Chapter Text
“We should go somewhere,” Rogue said, his voice partly muffled by the open cabinet of cables and relays he was sticking his head in. One of the screens on the wall had developed a fault, and in spite of the Doctor’s repeated offers to help, he had insisted on repairing it himself. The Doctor had found his own project instead, taking apart the robot arm Rogue had lying around for reasons he refused to disclose. But it was one of the few items in Rogue’s ship he was allowed to mess with. “Like where?”
“You ever been to Mokher-2?”
“I don’t think so, why?”
Rogue straightened up and wiped his hand on his thighs. “I was just thinking.” He slapped the screen a few times, until it fizzed back to life. “Ah, there you go. We haven’t gone out much lately.”
“Were you thinking of a date or of an adventure?”
“Could be both.” Rogue looked at him with the face of a man who knew him far too well. Knowing Rogue, the Doctor was pretty confident he already had a plan.
“Okay, why Mokher-2?”
“Lovely place. Basically an Earth twin, incredible wildlife. Kind of backwater place. Hasn’t officially been contacted yet, but since we’re not official…”
“And?”
“There’s rumour of a haunted house.”
“A haunted house?”
“We could have a look. Just for fun. See what’s there.”
The Doctor had perked up, but now narrowed his eyes. “What kind of rumour? Who’s telling it?”
Rogue examined the back of the screen to juggle some cables. “Just some old friends. Well, people I know.”
“’Mmh.” The Doctor walked up to the screen to look behind it from the other side. “And that wouldn’t have been anyone of your old colleagues, right?”
“Why would you think that?” Rogue checked the screen again, which worked just as fine as before.
“Because those transmissions are so not secure, babes.”
“What?”
“Just kidding. I saw you check the comms yesterday and get that look on your face.”
“Is that the ‘I’m going to be able to buy food’ look?”
“We have food at home. I can’t believe you tried to scam me into bounty hunting.”
“Relax, it’s a live capture. See?” Rogue pulled the comm from his pocket and waved it in front of the Doctor’s face. “I set my profile to ‘no kills’. Because I respect your values.”
“You’ve literally just tried to rope me into a semi-legal bounty hunter mission without telling me.”
“Can’t expect me to give up my career for you, can you?”
“Completely skipping the point there.”
“You would have been perfectly happy to investigate for free. Come on. Haunted house. Mystery.”
“And the mystery is an escaped criminal?”
“Hiding in a big old abandoned mansion.”
Rogue watched patiently while the Doctor fought against his curiosity and lost.
“How haunted are we talking?”
“Very. And I’ve already collected some old reports to go with the case details.”
The Doctor sighed. “Let me see that file.”
“So. Your target…”
“Our target.”
“Our target is an plasma creature that’s been killing people on several planets and moons of the Mokher System. Does it say what kind?”
“It’s a cloud of diliqanite particles.” Rogue tapped the keypad a few times. “The first cases were dismissed as accidents, but it became clear pretty soon that this thing is sentient.”
“Could have told them,” the Doctor mumbled. “But they’re usually peaceful. I’ve spent a whole year on Dliqan once, back when I had the chin. What did it…”
He reached across the console and opened one of the attachments. “Disintegration? Nasty.”
“Yeah. Slipped into the bodies and… pfff. Not much left of them.”
“How did you plan on catching it?”
“Poymat field.”
“You have a Poymat trap lying around here?”
Rogue pointed to one of the tables in the back of the console room. The Doctor turned to look, but it was impossible to identify the trap among the clutter.
“Small one,” Rogue said. “They’re not that expensive, if you know where to look. I charged it with tetr-ex as bait.”
“I’ll have a look at that later,” the Doctor muttered, then turned his attention back on the file.
“So, a Diliqanite. Hiding in a haunted house. What do we know about that?”
Rogue typed a short command into the console, and a different file popped up. The Doctor skimmed through it. “People going in and never coming out again, general feelings of dread, alright… ghost voices?”
“Ghost voices,” Rogue nodded.
“And the villagers swear that the voices belong to the missing people. That’s interesting.”
“Wouldn’t put too much on that. The last disappearance was - hold on - forty-six years ago. Enough time for stories to grow around it.”
“What do the voices say?”
“The usual. Crying, pleading, cursing.”
“Starting about two hundred years ago… oh.”
“That’s the good part.”
“…when its inhabitants, a family of four, all disappeared without a trace in a single night. No clues what happened to them?”
“No. Nothing. According to contemporary accounts, the housekeeper went to work in the morning and never came out. Then the groundskeeper. After that, a team of investigators, second team to search for them, never seen again. The house was boarded up and declared off limits. Later we’ve got the occasional kid on a dare, friends or parents looking for the kid… all in all, the house has swallowed twenty-something people.”
“That’s… a lot. Why didn’t they pull it down?”
Rogue shrugged. “Scared of setting loose an ancient evil?”
The Doctor paced back and forth between the console and the door. “So the inhabitants disappeared. Then everyone who went looking for them. Then everyone who went in for whatever reason. Really, everyone?”
Rogue scrolled through the file. “Says so.”
“How does anyone know about the first disappearance? Why do they say ‘without a trace’? There might have been a simple accident. Leaky fireplace.”
“That leaky fireplace would have been killing people long after it burned out.”
“I’m just curious where the stories come from. Why is everyone so sure they vanished? As opposed to, no one was able to recover the bodies? The ghost stories make sense, but if no one ever found out what happened…”
Rogue sighed. “We’re not solving the haunted house mystery, we’re catching a monster. This is just risk assessment.”
“But could it be responsible? You said it disintegrates people.”
“It was on Mokher-4 only three weeks ago. Why would it haunt an empty house for two centuries, travel the star system to kill some people and then hop back?”
“And we’re sure it’s there?”
“Someone tracked it down ten days ago, shortly after the bounty went up.”
“Did they try to capture it?”
“Never reported back, apparently.”
“Okay, that’s bad news. Anyone you know?”
Rogue shrugged. “Couldn’t find out who. It’s just talk. Could be any reason, or someone made it up.”
“Rogue, are you sure you want to take this one?”
Rogue snorted. “You’ve already decided to go. You just copied the entire file to your screwdriver thing.”
The Doctor looked down on the device in his hand. “So I have,” he admitted. “Swear I didn’t notice.”
Rogue gave him a pointed look, then continued scrolling through the file. “Okay, that’s weird. The last victim on Mokher-4 somehow got better.”
“From disintegration?”
“Reasonably confirmed.” He couldn’t fight a grin. “Apparently, he just walked out of the secured crime scene two days later, buck naked.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Maybe we should talk to him. Look at that jawline.”
