AN: Here it is, the big one (literally, it's 4700 words), the one we've all been waiting for. Or at least that I'VE been waiting for. Review and let me know which of these five fight chapters is your fave, I'm curious.
The Phantom vs. Bad Wolf
Clara
She was punched through the air and thrown into oblivion in a blinding flash of gold light, trying to limit the damage of a tackle from Rose Tyler one minute and soaring through cool air the next, until she landed with a whistling thud into a bed of soft plants and leaves. Her ears rang sharply; the bright lights of the Valiant Mk.2 interior had evaporated into a starry, night sky, and there was an overwhelming, sticky sense of humidity leeching around her immediately. Oswin's ghostly shape had vanished along with everything else familiar.
It took her a little longer than it maybe should have done to realise she'd been teleported – she was too used to her own sickeningly painful teleportations, like she was being dragged by a fishhook wedged into her skull to and fro. Being teleported by Rose was nothing like that, it was as smooth as blinking. The only thing she could deduce was that she was now in a jungle, dense thickets of greens upon greens upon greens, and that Rose Tyler herself was nowhere in sight. Perhaps she wasn't there? Maybe she had just wanted rid of Clara so badly she'd decided to fling her into an anonymous bit of reality and let her be somebody else's problem.
Clara was able to move quickly through the underbrush of the thick jungle, the heat slowly building on her. She supposed they were in some tropical climate, but who knew what planet? For all she knew, Rose could have thrown her back down onto Eslilia. And even if it was on Earth, there were thousands of places she could be. A desert island, potentially, one which had never seen a human before, and then she would be living her own retelling of Robinson Crusoe.
When she heard familiar sounds, though, she became even more confused. The absence of information was far simpler than the providing of clues, clues required analysis, but a lack thereof required nothing but imagination. Phasing, she stumbled through the trees to follow the noise of a car engine – for that was what it sounded like – and picked up the other intelligible sound of a radio coming in crisply above it. She staggered out of the jungle to the bank of a muddy road as a camouflaged jeep trundled past, half a dozen green-clad men in the back, with guns. Over the radio she could hear Wild Thing playing out with its messy, garage-sounding guitar chords.
She stepped out into the road to look after it, the path too shadowy for the men on the back of the jeep to see her, putting the pieces together in her mind. It had a US flag on its rear bumper, muddy and metallic, a similar size to the vehicle's license plate. When did Wild Thing come out? The late Sixties? If she was seeing American soldiers, hearing Sixties music, and stumbling around in the jungle, it had to be Vietnam. Good thing Clara knew her history.
When she heard rustling in the trees she went intangible again, letting herself sink into the darkness, trying to go unseen.
"I know you're here," Rose Tyler said mockingly, an invisible presence now stalking her through the hot countryside. Clara was sweating quite a bit already. She held her breath, kept melting through the trees. "I can find you with the time vortex, you know." Rose's voice now came from a completely different place, somewhere behind her, making her jump and whirl around. But she was still faced with nothing.
Footsteps to her left, the ghost of a shadow, Rose spoke from the opposite direction: "This game of cat and mouse is quite fun." Clara turned to look and saw her, eyes gold, image burning brightly, and whirled around to try and run the other way. But Rose was there, as well, teleporting instantaneously, and she swung her fist through the air and Clara barely managed to duck in time. Behind her head, Rose's knuckles tore a tree apart and sent the trunk falling down. Clara side-stepped it and realised she wasn't phasing, she tripped over a branch. Rose noticed and immediately she was grabbed from behind, one hand on the top of her head and one on her chin, like Rose might break her neck.
The panic of being about to die (again) meant Clara's teleportation finally came into play, and she was dragged by her own volition into the clearing that had just been made by the fallen tree. Rose wasn't happy about Clara escaping.
"Why do you want to kill me?" Clara asked.
"Because I hate you."
"I've never done anything to you!" she protested, seeing if, against all odds, reasoning with Rose might actually work.
"You've done enough!" Rose shouted, running to punch Clara again. But Clara wasn't so lucky with her teleporting this time, and Rose's fist connected with her face and she was blinded by dazzling lights again, and thrown into water and mud and sharp objects, drenched from a rainstorm immediately.
