Doctor Who Fan Fiction ❯ Rose and Ten The Inbetweens and backstories ❯ Chapter Six ( Chapter 6 )

Rose awoke sleepily the next morning and stretched her arms above her head with a yawn. She then remembered that she had a date with a mirror, and threw the covers back, hurrying over to the dressing table. A broad smile spread across her face as she turned her head left and right, before raising her chin. The gill marks had completely disappeared.

'Yes!' she exclaimed, performing a fist pull in triumph. The Doctor had been right; he'd said the marks would disappear. He'd also said she was beautiful, and she remembered again about how he'd looked at her.

She rummaged in a draw and found a blue T-shirt with a trendy logo on it, to wear with her denim skirt. She pulled on a pair of dark tights, and zipped up her black boots. After doing her hair, putting some lippy on, and putting her denim jacket on, she went to find the Doctor and get some breakfast.

The Doctor wasn't in the kitchen, but she stopped off and had a bowl of cereal, before resuming her search for him. Well, search was over stating it a bit, because she knew exactly where he'd be. Whilst she was eating her breakfast, she could feel the TARDIS in the back of her mind, and it felt as though she was fretting and nauseous.

She made two mugs of tea, and the lights started to dim and flicker. “What's he doin' now?” she thought to herself. “Typical bloke, always tinkerin' with stuff.” She made her way to the console room to see what he was up to.

The only constant light was shining up from beneath the floor plates. A pale yellow glow that tinged the air like faint mist and made the Doctor's face look shadowed and angular as the main lights flickered and flashed apparently at random.

`So what's going on?' Rose asked.

`Going on? It's all going completely mad. Every sprocket and wocket and mergin-nut. Mad, mad, mad.' He slammed a lever across as if to show how it made no sense at all. The light was fading, the Doctor's face getting darker. Then, abruptly, it glared into brilliance; making both the Doctor and Rose screw up their eyes.

`Time for a service?' Rose suggested. She wasn't worried. Not really. Not yet. Whatever the problem was, the Doctor would fix it soon enough. Probably. `Should have got a ten-million-mile service back on New Earth.'

`I dunno, you materialise for a split second in real space-time to take a bearing and see what happens?' The Doctor was shaking his head, clicking his tongue, moving quickly round the console. `What's the scanner say?'

Rose glanced at the screen. `Sort of whirly stuff.'

The Doctor paused, hand over a control. `Whirly stuff? That could be bad. How much whirly stuff? I mean, a few whirls or the inside of a clock?'

`You know that screensaver Mickey has on his computer with pipes that keep growing till they fill the screen?'

He sucked in a deep breath. `Well, that's not good. Here, let's have a look.' The Doctor was leaning over Rose's shoulder, his fingers tapping out a rhythm she could feel through her jacket.

`Problem?'

He nodded. `EMP signature. Electromagnetic pulse. Like you get in a nuclear . . . what's it.' He waved his hands to demonstrate. `Whoosh. You know.'

`I know. Cities getting cooked.'

`Sort of thing,' he agreed. `Only it just goes on and on. Look at it. Whirly stuff. Like there's a thousand bombs going off one after another. With no let-up. Must be hell out there.'

`Then let's stay in here,' Rose suggested. `Where it's safe.'

`Ah.'

`It is safe?' She peered at him through the flickering light. `Tell me it's safe.'

`Er.'

Then the console exploded.

After a few minutes of rushing around the console, pulling levers, flicking switches and finding anti-radiation pills, just in case, the Doctor managed to stabilise the console. It wasn't working, but neither was it exploding and spitting out sparks.

There was a crank handle in a cupboard close to the main doors. Rose watched with a mixture of amusement and apprehension as the Doctor fitted it into a small socket under the telephone and began to turn it. She was holding an everlasting match so he could see what he was doing as the lights continued to flicker and fade and flash around them.

There was a gap between the doors now. Outside looked dark, but not as dark as in the TARDIS. The Doctor paused to get his breath back. `Can you get through there?' he asked, meaning the narrow gap between the doors.

