Fic Revival Week, post 5.3
Mar. 28th, 2010 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthTitle: To the Tune of Time (Chapter 3)
Author: jedi_of_urth
Characters/pairing: Rose, (Alt)Five, Mickey, Jake, Pete, (Alt)Nyssa, (Alt)Tegan, (Alt)Master. past Rose/Doctor shipping.
Rating: PG-13 ish
Disclaimer: Nope, still not mine
Spoilers: Doomsday in Rose-time, in Five-time it's a bit after Earthshock
Summary: Alternate universe with an alternate Doctor, but he's a lot different from the Doctor Rose knew.
I explained the rest of the stuff in Part 1
Chapter 3
“You guys hear anything?” Mickey asked as the group neared the TARDIS, certain he had heard something. No, heard was the wrong word, felt maybe but looking around there was only the other three people and the same sandy, windy beach.
The two women both shook their heads but Jake actually looked at him, they were used to relying on each other’s instincts. “What did you hear?” he asked.
“Nothing really,” he allowed. “Guess the wind’s just getting to me.” That was certainly possible, his head felt like it was echoing the gusts across the beach.
“Stop being paranoid,” Tegan scolded him as she pushed open the TARDIS door. Earlier Mickey had been surprised by the double entry, inner and outer doors where he’d once been used to the TARDIS with only one set. In some ways he might reckon it was more logical, as much as anything was logical about the TARDIS, any TARDIS.
This time the inside was an even bigger surprise. There was smoke clouding the consol room, there was clanging echoing through the room, probably the whole ship. Mickey flinched, the smoke and noise making his headache worse.
“Doctor?” he heard Tegan calling out, Nyssa echoing her.
“Rose?” he asked loudly into the smoke, coughing as he did so. “Rose, you there? Doctor?” Jake reached out and found Mickey’s hand, though it was so clouded they could barely see each other.
“The TARDIS is overloading,” the Doctor shouted, and Mickey could hear the frantic pressing of buttons.
“Might have guessed that,” Jake called back. Mickey and Jake moved towards the Doctor’s voice and Mickey distantly though how much easier it was to get around in this consol room, much less risk of falling over things.
The Doctor nearly ran into Mickey as he raced around the consol. “You might want to check on Rose,” he managed to say as he passed, slamming his hand down on another key pad. “Nyssa, start up the Koplik Protocol,” he said, turning his attention to his companions, already ghostly in the smoke to Mickey’s eye and he was only a few feet away.
Mickey looked around the room for Rose, but between the smoke and the tears he was producing in reaction to the smoke it seemed useless even in such a small room. Jake, being somewhat more quick thinking then Mickey this time, dropped to his hands and knees, in search of clearer air.
Above them the three TARDIS travelers continued hollering back and forth about what to do in an effort to get this under control, Mickey hoped they would as they were all coughing now and he knew they couldn’t stay in this environment for long. The smoke wasn’t quite as thick at this level and he could just make out a form ahead of him across the room. “Rose,” he said, gasping for breath as he and Jake crawled quickly over to Rose’s prone form.
Jake reached her first and turned her onto her back to better examine her. “She’s breathing,” he told Mickey quickly. “Rose, can you hear me?” he asked. He looked at Mickey, “We’ve got to get her out of here.”
Mickey nodded agreement, his heart racing even faster than it had been. Gathering his strength he slipped his arms under Rose and lifted her up. She grunted as he did so and he thought there could hardly have been a sweeter sound.
She was coughing, gagging on the smoke as Mickey nearly ran into the consol attempting to hurry across the room. “Careful,” Jake reminded him, nearly running into him from behind.
“Yes, careful,” the Doctor said, just discernable a few feet away. “Now all of you should get out of here.”
“What are you going to do?” Nyssa asked and now Mickey could just make out the two women a bit closer to him on the other side of the consol from the Doctor, but with his head still pounding in time with the siren and the smoke reacting badly with his senses he didn’t focus on them long instead making his way towards the exit.