Teleported again, undoubtedly, and now it felt like she had been shot in the side of her head. Somebody lifted her up out of the mud, and for a split-second she saw it was Rose, who threw her across whatever plane they were on until she landed in more mud. To her right there was an explosion, and she could hear gunfire, and men yelling, and could see smoke and hear shrill shells. The explosion's force pushed her enough so that she could get back to her feet as Rose, yelling, came for her again.
This time she managed to teleport herself, was wrenched across a muddy battlefield, stumbling when she arrived somewhere behind Rose Tyler. Rose was furious that Clara kept evading her, and truthfully Clara had no idea how she was managing it with the pain in the side of her head, like her skull had been split. Hell, maybe her skull had been split. Her left ear still rang from the punch, so much she barely noticed a rifle bullet whoosh past her. Another explosion nearby and she saw silhouetted bodies thrown up from the g. Somewhere, someone yelled that they were stuck in barbed wire. Clara thought it must be World War One.
"Rose, I think you need to calm down – you don't really want me dead," Clara said, wobbly on her feet.
"The more you run away the more I really do want you dead," Rose said angrily, through gritted teeth. She looked like she was about to run at Clara, when a volley of machine gun fire ripped between them, the shock sending Clara staggering backwards. That was when she decided her best course of action was to just run, try and run through No Man's Land, an unknown battleground presumably somewhere in France. So she turned the other way and tried to sprint, but was bogged down in the deep mud and the heavy rain from above; Clara was soaked to her skin, going from much too hot to practically freezing in a matter of seconds.
In a gold shimmer, Rose appeared in front of her, eyes ablaze, and Clara barely managed to sidestep, diverting her course to be running elsewhere. Towards the British side or the German side, she hadn't a clue, but she'd take enemy soldiers over the Bad Wolf any day.
But she tripped, again, caught her whole ankle in a barbed wire knotted together in the dirt, a dead body tangled among it and torn into at least a dozen pieces. She phased right through it, dragged herself along the floor, but when she got back to her feet and once again made herself tangible so that she wouldn't just sink through the mud, her arm was grabbed from behind. Rose.
She was flung around in a circle and thrown slap-bang into a solid wall, in a completely different room, in the daytime. Nor were they alone when they appeared now, or ignored by soldiers with more important things to pay attention to. There was a whole host of regal-looking people as Rose went for Clara again and Clara ducked her arm after getting up from where she had been on the floor, blasting Rose from behind with telekinesis and sending her crashing somewhere for a change. A woman screamed.
"I demand to know who these people are! They are perhaps trying to commit treason!"
Clara was startled, "Treason?" she exclaimed. Rose's head had been forced through the plaster, and she appeared to be – at least for the moment – stuck. Clara was panting, and she was filthy and damp.
"You are ghastly people," said the woman who had spoken before, a very short woman perched on what must be a throne, with an oversized crown on and everything. A familiar looking woman. Clara had to squint.
"Holy shit," Clara said, and practically everyone in their present company gasped.
"What kind of vagabonds are you who will utter profanities and appear, so unkempt, in front of the Queen?" Rose freed her head from the wall.
"Are you Queen Victoria?" Clara, star-struck asked. Could it be? She had been transported now right into the middle of Queen Victoria's throne room? A young Victoria, too. Rose ran at her again and, predictably, caught her off-guard. She grabbed Clara by the neck and lifted her off her feet, then slammed her against the wall. It took all of Clara's reserves of telekinesis to battle Rose's superstrength as Rose tried to tighten her hand around Clara's neck, holding her nearly a foot off the ground.
"You could kill me in a second," Rose said, "Just look how you're managing to stop me from crushing you."
"I'm not going to kill you," Clara said slowly, hoarsely. Kill Rose? The thought hadn't even crossed her mind. She hadn't even tried to really injure Rose; she was just trying to escape this whole time.
"Who speaks of murder in my throne room!?" the Queen demanded, actually getting up off her throne (which didn't do much for her height at all) to object.
"Then you're going to die, Clara," Rose said, "The only reason I haven't made you cease to exist is to make you suffer first."
"Do you think Her Majesty over there looks a bit like me?" Clara asked.
"When will you stop being so in love with yourself!?" Rose used all of her strength, apparently made furious by Clara being overt about her sexuality (which always seemed to get on Rose's nerves a bit, how she sometimes, occasionally, hardly ever, talked about girls), to draw back her free hand and curl it into a fatal fist. The world slipping into bullet time, Clara had a long moment to react and felt herself being pulled elsewhere by her reflexive teleportation. But Rose saw the black wisps begin to curl off her shoulders, and as Clara teleported, as Rose's hand sailed through the space where Clara's head had just been, Rose did, too.
