Work Text:
She dropped the remaining distance from the ladder to the damp floor with a soft thud. Light from the surface cast her shadow on the brick wall several feet away, and made the puddles on the ground glimmer. To her right was a dead end, just as the map had indicated. To her left, and endless hallway and a thick darkness that swallowed her torchlight.
Breathing a small sigh, she stepped out from under the manhole. She turned the light to the walls as she walked, looking for any signs of the creature. There were no traces of the greyish goo that Owen had showed her earlier that day, or of anything else for that matter. The brick stretched onward, uninterrupted, and eventually she had walked far enough that the torch became her only source of light. She had to fight down a rising sense of claustrophobia.
She’d been dropped a half-mile from the team’s meeting point, about the same distance as the others had been. Her journey was almost entirely a straight line, so she didn’t expect to take longer than half an hour searching. Unless, of course, she encountered the alien and had to deal with it.
She found herself wishing Jack could have come up with a better plan.
Minutes trickled by with the sewer water, and she listened to the sound of her shoes clacking against the hard concrete in order to ground herself. There was really nothing to worry about. Not yet, anyway. But the long stretches of unchanging wall, as well as the relentless blackness ahead, was unnerving.
After walking quite a ways, she began to get suspicious of the fact that she hadn’t hit the singular fork in the path that she had anticipated. Jack had marked it on her map with a little red arrow indicating that she should go left, just as she’d done in the beginning. She’d been anticipating the change to be some kind of relief from the monotony, and was worried that she’d somehow missed it. Or that the map was wrong. She stopped, and tentatively pressed a finger to her comm.
“Jack? Is this working again? Can you hear me?”
“Tosh! Oh, thank goodness.”
“What is it?”
“We’ve got problems.”
“Are you alright?”
“For now.”
She’d stopped walking, listening to the undercurrent of stress in Jack’s words. “Do you need help?”
“Yes. There’s more than one of them. The aliens.”
“How many?”
“It’s an entire swarm of them. Enough to cause mass hysteria if they were to get out into Cardiff.”
“Okay, so we need to stop them here. How?”
“You need to blow up the tunnels.”
She gaped, even though she knew no one could see her. “What? No, we can’t.”
“You have to,” Jack insisted. “It’s the only way.”
“But we actually can’t,” Tosh replied. "I don’t have anything on me that I can detonate from a distance. It could trap us all inside, and the integrity of the city above us could be compromised.”
“Well, then we’ll just have to deal with that.”
“Jack, we could die.”
“I gave you an order.”
His tone had chilled perceptibly, and she stiffened.
“No.”
“Refusal is not an option here.”
“It needs to be an option. This is a bad plan.”
“I’m sorry, I believe you work for me. Not the other way around.”
“But–”
“And I think you know what happens if you forget that.”
The air grew thin, and she let out a small gasp. “I–”
“I’m sure UNIT would be quite willing to take you back. Had a hell of a time convincing them to let you out in the first place.”
“You wouldn’t–” she choked.
“Believe me,” Jack’s voice rang as if he was standing beside her. Breathing in her ear. “I would.”
She staggered backward. The walls were closing in around her. Transforming into grey, impenetrable rock. They were the walls she’d stared at for nearly two years.
“And this time, I think they might have a spot for your mother, too.”
“Jack–” she collapsed, horrified.
“You thought I’d be different, didn’t you? That I wouldn’t use you, like they did. You wouldn’t be a pawn anymore. You’d be doing something good.”
“Please!” she cried. “Please don’t do this!”
“You were wrong, Tosh.”
She screamed and lashed out, pushing uselessly at the confines of her prison.
And felt her skin tear against seemingly faultless stone. Blood trickled from her palm, and through her fear she could see the reddish-brown dust surrounding her cut.
The rust colored dust of brick.
With that, the nightmare collapsed upon itself and disintegrated. Her breath hitched as she glanced around her, seeing the torch she’d abandoned a few feet away. And the familiar wet ground. She registered the the steady sound of static playing in her ear. Her comm was still non-functional.
Eventually, she collected herself and rose to her feet.