Chapter Eight: Lost In Translation
Hex knew that they should leave – should go back to the TARDIS, like the Doctor had told them to – but he just couldn't. It felt wrong to abandon him like this; it would be like running away. And the Doctor never ran away from danger.
"We've gotta do something," he muttered to Ace, even as Nobody continued howling with glee.
"Agreed," Ace said, her tone clipped and anxious, "but what?"
Hex was about to say something – although it was really more than a little unclear exactly what he had been planning to say – but before he could, he saw the Doctor's head turn ever so slightly in their direction. Nobody didn't notice, being caught up in his ingloriously over-the-top laughing fit – the Doctor very deliberately caught Hex's eye, and for a second, Hex thought that he was going to order them back to the TARDIS again. But that wasn't what happened.
Instead, the Doctor winked, very quickly, and turned back to face Nobody once more.
He could tell by Ace's short inhale of breath that she had noticed it too. And Hex knew instantly that, without a doubt, the Doctor most definitely did have a plan (and he had been an idiot to think otherwise, honestly, this was the Doctor, when did he not have a plan?). This realization was accompanied by immense relief, and then the second, equally flooring realization that the Doctor was going to be absolutely insufferable about the whole thing when it was all over.
"Excuse me." The Doctor cut neatly through Nobody's slowly dwindling laughter. "If I may –"
He let out one last bark of laughter, and then slipped off the edge of the shelf to land, cat-like, in front of the Doctor. "What?"
"I have a hypothetical, a very brief one, to pose to you." The Doctor looked utterly calm. If he had been in possession of his umbrella, as opposed to Ace, he would probably have been tapping an even, steady beat onto the handle.
"Oh, I don't like where this is going," Nobody said, frowning, "you're a tricky one, Doctor. This is a plan, isn't it? Part of your big," he wriggled his fingers dramatically, "master scheme. Go on," he added, "I'm intrigued now. Don't forget, though – any tricks; Dorothy dies."
The Doctor simply nodded, not even blinking at another threat on Ace's life. Maybe he was getting used to it. "What would happen," he said, "if I switched off the language centers in the brains of everybody nearby? Say," he added, "a four-hundred-five meter radius. What would happen then?"
There was a very long silence, and then Nobody laughed again. This time it was more subdued, and very, very cold. "Are you suggesting that you use the TARDIS to disrupt all the words in the vicinity?"
"I'm not suggesting anything," said the Doctor. "Again; it's only a hypothetical."
"Well," said Nobody, eyes narrowed. "I suppose that it may have some... effects on me. But as far as I know, nothing of the sort's ever been attempted. Anything could happen. Oh, and dear Ace over there would die instantly," he added, "just in case you were worried about this becoming something less than a 'hypothetical'." He made bunny-eared quotation marks with his fingers.
"I see," said the Doctor, and his eyes darted back to Hex and Ace again.
"Now, if we're quite finished," Nobody began.
But the Doctor wasn't listening. "Ace?" he said – a question and an apology and a warning, all at once.
"Go ahead, Professor," Ace said, leaning out from behind a shelf to meet his gaze properly. The unspoken words were there: it's all right. I trust you.
Nobody's eyes narrowed sharply. "Now, hold on just a minute–"
"I'm sorry," the Doctor said – it wasn't exactly clear who he was apologizing to – and quick as a flash, he whipped out his sonic screwdriver from some pocket, somewhere, and pointed it in the direction of the TARDIS. It buzzed sharply, the harsh whine cutting over whatever Nobody had been saying, and then something shifte
snap
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snap
- not to worry, Mister Hex!" the Doctor was shouting, "language should reassert itself in – ah!"
Hex blinked and tried to figure out what was going on and why nothing made any sense and why Nobody No-One wasn't there any more –
– wait, what, Nobody No-One wasn't there any more.
The Doctor didn't look as pleased as Hex thought he should be in this turn of events. He had moved forwards to the shelf that Nobody had been standing in front of, and was now frantically combing through the scrolls that were there – whatever he was looking for, he evidently wasn't finding it and appeared very annoyed about it.
"Wait, what did you –" Hex began, taking a step in the Doctor's direction, but the Time Lord shook his head, something wild and panicked in his eyes.
"Ace," he told Hex urgently, still searching through the shelves of books, "help Ace!"
Hex spun, and saw Ace on the ground, hands around her throat and struggling hard against her own grip. She was gasping for air and making incomprehensible, desperate, choking noises.
