Hello again! I would like to wish everyone a happy new year, and a huge thank you for the reviews, favourites, and follows.
Now this chapter is a product of many things. There I was, smelling my old Doctor Who BBC books, (I hope I'm not the only one that thinks they have a really distinctive smell), and I realised I could smell my childhood, and I knew I needed to continue this. So yeah, that was inspiring to a point. Also, I was listening to my Disney playlist (hardcore, I know) and the songs of 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' (strictly not Disney I know, but they all fall into the same category, right?) and I thought to myself how wonderfully they reflected the story of Doctor Who from series 1 to 2, so that got me going a little bit. Hope you enjoyed that little insight into my life there.
Before I get carried away, enjoy!
The device chuckled throatily at him, as if revelling in a private victory. The swollen capsule's red light stained the pasty white of his face into a darker anger. What the hell was he supposed to do? There was a human child in his presence, a human child that would not leave. He spared a glance at her rooted form. Stubborn spawn. She wore a smug smile as well as he wore a rugged Stetson. And yet there was something, something in her misguided smirk, in the misshapen twist of her rosy lips, he felt he liked, for whatever dim-witted reason.
But that wasn't important. Not now. Flashes of images. Strange, corrupted memories trembling somewhere before the safety of sense. He couldn't make head or tail of most, though there seemed to be a frenetic idea, a grotesque idea, coursing, scraping, through his connective neurones.
Danger.
'No, no, no,' his hands fingered the miscellaneous switches. 'This is not good.' He elevated an infamous eyebrow at the child, clearly baffled. 'Not good at all.'
'Why?' Her soft reply dripped with concern.
He rounded on her until they were nose to nose, a crooked posture for him and a stretch for her. He was utterly serious. There was a pause.
'How did you spot it before me?' He exclaimed, ridiculously put-out. A tsunami of arms before her accentuated his point. 'Look at your eyes - they're too tiny for your giant face. How are you supposed to balance that thing on your teeny-weeny body?'
His rant fell upon unlearned ears, however, and he was met with nothing, nothing except the scream of the mechanism as it doubled in size. Damn.
'Oh now look what you've done,' he griped, examining it closely. He threw his eyes back at the girl. 'Stop it. The basketball-head is distracting - get that under control. Now.' The TARDIS spat at him, but he decided to ignore her.
Whisking out his sonic, he fiddled with the controls before a steady whistle confronted the shrieks of his huge, mechanical problem. The Doctor flicked the column repeatedly, deftly analysing.
Suddenly, his conclusion sprang at him, and his facade disappeared. It was quickly replaced by something else.
Worry.
He listened for a final moment. 'A bilinear tempus extrapolator with an added paradox matrix. Sodonian in nature, which means... a time-line extractor.'
Everything seemed attuned to him now, spare the minor canyon scooped out of his memories, and his face chalked. Time crawled past him, dragging feet of lead. This was... a weapon. He was mothering a weapon in his crooked, nervous hands. It seemed to him that nothing in life came without a shred of irony, cruelly laughing as if a spectator of a theatrical farce, and oh his life had been long, longer than most.
But this... this was no ordinary weapon, far from it. It was... impossible. Sheer, blinding white power bubbled from the small capsule encased in the middle, as if his slippery kraken returned to haunt him in its dark waters.
It would take such a great amount of artron energy to even form a milligram of this catastrophe, and to form this - well, for once, he did not know.
And that scared him.
How he had required said death bringer, he had no recollection of; hastily, he plundered mechanically through the erected forts of his mind, severed the shackles to old, forbidden, torturous thoughts.
Nothing.
Frustrated, he dug, deeper and more frantic by each passing minute. A time-line extractor... for that was what the monster claimed to be, in essence. A great big scalpel of which someone could manoeuvre to manipulate... time itself! And there would be no consequence... the paradox matrix saw to that. No wonder the TARDIS leered, had growled as an haemovariform.
Uncoiled, the world shot back to speed. He catapulted himself in very much the same fashion. Tearing a heavy, leather-bound book from its hospitable sanctuary, he launched it at the child, who promptly let it drop to the floor with a squeal.
'Human. Dismantling volume. Read the first two words. Go,' he instructed, a spark of an idea forming.
The child gathered it up gingerly. 'It's heavy!'
'Of course it is, it's bigger on the inside. The opposite I gather to your massive head.'
The child allowed herself a silent moment, and, with a tremulous pull of will, a word sprang from her scarlet lips. 'Bad...'
The Doctor muttered starkly, 'Take your time, it's not like I've got a whole universe to save.' The girl was immune, fortunately.
'Wolf...' And Time hauled his twisted legs no longer, curling, contorting, like some feral beast, into a rich mess of all limbs, stark still. The haze, the fog, of his mind seemed to clear, if only for a second, dispersing for the infiltration of an even brighter being: the light. Her light. No! No! No! He strangled his distraction, beat the stragglers, the remainder of her out of his head. It couldn't be her.
'No, that's utter nonsense.' Was he convincing himself, truly? 'Keep saying things like that and you'll get yourself sectioned. The instructions, three lines down. Now.' His tone offered no room for debate.
'He huffed and he puffed, and he blew the house down.' Something about the eerie sing-song phrase doused him with fear, and yet he forced the corner of his brazen lips to twitch with triumph. 'Got you! Hand it over.' He snatched up the manual.
'First two words? Flux inhibition. Third line down? Dismantle the temporal fission by reversing the transcribing nanoversatility. Try to say that when you've had ten shots.'
The blonde allowed herself to frown. 'You're not real!' He nodded half to himself. 'And, by process of a diverse assessment of elimination, this isn't real. It hasn't been for a long time.'
He knew now. He'd touched the vainglorious minds of gods, and the repentant minds of daemons, however their corruption was negligible when he had once compared them to the idle bystander - the great Gallifreyan race. That was what he had disagreed with most of all - their monstrous laws. And, so, he hadn't been idle, oh he always interfered, and yet, he assumed, his, and only his, misshapen mind would have the immorality to punish him for the one time he could do nothing, say nothing, on that fateful day in Canary Wharf...
And who better to conjure up? His brain had a cruel sense of humour.
'Now off you pop back out of existence, Rose Marion Tyler.'
TO BE CONTINUED
Sorry for the rambling at the end there, but you see that big, (not) red, (un)threatening button over there? You know what I do when I see a big, (not) red, (un)threatening button? I like to press it. ;)