The Hidden Well, Chapter Twenty-Four
Nov. 7th, 2007 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kalleahPairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG
Betas:ivydoor , np_complete , platypus , and sensiblecat
Previous Chapters
Warning: This chapter contains some fairly significant violence, although not graphic. I'm not changing the rating for the story overall, but please be aware that the content of this chapter is quite different from the others.
In this chapter: The confrontation at the TARDIS.
Rating: PG
Betas:
ivydoor , np_complete , platypus , and sensiblecat Previous Chapters
Warning: This chapter contains some fairly significant violence, although not graphic. I'm not changing the rating for the story overall, but please be aware that the content of this chapter is quite different from the others.
In this chapter: The confrontation at the TARDIS.
--
How long, Jonah? Rose thought, still feeling his persistent warning to for her to stay back from the TARDIS.
Fear spread out like an ever-expanding ripple in a pond from the small boy, so possessive in his contact with her. Did he truly know something, she wondered, or did he simply now cling to her in a desperate effort to keep her and his father safe from the danger he felt building around the others?
Despite his power, he was a child, and not only that: a child who had faced loss and hopelessness in his young life. She needed to be the one in control.
Beside her, Connor leaned against the wall and ran his thumb over the barrel of his blaster. The gesture comforted Rose in a strange way; she knew he was primed for action and as worried for his wife's safety as she was for the Doctor's, but his repetitive motion spoke of careful control rather than frayed nerves.
She summoned up her feelings for Jonah. It was easy to remember his hand in hers, supple and yielding; his first, gurgling effort at speech; the boundless soul in such a small form. We have to do something, she told him tenderly. Show me what you see.
There was a moment of fading resistance from Jonah, and then the hallway, and Connor within it, dissolved from before her eyes. Immediately, she saw Frances Wittener standing next to the TARDIS, holding a blaster aimed straight at her, and she flinched defensively.
I'm not really here, she thought, heart pounding in her ears, and tried her best to ignore the weapon pointed at her belly. He's showing me. Even as she repeated the words to herself, she knew with sickening certainty that the blaster was very real, and so was the danger.
Emelia stood on one side, her face pinched with either fear or anger, but – as Jonah had asserted earlier – seemingly unharmed. Rose could see an unfamiliar man crouched next to a series of wires and cables leading from the TARDIS to a panel in the wall. Wilson Wittener? In any case, he was surely involved with Frances, who had her back turned to him without any apparent concern.
The man shifted positions and pressed a palm against the TARDIS for support. Rose felt the same revulsion at his touch on the TARDIS as she had felt with Frances' hand in Jonah's. She pulled her eyes away from the man and looked everywhere for the Doctor, but she could not find him. Panic welled up inside her despite her best resolve to stay calm.
Where is he?
A ghostly hand materialized in front of her and wiped at something in the vicinity of her forehead, although she couldn't feel the touch. Her eyes widened. Am I seeing what the Doctor's seeing? She sagged with relief at Jonah's affirmative response. How? She pushed the thought away. It didn't matter now.
"It's time," she said to Connor as her vision shifted back to normal. She described as best she could the relative positions of the players involved to the TARDIS and together they sketched out a plan.
Connor switched the safety off his blaster and kept it leveled at the ground. "I won't use it unless I have to," he told her. "Where's yours?"
"Left it," she mumbled, avoiding his eyes. At the time, it had seemed the noble act to leave the blaster behind. After her visceral reaction to Frances, she wished she hadn't.
"All right," Connor said, not arguing the point but clearly unsatisfied. "Let's go."
…
Emelia found it easy enough to begin a shouting match with Frances, and quickly, her rage had taken over.
"How did you manage to pull this off?" she ranted, watching Frances' narrowing eyes with satisfaction. "Don't tell me you're in charge. You've never had enough backbone to run the nursery much less –"
"You've never let anyone even try!" Frances barked. "If an idea isn't yours, it's garbage. You think you've got such a loyal staff?" Her face crinkled with unpleasant satisfaction. "They all hate your guts, and why shouldn't they? They're invisible unless they don't measure up to your standards, and then you're there to make sure everyone in the project knows how incompetent they are."