"Oh god," said Hex, and practically tore across the room, falling to his knees in front of her – forgetting the Doctor for the time being. He did his best to help – peeling back her fingers, wedging his arm in-between her clawing hands – but he was, more or less, fighting a losing battle. "Stop being so strong," he complained, panting.
Even though she couldn't really speak at the moment, she still managed to shoot him an absolutely withering look. Hex winced. "All right, yeah, sorry –" and they both redoubled their efforts in trying to prevent Ace's Word Lord-mediated suicide. It really was not going well at all. Ace was weakening, visibly – not fighting her own grip as much, and a lot of the color in her face was disappearing.
"Doctor," Hex yelled, "whatever you're looking for, can it wait? We could kinda use your help here!"
"I'm afraid it can't," the Doctor called back. There were a pyramid of discarded scrolls by his feet now, and he was going through the remaining ones at an almost feverish rate. He was talking very fast, too, an anxious patter. "The thing is – I may have banished our word-twisting friend for the moment, but language disruption can only do so much. I suspect that he's been forced into a nearby text, although, I'm not sure which one it is... not yet..." He threw an armful of scrolls deemed unnecessary to the ground, and swept across another armful. "Ace will be fine when the Word Lord is destroyed for good –"
"Hurry it up, then!" Hex said, just as the Doctor let out a short cry of triumph. He snatched the scroll he had been reading from the shelf so fast that it crumpled in his grip, and hurried across to Hex and Ace, joining them on the ground.
"Got him," the Doctor said with sort of dark triumph, and dropped the scroll briefly onto the sandstone floor so he could assist in wrenching Ace's hands from her throat with the sort of easy strength that you never would have thought he had. He pinned one of Ace's arms neatly underneath a knee. "Mister Hex, if you could –"
"I'll try," Hex said, and with considerably more struggle, succeeded in doing the same with her other arm. Ace was looking slightly less blue than before, but appeared to be having some difficulty breathing.
"This sucks," she decided hoarsely, staring at the ceiling. Her arms were twitching irregularly at her sides. "Can we leave now?"
"Not long now," the Doctor said reassuringly, patting her shoulder. "Just try to breathe for now, hm?"
Ace nodded, although she looked annoyed – Hex suspected that it was because she hadn't got the chance to punch Nobody properly yet, and honestly he couldn't blame her.
The Doctor unraveled the scroll with his free hand, letting it unspool along the ground. He hunted around in the apparently infinite realm of his jacket pockets. "Now, let's see..."
Hex leaned forward as best he could so he could read the text on the parchment, and was rather relieved when he found he actually could. He had been half-convinced that the brief few minutes when the Doctor had done – well, whatever it had been to the language thing in the TARDIS – would have permanently lasting effects.
"'The man stood frozen behind the confines of the parchment'," Hex read aloud, "'face twisted in anger and hand pressed against the edge of reality. It almost looked as if he were about to break out from his papered prison at any moment, to escape from –'"
Before Hex could continue, the Doctor growled, "that's quite enough of that," and drew the red pen that he had retrieved from within his jacket sharply across the page, neatly crossing out the rest of the sentence.
Hex's eyes widened. "He's – sorry, he's literally trapped inside the text?"
The Doctor brandished his red pen menacingly in the direction of the scroll. "Yes, and I rather think that unless he wants to be subjected to some good, old fashioned constructive criticism, he's going to stop trying to escape and listen to what I have to say."
Hex risked another glance at the scroll. Improbably, the words had changed, even though there was no visible shift in the text's overall appearance. "'"Cute party trick," said the man, folding his arms – although the scowl remained on his face – "but trapping me in an ancient medical text, clever as it might be, is not going to stop me from killing dear little Dorothy." And the man grinned.'"
"Don't you dare," said the Doctor, and furiously crossed out the word 'Dorothy', scrawling in 'Ace' in its place. "Here are my terms, Nobody No-One. You leave us alone – you swear to a binding contract to do so, and you follow it to the letter. You release us from any and all effects that we have caused by misusing your name, now and forever, and if you don't," he paused to take a breath of air, "if you don't do all of this, I will destroy you."
There was a second or two where Hex tried to find his place in the text. "Er... 'The man was silent for a second, or maybe two, and then he started to laugh.' Doctor, I don't like where this story is going."
The Doctor frowned, and took up the task of reading the narrative aloud – they were doing it mostly for Ace's benefit at this point, since she couldn't exactly see the scroll from where she was. "'It was the laugh of somebody who knew exactly what his next move was going to be. "All rightio," he said cheerfully, and snapped his fingers. "Ace–" said the Word Lord,' - oh, no, no, no –" He was scrambling for his red pen again, but it was too late.
