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April 19th, 2008
12:52 am - Chapter Four: Xenobiotic Sentients
The Angel blinked. “You will please step away from the subject.”
Rose squeezed Gella’s hand. The Angel was tall and silvery with golden hair. Its eyes were a pale, cold blue.
“Very polite. Don’t you think he’s polite, Gella?” The Doctor addressed the Angel, “No, I don’t think I will.”
The Angel considered the Doctor and Rose. “You are xenobiotic.”
“Oi!” Rose exclaimed.
Raising its hand, the Angel pointed to Rose and the Doctor. “You are a contaminant. You contaminate the data. You will come with me.”
“Ah! Not so polite! In fact, I’d say that was rude!” The Doctor peered around Gella at Rose. “He’s even ruder than I am."
The Angel tipped its head to the side, listening to something that only it could hear. “Xenobiotic sentients must be removed. You will come with me.”
Rose didn’t hear the Doctor’s reply. Light dazzled her eyes and she stumbled with a sudden change of gravity and air pressure. Gella gave out a shuttered shriek of surprise and Rose moved closer to the older woman, putting an arm around her shoulder and hugging her close. “Hold on there, Gella! I’ve got ‘cher.”
“Yeah,” Gella muttered, “but who’s got you!
Good point. Rose looked around the room. It was very large and bright, with white walls and a high, white ceiling. In one corner were what could only be examination tables. With straps.
The Angel was not with them.
Gella had gone pale and wobbly. “Where’s the Flame?” She turned to Rose, eyes wide. “I … I don’t understand. What is this place?”
The Doctor was sweeping the sonic screwdriver around the room. “Not very heavenly,” he agreed. “But how did they hide from the TARDIS?” He dropped the screwdriver back into his jacket pocket.
A door opened and a man entered the room. He was short and tubby, with thin hair combed over his shiny pate, and dressed in a bright, white jumpsuit that exaggerated his potbelly and turned his skin sallow. He waved a clipboard at the Doctor, frowning. “Now what have we here?”
“Excuse me?” The Doctor clasped his hands behind his back, frowned and lifted his nose. “That is the question, isn’t it? What do we have here? Why have you brought us here? Who are you?” He lifted his brows for emphasis, “What is the meaning of this, hm?”
The man in the bad comb over back-pedaled. “Oh, well, I say! This is quite irregular!”
“I would say so!” The Doctor bounced lightly on his toes.
Rose stood with one arm around Gella and the fingers from the other hand pressed against her lips. The strange man buried his nose in his clipboard and the Doctor sent Rose a quick wink. Oh, god, he’s having fun…
“… completely irregular…” Comb-Over muttered. “… years of data … someone is going down for this, and it won’t be me …”
“I have been brought here, been absconded, against my will! What is this place? I demand to know what is going on! I demand an apology and reparation!” The Doctor stalked forward and poked the shorter man in the chest. “I demand,” he annunciated icily, “to be taken to your leader.”
Rose bit the inside of her lip. Oh, no. I’m gonna lose it.
The door opened with a whoosh and Comb-Over led them through a winding corridor. Other white-jumpsuited people went by, all short and potbellied with sallow skin, clutching clipboards, folders, and the odd cup of hot drink.
They turned a corner and stopped in front of a white desk. A man sat at the desk, leaning back in his chair and speaking softly into a headset. He looked up with surprise.
“I must see the Director at once!” Comb-over pronounced. “We have a … situation.”
The secretary pulled the headset off and stared. Not taking his eyes from them, he backed away and through a second door, reappearing almost immediately. “The Director will see you,” he squeaked, waving them through the open door.
The Doctor breezed forward. “I demand an explanation! Why am I being held? What’s the meaning of this?”
The man behind the desk was old and completely bald. His dark, deep-set eyes looked like two raisins stuck in a pudding. The front of his jumpsuit was graced with a medallion shaped like a flame. He frowned at the Doctor. “Sit down, sir. There is no need for this commotion.”
“No need?” The Doctor’s voice dropped low and he spoke through his teeth. He laid his hands on the Director’s desk and leaned forward. “You will tell me now, sir, just what you are up to.”
“I tell you — whoever is doing this to these people has my enmity!” Rose shivered. No, not fun. Maniacal, maybe, but not fun.
The Director pushed back his chair so that the Doctor wasn’t hovering over him, but he didn’t stand. His raisin eyes opened wide in surprise, “We are social scientists, sir. This is Outpost Five-Flame-Seven; we have been studying this society for over five thousand years.”