"That's not how I –" Emelia began, but Frances continued her scathing assessment without taking a breath.
"The hell it isn't! When was the last time you had a kind word for anyone? Me? Brandon? Howard?" She drew up straight, her eyes glittering with triumph. "You practically skinned him alive for taking five minutes to get to the nursery. You've got time for parties –" the word lashed out from between her lips – "and finger painting –"
"Stop it!" shouted Emelia, pointing a finger squarely back at Frances despite the blaster. "You leave them out of it!"
Wilson had paused from his work on the wiring between the TARDIS and panel to observe the exchange with an open mouth. Like a spectator at a tennis match, he turned his gaze back and forth between the two women as they furiously slammed insults at one another.
Emelia couldn't look at the Doctor. Please, know what you're doing. she pleaded internally, followed quickly by a more pragmatic hope: Please, be doing something.
As if to confirm her thought, there was a blinding flash from the TARDIS and the building went dark again.
…
Although Rose was expecting the surge, its brilliance and intensity shocked her. She forced her eyelids open and found only the afterimage of the explosion before her in the renewed darkness. Thank you, she thought with relief. At last, they could act.
With one hand in Connor's, the other skimming the wall to orient herself, she pressed forward. In front of her, she could hear confused shouts, the loudest from Emelia, and her ears strained for the Doctor's voice in the melee. She put one foot precisely in front of the other, focusing on what Jonah had shown her and trying to suppress her own terror.
She released Connor's hand and as planned, they separated. She could feel the familiar texture of the TARDIS beneath her fingers as she skirted around the blue box. She heard Frances, cursing loudly, so close in front of her that she could reach out and touch her.
Now.
Rose lunged into the darkness.
Connor fired his blaster into the air.
In the second moment of distraction, she grabbed Frances' weapon. The other woman realized what was happening and fought back, but Rose had the advantage of surprise. She kicked once, hard, aiming for where Frances' knee ought to be, and heard a sickening crunch and the other woman's scream of pain. The blaster was hers. She stumbled back, pressing herself flat against the TARDIS.
"Connor, got it," she yelled. "Doctor, where are you?"
Something grabbed her right ankle and jerked it forward, and she fell forward across a flabby human form. The blaster bounced out of her hand and clattered across the tiled floor away from her. Long fingernails stabbed into her arm and she yelped, trying to drag herself upright. A hand tangled in her hair and yanked painfully. Rose lashed out with a fist and connected with someone's nose. She scrambled across the floor, away from her attacker, but she had no idea where the blaster might have ended up.
As suddenly as they had gone off, the lights came back on. Rose surveyed the scene around her as her eyes adjusted. Connor had Wilson Wittener pressed face first against the wall with the blaster pointed against the back of his skull. Only a short distance away, Frances sprawled out on the floor, holding one hand against her nose in an ineffectual attempt to stop the bleeding.
At last, Rose saw the Doctor slumped against the wall, and her heart came into her throat at the sight of him. His face and shirt were smeared with blood, enough that she couldn't tell where it came from or indeed even if it were his blood. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and his freckles stood out prominently on his too-pale skin.
She struggled to her feet and ran to him. As she drew near, he held out an arm and tugged her close. She wanted nothing more than to sink into his embrace, but she pulled away enough to survey his beloved face and find the gash across his eyebrow, his only obvious wound.
"Worse than it looks," he told her with a grin that was probably meant to be cheeky but ended up gruesome. It faded immediately and he focused on a point behind her. She turned and saw Emelia picking up the blaster that she and Frances had dropped in their struggle.
Emelia's hair had slipped out of its bun and curled in loose waves down her back. She had a red mark that would form a nasty bruise over one cheekbone. Always before, Rose could see her emotions roiling just below the surface, but now, the anger and fear had been replaced with chilling composure.
"Emelia," said the Doctor reassuringly. "It's over. Put down the gun."
Emelia straightened and stared down at Frances. She brushed her dark hair away from her face and then gripped the blaster more firmly with both hands.
"Emelia," repeated the Doctor with more command this time. "This isn't the way."
She didn't respond.
Frances looked up at the barrel of the blaster. "Please," she said in a wavering voice. "I never meant for anyone to get hurt."