Ace mouthed 'oh, fuck', as soon as she realized what was going on, and then she was no longer struggling for control of her hands. In fact, she was no longer doing anything at all. Hex looked down at the text, and felt his heart skip a beat when he saw what had been written there.
"Ace," said the Word Lord, "stop breathing."
Hex was momentarily frozen to the spot – years of medical training had, maybe unsurprisingly, not prepared him in the least for this situation. He felt a faint whoosh of air beside him, and looked up to find that the Doctor was now standing.
"All right," he said. He appeared perfectly serene and the R in 'right' had been rattling around like a runaway train – some serious shit was definitely about to go down. "I suppose that makes everything rather simple, doesn't it?"
Hex scrambled for the scroll again; scanned it feverishly. "He – he says that he'll let her live if you let him out of the text. Doctor –" A human being can survive from five to ten minutes without oxygen being delivered to their brain. Any longer may result in serious brain damage.
He nodded, and held out a hand. "My hat, if you would?"
"Your–?" Hex was confused, extremely so, but quickly realized that it would probably be better if he didn't ask questions for the moment. He scooped up the Doctor's white hat from where it had fallen, and tossed it over.
The Doctor caught it, quite neatly, with a showy little twirl that was more than a little unnecessary, then pulled back the paisley hatband, letting a box of matches drop into his hand. He slid it open, pulled out a match, and struck it hard against the box's side – it sparked to life, casting shadows against his face.
"I presume you've heard of the burning of Alexandria's greatest library," he said. There were flames dancing in his eyes, and no trace of humor on his face.
Hex pulled the scroll closed to him, reading quickly. "He says you're bluffing," he said – no more time left for reading exact words; paraphrasing the text would have to do. "And – Doctor, he's right, the library's already been burnt ages back. You – you can't –" and then he stopped, because who was he to tell the Doctor what he could or couldn't do?
The Doctor seemed to understand, though. "I'm rather afraid I can, Mister Hex," he said. "In fact – calling the event in question 'the destruction of the Library of Alexandria' is more than a bit a misnomer, because it implies that there was only ever one, definitive destruction of it. Which is most assuredly not the case."
Hex stared at him for a moment – match in hand, held evenly before him; steady, unwavering expression – and then remembered Nobody No-One and the scroll. "'Only one burning, though'," he read.
"History is... well, shall we say divided on that point." The match was burning down, now, and the Doctor had to shift his fingers slightly downwards to prevent himself from behind burned. "Modern texts claim that there was only ever one, but really? Who are we to say that another, unrecorded – or perhaps unrecovered – incident never happened? Time is tricky that way, you know." He shook the matchbox – it was nearly full. "Last chance. Let us all go, and you may survive this yet."
"He..." Hex swallowed. He risked a glance behind him: Ace wasn't moving. "He's laughing again. Saying that you'd never go through with it; there's too much knowledge in this library for you to destroy. He... seems pretty confident that you're bluffing."
"Does he really." The Doctor's tone could have frozen lava. "Well. We'll see about that."
The match in his hand had nearby burnt down by now, blackened and twisted all the way to the end. And quick as a flash, the Doctor tossed it neatly into the pile of scrolls that had been gathered while he was searching for Nobody. They went up in flames; glorious, terrible flames. The parchment withered and burned, flaking away and reducing to ashes within seconds. The fire caught onto a nearby shelf, and began the process of consuming it as well – all of the shelving units were wooden, intricately carved, and so very flammable.
"D – you –" Hex's eyes were already beginning to water, but he still managed to read what was written next. "He's surprised that you weren't bluffing, and honestly so am I."
"Good." The Doctor struck another match and tossed it, seemingly carelessly, over his shoulder. Another shelf caught alight, flames creeping up to the roof. "I'd hate to become predictable." A third, and fourth match were lit – they went left and right, respectively – and now the room was quickly filling with smoke and flames and it was getting downright dangerous in here. Outside the room, Hex could hear distant voices; running footsteps, and some people were already beginning to bang on the doors, which were probably locked. Evidently, the fire had already been noticed.
"Hex!" The Doctor was tucking away the matches. "The scroll!"
Hex gathered it up roughly and pushed it in the Doctor's general direction – he scooped it up, and glared at it briefly. "Well? Final chance, No-One; in case you thought I wasn't being absolutely serious by this point. No last minute escapes – there will be no works of literature for you to jump across to. Not so much as a postage stamp will be left by the time I am done here."
