Chapter Nine: The Circle Must Be Broken
Guards chased after Rose, the Doctor, and Donna as they ran through the complex, but above the shouting and feet stomping on the hard pavement, Rose heard something else. Singing.
She grabbed the Doctor's arm and held a hand to her lips when he tried to pull away. "Shhh. Don't you hear it, Doctor?"
He tilted his head for a moment, then a smile spread across his face. "Oh, you're brilliant, Rose." He took her hand, then looked over at Donna, who was frowning at the both of them. "Come on, Donna, this way!"
They followed the song to another metal building, and Rose sonicked the door open. The three of them filed inside, then she watched with raised eyebrows as the Doctor turned his sonic on the lock, frying the mechanism.
"Hold on. Does that mean we're locked in?" Donna demanded.
"Listen." He held up a hand. "Listen, listen, listen, listen."
Rose and the Doctor both set their sonic screwdrivers to the torch setting and followed the sound of singing deeper into the facility.
The song grew louder as they walked down a metal staircase, and when they reached the bottom, they paused and put a hand to their heads. "My head's killing me," Rose muttered.
"Yeah," the Doctor said, his voice raspy.
"What is it?" Donna put her hand on Rose's shoulder, and looked at her and the Doctor.
"The Ood." Rose rubbed at her temple. After almost four years of practice, her telepathic barriers were adequate to keep most chatter out. But the Ood… "They're singing telepathically. It's… haunting. And really, really loud."
The Doctor shone the torchlight around the room, and they all sucked in a breath when they realised they were surrounded by cages. He walked slowly to a switch and turned the lights on.
Cages full of Ood.
They stared into one cage, and the captive Ood trembled and slowly turned their backs to them. The implication of an entire group of Ood cowering at the sight of humans horrified Rose.
"The only humans they've ever met have been cruel," she whispered.
Staring at the cages, Donna wondered why she'd thought it would be a good idea to travel with the Doctor and Rose. First Pompeii, and now an entire species, enslaved. "They look different to the others," she said.
The Ood seemed to be aware they were being discussed, because they shifted again. They were still squatting on the floor, holding something protectively inside their cupped hands, but they weren't turned completely away from them anymore.
The three of them knelt down in front of the cage and looked through the bars at the Ood.
"That's because they're natural born Ood," the Doctor explained, "unprocessed, before they're adapted to slavery. Unspoilt." He took a breath, and when he spoke again, she could hear tears in his voice. "That's their song."
Donna shook her head. They kept talking about a song. "I can't hear it."
In her peripheral vision, Donna saw the Doctor turn to look at her. "Do you want to?" he offered quietly.
Donna looked at the Ood, then at the Doctor and Rose. "Yeah."
"It'll make you cry, Donna," Rose warned, wiping tears away from her eyes as she did.
She swallowed hard, then looked at the Doctor. "Let me hear it."
"Face me."
Donna turned to face the Doctor, and he closed his eyes and pressed his hands to her temples. A moment later, she felt something brushing against her mind, and she shuddered at the sensation.
"Open your mind," he instructed.
She didn't have a clue what that meant, but she closed her eyes and forced herself to relax into the pressure, rather than fighting against it.
"That's it," the Doctor whispered. "Hear it, Donna. Hear the music."
Donna's head filled with the haunting sound of a single voice rising and falling, like the descant of a Gregorian chant. When Rose told her the song was sad, she hadn't realised that meant she'd be able to feel the overwhelming sorrow of an entire species in captivity, separated from each other in a way that was never meant to be.
She pulled back from the Doctor's hands, but whatever he'd done to let her hear the song didn't go away when she broke physical contact with him. A sob got stuck in her throat as the mournful song echoed around her.
Donna looked at the Ood in the cage, seeing them with new eyes. Hearing how sad they were gave her compassion for them a depth it had been missing earlier. This captivity was truly destroying their lives. One of the Ood looked directly at her, and suddenly the shared sorrow of the species narrowed down to this individual.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked up at the Doctor. "Take it away," she sobbed.
His eyes were sad, but understanding. "Sure?"
The song swelled, as the Ood seemed to sense her sadness on their behalf and add it to their lament.
Donna nodded frantically. "I can't bear it."
The Doctor pressed his fingers to her temples again, and the song was gone. Donna sniffed and swallowed back her remaining tears before swiping at her face, trying to regain some composure.