The result was another quick flit through time and space, but this time, a bit like the first time, they materialised separately. Some of the quaintness of the environment stayed, but the daylight had turned, again, to darkness, and Clara landed on something soft that she soon recognised as a four poster bed. Scrambling around, she saw no telling traces of gold dust in the air, no sign of Rose Tyler appearing in that small room. She was still breathing deeply, her heartbeat wild in her ears after nearly being crushed to death in front of the Queen, when she realised this bed was not unoccupied.
Clara glanced over her shoulder and saw there was some random girl in the bed, while Clara was just on top of it and getting mud and moisture and mess all over the crisp linen. Fearing that the girl would scream and alert Rose to where she was, if Rose had not accidentally landed herself elsewhere, Clara made a lunge and covered this woman's mouth with her dirty hand.
"Shh," she breathed, kneeling on the sheets, trying to listen out for London-accented jeering coming her way. "I'm not going to hurt you," she said, still looking about the room, desperate to figure out how close Rose was. She spied a whole lot of paper and empty ink bottles on a nearby writing desk in the corner. The girl mumbled underneath Clara's hand. "I said shh! You can't make any noise, okay? Someone's trying to kill me." And then this woman, whoever she was, proceeded to shamelessly lick Clara's muddy palm, and Clara reeled away in disgust.
"Who's trying to kill you?" they asked urgently, apparently unfazed, "How did you get here?"
"It's complicated," Clara whispered, wiping her hand on the muddied hem of her skirt, surprised this unknown didn't scream. The woman said something else, but Clara was too busy trying to somehow locate Rose, wishing she had Rory's super-hearing. How long was this chase to go on for? This 'fight?'
"Clara?" the stranger interrupted her thoughts by addressing her by name, reaching up a hand to touch her cheek and make her meet their gaze. But Clara, still alert and full of adrenaline, didn't like this woman knowing her name when she hadn't told her, and grabbed her hand out of the air.
"How do you know my name?" she hissed, and the woman's brow creased, a look of hurt in her face.
"You're being ridiculous. It's me."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Clara demanded under her breath, and they didn't speak, "I'm running for my life here, so the least you could do is explain who the hell you are." The woman pulled her hand free of Clara's grip.
"I haven't seen you for months, and this is the greeting I get?" she questioned, "This isn't one of your 'pranks' is it?" She said the word 'pranks' as though it was unfamiliar.
"What?" The woman glared. "I'm sorry, but I don't know who you are, alright? What year is this?"
"It's 1805," she answered stiffly, "Didn't you come to see me?"
"How many times do I have to-"
She gasped and her eyes widened at Clara's left arm.
"What's that monstrosity!?" she exclaimed, speaking of the bandages, presumably. Clara frowned.
"Nothing, an electrical burn – do you have electricity in-"
"No, that," she surprised Clara by grabbing her hand, in a way like she may have taken Clara's hand a hundred times before, and pointing out to Clara her own wedding ring.
"My wedding ring is not a monstrosity!"
"You got married? It can't have been that long – you still look so young! Why do you always look so young? You're not…" she paused, and Clara didn't speak, still paying more attention to listening for Rose, "…not to me, are you?" It took Clara a moment to realise that this stranger was asking if they were married. She stared. "You're always telling me that it's ordinary when you come from-"
"Sorry, 'when?' And what's ordinary – a girl and… I'm confused. Who are you?"
"My word – how can you still pretend not to know me? This joke isn't very funny, Clara. I can't be from your future because you would have told me about a marriage before, but if I was from your past you would recognise me right away – your Jane," she said. This woman knew she was a time traveller!?
"My Jane? Jane who?"
"Jane Austen, of course, Clara Oswald," she said, smiling. And in a whirlwind Clara was being kissed, and she was more taken aback by this moment than the shells in the First World War and the machine guns trying to take off her head, even running into Queen Victoria – because who cared about Rose Tyler anymore when Jane-freaking-Austen had her mouth pressed on Clara's? Clara was so stunned that she didn't even remember she was married, despite it just being pointed out. Not until there was a crash and she was wrenched away from Jane Austen (seriously! Jane Austen! THE Jane Austen!) with somebody's fingers clasped around her throat, half lifting her off the bed. Jane shrieked with fright and Clara's eyes found Rose's, golden and furious, glowering at her from a hole in the wall above the bed she had just made with her fist. And now she was trying to choke Clara (again.)
