Time Warp II

Rose

Apart from the Doctor and Rose, nothing moved. They had all been moving a few moments ago, they had been marching past the cleaning cupboard the interlopers had found themselves in, but now the heavily armed patrol had come to a complete halt. Some of them didn't even have either of their feet on the ground, they were floating in this blurry and spectral space-between-spaces. It was hard for Rose to tell who were the unnatural ones there. Had the entire universe just frozen at that moment? The Doctor walked up to the guards, moved in and out from between them, lifted a visor and peered into the eyes.

"Nothing," he said. He noticed the gun of the one in front of him was aimed, by accident, right at his gut, and he pushed down the muzzle to be pointing at the floor instead. "Shouldn't be able to move them. If we were in between time we wouldn't be able to interact at all. This is some sort of… collision." A collision of what, he didn't say. She didn't think he knew.

"Their guns look weird," Rose said. She was not going near them, in case they unstuck all of a sudden and began firing on the pair of them. The Doctor was not so cautious. He glanced down at the firearm he had just pushed out of the way, then crouched in between the men of the platoon to get a better look at it. He now seemed less inclined to touch them.

"Sonic weaponry," he said, standing back up and shifting out of the way of them, "That puts us in the future, closer to Jack's century than I'd like. But clunky… so we must be earlier than him. What is this place? Any ideas?" Rose just shrugged. She didn't know. She knew there was some sort of crazy temporal disturbance, which was easy enough to figure out even if you weren't connected to the time vortex on a molecular level, but nothing more than that. The issue was a bit too urgent to be fully briefed, clearly.

"I don't know, but shouldn't we leave? Before they, you know, unfreeze?" she said, indicating the soldiers. She did not think they would take too kindly to Ten and Rose just showing up out of nowhere, flitting around the place and not having a clue where they were or what they were doing. They would most likely be shot on sight. When she pointed this out, Ten seemed to agree, and motioned his head to indicate that she should follow him down the hallway in the opposite direction to those soldiers. "Shouldn't we see what they're running towards?"

"Not yet, I don't think. And if we walk past them they'll catch up to us as soon as they get themselves unstuck," he said, "Best to go the other way. I don't think the soldiers will be the only thing we have to worry about if there's some sort of rupture in time. C'mon." She followed him, glancing back at them again for only a moment until they went around a corner. Then they felt that pulsation again in the atoms of the air itself, a ripple which reverted the world's suddenly-bland colours back to regular vibrancy, and which heralded the noises of the soldiers running again. "Just in the nick of time," Ten whispered to her wryly. She crossed her arms uneasily as she walked, feeling unusually vulnerable.

"What are we looking for?" she asked quietly.

"Uh… you know. Clues."

"Clues? Clues like what those soldiers were running towards?" she pressed.

"Do you want us to get shot?" he turned to ask her, and she stopped.

"Well, I… no."

"Then we're going this way, end of," he said simply, and she grimaced when she followed him again. She supposed she should have trusted him in the end, because they did actually find a clue by going the other direction, a very big clue in the form of a window. She didn't know why she had assumed they would be on Earth somewhere – her Earthling roots, presumably, she did sometimes enjoy stepping out into the familiarity of a non-alien world – but she was immediately proven wrong.

It was a very pretty view, though; space never ceased to amaze Rose Tyler, ever since the moment when she had stepped out of the TARDIS after her very first jaunt through time and space to get to that spacestation and watch the end of the world from high above and eons away from anything ordinary. Then again, ordinary was relative, and for years now this had all become Rose's new normal. She didn't know if she recognised this area of the universe, she didn't have much of a retention for astronomy, but the star at the centre of the system cast everything outside into vivid shades of indigo with a streak of red from some sort of space-cloud probably thousands of lightyears away. She was transfixed by this sun and by the space rocks orbiting it, and by once seeing what could be a shuttle or a comet fly past in the distance with a blurry streak of cosmic light trailing away after it.

"This isn't right," Ten said, frowning. There were many things that were 'not right' at the current moment, she thought, but he said it with rather a lacking conviction. Rather than something being completely off, it appeared that the Doctor was merely confused. They stood side-by-side in front of the window, and she was wondering whether she might take his hand, but he had both of them in his pockets so she remained observing.

"What's not?" she said. He frowned and scratched the back of his head.

"Hrmph," he muttered to himself, messing his hair, "The century, and this place – this is Moso, that's the name of the solar system we're in, but it's uninhabited. Some backwater of the Milky Way no-one can be bothered to terraform, there's no life. So why is there a big human base out here?"

"We were at a base in this century the other week, weren't we?"

"I don't know about that. Same millennia, but not the same century," he said, "We're a bit later than that. Makes me think that this place probably isn't so legal. Shadowy."

"Don't say 'shadow', you'll make him show up," Rose said, then she actually did glance around a little to see if the Shadow appeared anyway. But the corridor was so brightly lit there was nowhere for him to hide, though she had most certainly just given him an opening to dramatically reveal himself. The Shadow was quite the showman. "So they're doing something illegal… and they've accidentally, what? Destroyed the universe?"

