The third time it happens, he thought she was dead.
Outside snow is falling. She can see the flakes swirl across the dirty window. Her fingers are numb as she picks, pointlessly, at her bonds. The thick rope bites painfully into her wrists. She needs a better escape plan. There has to be something in this miserable shack. A rusty nail. A splinter of bleached wood, even.
The chain manacled to her ankle rattles. She'd forgotten about that. Hardly seems necessary. Where would she go? Outside the plains are death, even to the well prepared. Let alone a girl in a tattered blue summer dress and no shoes. If she's to have any chance of survival, the shack is it.
They wind moans. At least she hopes it's the wind.
Her scrabbling fingers find the nail she's looking for, twisted out of a warped floorboard. Most excellent; she can use it to saw through her rope bonds and pick the manacle. Not that she know how to pick a lock, of course, but when the choice is learn quickly or get eaten she's sure she'll figure it out.
The snow is piled up against the window by the time she frees her hands, wrists bleeding freely. Not good. The smell of blood will draw them. And she still has to learn to pick locks before sunset, which looks to be fairly imminent given the pinkish hue of the light outside.
"You're not going to die," she tells herself firmly, and sets to work picking the lock.
In the end, it proves easier to jam the nail into the rusty hinge of the manacle and force it open that way, just as the light is really beginning to fade. Now what? She crawls over to the window, ears straining for any sound that isn't the wind or the creak of the shack. She chances a peek outside.
The snow is a boon to her, reflecting the light of the rising moon. The plains are a white expanse, all the way to the mountains on the horizon. No tracks, no idea where her captors have gone. Mercifully free of dark shapes.
She crosses to the door, still keeping low. No lock. Nothing in the empty room to barricade it with. Well, she probably used up all her luck finding that nail. Time for clever.
She opens the door carefully; waits in case something she's missed should come snarling out of the darkness. That's what she tells herself anyway, as she screws up her courage to step outside.
The cold is almost unbearable, her feet burn as she pads across the snow, keeping her back to the walls of the shack. The other side of the building affords a similar view of nothing but snow-covered saw grass. There is a mess of rubbish out back, including a very solid iron crowbar. Her fingers close around the cold metal, a weapon. She lets out a shaky sigh of relief.
Logically she knows it won't be enough. Not if they come in the sort of numbers they've seen elsewhere. But some animal part of her brain is grateful for this gift. Just let them try, it says, buoyed up on the adrenalin that sustains her in cold and pain.
She continues searching. There is a metal drum filled with cold ashes and half a canister of petrol. Her heart thumps painfully as she picks it up and hears the slosh of fluid inside. She unscrews the lid and sniffs. Definitely petrol.
Out in the dark something screams. High, unearthly and agonised. She flinches, the immediate instinct to run back inside, to slam the door against the terror of the plains and pretend it affords her any shred of protection. She draws in a deep breath. Time to get a move on. They are coming.
She gathers up the dry straw in the shack, pulls loose floorboards and boards from the walls, ringing the cabin with a rough circle of combustibles. It goes slower than it might, as she's constantly looking over her shoulder. Are they near? She wastes valuable seconds squinting out over the plains to see.
Her stomach contracts. There is movement now, silhouettes against the snow impossible to make out clearly. She doesn't need to see them. She knows that her time is almost up. They have found her.
She whimpers softly, not a sound she's conscious of making, an animal noise of terror. She summons the ghost of him in her memory, chiding her, eyes flinty beneath beetling brows. "Don't be a pudding-brain," he snaps, "You're not dead yet."
She strikes the crowbar against the busted manacles, which clang horribly. She hears their excited moaning, carried on the wind, as she hits the manacles again. Ringing the dinner bell, she thinks macabrely, and raises the bar a third time. Sparks fly from the struck iron, landing on a petrol soaked rag she has placed in a rusted bucket. It goes whump. Shaking with relief that she hasn't set herself on fire along with it, she grabs a long stick, thrusting it into the bucket.
It catches alight and she almost cries with happiness. Using the pole, she carefully ignites the piles of hastily gathered, petrol-splashed debris that encircle the shack. In the flickering light she can see them now, shambling towards her. The first of them is only a few hundred metres away.
She has done all she can. Now she has to hope the fire will keep them away long enough for the Doctor to find her. There really isn't another escape option at this point. Assuming he wasn't also captured by the raiders and is himself trussed up in some plains shack…
She derails that train of thought, clambering up on the big drum and pulling herself onto the roof through sheer determination. She doesn't think they can climb, but if enough of them turn up it won't matter. Those at the back will simply climb over the bodies of their colleagues to reach her and pull her to pieces. If she's lucky.
She's not sure which is worse, the constant rasping groans of the creatures as they shuffle around the circle of flame she has created, or when one of them decides to try and cross the boundary and sets itself alight. They don't seem to feel it, they stumble onward towards the shack. They reach out to her, mad eyes and bloodied teeth glinting in the light of their own limbs aflame, until enough of them crumbles to ash and they burn away where they fall. Others go up like torches, throwing more light over a scene straight from a horror movie, hundreds of them moving towards her in the dark.
One of them−he must have been an enormous man in life−makes it all the way to the walls of the shack. He reaches up and the flames from his body begin to char the wood of the walls. There is no adrenalin left to pump in her veins, only a leaden certainty that her time has run out, and the grim realisation that burning to death might be the better option of the two available.
She closes her eyes, trying to leave the crackle-pop of roast zombie, the horrible charred flesh smell and the horrendous moans of her would-be killers behind. She thinks of Danny, his handsome face smiling from her memory before it twists, turning into the ruin of his cyber-self.
She doesn't want to die like this, overwhelmed with grief and regret, doesn't want to die at all.