The Doctor reached across the console and closed the files. “Waste of time. Have you packed your things already?”
Rogue eyed him with suspicion, but gestured to a satchel sitting between the machine parts on the table he had pointed to. “We could leave right now.”
The Doctor clapped his hands. “Good! Great. We’ll take the TARDIS, yeah? I’ve still got a detector lying around somewhere, from that gap year…” He marched towards the door, then stopped abruptly and turned around again. “Hold on. Wait. That last victim didn’t happen to have a vortex manipulator, did he? If he was wearing one, the Diliqanite could have fused with the chronoplasm and escaped through the time vortex.”
Rogue grabbed his bag. “So it could have jumped back in time?”
“And between planets. But that must have been rough.”
“If it did, it had two hundred years to recover before another person came looking for it. Let’s hope it’s not searching for a new hiding place already.”
Rogue stepped out after the Doctor, squinting while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The TARDIS had materialised in a small jungle, under the sprawling branches of a towering hedge. The light of the moon, a smaller one than Earth’s, but still shining bravely, turned the overgrown garden into a shapeless wilderness, behind which the mansion loomed bone-white like a stone creature, its eyes nailed shut with wooden boards and beams.
“The TARDIS didn’t think of landing on a bright morning?”
The Doctor pulled the door shut behind him. “Don’t antagonise her. She just loves to set the mood.”
He pointed the sonic at the house, letting it sweep over the grounds, listening intently to the series of beeps it emitted. “Interesting.” Rogue looked at him, eyebrows raised, but instead of sharing his findings, the Doctor started fighting his way through shrubbery and hip-high grass towards the mansion.
Once he had reached it, he switched to the detector, turning left and right while the device hummed in changing frequencies.
“Well?” Rogue had come up behind him, picking burs from his clothes.
“Give me a second,” he replied without taking his eyes from the walls. He caressed the stone surface, looking up the facade. “This house is old,” he whispered. “So much history…”
Rogue looked down at his comm. “About five hundred years. Might be another reason they didn’t tear it down.”
“No way.” The Doctor drew his fingers across the stone again, then gave it a lick. “That’s thousands of years. I can taste it.”
“This is neo-Aravoric architecture. Five hundred years, tops.”
At the Doctor’s surprised stare, he waved his comm. “It says right here. Come on, does it look that old?”
“I know that taste.”
Rogue shrugged and pulled the trap from his satchel, dropping the comm into it. “Either way, we’re not here for sightseeing. What does your scanner say?”
“It says our Diliqanite is still in there. But I can’t get a clear reading.”
“I thought that thing detects these particles specifically?”
“There’s more, much more. A different kind of energy, and more signals. Individual ones.”
“It’s not alone?”
The Doctor shook his head with a perplexed laugh. “They’re not… now. I get signals from sources that used to be here. Except they still are. But not in this time.”
Ignoring Rogue’s look of confusion, he continued along the wall, switching back and forth between the two devices. Rogue plodded after him through the twines that had crept up to the house and caught on his feet with every other step. After a long silence, which was only disturbed by the buzzing of the Doctor’s scans and the snapping of the tendrils across his boots, he cleared his throat. “Doc.”
“Sorry, sorry, I know. It’s just… wow. I’m so glad we came here.”
“The explanation part.”
“It’s time. Lots and lots of time. This house is just bursting with temporal energy. I can’t get any good results, because there are layers on top of layers. Wrinkles and pockets and holes. There’s a lot more time in this house than there should be, Rogue.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The Doctor shook his head again, but he had that glint in his eyes, and a smile spread on his face. “No idea. Let’s find out.”
“Really glad I brought an expert. Any guess how dangerous it’s going to be?”
But the expert was already on the move again. “Door’s that way, come on!”
At the front of the house, with an overgrown pathway leading to it from the gates of the garden, they found the former entrance under a mighty stone arch. Like the windows, it was barred; behind thick wooden beams that had been nailed across the frame, the lock was sealed with resin.
Wordlessly, the Doctor started resonating the nails, allowing Rogue to pull away the first board, which he then used to pry off the rest. When the door was accessible again, Rogue leaned against the stone.
“So, who is he?”
“Who?”
“The guy who got better. On Mokher-4. The naked one.”
“What? You’re the one who told me about him.”
“Seemed like you recognised him.”
“Just sounded familiar. I’ve met a lot of people, you know.”
“How many naked guys sound familiar to you?”
“It wasn’t… stop grinning like that.”
“Ex-boyfriend?”
“Rogue. Really. We’re standing in a moonlit garden, all alone, in front of a beautiful old mansion, and you want to talk about ex-boyfriends?”
“Mh, you’re right. We should be standing inside by now. Can you open the door?”
The Doctor scoffed. “No sense for romance.” But he did as Rogue asked. Rogue slipped past him and stuck his head through the door. “Everything quiet. Tell you what, I’ll buy us a romantic dinner with that money. In a moonlit garden, if you want.” He took out a torch and went in. The Doctor followed.
“Can you detect where it is?” Rogue whispered, turning on his heels to survey every corner of the foyer.
“There’s a lot of interference,” the Doctor whispered back. “But I could tell if it got close.” He had turned the sonic into a torch of his own. “No ghosts yet.”
“There are no ghosts.” Rogue nodded towards the stairs that led to a gallery above the entrance hall and from there to several doors. They climbed them, carefully testing each creaking step.
“What makes you so sure?”
Rogue walked up to the first door. “Picking up anything dangerous inside?” The Doctor shook his head. Nevertheless, Rogue opened the door with caution, peeked inside, then stepped through it. “Dead people don’t talk to us,” he answered eventually. The light of his torch moved over the furniture, along the shelf-lined walls, across the ceiling. “Not really.”
The Doctor followed him in. “I’ve met ghosts,” he said.
“Of course you have. Room’s empty.”
“Someone’s study,” the Doctor murmured, sweeping their surroundings with his own light. A cluttered desk near the window caught his attention and he moved closer. Two books lay open on its surface, their pages held down by other works to keep them from turning. A few more were piled up in the left hand corner of the desk, and on the right side, an empty glass stood next to an open decanter.
“Classy.” He shone the light into the glass. Under the coat of dust, he thought he saw some dried residue, and confirmed it with a quick scratch of a pen. “That glass was left half full. Same with the decanter. And the stopper on the table… I think someone was interrupted.”
“What were they studying?”
“Just architecture.” The Doctor sighed. “Look, on the floor. I guess there’s one mystery solved.”
