kalleah | The Hidden Well, Chapter Seven

Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG
Betas:

sensiblecat
[Unknown site tag]Previous Chapters

In this chapter: Rose deals with more culture shock, this time of a temporal variety, Connor learns something surprising about the presumed company flunky, and something unexpected happens at the nursery.

In the morning, Rose woke with the Doctor pressed against her back and his long limbs curled around her. She smiled in her sleepy, disconnected morning way and closed her eyes again. They snapped open when she realized what had woken her: he was blowing with quick, forceful puffs on the back of her neck.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

The blowing stopped and despite the fact that he was behind her, she knew he had his most innocent face on. "Breathing exercises," he said glibly. "Helps calm both the body and the mind."

She rolled her eyes. "Right. And the fact you were getting bored with me sleeping had nothing to do with it."

"I'm not at all bored," he protested, his voice a fraction higher than usual. "I've been thinking about the atmospheric converters. I have a few things to talk about with Connor."

She rolled over to face him, and he adjusted to accommodate her. "Hello," he said, with a sweet smile.

"Hello," she said, and was unable to resist smiling back. "Have a good night?"

His hand settled on her hip and he rubbed lightly with his thumb. "Not as good as you did, I think. You slept like the dead."

"Yesterday was exhausting!" she said, and stretched, drawing in a deep breath and extending her arms above her head. He took advantage of her change in position to slide his hand up and down her side. "You could give me five more minutes," she said, yawning.

His hand came to rest with his fingers splayed across her ribs. "Five minutes your time or Arisbe time?"

She blinked, ending her stretch abruptly and staring at him in confusion. "What difference does that make?"

"Five minutes Arisbe time is longer," he said, as it that fact should have been patently obvious.

The particular part of her brain that began to ache when she found herself trying to follow his logic twinged. "Five minutes is five minutes."

"It most certainly is not," he corrected her. "On these terraformed planets, one of the things they can't change is the speed of the planet's rotation on its axis. Arisbe's solar day is approximately 25.668 Earth hours long. So, in the interest of not having noon be at 12.834 o'clock, which doesn't exactly trip off the tongue –" at that, he pulled a face and clacked his tongue against the back of his teeth – "they just made the minutes longer. 60 seconds in one of your minutes, 64.17 seconds in an Arisbe minute."

Rose realized her mouth was hanging open, so she closed it. He regarded her quite seriously, expecting some response. When she didn't offer one, he continued. "It's quite a common practice on planets with solar days similar to the Earth. So really, your eight hours of sleep was nearly seven percent longer than it would have been on Earth. You should be quite well rested."

She realized that when he had made his offhand suggestion about adjusting to local time, he hadn't been talking about mere time zone differences. Her head hurt in earnest now and she knew it didn't matter if she got another hour in bed, on either planet, because she was, regrettably, very much awake already.

"I can't handle this at this hour of the morning," she told him, and climbed out of bed.

Another morning, she quickly remembered, meant another sponge bath.

…

The Doctor repositioned his glasses and studied the display on the exchange console. Connor shifted from one foot to the other and tried not to look guilty. He wasn't. It wasn't his fault. Perhaps the Doctor wouldn't notice?

"The chlorotrifluoromethane pressure has dropped from yesterday," said the Doctor, pinpointing the precise fact that Connor had wanted him, somehow, to miss.

"It's a normal fluctuation." He thought his voice sounded more confident than he had a right to expect.

"Connor," said the Doctor in the same almost injured tone he had employed the day before, "when are you going to tell me what's going on?"

"I don't know what you are talking about," he replied.

"What this all superficially looks like is systematic disorganization and systems mismanagement," said the Doctor. "Everything we entered yesterday is here, but skewed – instead of the fluorination catalyst being point-oh-oh-three-eight degrees warmer, it's point-oh-oh-three-eight degrees cooler." He tapped on the display and frowned. "The changes are small enough that someone else might not notice, but I remember perfectly well what we did yesterday." He ran his hands through his hair. "Someone's going to a lot of trouble to make subtle changes to the data."

Connor looked down and tried not to fidget. "The project is on schedule."

"For now," said the Doctor ominously. "Someone's going to a lot of trouble to make you and your staff seem incompetent." He licked his lips and studied the ceiling for a moment. "All right. I'll tell you my secret if you tell me yours. I'm not here to check your work. I'm not from the company at all."

