Jeopardized Jellybean

Prompt: "Jeopardized Jellybean"

From: short-and-satanic

Words: 730

The man—it was impossible to tell who he was, not from where they were standing—ran past, his long coat swishing behind him, dark curls bouncing on his forehead. The Doctor backed up into the wall, pulling Donna with him, so the man didn't see them. He didn't know why he'd done that, but now, as the man stopped in the middle of the street, he suddenly got the feeling that he did the right thing.

The man slowly turned around, first his head, then his body. His collar was open, and he wasn't wearing a scarf, despite the wind. Donna wasn't sure why the wind was so heavy in the middle of a city, but maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was night. Weird things always happened at night.

Right before his eyes would have reached where the Doctor and Donna were hiding, the man spun the other way, the streetlights catching his eyes and making them even more alert. Donna pressed closer to the Doctor.

The man walked into a building.

"Where's he going?" Donna whispered. "Doctor?" she gulped at the dawning look of horror on his face. "Doctor, where's he going?"

"He's going inside."

"Yes, I got that part," she peeled herself from the wall and caught up to him. "Where? Inside where?"

"The Bentley House," he picked up his pace and began talking quickly, but quietly. "Built in central New York in the mid-1800's, always added on to and updated with the times, passed down from generation to generation of Bentleys . . . until a few years ago, in linear time, at least," he took a deep breath, "Now owned and managed by a Miss Carrie Fisher, who came into ownership at a bankruptcy auction."

"What's so special about it, though?"

"What's special about it"—he knelt down and picked the lock of one of the windows, Donna cautiously looking around— "is that it is home to the biggest jellybean of all time."

Donna paused halfway through the window. "Excuse me?"

"It's 2289," he replied in a dramatic half-whisper, "the sweets industry is overrun by cakes and chocolate. And everyone's forgotten about one thing—jellybeans!"

"Jellybeans?" Donna's eyebrows threatened to rise off her head and fly away into the cosmos.

"Not as good—or helpful—as jelly babies, I admit," here, the Doctor opened a wooded door into what turned out to be a cabinet. "But they're on the verge of extinction."

"And this pertains to our mysterious curly-haired man . . . how?"

"With a grave import," the Doctor stuck out a hand to hold Donna back when she tried to enter the room. "Look."

She did. At first, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then, her gaze fell onto a large display, a jellybean of multiple colors, in a glass box. She turned to the Doctor, but he wasn't looking at her. She followed his pointing finger, and just barely fought back a gasp. The man, his back toward them, had approached the case, and was taking off the glass covering.

"Shouldn't we stop him?" she whispered, the Doctor nearly not hearing her.

The room erupted into flames, just as the Doctor whispered, "Yes."

With one arm, he threw her from the doorway, and before she had time to react, raced into the room. Sidestepping the flames and barely managing to catch on fire, he returned just as she was sitting up, slightly dazed.

"Doctor?" she rubbed her behind, standing up.

"Yup," he nodded. "You alright?"

"Yeah," her eyes widened as they fell upon the large—impossibly, overly, gigantically large—jellybean in his hands. "You knew that would happen?"

"Nope," he bounced on his heels as he waited for her to brush her hair out of her face. "Well . . . not really. I just knew that something was going to happen tonight, and when we saw Mr. . . . oh, he got away, didn't he? Oh, well. Anyway, when we saw him enter, I knew that I was right in my assumptions."

"What are we going to do now?"

The door, just barely behind the Doctor's back, started smoking, and from inside the room, they heard a loud crash. When the door fell open, the man, his look crazed but otherwise unharmed, emerged and growled at them. The Doctor took Donna's hand.

"Run!"