The Doctor shrugged, "Getting there. Not quite destroyed yet. How does it feel?" he asked.

"A bit like when you need to be sick but you can't manage it," she answered him. It really was a very nauseating feeling, being connecting to the very reality that was currently trying to tear itself apart. "When time stopped, why were you not affected?" Rose asked him.

"What? You don't ask why you weren't affected?" he remarked jovially, and she smiled a little, him putting his hands in his pockets again and meandering off to investigate elsewhere.

"I think it's a bit obvious why I wasn't affected," Rose said, and he laughed.

"Well, we're both creatures of the time vortex. Time Lords are created by prolonged exposure to it – you know that. That's how River became one, because she was conceived on the TARDIS. Time Lords and Gallifreyans aren't mutually exclusive, my kind were just always a bit selfish when it came to basking in the never-ending joys of the untempered schism," he said bitterly, moseying along, "I doubt anybody on here is a Time Lord. Probably best that we don't keep getting stuck anyway." When he said this, it happened again. The sensation of time stopping around you was very jolting, it completely knocked Rose out of kilter and made her head hurt. Like when you were a child and you tried to watch TV upside down and the blood rushed to your head – and she happened to have a lot of idle memories of those sorts when she was bored and young and Jackie wouldn't let her go out onto the rest of the estate, because the Powell Estate has always been rough. But that sensation of the blood clotting up around your brain was akin to what it was like now, to be stuck so thoroughly with unusual pressure pressing in on her bones. Suffocating.

Ten didn't pay much note to it a second time. Not until he was proven wrong, however. Time was stuck alright, they could tell that when they saw a shuttle outside completely halted in the air, and by the odd discolouration making the world itself have a touch of film grain, but they heard voices. Or one voice, rather, muttering to itself, in a room on its own nearby.

"What do we have here, then?" Ten said curiously, more to himself than to Rose, going up to the closest door. It was in there where the talking of one singular and panicked voice was coming from, and the Doctor tried to force it. It didn't open and silence fell within, then he glanced back at her and bit his lip in a caricature way meant to convey worry. Then he got out his psychic paper and held it against the door scanner and barged his way in anyway.

"Stop right there," someone ordered them.

"Whoa, whoa!" the Doctor protested, raising his hands instantly. They had a gun drawn on them, a sonic blaster like Captain Jack's only bulkier and less efficient-looking. Rose copied the Doctor and raised her hands in surrender as well, "We're only looking around."

"Looking around – looking around? Who the hell are you to be 'looking around'? We're in the middle of a freeze, how the hell are the two of you moving?" a young man talking frantically stammered. He was sweating a lot and trembling with the gun in his hand. He must be around thirty, Rose thought, and she couldn't very well understand why he could move.

"Could ask you the same question, mate," Rose said calmly, her hands behind her head, "Put the gun down, alright?"

"How could I do that? You might be trying to stop me. I've never seen either of you around here, though – and you don't look like personnel. How did you get here?" he demanded.

"Put the gun down," said the Doctor, "What's your name?"

"My name? Don't talk to me like you're negotiating a hostage situation – this is more important than you can understand. I don't know who you are but you need to leave and let me carry on my work before they figure out where I am," he said. 'They.' The soldiers? She didn't know who the soldiers were, but unless they were UNIT they were probably on the opposite side to Ten and Rose. And even then, sometimes UNIT were a bit too ruthless for Ten's tastes. What was the adage? The enemy of my enemy is my friend? If the soldiers were after him, maybe he was useful. Not to mention his ability to remain unaffected by these 'freezes.'

"Just put the gun down and we can talk," said Rose.

"Talk? There's no time to talk, blondie," he said, "Reality is collapsing around us, okay?"

"Yeah, I kind of heard about that," she said, and then she sighed, and was not a big fan of some frantic borderline-lunatic pointing a loaded gun at her and her fiancé. In an instant, half a second only, he was disarmed. He was disarmed because Rose simply teleported and grabbed it from him, relieved that her powers still worked adequately enough when 'reality' was 'collapsing' and they were stuck in the static space between moments. He screamed.

"How did you do that?" he demanded, scrambling to get away from Rose, who held the gun like it was filthy with the tips of her fingers and set it down carefully on the desk next to her. The Doctor came to move it further out of anybody's reach.

"We're not stowaways, we're time travellers," Rose said.

"Time travellers!" he exclaimed, "Time travel is what got everyone into this mess in the first place."

"Hold on, what do you mean? I'm the Doctor, this is Rose," Ten began, "I'm a Time Lord, she's… a sort of… intertemporal being. A little bit omnipotent."

"You can't be a 'little bit' omnipotent, that defeats the purpose of omnipotence to begin with."

"What does 'omnipotent' mean?" Rose asked.

"All-powerful," Ten said.