"You don't deserve the Doctor if you're going to cheat with every slag who throws herself at you," Rose said. Now, insulting Clara was one thing, if she had called Clara a slag, Clara wouldn't care in the slightest. But Jane Austen? That wasn't on.
"She kissed me," Clara struggled to defend herself, clawing at Rose's arm to try and pull her off.
"I'll crush you," Rose said through gritted teeth, and Clara felt Rose using all of her strength, more strength than she had used so far at all, really trying to kill her now. Clara scrunched up her face as she attempted to resist with her telekinesis, using more of her psychic powers than she had ever had to before.
"Your nose!" Jane Austen exclaimed as Clara felt her face grow hot and wet, and tasted blood on her lips (though she would rather taste Jane Austen.) Her nose was bleeding through the effort of keeping herself alive; she felt like her eyes might explode out of their sockets. Rose made a roaring noise with anger and dragged Clara so that she slammed into the wall.
But rather than feel her whole body tear through it she instead found herself floating just before impact. Rose had teleported them again, to another new place, and Clara could hardly keep all these locations straight in her mind (but Clara couldn't keep much of anything straight in her mind.) It was very bright though, by comparison to Jane Austen's boudoir in the middle of the night. She saw Rose before she paid attention to much else, but Rose hadn't really thought through what she was doing enough and was drifting away, flailing, down a corridor. An odd corridor, though – every single wall was covered with machinery and gadgets and devices; it was like being in her sister's laboratory.
"Who the hell are you!?" somebody demanded of her, and she looked the other way, kind of rolling forwards very slowly. At the other end, Rose Tyler still struggled. Clara turned and saw two people there floating, like they'd just been using two of the oddly-placed laptops fastened to wall brackets, hair everywhere. Blots of red floated around in the air around her.
"Uh…" Clara said, finally putting together in her jarred state that she was in zero gravity. Rose's momentum trying to drag Clara through a wall must have thrown her off down the other end of the ship.
"You just appeared!" the second of the two people asked. The first who had spoken was a woman, the second was a man, and she didn't really have enough time to pick out details aside from that. They were astronauts, she assumed – she wasn't too big on spaceships, but whatever this was, it wasn't quite as state of the art as she was generally used to being the Doctor's wife.
"I'll murder you for this!" Rose yelled
"I didn't bloody do anything!" Clara yelled, 'bloody' being the right word; she was bleeding from her head where Rose had punched her when they'd still been on the Valiant, bleeding from muddy wounds on her ankle from barbed wire that hadn't had a chance to heal yet, and still bleeding from her nose. She must look a mess.
"How the fuck did you two get onto the ISS!?" the woman shouted. Oh, so that was where they were, the International Space Station. Her head hurt even more being dragged into this oxygenated environment where she didn't know which way was up. To say she lived in space, she didn't spend an awful lot of time in 0G.
"Didn't NASA ever teach you that the F word is bad?" Clara questioned. They just stared at her. Rose kind of roared and tore some probably very important piece of apparatus from the wall in her fury, and then threw it at Clara. She didn't know a lot about gravity, but she knew that when there wasn't any of it, you couldn't really throw stuff very aptly. Unless you were the kind of person with enough strength in your little finger to crush a speeding bullet. Then you definitely could, and Clara phased at the last moment so that the machine (whatever it was) sailed through her head. One of the astronauts screamed. "You can't rip a spacestation apart!"
"Watch me!" Rose said, pulling something else off the wall and throwing it even harder. It was here, when everything was floating, that telekinesis gave Clara the advantage. She shot across the corridor out of the way and crashed into the opposite wall, moving herself psychically rather than the objects around her. "Why won't you die!?"
"You're just not doing a very good job of trying to kill me," Clara said. Definitely the worst thing she could have said in that situation. In fact, Rose was still drifting off away from her. If she was just going to keep throwing things, Clara was sure she could very easily dodge them and wait for Project Crystal to wear off. But there were the two astronauts behind her, two very confused astronauts. She thought it was funny how they'd trained and trained for years to get into space, while all she had to do was bat her eyelashes at a floppy-haired extra-terrestrial with a penchant for tweed. But despite all their training, they probably couldn't turn intangible and avoid Rose's missiles. "Rose, this place is too fragile! You could break it and kill everyone inside!" Rose finally reached the back wall of the ISS, before Clara assumed there was some other corridor leading elsewhere. Though her eyes were still golden and angry, she appeared to be thinking.
