Without waiting for the Doctor to catch her up, Klára took off running to the back of the building where the rusty fire escape was still hardly clinging against the brick wall of the shelter.
"What are you talking about?" shouted the Doctor as she jumped atop a garbage can, stretching up to grasp the escape ladder in her skinny hands and pull, sending it clattering to the ground, inches from taking the Doctor's nose off. "Oi, watch it!"
"The teacup on top," shouted Klára as she climbed, as if she couldn't get the words out fast enough. "It showed up before the Solorith did, but…but…oh, it's so confusing! It's like it's hardly been here, but it's always been here. I think they must have put it in our heads to keep us from noticing, because it—is—new!" She let out a groan as she hauled herself up onto the roof, tired out from the combined effort of nearly dying and the two-story climb. "Are you coming or not?"
"Give an old man a moment!" complained the Doctor as he followed her, climbing faster than she had but still tiring out just as quickly. "And perhaps a hand up, if you don't mind!"
Grinning, Klára pulled the Doctor up onto the roof. "I never did understand why an old community center would have a statue of a teacup on top, but I accepted it because I thought 'well, it's always been here'!"
The older man grinned and brushed the dust from his trousers, letting out a huff of air to appraise the strangely-immaculate teacup perched atop the crumbling building. "You're right, Klára, this is far too new to have been here as long as the building. Why would anyone bother restoring an ornament if they didn't keep the building up?" He laughed to himself, hands on his hips.
"It looks too small to fit all of them," commented Klára, peering around him to look at the spacecraft.
"That's the beauty of the Solorith, Klára, they're extremely intimate creatures. Well, when I say 'intimate', I mean 'they don't mind invading one another's personal space'. They get into the ship and collapse their bodies into burning embers, roiling lava and the like, so they all can fit inside for the journey. They land, separate, and father gore to last the rest of the way."
Klára glanced at him from the corner of her eyes. "Beauty?"
She was met with a stern look from the Doctor, who was smiling. "Everything has beauty, Klára, even bad things." They stood in silence for a few moments, drinking in the humbling the fact of their own feeble existence in the world, broken only by the Doctor clapping his hands loudly. "Right then, time to open her up! Sorry about this," he said, almost to the ship itself, "you're a lovely machine, really." Then he took his sonic screwdriver and buzzed it up and down the side of the ship until the top popped off.
With a jaunty spread of his arms, almost asking "who da man?" the Doctor reached up and pulled himself up into the top of the ship.
"Oh, this is lovely," came his muffled voice from the bowels of the teacup. "Look at you, you sweet, curvy thing, you! Not quite as sexy as the TARDIS, but still admirable, I admit…. This ship is powered by psychic waves, very basic controls, but very advanced for this time in history. The interior is lined with a reflective alloy to keep the solar energy bouncing around. Now, if I just do a little buzz here, a twist there…"
Sounds of the sonic screwdriver whirring came through the thick protected walls, and with a high-pitched hissing sound the three remaining Solorith materialized all around Klára in their humanoid disguises. "Doctor," she called cautiously, sinking against the side of the ship while the Doctor continued to work. "Doctor, we've got company!"
"I know!" replied the Doctor almost gleefully, his head popping up above the rim of the teacup, grinning. "I brought them here." Surprisingly agile, he jumped down onto the roof of the shelter and straightened decisively rolled up his shirtsleeves. "Now then, we're all here, perfectly civilized organisms, and we can have a nice chat about the humans you've been consuming."
The Solorith shifted from foot-to-foot, appearing to glance at one another despite the fact that they had no eyes, merely exchanging psychic waves before turning their blind gazes onto Klára.
She cringed against the Doctor's side, expecting pain, but slowly relaxed when nothing happened. "Now then," calmly said the Doctor, subtly pushing the girl behind him as a precaution. "Let's all divert our psychic energies for the time being and communicate nicely."
Of course that had been a stupid comment; the Doctor realized when it occurred to him that the Solorith could hardly speak without their psychic connections. They really were very highly-evolved. "Right. Now. You need a new planet, don't you?"
The largest of the three Solorith, their new leader, took a step forward and tilted its head. Within seconds it had transformed, wide mouth emitting a faint steam from the moisture in the air around. "Yesssssss…" it whispered.
"Your planet is so hot that your bodies are turning to stone. It's dying," the Doctor continued as a helicopter whizzed by overhead, a news camera staring at them. Klára stood a bit straighter.
