The Eleventh Doctor || Doctor Who (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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trans_92011-08-10 02:08 am
makeherblue) wrote in trans_92011-08-10 02:08 am
Hanger - TARDIS
[Takes place right after clone plot and arriving back on Stacy. After there]
“First sharks and now explosions!” The Doctor held up his ruined sonic screwdriver and turned it in the light. “I’ll have to proof against both, I suppose.”
He crossed the Hanger in long strides, expecting Otter Soother Daniel Jackson to keep up. Daniel had held himself rather well during the whole clone thing and what was more, he even saved his sonic for him! The Doctor found himself feeling rather fond of the human right this moment. Good man! Resourceful! But also being annoyingly close-mouthed about what he might have picked up from that encounter with the Other Doctor, which was surprising because he thought he knew humans and if there was anything he learned from all his time amongst them, it was they loved talking almost as much as he did! Questions in particular were their favorite, no matter how obvious or rhetorical or downright silly. Big big fan of the obvious questions. Basically they were a chatty species.
Part of the reason why he’d asked Daniel to come with him to the TARDIS.
If he was lucky, Daniel would tell him what he’d seen from that clone on his own, given enough time and company.
The Doctor was tucking the sonic back into his pocket when they came into sight of the TARDIS. He only paused for the briefest of beats as he took in the fact the old girl’s doors were wide open, positively gaping open! This wasn’t looking very looked out after and he wondered if maybe Jamie’s memory retention was failing thanks to him being an ex-dead man. Clearly the human needed a talking to! He approached cautiously, poking his head inside.
Everything in the console room looked in order, if you ignored the suspicious trail of foam cups leading away from the door and a few minute scratches on the glass which he knew for a fact hadn’t been there since he last checked. The Doctor’s lips pursed as he peered about, head weaving as he checked under the control console and then straightened. Where was Jamie? In fact, where were the rest of his friends?
“Better have a look around,” the Doctor lied, perhaps too cheerfully. “Long time away from home and I’m afraid River’s gone and organized things. I’m very specific on my organization system, I’ll have you know.”
He made a vague shooing motion at Daniel.
((So basically this is thread two, with the Doctor/Daniel/Rory jumping into a TARDIS taken over by the Master. Since the Master can switch up rooms (up to the players in the threads for what's wrong with the rooms) and trap people/shift people around, I guess assume timey-wimey things to allow different characters to stumble into each other? But yeah, I guess do subthreads for characters stumbling and we can subthread different people running into them.
I think we're looking at people in the TARDIS as: Victoria, Martha, The Master, River, Jamie, Doctor, Daniel, Rory, Amy, Eva. If I missed anyone, poke me!))
“First sharks and now explosions!” The Doctor held up his ruined sonic screwdriver and turned it in the light. “I’ll have to proof against both, I suppose.”
He crossed the Hanger in long strides, expecting Otter Soother Daniel Jackson to keep up. Daniel had held himself rather well during the whole clone thing and what was more, he even saved his sonic for him! The Doctor found himself feeling rather fond of the human right this moment. Good man! Resourceful! But also being annoyingly close-mouthed about what he might have picked up from that encounter with the Other Doctor, which was surprising because he thought he knew humans and if there was anything he learned from all his time amongst them, it was they loved talking almost as much as he did! Questions in particular were their favorite, no matter how obvious or rhetorical or downright silly. Big big fan of the obvious questions. Basically they were a chatty species.
Part of the reason why he’d asked Daniel to come with him to the TARDIS.
If he was lucky, Daniel would tell him what he’d seen from that clone on his own, given enough time and company.
The Doctor was tucking the sonic back into his pocket when they came into sight of the TARDIS. He only paused for the briefest of beats as he took in the fact the old girl’s doors were wide open, positively gaping open! This wasn’t looking very looked out after and he wondered if maybe Jamie’s memory retention was failing thanks to him being an ex-dead man. Clearly the human needed a talking to! He approached cautiously, poking his head inside.
Everything in the console room looked in order, if you ignored the suspicious trail of foam cups leading away from the door and a few minute scratches on the glass which he knew for a fact hadn’t been there since he last checked. The Doctor’s lips pursed as he peered about, head weaving as he checked under the control console and then straightened. Where was Jamie? In fact, where were the rest of his friends?
“Better have a look around,” the Doctor lied, perhaps too cheerfully. “Long time away from home and I’m afraid River’s gone and organized things. I’m very specific on my organization system, I’ll have you know.”
He made a vague shooing motion at Daniel.
((So basically this is thread two, with the Doctor/Daniel/Rory jumping into a TARDIS taken over by the Master. Since the Master can switch up rooms (up to the players in the threads for what's wrong with the rooms) and trap people/shift people around, I guess assume timey-wimey things to allow different characters to stumble into each other? But yeah, I guess do subthreads for characters stumbling and we can subthread different people running into them.