"You killed nine people," Emelia enunciated evenly. "I saw them. I helped clear the rubble. When I lifted someone's arm to scan an ident chip, it crumbled under my fingers." She paused. "For real estate."
Frances began to babble. "It wasn't supposed to – it was an accident – we didn't mean to hurt anyone." She gulped. "Once it happened, we didn't have a choice."
"There's always a choice," Emelia said, emotionless and still as a statue.
Rose realized in that instant what Emelia was capable of, what the Doctor feared. She could strike Frances down, and it would be murder.
"Yes," agreed the Doctor, his arm around Rose winding tighter, "there is always a choice, Emelia. Walk away. You're better than this."
Her attention snapped briefly from Frances to the Doctor, and her eyes were as cold and unforgiving as sea ice. "No, you're wrong. I'm not better and I don't want to be." It might even have been a reasonable tone if she hadn’t been pointing a gun at someone. "I can't let her go. She killed my people. She killed Jonah's parents. She would have killed me – and Connor – and risked everyone on the planet. My children." Her gaze returned to Frances. "She doesn't deserve to walk away from that."
"But you don’t deserve to judge and sentence her. That’s the law of the jungle. You’re not her executioner."
"And you are?" Emelia queried mildly, never taking her eyes off Frances. The question was eerily calm and deliberate. "Tell me, Doctor, have you ever killed an enemy?"
Rose felt him stiffen beside her. "I have," he said quietly. "You don't want to carry that burden." The grief and compassion in his words caught at Rose, but Emelia was still distant.
"It's not a burden," she said, raising her chin. One finger tensed on the trigger – a hair's breadth of movement. Rose swallowed.
"Emelia," he interrupted again, more forcefully this time. "Think of Ian and Jonah. Do you want them to know you've killed a woman in cold blood? That you committed murder?"
"Em, please," said Connor, taking a half-step back from Wilson. "We can make sure they're punished, but not like this."
"There will be punishment," the Doctor promised, his coldness the twin of Emelia's. In a fraction of a second his demeanour shifted and he offered support. "You're a good mother, Emelia. You care about your people. You're not a killer. We've caught them both and can make sure they're never free again to harm another living soul. Put the gun down."
Emelia thawed, just a fraction, but at that moment, Frances Wittener made the last mistake of her life.
…
"… not like this," Connor said. Please, Em. Don't.
He hardly heard the Doctor's words as he stared at his wife with the blaster in her hand. She trembled, and he saw the first shimmer of tears in the corners of her eyes. Hope flooded through him.
It died as Frances seized the opportunity presented by Emelia's hesitation and rolled to one side, toward the TARDIS. Everything after that progressed frame by frame in slow motion.
Emelia pulled the trigger.
Connor saw the burning air elongate for a single, shining moment from the barrel of the gun toward Frances' head. He didn't have time to avert his eyes, nor did Frances have time to scream before the impact.
At once, Wilson let out a wail of agony and crumpled to the ground like someone had pulled out his spine. As Wilson screamed, the Doctor shouted and leapt toward Frances' motionless form.
"Rose, get me the kit from the med bay," he ordered, kneeling beside Frances and pulling what was left of her head into his lap. Rose's mouth formed a wide O of shock, but she complied readily enough. Connor heard the rasping sound as she struggled to fit her key into the ship's door.
Emelia still held the blaster with both hands but was now pointing it at a spot on the floor just beyond her feet. Connor, with a glance at the still-screaming Wilson, tucked his own weapon in his waistband and walked slowly toward her.
"Em," he said carefully, extending a hand out in her direction. "Give it to me."
Her wide and glassy eyes shifted from Frances and the Doctor back to him, and he saw a spark of recognition deep within them. He extended a little further and put his hand on top of the blaster. Her grip relaxed and he moved his other hand underneath so he could delicately slide the weapon away from her. When her hands were empty, they fell listlessly to her sides. She allowed him to pull her close against him with his free arm but made no movement of her own.
Rose emerged from the TARDIS at a run and threw a white case to the Doctor, who began searching for equipment in it. Connor looked away. He didn't know what resources the Doctor might have at his disposal, but he knew Frances was dead.