The freezing air outside was a shock after the overheated interior of the TARDIS and even Rose in her state of semi consciousness recoiled from it by grasping more tightly to Mickey. He settled her down in the relative shelter of the side of the TARDIS, Jake behind them with an arm around Nyssa pulling her out and Tegan behind them. “You okay Rose?” he asked her, hoping she’d actually be able to respond.
“Can’t,” she gasped, he eyes still squeezed shut. “Can’t breathe.”
“It’s alright, we’re out now,” Mickey assured her.
“Out…out of tune,” she forced out between shallow breaths. She pulled on the front of his coat and managed to open her eyes to look at him. “Universe…overloaded. Me…wrong.”
She looked at him desperately, obviously hoping he’d understand, but he didn’t. “What?” he asked, shaking his head.
Her mouth started to move as if she might try and say something more, but her body was wracked with spasms and Mickey did the only thing he could think to do. “Doctor!” he shouted.
He’d tried every reasonable thing he could to get the TARDIS systems under control, but nothing had worked, now he needed a brilliant unreasonable solution. But almost as soon as the others had left, the consol exploded in a shower of sparks, brightly visible even among the haze.
He dodged away, shielding his face from the blast. Even he was struggling not to cough now and the cacophony on sounds wailed both danger and distress. He tried to approach the consol again, perhaps he could finally figure out what was causing the energy overload, but he could feel another eruption coming so he turned and ducked out the door, feeling the TARDIS shake against his back.
“Doctor!” Mickey shouted and the Doctor look around the corner of police box exterior and saw the group crowded around Rose’s shaking form.
“What’s happened?” he barked.
“Woke up some and said something about being out of tune and the universe overloading,” Mickey said quickly, “and then she started this.”
The Doctor looked at Mickey for a moment that was all he could spare. “Oh course,” he gasped. “It’s like I said, she’s out of tune with this universe, so someone somehow is flooding the universe with energy and she’s reacting like this and the TARDIS is overloading with it.”
“Great, how do we stop it?” Jake asked, he voice strained by trying to remain calm and cool.
Thinking quickly the Doctor kept talking as his mind raced. “Rose is basically a point of negative energy, if we could somehow use that and feed it back through the network it should stop the process.”
“Should?” Jake jumped on.
“You’re not sacrificing her,” Mickey said sharply.
The Doctor wondered what sort of man his double had been that that was Mickey’s first thought. “I am not going to sacrifice someone else,” he said forcefully. Nyssa and Tegan would know he meant Adric, he it was doubtful the others would understand his meaning.
Mickey looked at him solidly, in that he sounded more like the other Doctor than Mickey had yet heard him sound. He nodded his acceptance, he’d have to hope there wasn’t a version of the Doctor in any universe that could knowingly sacrifice Rose Tyler.
The Doctor only hesitated another moment before his fingers sought her temples. Mickey looked on, worried again, he’d seen the other Doctor do this only twice and it always freaked him out. He heard Nyssa gasp and tore his gaze away from the Doctor and Rose to look around, and found that the breach the Doctor had correctly placed earlier was now glowing with an electric white glare.
The hands that pressed against her face were still unfamiliar, but in her mind as he guided her away from the pain pressing into her, those hands were ones she knew the touch of. Beloved rough palms and long fingers that had taken her hand at every opportunity whether running across the desert on Yangor Prime or just walking across the Powell Estate. She would know that hand anywhere even if it wasn’t always the same hand technically.
They weren’t on Bad Wolf Bay any more, it was New Earth, the scent of sea and fruit surrounded her, the brightness of sky and sea and land filled her senses. She had to blink to clear her vision, though as she did she realized it must be useless, it was all in her mind anyway. She took another deep breath of the clean air, it even tasted new as everything had that day.
“New Earth? A bit direct of him,” the Doctor commented and she finally focused on him. The Doctor she had just met was most clear, but she could see familiar features lurking behind those pale ones, and more beyond that. She had done this a few times with her Doctor so shutting out the other faces was easy enough, they were a part of him as much as his present features were but the echoes were just that.