Rogue stepped closer. “Rings. And metal buttons.” He pushed them lightly with the tip of his boot. “That would survive disintegration.” The Doctor nodded, his face crumpled unhappily. They both stared at the leftovers for a few glum seconds. “So we were right. It did jump back two hundred years and killed this family. Probably all the missing people, too.”
Rogue turned back to the door. “We should check the other rooms.”
The Doctor threw a quick glance at his detector. “It’s not upstairs.”
“But we could find out more about what happened to the others. Risk assessment, remember?”
“Skaitisa?”
“Skaitisa, are you here?”
Rogue froze. “What the hell.” The Doctor quickly walked up to him, head tilted, listening. “That came from the foyer.”
“Can you h-“
“Can you h-“
“Can -“
They exchanged a quick glance, then inched towards the door. Rogue switched off his torch and held the trap ready; the Doctor dimmed the sonic’s light and shielded it with his hand. The foyer was dark, even more as their eyes had not adjusted yet, but nothing seemed to move on the lower floor. There was no whisper of a sound. All was quiet again. Rogue lightly tapped the Doctor’s arm and slipped out of the room. He silently moved along the gallery, trying to get a view of the entire ground floor, until he reached the wall at the far end of it.
Nothing.
Across the gap between them, he could see the Doctor eerily illuminated by the muted glow of his screwdriver, which was starting to blink rapidly. His eyes moved aimlessly around, gliding over him, focusing on a point to his left, or to his right. For a moment, he thought the Doctor was seeing ghosts now, until it occurred to him that he must be near invisible beyond the reach of the light, a shadow between shadows. Still, the Doctor kept looking for him. Rogue felt a smile spread on his face as he made his way back to him in the darkness.
“Can’t get out,” a small voice sighed next to him. He whipped around and switched his torch on, turning on his heels, then turned once more.
Nothing beside him but a wall and closed doors.
“Rogue?” The Doctor hurried over.
“Did you hear that?”
“Just a whisper, what did it say?”
Rogue took a deep breath, shone the light along the gallery, again, and all over the ground floor for good measure. “Said it can’t get out.”
“‘Are you here. Can you hear me. Can’t get out.’” The Doctor frowned. “Sounds like something those missing people would say, don’t you think? At least those who went looking for the others. So what did we just hear? Echoes? Imprints? Did they get lost in some time maze?”
Rogue pointed the light of the torch to the front door, lost in a different thought. “Did we? Can we still get out?” He quickly made his way down the stairs.
“Good thinking.” The Doctor rushed after him, half of his attention on the sonic. It was now blinking furiously. As he caught up, Rogue pulled the door open. Soft moonlight poured in, along with fresh night air. The Doctor touched his arm to hold him back, took a careful breath and stepped across the threshold.
“Well,” he said, straightening his coat. “That was underwhelming.”
Rogue followed him. Standing outside in the light breeze, which carried the chirping of insects and the gentle hoot of some nocturnal bird over from the field beyond the garden, the deathly silence of the house seemed to hover behind him like a heavy cloud. He turned back towards the front door’s gaping mouth.
“Why are we outside?” Despite his audible disappointment over it, the Doctor was intrigued. “We searched the house, but we didn’t go missing. Did we? The voice said it couldn’t get out, so whatever happened to them trapped them first… which means, it didn’t happen to us.”
“Yet.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“So what did your thing find out?” Rogue nodded towards the sonic, which had calmed down. The Doctor regarded it thoughtfully. “Like I said. There’s too much time crammed inside this house. Lots of overlapping signals.” He crinkled his nose. “And somewhere behind that noise, a creature waiting to disintegrate us.”
Rogue peered into the darkness. “Let’s search the rest of the house.”
The remaining doors on the upper floor revealed more of the private lives of the unlucky inhabitants. There was a small dressing room, where a tattered, moth-eaten robe still waited, draped over the back of a chair, to be put on again. A bedroom, the blankets of the double bed fluffed up a long time ago, with no one to slip under them. A corner room, its wide windows hidden behind heavy curtains, with another book shelf, two armchairs and a tiny coffee table, and framed pictures on a sideboard.
“I don’t actually mind finding out about ex-boyfriends, you know?”
The photographs had shown faces once, but they had become unrecognisable with age; only shapes remained, and dark splotches where the eyes must have been. Rogue resisted the urge of turning them face down. “You’re just so adorable when you squirm.”
“I didn’t squirm.” The Doctor searched the floor along the shelf, a bit too thoroughly, Rogue thought.
“I’m just saying. We’ve both had a life before this. No need to be bashful about it.”
“He’s not an ex.”
“Ooh, side piece?”
“He’s just someone I know, okay? Like I said. I meet a lot of people.”
“Okay. Told you. I don’t really mind.” Rogue tore his eyes away from the disfigured photographs and gave the Doctor a quick grin. “You did squirm though.”
“If that’s what you want to see.” The Doctor sniffed. “So what about you, then? I never asked.”
“What about me?”
“Any other former boyfriends?”
Rogue was quiet for a few seconds. “No. None that count.”
He turned his attention to the centre of the room. A book was lying face down on the carpet next to one of the chairs, the pages creased from the careless drop.
“Doc,” he whispered. He shone a light on the seat of the chair. It glinted on a delicate silver necklace. The Doctor was next to him with a few quick steps and stared down on it, unmoving. In just an instant, his face had become ancient, a distance of centuries between them. “They didn’t surprise it,” he said quietly. “It went from room to room, surprising them. This didn’t happen in a panic.”
“More reason to find it.”
“Rogue?”
“Mh?”
“Be careful, okay?”
There was only one room left, at the far end of the gallery. Rogue stuck his head in for a moment, then pulled the door shut again, keeping his hand on the doorknob to block the Doctor from entering.
“Nursery,” he said simply.
Behind the closed door, faintly, ghostly, a baby gurgled.
They went downstairs again, moving slowly along the hallway, their two circles of light dancing across the floor and jittering up the walls. “Is it just me,” Rogue whispered, “or do you feel watched, too?”
“Since we came in,” the Doctor replied. “Thought it was part of the mood.”
“Guess the crying is part of the mood as well?”
They stopped, listening into the darkness.
“That’s a kid,” the Doctor said.
“Last door on the left,” Rogue answered.
“I just want to go home,” a young voice whimpered.
They stopped outside. Rogue grabbed the Doctor’s sleeve. “It’s going to be empty. We can’t keep hunting ghost voices, we need to get that creature.“
“I just want to see,” the Doctor said, gently pulling his arm free.
“Let’s go to the cellar. We walked past a door that looked like leads downstairs, we should go back.”
“I want my mum.”
The Doctor had already opened the door and taken a few steps inside.
“Doc.”