"Yesssssss…"
"So you thought it would be alright to land your ship on a Level 5 planet, in accordance to the Shadow Proclamation, and consume its inhabitants without consequence." The way the Doctor said it, as a statement and not a question, made the Solorith shift together again.
After an obvious psychic exchange between the three, the lead Solorith spoke up. "Perhapsssssss…we were…misssstssssaken…." The Doctor laughed, a cold and unrelenting thing that made the Solorith cringe and curl against one another in the same way Klára had to him. "Pleassssssssse…have mercssssssssy…"
"Did you show mercy?" demanded the Doctor, taking a step nearer to the positively trembling creatures.
"Did you show this human girl – this human child – mercy when you stalked her and frightened her half to death before trying to kill her?"
"Human…intelligencsssssssse…issssss inferior…tssssso ourssssssss…" the Solorith argued weakly, as if it knew it would not win this fight, and, surely enough, the Doctor was smiling in his annoying way again.
"That makes no difference and you know it," he said in a low, heavy voice full of implications. "My intelligence is superior to every living creature in the universe, and yet you don't see me going about, picking them off the streets one by one, terrifying and torturing them!"
"There…wassssss…no…other…way…" hissed the Solorith, scuttling in a wide arc to get to its ship while the Doctor countered its movements.
"There is always another way!" shouted the Doctor back, snapping as if from nowhere, feeling the Oncoming Storm rising in himself like a tsunami, the blood and fire and rage that had been so unstoppable in the final days of the Time War, the same rage that had risen in him when the lone Solorith had killed Klára, and in that moment he easily could have destroyed them all, aiming his sonic down at the clearly-visible TARDIS in the street below.
He looked at Klára with Gallifrey burning in his eyes, and saw that she was afraid of his anger; he forced himself to breathe and calm down, but kept his screw driver trained on the TARDIS. "You have fifteen seconds," he slowly said. "You have fifteen seconds to get your ship and fly away before I use my ship to cause such extreme atmospheric excitation that we'll need to go back in time and fetch a bloke named Noah to get us out of it! Klára, would you be a doll and count down for me?"
"You're going to kill them when you just said there was always another way?" asked Klára anxiously. He tried to tell her with his eyes but not his mind that he had no real intention of killing the Solorith, but she either couldn't or wouldn't pick up the message.
"Count, Klára!" he shouted, regret instantly filling the space his fleeing bloodlust had left behind when Klára flinched.
"F-f-fifteen," she called out, white as a sheet under the blood and dirt on her face, looking as though she might cry from running and dying and now being shouted at by the only person who had stood up for her since her parents had died. "F-fourteen…thirteen…"
She gave them far more than a second between numbers, but hardly needed it for how quickly the Solorith dragged themselves into their ship, their bodies crumbling and collapsing together to fit for the journey. Within reach of "six," the lid popped back into place, and by "four," the ship had taken off into the misty gray sky.
There was a moment, no more than the beat of a Time Lord's heart, before the news reporter in the helicopter's cry of jubilation could be heard even as the helicopter's motor roared around them, landing right there on roof with them. "Mr. Doctor!" shouted the reporter, jumping from the helicopter the moment it landed, his cameraman leaping out behind him and still managing to keep them in view of the lens. "Mr. Doctor, you've done it!"
The Doctor took a small step back from the reporter, eyes wide with the recognition that the whole nation of America was staring into his aged face at that moment. "Just the Doctor, actually," he mildly said, reaching to straighten the bow-tie that had been ripped from his throat over two hours ago, and then reaching to straighten the tweed jacket that had been draped over Klára's shoulders even before that. "Looks like I'm the Raggedy Doctor all over again," he murmured, more to himself than to the reporter before smiling up at Klára. "Shall we?"
She didn't move a muscle, watching with the same cautious hurt and mistrust in her eyes that had been there when the Doctor first arrived. His display had, no doubt, frightened her, and it would take a bit of coaxing to convince her that the only way for the Solorith to believe that he would kill them was if Klára believed he would.
"Klára," he said softly, so the microphone of the rather nosy reporter couldn't pick him up. "Klára, give me a moment to explain, please."
After several long moments she nodded, crouching to pick her things up again, and when she came back up the Doctor pushed her toward the camera. "This is Klára Frost, the lonely girl who saved Seattle!" he announced devilishly before pulling her away to the fire escape, rambling on all the while about his reasoning behind being so rude (and not-ginger) to her.