Shutting out the familiar faces was harder. To focus on his sparkling ice blue eyes or the deep brown ones she could lose herself in was just what she wanted to do; to see her him rather than the man that had brought her here. She blinked a few times but she just couldn’t make her mind send them away, although she could separate them from the newest face she’d met. “What’s going on?” she asked, focusing on the blond Doctor while the figures of the other two figures hovered just visible near their counterpart. Sometimes they were merged and sometimes not; apparently her mind couldn’t decide how best to present things.
“It’s your psychic energy,” he explained. “That’s why you’re in pain and what we need to stop this effect.”
“Alright,” she nodded. “What do we do?”
“I need you to trust me,” he said, taking a step towards her. “Just relax and trust me.”
Rose’s focus left him for the shadows behind him, to the man who she could barely recall having to ask for her trust he had simply had it. Did she trust the stranger with his name? Did she trust him only because he was the Doctor and she like her parents and Jake felt drawn to the double of lost love?
He was so different here, but still he saved her life, he asked her along, the first word he’d said to her was “run” even if she hadn’t listened. She supposed she did trust him if it came down to that, she just hoped she trusted him for the right reasons.
She reached out and took his hands in hers, here in their mind he couldn’t hide his surprise at her forward familiarity. She couldn’t help it, to put her life, her mind, in his hands she had to hold them, or at least feel as though she did. His hands weren’t familiar, sharp but not boney. She took another deep breath of the sweet air and nodded to him, and another breath to continue relaxing.
And then the world rocked again, this time golden light overcame everything else her mind had been presented with. Even her breath was a golden spiral, flowing into him, the light hiding his features and her mind blurring them until he seemed lost in the glow. But he gripped her hands tightly, and wouldn’t let go, and she smiled, trusting he wasn’t going to.
Rose glowed for a few seconds and then the glow seemed to migrate to the Doctor, he was crackling with energy as the warm light filled him until his eyes were filled with golden light.
He could barely hold it, the power he was drawing from her. It could consume him or destroy him and he wanted to howl with the power. But in his mind she felt tight to him, grounding him even as she fed the fire inside him. How had he not seen this in her? This power so outside of this universe, burning so brightly just under the surface of her mind.
And this was just a taste of what she had once held, the memories, her memories, of that event were a worse jumble than his own state of mind with the energy flooding his senses. “Let go,” a voice told him and he wasn’t sure whose it was. It was a command, but how could he let go of this? “Let go, now.” The command seized control and he did, directed the energy to the rift.
The burst of golden energy seemed to be absorbed into the crackling rift. As it was, the rift pulled in on itself, pulling the collapse as the network short circuited, flooded with the wrong fuel. In his mind, other things shorted out, the entire time vortex nearly collapsed as the subnetwork could only explode into the Vortex but it dispersed quickly enough that there would only be a few months of problems rather than decades. The TARDIS systems, already stressed and troubled, finally shut off but they were still alive, in only just.
The Doctor’s fingers were still locked to Rose’s temples, dream hands grasped tightly and neither sure who was holding and who was held anymore. Neither sure which of them slipped and pulled the other into unconsciousness, but they both fell into its easy oblivion.
The Doctor began to regain consciousness fairly quickly, not that there was much to be conscious for besides his companions and guests considering what to do.
“We could try to find the Zero Room, the Doctor said it was only misplaced after his regeneration.”
“Rose’s phone used to get reception even in the TARDIS, now I can’t even get anything outside.”
“Mickey how many times do I have to remind you today, she doesn’t carry that phone with her any more? Does that phone look like it came from the other universe? And what’s a Zero Room?”
“”Nyssa look around do you really think the TARDIS has a working Zero Room even if it’s still here.” Tegan sounded snappish the Doctor considered, not unusual for her but more unusual for it to be directed at Nyssa.
He concentrated on getting his biological systems functioning, it wouldn’t take long and he’d be back on his feet, and then he’d have to see just how bad things were.
“Do either of you have a super phone?” Mickey asked.
“What’s that?” Tegan turned her ire on him now.
“Just that, the Doctor used to mess around with Rose’s mobile and she could make calls from anywhere. Not that she did very often, but she could. And I’m thinking we need to get some help up here I know for a fact the nearest town is more than ten miles down the road, and it barely deserves to be called a town.”