Wilson stopped screaming and began to sob with the loud, breathless gulps of a drowning man. He wound himself up into the foetal position and rocked from side to side. Connor closed his eyes. They would have to deal with the aftermath now; the sabotage, the conspiracy, Frances' death, Wilson's complicity.
Emelia, his dynamo, balanced against him and made no sound either of relief or regret. Shock had made her unreadable to him. What would they do now?
"She's dead," said the Doctor unnecessarily after several moments. Wilson's sobs became a low, continuous whimper.
Involuntarily, Connor looked back over. The Doctor had folded a handkerchief across Frances' face, saving them all the horror of looking at what was no longer there. His shoulders slumped as he knelt beside the corpse, and when he looked up, Connor almost took a step back at what he saw. Not anger, which he had expected, but deep mourning, distress, and exhaustion. Connor had taken the Doctor to be younger than himself, but now he wondered. So much guilt, he thought, and gathered Emelia closer to him.
Rose knelt beside the Doctor and touched him lightly on the shoulder. He turned to her and she began to clean his face with a damp cloth, washing away the blood and dust to reveal the cut above his eyebrow and the shadows under his eyes.
"You did everything you could," he heard Rose say softly, and the Doctor's eyes dropped to the bloodstains on his clothes.
How long, Jonah? Rose thought, still feeling his persistent warning to for her to stay back from the TARDIS.
Fear spread out like an ever-expanding ripple in a pond from the small boy, so possessive in his contact with her. Did he truly know something, she wondered, or did he simply now cling to her in a desperate effort to keep her and his father safe from the danger he felt building around the others?
Despite his power, he was a child, and not only that: a child who had faced loss and hopelessness in his young life. She needed to be the one in control.
Beside her, Connor leaned against the wall and ran his thumb over the barrel of his blaster. The gesture comforted Rose in a strange way; she knew he was primed for action and as worried for his wife's safety as she was for the Doctor's, but his repetitive motion spoke of careful control rather than frayed nerves.
She summoned up her feelings for Jonah. It was easy to remember his hand in hers, supple and yielding; his first, gurgling effort at speech; the boundless soul in such a small form. We have to do something, she told him tenderly. Show me what you see.
There was a moment of fading resistance from Jonah, and then the hallway, and Connor within it, dissolved from before her eyes. Immediately, she saw Frances Wittener standing next to the TARDIS, holding a blaster aimed straight at her, and she flinched defensively.
I'm not really here, she thought, heart pounding in her ears, and tried her best to ignore the weapon pointed at her belly. He's showing me. Even as she repeated the words to herself, she knew with sickening certainty that the blaster was very real, and so was the danger.
Emelia stood on one side, her face pinched with either fear or anger, but – as Jonah had asserted earlier – seemingly unharmed. Rose could see an unfamiliar man crouched next to a series of wires and cables leading from the TARDIS to a panel in the wall. Wilson Wittener? In any case, he was surely involved with Frances, who had her back turned to him without any apparent concern.
The man shifted positions and pressed a palm against the TARDIS for support. Rose felt the same revulsion at his touch on the TARDIS as she had felt with Frances' hand in Jonah's. She pulled her eyes away from the man and looked everywhere for the Doctor, but she could not find him. Panic welled up inside her despite her best resolve to stay calm.
Where is he?
A ghostly hand materialized in front of her and wiped at something in the vicinity of her forehead, although she couldn't feel the touch. Her eyes widened. Am I seeing what the Doctor's seeing? She sagged with relief at Jonah's affirmative response. How? She pushed the thought away. It didn't matter now.
"It's time," she said to Connor as her vision shifted back to normal. She described as best she could the relative positions of the players involved to the TARDIS and together they sketched out a plan.
Connor switched the safety off his blaster and kept it leveled at the ground. "I won't use it unless I have to," he told her. "Where's yours?"
"Left it," she mumbled, avoiding his eyes. At the time, it had seemed the noble act to leave the blaster behind. After her visceral reaction to Frances, she wished she hadn't.
"All right," Connor said, not arguing the point but clearly unsatisfied. "Let's go."
…
Emelia found it easy enough to begin a shouting match with Frances, and quickly, her rage had taken over.