The Doctor swept away from the desk, turning to Gella and Rose. “You know,” his hand flipped palm up, “I was ready for a soul-sucking Fendahl, an Animus or a BOSS. Maybe even Krotons.” He shoved the hand through his hair, quirking a brow. “Haven’t seen Krotons in a while…” He whirled back to the Director. “But … Sociologists? I mean, excuse me? Angel wielding, mad sociologists?”
In two steps, he was back at the Director’s desk, his face almost expressionless. “This type of study has been banned across the known universe for hundreds of thousands of years! Who do you think you are? What gives you the right to play God with these people?”
The Director smiled. “They did. I have their signed permission forms. Everything is in order.” He reached out and pressed a button. “Mr. Pym, will you please come and escort our … guests … to a room where they may relax?”
The Doctor was clenching his hands behind his back. Rose could see his white-knuckled fists. “I’m not through with you, Director.”
“But I am through with you. Good-bye ... whoever you are.” The Director smiled. “Surely it isn’t necessary for me to call an Angel to escort you?”
Rose’s chair was very soft and comfortable. She blinked sleepily, watching the Doctor pace back and forth. Gella, in a matching chair, had succumbed to the late hour and her confusion, and was snoring softly.
“This is insufferable,” the Doctor muttered. “Bureaucracy at its very lowest form — but oh-so-reasonable!” He ran his hand through his wild hair. “I have their signed permission forms,” he mimicked. “Damn him!”
She had seen the Doctor battle monsters and mad men, robots and manikins. She had seen him frightened, even terrified. She had seen him irritated, frustrated and stymied. She had seen him this coldly angry only once before. No, you’re right, not a single word — six words.
Rose rubbed her face. “But, you said that what they’re doing is banned, right? Can’t you, uh, blow the whistle on them?”
“Oh, yes!” The Doctor nodded briskly. “I can notify the Galactic Federation. They’ll send out an investigation team.” He began to pace. “And the investigation team will file their papers. Then the Director will file his papers, then, oh, more papers, more investigations, court systems, debates, politics, personalities, bribes …” He laughed hollowly. “It may well go on for another five thousand years.”
He stilled and his gaze went inward. “The worst atrocities in the universe have been committed by beings who were simply filling out forms.”
Giving himself a shake, the Doctor blinked and looked into Rose’s face. Suddenly he smiled and knelt down beside her chair. “You're tired,” he said gently.
He could do that, set aside a passion as if he had left it in a room and closed the door behind him. Rose bit her lip. Not human. She had a sudden vision of the Doctor’s mind as something like the rooms of the TARDIS — moving, changing, always something different around a corner, supplying whatever was needed.
She looked at him through slitted eyes and tried to see him, just for a moment, as if he were human: skin a little pale, a dusting of freckles across his cheeks, wild hair. That part looked soft and touchable. But then she met his eyes.
For just a moment, he let her in; let her see the dancing, manic intelligence, let her see the ancient alien.
His fingers feathered through the hair that had half-fallen in her eyes. “Go to sleep, hm?” His fingertips brushed her brow and, without thinking, Rose leaned her face into his hand. His palm moved to cup her cheek. “Good night, Rose.”
Rose blinked into those eyes, different color, different shape, but still, her Doctor’s eyes. He swept his thumb over the ridge of her brow and she sighed, closed her eyes and snuggled her cheek into his cool palm.
“G’night, Doctor.”
The Doctor eased his hand from Rose’s cheek. With a sigh, he sat on the floor, pulling his legs up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. He laid his forehead against his knees and pushed off with his toes, rocking himself.
If he was human, he might have taken her in his arms, buried himself in her and filled his senses with the taste and smell and feel of her. She would have taken him, of course she would. She would open herself up and take his frustration and anger, take his bitterness.
His father had loved a human.
But he wasn’t his father. He was a man of no people, no home — a tragic past and too much future. He couldn’t do that to Rose. Not to Rose.
He saw her again, filled with the Vortex. Impossible. All of his timelines had bottlenecked in that one moment; she was the gateway that had opened into his future. She was focused now on how much that event had changed him. But it had changed her so much more. And he couldn’t see it. Impossible. The Time Vortex roiled around Rose like water flowing over an up-thrust rock, and he couldn’t see the pattern. He couldn’t sort the time threads.
Might as well be human. Huh, he snorted to himself, nice try.
Gella moaned and turned in her chair. Her round face was care-worn. She had loosened her long, dark hair so that it flowed over her sholders. He could see strands of silver shining there. It struck him suddenly how very beautiful she was, with her laugh lines and roundness and silver-shot hair.
And these Sociologists would pinch her life out with less thought than pinching out a candle flame. Think,think! He funneled the rage, used it — let it fill his head and literally pull him up from the floor. Hands clasped behind his back, he paced. Yes. He nodded to himself. That should do</span>
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