I think we're looking at people in the TARDIS as: Victoria, Martha, The Master, River, Jamie, Doctor, Daniel, Rory, Amy, Eva. If I missed anyone, poke me!))
Hey, if it helps, I typoed now as know :( And things like that before
Aside from possibly falling out of that harness to who knew how far the drop was, but he's telling the truth when he says that technically Eva was safe from getting eaten by the Guinness Book of World Records, for example. No murderous books just yet. The Doctor watches as Eva keeps a foot on the door. It looks like for now the library's moved on and while it's off trying to get at them more creatively, he's keen on heading toward that dumbwaiter.
Only Eva's doing that human thing: digging in her heels with all these questions. He doesn't doubt they're legitimate questions. It's just now is spectacularly bad timing with an intruder in the TARDIS and Eva is lucky the room she's in hasn't decided to implode on itself, like poor Rory's.
"Well? Did you want to wait for the library to come have a go at you too?" The Doctor asks, exasperated, some of the stress briefly coming through.
I typo 'time' as other things a lot. Never sure why.
She notices the stress, the brief crack in the flippant, distractable exterior. And despite the fact that her stubborn, contrary nature is screaming at her to keep resisting his insistence, she also knows he knows the place infinitely better than she does (or than he'll ever let her), and if he is trying to keep her safe she'd better follow along. She takes her foot off the door. "Alright, the dumbwaiter. Would you mind actually telling me what's going on so I know what to look out for?"
Unfortunately, he won't get to tell her anything in time to stop the gravelly hand that emerges from a nearby wall, grabs her by the shoulder, and in less than a second starts to pull her against the plaster surface. She yelps in shock before another emerges and puts its hand over her mouth. A third and fourth restrain her wrists as she struggles.
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The hands are trying their best to pull Eva right through the wall, despite it being a solid mass. The Doctor bounds over, trying first to pull at the hands the old-fashioned way and then sonicing them: the sonic glows green and the only thing that seems to happen is the hands spasm and grip even harder than before, enough to bruise. He tries again to get his fingers under the hand on Eva's shoulder, then mouth, finding that each of the attempts is about as success as the last. As they watch, words of some alien language began to spread up from the wall, softly glowing with the planetary colors of the TOURIST SOCIETY SECTION A. The hand covering Eva's mouth starts scrolling with WELCOME TO HALGON.
Oh. So that's not good at all. Didn't think it'd get here so fast!
"Eva, I need you to be calm," the Doctor weaves, trying to get her to look him right in the eye."Very extremely absolutely calm. Trust me, the more you struggle, the more appetizing you look."
It's the music. He can hear it through the walls, the Doctor freezing only inches from Eva and looking up. A few notes, dipping between octaves slightly too low for a human to hear, and he knows them by hearts because they came from that holo-brochure about Tir of Antion's Concert Extravaganza: All Lifeforms Invited. You know, that one he visited back when he wore rainbow. Or was it the celery? Rainbow or celery. The music sets his teeth humming in the back of his mouth. It's designed to be pleasurable even to lifeforms who have a limited aural range, such as humans like Eva.
It's also from a brochure he left in the library he just escaped from.
The Doctor shakes himself and tries to work faster as the notes get louder and closer. The hands on Eva start to look less like hands and more like bits and pieces of the library melted together as the main body of it gets closer and closer.
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She's almost doing well until the wall starts growing more hands, and fingers ringed with letters and titles start picking at her. A curious ring finger tries to drill into her ear, and her composure is completely lost. Dead and eaten is one thing, but this reminder of her slavery sends her into conniptions. She thrashes what she can of her body, sobbing, screaming against the gag (which has now melted back into a paperback), oblivious to the wall dribbling to the floor and reforming itself behind her into a gaping maw.
The paperback around her mouth starts to wring her neck instead. "Get away from me! Get it away from me!" she chokes, wrenching one arm free and reaching to the Doctor for help. In this one moment, she trusts him entirely. It's all she can do.
ugh, sorry, massive typos when I wrote this D:
He supposes he can't blame her for going mental: it's not every day you get attacked by a library and she's human, so that means she's has generations of Homo sapien instincts telling her this sort of thing is impossible. He doesn't waste time comforting her. Maybe a few lives ago he would have done, but he's not that sort of man these days and he can always comfort her as much as she wants when she's not, well, dinner for the library. Now that the library is solidifying to something more library-ish, the Doctor has a better idea what setting to use. He flicks through the sonic screwdriver's settings and takes aim.
The wood pulp on the hand holding Eva's neck twitches as its molecules start vibrating. The hand lets go. The Doctor grabs Eva, a bit roughly, and pulls her head out of range as the hand suddenly bursts into flames.
The mouth behind Eva opens in a terrific roar.