A hand on her shoulder surprised her, but when Rose offered a one-armed hug, she accepted it gratefully. "I'm sorry," she whispered, not sure if she was talking to the Doctor and Rose, or to the Ood, who could never get away from the song.
Rose squeezed her shoulder, then stepped away. "It's okay."
Donna took a deep breath and looked into the cage. The Ood looked just as dejected, as downtrodden as they had a moment ago, even though she could no longer hear the song. "But you can still hear it," she said, not sure if she was talking to her friends, or to the Ood.
"Yeah," Rose whispered hoarsely. "An' it hurts."
"All the time," the Doctor agreed, taking Rose's hand.
Donna watched them for a long moment, taking in the way they comforted each other in this shared sorrow. Her curious side was still intrigued by the hints of telepathy she saw in their relationship, but the pragmatic side could only see the resigned acceptance in their eyes. This wasn't new for them.
All the beauty, all the incredible things she'd imagined seeing if she got to travel with them… she never imagined this. Never imagined that she would have to help kill twenty thousand people to save the planet, never imagined that in two thousand years, humanity had still not gotten past its need to enslave those it believed to be less than themselves.
The now-familiar buzz of the sonic screwdriver pulled her out of her thoughts. When she shook off her melancholy, the Doctor already had the cell door open.
But Donna heard something else, something coming from above. Something that sounded like bolt cutters. "They're breaking in."
"Ah, let them." The Doctor threw the door back and walked slowly into the cell. The song still playing in his head made him reckless—he wanted that confrontation with the management of this company.
The Ood huddled in a corner, and he realised they were picking up on his anger but couldn't tell who it was directed at. He took a deep breath and started to crouch down in front of them, but Rose was already there, kneeling on the floor with her empty hands held out, palm up.
One Ood raised his head and made eye contact, and Rose smiled at it. "It's all right," she said, her gentle voice a counterpoint to the banging coming from above. "We're not going to hurt you. We're here to help, if we can."
Their hunched shoulders relaxed slightlyas she projected a solid wave of compassion, and Rose's smile widened a bit. "Will you show us what you're holding?" she asked. "You can trust us. I'm Rose, and this is the Doctor and Donna. We're your friends."
The Doctor watched breathlessly as the Ood shuffled forward, still keeping whatever he had in his hand covered protectively. But when he reached Rose, he carefully removed his top hand.
They all stared at the pale pink, fleshy sphere the Ood held in his hand. "Is that…?" Donna whispered.
The Doctor nodded as the mystery of the blank personality of the Ood suddenly made sense. "It's a brain. A hindbrain. The Ood are born with a secondary brain." Now he could see a fleshy cord connecting the brain to the Ood's head, just below the tentacles on the face. "Like the amygdala in humans, it processes memory and emotions. You get rid of that, you wouldn't be Donna any more. You'd be… like an Ood. A processed Ood."
Tension radiated off of Rose, but she was trying to control it, to not alarm the Ood. "They cut off their brains, and stitch on the translator," she said, her voice flat.
"Like a lobotomy," Donna agreed. The Doctor looked over at her, and his hearts sank at the disillusionment on her face. "I spent all that time looking for the two of you because I thought it was so wonderful out here." She shook her head. "I want to go home."
He wanted to argue, but a final, loud bang indicated that the door had finally been opened. He spun around and saw a guard leading the same businessman they'd spotted earlier down the stairs.
"They're with the Ood, sir," the guard said.
The Doctor jumped to his feet and pulled the door shut with a hard clang of metal on metal. "What you going to do, then?" he snarled, his chest heaving with rage. "Arrest me? Lock me up? Throw me in a cage? Well, you're too late. Ha!"
The businessman rolled his eyes. "I don't know how three idiots managed to infiltrate this far into the facility," he muttered as he gestured for the guard to unlock the cage. Which… yes, it should have occurred to the Doctor that they would have keys, but honestly, he was only trying to make a clear statement at the time.
"What should we do with them, sir?" the guard asked. The Doctor was relieved to see that he kept his gun trained on him, though his gaze did wander to Rose and Donna frequently, keeping an eye on all of them.
"Bring them to the office," the man said. He smiled cooly at the three of them. "I'd recommend that you follow without any protests or attempts at heroism. It would be a shame if Kess here fired accidentally."
The barrel of Kess' gun shifted from the Doctor to Rose. The Doctor's jaw clenched. "Mr…. What was your name?"