“Let me just have a look…”
“Doc. Small problem.”
He turned around to look for Rogue, who still stood outside in the corridor.
“What is it?”
“I can’t move.”
“Can’t move how? What’s happening?”
“Feels like… I don’t know, like I got disconnected. I can’t make myself take another step.”
“What about the rest, can you give me your hand?”
“Nope. Arms just went offline, too. I can still move my head, that’s it.”
The Doctor scanned him, then looked at the readings for a bit longer than Rogue liked. “Okay. Okay, that’s not good.”
“What’s going on?”
“A glitch. I think.”
“That means…?“
“It says… it says you’re not there. Actually, slightly worse, it detects a body, barely, but nothing else. No heartbeat. No brainwaves.”
“Of all the times for this thing to develop a glitch.”
The Doctor shook his head. “It’s not the sonic that’s glitching, it’s you.“
“But I’m talking to you, so clearly I still have brainwaves”
“Eh.”
“Try a different setting.”
The Doctor fumbled with the sonic, provoking a series of frantic beeps, then static noise. At the same time, the light from Rogue’s torch went out. He looked up and froze, holding his breath. Rogue had stood only an arm’s length from him, right under the door frame. Now the place was empty; he had simply vanished.
His voice, however, hadn’t.
“Okay, what… come on.”
It had nothing of the hollow ghostliness of the other voices. With his eyes closed, he would have expected him to stand right there, where he last saw him - only he didn’t.
“Doc? Can you hear me?”
“Rogue?”
He heard the sound of a relieved breath from the door. “What the hell did you do? You just turned invisible.”
“No, you did. You disappeared.”
“You were fidgeting with your remote, I blinked and you were gone.”
“You were the one who glitched just now.”
“I didn’t - okay, stay where you are. Back in a second.”
“Rogue?”
There was no answer.
Rogue strode down the hallway towards the front door. He could hear more whispers now, behind the doors or trailing behind him. Some seemed to be talking to themselves to calm down; others called out names or quietly cursed. Some were simply crying. But they were still muted, as if they were locked behind glass, or faint, as if they were carried away by a wind. The Doctor had sounded just as he always did. He reached the heavy wooden door, took a deep breath, and pulled.
It didn’t budge.
Cursing under his breath, he tried harder, rattling on the doorknob, even propping his foot against the wall to gain more force. As a last resort, he pushed.
Nothing happened. The door might as well have grown into the stone.
“Great,” he muttered.
Interpreting Rogue’s instruction liberally, the Doctor paced inside the room. With his sonic doubling as a torch again, he could now see that it was a kitchen - cleaned for the night, with pans and pots lined up on the walls, shimmering softly under a coat of dust. Nothing seemed out of place here, nothing had been dropped in a moment of panic. Through a gap in the boards outside the window, he could see a small ribbon of a brighter night sky.
Rogue’s voice, only one step behind him, startled him.
“Are you still here? I can’t get out anymore. The door’s locked somehow.”
“I’m right in front of you. Have you tried pushing?”
“Hah. Yes, I have. Can you still get out?”
“You know, if you’d just told me…” The Doctor stepped through where he guessed Rogue to be and walked back into the entrance hall to try the door. It opened with little effort. “Works for me,” he said, and walked through. “Can you follow me?”
No one answered. He stepped back inside. “Rogue? Door’s open.”
“Still closed for me.” Rogue sounded resigned.
“Interesting. And is it still solid?”
“Can’t ghost through it.”
The Doctor waved his hand through the open door for good measure, then closed it again. “You do have a gift for it, though. Getting trapped in weird places.”
Rogue huffed. “Don’t start.”
“I’m just saying…”
“Fuck.”
The tone of Rogue’s voice made him shut up instantly. He heard a shuddering breath, then nothing for a few long seconds.
“Are you seeing this?” Rogue whispered at last.
“Seeing what?”
Another few seconds of silence.
“One of them stood right behind me.”
The Doctor felt a coldness creeping up his back. “You can see them?”
“Only one,” Rogue murmured. “I don’t think he can see me. He’s walking to the window now.”
“What does he look like?”
“Kind of blurred. Colourless. Light goes right through him. He looks… he looks like someone’s father.”
“Is he doing anything?”
“Just staring out of the window. The one closer to the stairs.”
“The window’s boarded up.”
“Yeah,” Rogue said softly. “It was when we came in.”
“Can you see anyone else?”
“Not so far. And he’s already fading again. Let me take another look at the kitchen.”
“The kid?”
Rogue’s voice came from the corridor. “Keep up.”
“Invisible boyfriend,” the Doctor muttered to himself. “As if he wasn’t enough of a handful already.” He rushed after him.
“Can you see out of the window?” he asked when he reached the open kitchen door.
“Boards are gone here, too,” the empty space right in front of him confirmed. Rogue was moving away from him, further into the room. “He’s sitting on the counter. Crying. I think he was trying to smash the glass.” His voice had become gentle, more so than the Doctor had ever heard him talk. “About twelve years old. Must have been one of the kids on a dare.”
“He can’t see you either?”
“Don’t think so. And I can’t touch him.”
“So we’ve got several levels here,” the Doctor mused. “You’re on one, these ghosts are on a different one… do you think they can see each other?”
“If they can, why would they let him sit here alone?”
“Everyone in their own little world then. But we can communicate with each other. And the ghosts… both of us can hear them, only you can see them, they don’t even seem to know we’re here. Are they in deeper? Are they fading? Losing contact?” He pointed the sonic at the counter under the window. “If I know where to look, I might be able to isolate some signals…”
“Doc. When you said you’ve met ghosts… what were they?”
The Doctor fiddled with the settings. “Oh. Yeah, they were dead people.”
There was a long pause.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t think it’s the same thing.”
“So what is it?”
The sonic warbled as he tested a frequency. He tried another. “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out, Rogue. And I’ll get you back, too.”
“Are they causing the interference?”
“Can’t be. But they’re blending in, it’s definitely connected. No, there’s something else. I just can’t…”
“He’s gone now.”
The Doctor sighed and pressed a button. The buzzing of the sonic died down. He stepped closer to the counter and softly stroked its surface, leaving streaks in the dust. He thought he could feel Rogue, who had been standing somewhere near, trying to reach out to the boy. The sadness in his voice echoed in his mind, and he suddenly wished he could hold his hand. And then he felt it, gently, not quite real; fingertips caressing the back of his hand, a palm lightly pressing against his wrist. It made him smile - somehow, Rogue always found a way to connect with him.