`Only in my dreams,' Rose told him.

`I probably can,' he said, and Rose cast him an offended look. Was he saying her bum was big? `Only teasing.' He set back to work. `Outside,' he went on, more seriously, `is probably a wasteland. Be prepared for that. Aftermath of a war on this scale isn't much fun. People suffering dreadfully, if they've even survived. Death, destruction, devastation. Lots of “D” words really. Bit of a disaster.'

The gap was wide enough now and Rose squeezed through. She stood just outside the door and stared at the scene in front of her. It was night, stars shining brightly above her, and the scene illuminated by what looked like gas lamps. She blew out the match.

`I can see something,' Rose said loudly, `that doesn't begin with D.'

`What?'

`I think it's a pub.'

`Good grog, that,' a passer-by rasped. `Do a good pint in the Spyglass, they do.' Then he gave her a short wave and carried on down the street.

`Well, I didn't expect this,' came the Doctor's enthusiastic voice from beside her. `Pleasant surprise, isn't it?' Rose watched as the Doctor's grin slowly changed to a puzzled frown. `So I wonder what's up with the TARDIS,' he said.

Rose was saved from having to answer the Doctor by the click of the TARDIS's doors closing behind him.

`Safety measure,' the Doctor said sadly. `Keeps the interior in stasis till she gets back to normal.'

`So they close themselves till you open them again?' That seemed sensible.

`Yes, well. Not quite.' The Doctor peered into the distance, avoiding Rose's gaze. `Absolutely correct, right up to the bit about opening them again.' His voice was fading as he walked briskly away and Rose ran to catch up with him - in time to hear him say, `Once the doors are shut, they stay shut.'

`Stay shut? What, for ever, like the match?'

`No. That would be daft. Just till she can repair her systems and get everything working properly again.'

`And let me guess, we can't open them with that starting-handle thing either. Because that would be daft.'

`No, completely wrong. We can't open them with the starting handle thing because it's still inside.'

As the Doctor explained that they would have to find the source of the EMP and deactivate it, a steam powered vehicle turned in a wide arc which brought it quite close to where the Doctor and Rose were standing. As it passed, they were enveloped in warm, oily steam. The steam cleared, leaving the Doctor standing alone, looking round in confusion.

`Rose?' he shouted.

She waved to him from where she was perched on the back of the low trailer. `Come on! Who knows how far this thing's goin'? I'm not traipsing miles through the night after it. Might be going to Carlisle.'

They sat side by side, swinging their legs. Rose watched the people as they passed them. The Doctor was right; the place seemed like a busy seaport. Maybe they were headed for the docks to load a ship. The Doctor was leaning back against a crate and looking up at the sky.

`I don't think we're going to Carlisle,' he said at last.

`York?' Rose suggested.

He shook his head. `Stars are wrong. And there's no moon.' He sat up straight again. `This isn't Earth.'

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++*+*+*+*+*

The Doctor, Rose, and the TARDIS, were in one of the spacious escape pods of the steam powered spaceship Venture. The Doctor thought that how they came to be there was quite amusing. Well . . . interesting at least. Well . . . more complicated than anything else, although . . .

Rose thought it was unbelievable.

What amused the Doctor, was the way the inhabitants of Starfall, a planet in the middle of a zone of electromagnetic gravitation, had developed sophisticated steam powered devices, because no electrical device would work in the zeg, as the locals called it. They had steam powered vehicles, steam powered robots, and even steam powered spaceships. They were brilliant!

What wasn't so amusing, was that the TARDIS had gone into hibernation to protect itself from the effects of the zeg, effectively stranding them on Starfall.

The interesting thing was, there was a legend of a blood thirsty space pirate called Hamlek Glint - Scourge of the Spaceways. Apparently, he had sold his robot crew for scrap, to be crushed and recycled, and made a run for it in his ship, the Buccaneer. Unfortunately, he ran straight into the then uncharted zeg, stranding himself in the spaceship graveyard.