"What?" Connor was aghast. Had he been one-upped by a fraud rather than a flunky?

"I'm a traveler. Ended up here purely by chance. I'm your best bet to fix whatever it is that's going on here." He put both hands on the console and leaned in toward the other man. "Now do you want to tell me what's going on?"

…

Rose sat on the bench next to Brandon and watched the children in their exuberant enjoyment of the out-of-doors. There was a fenced-in area that ran the whole length of the section in the back, filled with the oddly familiar children's play equipment like swing sets, a sandbox, and two slides. The rolling, ruddy terrain around them, free of trees or any plants at all, made a surreal backdrop for such an ordinary looking scene. Above them, the shimmering ripples of the atmospheric shell muted the blue sky, letting the light fall kindly on the children and the two adults watching them.

Brandon had brought a book, although Rose hadn't noticed the title, and was absorbed in reading. She watched the children scamper up the slide and come down in a whirl of arms and legs and laughter.

Jonah, as usual in his own world, sat in the sandbox and sculpted precise geometric figures in the sand. None of the other children paid him any attention, and she stopped to wonder about that, comparing their lack of interaction with him to the taunting and teasing of the outcast children in her own childhood. Perhaps even a bully would lose interest in a subject so devoid of response to cruelty or mocking. Or, perhaps, Brandon had put an end to anything like that in his commander mode. She didn't imagine he would tolerate bullying well. He had probably been on the receiving end of it when he was a child, with his quiet, bookish manner.

The girls had scraped out some squares in the red soil and were playing hopscotch, sending small clouds of dirt into the air with each jump and landing. Ian, she saw, was one of the children on the swing sets, kicking his small feet against the ground with enough vigour to send him sailing up and into the air, then backwards in a gentle arc.

"Miss Rose!" he called. "I'm going so high!"

She beamed and called encouragement to him, half wanting to tell him to be careful. Another boy on the swings catapulted himself into the air as he reached the highest point of his arc. He landed with a less-than-perfect dismount and let out a sharp wail.

Rose and Brandon were next to him in a moment, first assessing that he was unhurt and second scolding him roundly for his acrobatics. He stopped crying and rubbed his teary eyes with grubby, reddish hands. "But it was fun," he protested. "Can I go back and swing?"

"Most certainly not," said Brandon crisply. "Go and sit in the corner. We've talked about this before." The boy retreated with a few additional sniffles to the nearest corner of the fence and sat down with a thump.

Jonah had lifted his gaze from the sand to the swings, and his expression was almost wistful. "Can I take Jonah to the swings?" she asked Brandon in a low voice.

He looked over at the silent boy and nodded thoughtfully. "He does look interested, doesn't he? Might be good for him."

Rose hopped up and went over to the sandbox. She knelt beside Jonah. "I'll push you on the swing if you'd like," she offered. He let her help him stand and cross to the swing, and she carefully arranged him in the seat.

"Hold tight on both sides," she instructed, guiding first his right hand and then the left to grip the chain. "Don't let go until I tell you so, all right?" She stepped behind him and gave his back a gentle push. He swung a small distance forward, then back, and she pushed again, a little more firmly.

To her great pleasure, he continued to hold steadily on both sides. His dark curls ruffled in the breeze as he swung. She didn't push too hard or too high, not wanting to risk a fall if he did suddenly let go.

"Isn't this fun, Jonah?" she said, smiling broadly. "I'm having fun. I haven't been on a swing in ages and ages."

She continued to push him, keeping the motion controlled and relatively easygoing, until Brandon called to the children that it was time to go back inside. As the children made small cries of protest and gathered in front of Brandon, Rose let Jonah come to a gentle stop and crossed in front of him.

"All right," she told him. "You can let go now." He didn't, and she gently touched his hand. "Here you go, Jonah. We can do this again tomorrow."

It hit her like a blast from a furnace, the sheer force of it knocking the wind from her lungs and tearing the sight from her eyes. Motion – wind – freedom – ah, laughter! – protest and tearing away and no, no, no, no – the pressure, the colors, the noise, too much noise, too much noise, why won't they be quiet?

The world tilted abruptly ninety degrees to the right and Rose hit the ground with a boneless thud.