"Halpen," the businessman said.
"Excellent. Mr. Halpen, I think you'll find that we'll come peacefully enough. There's no need to point weapons at anyone."
A sly smirk twisted Halpen's mouth. "Kess, keep your gun trained on Mrs. Tyler. If any of them try to escape, shoot her."
The Doctor clenched his hands into fists, and Halpen chuckled. "Oh yes, Dr. Tyler—Solana mentioned that you were married to one of these two ladies. Thank you for offering me the perfect leverage."
Rose tried to push calm over the bond as she climbed the stairs, but the Doctor wasn't interested. His anger and rage had been building ever since they'd realised exactly how the Ood were processed, and the threat to her had pushed his temper to the limit.
Outside, she blinked a few times as the glare of the sun off the snow blinded her. "Move along," Kess growled, poking her in the back with the gun.
Rose stumbled a few steps, then wheeled around and glared at him, which had the dual effect of letting the Doctor see she was absolutely fine. "God, humans can be so thick," she growled. "If I'm your boss' leverage, what do you think my husband will do if something happens to me?"
Kess' gaze shifted to the Doctor, taking in his wild eyes and heaving chest. He took an involuntary step back, and the barrel of the gun swung around to point at the Doctor.
Mr. Halpen rolled his eyes. "Oh, for God's sake, Kess, be careful. It would be nice if we could all reach the office in one piece—and without any weapons fire to alert the buyers to potential problems. Do you understand?"
Kess nodded slowly, but Rose watched him out of the corner of her eye as they crossed the compound, and noticed that he never really looked away from the Doctor.
The rest of their walk was uneventful. Solana must have kept the buyers occupied so no one noticed three people being led across the compound at gunpoint.
When they reached a sterile, white office, Kess handed them off to other guards and disappeared. Rose, the Doctor, and Donna were all dragged over to some exposed pipes and handcuffed there. Rose tugged at her restraints, but these didn't seem like the kind that would pop open if you pulled just right.
Halpen leaned against a table as an Ood in a simple black outfit looked on. "Why don't you just come out and say it?" he demanded. "FOTO activists."
"Friend of the Ood?" Rose guessed, the long-ago conversation with Danny and Scooti coming back to her. "I was asked that once before, and I'll say the same thing I did then. Maybe I am—because as far as I'm concerned, humans have no right taking slaves."
Halpen's eye twitched and he raised his voice. "The Ood were nothing without us, just animals roaming around on the ice."
"That's because you can't hear them," the Doctor spat out.
"They welcomed it," Halpen insisted. He shook his head and chuckled. "It's not as if they put up a fight."
"You idiot," Donna hissed.
The man's smile disappeared, but Rose watched the Ood standing behind him as Donna delivered a merciless blow to Halpen's egotism. He'd tilted his head curiously when Donna spoke, and Rose got the sense that he was… intrigued by their outspoken support of his species.
"They're born with their brains in their hands," Donna continued. "Don't you see, that makes them peaceful. They've got to be, because a creature like that would have to trust anyone it meets."
"Oh, nice one," the Doctor muttered approvingly.
"Thank you."
Rose agreed with the Doctor's praise and hoped it would convince Donna to stay with them, but she hadn't looked away from the Ood. Unless she was wrong—and it was hard to say, given how difficult it was to read an Ood—he was both pleased and grateful for Donna's scathing rebuttal.
Halpen's eyes narrowed, then he stood up. He took a few steps forward and tried to intimidate the Doctor into obedience, but the Doctor just straightened his back and looked down his nose at the human.
"The system's worked for two hundred years," Halpen said angrily. "All we've got is a rogue batch. But the infection is about to be sterilised." He raised his wrist to his mouth and spoke into a comms unit. "Mr. Kess. How do we stand?
Kess' voice filled the office, a tinny, hollow sound. "Canisters primed, sir. As soon as the core heats up, the gas is released. Give it two hundred marks and counting."
The Doctor sucked in a breath. It was bad enough when the humans had just been enslaving the Ood, but the slaughter he was suggesting now was outright genocide. "You're going to gas them?"
"Kill the livestock," Halpen said coldly, a hint a smirk curling the corners of his mouth. "The classic foot and mouth solution from the olden days. Still works." He chuckled, and the Doctor wanted to smack the smirk right off his face.