The story went, that Glint shut down all the systems on the Buccaneer to protect it from electrical overload, and put himself into an artefact called the Resurrection Casket so that he would survive in a form of suspended animation.

People had been coming to Starfall for fifty years or more, mainly to mine the asteroids for precious minerals, but also to try and find Glint's mythical treasure aboard the Buccaneer.

The self appointed overlord of Starfall, Drell McCavity, was a firm believer in the myth, and the Doctor had convinced him that he could find the Buccaneer, if McCavity would fund an expedition. Of course, he would have to take his equipment, which he kept in a big blue wooden box.

It got complicated, when Rose found a ten year old stowaway called Jimm, and discovered that the Venture's robotic crew, were in fact Glint's blood thirsty robotic pirates. If that wasn't bad enough, the Doctor discovered that McCavity was a homicidal maniac, who had control of a great big, black furred, trans-dimensional, murdering monster called Kevin.

Now, Kevin thought the label "monster" was a bit unfair. He was a sensitive soul, and was always polite and good mannered. He apologised to his victims before ripping them apart with his razor sharp claws, and when he wasn't slicing and dicing people, he liked to read, and enjoyed intellectual pursuits, such as crosswords and sudoku.

He had twice been contracted to kill the Doctor, which neither he, or the Doctor where too happy about. But on the first occasion, the Doctor had used his guile and superior intelligence to find a loop hole in the contract and declare it null and void.

What Rose thought unbelievable, was the fact that any of them survived the blood thirsty robot pirates. Poor Dugg, McCavity's bodyguard hadn't. He'd held them back, so that she and Jimm could escape to the engine room.

What was even more unbelievable, was that Kevin had carried them from the engine room of the Buccaneer, through the vacuum of space in sealed equipment lockers, over to the airlock of the Venture. Once there, the Doctor had set a course deep into the zeg, where the robots would stop functioning, and the powered up Buccaneer being dragged alongside would explode.

And that was why they were in the escape pod, heading out of the zeg. But that wasn't the end of it, because unbelievable became SO unbelievable, that it just got weird. It turned out that the Resurrection Casket was empty!

McCavity wanted the Doctor to operate the casket to bring the remains of his dead wife back to life. When the Doctor told him it didn't work like that, McCavity slipped him a death note, which Kevin had to obey. After a lot of running around the TARDIS, and helping Kevin with eleven down in the crossword, the Doctor called time and asked if he could say goodbye to his friends.

Being a decent sort of murdering monster, Kevin agreed. The Doctor shook young Jimm's hand, and palmed the death note to him, who in turn slipped it to McCavity. Kevin now had a new contract, and was quite happy to carry this one out. McCavity staggered backwards, away from Kevin, and fell into the open casket, where Jimm slammed down the lid.

`So, it's goodbye time,' the Doctor said. `Time we were off while the TARDIS is still working. We'll set you on a course back to Starfall, Jimm.'

`We're leaving him on his own?' Rose asked.

`I can manage,' Jimm insisted.

`Kevin can help,' the Doctor said. `Jimm's got the medallion.' The medallion was a piece of Glint's treasure that called Kevin back from the Shadow Dimension.

`That's right,' Jimm remembered, and pulled it from his pocket. `Only . . . '

`Yes?' The Doctor sounded hopeful, and Rose wondered what he was up to now.

`Kevin wants his freedom. He doesn't want to have to do what I tell him.'

The huge hairy creature looked down kindly at the boy. `I've been doing it for long enough,' he said. `Another few days while we get back to Starfall won't matter much. Or weeks, or months. Or even years, come to that.'

`No,' Jimm said. `No, you should help because you want to, not because you have to.'

He handed Kevin the medallion. The gold disc was almost lost in the monster's enormous paw. He looked down at it through blood-red eyes that seemed to glow with moisture.

`Thank you,' Kevin said quietly, and closed his hand on the disc. When he opened his fingers again, the medallion was gone. `Thank you,' he said again, and gave a great roar of laughter.

The Doctor grinned and unlocked the TARDIS door.

`Will they be all right?' Rose asked him as they stepped inside. `Just the two of them?'