"Oh. Eurgh. Don't say that, makes me sound like a god, or something," she shook her head, "What's your name, who are you?"

"Charlie. I'm a scientist," he said, "I tried to warn them against doing this, but they didn't listen."

"And it's, what? A time machine?" Ten asked, then realised something, "Oh, of course. Sonic weapons, just before Jack's time? Mid-fourth-millennia? It's got to be the Time Agency. Or whatever preceded the Time Agency. Experimental time travel technology never works. You might end up stuck in a pocket universe, or something, stuck there for who knows how long? And then it's very hard to get people back from pocket universes."

"What's a pocket universe?" Rose asked.

"Sort of a remnant of a place, they don't last very long. Minutes, usually, they always collapse in on themselves, a black hole of metaphysical energy. Very hard to enter those sorts of places," he said, "But that's not what this is. These scientists must have disrupted the time vortex quite a lot to call you out here. What were you trying to do?"

"Lock the soldiers into one area, the docking bay," answered Charlie the scientist, "So they won't bother me. I don't know how to fight. But they've been ignoring my relayed orders, and I can't hack into their comm channel to hear what's been going on with them."

"Hacking? Simple enough, let me try," the Doctor said, "We're here to help. We don't really want the fabric of reality to crumble, either, Charlie-boy."

"I don't understand how you got here," Charlie persisted, "You just show up out of nowhere. And a 'Time Lord'? What is that?"

"An alien," Rose answered on his behalf as Ten pushed Charlie out of the way to get at the computer. So, they were in a big secret base owned by whatever company had existed before the Time Agency, and whoever was operating it was an idiot who had tried to use very experimental time travel technology. Didn't seem too tricky, but then, figuring that out was only the beginning. Time was destroying itself. How, exactly, did one stop time from destroying itself? The Doctor took out his screwdriver.

"Is that sonic?" Charlie asked.

"Yep," he said, distracted, pointing it at the keyboard and glancing between the keyboard and the computer screen.

"People have been trying for years to get sonic technology that compact."

"It's from the future," he answered, "Time travellers, like Rose said, that's how we got here. Rose can time travel without a capsule, without anything, at will. Comes from extreme exposure to the time vortex, the thing your people are so intent on controlling. Easy enough to use as a weapon, I suppose, like that 'reality gun' Davros built. You remember, Rose."

"Mmm."

"He probably got the idea from what you did on Satellite 5 to begin with." She didn't say anything else.

A shudder in the molecules of the air around them signified that the freeze had just undone itself around them. When they were stuck, she had a headache, but when they were unstuck, she felt sick. It was just a lose-lose situation all round, and in the moment she didn't like either sensation at all.

"How come you don't get stuck?" Rose asked Charlie.

"I have a device, it protects me," he said.

"I'll have a look at that in a bit, if you don't mind," Ten said, "Some sort of pocket of energy strapped onto you, I imagine? Hmm… here we go." He stepped back from the computer as radio chatter came out of the speakers. Well, she did wonder if they still used radios to communicate in that century, but she figured they were reliable, so possibly. What they heard was not good, though. Rose had thought this temporal collapse wouldn't have been so bad for the people who were affected by the freezes, because no doubt they would not notice the freezes around them at all, they would just continue on their merry way to whatever horrid crucible was the cause of all this dismay. But that wasn't what it sounded like on the comms.

"It's coming, it's – oh god, there's two of them!"

"Come in, X-Ray, come in," said an authoritative voice to a screaming soldier. "X-Ray, do you copy?"

"It's eating him, it's eating him! We're all going to die!" Then a roar which was all the more spine-chilling for Rose because she recognised it. She recognised that sound vividly and would do until the day she died, even if that day turned out to be thousands of years away. The soldier screamed and then the comm link died, leaving just the desperate commander trying to gain contact with his team again. Ten pushed a button on the keyboard and the line went dead for the three of them, too. Good, Rose thought. If they re-established a connection, she did not want to listen to soldiers being slaughtered by an invincible enemy.

"What was that!?" Charlie exclaimed.

"Something nobody here will be prepared for," Ten said darkly, "Messing with the time vortex causes repercussions. Rose isn't the only line of defence."

"But what was it? Eating them?"

Rose answered hollowly, feeling like something had been sucked out of her, like the world had been pulled from underneath her feet and left her floundering: "Reapers."

AN: Author's note completely unrelated to what's actually going on in fic (by the way what'd you guys think of the Suffragette storyline?) but I associate a lot of songs with this fic, and I hardly ever mention music apart from jazz (and Cyndi Lauper just recently) because it always annoys me when other writers do it – but if you guys ever get the chance to listen to Last of the American Girls by Green Day that is like Thirteen's anthem, that whole song just sums her up and I thought I'd give you guys some greater character context for her. ALSO would any of you be opposed to MORE lesbians? Cos I wanna give Nios a girlfriend. The Humans character she's based off, Niska, is also gay, which wasn't even canon when I originally wrote her in, so now I'm like, gotta do the canon justice.