The Ood song crescendoed, fear harmonising with the sorrow as anger solidified into a pulsing bass line. The Doctor pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth, biting back a groan of discomfort. They were reaching out for each other, trying to help each other in this moment. They knew they were going to be slaughtered, and they weren't going to let it happen.
He wasn't surprised when an alarm blared throughout the complex. The red-eyed Ood were obviously causing enough havoc to cause alarm.
Mr. Halpen had turned around to talk to Dr. Ryder, but he spun back around when the alarm started. "What the hell?"
The two men and the Ood that followed Halpen around left the office through the private, outdoor staircase. They left the doors open, so the Doctor, Rose, and Donna could all hear the gunfire and screams sounding from outside.
Doctor. He turned around to look at Rose. I don't think Mr. Halpen's favourite Ood is quite as domesticated as he thinks. It's just a guess… but that might be a point in our favour, later on.
The Doctor craned his neck in an attempt to see the Ood she was talking about, but they were already out of sight. Well, we need to get out of here before that can do us any good, he replied, tugging at his cuffs.
Halpen and his entourage reentered the room a moment later. "Change of plan," he said curtly.
"There are no reports of trouble off-world, sir," Dr. Ryder told his boss. "It's still contained to the Ood Sphere."
Halpen straightened his spine and stared down at the scientist. "Then we've got a public duty to stop it before it spreads."
"What's happening?" the Doctor asked, looking at the two men and trying to put together some reasonable course of events.
"Everything you wanted, Doctor," Halpen said bitterly. "No doubt there'll be a full police investigation once this place has been sterilised, so I can't risk a bullet to the head." He smiled viciously. "I'll leave you to the mercies of the Ood."
The Doctor called after him as he left the room. "But Mr. Halpen, there's something else, isn't there?" Halpen stopped and looked back at him. "Something we haven't seen."
"What do you mean?" asked Donna.
"A creature couldn't survive with a separate forebrain and hindbrain. They'd be at war with themselves." Mr. Halpen's eyes had widened during his explanation, and the Doctor knew he was right. "There's got to be something else, a third element. Am I right?"
"And again, so clever," the businessman said condescendingly.
"And that's where the red eye is coming from, isn't it?" Rose guessed. "What is it?"
Halpen strode forward and got right in her face. "It won't exist for very much longer," he snarled. "Enjoy your Ood."
The Doctor made eye contact with the Ood before they left the room. Rose was right; there was something in the eyes… He glanced down at the Greek letter printed on the pocket of the Ood's jumpsuit and made note of his designation: Ood Sigma.
After they were gone, the Doctor let part of his brain ruminate over what Halpen could possibly have meant. Whatever was tying the Ood together, he was planning to destroy it. That would essentially kill any chance they ever had of going back to their natural state.
He tugged again at his handcuffs; they couldn't let that happen. "Come on," he grunted when they didn't give.
"Well, do something," Donna ordered. "You're the one with all the tricks. You must have met Houdini."
On his other side, Rose huffed as she tried to get the restraints open. "Yeah… the thing is, Donna, these are really good handcuffs."
"Oh well, I'm glad of that," Donna snarked, and they could hear the eye roll in her voice. "I mean, at least we've got quality."
The door slid open and they froze for a moment when they caught sight of three Ood standing on the other side, their eyes red and their translator balls in their hands. Then Rose panicked and tugged frantically at her cuffs.
A moment later, calm washed over the bond, but Rose shook her head violently.
They use that thing as a weapon! she explained to the Doctor. She shared the memory of watching the young crew woman die when a translator ball had been pressed to her head. The Doctor sucked in a breath, and she nodded quickly.
Then she forced herself to calm down enough to talk to the Ood. They were telepathic; couldn't they tell the three of them meant them no harm? "We're here to help," she insisted as she yanked at her bindings. "You can trust us," she said, just as she had in the cage with the unprocessed Ood.
The Doctor nodded frantically. "That's right. Friends. Rose, Doctor, Donna—friends."
Donna jumped into the round a moment later, saying, "The circle must be broken."
Rose nodded; she'd almost forgotten about the first Ood they'd met, and the way the Ood in the cargo container had repeated that phrase in unison.
"We're here to help. You can trust us," she said over and over, while the Doctor and Donna likewise repeated their own phrases. The Ood didn't seem to understand, though—they kept advancing, with the translator balls held at the ready.