Hex scrambled over to Ace, and pulled her away from the flames that were beginning to creep up towards her body. She was dead weight – not exactly heavy, but moving her was definitely a struggle.
"To reiterate," the Doctor said, "I will drop you into the flames here and now, without a second thought. Your essence – your makeup, even your CORDIS, will be consumed, utterly. You will, as much as you are able to, die." The sound of people pounding on the outside doors and books crackling and burning to ashes filled the air for a moment. The Doctor directed a fierce glare toward the parchment in his hand. "Do I make myself clear?"
Hex couldn't see the text of the scroll from where he was, but judging by the expression on the Doctor's face, the Word Lord trapped inside hadn't responded favorably to this.
Abruptly, the Doctor strode over to the nearest burning shelf, thrusting the scroll directly into the midst of the flames. The paper caught alight. Hex could have sworn that he heard Nobody scream, even though that was probably impossible. Wisps of back smoke curled upwards and outwards, and the Doctor kept holding the scroll there, even though his hand was probably getting painfully burnt under the immense heat.
Hex was now coughing hard, and struggling to breathe – although probably not as much as Ace was. He crouched, keeping low, and considered starting CPR on her. Pros: it might give her a better chance of survival until the Doctor finished doing... whatever. Cons: she probably physically couldn't breathe, at all – but, if there was a chance...
He pulled himself over to her, and began performing chest compressions, casting glances over his shoulder. He could only see the vaguest of flashes of what was going on between the flames, but it certainly looked like the Doctor was still holding the scroll in the pyre of wood and paper, and that the scroll was taking far longer to burn than it really should have. The Doctor was talking – his mouth was moving, although Hex couldn't make out the words.
Hex was twenty compressions in when Ace sucked in a deep, panicked breath of air, and sat bolt upright, nearly slamming straight into Hex, who had been bending over her. She immediately started coughing and cursing indistinctly between said coughs.
"Take it easy, McShane," Hex said, trying to ease her back to the ground. "You're fine. You're all right. You're –" She snarled at him, actually properly snarled at him, and he saw that her eyes had gone yellow again. Instinctively, he backed away, horror-stricken. "Oh my god. Ace –"
"Ace?" came the Doctor's voice from the other side of a mound of burning, shriveling books. It was no longer in the 'I will destroy all my enemies indiscriminately' register, but there was still that imperative, anxious undertone to it. "Ace! Talk to me!"
Hex opened his mouth to reply, but choked on a mouthful of ash and just ended up coughing weakly while trying to back away from her. He was sure that right there and then he was going to die – not from the fire or from the Word Lord, but from Ace; from somebody he very much considered to be a close friend. And that was possibly the worst part of all of this.
And then, incredibly, Ace smiled. It was far sharper than it usually tended to be, but it was definitely an Ace smile – gleeful in the face of improbable odds. There were sparks of flame dancing through and around her hair, giving her a sort of halo, and she had never looked more vibrant or more alive. She rose to her feet, snatching the Doctor's umbrella from where it had fallen away from her, and clenched one hand around the handle. "I'm fine!" she yelled, hoarse but voice just as loud as it usually was. "Be right back, Hex," she added almost cheerfully to him, and patted him on the shoulder before turning sharply to the fire. Without missing a beat, she strode straight through the flames without even flinching.
The only thing Hex could really think to do was follow – but he skirted around the outside of the shelves, finding a relatively safer path towards the action.
He rounded the edge of the shelves just in time to see the Doctor raising Nobody's scroll out of the flames, putting out the fire by means of batting it out with the sleeve of his jacket. The Doctor saw him first, and nodded in hurried greeting. "We've got to get out of here!" he shouted.
Hex couldn't have agreed more, but there was definitely something wrong with this picture. "Doctor, what are you doing? Just let him burn!"
"He agreed to let us go in return for his own survival, and in Word Lord terms that's practically binding." The scroll was now only slightly smoking, and barely scorched. The Doctor eyed it with distaste. "If I don't keep this safe from now on, there could be nasty consequences."
"But!–" Hex began, and then he saw a flash of red jacket out of the corner of his eye, and he had a thought. "–but, hey. Doctor, you need to keep it safe, right?" He coughed, gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the smoke. "Just you?"
The Doctor rolled up the parchment neatly, and did that half-smile thing of his. Hex got the impression that the Time Lord had caught onto his plan already. "Well, I suppose not. If there was somebody else that I trusted very much to safeguard it –" A slight quirk of the eyebrows. "–how's your catching arm, Mister Hex?"
