Into the Howling: Chapter 5

[timelord1]

Title: Into the Howling
Rating: Teen
Pairing: 10/Rose
Category: Drama, Romance, Humor, Action/Adventure
SPOILERS: AU on end of Doomsday and points west.
Summary: What if things had happened just a bit differently there at the end, with the levers?
Notes: This chapter was posted without a beta, because I am a sadist. Also, I want to shout out to monkeyprincess7 for giving me food for thought. Some of this is her fault. :)

Time did not exist in the Void, but she had her mobile with her and though it had no signal, the clock was still working. According to Tardis Local Time (how she missed the dim amber glow of that beautiful ship), they left the Abzath planet at seven in the evening. The Doctor had collapsed close to eight. Now, as she curled up in the pod beside him, mopping his forehead with his tie, it was nearly six in the morning.
 
His skin was normally cool to the touch, but now it felt at least as hot as hers, if not hotter. She wished she had a regular thermometer to take his temperature. Of course, she didn’t know what his temperature was supposed to be, so it wouldn’t do much good to find out what it was at the moment anyway. She’d found a stethoscope in the medical cabinet and occasionally listened to his hearts beating their frantic, erratic rhythms. He sometimes stirred enough to cough or to roll over and politely get sick over the edge of the pod onto the more easily-cleaned floor of the ship. Once he mumbled an apology as he flopped back into the pod after being sick, but those were the only intelligible words he spoke that night.
 
Rose was reminded in part of the first Christmas she spent with him, after his regeneration. He lay in bed for nearly an entire day, far less active than he was now, but she had mostly clung to the hope then that he would get out of bed at any moment and save the day. This time was different.
 
This time she knew that she was waiting for him to die.
 
Rose passed the next day and night in the mausoleum silence of the Void ship, hovering at the Doctor’s side, afraid to look away from him for too long or stray too far from his pod. She finally had to lie down and sleep at seven-thirty the next morning. She climbed into the other pod and draped her arm into his so she could hold his hand while she slept. Every time he coughed or shifted or rolled over to get sick, she would spring to wakefulness as if someone had hit her with a cattle prod. After a few hours of that, she was so tired she felt as if she was about to get sick herself. Her back ached and her whole body wailed for a few hours’ rest and finally she gave in, falling into a leaden, dreamless sleep that felt as if it lasted only a few seconds.
 
The next day was a duplicate of the one that had come before, except this one had the added bonus feature of the Doctor moaning in a jumbled collision of languages for most of the day. Eyes clamped tightly shut, hands alternately clutching the sheets and Rose’s hands, he raved for endless stretches of time, often bringing Rose to tears with the anguish she could hear so clearly in his voice. She recognized her own name multiple times amid the tumult of words, along with ‘Dalek,’ ‘TARDIS’ and a horrible few minutes when he seemed to weep and kept calling out for Gallifrey and something that sounded like ‘Koschei.’ It was as close as she’d ever been to the pain he must have felt in losing his homeworld. There was so much about himself that he never shared with her, and she felt almost dirty being exposed to it without his knowledge. She could only hold him and press comforting kisses into his damp hair and be thankful that the TARDIS was not there to translate everything he said and force her to eavesdrop even further on his soul.
 
She stepped away from her constant ministrations to familiarize herself with the rest of the ship. Most of the controls made no sense to her, though she could tell that one alcove was set up to be a battle station; she had seen enough displays on Mickey’s video games to recognize ammunition counters and targeting systems when she saw them. She leaned on the weapons control panel and caught her breath; she was so tired from her vigil she felt like a shadow moving through the ship. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d said something out loud; it had only been a day and a half or so since she’d last spoken to the Doctor, but it felt like hundreds of years had passed since then. For all she knew, outside the Void ship, they had. It was too much to think about now; she could barely do with what was right in front of her.
 
At the far end opposite the medical cabinet, she found a cooler full of plastic packs of clear liquid. There wasn’t a word on the packaging she could understand, but, handily, there was an illustration of a happy stick figure showing how to open the pack and drink from it, so she assumed it was water. There was quite a bit of it – of course the Daleks would have had no use for it – and next to the water were tins of what turned out to be some sort of rations. She was just hungry enough that the dry biscuits and unidentifiable brown protein tasted like gourmet cuisine to her. There were six tins, and she wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t expired, but they were better than nothing.
 
The Doctor had been raving steadily all day, so when the stream of nonsense suddenly stopped, Rose jumped and ran back to his pod to see what was wrong with him. His eyes were open wide and staring at the ceiling, the rest of his face slack as death.
 
“Oh no,” Rose breathed. She crouched at the side of pod, fumbling for the stethoscope. “Please,” she choked, stuffing the earpieces into her ears. She put the stethoscope to his chest and heard his hearts beating frantically out of control. She called his name, shouted it in his face, and then tried his Gallifreyan name, but his eyes never moved from the point they were staring at on the ceiling.
 
And then he sat up.
 
Back straight, arms at his sides, he sat up as if he’d been lifted by an invisible lever. She cried out and fell back away from the pod. His eyes lolled in her direction, the irises contracting with the pupils until there was nothing left but a pair of dark pinpricks. His mouth fell open and the most horrible, crow-like screech came out of his mouth that Rose couldn’t help but scream.
 
A second later, the irises expanded back to normal and a look of pained exhaustion swept over his face. He looked at her, actually seeing her this time, and the exhaustion on his face was overwhelmed by fear.
 