Rose and the Doctor both tried to reach out to the Ood telepathically at the same time. It should be easy, if the species was as telepathic as they seemed to be. But something… something seemed to be blocking the full signal, and all the Ood could do was project emotion.
The circle must be broken, Rose realised, finally getting an idea of what exactly that line meant. The circle was the thing cutting the Ood off from that third brain the Doctor had mentioned—a third brain that let them connect telepathically.
The Ood song swirled around them, and Rose closed her eyes and opened herself up to it. We're here to help. You can trust us. The circle must be broken, she said, adding the last in there on a random instinct.
The translator balls were only inches from their faces now, and she cringed back from it as far as possible. We're here to help! Rose cried out telepathically. We're your friends.
She held her breath when the Ood froze. A moment later, the lights in the translator balls turned off, and as one, the Ood dropped them and clutched their heads, listening to a message. "Friends," they said a moment later. "Rose, Doctor, Donna. Friends."
Rose sagged back against the wall, while the Doctor and Donna agreed exuberantly.
"Yes. That's us. Friends. Oh, yes," they said, their words spilling out on top of each other chaotically.
The Ood clipped their translator balls to their shirts, and one of them found a set of keys in Mr. Halpen's desk. "You must hurry," he said as he unlocked their handcuffs. "The circle must be broken."
Rose was the first to be released, and she looked at the Ood as she rubbed at her sore wrists. "Thank you… er, what's your name?"
"Omega Twenty."
"Thank you, Omega Twenty." She looked at all of them. "Thank you."
As soon as he was free, the Doctor grabbed Rose and Donna's hands and they ran out of the office and down the stairs, straight into a war zone. Guards were firing blindly into the worsening blizzard, trying to kill the Ood.
They hunkered down behind the corner of a building. "I don't know where it is. I don't know where they've gone."
"What are we looking for?"
Donna's question echoed behind him as he took off running again, trusting they would both follow him.
"It might be underground, like some sort of cave, or a cavern, or…" He stopped and spun in a circle, trying to find some clue to where they needed to go.
Rose and Donna ran by him, Rose grabbing his hand as she passed. Come on, Doctor. No time to stand still. Follow the singing.
He'd tried to keep them out of the worst of the fighting, but doing as she said and following the Ood song to its source meant leading them directly into the fray. "Keep your head down!"
The force of an explosion behind them knocked them all to the ground, thankfully covered by a soft blanket of snow. When the vibrations stopped, the Doctor knew, thanks to the bond, that Rose wasn't in any pain, so he looked over at Donna first.
"All right?"
She nodded shakily, and he rolled onto his side so he could look over his shoulder. The air was filled with smoke, and as it cleared, Ood Sigma appeared. Before the Doctor could worry about his intentions, he spoke.
"Rose, Doctor, Donna—come with me. The circle must be broken."
The Doctor jumped to his feet and helped Rose and Donna up. "Ood Sigma. Rose said she thought you might have a bit of a mind of your own."
"All Ood have a mind of our own, Doctor."
The Doctor felt his ears get hot at the mild reproof. "Right, of course. Ah… I'll let you lead the way, shall I?" he said, pointing in a random direction.
Ood Sigma set off at a fast pace, leading them around the fighting to another warehouse. The Doctor pointed the sonic at the lock box, destroying the controls instead of just unlocking the door.
Like the warehouse that housed Ood Conversion, they were immediately met with a set of stairs. The song grew louder as they ran down them, and when they reached the main level of the building, the Doctor darted over to a railing and looked down on an enormous brain.
"The Ood Brain," he said in a hushed voice. "Now it all makes sense. That's the missing link. The third element, binding them together. Forebrain, hindbrain, and this, the telepathic centre."
A sudden surge of anger from Rose took him by surprise, and he looked over at her. "They're supposed to be connected," she said, grinding out the words. "The song, it's like our bond, Doctor."
Before the Doctor could respond to the memories she'd dragged out, he heard the sound of chains clinking on his right. He turned cautiously and wasn't surprised to find Mr. Halpen, pointing a pistol at them.
"Cargo. I can always go into cargo," he said as he walked slowly towards them, Dr. Ryder behind him. "I've got the rockets; I've got the sheds. Smaller business. Much more manageable, without livestock."
"He's mined the area," Ryder said, the anger in his eyes making it clear what he thought of that fact.