“I can feel you,” he whispered. “Keep doing that.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Rogue answered from the other end of the room. The Doctor snatched his hand away from the empty space that was creeping up on him. “Enough of the kitchen,” he said, marched out and turned left.
“What happened?” Rogue called after him.
“Nothing. Living room. Now.”
Chapter Text
To him, the great salon was bright with moonlight flooding through the large windows. The wild growth of the neglected garden had been replaced by neatly trimmed topiaries and low hedges, opening the view to a wide field beyond, and a forest at the far end of it. The room itself was unchanged. The dust that covered everything else in the house had settled here too, and the chairs and curtains were worn thin by generations of moths. It wasn’t empty - in one of the chairs, a lonely figure sat hunched over, his elbows resting on his thighs. Rogue walked up to him until he couldn’t have stayed unnoticed, but the man showed no sign that he could see him. He held a small device in his hands, turning it around and around without looking at it. His face was empty, tired, resigned. He seemed to be waiting - maybe for the idea to save the day, or maybe for things to finally get worse. If he was a ghost, the latter must have already happened. Rogue felt like his night had turned worse, too.
“Doc. There’s another ghost. In the chair facing the door.”
“Same as the others?” From the direction of his voice, the Doctor had been examining the cabinets. Now the buzzing picked up again.
Rogue struggled to find the words, then settled for the simple ones. “I know him.”
The noise of the sonic stopped. “The missing bounty hunter.” It wasn’t a question. “Who…?”
Rogue shook his head, forgetting for a moment that the Doctor couldn’t see him. “Didn’t know him well. Just…” His breath felt heavy. “Someone’s waiting for him.”
“Oh, Rogue. I’m sorry.” Softly, much closer now. “If nothing else, we’ll make sure they don’t have to wait forever, yeah?”
Rogue shook his head again. “I want to know what’s happening here, and whatever the hell it is, it needs to stop. Can we finally catch that monster now?”
“Mh. You know, there’s another small problem, actually. You know that trap you have? To trap the monster?”
Rogue held it up. “What about it?”
“Well, you have it.”
It took Rogue a few moments to understand.
“You think I can’t use it from… wherever I am. And the creature’s on your level.”
“Ninety percent certain. No, make that ninety-nine.”
“So if it showed up right now…”
“…that wouldn’t be good, no.”
Rogue looked at the useless device in his hand, then at the man in the chair, and made a decision.
“Get out.”
“No chance. We haven’t even found…”
“No. Get out, now. You’re not trapped and you’re still alive, you keep it that way and leave. Right now.”
“Rogue, stop it. I’m not leaving you here. Maybe I’m wrong! We can still talk to each other, maybe the trap still works, too. I won’t…”
“The trap didn’t do him any good. Will you just once do the smart thing and get out while you can?”
There was a shocked silence, and he could feel his heart starting to beat rapidly. He shouldn’t have raised his voice. He really shouldn’t have been that loud. But nothing stirred. Not where he was, at least.
“Doc?”
“What did you just say? About the trap?”
Rogue drew in a breath. “I said it didn’t help him either. He brought his own, he’s holding it.”
“Oh, brilliant, Rogue, that’s brilliant. Good man. Ghosted with a trap in his hands, just how I like them.” He could hear the Doctor scanning the room again, a slightly different sound now.
Rogue sighed. “Whenever you feel like making sense. No pressure.”
“It’s a Poymat field, Rogue. It’s got a very specific signature.” The sonic gave off a series of frantic beeps. “Didn’t do us much good to have just one, but now we’ve got a second one on another level….”
“In your own time.”
“In yours, actually. If I adjust the transition frequency to mirror the field, triangulate with the second device for depth and allow for a little time dilution… when would you say you are? Judging by the state of the house?”
“Hard to tell. The garden outside looks like it was trimmed yesterday, this guy here must have arrived some time last week, so… will you just get out of here already?”
“Got a fix on you.” He could hear the satisfied grin on the Doctor’s face. “There you are, I’ve got you, alive and four-dimensional, like you were on the day I met you. My smart, beautiful boyfriend.”
“Thought I was the boyfriend that gets stuck in stupid places?”
“Well, you’re both. Hah! There’s your friend in the chair, too.”
“Still can’t see you. What happened to you leaving?”
“Staying right here. I can’t see you either, but the sonic can. I’m getting a fuller picture of all those layers inside this house, and…” He laughed. “Now that is beautiful.”
He thought he could feel Rogue staring at him. That face he made when he wanted to show he was putting his foot down. Too bad for Rogue that he could see neither face nor foot. But he could see much clearer now.
“So. About these ghosts.”
“Mh?” Yes, he definitely had his serious face on.
“Remember how I said there was more time inside that house than there should be?”
“I remember you had no idea what that meant.”
“Well, I do now. They’re not simply trapped in this house, they’re all trapped in time. Each one inside their own time bubble. Roughly twenty-one hours long.”
“So… one day on this planet?”
“Exactly! You see, if you’re creating a time bubble from scratch and you don’t have much to work with, the easiest thing is to use natural markers, like one spin of the planet. That’s a pretty large one, obviously, not what I would use, because it takes a lot to sustain it, but if you have little else to go on, it may look like a good idea. Until there are too many of them. Fascinating things, time bubbles. You see, they are-”
“-something you can explain to me all night once we’re out of here, promise. Can you get back to the situation, please?”
“Sorry, right. There are twenty-two time bubbles in this house, all repeating the same hours again and again. Oh, and yours of course. Twenty-three. Going round and round.”
The Doctor listened into the empty room. A few seconds of silence ticked away.
“Doc?”
“Yes, dear?”
“How many times have I looped already?”
“Oh, no, it’s still your first go. We just came here.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“Not this time.”
An incorporeal snort came from his left.
“If you’re going to be trapped here, you should work on your ghostliness, love.”
“No use if I’ll reset in twenty hours. Better get me out of here, if you’re not going to leave.”
“Easier said. That’s a lot of temporal power.”
“Thought you were Lord of it and all that.”
“Where’s it coming from? This isn’t something a Diliqanite can do. It’s something in this house.”
“You didn’t detect any other life signs.”
“I detected a lot of energy. Same thing, after all.” He went to the window and peeked through the wooden boards into the overgrown garden. “Whatever it is, it must be ancient. Older than this house, or even the village. It’s been here forever.”
The floorboards creaked as footsteps crossed the room and stopped right behind him.
“You noticed that, didn’t you,” Rogue said softly, close to his ear. “When we were outside. You said you could taste it.”
“Thousands of years,” the Doctor whispered, lost in thoughts. “The house is older than its physical structure, because…” He reached out to touch the wall again, and shuddered. “You said you felt like something was watching you. I think it was the house itself.”
