Chapter Text
Oliver wished, not for the first time, that he had called in to work that morning. He had awoken with a smidgen of a headache, after all. That seemed like a perfectly reasonable reason to stay home, and a much better alternative to hunting for killer telepathic mold in the women’s loo.
“I don’t understand. If it was really just mold, then the bleach should have killed it,” Oliver said. He held onto a large empty marmalade pot (wondering, not for the first time, how, where, and when the Doctor had procured it) while the Doctor scraped away at the wall with an abandoned painter’s tool. “That’s what bleach does. It kills mold. So this stuff can’t be mold. It’s got to be some kind of alien virus or something,” Oliver insisted.
“You didn’t kill it, but you did weaken it,” the Doctor said, scraping through layers of paint. “Once the hive mind was threatened, it started to expand, sending foot soldiers out in search of a new place to live, a place they could more easily defend. Couldn’t risk getting bleached and painted over again, you see. And after sensing all of the people passing through here, what better host could they think of than a warm, moving, human body?”
He let out a grunt at a particularly stubborn bit of paint. “So the hive mind sends out a sort of reconnaissance team, if you will, and their job is to determine which bodies would make suitable hosts for everyone in the hive.”
“And they do that by?”
“They’re telepathic, remember?”
“Ah, of course,” Oliver said, rolling his eyes. “However could I forget?”
“Anyway,” the Doctor continued as if he hadn’t heard Oliver, “I figured the bleach would work on the foot soldiers, the members of the group that physically possessed Rose and your employees. They’re a little weaker, being so far away from the core group. But when dealing with the core group, with the actual hive mind, you need to use something a bit stronger.”
He paused. “I reckon you just really ticked the hive mind off.”
“And...the hive mind is living underneath the paint, in the women’s loo?” Oliver asked dubiously, looking around the pale grey stalls. He felt more than a little silly standing in there with a marmalade pot while the Doctor stood on a toilet and chipped away at the back wall.
“Mold likes to live in damp places. Where do you find mold? The toilet.”
“Yes, but how do you know for certain that this is the hive mind?” Oliver asked.
“Educated guess. And some interminably boring interdepartmental memos about maintenance and fresh paint jobs. About as fascinating as—well, as watching paint dry, really.”
The Doctor stopped. “Ah. See, there it is.”
Oliver leaned in close. Certain enough, there was a large black spot on the wall, dark and ominous underneath the fresh white paint. Oliver swore he could see it growing right before his eyes. His jaw dropped. “We just had it removed,” he said. “Bloody ineffective cleaners, they’d better give us a refund is all I have to say.”
Then he panicked. “Wait—how are you certain we won’t get contaminated, right here and now?”
“I’m not,” the Doctor said firmly. “Hand me the pot.”
Oliver complied, but he wasn’t happy about it. He leaned out of the stall a little bit, peeking at the exit longingly.
“If we can take out the hive mind, that should eliminate the remaining foot soldiers as well,” the Doctor was saying. “They can’t survive without the rest of the hive.” He scraped bits of drywall and black mold into the pot.
Oliver wrinkled his nose at the black stuff quietly plink, plink, plinking against the glass. This was easily the nastiest bloody thing he’d ever encountered in a marmalade pot.
“And the whole hive mind, or home base, or whatever, the whole thing’s going to fit in here?” he asked, eying both the wall and the pot.
“Ah, don’t be fooled by its surface area. It’s mold, not jam. It doesn’t take up a lot of volume. Not until it’s expanded inside a living host, anyway.”
Oliver looked at the ever-filling jar, shuddered, and swore to never touch marmalade again.
“And how do you plan to kill it?” he prodded.
“Thought I’d take it down to your evil secret lab and see what you’ve got,” the Doctor replied. “Any suggestions?”
Oliver thought for a moment. “I might have a few ideas,” he said.
**
Rose huddled in the corner of the hallway, forcing herself to breathe. Greg’s corpse stunk in front of her. Miranda stood over him, regarding his body with an almost curious stare.
Rose lifted the spray bottle. It was empty.