`Two? Three.' The Doctor turned in the doorway and gently ushered Rose back out again. `I almost forgot. We should open the casket.'

`And that's another thing,' Rose said as the four of them gathered round the black coffin-like casket. `Glint's out there somewhere. A murderous, homicidal, crazy pirate on the loose, ready to rob and pillage and . . . stuff.'

`I hardly think so,' the Doctor said. `Open it.'

`Sure?' Rose said.

But before the Doctor could answer, Jimm had undone the clasp and swung the lid open. They looked inside. And as the colour drained from her face and her legs went all wobbly, Rose realised the truth - what the Resurrection

Casket was and what it did, and where Glint had gone.

`Oh,' she said. `Blimey.'

McCavity's clothes lay in a muddled, empty heap. The baby in the casket looked up at them through large, deep blue eyes.

`Ah, what a sweet ickle baby. Did the nasty man become a little kiddie again, did he, didums?'

`Yes, thank you, Kevin,' the Doctor said. `I think that's quite enough of that. Actually, I think rather than take Baby McCavity out you'd do better to close the lid again and fish him out when you get back to Starfall. Just as you did ten years ago.'

Rose was horrified. `You can't shut the baby in a box!'

`It's that or a couple of days in an escape pod listening to his wailing, having nothing to feed him, and no spare nappies,' the Doctor said.

`Jimm's choice.'

`Let's close the lid,' Jimm said. `He'll still be all right, won't he?'

`When you open the lid he'll be exactly the same as he is now. That's what happens. Living genetic material is extracted and projected. Then the old body is discarded and a new one cloned. That's what the Resurrection Casket does. That's what Kevin here and Bobb found out when they opened it the first time.'

Rose gaped. `Bobb? You mean, Bobb . . . '

`Bobb is Robbie the cabin boy, yes. Or rather he was.'

`Getting a bit long in the tooth now,' Kevin admitted. `But still the same old Robert Delvinny. They don't make 'em like him any more, I can tell you.'

`Uncle Bobb was a pirate cabin boy?' Jimm said. `Oh, way cool! Why'd he never say?'

`I'm not sure he was actually all that proud of it,' the Doctor said.

`Though there was one thing he was proud of.' Kevin nodded in agreement. 'The way he brought up Hamlek Glint, the way he nursed him as a baby and helped him grow into a boy. A boy he was determined would not follow in the same footsteps, a boy who would make a different choice about his life. Boy done good,' he said solemnly.

`Ten years ago,' the Doctor said, raising his eyebrows.

`But hang on,' Rose said. That would mean . . . Ah . . . ' She laughed in nervous embarrassment. `Right. Got it. Just call me Slow Rose, all right?' She'd finally worked out that Jimm was in fact Hamlek Glint.

Jimm stared at them, one after the other, his eyes wide as the porthole behind him. `You don't mean . . . '

The Doctor slapped him on the shoulder. `Sorry I blew up your ship,' he said. `Cap'n. Ha-ha!'

Rose hugged Jimm. `Don't worry,' she said. `He's always doing that. Blew up my job when I first met him, then he took me to see my own sun blow up.'

`Oh, not fair,' the Doctor protested. `That wasn't actually my fault, you know, it did it all by itself. Blew up your government, OK, fair enough. Though they were all aliens of course . . .' He broke off, realising that Kevin and Jimm were looking at him. Jimm was staring, open-mouthed.

`What? Look, never mind. Important thing is, you're making your choices, and I think Sad Sally's made hers.' Robotic Sally that they met in the pub, was in fact Salvo 5-70 the murderous robot pirate.

'So, time we were going before the TARDIS packs up again.' The Doctor grinned as a thought occurred to him. `Tell you what, p'raps I'll zeg-proof it and come back and see how you're doing one day.'

`That'd be good,' Jimm said. `I . . . ' He broke off and sighed. `I don't know who I really am any more. What I should do.'

`Do you feel any different?' the Doctor asked.

`Well, no.'