“You said it was older than that.”
“I know. But not older than what the house is made of. I think it grew into it when they built it. It’s in the stones, weaving itself through every part of it, becoming it, over centuries. But people only started disappearing two hundred years ago. Why?”
“We know why. Our creature arrived.”
“Exactly. But it didn’t - Rogue, are you alright?”
“Apart from being turned into a ghost? Sure.”
“Are you in pain? Scared? Is anything causing you discomfort?”
“I’m fine. Why?”
“Safe as houses,” the Doctor mused. “Your body is tucked away in a bubble, never moving further than twenty-one hours.” His fingers drummed on the windowsill. “You could stay here for two hundred years and not even go mad, because you don’t experience them. For all you know, you’ve only been here for a day.”
“You could drive me mad in less.”
“Soon as we’re home, love. But think about it, if your body is stashed away, if it’s been taken out of spacetime…”
“It can’t be disintegrated.”
“The creature can’t hurt you.”
Both were quiet for a minute. It was Rogue who spoke first. “What if the house saw what happened that night…”
“What if it could pull time into wrinkles and folds and roll it up, to hide everyone from the monster…”
“But the rings and the necklace upstairs.”
“I know,” the Doctor whispered mournfully. “I guess it couldn’t save its family."
In his own crease in time, Rogue pressed his palm against the wall, but felt nothing. When he turned back to the room, the figure in the chair was gone. He couldn’t tell if the ghost had faded again or simply moved on, but he told himself it didn’t matter. Only one day of being trapped, for his colleague, for the boy in the kitchen, for the father looking to find him. Everyone was safe after all. Everyone but…
“Why didn’t it trap you?”
The Doctor laughed. He seemed to have moved on along the window front. “Try folding up time wide enough to hide me. No, I’m way too much for it. And you’ve been struggling to hold on already, haven’t you? Letting all those voices leak out?”
Only silence answered.
“And now some time travellers roll up, drenched in Artron energy. No wonder my Rogue here is barely hidden. You’re wearing thin.”
There was a flicker of light, a few feet away.
“It’s okay,” the Doctor coaxed. “We’ll look after each other. We’re safer together, I promise.”
Dim, but clearly visible in the darkness behind the shuttered windows. It kept blinking, a small device, held by a familiar hand.
“Please tell me it’s you,” the Doctor whispered. In the slowly growing light, the rest of him became visible to Rogue, staring into the shadows beyond the small circle of brightness. Just like he had on the gallery. With a flick of his thumb, he turned the sonic into a torch again and lifted his hand, pointing at him.
“Doc. You’re blinding me.”
“I’m blinding you! You can see me. You’re back.”
The light flicked back to the floor, and before Rogue could blink away the glare, he was caught up in a crushing embrace. He wrapped his arms around the Doctor’s waist and leaned into it for a moment. “Good job,” he whispered.
The Doctor kissed his cheek and turned his face towards the silent room. “Thank you.”
Letting go of Rogue, he reached for his hand that held the Poymat device. “Smart of you to carry a beacon,” he grinned. “Now, shall we deal with the monster downstairs?”
“Did you track it down?”
“No,” the Doctor said. He was already at the door to the corridor, grinning even wider as he turned back to him. “You did. We’ve been poking around for a whole while, but our friend in the walls only snatched you up the moment you said ‘cellar’. Wanna bet that’s where the danger is?”
Rogue caught up to him with a little sprint. “Yes. And it probably heard us poking around the whole time. Stay close, please.”
“Good point. Why hasn’t it come out yet? It must have sensed us.”
“It’s trapped down there?” Rogue suggested.
“No. Inside the house, yes. But there’s nothing to keep it from roaming the rest of the place. Nothing our friend did, at least.”
The Doctor stopped at the door and turned around in a full circle, scanning the floorboards - or what was hiding underneath them. His forehead creased with worry. “The good news is, I can filter out most of the noise, now that I know what caused it. Get a full reading of our Diliqanite.”
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
“No…” The Doctor turned a small button on his device, meticulously going through several frequencies. “Something’s wrong with it. That’s not its natural composition, it’s more like… What did the file say, it went into the bodies? Like it was trying to merge with them?”
“It didn’t go into detail, but I suppose.”
“Destroying them instead. Rogue…”
The Doctor turned towards him with his eyes closed and his finger pressing against his forehead, deep in thought.
“What would you do, if you were wounded and in terrible pain, but realised that every attempt to save yourself was harming innocent people around you?”
Rogue stared at him for a long moment. “I would crawl into a hole to die,” he said eventually. He put his hand on the cellar door. “You think…”
“It could come out anytime. It’s choosing not to.”
“To keep itself from doing more harm? Took its time to figure out it was killing people, though.”
“It’s a plasma cloud, Rogue. You’re a very strange clump of mostly oxygen, carbon and hydrogen to it. You said it took people a while to understand it was sentient. That might have been mutual. Maybe it couldn’t even help itself from reacting with a body, until the vortex manipulator gave it a chance to get away. Maybe it didn’t jump planets to evade capture, maybe it was just trying to remove itself from a populated area. It had no way of setting any destination.”
“Either way, it has killed a lot of people. And it’s still dangerous.”
“More than ever. The vortex jump could only have made it worse, and it’s been holed up in this house for two hundred years. It must be half mad by now. And still holding on.” He turned back to the door, the detector still quietly buzzing in his hands. “But if it’s compromised like this… Could you open the trap, love? Just a little bit, open and shut.”
Rogue did, and watched the Doctor’s mood crumble even more. “Problem?”
“Big one.”
“Okay, what’s it doing?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No change whatsoever. It’s not reacting to the bait, but it should.”
“Maybe it’s too weak. Or the bait is.”
The Doctor shook his head. “It’s within reach, and I would have picked up some resonance, even if it doesn’t move. Oh, I should have known there’s something wrong with it from the start. They never attack people.”
“So that… corruption or what it is, it makes it immune to tetrapyrsic exothrevite?”
“Not immune, adverse. We basically brought pepperoni pizza to fight a heartburn. It’s already oversaturated, that’s the last thing it wants. We have nothing to lure it in.”
“The trap will still work if it gets close enough.”
“Rogue. It went for bodies. We probably look like a nice pack of antacids to it. If we get close enough, it’s going to pounce on us.”
“So we leave. Forget the bounty, you were right about it anyway. If the house has it trapped, it’s just going to die, sooner or later, right?”
“Eventually, yes. But we can’t.”
“Why not? We can put out a warning. Keep people away. How long would it take, Doctor?”