Miranda shook her head. “We don’t know why you would do that,” she said. “You are going to die anyway. Killing our hive-mates will not change your fate.”
“Yeah, well...” Rose gasped. “Human beings don’t really like it when something tries to kill them. We’re...funny that way.”
“We are only trying to survive,” Miranda told her. “We tried living in the walls and the dark places, cut off from our family hive, our brothers and sisters back home. We did not harm anyone, and your kind tried to kill us. And they did. They killed so many of us with their chemicals and weapons and their fire.”
Rose opened her mouth to speak, but fell silent. She suspected that the explanation of “Yes, but we get rid of mold all the time” wouldn’t fare so well.
“Your kind has the ultimate power in this world. If we cannot go home, we need bodies like yours to survive. What would you have done in our place?” Miranda’s body asked.
Rose thought for a moment, panting for breath. She felt bad for these creatures. She really did. She knew what it was like to be cut off from the world and the life she knew. But she couldn’t condone their actions, no matter how sympathetic she may feel.
Miranda and Jared and Greg didn’t deserve to die for them.
“I would have found another way,” she said obstinately. She could feel her heart slowing. It was very painful. Each word was a struggle.
“In fact...” she said, even as she realized it was true, “I still can.”
“Empty words,” Miranda spat.
She jerked her head to the side, as if hearing something, something far away. Her dark eyes widened and her mouth tensed. She did not like what she heard. Miranda let out another one of her unearthly screams.
“Broken promises and lies,” Miranda’s body hissed, her head snapping back toward Rose. “Your precious Traveler-Doctor is planning to kill us all right now!”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Rose insisted. “That’s not his way.”
“But we can see the truth beyond that,” Miranda told her. “We can see the truth in your mind. This is not the Traveler you knew. This is something different. He will not help us. He will kill us all.”
She stopped.
“Unless we kill him first.”
**
“Our laboratory has some of the most advanced scientific and military equipment on Earth,” Oliver explained as he and the Doctor made their way down to the lab. “I don’t know how well it holds up to—to—Time King technology or what have you, but it’s pretty good stuff.”
“Time—what?” the Doctor asked as they ran down the stairs.
“Time King, isn’t that what you are?”
“Time Lord, I’m a Time Lord,” the Doctor shot back. “‘Time King’,” he muttered derisively.
Oliver huffed. “Well excuse me if my brain is a bit too occupied at the moment to remember something like that. It’s not every day I deal with killer alien fungus, you know.”
“Pretty typical day for me. This it, then?” the Doctor asked as they landed outside a plain white door on the lowest level of the building. “Bit underwhelming, isn’t it?”
“Sorry it fails to impress,” Oliver said, rolling his eyes. “If we’d known you’d be dropping by, maybe we’d have put up a banner or something.”
He pulled out his keycard and swiped it. The door slid open. He and the Doctor stepped inside.
The Doctor let out a low whistle.
While the outside was nothing special, the laboratory itself was a scientist’s dream. Even with most of the lights out, the Doctor could see a vast room in chrome and white, stretching out for what seemed like an impossibly long distance, full of projects upon projects awaiting completion. He walked between the tables, looking over pads of paper covered in hastily scribbled notes, a magnetics project that was easily 98% complete even if its scientist didn’t know it, and tablets screens frozen on scenes of computer-generated project simulations; he noticed that one of the scenes bore the initials “LR”, and wondered if Luke Rattigan worked for Torchwood in this universe. He saw nanotech and biospheres and gravitrons and machinery in various states of assemblage on stainless steel tables, lying next to beakers and vials and glass globes full of all sorts of fascinating liquids and gases, everything separated by fancy clear boards covered in equations and theories and diagrams.
“Not bad,” he said in approval. “Got a few years to go before you solve the Hellfire Paradigm, but really, otherwise, not bad.”
He glanced back at Oliver. “How did you know I’m a Time Lord, anyway?” he asked.