`Then you're the same person as you always were. And you should carry on in just the same way, don't you think?'

Jimm shrugged. `I suppose. It's a surprise but, yes, I guess it makes no difference.' He blew out a long, thoughtful breath. `You need us to help push your box into the airlock?' he asked.

`No need, thanks,' Rose told him. `We just sort of . . . go.'

`I can do that,' Kevin said modestly. `In fact, I've a couple of things to sort out if you can spare me for a few minutes, Jimm. Be right back, though. Promise.' He turned to the Doctor and Rose. `So, I'll say goodbye, then. It's been fun.'

`Hasn't it, though?' the Doctor said, grabbing Kevin's paw and shaking it enthusiastically.

`Oh yeah,' Rose agreed sarcastically. `It's been a riot. Come here, big man.' She flung her arms round Kevin, and wasn't surprised to find they didn't reach anything like round him. She also realised, more than slightly embarrassed, that given his height she was probably clutching his buttocks. She let go quickly.

Kevin laughed, and hugged her back, almost squeezing the air from her lungs and cracking her ribs. `Look after him,' he growled, nodding at the Doctor. `I think he needs you.' Then to the Doctor, he said, `Oh, and I'm sorry about . . . you know.'

`Oh, no problem,' the Doctor assured him. `Happens. And good luck with seventeen across. It's a stinker.'

Kevin frowned, then the frown became a huge hairy smile. `Bad Eggs. Of course. Thanks for that, Doc.' And in a puff of unsmoke, he was gone. The Doctor laughed, and opened the TARDIS door.

`Bobb'll be surprised when we get back,' Jimm said.

The Doctor paused in the TARDIS doorway. `Doubt it. I expect Kevin's nipped back a couple of times to tell him you're OK. He may not be pleased, but he won't be surprised. You take care of yourself. Make the right choices, yeah?'

`Yeah,' Rose told him. `Have a great life. This time, do it right. You'll be fine. You'll be great.' She pulled Dugg's notebook from her jacket pocket and handed it to Jimm. `Here you go - souvenir. His writing's terrible, but he scribbled notes on everything.'

`Like a logbook,' Jimm said. `Thanks. It'll help me remember.'

`Captain's log, yeah. Remember our exciting time.'

`And the people who died,' the Doctor said. `Remember Dugg. Remember who he was and what he did, won't you? Like Bobb remembers.'

`Yeah,' Rose told Jimm.

The boy nodded, his eyes glistening. Rose hugged him again, then followed the Doctor into the TARDIS.

`Will Jimm manage?' Rose asked. `Will he make it back to Starfall?' Her mobile phone started to ring and she rummaged in the pocket of her jacket.

The TARDIS quivered and spun and swam through the space between reality and non-existence, between time and emptiness. At its heart, the Doctor fiddled with the controls and whistled a hornpipe. `Manage?' he asked in a pause between verses. `Of course he'll manage. He'll be magnificent. He has no choice about that.' He grinned. `It's in his blood.'

She smiled at him, and then looked at her phone. The caller display said "Mickey".

'Hiya Mickey. Is . . . is everythin' all right?' She felt their friendship had been strained by Keisha's accusation of infidelity, and her reluctance to hang around after the Waterhive incident.

'Eh? Oh, yeah, everythin's fine this end now. It took a coupla weeks for everythin' to calm down. Government scientists are sayin' it was mass hysteria like you get with those religious cults and stuff.'

She'd meant, "are YOU all right?" but she didn't push it, he sounded okay. Hang on though; did he just say a couple of weeks? It had only been a couple of days for her. But before she could ask, he was speaking again.

'Did those scars heal up on your face?' She could hear the concern in his voice.

'Oh yeah. A good nights sleep, and they'd completely disappeared.'

She heard the relief in his voice. 'Thank God for that, I was really worried that it was permanent.'

'Well, if they hadn't have gone, the Doctor knows this hospital in New New York that could probably have fixed me up.'

'Talkin' of the Doctor, is he there to talk to? I've got somethin' off the conspiracy sites that'll be right up his street.'