"Pretty good, Doctor." He was willing to bet a great deal of money that Nobody No-One was cursing up a storm, trapped inside that scroll of text. This made Hex feel a lot happier than he was prepared to admit.
"Excellent!" That bright, almost childish grin appeared; the one that tended to only pop up when the Doctor was extremely delighted with something. "In that case –" And the Doctor swung back his arm, and threw the scroll overarm, high over the flames, which seemed to jump up as it passed above them, as if desperate to consume it. Hex instinctively reached out to grab it, but it never reached him, because at that very moment, Ace showed up.
She came from seemingly nowhere – leaping far higher than any human should ever be able to, and with one hand outstretched – the Doctor's umbrella still in the other. She intercepted the scroll neatly in the downstroke of her arc, and landed in a shower of ash and sparks with a laugh that was more of a gleeful howl than anything else. Before anybody could say anything, she took either end of the scroll in her hands and snapped them apart, opening it. "Well?" she said, eyes yellow – which could have been a trick of the firelight or something else entirely. "Go on. Beg me not to end you right now. Plead with me. Convince me not to do it."
There was a moment when she was silent, simply staring at the page in front of her. It was unclear, exactly, what Nobody No-One said to her, and neither Hex nor the Doctor made a move to go find out. The flames were inching up, higher and higher, and not a single book or scroll or manuscript anywhere around them appeared to be still intact.
And then Ace said, quite abruptly, "yeah, that's what I thought," and she tore the scroll cleanly in half longways, then did it again the other way for good measure. "Burn in hell, fucker," she told the remains, which were already starting to leak black smoke, and dropped them into the raging fire.
No fanfare. No further words. The scroll containing Nobody No-One was, within moments, being erased from the word in perhaps one of the most permanent ways in existence.
(Hex fought the instinctive urge to start cheering.)
Within seconds, it was gone, reduced to so much ash and burnt, unreadable scraps of parchment, and Ace was running back towards Hex and the Doctor. "This place isn't going to hold up for much longer!" she shouted. "We've gotta get out of here before the roof comes down!"
"Quite right!" the Doctor called back, and pointed in a direction that was just as fire-engulfed as everywhere else. "The TARDIS is this way–"
"Right behind you!" said Hex, and the Doctor led the mad dash through the rapidly collapsing library. There was a lot of cursing and yelping, and at one point Hex's hair actually caught on fire, but, as was often the case in these situations, they made it to the TARDIS just in time.
"Get in, get in!" said the Doctor, wrenching open the door, and practically shoving them through the doorway before tumbling in himself. Just before he slammed it shut, there was an ominous, loud crack from outside, and tiles and beams of wood began to shower haphazardly down from the roof above.
And then all noise from outside was cut off – there were only the familiar, subdued sounds of the TARDIS left.
They all lay there, sprawled across the console room floor in relative silence, for a while – covered in ash and the occasional scorch mark, utterly disheveled, and coughing intermittently, but all alive.
"Well," said Hex eventually, "we just burnt down the Library of Alexandria." He paused for a second. The reality of this was finally sinking in. It was a pretty big reality. He wasn't sure if he liked it. "That's... something. That's – that's a thing that just happened."
"It's gonna be a hell of a story to tell at parties later on," Ace said, and then started laughing almost uncontrollably, even though it really wasn't that funny. After a second, Hex joined in, and even the Doctor began to chuckle. It was the borderline-hysterical laughter of a trio of people who were just really quite glad to have survived an awful, terrible experience.
Hex, still giggling weakly, fell back so he was lying against the wall of the console room. "Oh god," he said. "This isn't funny. Doctor, you just destroyed – you just burnt all those books. Oh my god. There must've been so much information in all of those, and they're all gone."
"Oh, so first it's 'we did it', 'we burnt the library down'," Ace said lethargically, raising a hand vaguely into the air to point at Hex, "but now that you've realized how bad this whole thing is, it's all the Doctor's fault? I see how it is, Hex, I see how it is–"
"Hey, it is all the Doctor's fault!" Hex defended himself, and then realized what he was saying and quickly backtracked. "I mean – it's not like I'm not grateful and all –"
"Charming," the Doctor noted dryly. At some point, he had sat up properly, and was now cross-legged and brushing dust off his hat.