"You're going to kill it?" gasped Donna.
Halpen reached the railing and looked down on the brain. "They found that… thing, centuries ago beneath the northern glacier."
"Those pylons," the Doctor said, noticing them for the first time. He'd been too excited to find the brain before to realise what he was looking at.
"In a circle," Donna agreed. "The circle must be broken."
"A telepathic dampening field," Rose spat out. "Keeping them from connecting for two hundred years."
The Doctor shuddered; he knew that pain very well. Five months had nearly been enough to drive him mad. He couldn't imagine going on without their bond for two hundred years.
Halpen frowned at the Ood who'd brought them there. "And you, Ood Sigma, you brought them here. I expected better."
"My place is at your side, sir," Ood Sigma said smoothly as he walked around the Doctor, Rose, and Donna to stand with Mr. Halpen.
The man chuckled. "Still subservient. Good Ood."
"If that barrier thing's in place," Donna said, waving at the railing and the Ood Brain beneath it, "how come the Ood started breaking out?"
The Doctor nodded; he'd been wondering that himself. "Maybe it's taken centuries to adapt. The subconscious reaching out?"
Dr. Ryder stepped forward. "But the process was too slow. It had to be accelerated." He shot a scathing glance at Halpen. "You should never give me access to the controls, Mr. Halpen. I lowered the barrier to its minimum. Friends of the Ood, sir. It's taken me ten years to infiltrate the company, and I succeeded."
Halpen narrowed his eyes, then smiled "Yes. Yes, you did."
The Doctor recognised the intent in Halpen's voice a second too late to stop him from pushing Dr. Ryder over the catwalk and onto the Ood Brain. He tried, darting forward to lean over the railing, but he wasn't in time. Instead, he watched, horrified, as Ryder sank into the neural tissue, slowly absorbed by the species he'd come to save.
Donna and Rose were hanging over the railing with him, and it was Donna who found her voice first. "You—you murdered him."
The Doctor straightened up and glared at Mr. Halpen, who was busy rolling his eyes at Donna, as if she were a naive child. "Very observant, Ginger."
He pointed his pistol at the three of them, and the Doctor shifted to put himself in front of Donna and Rose.
"Now, then." He coughed as he looked down at the gun in his hand. "Can't say I've ever shot anyone before."
He gagged, and the Doctor tensed, ready to take advantage of the smallest weakness on Halpen's part that might let him overpower him.
"Can't say I'm going to like it," Halpen continued. Then he shrugged and smirked. "But er, it's not exactly a normal day, is it? Still." He raised the gun to fire.
"Would you like a drink, sir?" Ood Sigma asked, holding out a shot glass.
Halpen chuckled. "I think hair loss is the least of my problems right now, thanks."
The Doctor watched Ood Sigma smoothly position himself between Halpen and his gun, and the Doctor, Rose, and Donna.
I told you he was different from the other Ood, Rose said.
"Please have a drink, sir," Ood Sigma said—no, that was an order. Calmly given, but clearly an order.
"If—" Halpen gagged again. "If you're going to stand in their way, I'll shoot you too."
By the end of his sentence, it was obvious his body was trying to push something up through his throat. Somehow, the Doctor didn't think it was a typical regurgitation.
"Please have a drink, sir," Ood Sigma insisted.
Halpen's eyes widened in fear, and the gun shook in his hands. "Have, have you poisoned me?"
"Natural Ood must never kill, sir."
"What's in that drink?" Rose asked.
Ood Sigma half-turned, so he could look at them and keep a watchful eye on Halpen at the same time. "Ood graft suspended in a biological compound, Rose Tyler."
Halpen pressed his hand to his head. "What the hell does that mean?"
"Oh, dear." The Doctor took in Halpen's appearance, from the balding head to the way he was sweating, looking like something was trying to force its way out of his oesophagus.
"Tell me!" Halpen demanded.
The Doctor was happy to oblige. He couldn't have thought of a more fitting punishment for the man who'd spent his entire life subjugating the Ood.
"Funny thing, the subconscious. Takes all sorts of shapes," he explained. "Came out in the red eye as revenge, came out in the rabid Ood as anger, and then there was patience." The Doctor looked down at the Ood Brain, listening to the inherent compassion in the Ood song and imagining how that would have swayed the patient creature. "All that intelligence and mercy, focused on Ood Sigma."