“All Torchwood agents are required to divulge any information about alien contact before they start working here,” Oliver explained. “Tyler told us about her travels with you. Said some pretty impressive stuff. Quite frankly, that’s the only reason I’m going along with whatever potty plan you’ve got going, is based on her stories about you.”
“Ah. So what else did she say about me? Anything good?” the Doctor asked with a twinkling smile.
Oliver cleared his throat in response.
“Right! Priorities, end of humanity and all that. So what do you have in here that can kill killer mold?”
“We have a few things in the classified department,” Oliver said. He gestured to a door marked “Clearance One Personnel Only”, next to a set of windows opening into a dark room. “It’s all highly experimental, but I’m sure you’ll find something. We have a world-class laser, strongest known one on Earth. There’s also a cryo-chamber and a vibranium core and a miniature microwave reactor. Surely we’ve got something you can use.”
Oliver swiped his card again, and the “Clearance One” door slid open.
The Doctor stood in the doorway, surveying the contents of the room. “Don’t know about you, but I feel like that laser is looking pretty good,” he said.
He and Oliver stepped inside the chamber.
Inside the dark outer room, something moved.
**
“Please, I’m begging you, just let us help,” Rose pleaded with the Miranda, or rather the creature inside her. “You don’t need to kill anyone else.”
“Like Rose and the Traveler and the others here killed us?”
Rose winced. “That was different, we didn’t understand. But now I do. And I can help you.”
Miranda shook her head. “We’ve heard that before. The Traveler-Doctor promised to help. And now he’s planning to destroy us. You are lying just as he was.”
“He doesn’t lie,” Rose said, fully knowing that this wasn’t true.
Miranda laughed. “Oh, poor child!” she said. “Poor, stupid child. The Traveler is a lie! His entire existence! You forget, as the end approaches, as your shell is hollowed to make room for us, we can see everything inside your mind. We see the true Traveler leaving you behind, leaving you with this duplicate, this shadow, this poor facsimile of himself. We see your thoughts and hear your feelings. We know everything.”
“Then know this!” Rose gasped. She tried to stand up, but could not. She slumped back against the wall. “If you know everything going on inside my head, know this: I’m not lying. I will help you, if you’ll just let me. He might not do anything for you, but I will. I promise.”
Miranda stared at her. Rose couldn’t tell what she was thinking, if anything.
Rose closed her eyes. “I promise,” she said. A grey tear slid down her cheek. “I promise.”
After a few moments, Rose opened her eyes. Miranda was standing very close to her now. Her hand extended outward to Rose.
Rose blinked the grey tears away, confused.
“We...believe you,” Miranda said.
**
“The laser will take several minutes to charge,” Oliver explained as he initiated the start-up sequence. He flipped switches and hit keys on the console of the gigantic laser, a monolithic silver cannon-shaped thing. A hum filled the room, growing louder as the weapon powered up, buzzing like a nest full of bees. The sound sent tiny vibrations through the air and set the Doctor’s teeth on edge.
“It’s a pretty damn powerful thing,” Oliver noted over the noise.
“You said it can incinerate just about anything?” the Doctor asked. Oliver nodded. “That should be good enough, then. Except you look nervous,” the Doctor said. “Should we be nervous?”
“Well of course we should be cautious, everything in here is highly experimental,” Oliver said. “For all we know, anything in here could blow up in our faces.”
The Doctor clapped him on the shoulder. “Well that just makes it fun! Now where’s the pot?”
Oliver handed the marmalade pot to him, his face incredulous. “You’re a bit barmy, you are,” he told the Doctor.
The Doctor nodded, grinning like a madman.
He placed the jar in the laser cannon’s line of fire. “That’s it, then,” the Doctor said. “I guess all we do now is—”
Something caught his eye.
“Run!” he shouted.
Oliver turned around to see a very dead person in a HAZMAT suit in front of him. The dead person opened his mouth.
“What—”
“Run!”
The Doctor just barely managed to pull Oliver aside before a stream of black shot out of the corpse’s mouth, burning a hole through his mask. A few droplets of it caught Oliver on his arm and the side of the face.
