Well, leave it to her to drive him off with her innuendo that she wasn't even really into. What did she care if the Doctor left her behind? He probably wanted to go have a sesh with his beloved bananas. She giggled through her conscious frown, and that little part of her shuddered. She didn't much like being out of control. But all the same, if she just gave into it and stopped worrying, it could be fun. After all, the Doctor had already left her, so she figured she couldn't do too much to screw it up…

She took another deep breath, trying to get drunk off whatever was making her like this. It was coming from a building at the edge of the farm complex. A steady line of smoke was coming up from the chimney, but even in her state she could tell that it wasn't wood smoke, or even just coal smoke. Something pricked at the back of her mind, a shot of pain linked to a memory she couldn't quite recall.

She walked confidently toward the building, and it was only when security stopped her that she decided she should probably think up a story. That's when she heard the sound. In the distance, she could hear a rifle – 30 06, from the sound – being fired in the back. Strange weapon to be using on a clearly advanced alien planet.

"No access to this building ma'am, except for inspectors." He was a humanoid creature, so tall that she had to tilt her head all the way back to look up at him. The sound came again, followed by the prick of memory. "For the 30 06 test rounds? I know." She tried to pretend that the size of the security guard didn't scare her near to death, or that her mind was busy doing cartwheels off whatever chemical was being produced. God, she was drunk. But now was not the time to give into the sensations. She focused on his words, thanking the stars for the TARDIS psychic translations, leaving her to focus on correctly forming sounds with her own tongue and teeth.

"I'm sorry ma'am, didn't know you were part of that. Do you have your pass?"

Her what? She thought fast, adopting an annoyed, irate air. "Damn good question. And if your security team was more vigilant about patrolling the rest of the farm, I would. Honestly, how would there be any way for me to know that I was going to be pickpocketed ON SITE?" She shouted the last two words, glaring up at him. "So you know what? If you don't want to let me through, that's just dandy. I can report back that not only was I robbed before arriving, the whole thing is just a shit show." She turned on her heel.

"No, ma'am, it's not like that… Who did you say you were representing today?"

"Guild of Turin." She felt like that had been a title to something – maybe a Tolkien book? Not quite. Didn't matter. Her brain was reminding her gleefully of how drunk she was and how much effort this was taking to keep being creative and lying. It made her ornery. To her surprise, though, he nodded.

"Of course ma'am. Go on in." He handed her a security pass. "If you just go in through that front door, you'll be able to observe the manufacturing wing.

"Thank you," she managed. She forced each foot in front of the other until she was out of sight from the security booth, then she leaned against a wall, breathing through the fabric of her shirt in case that was a way to filter out whatever was getting to her. She was starting to get lightheaded again. "That was too easy," she muttered."

"What were you talking about – thirty aught six?" She started when she heard the Doctor's voice.

"It's a gun. The sound in the background – that's the type of weapon."

"You can recognize it by the sound?"

She shrugged. "I was raised with guns. My dad used to take me shooting a lot. My neighbors all had guns. It was just something that was part of how I learned." She looked him over. "So how'd you get in?"

He held up the sonic screwdriver and grinned. Then he looked at her again, concern marking his features. "You alright?"

"Peachy." She mentally steeled herself. She needed to pull herself together. Whatever was getting to her was clearly not affecting the Doctor, and something was wrong. There was something oh-so-wrong. And guns. And the Doctor. Who was looking at her with those gorgeous blue eyes and… She gritted her teeth and stood up straight. "What's the problem here?"

"Factory's producing some kind of weaponry with a chemical byproduct. It hasn't been detected yet because it doesn't seem to affect the natives or current colonizers. In fact it only seems to affect, well, humans." He looked slightly guilty at this, as though it was his fault.

"And 30 06 rifles have what to do with all of this?" She was still trying to force her thoughts into coherent order and felt like she may have been missing something.

"Dunno. Wanna find out?" He grinned, and she was at least relieved that she wasn't being stupid. She followed behind him as they approached the factory door.

It was a huge thing, full of metal and fire and gunpowder. And the chemical was almost overwhelming. There were guns lying everywhere, different models on display. She picked one up – a part of her brain whispered that it was a bad idea to be playing with guns in this state, but what did she care? She inspected it closely, looking for traditional loading and firing mechanisms. The Doctor lifted it gently from her hands. "Laser weaponry. High heat variety. Very dangerous." He said this as though he was chiding a naughty 5 year old. She pouted.

"Yeah, right. No touchy for the human, got it."

"The drunk human."

She sneered at him, sticking her tongue out for good measure. Thinking that might have ruined the sneer, she turned away from him and walked around a large tank, pocketing a long-range pistol when she did. Safety was on. She checked. And then she stumbled.