He leaned forward and looked closely at the trembling businessman. "How's the hair loss, Mr. Halpen?" he taunted.
Halpen reached up and pulled a whole hank of hair out of the back of his head. He looked at it in shock, then looked at Ood Sigma, somehow daring to look betrayed, even after all he had done to the Ood.
"What have you done?" he sobbed, still trying to hold the gun in his shaking hands.
The Doctor straightened and shook his head. "Oh, they've been preparing you for a very long time. And now you're standing next to the Ood Brain. Mr. Halpen, can you hear it? Listen."
Sweat beaded up on Mr. Halpen's forehead as he listened to the Ood song, truly hearing it for the first time, but certainly not for the last.
"What have you…" He gagged before he could repeat his earlier question. "I'm not…"
He tried swallowing, but a moment later, he dropped the gun and slowly raised his hands to the top of his scalp. The Doctor felt a shiver of disgust mixed in with his curiosity when the man bent forward and peeled his skin off. The tentacles that had been pushing their way up his throat finally dropped out of his mouth, and when he stood up again…
"They, they turned him into an Ood?" Donna said breathlessly.
The Doctor put his hands in his pockets and nodded. "Yep."
"Oh, that's brilliant," Rose breathed. "I mean… don't get me wrong, it's disturbing, but what an ingenious revenge and punishment."
The Ood formerly known as Mr. Halpen groaned in dismay, and the Doctor wondered how long he would retain his memories of his former life.
A moment later, he coughed up a hindbrain, catching it in his hand. The Doctor couldn't help wondering, as he looked at it, how exactly natural born Ood got their hindbrains. Did it happen like this? Were Ood born, or hatched?
Ood Sigma put his hand on the shoulder of his new brethren, interrupting the Doctor's musings. "He has become Oodkind, and we will take care of him," he said serenely.
Donna pressed her hands to her temples. "It's weird, being with you," she said, sounding a bit dazed. "I can't tell what's right and what's wrong any more."
Rose put her arm around Donna's shoulders. "Yeah, it's better that way though. People who know for certain tend to be like Mr. Halpen."
The Doctor jolted forward when something started beeping. He'd forgotten that Halpen had rigged the entire enclosure to explode. "Oh!" He reached over the railing and turned the detonator off. "That's better."
That left only one thing left to be done. He jogged over to the control panel for the telepathic dampening field, then spun around and looked from Rose to Ood Sigma. "Now, no one here has been more upset on your behalf than Rose. Would you let her be the one to set you free?"
Ood Sigma bowed slightly to Rose. "A song has been sung for generations of a Wolf who would break the circle. The honour is yours, Rose Tyler."
The Doctor purposely ignored the second reference to Bad Wolf in a week, and gestured for Rose to come forward.
"I have no idea what I'm doing," she warned him as she walked across the catwalk to join him.
He pointed at the dials on the control panel. "Turn those all the way down first." The electric crackling intensified as she did. "And now, flip the switch, Rose."
She threw a final lever with gusto, and after a few more seconds of crackling, the electrical current flowing through the pylons shut off. Ood song filled the room, no longer the song of captivity, but the song of unity.
"I can hear it!" Donna gasped, her face lighting up at the joy in the song that hadn't been there before.
The Doctor looked at Rose and reached for their bond, warm contentment burning in his hearts when she reciprocated the touch, twining their minds together in a gesture that, had he been forced to describe it, he would have said felt like holding hands.
"We should rejoin the others outside," Ood Sigma said.
The Doctor blinked. "Yes, right. After you, Ood Sigma. And…" He gestured at the Ood formerly known as Halpen. "Whatever you end up being called."
After ten minutes in the dark cellar, the sunlight was blinding. But the sight they saw when they blinked the light out of their eyes was even more dazzling. The Ood were standing together in groups, hands raised in supplication as they joined in the song.
And the humans? The humans had laid down their weapons and were watching, awestruck, as they finally learned the true majesty of this species they had belittled for far too long.
"Time for us to be going," the Doctor said quietly, taking Rose's hand.
"We will see you off," Ood Sigma said, gesturing to the ten Ood in the circle closest to them.
The Doctor made one last stop as they left the compound, poking into the operations centre to catch the chatter on the radio. He grinned when he heard the message he'd hoped for.
The Ood song followed them on their trek back to the TARDIS. It filled the entire planet now, echoing and resonating in the atmosphere, the way it had always been meant to do—the way it had done for generations before humans arrived on the planet.