"How did you manage to pull this off?" she ranted, watching Frances' narrowing eyes with satisfaction. "Don't tell me you're in charge. You've never had enough backbone to run the nursery much less –"
"You've never let anyone even try!" Frances barked. "If an idea isn't yours, it's garbage. You think you've got such a loyal staff?" Her face crinkled with unpleasant satisfaction. "They all hate your guts, and why shouldn't they? They're invisible unless they don't measure up to your standards, and then you're there to make sure everyone in the project knows how incompetent they are."
"That's not how I –" Emelia began, but Frances continued her scathing assessment without taking a breath.
"The hell it isn't! When was the last time you had a kind word for anyone? Me? Brandon? Howard?" She drew up straight, her eyes glittering with triumph. "You practically skinned him alive for taking five minutes to get to the nursery. You've got time for parties –" the word lashed out from between her lips – "and finger painting –"
"Stop it!" shouted Emelia, pointing a finger squarely back at Frances despite the blaster. "You leave them out of it!"
Wilson had paused from his work on the wiring between the TARDIS and panel to observe the exchange with an open mouth. Like a spectator at a tennis match, he turned his gaze back and forth between the two women as they furiously slammed insults at one another.
Emelia couldn't look at the Doctor. Please, know what you're doing. she pleaded internally, followed quickly by a more pragmatic hope: Please, be doing something.
As if to confirm her thought, there was a blinding flash from the TARDIS and the building went dark again.
…
Although Rose was expecting the surge, its brilliance and intensity shocked her. She forced her eyelids open and found only the afterimage of the explosion before her in the renewed darkness. Thank you, she thought with relief. At last, they could act.
With one hand in Connor's, the other skimming the wall to orient herself, she pressed forward. In front of her, she could hear confused shouts, the loudest from Emelia, and her ears strained for the Doctor's voice in the melee. She put one foot precisely in front of the other, focusing on what Jonah had shown her and trying to suppress her own terror.
She released Connor's hand and as planned, they separated. She could feel the familiar texture of the TARDIS beneath her fingers as she skirted around the blue box. She heard Frances, cursing loudly, so close in front of her that she could reach out and touch her.
Now.
Rose lunged into the darkness.
Connor fired his blaster into the air.
In the second moment of distraction, she grabbed Frances' weapon. The other woman realized what was happening and fought back, but Rose had the advantage of surprise. She kicked once, hard, aiming for where Frances' knee ought to be, and heard a sickening crunch and the other woman's scream of pain. The blaster was hers. She stumbled back, pressing herself flat against the TARDIS.
"Connor, got it," she yelled. "Doctor, where are you?"
Something grabbed her right ankle and jerked it forward, and she fell forward across a flabby human form. The blaster bounced out of her hand and clattered across the tiled floor away from her. Long fingernails stabbed into her arm and she yelped, trying to drag herself upright. A hand tangled in her hair and yanked painfully. Rose lashed out with a fist and connected with someone's nose. She scrambled across the floor, away from her attacker, but she had no idea where the blaster might have ended up.
As suddenly as they had gone off, the lights came back on. Rose surveyed the scene around her as her eyes adjusted. Connor had Wilson Wittener pressed face first against the wall with the blaster pointed against the back of his skull. Only a short distance away, Frances sprawled out on the floor, holding one hand against her nose in an ineffectual attempt to stop the bleeding.
At last, Rose saw the Doctor slumped against the wall, and her heart came into her throat at the sight of him. His face and shirt were smeared with blood, enough that she couldn't tell where it came from or indeed even if it were his blood. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and his freckles stood out prominently on his too-pale skin.
She struggled to her feet and ran to him. As she drew near, he held out an arm and tugged her close. She wanted nothing more than to sink into his embrace, but she pulled away enough to survey his beloved face and find the gash across his eyebrow, his only obvious wound.
"Worse than it looks," he told her with a grin that was probably meant to be cheeky but ended up gruesome. It faded immediately and he focused on a point behind her. She turned and saw Emelia picking up the blaster that she and Frances had dropped in their struggle.