Hex, too, sat up. "No, I mean – okay, look. Let's put it like this. Great rescue, Doctor. Nine out of ten for style, another nine for planning; I'm gonna give it six out of ten for actual execution, 'cause that could have gone a lot better, let's be honest, and eight out of ten for incidental cheetah. But the mark for not setting famous historical repositories of knowledge on fire is so far below zero right now that I think you actually broke the scale."
"All in all," said Ace, never one to miss the chance to insert a cheeky comment. "That went much smoother than it usually does."
The Doctor sighed pointedly at Ace, and then raised an eyebrow slightly in Hex's direction. "It was more than a little extreme, I must admit. But this burning was due to happen – although this particular instance wasn't common knowledge, which is why the Word Lord didn't know anything about it. And it's not as big of a tragedy as you seem to think it is."
Hex tried to read his expression. "...because it's happened before, and is gonna happen again more times, even without your input?"
"Well, partly," said the Doctor. But the legend of the Library of Alexandria's destruction being such a tragedy is... well, it tends to be just that. An exaggerated legend."
"How can you say that?" Ace asked. She didn't exactly sound angry – just curious. "We saw the place. There were all those books –"
"Scrolls, mainly," the Doctor corrected.
"You know what I mean."
"I do." There was a pause. "It's true that the loss of such a large cache of history is, and always be, a horrible, terrible thing. But more information was lost to the human race due to degradation and decay over the centuries." A wry smile. "You don't see humans kicking up such a great fuss about papyrus decay, do you?"
"So just because the loss isn't that bad, it makes it okay?" Hex's tone, like Ace's, wasn't accusing, but there was definitely some tension underlying there.
The Doctor sighed. He looked tired, which was probably justified, considering the circumstances. "I could make a multitude of arguments, Hex – the library's books were primarily copies of outside texts; it's been destroyed so many times, so what's one more? – but the fact remains that you are, in fact, completely right. It was a terrible act on my behalf, which isn't mitigated in the slightest by the fact that I was doing it to save the two of you." A tiny shrug. "Does that make it a selfish act?"
No, Hex thought, but that's definitely some heavy stuff. He hesitated, not sure how to voice what he was thinking – burning down a library to save his life was great and all, but he wasn't all that sure he really deserved a rescue of that magnitude.
"Thanks," said Ace suddenly, saving Hex the trouble of speaking, and threw the Doctor's umbrella across the console room, in his direction. She smiled. "For saving us, I mean. It probably wasn't the most ethical way to do it, but... you know. Nobody got hurt."
The Doctor, chuckling, reached up and caught the umbrella neatly out of the air. "He certainly did. And it was no trouble. Well," he amended with a frown, "to be honest, it was far more trouble than was strictly necessary. But I feel that the end result was well worth the stress."
"What, arson without consequences?" Hex said jokingly.
The Doctor didn't rise to the bait. "No," he said. "The two of you. Alive and well."
And then there was silence again, but only for a second, because almost immediately the Doctor sprang into life – leaping up from the ground to stand at the console with that familiar, cheerfully manic energy that he sometimes had. "Right then! To somewhere else, I think – somewhere quiet. Paris, perhaps? Or the Eye of Orion –"
"I might just go and pass out in bed for a week or so," Hex said, only half-joking.
The Doctor pulled the dematerialization switch down, hard, and the TARDIS began to move and whir around them. "Ah," he said, energy retreating. "Yes, well – that's more than fair enough, I suppose. In that case..." He trailed off, seemingly unsure of what to say.
Ace sighed after a second or so of this awkward silence. "I'll make the tea, shall I?" she said in a long-suffering manner.
The Doctor muttered something embarrassed and vaguely affirmative, and hit a few buttons before beginning to twiddle the array of dials above the readout monitor. "The library, I think," he said.
"The library sounds good," said Hex, and then – "One last thing. "Ace, you said you'd explain the whole – what did you call it? – 'cheetah thing'? You said you'd explain it later." He struggled with words for a second and then made a hopeless motion with his hands. "What the hell was that?"
Ace and the Doctor exchanged a loaded glance. The Doctor looked more than a little concerned, but Ace waved him off with a, "don't worry, I've got it all sorted." And then, to Hex: "like I said before; very long, very weird story."
Hex shrugged. "We've got time, don't we?"
"Time is one thing that we most definitely have an abundance of," the Doctor said in a manner that was probably meant to sound very wise. And then he smiled, and deposited his umbrella at the base of the hatstand next to the doorway. "Come on, you two. That tea won't brew itself, you know."
And somewhere far beyond anyplace near to Earth, the TARDIS traveled on.