“Too long.” The Doctor leaned his head against the wall. “And the house won’t let go of all the people trapped with it, because it’s scared the creature will slip out, too. It only gave you back because it could barely hold you anyway. It won’t be able to contain the Diliqanite forever. It’s already failing, reaching out for help. When I thought you were touching my hand…”
Rogue surveyed the cellar door. “And someone else will come along, now that the bounty is out,” he said glumly. “They always do. Unless we can find the client and tell them to cancel it. But these jobs go to us because no one cares if…” He scoffed. “They won’t do that.”
“We can’t risk anyone else walking into this. And if it gets out, it will go through the village next. I can’t leave, Rogue. Everyone else who gets trapped or killed will be on me now.”
“On us. But I thought you were telling me it’s too dangerous.”
“It is.” The Doctor sighed. “No chance of getting you to stay outside?”
“Oh, how the tables… no. Let’s do this.”
“And without bait. I need to deactivate this, or it will repel the creature instead.”
“Won’t be a problem. We’ve got a strange clump of oxygen and carbon to attract it. And whatever you’re made of. Can you scan the floor plan and send it to my comm?”
“Doing it now.”
Rogue opened the file and zoomed in on the area around the stairs. “Gotta say, not my best idea for a couple’s night out.”
The Doctor turned to him, stepped closer and kissed him softly. “No, it’s a good thing we’re here. Come on, we’ll save the day and have a nice dinner after, okay?”
Rogue took him by his coat before he could turn away again and kissed him back. “Your choice where.”
They descended the stairs and turned into a corridor that led back into the other direction. Rogue nodded towards the end of it. In the darkness of the cellar, the faint outline of a door shone, reddish light seeping through the gap on the floor and along the doorframe. The Doctor put his detector away.
Rogue quietly set the trap on the floor and sent it sliding down the hallway. It came to a halt just outside the door.
“Nice,” the Doctor whispered.
Rogue allowed himself a small but proud grin, then pointed to the door to their left and to the dark open doorway at the end of the corridor. “According to the floor plan, this room is connected to the one next to it, the one that opens to the hallway right there. I don’t know about you, but I like having a second escape route.”
“I’ll check it. Meet at the trap?”
Rogue nodded, and the Doctor opened the door noiselessly, slipping through it like a cat. He moved down the corridor, never taking his eyes from the glowing doorframe. The light source behind it seemed to move too, almost as if it was pacing inside the room. If it had feet.
They arrived at the open arch where the second room joined with the corridor at the same time. The Doctor coughed delicately. “It’s where they stored their dust. And the good linen. But the path is clear.”
The dimmed light from the Doctor’s sonic swept around the room a second time. This one had two large wooden drums and a mangle lined up along the wall, a shelf carrying cardboard boxes with faded print next to them, and some more instruments Rogue wasn’t familiar with. In the back, there was another door, slightly ajar. Rogue checked the floor plan again. Only a small, narrow room behind it that stretched out behind the one where the creature hid; but it was a dead end. Two ways to the exit from where they stood, and the target confined and ready to be caught. Rogue knew better than to relax just yet.
“How do we get it to come out? I thought we’d be tasty enough to take care of that.”
“Just push the door open. I’ll find a broomstick or something.”
“What, your screwdriver isn’t up to that?”
The Doctor was already stepping back into the laundry room. “Trust me, the best thing to handle a wooden door is…”
He didn’t get to finish the sentence.
Whether it had been a crack in the wall or a small window that the sonic hadn’t picked up, Rogue never bothered trying to find out later. What he saw, while his body reacted on instinct, was the second door lighting up as if it was engulfed in flames, as the Diliqanite burst from the back room, barreling towards the Doctor. He grabbed the trap from the floor and flung it towards the creature, while he threw himself between the two. But the Doctor reacted just as fast. Before Rogue had found his balance, he felt two hands on his sides, using his momentum to push him fully out of the way. The room seemed to explode, filling with blinding light while the creature roared with triumph or rage or pain; somewhere inside that noise, he thought he could hear the Doctor scream.
The room went pitch black.
Only after the third frantic breath did he realise he was still standing. His shaking hands grappled with the torch until he could turn it on at last, to shine it into every corner of the empty room.
“No, no, no, no.”
The creature was gone. So was the Doctor.
“No. No, please.”
The creature rolled towards him like a burning avalanche, as he should have known, from the room they had failed to check. The other thing, he did know. Of course Rogue would try to get between them. He faintly registered that Rogue had thought to pick up the trap, and threw it, so he probably even had a chance. It felt almost dreamlike, the way time seemed to have slowed down, and rather offhandedly he grabbed him by the waist and hauled him to the side.
The creature burst into a blaze that threatened to consume them both, but the trap took hold, turning its bellow into a scream of blind rage, until it was swallowed with the last of the light. The Doctor stood in the darkness, and time stood still. The creature had fought the trap for a few seconds, rapidly dimming, painting the room in its stark, blood-red glow. Between the blinding flash and the fading of the light, there had been no trace of Rogue.
He made himself relight the sonic and stepped closer to where he had last seen him. The trap lay quietly on the floor, tipped over, its indicator light glowing dimly. The air around it tingled on his skin, still charged with residual energy. “Please,” he whispered. He searched the floor, over and over, finding it as empty as the rest of the cellar. No Rogue - but also no buttons, no hidden pocket knife, and no ring.
“Oh,” the Doctor breathed. “My clever old friend. Well done. Oh, well done. Don’t worry, it’s gone now. It won’t hurt anyone else, we’ll make sure of that. You can let them go now.”
He waited, listening into the silence. Then a sigh seemed to flow from the walls, more felt than heard, an ancient creature daring to breathe for the first time in two centuries.
Rogue looked like a ghost at first, being eased back into reality with great care. He was pale as a sheet, staring into nothing with his face frozen in shock and disbelief; his arms had dropped to his sides, leaving him standing in a circle of light from the torch he was barely holding.
Then Rogue was solid again. He drew in a deep breath, as if he was dragging himself back to the real world, waking up from a nightmare, and staggered towards him. “I thought it got you. Shit, I thought…” He took the Doctor’s face between his hands, as if to make sure he was there, and leaned against his forehead. “Let’s just get out of here, okay?”
He was surprised to see the early morning sun filtering through the gaps in the boards as he walked into the entrance hall, firmly holding the Doctor’s hand. The house looked much friendlier in the clear, young light, despite the two centuries of neglect. Sleeping peacefully under a blanket of dust. It deserved some rest, he thought, after keeping watch for so long.
Outside, the Doctor kissed the stone arch of the front door. “I will make sure people come back,” he whispered. “Your rooms will be alive again, I promise.”
