.
Rose, with blood on her face and her body, her hands pulled tight above her head. Her breathing was weak and irregular, and he could see bruises already forming on her arms and her torso where her t-shirt had ridden up. Patches of skin had been rubbed raw on her collarbones, and he filed away a note to himself to make sure they weren't infected. Maurice stood to the side of her, a large rusty chain in his hand and a sinister smile on his face. Ganjud lay dead in the corner, his chest shot open by a bullet. The Doctor wanted to be sick.