“Christ!” Oliver shouted, pulling his hand up to his cheek. He frantically wiped off the fluid with his jacket sleeve.
The Doctor stood and faced the dead body. “You can kill us, but you’ve only got about two minutes before your entire species fries,” he informed the walking cadaver, pointing to the marmalade pot perched on the laser table. “So what’s it going to be? Will your last act be one of acceptance or useless violence?”
The dead body opened its mouth again, a gurgling sound rising up in its throat. Black liquid welled up in its mouth.
The Doctor took a step back, found himself stuck between the dead body and the gigantic laser gun.
“Useless violence it is, then,” he muttered. He held up both hands and waited for the dead body to strike.
“Wait! Hive-mate, hold your venom!”
The Doctor looked up. Another dead body stood back in the laboratory—Miranda again. Rose was with her.
“Rose, get back!” the Doctor shouted. “There’s a—”
“I know,” Rose said, with a voice like sandpaper. “She’s with me.”
“She’s —” the Doctor faltered. “She’s what, now?”
Rose nodded toward Miranda wordlessly. Miranda and the other dead body stood very near each other, their respective sets of eyelids fluttering as they communicated with their minds. The Doctor looked from them back to Rose.
She stepped into the light, and his breath hitched in his throat at the sight of her. A network of dark veins was just barely visible at her temples and the inside of her wrists, and tiny grey trails marked her cheeks where tears had gone down. She looked awful, pale and tired and wan, as if every expansion of her lungs caused her pain. Even though the serum had bought her more time, as the Doctor had hoped, that time was now running out, draining right in front of him.
Rose didn’t have long before the things inside her fully awoke and took over. They could only put off their nature for so long.
She started to fall. The Doctor ran forward to catch her, and eased her onto the ground.
“Rose...”
“You can’t kill them,” Rose whispered.
That was a surprising development. And unsettling.
The Doctor shook his head. “I’ve got to,” he reasoned. “They’re parasites. They’ll keep going until there’s nothing left.”
“They’re just trying to survive,” Rose argued softly. “They can’t get back home. They’re desperate. Please don’t do it.”
“Don’t you understand? I’ve got to do it. Otherwise, you’ll...” the Doctor trailed off, swallowed loudly.
He wondered if the creatures inside Rose had tainted her thoughts somehow, were holding her hostage, had already won. Wondered if it was Rose talking to him now, or the things inside.
“I can’t lose you again, Rose,” he told her, and anger welled up in him at the thought of it. He shook his head. “I won’t do it. I won’t let that happen. I just won’t.”
The laser’s hum grew louder as it finished powering up. “Doctor, the laser is ready,” Oliver called from the restricted access room. “Should I initiate?”
“The Rose promised the Traveler would help,” Miranda hissed. The other dead body, the silent feral one in the HAZMAT suit, stepped toward Oliver. Oliver backed up against the far wall, glanced between the Doctor and the two dead bodies, waiting for the Doctor to act.
“The Doctor I knew would give them a chance,” Rose said.
“Doctor?” Oliver asked nervously. The feral body continued making its way toward him. “Doctor!”
“Doctor, please.” Rose grasped his hand.
The Doctor hesitated.
“I’m going to initiate!” Oliver shouted. He smacked the big green button on the side. The laser made a whirring sound as it prepared to focus its beam.
The Doctor couldn’t look away from Rose’s face. Her eyes were screwed shut, eyebrows knit together in pain, sweat beading over her forehead in grey droplets. These creatures were causing her so much pain, he thought.
And yet...
He noticed the TARDIS key hanging around Rose’s neck. She was holding his hand very tightly.
“No,” the Doctor said. He turned to Oliver. “No! Stop it! Deactivate the laser!”
“Are you mad?” Oliver shouted, backing away from the feral corpse. “They’re trying to kill us!”
“They’re trying to live! And l promised I would help them.”
He looked back at Rose. “I promised,” he said to her.
The whirring sounds of the laser grew even louder. The Doctor leapt forward and pulled the plug from the wall. The laser powered down.