The Doctor caught her elbows. "You need to get out of here. Off the grounds. Can you get far enough away to be able to breathe?" He was concerned about her, but there were clearly bigger things on his mind. So she nodded. She could walk away on her own. If she couldn't help, the least she could do was not get in his way while he was saving the world. She squeezed his arm reassuringly and made for the door. She even made it a few dozen solid steps outside the door before stumbling the first time. Her head was swimming. It was the line between being drunk and being on a rager. She would black out soon, the logical part of herself reminded. She hated the logical part of herself when she was like this.

She needed to get further away or she would breathe herself to death. She giggled at that. If she stopped breathing she'd die, if she kept breathing she might die. Sounded like terrible odds to her. But it's what she got for being curious. And traveling with the Doctor who thought she was a liability or an incidental, she wasn't sure which. But she kept walking. And then, she stopped.

The Doctor found her when he was running out of the building about half an hour later. He'd rigged the thing to blow, and here she was, curled up on the grass like it was the world's best place to nap. He knelt down and shook her, and she came too, slightly less groggy than before. She was still drunk, and they both knew it. "We have to go, Miranda! The thing's gonna blow!" He could hear the countdown in his head, and suddenly just covered her body with his.

Nothing happened. The door that he'd left open in his haste swung idly, and he realized that he'd let the buildup of flammable gases escape with him. She wriggled out from underneath him as he calculated his frustration. "You just want to blow the thing up? It's all combustible right? Yeah?" She took a few steps away from him, her hands in her pockets, looking between him and the building, her lips pursed over-dramatically.

"That's the gist of it, yep. Just didn't quite…" He jumped when the first blast rang through the air. He realized as he tackled her to the ground that it had been her – she had a gun in her hand and had somehow made the laser shot through the open door, setting the whole thing alight. It crunched down on itself, the building absolutely decimated. She was crying as the gun flew from her hand, though she wiped it away along with a smear of blood. It hadn't quite worked as planned. She realized, then, that she didn't even know if there were people in there. Her heart dropped into the pit of her stomach.

When the blasts settled, she stood up hurriedly, ignoring the swimming in her head that was compounded by the nick on her forehead that couldn't seem to stop bleeding. She probably looked a sight, and didn't want him to see. So she walked with calm reassurance until they were out of sight of the explosion, around another building corner. The Doctor was a few feet behind her, and began to tear into her as he rounded. "I should have known better than to bring someone who pointed a gun at me first thing. Your kind just picks up a gun as the first answer, don't you? You just…" He saw her then, leaning against the wall, eyes squeezed shut, brow furrowed.

He cooled considerably during her thought process, and reached out to touch her arm. She flinched back, fixing him with an icy glare. "My kind, is it? Humans? Women? People who know how to shoot? You were trying to blow the place yourself, you hypocrite! For god's sake Doctor, having blood on your hands isn't exactly pleasant for anyone." The unspoken continuation – you should know. She bent her knees and slid down onto the pavement. The blue-gray of the sidewalk and the deep maroon of the building shimmered as the sun danced through the leaves, and she mourned for this beautiful planet that somehow had drawn "her kind" to it. And all they wanted to do was destroy it.

"You regret having brought me." She added it several moments later, the weight of the words filling the space between them ballooning outward from her until it seemed to reach the edges of space. The whole world was bearing the weight of those words and the silence that surrounded them.

The Doctor took a breath. He had been so ready to condemn her, to see her as part of all of this destruction. But she was right – no one really wanted blood on their hands. And she didn't seem like the sort who could just wash it away like Pontius Pilate. He opened his mouth to respond, and closed it again.

She wasn't looking, but she could almost feel the stretch of his jaw as he nearly said something, but stopped. Nearly denied it, out of courtesy, but couldn't. She felt something click into place within her – a bulwark snapping shut. "Let's just get back to the TARDIS, yeah?"

He seemed to notice the blood on the side of her face from the cut above her temple. Her took her hand and ordered her into the next passing cab. He was sure the cab driver thought he was murdering her, but he didn't particularly care what the cab driver thought. His mind was racing to the medical bay of the TARDIS and whether he had and bio-adaptable medi-compound left. He was sure he had some programmed to himself, but a bit of human cellular regeneration was what she needed. He took her hand and led her back to the TARDIS slowly. She felt like he was racing through the streets with her.

The TARDIS door was quickly becoming her favorite sight. The first time because, well, it was the TARDIS. This time, more because she hadn't been able to see straight in what seemed like forever and she felt like the Doctor had just dragged her through a race at full sprint. She could feel her muscles twitching hard, her lungs practically shrieking for a rest so they could catch up, and each beat of her heart thundering through her ears. Blood, oxygen, water. She leaned against the closed TARDIS door and let her body catch up.

