timelord1: (Default)
timelord1 ([personal profile] timelord1) wrote2011-11-16 08:30 am

Into the Howling: Chapter 9

Title: Into the Howling
Rating: Teen - LANGUAGE and VIOLENCE warnings for this chapter!
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: I just keep ratcheting up the tension on this one. Be prepared. Also includes what some might consider violations of canon. So there, you're forewarned. Enjoy!

The Doctor put his hands on either side of the nurse’s head and squeezed. His face twisted into a venomous mask. A quick jerk to one side and the problem would be eliminated. But he couldn’t do it. The older he got, the more cowardly he became, and he hated it.
 
“What in the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Rose cried, gripping the edge of the bed as she came around to his side. “You’re not a killer! Are you?”
 
“Rose,” the Doctor said with a sigh, “you have not understood anything that has been said.” The nurse whimpered in his grip, putting her hands over his. It tore at his hearts, amplifying his self-loathing. He wasn’t sure if he was more upset that he’d lost the stomach for killing, or that he’d once had the stomach for killing in the first place. The nurse was crying, too frightened to scream any more.
 
“Please don’t,” the nurse sputtered.
 
“Hurry up and do it,” Whut urged.
 
“I can’t,” the Doctor snapped. There was another option, though it was going to feel like ripping the nurse’s clothes off in the center of town. If he had done this on Gallifrey, he would have been prosecuted as a rapist. Still, violated was better than dead, and this wasn’t Gallifrey. He closed his eyes and he and the nurse gasped at once as he wormed his way into her mind and plucked out every memory having to do with himself and Rose. While he was already in the commission of a crime, he decided to look around for any useful information he could glean about the Confederacy without the gloss of faithful zeal all over it.
 
Beyond the usual mindless doctrine, he was able to read that she had intended to drug him, take him to the Gilthonian Temple so his mind could be wiped and reprogrammed as a drone solider for the revolution. Rose would be told that he had died while she had been sleeping. If she had caused any trouble after that, she would have met the same fate. Again he entertained the idea of snapping the nurse’s neck instead of just letting her go, but there were more important things concerning him at the moment.
 
The more he poked around inside the nurse’s brain, the more he began to understand that Qennda was less a haven for refugees and more a prison planet. Refugees that came to Qennda rarely, if ever, left again. If they were able to get a job their wages were mostly paid back to the government through a series of taxes and residence fees, and, most disturbingly, once a refugee left the camp through which they had been processed, they were not allowed to return. Which served to separate them from their only potential means of escaping this gem of a planet. And that was the work of the good guys; the current government. If the Confederacy were to take power, things would become infinitely worse.
 
The reason the government was keeping sole survivors inside the refugee camps also became clear as he dug into her thoughts on the Purge. They were not being detained as much as they were being protected from the Confederacy. If the Confederacy learned that someone living on Qennda was the sole survivor of their planet, they were marked with a glyph so that when the time of the great Purge came, they would be easy to identify and round up for mass extinction to please one of the Gilthonian gods. What disturbed him most of all, however, was the one word that repeated everywhere he looked inside her head, as if it were spray-painted over all her thoughts. Tonight.
 
He backed out of her mind and she sagged in his arms. The exit had been graceless and crude, and left him with a piercing headache.
 
“I just found out how right you are, Doctor. We have to get out of here, as quickly as we can,” he said, scooping the nurse up to carry her to the bed. “The revolution is going to begin tonight.”
 
He and Whut put her in the Doctor’s bed and the three of them walked out of the room as calmly as they could. Doctor Whut went to the nurse’s station and pulled their charts and then they went to the lifts, down to the main floor.
 
“Are you able to run if it is required?” the Doctor asked once they were inside the car, resting his hand on Rose’s back.
 
She nodded, looking up at him. “You weren’t going to kill that woman, were you?”
 
He attempted a smile. “Of course not.”
 
She only looked at him, saying nothing. He could see in her eyes that she knew he was lying, and the disappointment there would have to be addressed when they had time to stop and worry about things like hurt feelings and disappointment. For now, he was consumed with getting Rose out of the hospital and back to the ship. Once she was there and safe, he was working out what he could do to help in the fight against the Confederacy. If the nurse’s thoughts were any indication of fact, they were much larger than anyone realized. He calculated the ratio at about four to one in favor of the Confederacy. And they were well-armed.
 