“You must have a plan, Rose,” he said, his voice thick and weary as he reached his hands out to her. She climbed into the pod with him and he slumped against her chest, closing his eyes. “I may not survive this.”
 
“Yes you will,” Rose said, wrapping her arms around him. “We’ve been through worse than this. Come on – we stood right under the atomic bomb and walked away from it.”
 
His laugh was flat and completely without humor. “That was the TARDIS’s doing. You and I are alone here. I am so sorry I could not get you home.” He sighed against her and fell asleep again. She could feel the heat in his face through her sweater.
 
For some reason; whether it was because she was afraid this might be their last night together or because she was sick of hearing his incoherent babbling, Rose began to talk. She didn’t know if he could hear her, but she told him every story of her life she could think of. She told him about the first time her mum told her about her father and how he’d died with the mysterious blonde woman by his side. She told him, laughing with hindsight, of her twelfth Christmas when her mum had gone nearly crazy trying to figure out how a brand new red bicycle had gotten into the flat with a glittering tag on it saying only that it was for Rose, and that it had come from Santa.  She told him how much she’d loved that bicycle and had ridden it everywhere, including on the sidewalk one day when she’d fallen and a handsome stranger with big blue eyes cleaned up her scrapes and bought her a Mr. Whippy, sitting on the curb with her until she stopped crying.
 
“That was Captain Jack, you know,” she said, nuzzling her face into the top of his head. “You two have been fighting over me my whole life, and you didn’t even know it when you met me.”
 
What she could not know, and might never know, was at that moment the Doctor’s mind had just about succumbed to the Abzath virus and was slipping into its final obliterate darkness when her words penetrated the viral haze like one last, glittering lifeline. He grabbed on to it and pulled as hard as he could.
 
She talked steadily until after five in the morning, when she finally got into her own pod, took his hand and was lulled to sleep by the sound of his labored breathing. She was glad for the sound, because it meant that he was still alive. She didn’t want to think about what would happen when the virus finally killed him, any more than she wanted to think about the fact that she was now saying ‘when’ instead of ‘if.’ Her only hope was that he would regenerate and come back virus-free. And maybe even still feel the same way about her after regenerating as he did now.
 
 If the virus turned him all the way into an Abzath, though, she had come up with a plan. The moment she was certain the Doctor was gone and the virus was using his beautiful shell like a puppet, she would get into her spacesuit, strap herself in somehow, and open the hatch. She wouldn’t watch as his body was ripped out into the Void, just in case there was some glimmer of himself left that could look at her through the wastes of the virus and thank her. Of all the things, she couldn’t take that. She knew it was what he would expect her to do; what he would want her to do. After that, she would figure out how to fly the Void ship and get herself to the first safe planet she could find and live out some sort of a life – the only one of her kind, stranded on a strange world with her alien ship. Not so far from the Doctor in the end. In her next breath, she was deeply asleep.
 
She peeled her eyelids open again when she heard the Doctor getting sick for what had to be the ninth time. This time, however, he was sitting most of the way up in the pod instead of hanging his head over the edge. She checked her phone; it was five in the evening. When he’d finished, he sat the rest of the way up and heaved a weary sigh, then turned and looked at her. He was ashen, his hair soaked with sweat. He managed a watery smile.
 
“I think I have now thrown out everything I have ever eaten in nine hundred years of life.” His voice was hoarse and crackling around the edges, but his dark-circled eyes were bright and very much alive. The sight of him was like that Christmas morning all over again.
 
“Up,” she corrected, stretching. She was not permitting herself to hope that his being properly awake was any sort of sign that he might be getting better, but it was hard. He cleared his throat and stuck out his tongue, making a face. “Would you like some water?” she asked.
 
He nodded, lying back down and closing his eyes. “My mouth tastes like the inside of a frog.” He hung his tongue all the way out of his mouth and left it there while Rose got up to get him a pack of water. He drank too big a gulp at first and it came right back up, spattering onto the floor.
 
“Apologies,” he sighed as he leaned over to clean up the mess. “I went too fast.”
 
Rose stopped his hands and pushed him gently back into the pod. “I’ve got it. Just sip. Seems like you might be feeling better,” she ventured, giving him a sideways look as she cleaned up the mess.
 
He nodded. “I fear that my superior Time Lord biology is committing genocide on the Abzath as we speak. Because of you.”
 
She looked up at him from her spot on the floor. “Me?”
 
“You would not let me go,” he said. “Just when I thought I was lost, you were there to stop me falling.”
 
“I’ll never let you go,” she said, climbing into the pod with him. This time he took her into his arms, holding her close to his chest. He smelled of two days’ sweat and sickness and the stubble growing on his face scratched her forehead, and it was absolutely wonderful. “Isn’t it stupid that right now, saying ‘I love you’ doesn’t feel like it’s enough? Sounds like something they’d say in a bad song by those bands with the large hairstyles.”
 
“Va’haella lacraidh,” he whispered into her hair.
 
“What’s it mean?” Rose asked, closing her eyes. She was so exhausted it was hard to believe she’d just slept for twelve hours. She could sleep another twelve without thinking twice about it. If he let her lay in his arms, she felt like she could sleep for the rest of her life.
 
“More than ‘I love you’ ever could,” he said.
 
Rose was gone by the time he answered her.

Chapter 6

Comments

[timelord1.livejournal.com]

It added quite a nice bit of tension there...very awesome. :)

What a lovely comment - I'm glad you enjoyed!! I'm going to try to throw in more bits of Gallifreyan here and there, so keep an eye out. You've left me grinning. Thanks for your nice words.

More to come soon!! :)