“Well, now what are we going to do?” Oliver said loudly in the now-silence. The feral zombie continued to lumber toward him. “Come on! Help me think of something!” Oliver demanded of the Doctor.
“Make him stop!” the Doctor shouted at Miranda, but she shook her head.
“Our hive-mates are silent,” she said. “They are not listening to the hive. We cannot reason with them. They will not stop.”
The Doctor’s mind raced frantically. His thoughts darted from Oliver, to Rose, to the killer mold that would certainly destroy them both in a few moments. If only he had something to stop them, if only he could just freeze them in their tracks somehow, if only—
He blinked. Oh, he could be so stupid sometimes.
“Oi!” he said, waving his arms. “Hey! You in the suit!”
The wild corpse slowly turned away from Oliver to glare at him.
“Look what I’ve got,” the Doctor said, grabbing the marmalade pot. “Recognize anyone here?”
The feral cadaver paused for a moment, as if deliberating. Then it followed after him.
“Good, that’s right! After me! Allons-y!” the Doctor laughed. He ran through the restricted chamber, the wild corpse trailing after, gaining in speed. “Good boy!” the Doctor applauded.
“What’s he doing?” Oliver asked, darting over to Rose where she lay.
She smiled a little bit. “He’s just being the Doctor,” she said. She closed her eyes as consciousness left her.
Inside the restricted room, the Doctor found himself at a bit of a dead end. He turned to face his pursuer, his back pressed up against the wall.
“Just you and me then, eh?” he said. “I hope you’re glad that someone I care about put in a good word for you. If it had been up to me, you all would have burned.”
The feral zombie approached, opened its mouth. The Doctor felt around on the wall behind his back.
“But I guess I can settle for the opposite,” he said. He found a button and slammed it.
A door behind him slid open and he jumped to the side just in time for the dead body to come barreling through. He hit the button again before the body had a chance to recover and escape, sliding the marmalade pot in through the gap between the wall and the closing door. It flew in, just barely in time. The door closed with a great clunk sound.
The Doctor could see the corpse through a small window in the door, roaming around the chamber, hitting the wall as if it could break through. The body beat its fists uselessly against the white inside of the room.
“This is me keeping my promise,” the Doctor said.
He entered a few digits on a keypad and hit the go button. He watched as the room was flooded with a white mist. He listened as the corpse screamed and screamed its terrible animal howl. And after several futile windmilling attempts to fight the cold, its body moving slower and slower all the while, the wild corpse screeched its last.
**
Oliver looked up to see Miranda clutching her hands to her head, shrieking.
“What’s going on?” he demanded. “What is it?”
Miranda fell to her knees. “Mum and Dad are...” she said. The black veins in her face and arms faded; the black liquid in her eyes cleared up.
“…Cold,” she finished.
She fell over. She did not move again.
**
The Doctor waited a prudent amount of time before turning off the cryo-chamber. When several moments had passed, enough time to ensure that anything living had been completely and utterly frozen, he opened the door again.
The once-wild corpse lay on the floor in a fetal position, the marmalade pot clenched in its hands. Both were covered in a thick layer of frost. The Doctor knelt down to inspect the body and the pot it was trying to protect, his breath hanging white in the air behind him.
He shuddered in the cold. This new human body was bollocks at regulating its temperature.
“I will help you,” he said to the corpse. “Rose was right. You were just trying to survive. But you can’t live here. I’ll find you a new home someday. Maybe when the new TARDIS is up and running.”
He thought of the coral in his pocket, felt calm and assured.
“I’ll find you a new home. And that is a promise.”
He left the chamber and closed the door behind him, making sure to set the temperature at a nice amount of freezing. No reason to risk it.
“You’ll need an extraction team in there ASAP to make sure that body and that pot are stored properly,” the Doctor announced to Oliver as he re-entered the laboratory. He stopped and watched Rose’s prone figure for any signs of life. Oliver was sitting next to her, having folded his suit jacket into a pillow under her head.
Rose was not moving.
“And how is she?” the Doctor asked, forcing his voice to sound casual.