“Won’t be necessary,” the Doctor said, sitting up and surveying the surrounding for the first time. They’d moved him into the consol room, which was still warm but that was from the heat produced earlier, if he couldn’t get the environmental systems working again soon it wouldn’t be long until it grew too cold in here for the humans. There was still a slight haze from the earlier smoke but it had mostly settled or dissipated, the consol itself was blackened in few sections and the lighting barely qualified as that, even the emergency lights weren’t providing much illumination. Tegan, Nyssa, and Jake had gathered around the consol and Mickey was near the door, having just returned from outside.
A glance to his right confirmed the Rose was laid on the floor next to him, a moment’s examination physically and mentally, confirmed that she was merely unconscious and not damaged by her part in the earlier process. Then he got to his feet and joined the group at the consol. He ignored Mickey smirking at him, especially as, even though Mickey was misinterpreting his attention to Rose, he understood why the young man was inclined to smirk over it.
Things were fortunately no worse than he thought they were that much he could see quickly, they also weren’t much better than he’d foreseen. He could shut down non-essential portions of the TARDIS to make some time for the recharge cycle to make some headway but it was going to take some time since the raw energy of the vortex was somewhat tainted for it to be purified to heal the ship.
“So how much is wrong?” Mickey asked. Of course, Mickey might be just as bad as Rose at pestering him with useless questions while he worked.
“Give me a moment and hopefully less will be,” he snapped.
There, he could just get faint connection to the Eye of Harmony, that should stabilize things here and they should be able to start patching up soon. For a fleeting moment he wondered how they were dealing with this back on Gallifrey but he didn’t really have time to concern himself with that now. He’d also been closer to a breach, and it had only been a spatial rift so none of it had come near Gallifrey, except that the Vortex had been disrupted, and that could cause them a large number of problems. No sense worrying if his increased draw on resources would be lost if the planetary population required more.
“Alright,” he breathed, patting the TARDIS as he finally relaxed. “That should manage things for now.”
And that's were I wandered away from this fic, sorry anyone who really wanted more. Maybe one day, but I wouldn't hold my breath
Author: jedi_of_urth
Characters/pairing: Rose, (Alt)Five, Mickey, Jake, Pete, (Alt)Nyssa, (Alt)Tegan, (Alt)Master. past Rose/Doctor shipping.
Rating: PG-13 ish
Disclaimer: Nope, still not mine
Spoilers: Doomsday in Rose-time, in Five-time it's a bit after Earthshock
Summary: Alternate universe with an alternate Doctor, but he's a lot different from the Doctor Rose knew.
I explained the rest of the stuff in Part 1
Chapter 3
“You guys hear anything?” Mickey asked as the group neared the TARDIS, certain he had heard something. No, heard was the wrong word, felt maybe but looking around there was only the other three people and the same sandy, windy beach.
The two women both shook their heads but Jake actually looked at him, they were used to relying on each other’s instincts. “What did you hear?” he asked.
“Nothing really,” he allowed. “Guess the wind’s just getting to me.” That was certainly possible, his head felt like it was echoing the gusts across the beach.
“Stop being paranoid,” Tegan scolded him as she pushed open the TARDIS door. Earlier Mickey had been surprised by the double entry, inner and outer doors where he’d once been used to the TARDIS with only one set. In some ways he might reckon it was more logical, as much as anything was logical about the TARDIS, any TARDIS.
This time the inside was an even bigger surprise. There was smoke clouding the consol room, there was clanging echoing through the room, probably the whole ship. Mickey flinched, the smoke and noise making his headache worse.
“Doctor?” he heard Tegan calling out, Nyssa echoing her.
“Rose?” he asked loudly into the smoke, coughing as he did so. “Rose, you there? Doctor?” Jake reached out and found Mickey’s hand, though it was so clouded they could barely see each other.
“The TARDIS is overloading,” the Doctor shouted, and Mickey could hear the frantic pressing of buttons.
“Might have guessed that,” Jake called back. Mickey and Jake moved towards the Doctor’s voice and Mickey distantly though how much easier it was to get around in this consol room, much less risk of falling over things.