Emelia's hair had slipped out of its bun and curled in loose waves down her back. She had a red mark that would form a nasty bruise over one cheekbone. Always before, Rose could see her emotions roiling just below the surface, but now, the anger and fear had been replaced with chilling composure.
"Emelia," said the Doctor reassuringly. "It's over. Put down the gun."
Emelia straightened and stared down at Frances. She brushed her dark hair away from her face and then gripped the blaster more firmly with both hands.
"Emelia," repeated the Doctor with more command this time. "This isn't the way."
She didn't respond.
Frances looked up at the barrel of the blaster. "Please," she said in a wavering voice. "I never meant for anyone to get hurt."
"You killed nine people," Emelia enunciated evenly. "I saw them. I helped clear the rubble. When I lifted someone's arm to scan an ident chip, it crumbled under my fingers." She paused. "For real estate."
Frances began to babble. "It wasn't supposed to – it was an accident – we didn't mean to hurt anyone." She gulped. "Once it happened, we didn't have a choice."
"There's always a choice," Emelia said, emotionless and still as a statue.
Rose realized in that instant what Emelia was capable of, what the Doctor feared. She could strike Frances down, and it would be murder.
"Yes," agreed the Doctor, his arm around Rose winding tighter, "there is always a choice, Emelia. Walk away. You're better than this."
Her attention snapped briefly from Frances to the Doctor, and her eyes were as cold and unforgiving as sea ice. "No, you're wrong. I'm not better and I don't want to be." It might even have been a reasonable tone if she hadn’t been pointing a gun at someone. "I can't let her go. She killed my people. She killed Jonah's parents. She would have killed me – and Connor – and risked everyone on the planet. My children." Her gaze returned to Frances. "She doesn't deserve to walk away from that."
"But you don’t deserve to judge and sentence her. That’s the law of the jungle. You’re not her executioner."
"And you are?" Emelia queried mildly, never taking her eyes off Frances. The question was eerily calm and deliberate. "Tell me, Doctor, have you ever killed an enemy?"
Rose felt him stiffen beside her. "I have," he said quietly. "You don't want to carry that burden." The grief and compassion in his words caught at Rose, but Emelia was still distant.
"It's not a burden," she said, raising her chin. One finger tensed on the trigger – a hair's breadth of movement. Rose swallowed.
"Emelia," he interrupted again, more forcefully this time. "Think of Ian and Jonah. Do you want them to know you've killed a woman in cold blood? That you committed murder?"
"Em, please," said Connor, taking a half-step back from Wilson. "We can make sure they're punished, but not like this."
"There will be punishment," the Doctor promised, his coldness the twin of Emelia's. In a fraction of a second his demeanour shifted and he offered support. "You're a good mother, Emelia. You care about your people. You're not a killer. We've caught them both and can make sure they're never free again to harm another living soul. Put the gun down."
Emelia thawed, just a fraction, but at that moment, Frances Wittener made the last mistake of her life.
…
"… not like this," Connor said. Please, Em. Don't.
He hardly heard the Doctor's words as he stared at his wife with the blaster in her hand. She trembled, and he saw the first shimmer of tears in the corners of her eyes. Hope flooded through him.
It died as Frances seized the opportunity presented by Emelia's hesitation and rolled to one side, toward the TARDIS. Everything after that progressed frame by frame in slow motion.
Emelia pulled the trigger.
Connor saw the burning air elongate for a single, shining moment from the barrel of the gun toward Frances' head. He didn't have time to avert his eyes, nor did Frances have time to scream before the impact.
At once, Wilson let out a wail of agony and crumpled to the ground like someone had pulled out his spine. As Wilson screamed, the Doctor shouted and leapt toward Frances' motionless form.
"Rose, get me the kit from the med bay," he ordered, kneeling beside Frances and pulling what was left of her head into his lap. Rose's mouth formed a wide O of shock, but she complied readily enough. Connor heard the rasping sound as she struggled to fit her key into the ship's door.
Emelia still held the blaster with both hands but was now pointing it at a spot on the floor just beyond her feet. Connor, with a glance at the still-screaming Wilson, tucked his own weapon in his waistband and walked slowly toward her.
"Em," he said carefully, extending a hand out in her direction. "Give it to me."