She thinks of him instead, of his old young face, eyes full of tears as she told him of Trenzalore. The fear he couldn't hide. The fact they went there anyway. "Don't be afraid," he said. And she won't be. Not now, not ever.
The flames billow, boiling up the side of the shack where the big zombie has immolated. She stands, tall as she can. "Five-foot one and crying," he says in her strobing memory; the smoke is sending her dizzy. "You never stood a chance."
And then she hears it, that sound that brings hope to the universe. Wheezing into being, the TARDIS lands on the roof.
He throws open the door as she stumbles home, catching her by the arms and pulling her into a wordless embrace, as the door slams shut behind her.
She can still count on one hand the number of times her has held her like this.
Eventually he lets her go, retreating to the console and setting them in flight. She is shaking, from relief or exhaustion; maybe both. For a second she finds herself wishing he'd come back to hold her again. Predictably he does not, biting his thumb instead as he flicks switches and taps keys, avoiding looking at her.
"You got the TARDIS back, then?" A truly pointless question, but she has to re-start communication somehow.
"Yes."
She doesn't ask how. Something in his tone suggests she might not like the answer.
"Did they… the others from the Resistance… did they get away? Are they going to be okay?"
She almost quails as he meets her eyes at last, such fury in his face. "They got away. I don't know if they're going to be okay. Frankly, I don't care."
"Doctor−"
"No," he snaps, "Don't. Don't make their excuses. They had one instruction. Just one. To keep you safe."
"Doctor," she says gently, because she understands their reasons even if she can't quite forgive them. "You were the person of strategic value. You could help them find the cure."
"Could," he says heavily, "Yes, could." He crosses to her again at last, taking her hands and examining the wounds on her wrists. "I could have helped them. If they'd done that one simple thing that I asked."
Shocked, she pulls her hands out his grip. "Tell me you didn't just walk away?"
He looks at her, almost sneering at her expression of mingled horror and anger. She knows he thinks her a fool. "No," he says at last, voice thick, "How else do you think I got the TARDIS back?"
"Their planet was dying Doctor."
"That doesn't excuse what they did."
She knows that if she pursues this any further they are going to boil over into a blazing row, and she's too tired for that right now. A part of her can't quite believe she's arguing for the people that sold her to their enemies, anyway. She decides to let the matter drop. She lets him take her hands again and finish his examination.
"Did they bite you?" he asks.
"No."
"Good. The vaccine I developed works but it isn't pleasant. I was hoping you wouldn't need it."
She nods, too drained to think of a suitable reply.
"A bath and a nice cup of tea," he continues, "That's what you need. I have something that can fix your wrists but it'll be better if you're clean first."
Half an hour later she is happy to agree, warm again after a long soak in her favourite tub, and wrapped in an enormous fluffy bathrobe. He knocks on her bedroom door as she twists her hair in another towel.
"You can come in."
He enters awkwardly, carrying a steaming mug in one hand and a first aid kit in the other. He thrusts the mug at her, instinct making her sniff the liquid suspiciously before she dares to take a sip.
"It's just tea," he says, feigning offense.
"Sorry, but it's not like you don't have previous." She spent a day bright blue once, turquoise head to toe, after he decided to switch her Lancashire Tea for something more exciting. Clearly her threat to extract an unholy revenge should it ever happen again has been taken seriously. She risks a sip and tastes home; rainy afternoons with her gran along the seafront.
He sits down gingerly on her bed, clearly cataloguing all the changes she's wrought to the room since the last time he saw it. For once, criticism of her decorative choices remain unspoken. "I've got the dermal regenerator."
She puts down her tea and sits next to him obediently, holding out her wrists. The wound from the rope is livid scarlet. He is scowling again as he gently takes her hand, turning it this way and that as he tracks the regenerator over damaged skin.
"I'm sorry," he says at last, when the wound has faded to a faint yellow bruise. He puts down the regenerator, long fingers are still folded around hers.
"Don't be," she says lightly, "I was the one who said we should stay for a while with the Resistance." She ignores the drumbeat of a racing heart sitting like this, quiet and close, seems to cause now. It's his anger, she lies to herself, barely contained rage just under the surface that scares her a little. No other reason.
"I thought that I had lost you."
She meets those fierce eyes, full of fire and rage, and underneath it all a curious dread. He used to be so sad; a man grieving for all that he had lost. Now the more he finds−of himself, of his past and his planet and his future−the more he fears. She can see straight through his spikey armour of bad temper and disdain, right to the terror at the core of him
Never, she should say, a reassuring lie. You'll have to try harder than that, she could quip, but it sounds a bit crass even in her head.
"Doctor," she says instead, trying honesty for once instead, "I can't promise that one day you won't. But you have to know; all of this… it will be worth it. I wouldn't be here otherwise. I can't give it up any more than you can. And I wouldn't change it for the world."
His mouth quirks at that, just a little, turning up at the corner. "Good to know."
"Yes. Good." She wishes he would look away. If he could just go back to avoiding her eyes again, like in the console room, she could swallow the butterflies in her stomach and stop thinking about his mouth.
Instead, he does the unthinkable, leaning in towards her. Slow but inexorable. Her eyes close automatically as his lips brush hers, a gentle question. The dwindling rational core of herself doesn't know how she should answer, but it's too late. Every other fibre of her being is saying yes; and it's her turn to kiss him like he's the only other person in the universe.
Afterward, she expects him to leave. To make an excuse about repair jobs that need doing, or a joke about the human need for sleep.
Instead, he curls around her in the dark; hands clasped around hers, face buried in the nape of her neck.
She closes her eyes and tries not to think too hard about what it might mean.