The Doctor, meanwhile, had gotten lost in the glory of his new idea. "Always keep a supply in the medical bay, you know. It's important stuff if you get hurt." He was talking to himself, perhaps, or narrating to her. It wasn't a debatable line. Not that she had any spare breath to debate. They must have looked like lunatics outside, the tall man in the leather jacket and sweater and the bleeding woman he was practically dragging along behind him. Well, she thought, they were both a bit mad, so appearances weren't all that deceiving.

She closed her eyes as blood started to swarm her vision with cloudy darkness. It would only last a minute while her body readjusted to normal blood pressure. She wasn't losing that much blood. She counted slowly, tapping her wrist to the beat she whispered. A small attempt to reset her blood pressure. Her adrenaline kick was dying off. She was feeling almost normal. She opened her eyes. The Doctor was nowhere to be seen. He'd probably skittered off to themedical bay to get some ofwhatever he was talking about.

She sagged into the captain's chair and leaned back. The Doctor's voice was just audible, though she couldn't make out his words. He'd just have to repeat himself if he wanted to tell her anything important. It didn't really matter, of course. He was going to find a way to leave her behind soon. Or she would find a way to leave him. It was inevitable. He already regretted bringing her.

She leaned her head back, listening to the dull hum of the TARDIS' systems. Low and comforting, it aided the sudden drop off in adrenaline and slow drip of blood out of the gash on her head in making her doze off.

The Time Vortex swirled in the heart of the TARDIS. Perhaps it sensed another being that had crossed the void, or it recognized that Miranda Larsen was not really of this world, or any world in this dimension. The mix of the Void and the Time Vortex could not help but change even the most normal person. Perhaps Miranda Larsen had been normal when she sat on her back porch in her world. Perhaps she had been normal when she first stepped onto the TARDIS. Perhaps. But she was not now.

Half-asleep in the control room of the TARDIS, the hum grew louder in her ears, filling her mind like a too-loud meeting. So many noises and voices. They all meant something, she knew, if only she could listen to one of them instead of the cacophony of all of them. She tried to focus on one, any one. She started with the one that seemed closest. It was a faint woman's voice. It was still humming, but it was a simple tune rather than a monotonous buzz. It calmed her and helped her to focus. She didn't think she knew the melody, but it was familiar all the same.

She listened for a long while, the song repeating itself a few times. She was tempted to just let it lull her into a deep, oblivious sleep, but there were so many other voices to hear. She drew herself away and listened to another voice.

It was a voice she didn't quite recognize. Male. British accent - Received Pronunciation. She tried to focus her eyes, but there wasn't really anything to see. So she listened. It was a voice already full of anger and pain. "This is too much - too many horrors have been unleashed. It has to be stopped somehow..." There was so much grief in those words, but the next sentence nearly undid her as it choked out its conclusion. "I have to stop it. I have to fix what we've done."

She pulled back, trying to find another voice that would make the pain echoing in her head stop. She listened for the humming voice from before, but it was strangely quiet now. She struggled to isolate one voice - any voice - in the mess of her mind. "...All of time and space." She flew towards those words, not caring what they were about or who spoke them, just needing the reassurance of hearing them. "All of time and space."

She wanted to ask what about all of time and space, but she felt the voice's pause was full of its own questions. After a moment, she heard the same voice, soft and thoughtful. "How could she be so wrong? There are so many of them, in so many worlds and so many times, and they always think...She'll save every world we see and still think that if I let her." The northern British accent was familiar even now. "If we make it through this, we'll see about changing that." There was resolution in his voice. She wondered when this was, or if was even real. She doubted it. She'd learned a long time ago that dreams were more likely to be fantasies or nightmares than anything else. The power of dreams was that they weren't real.

But if it was - and if he was talking about her - maybe he didn't want her gone. Maybe she was overreacting and he was under-reacting and there was bound to be a way to meet in the middle. She dared hope for a minute. Then another voice, loud and definite, raging at something or someone or - her heart seized with the thought - her: "Stupid apes! All of them putting their noses where they don't belong and getting in the way of everything. Can't see their hands in front of their faces when it comes to time and space. Nothing but monkeys launched in a rocket." That voice, she understood with painful certainty, that voice was also the Doctor's.

She fled from her own dream, shaken, struggling to feel the reality of the chair beneath her, fighting through the barrier between dream world and waking. It stole her breath. And then it was over. The only hum was that of the TARDIS. She was alone in the control room. She rested her head back and took a deep breath. She would save this world with him. And then she would take her stupid ape self elsewhere.