Her wide and glassy eyes shifted from Frances and the Doctor back to him, and he saw a spark of recognition deep within them. He extended a little further and put his hand on top of the blaster. Her grip relaxed and he moved his other hand underneath so he could delicately slide the weapon away from her. When her hands were empty, they fell listlessly to her sides. She allowed him to pull her close against him with his free arm but made no movement of her own.
Rose emerged from the TARDIS at a run and threw a white case to the Doctor, who began searching for equipment in it. Connor looked away. He didn't know what resources the Doctor might have at his disposal, but he knew Frances was dead.
Wilson stopped screaming and began to sob with the loud, breathless gulps of a drowning man. He wound himself up into the foetal position and rocked from side to side. Connor closed his eyes. They would have to deal with the aftermath now; the sabotage, the conspiracy, Frances' death, Wilson's complicity.
Emelia, his dynamo, balanced against him and made no sound either of relief or regret. Shock had made her unreadable to him. What would they do now?
"She's dead," said the Doctor unnecessarily after several moments. Wilson's sobs became a low, continuous whimper.
Involuntarily, Connor looked back over. The Doctor had folded a handkerchief across Frances' face, saving them all the horror of looking at what was no longer there. His shoulders slumped as he knelt beside the corpse, and when he looked up, Connor almost took a step back at what he saw. Not anger, which he had expected, but deep mourning, distress, and exhaustion. Connor had taken the Doctor to be younger than himself, but now he wondered. So much guilt, he thought, and gathered Emelia closer to him.
Rose knelt beside the Doctor and touched him lightly on the shoulder. He turned to her and she began to clean his face with a damp cloth, washing away the blood and dust to reveal the cut above his eyebrow and the shadows under his eyes.
"You did everything you could," he heard Rose say softly, and the Doctor's eyes dropped to the bloodstains on his clothes.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-08 03:16 am (UTC)So when's the next story-niblet released into the wild? How will this affect Jonah - we know he had a gut-lurching reaction to Frances, but I doubt that he'll deal with this well at all. It may shut both of his voices up again.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:20 am (UTC)I'm glad you think so!!!
So when's the next story-niblet released into the wild?
Not sure. I'm still working on it. I hope to get a good chunk done this weekend.
How will this affect Jonah - we know he had a gut-lurching reaction to Frances, but I doubt that he'll deal with this well at all. It may shut both of his voices up again.
And that is certainly one of the important questions to be answered, exactly.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:23 am (UTC)I had more nerves posting this than anything since my first smut. It was terrifying. I'm glad it was compelling.
Poor Emelia. Poor Doctor. Neither one of them is terribly good at forgiving themselves, are they?
The Doctor? Oh, certainly not. Emelia? We'll see.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-08 04:02 am (UTC)Brilliantly done.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-08 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:24 am (UTC)Exactly. Now, it's a matter of the cleanup.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-08 04:49 am (UTC)And nice bits of characterization involving the guilt the Doctor carries. Can't wait for more. :)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:25 am (UTC)Soon, I hope!
no subject
Date: 2007-11-08 05:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:25 am (UTC)That's the question, isn't it?
no subject
Date: 2007-11-08 07:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:26 am (UTC)Oh, thank you! That is a lovely compliment.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-08 07:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 12:27 am (UTC)No time for fluff, yet. Sorry. ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 02:58 am (UTC)I'm willing to bet Rose makes the Doctor stay a bit longer than usual, too.
Great chapter, though.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-09 03:29 am (UTC)She already has! But yes, while his first instinct will probably be to flee the scene, the Doctor's stuck in the middle of this disaster for a while.
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Date: 2007-11-09 06:49 am (UTC)Editing my comment because I can!
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Date: 2007-11-10 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 03:05 pm (UTC)I was trying to write the word 'unglamourous' in italics and it all went wrong!!
I'm not a great technochick, I'm afraid - I've only just sorted out an icon!
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Date: 2007-11-10 05:05 pm (UTC)Thank you; I was definitely worried about how everyone would react. Yes, the consequences of this make up a good bit of the end of the story.
And don't worry about the italics stuff. I got what you were saying :) and I like the new icon!
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Date: 2007-11-11 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-11 05:40 pm (UTC)