"The message has gone out," the Doctor said when they reached the TARDIS. The Ood deserved to know what he'd learned from eavesdropping on the radio. "That song resonated across the galaxies. Everyone heard it. Everyone knows. The rockets are bringing them back. The Ood are coming home."
"We thank you, Rose, Doctor, Donna, friends of Oodkind," Ood Sigma said. He cocked his head in that almost avian fashion the Ood had, and a shiver ran down the Doctor's spine. "You would be welcome to stay with us if you wished, but I think that your song is not yet over."
Rose smiled at the Ood and squeezed the Doctor's hand. "Our song never ends," she said, for once feeling confident enough to say that definitively.
Ood Sigma bowed and took a step back, into the semicircle of Ood gathered around the TARDIS. "Then we will say goodbye for now, but not, I think, forever."
"Yeah…" the Doctor drawled. "We'll be off, then, I think."
Ood Sigma raised his hands, and the Ood behind him mirrored the gesture. The Ood song crescendoed around them, and Rose blinked back tears at its beauty.
"Take this song with you."
"We will," Rose and Donna promised together.
The Doctor nodded. "Always."
"And know this, Rose, Doctor, Donna. You will never be forgotten. Our children will sing of the ones who freed us from captivity, and our children's children, and the wind and the ice and the snow will carry your names forever."
The weight of what they'd done hit Rose, and she couldn't speak. She settled for a smile and a nod, and then followed the Doctor and Donna back into the TARDIS.
"Ready?" the Doctor asked quietly as she closed the door.
Rose nodded, then glanced at Donna as the Doctor sent them into the Vortex. "Do you still want to go home?"
Donna shook her head firmly, and Rose was relieved to see a smile on her face. "No. Definitely not."
"Good," she said fervently. "I won't tell you there isn't ugliness out there, Donna, but that's not all the universe is. There's so much beauty, so many amazing things to see and amazing people to meet."
Donna nodded. "I know. I think I get it now. You can't be afraid to see a little ugliness, not if you want to see some of the tremendous beauty."
"And there is beauty, Donna. So much." Rose tilted her head and bit her lip, then said, "I could show you some of my photo albums, if you like. We could sit in the library tonight and share some stories?"
A slow smile lit up Donna's face. "Yeah, I think I'd like that."
Rose had already taken a step up the ramp towards the corridor when Donna's voice stopped her. "There's just one more question I have. Ood Sigma, he said you have a song of your own. What did he mean?"
Rose and the Doctor exchanged a look. On one hand, this was only Donna's second trip with them. It had been two months before they'd explained their bond to Martha. On the other hand, Martha had needed that information on their very next adventure, and Donna had just seen up close and personal how much a part of their lives telepathy was.
Finally, the Doctor tugged at his ear and cleared his throat. "Right, so… we're not human."
Donna rolled her eyes. "Got that, thanks," she snarked. "Bigger on the inside spaceship is kind of a dead giveaway."
"And! Just like different human cultures have different marriage customs, Time Lords took a life partner in a way that would be completely foreign to humans."
"But you've got wedding rings," Donna said. "And you said you were engaged last Christmas." A new memory came back, and she frowned at Rose. "You said your mum was from Peckham," she argued, remembering the sadness on Rose's face as she'd pointed out her home while they were on top of the office building in the City.
Rose winced. "Well, I used to be human… only I'm not so much anymore." She shrugged. "It's hard to explain."
"The important thing," the Doctor interjected, "is that she's telepathic enough to share a marriage bond."
Donna tilted her head and looked at the Doctor and Rose. "You mean like… you can read each other's thoughts?"
"That's part of it," Rose said carefully. "But it's also feeling each other's emotions, being able to find each other, things like that."
"Oh!"
Rose jumped a little at Donna's exclamation.
"That's why you were so upset, back there with the big Ood brain. Because you were imagining what it would be like if someone made it so you couldn't communicate, like the humans had done to the Ood."
"Pretty much," the Doctor agreed.
His voice was tight, and Rose smiled at him and placed a soothing touch on the bond. We're together now, she reminded him.
Then she turned to Donna. "Come on, let's get into comfortable clothes and relax in the library. I bet we'll find food waiting for us when we get there."
"Yeah, all right," Donna agreed. "I'm definitely ready to hear more of your stories."