Still, he kept glancing at Rose to see if she was still looking at him with that same disgusted look in her eyes. He couldn’t have her pulling away from him now; the distraction of her distance might cause him to make a mistake that could get them both killed.
 
“I would not have killed her,” he said with a sigh. “I thought about it, but I could not. I am too much a coward.”
 
The look in Rose’s eyes softened. “That’s not the word I would use,” she said, taking a step closer to him.
 
“Is this the wrong word; coward?” he asked. “I mean a weak person who is full of fear.”
 
“That’s the right word, but it doesn’t describe you,” Rose said. He had been about to ask her what word she would use to describe him when the lift doors opened and they came out into the lobby. As they were walking towards the doors, the Doctor spied Mu sitting at the front desk. He ran over to her, Whut and Rose following. She looked up at them with a blank smile. That was when the Doctor noticed the bruises on her temples, peeking out from under her curls.
 
“Blessings,” she said. “How may I help you?”
 
“Mu?” Doctor Whut asked. “What’s the matter with you?”
 
“Just walk away,” the Doctor said, pulling Rose so she was behind him as he backed away from the desk. “Let’s just walk out of here while we still can.”
 
“Can I see your Rip cards, please?” Mu asked, the smile never flickering from her face. She stood up and came out from behind the desk.
 
“But Mu,” Doctor Whut said, her sweet voice sounding hurt. “You know who they are.”
 
The Doctor came back and grabbed Doctor Whut by her left elbows. “For a doctor, you are very, very thick,” he said. “We need to turn around and walk out of here right now.”
 
“Your Rip cards,” Mu repeated. The blank smile was evolving into something slightly more bloodthirsty as she approached. The Doctor swung Whut behind himself and kept backing away as Mu advanced on him.
 
“Run!” the Doctor said, turning to go. He heard the crackling of electricity and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as the two electrodes of a flying stun gun zipped past his ear, en route towards Rose. He caught the wires, ignoring the shock that buried itself in his hand, and yanked. The gun came out of Mu’s hands and he dropped the wires as they reached the doors and burst onto the sidewalk.
 
“This way!” Whut cried, leading them to the left. Alarms began to sound inside the hospital as the three of them sprinted down the block. The Doctor found Rose’s hand at some point and was glad to feel the strength with which she was holding his. There was one door on that side of the hospital, and the Doctor let go of Rose’s hand when the door swung open and a large man in a security uniform stepped out, spied them and drew his blaster. Without hesitating a step the Doctor tackled the guard and they began wrestling on the sidewalk, crashing into the still-open door. The blaster clattered across the cement.
 
The Doctor’s current form may have looked slender and pretty, but his strength was not diminished in the least by his build, and his mind well remembered the years he had spent studying Venusian Aikido, even if these muscles had not yet practiced the art. With a few deft turns he got the advantage over the guard and pinned him against the door. He pressed the side of his arm just under the guard’s jaw until he stopped struggling and passed out. The Doctor got up and gave his companions a chuffed smile as he dusted himself off.
 
“That’s how you handle that,” he said, pushing the guard back inside the building and closing the door behind him.
 
Whut was holding the guard’s blaster between two fingers like it was a dead mouse. “Here,” she said, putting it in the Doctor’s hands. His eyes went immediately to Rose, and she nodded. It was all the encouragement he needed. They took off again, and the Doctor examined the blaster while they ran. It was a short-range laser with a double safety and a self-renewing photon cartridge. Easily the nicest weapon he’d handled since the Time War. He flicked off the safeties and held it at the ready as they ran across the street and down the sloping hill up which he had carried Rose the day before.
 
He’d forgotten how good a blaster could feel in his hands. He had sworn to be the man who never would again, but just feeling the gentle hum of the photon cartridge in the handle and the coolness of the polycarbon housing, molded to be held comfortably for long periods of combat made that vow seem somewhat rash and unnecessary. Especially where Rose was concerned. What good was the moral high ground if something happened to her?
 
His senses were on high alert as they made their escape, so when he heard the snap of another flying stun gun being fired behind them, he turned, sighted his target and fired the blaster before Rose or Whut had stopped running. He shot the gun out of the hands of the guard that had fired it, just as the stun gun’s barbed charges attached themselves to the fabric of the Doctor’s shirt. He ripped them off and urged his companions down the hill.
 
“You shot it out of his hands!” Rose cried, looking back. “You didn’t even hit him!”
 