The Doctor nearly ran into Mickey as he raced around the consol. “You might want to check on Rose,” he managed to say as he passed, slamming his hand down on another key pad. “Nyssa, start up the Koplik Protocol,” he said, turning his attention to his companions, already ghostly in the smoke to Mickey’s eye and he was only a few feet away.
Mickey looked around the room for Rose, but between the smoke and the tears he was producing in reaction to the smoke it seemed useless even in such a small room. Jake, being somewhat more quick thinking then Mickey this time, dropped to his hands and knees, in search of clearer air.
Above them the three TARDIS travelers continued hollering back and forth about what to do in an effort to get this under control, Mickey hoped they would as they were all coughing now and he knew they couldn’t stay in this environment for long. The smoke wasn’t quite as thick at this level and he could just make out a form ahead of him across the room. “Rose,” he said, gasping for breath as he and Jake crawled quickly over to Rose’s prone form.
Jake reached her first and turned her onto her back to better examine her. “She’s breathing,” he told Mickey quickly. “Rose, can you hear me?” he asked. He looked at Mickey, “We’ve got to get her out of here.”
Mickey nodded agreement, his heart racing even faster than it had been. Gathering his strength he slipped his arms under Rose and lifted her up. She grunted as he did so and he thought there could hardly have been a sweeter sound.
She was coughing, gagging on the smoke as Mickey nearly ran into the consol attempting to hurry across the room. “Careful,” Jake reminded him, nearly running into him from behind.
“Yes, careful,” the Doctor said, just discernable a few feet away. “Now all of you should get out of here.”
“What are you going to do?” Nyssa asked and now Mickey could just make out the two women a bit closer to him on the other side of the consol from the Doctor, but with his head still pounding in time with the siren and the smoke reacting badly with his senses he didn’t focus on them long instead making his way towards the exit.
The freezing air outside was a shock after the overheated interior of the TARDIS and even Rose in her state of semi consciousness recoiled from it by grasping more tightly to Mickey. He settled her down in the relative shelter of the side of the TARDIS, Jake behind them with an arm around Nyssa pulling her out and Tegan behind them. “You okay Rose?” he asked her, hoping she’d actually be able to respond.
“Can’t,” she gasped, he eyes still squeezed shut. “Can’t breathe.”
“It’s alright, we’re out now,” Mickey assured her.
“Out…out of tune,” she forced out between shallow breaths. She pulled on the front of his coat and managed to open her eyes to look at him. “Universe…overloaded. Me…wrong.”
She looked at him desperately, obviously hoping he’d understand, but he didn’t. “What?” he asked, shaking his head.
Her mouth started to move as if she might try and say something more, but her body was wracked with spasms and Mickey did the only thing he could think to do. “Doctor!” he shouted.
He’d tried every reasonable thing he could to get the TARDIS systems under control, but nothing had worked, now he needed a brilliant unreasonable solution. But almost as soon as the others had left, the consol exploded in a shower of sparks, brightly visible even among the haze.
He dodged away, shielding his face from the blast. Even he was struggling not to cough now and the cacophony on sounds wailed both danger and distress. He tried to approach the consol again, perhaps he could finally figure out what was causing the energy overload, but he could feel another eruption coming so he turned and ducked out the door, feeling the TARDIS shake against his back.
“Doctor!” Mickey shouted and the Doctor look around the corner of police box exterior and saw the group crowded around Rose’s shaking form.
“What’s happened?” he barked.
“Woke up some and said something about being out of tune and the universe overloading,” Mickey said quickly, “and then she started this.”
The Doctor looked at Mickey for a moment that was all he could spare. “Oh course,” he gasped. “It’s like I said, she’s out of tune with this universe, so someone somehow is flooding the universe with energy and she’s reacting like this and the TARDIS is overloading with it.”
“Great, how do we stop it?” Jake asked, he voice strained by trying to remain calm and cool.
Thinking quickly the Doctor kept talking as his mind raced. “Rose is basically a point of negative energy, if we could somehow use that and feed it back through the network it should stop the process.”
“Should?” Jake jumped on.