They fought their way back to the TARDIS through the garden, slowly, because the Doctor turned back to him at every other step, grinning, almost bouncing with joy. “I’ll just forge an inspection report that there’s nothing wrong with the place, with a recommendation to have it inhabited again for conservatory purposes. It is historic architecture, after all.”
Rogue turned around too, glancing at the house. “Isn’t it weird though? Living inside a creature who watches you day and night?”
They had reached the blue doors, and the Doctor leaned against them, beaming at Rogue. “You think?”
“Guess why I prefer to keep some parts of my life on my own ship.”
The Doctor laughed. “It’s not watching like that,” he said, nodding to the mansion. “It only paid so much attention to us because we were the first visitors in years. If you’re this ancient, the little everyday things start blurring. It was only dozing, decade after decade. It’s the passage of time it loves, you know? Lives lighting up in the stream of the years, blooming, igniting new life and ebbing again, everything in its own time, comforting as a lullaby. Until that night.”
“Until those lives were cut short before it knew what was happening.”
The Doctor turned the trap in his hands. “I didn’t want to say it inside,” he said quietly. “But the chronoplasm absorbed by the Diliqanite might have drawn it here in the first place. This massive presence of temporal energy.” He sighed. “But then again, if it hadn’t been trapped here, nothing else could have stopped it from wiping out the village. Maybe this was the best case scenario. Poor thing.” He gave the house a last, rueful smile and opened the TARDIS door.
Rogue followed him inside. “What happened to the people it let go? Shouldn’t they be here, too?”
“No, of course not. Their time bubble popped.” He somehow managed to split the last word into three syllables.
“They died?”
The Doctor looked at him as if he had said the most outlandish thing he’d ever heard. “Their day continued, they went home. In their own time. Unsettled but unharmed. By the way, Rogue, do I really drive you mad?”
“Haven’t been right in the head since I’ve met you.” Rogue leaned on the console, staring up the gleaming time rotor. “But didn’t we just create a paradox?”
“No. Well, yes, of course we did, but time stitched itself up and everything’s fine.”
“‘Stitched itself up’?”
“Time fixes itself all the time, you just don’t notice. And in the lucky case of our village… well, you’ve said it yourself. Backwater place. Big history just marches past. It doesn’t mean a lot to the universe that a few people here suddenly have never been gone. But for the people here…”
“It means the universe.”
“Even if they never knew. Maybe they wondered sometimes why they were so glad to see their loved ones…”
“But the house was supposed to be haunted.”
The Doctor grinned widely. “It still is. People swear someone has disappeared, but no one can tell who exactly. Remember how you couldn’t find out which of your colleagues was missing? Everyone knows that someone’s gone, no one remembers who. No empty beds either, everyone is accounted for. All everyone knows is that you don’t go into that place if you value your sanity. But that’s the beauty of a haunted house, isn’t it? Things are supposed to be just that little bit off, and you can never quite put your finger on it.”
“So you just threw a few spiderwebs over your massive paradox and called it haunted.”
“Basically. Yes. Now stop poking at it.”
Rogue checked the file on his comm again.
“Guess you’re right. It just says ‘disappearances’ now, no details on who or when. Everything else…” He stopped abruptly and stared at the screen. “Doc,” he said quietly.
“Mh?”
“Says here the housekeeper found the two kids in their beds in the morning. The mansion belongs to one of their descendants.” He took a shaky breath. “The creature never got them.”
The Doctor was quiet for a moment. “We did hear a baby, remember? I didn’t connect the dots, but that should have told us it was safe. At least the house could protect a part of its family. Oh. Wait a minute.” Some other thought had crossed his mind. He took the comm out of Rogue’s hands, typed on it, buzzed his sonic at it and continued typing. “Interesting.”
“We could put up a jar,” Rogue suggested.
“What for?”
“For every time you mumble ‘interesting’ without going on.”
The Doctor smiled broadly at him. “You love me.” He punched a few buttons on the console and threw a lever. “Time to make a delivery.”
As he followed the Doctor outside, Rogue considered suggesting a second jar for every time they didn’t land where they should. It would have to be a big one.
“That’s not the agency,” he said, feeling a hint of exhaustion at the sight of a desolate, dusty planet. With some imagination, he thought he could see buildings far off, or perhaps only rock formations, but the air was too hazy to tell for sure.
“Nope,” the Doctor replied cheerfully. “We’re on Dliqan.”
“Why?”
“Watch.”
The Doctor put the trap on the ground a few steps away from the TARDIS, retreated to the doors and lifted the screwdriver above his head. It sent out a series of chittering clicks. A few moments later, the air bristled and three glowing red clouds formed, hovering above the trap.
“Please tell me what you’re doing?” Rogue muttered under his breath. He didn’t get an answer. Instead, the Doctor pointed the sonic at the trap and pressed a button.
“What the hell are you-“ Rogue watched in horror as the device unlocked and the creature, glowing in a darker, sickening red, poured out. Then the others descended on it, merging into one and consuming it whole. Slowly, the colours blended to the same shade, softly pulsating. A quick sequence of clicks came from it.
“Hard to translate the language of a species without vocal cords in all its intricacies,” the Doctor whispered. “But I’d say it means ‘thank you’. Well, that’s our part done.” He gave a small nod to the Diliqanite cloud and went back into the TARDIS. Rogue followed and closed the door behind him, but stayed with his back to it while the Doctor strode up to the centre.
“Doc,” he said, as calmly as he could.
“Yes, love?”
Impossible to be mad at him when he was beaming like that.
“Did you just let them dissolve a stupendously large bounty?”
Somehow, the Doctor’s smile grew even wider as he walked back towards him. “Oh Rogue, you don’t even need the money.”
“What about my professional reputation?”
The Doctor took both his hands in his and gave him a little kiss on the nose. “I told you, those transmissions aren’t secure at all.” He pirouetted and walked away again. Rogue wistfully thought of another trap to get him to stand still for once.
“Because I thought, who would want a murderous cloud creature to be captured alive? So I hacked into your agency’s database - that was the ‘interesting’ earlier, see how easy it was - et voilà! The creature’s family, of course. They’ll take care of it. They didn’t dissolve it, they’re healing it. It won’t hurt anyone else.”
“Those clouds employed the agency?” Rogue slowly followed him down the walkway.
“All I did was skip the middle man to hand it over. Thought I deserved some reward, too.” He winked at him and turned to the console, setting the TARDIS to flight. “You’re going to find the money in your account. And I believe you wanted to buy me dinner with it…”
the_cosmic_cafe on Chapter 2 Sat 27 Sep 2025 12:05AM UTC
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