Disclaimer: I don't own "Doctor Who" or "Twilight", and the essential details of the original concept of this fic came from a video posted on YouTube by heroesdwtw- which has unfortunately now been taken off YouTube- and is used with their permission
Feedback: Much appreciated
AN: Another short chapter- and I'm sorry about the delay; I've had a lot on that had to take priority over writing-, but I hope you'll consider it worth the effort when the next chapter reveals the missing pieces of the puzzle about where 'Bella's vampires' fit into the Doctor's world...
The Future in the Past
A couple of hours later, as we lay on the ground a short distance away from the first village we'd found, with the TARDIS safely parked in a cliff that was in a good position to face the rising sunlight- on the grounds that the Doctor reasoned that no traditional vampire would even think of hiding there-, I wondered what we were actually doing here.
In some ways, the opportunity to watch what were probably some of the first human beings to form any kind of society was kind of interesting, even if the village was pitifully basic and only consisted of a few small huts; if I'd been able to use this kind of information as credit for history class, I could have made a brilliant report on it.
I knew that I couldn't do it, of course- if nothing else, I couldn't exactly cite the Doctor and the TARDIS as my sources-, but it was still interesting to look at the people who were the most distant ancestors of all modern humans preparing for the day's events, working on everything from making clothes to setting up houses and hunting for food in one small area, each of them responsible for a specific task required to cope in daily life rather than the complexity of the world where I came from...
Right now, however, points of historical interest aside, our priority was the vampires in the area rather than the humans. The Doctor had assembled an object that reminded me a bit of the thing he'd used when we were tracking that wormhole during our brief trip to London, except that this version had what looked like a bar-code reader with an elongated scanner in the place of the small dish that the original device had possessed, along with a small screen at the back that would, according to the Doctor, allow it to display the distance between our current location and wherever the vampires were.
"Any luck finding them?" I asked, looking curiously at the Doctor after we'd been lying there for a few moments; as fascinating as this was, we couldn't exactly wait here forever, particularly if the Doctor's projected timeline about when vampires were going to manifest on Earth was accurate.
"Just a moment..." the Doctor, adjusting a dial on the scanner, aiming his sonic screwdriver at the device to adjust something, before the screen suddenly lit up with a brilliant green light, quickly fading to a lower light as the Doctor adjusted the dial again.
"There it is," he said, smiling grimly as he indicated the direction that the scanner had illuminated earlier. "Just head that way for about... an hour or so of brisk walking, and we should be there."
"Right," I said, glancing in the direction that the Doctor had indicated; there was a mountain a short distance away, but the landscape, while not exactly smooth, also wasn't unsteady enough for me to worry about tripping. "Uh... lead on, MacDuff?"
"Always glad to see someone who knows literature," the Doctor said, smiling at me before he began to walk towards the direction indicated by the scanner.
As I followed him, I wasn't sure if I should feel like I was intruding on the creation of Frankenstein's monster or the creation of Adam and Eve; on the one hand, vampires were a sentient race with just as much right to exist as anything else, but on the other hand the Doctor himself had stated that he was certain that these vampires were somehow connected to the vampires he'd fought in the past, which really made them more of an experiment...
Still, as we approached the mountains, it quickly became obvious that whatever we were looking for was located in a cave hidden some way up the mountain, only visible to us because the Doctor and I were looking for something like that; far enough away from the village to avoid attracting attention without being so far away that whatever early vampires lived there would have had trouble finding 'food', particularly if they possessed anything like the strength of their 'descendants'.
As we began to climb the mountain I was initially worried about the possibility of tripping, but the Doctor seemed to have a natural knack for knowing where to step to avoid trouble, our subsequent ascent up the mountain being relatively straightforward so long as I focused on stepping only where the Doctor stepped.
"You... do this... a lot?" I asked after we'd been walking for almost an hour, looking uncertainly at the Doctor as we continued to climb.
"The mountain-climbing?" the Doctor said, shrugging slightly as he glanced back at me. "Just bits and pieces, really; most times when I've done this sort of thing the mountain's already had a path put together by something, and the last time I was in Vesuvius I was walking through the underground tunnels-"
"Vesuvius?" I said, halting in my tracks as I stared incredulously at the Doctor. "You were in Pompeii?"
"Twice, actually," the Doctor said, a suddenly pained expression on his face as he spoke. "First time I just nearly got trapped in the city- found the TARDIS in an archaeological dig in the 1970s and thought it meant that I'd lose the old girl there, but I got around it by staying in her while the lava hardened around her and then taking a quick hop forward nineteen hundred years without moving an inch in space-, but the second time..."
He paused, leaning against the cliff alongside the path with a frustrated sigh. "The second time I went there, I had to set off the eruption to stop a bunch of fire-based aliens taking over Earth with Pompeii as the centre of their planned empire."
"Oh," I said, once again feeling uncomfortable at the news that I had just- even if unintentionally- forced the Doctor to share.
I knew even without hearing the full story that the Doctor hadn't had a choice- what he'd told me during that mess with the Daleks had been enough; if he couldn't change history to save his entire race, he definitely couldn't do it to stop anything that I knew about Earth's history-, but that wouldn't exactly make it any easier to cope with the knowledge that he'd caused something like that...
"We're here," the Doctor said after a period of walking that I'd stopped consciously thinking about after what he'd told me- a part of me wondered if he'd done that deliberately, but it didn't matter-, looking solemnly at the cave that was the apparent source of the readings he'd detected earlier, before he turned to face me. "Now then, if these are the vampires I'm used to dealing with- and I have no reason to believe they're not- the crucial thing to focus on right now is faith."
"Faith?" I repeated in confusion.
"You know the old story about vampires being kept back by crucifixes?" the Doctor said, smiling briefly at me until I nodded in confirmation and his expression became more serious. "Similar idea, but they got the reason wrong; it's not the crucifix itself that keeps it back, but the faith of the person wielding it, since faith affects the transition between the quantum and classical states of physics in the humanoid mind, so if you focus on something you really believe in, you generate a barrier of faith that can keep them back."
"Like... what?" I asked uncertainly, trying desperately to consider what I had enough faith in to keep a vampire away from me.
"I knew a Russian soldier in 1942 who walked through an entire graveyard full of vampires because of his faith in the Russian Revolution; just focus on something you really believe in, and you'll be fine," he said, smiling at me in a manner that I knew was intended to give me more confidence than I should feel at that announcement.
Believing in something might not sound difficult, but believing in something to that extent...
As I looked at the cave in front of me, I knew that I'd never been one for faith; everything I'd ever tried to believe in had let me down in some way or another over the course of my life. My parents couldn't be fully counted on for anything no matter how much I loved them, Jacob had kept secrets from me, Edward had left me...
But the Doctor hadn't.
It was a strange and sudden thought to have, but as I looked at my friend, I realised that it was true; regardless of the fact that we'd only really met a relatively short while ago, even in the moments where the Doctor seemed lost, I never had anything less than total faith that he would get us both through our latest threat.
It might be strange to have faith in someone I'd only known for a matter of weeks over my parents and boyfriend, but I couldn't chance how I felt; I believed in the Doctor, and that was that.
Taking a deep breath, I focused on my faith in the Doctor and began to walk into the cave after him, my eyes straining to focus on his rapidly-retreating coat as we ventured further into the dark cave.
In a life of strange and dangerous things, this was definitely the strangest- even if I had some doubts about it being the most dangerous-; I was actually deliberately looking for a vampire...