He smirked. “Beloved, I could shoot the cherry off the top of a sundae at fifty meters without disturbing the ice cream. Just because I choose not to use weapons does not mean that I do not know how.” He gave her a gentle push to keep her running and they made their way down the hill and into the center of town.
 
Years prior, the Gilthonian Confederacy had designated that particular moment to mark the start of their revolution and several buildings on the street exploded at once, including one that they had been seconds away from running in front of when it became a fireball and a shower of broken bricks and shattered glass. The Doctor turned and took Rose and Whut to the ground with a wide sweep of his arms, shielding them from the fallout of the blast. People began pouring into the streets around them and the Doctor dragged Rose and Whut to their feet, pushing them into an alley for safety while he got a better idea of what was going on.
 
They were all gasping for breath, coughing and choking from the smoke and dust in the air. The Doctor still had his blaster clenched tightly in his hand and he was leaning against the alley wall with the other hand. Rose was bent forward, hands on her knees, her back heaving as she tried to catch her breath.
 
“Let me see you,” he said, lifting her face so he could check her for injuries. A stray fragment of brick had nicked her cheek, but she appeared otherwise unharmed. She clutched him tightly in a hug and he patted her back with his free hand. “Are you well?” he asked.
 
“Oh, I’m great,” Rose scoffed, rolling her eyes. “Forget trying to get home - we should get a house here.”
 
Doctor Whut was holding one of her right wrists with one of her left hands, but also seemed to be all right overall. People were screaming and half the street seemed to be on fire. He turned to Doctor Whut, who was looking down the alley at the panic in the street.
 
“Do you have family? Anyone to see to?” he asked. “If you do, you need to go. I can get us to safety from here.”
 
She grabbed his shirt and pulled him close to speak into his ear. “I’m the last of my kind, too.” She showed the Doctor the inside of her bottom right wrist. There was a mangled glyph carved into her skin, the wound new enough that it was still scabbed over. “I am marked for the Purge.”
 
“Then you’re leaving with us,” he said. Another series of explosions shook the two buildings that made the alley and the Doctor led the threesome out into the opposite street, past the Wayfarer Taverna, which was now engulfed in flames. Most people in the street were more concerned with their own safety than what anyone else was doing, and they wound through the burning, smoke-shrouded chaos for several blocks before they ran into trouble.
 
They came around a corner and each stopped in their tracks at what they beheld at the end of the block. There was a massive bonfire in the middle of the street and groups of people were shoving screaming people into the flames. The center of the bonfire was white-hot, and the screams of the victims stopped instantly when their panicked shadows touched the white core of the flames. Thermite fire.
 
“The Purge!” Doctor Whut screamed, clutching the Doctor’s arms with all four of her hands.
 
“Back the way we came,” the Doctor instructed, pulling Rose and Whut behind him. They had barely gone half a block when Rose’s hand slipped out of his grip and she started screaming. The Doctor whirled around and saw her in the hands of a large woman with bruises on the sides of her head. She was dragging Rose towards the fire.
 
A second later Rose was in the Doctor’s arms. The woman that had captured her was lying on the ground with a third of her skull blown off by a laser blast. There was no sound in the world. The bonfire threw jagged, dancing shadows over everything that wasn’t lit by the scorching orange light. He barely registered the sensation of Rose pulling on him, urging him to come on. He just stared at the body in the street, arms hanging limp at his sides, the blaster dangling from the tips of his fingers.
 
“It’s the inevitable consequence of a gun,” the Doctor spoke softly, in Gallifreyan, as sound began to creep back into the world. The bonfire roared in his ears, over everything else. “Every time I pick up a gun, someone dies.”
 
“We have to go!” Rose shouted, pulling him with all her might. “They’re coming!”
 
His eyes flicked up from the woman’s body to the four figures advancing on them and the Doctor lifted the blaster once again. He hated the perfection of its curves in his hand, the soothing thrum of the recycling photon cartridge against his palm. The soldier’s mentality he had left behind with his last incarnation burned its way to the surface, bright as the flames of the purging bonfire in the distance, incinerating the remorse he’d felt at taking the woman’s life.
 
“Which one of you wants to die?” he shouted in Default, training his weapon on the head of the tallest man. If one of them made a move for Rose, he would shoot. She had reduced him to this. Something deep inside him hated her for it.

Chapter 10


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