Oliver shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “All the black stuff is gone. She looks normal now. But she hasn’t, you know...I don’t know how much it had got to her.”
The Doctor crouched down next to them, pressed his fingers gently against Rose’s neck, feeling for a pulse.
“What did you do back there?” Oliver asked.
The Doctor ignored him for a moment, still feeling for Rose’s heartbeat. Eventually, he found it—it was thready, weaker than he’d like, but any pulse was better than no pulse. He lifted up her hand and inspected it—no black anywhere. He let out a sigh he didn’t know he was holding in.
The Doctor realized he was running his thumb over the soft, smooth underside of her wrist. He stopped. Even though it still felt like second nature—her hand in his, his arm linked round hers, their fingers intertwined, her cheek on his shoulder—she wouldn’t like it, he thought. Not right now. Not from him.
He swallowed. That was hard to take.
“Froze them,” he said eventually, once he remembered that Oliver had asked him a question. “Froze them until I can find them a new home. I figured the foot soldiers would sense the distress and run back to the hive mind in the pot, to try and protect them.” He rubbed a hand over his face, feeling very tired all of a sudden. “Unfortunately it was too late to save the other infected hosts. They were dead by the time the parasites left. But the bodies should at least be safe to bury now.”
He shuddered as he pressed his finger’s to Rose’s temples, willing her to awaken. “Their families can see them without the fear of being contaminated. They can mourn properly, if there is such a thing,” he continued.
“And what about Agent Tyler?” Oliver asked. “Will...will we need to contact her family, too?”
At that moment, Rose’s eyelids began to flutter.
The Doctor smiled. “I don’t think we’ll need to, no,” he said.
Rose woke up with a gasp. Her eyes darted wildly about, unseeing.
“Doctor—”
“It’s all right, Rose,” the Doctor said. He helped her sit up. “I took care of it. They’re going to be fine. Well, they might be a bit chilly, but they’re going to be all right, in the end.”
Rose nodded, running a hand through her hair, still a bit disoriented. “Thank you,” she said.
The Doctor helped her onto her feet. “No, thank you,” he said sincerely, pulling her into a tight hug without even thinking about it. She stiffened in the embrace, her own arms still limp down at her side, her shoulders raised just slightly, a subtle indication of her discomfort that only he would notice. The Doctor tried not to wince. Rose had never resisted a hug from him before. But after a moment she relaxed, wrapped her arms around him too, her fingers knotting themselves in the back of his suit jacket.
The Doctor smiled. Even when she hated him, Rose Tyler was still a very good hugger.
He held her out at arm’s length. “You called me ‘Doctor’,” he teased.
Rose rolled her eyes. “Shut up.”
“Never,” the Doctor said with a wink.
He extended a hand to help Oliver off the floor. “Shall we go, then?” he asked his two companions, glancing at the lab space all about them. “Don’t know about you two, but I’m a little tired of dark and damp places, myself.”
“In a minute,” Rose said. She walked over to Miranda’s fallen form.
Poor Miranda. The Doctor’s hands balled into fists. He hadn’t been able to save her. He’d only been in this universe for one day, and already people had died because he hadn’t moved fast enough, or thought fast enough, or acted fast enough. Now the world was needlessly missing one very kind-hearted dinner lady, and several other innocent people that didn’t deserve to die so soon.
He could still feel the urge to make the Letrion pay for what they did to Miranda and the others. What they almost did to Rose. He felt the anger burning deep and hot in his chest.
He pushed it down and out of sight.
Rose stood for a moment, looking at Miranda’s peaceful face, playing with the key around her neck. The Doctor wondered what she was thinking. Her face was impossible to read—which was a first for him, he realized with a pang.
She pulled the TARDIS key up and over her head. She held it in her palm, her eyes closed, her lips moving, as if in prayer. The key glinted brightly in the cold laboratory light. Rose opened her eyes and placed the key into one of Miranda’s stiff, open hands.
“Wherever you are now, I hope you’re not lonely anymore,” the Doctor heard her whisper.
She turned back to Oliver and the Doctor. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
***