“You’re not sacrificing her,” Mickey said sharply.
The Doctor wondered what sort of man his double had been that that was Mickey’s first thought. “I am not going to sacrifice someone else,” he said forcefully. Nyssa and Tegan would know he meant Adric, he it was doubtful the others would understand his meaning.
Mickey looked at him solidly, in that he sounded more like the other Doctor than Mickey had yet heard him sound. He nodded his acceptance, he’d have to hope there wasn’t a version of the Doctor in any universe that could knowingly sacrifice Rose Tyler.
The Doctor only hesitated another moment before his fingers sought her temples. Mickey looked on, worried again, he’d seen the other Doctor do this only twice and it always freaked him out. He heard Nyssa gasp and tore his gaze away from the Doctor and Rose to look around, and found that the breach the Doctor had correctly placed earlier was now glowing with an electric white glare.
The hands that pressed against her face were still unfamiliar, but in her mind as he guided her away from the pain pressing into her, those hands were ones she knew the touch of. Beloved rough palms and long fingers that had taken her hand at every opportunity whether running across the desert on Yangor Prime or just walking across the Powell Estate. She would know that hand anywhere even if it wasn’t always the same hand technically.
They weren’t on Bad Wolf Bay any more, it was New Earth, the scent of sea and fruit surrounded her, the brightness of sky and sea and land filled her senses. She had to blink to clear her vision, though as she did she realized it must be useless, it was all in her mind anyway. She took another deep breath of the clean air, it even tasted new as everything had that day.
“New Earth? A bit direct of him,” the Doctor commented and she finally focused on him. The Doctor she had just met was most clear, but she could see familiar features lurking behind those pale ones, and more beyond that. She had done this a few times with her Doctor so shutting out the other faces was easy enough, they were a part of him as much as his present features were but the echoes were just that.
Shutting out the familiar faces was harder. To focus on his sparkling ice blue eyes or the deep brown ones she could lose herself in was just what she wanted to do; to see her him rather than the man that had brought her here. She blinked a few times but she just couldn’t make her mind send them away, although she could separate them from the newest face she’d met. “What’s going on?” she asked, focusing on the blond Doctor while the figures of the other two figures hovered just visible near their counterpart. Sometimes they were merged and sometimes not; apparently her mind couldn’t decide how best to present things.
“It’s your psychic energy,” he explained. “That’s why you’re in pain and what we need to stop this effect.”
“Alright,” she nodded. “What do we do?”
“I need you to trust me,” he said, taking a step towards her. “Just relax and trust me.”
Rose’s focus left him for the shadows behind him, to the man who she could barely recall having to ask for her trust he had simply had it. Did she trust the stranger with his name? Did she trust him only because he was the Doctor and she like her parents and Jake felt drawn to the double of lost love?
He was so different here, but still he saved her life, he asked her along, the first word he’d said to her was “run” even if she hadn’t listened. She supposed she did trust him if it came down to that, she just hoped she trusted him for the right reasons.
She reached out and took his hands in hers, here in their mind he couldn’t hide his surprise at her forward familiarity. She couldn’t help it, to put her life, her mind, in his hands she had to hold them, or at least feel as though she did. His hands weren’t familiar, sharp but not boney. She took another deep breath of the sweet air and nodded to him, and another breath to continue relaxing.
And then the world rocked again, this time golden light overcame everything else her mind had been presented with. Even her breath was a golden spiral, flowing into him, the light hiding his features and her mind blurring them until he seemed lost in the glow. But he gripped her hands tightly, and wouldn’t let go, and she smiled, trusting he wasn’t going to.
Rose glowed for a few seconds and then the glow seemed to migrate to the Doctor, he was crackling with energy as the warm light filled him until his eyes were filled with golden light.
He could barely hold it, the power he was drawing from her. It could consume him or destroy him and he wanted to howl with the power. But in his mind she felt tight to him, grounding him even as she fed the fire inside him. How had he not seen this in her? This power so outside of this universe, burning so brightly just under the surface of her mind.