"You're right. I only want you to die. These people haven't done nearly as much to wrong me as you have."
"What have I done to wrong you!?"
"Everything!" apparently, was what Rose thought to be a good answer. Clara actually rolled her eyes. Why should she not have a sense of humour in the face of death? She'd rather go out on a sarcastic note than a terrified one. Rose kicked herself off the wall, like she was in 100-metre dash in a swimming pool, and came at Clara with as much superstrength-force as she could manage. And Clara knew that when Rose hit her she was going to teleport them again, and that to try and save the ISS and the astronauts within from destruction, she had to let her do it. So she didn't move out of the way at all, she was immediately winded as Rose grabbed her at sixty miles an hour in the confines of a space-pod, and then she was falling.
Daylight spilled out of the world, and she definitely wasn't in space anymore. Clara was in a clear, blue sky, falling like a rock, flailing wildly in the air. Rose had thrown her upon their arrival in this new locale, and now she was looking around to see that she had a long way to go until she hit tarmac and a busy road full of halted cars.
Rose Tyler appeared like a mirage above her, dove with all her strength so that Clara had to teleport up about ten metres to elongate her fall. Rose wasn't the only airborne hazard, though, there were hundreds upon hundreds of Daleks (yes, Daleks) flying through the air, a scene which she could have sworn she recognised from practically-ancient breaking-news bulletins. One of them tried to shoot her, as well, but she phased through the laser, still tumbling out of the sky.
Rose's teleporting was far more refined than Clara's, though. Clara just got vaguely out of the way of danger, Rose could pick exactly where she was going. Like a torpedo she crashed right into Clara, grabbing her and wrenching her out of the air with enough force that they shot through the window of the nearby skyscraper, shattering the glass. She rolled across the pristine floor, getting it covered in mud and blood. She had to duck out of the way of another punch.
"Where the hell are we!?" Clara demanded, "When the hell are we!?"
"Canary Wharf, 2006," Rose actually answered, "And you're going to die." Wait – this couldn't be the Battle of Canary Wharf? The Battle of Canary Wharf?
"Didn't you die here?" Clara asked, and Rose, about to clip her jaw with her knuckles, stopped, "Isn't this the day the Doctor lost you?" Clara was holding her hands up in a meek surrender type of pose, but Rose had stopped mid-punch. Had she struck a nerve? Rose turned her gold, burning eyes to the outside world, to the platoons of Daleks flying through the sky. "…I remember this," Clara said carefully, watching Rose, "This is the year after my mother died."
"What?" Rose asked hoarsely.
"She, um… it was March… 2005… a year ago," Clara said. She didn't like talking about that. It was a hard thing to do. "Why would you bring us here, Rose? You want me to die the same place you did? You want the Doctor to lose somebody else here, on this day?" The sound of Daleks rang outside. And hadn't the Bad Wolf, this being Rose was emulating, been created out of a desire to destroy the Daleks? "We could still die here! They could shoot both of us – or the Cybermen. Or you could run into yourself, change history, cause a paradox! And what if we did both die? Your desire to kill me will devastate two Doctors all over again. Don't you care about him enough not to let that happen?"
"Shut up," Rose mumbled, hardly a whisper. Clara did, but Rose continued, holding her hands to her head like she had a migraine, closing her eyes and hunching over, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" And then she gasped and fell to her knees. When Rose opened her eyes again they were brown.
"Are you okay!?" Clara asked her urgently, crouching down opposite, getting only as close as she dared. Rose stared around, saw the Daleks, recognised the time and the place.
"Oh my god… oh my god, we can't be here – how did we get here?"
"You brought us here."
"Why is your nose bleeding? And the side of your head – blimey, you look like someone's hit you with a cricket bat," Rose said.
"Because you've been trying to kill me for about fifteen minutes!" Clara said.
"I've what?"
"Klein drugged you, made you go crazy, come on, get up, we have to go," Clara said, standing up herself, "You have to teleport us back to the Valiant so we can stop him."
"Right… right, yeah… yeah. Were you saying something before? I thought you said something about… 2005?"
"Nothing, doesn't matter. What matters is Klein, so hurry up and get us out of here."