And this was just a taste of what she had once held, the memories, her memories, of that event were a worse jumble than his own state of mind with the energy flooding his senses. “Let go,” a voice told him and he wasn’t sure whose it was. It was a command, but how could he let go of this? “Let go, now.” The command seized control and he did, directed the energy to the rift.
The burst of golden energy seemed to be absorbed into the crackling rift. As it was, the rift pulled in on itself, pulling the collapse as the network short circuited, flooded with the wrong fuel. In his mind, other things shorted out, the entire time vortex nearly collapsed as the subnetwork could only explode into the Vortex but it dispersed quickly enough that there would only be a few months of problems rather than decades. The TARDIS systems, already stressed and troubled, finally shut off but they were still alive, in only just.
The Doctor’s fingers were still locked to Rose’s temples, dream hands grasped tightly and neither sure who was holding and who was held anymore. Neither sure which of them slipped and pulled the other into unconsciousness, but they both fell into its easy oblivion.
The Doctor began to regain consciousness fairly quickly, not that there was much to be conscious for besides his companions and guests considering what to do.
“We could try to find the Zero Room, the Doctor said it was only misplaced after his regeneration.”
“Rose’s phone used to get reception even in the TARDIS, now I can’t even get anything outside.”
“Mickey how many times do I have to remind you today, she doesn’t carry that phone with her any more? Does that phone look like it came from the other universe? And what’s a Zero Room?”
“”Nyssa look around do you really think the TARDIS has a working Zero Room even if it’s still here.” Tegan sounded snappish the Doctor considered, not unusual for her but more unusual for it to be directed at Nyssa.
He concentrated on getting his biological systems functioning, it wouldn’t take long and he’d be back on his feet, and then he’d have to see just how bad things were.
“Do either of you have a super phone?” Mickey asked.
“What’s that?” Tegan turned her ire on him now.
“Just that, the Doctor used to mess around with Rose’s mobile and she could make calls from anywhere. Not that she did very often, but she could. And I’m thinking we need to get some help up here I know for a fact the nearest town is more than ten miles down the road, and it barely deserves to be called a town.”
“Won’t be necessary,” the Doctor said, sitting up and surveying the surrounding for the first time. They’d moved him into the consol room, which was still warm but that was from the heat produced earlier, if he couldn’t get the environmental systems working again soon it wouldn’t be long until it grew too cold in here for the humans. There was still a slight haze from the earlier smoke but it had mostly settled or dissipated, the consol itself was blackened in few sections and the lighting barely qualified as that, even the emergency lights weren’t providing much illumination. Tegan, Nyssa, and Jake had gathered around the consol and Mickey was near the door, having just returned from outside.
A glance to his right confirmed the Rose was laid on the floor next to him, a moment’s examination physically and mentally, confirmed that she was merely unconscious and not damaged by her part in the earlier process. Then he got to his feet and joined the group at the consol. He ignored Mickey smirking at him, especially as, even though Mickey was misinterpreting his attention to Rose, he understood why the young man was inclined to smirk over it.
Things were fortunately no worse than he thought they were that much he could see quickly, they also weren’t much better than he’d foreseen. He could shut down non-essential portions of the TARDIS to make some time for the recharge cycle to make some headway but it was going to take some time since the raw energy of the vortex was somewhat tainted for it to be purified to heal the ship.
“So how much is wrong?” Mickey asked. Of course, Mickey might be just as bad as Rose at pestering him with useless questions while he worked.
“Give me a moment and hopefully less will be,” he snapped.
There, he could just get faint connection to the Eye of Harmony, that should stabilize things here and they should be able to start patching up soon. For a fleeting moment he wondered how they were dealing with this back on Gallifrey but he didn’t really have time to concern himself with that now. He’d also been closer to a breach, and it had only been a spatial rift so none of it had come near Gallifrey, except that the Vortex had been disrupted, and that could cause them a large number of problems. No sense worrying if his increased draw on resources would be lost if the planetary population required more.
“Alright,” he breathed, patting the TARDIS as he finally relaxed. “That should manage things for now.”
And that's were I wandered away from this fic, sorry anyone who really wanted more. Maybe one day, but I wouldn't hold my breath