It's unlike any roar he's heard before. It's every piece of fiction in that library, every bit of spam mail and love letter; tragedies, Greek comedies, out-dated holo reviews; that terrible book of poetry he wrote when he was just shy of 200. They all roar at once, the entire room shaking overhead and under their feet. The Doctor doesn't dare look at Eva's face and see her expression. He knows she's terrified. Humans tend to adventure into even more life-or-death situations than normal when they're around him. Maybe he ought to pass out warning cards and --
"Those are rubbish last words, Eva Salazar!" The Doctor tries to attack the other hands holding her with the sonic. Some of them crumple, as if they're being attacked by termites, and the others spasm back into flames. "You need to listen to me: pull! What good is screaming going to do? Must be a human thing. Big screamers, you lot! Pull! Come on!"
The Doctor works frantically to give Eva enough space to pull herself free. Considering how quickly the library is regrowing its "arms", she won't have much time and they're starting to pop up faster than the Doctor can take them out. The mouth sprouts an impressive row of fangs behind Eva, a nightmare mix of letter openers, broken broom handles, and huge splinters from the main door. A tongue of the collected works of Charles Dickens flops onto the floor. All the words run together into a big ugly mess. The smell of ancient musty books wafts out.
HDU I have never make typoes in my lief.
She's not scared anymore. Now she's mad.
She shoves roughly past the Doctor, not taking the time to thank him in her new self-appointed task. She takes a deep breath of that dusty, dry smell and leaps straight into the thing's mouth, gathering up its tongue off the floor in her arms and pulling it. It's heavy and thrashing, so she stumbles and nearly trips as she makes her way backwards out of the maw, but she has a firm enough grasp on it. Those awful teeth won't bite down while the tongue is out, at least, not if it's emulating a normal mouth.
"Use the damn torch on this," she yells at Eleven, stamping her foot down on the wrist of an arm that's appeared and tossing her head back and forth as another gets its fingers in her hair.
Unless he has a reason not to, that is. This is his world, the rules of physics and magic that govern his life and up until recently, not hers. She's only adapting as best she can.
Eva ILU. Also pointing fingers icon combo. :|
They're quite bouncy like that!
Eva surprises him by going above and beyond. Incredibly extremely above and beyond! So above and beyond she shocks even him! The Doctor stumbles out of the way as Eva chooses to jump right at the library mouth and decides, well, while she's at it, she might pick up a bit of tongue too and he's so downright surprised that there's that split second where he simply looks at it before she yells at him. Torch! Oh, right, she means the sonic! The Doctor takes aim at the tongue lashing in her arms, trying its best to throw her, or, better yet, reel her back in like some sort of hideous frog. He changes the setting to a much higher one and flicks it, the sonic's prongs snapping open.
A middle section of the tongue bursts into flames. Smoke fills the room, followed by the smell of burning wet, moldy books. Somewhere he thinks he can smell his second favorite arm chair burning, which is a shame - he doesn't even remember where that got to and now it's obvious. This particular library must've made off with it when his back was turned! A small final revenge until it can come up with something later. The fire spreads quickly as it hits the drier bits barely giving Eva time to drop the tongue. The library maw snaps those fangs at them and roars again.
Apparently this isn't quite the unfair fight it was looking for. It starts to retreat into the wall, that Tir of Antion song the last thing to fade. The Doctor approaches the great big hole cautiously, scanning it with his sonic, and decides that if they're going to get attacked again, it'll be some place they won't have so much space in. Probably.
The Doctor steps away from the hole and whirls on Eva. "Wonderful work, Eva! Let's get moving to that dumbwaiter before the library tries again."
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She gets back up right as the refrain of the song fades, slapping dust and ash off her shoulders and knees. Unlike the Doctor, she does not approach the hole, but keeps a safe distance. She takes a few deep breaths and puts her hands over her ears for a few moments, before digging her own fingers in to try and make sure that they're still clear. No Yeerk, no library. She bites her lip.
"Right, the dumbwaiter," she says, although the encounter has stoked that rebellious side. She gives the Doctor a steely glare. "At some point are you going to bother explaining any of that to me? Or how about anything beyond your most superficial interests? Do I ever get to know you, Doc, or do you just expect me to follow you around like some curious animal looking for treats while danger hunkers in the corner waiting for me to let my guard down?"
Just because the threat is gone doesn't mean her anger has left her. She's just shifted targets.
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"You and your explanations! Humans!" He tips his chin and blows out a breath. "Fine! Not that an explanation," he draws out the word derisively, "is going to do you any good. There's a strange man inside my TARDIS, I don't know who he is, and he's somehow managed to get the library sided against me! Among other...things."
He whirls back on his heel, trusting that Eva is the exact stubborn sort to want to keep this up and not willing to stick around in that room while she wants to have a row with him. They can keep going in the dumbwaiter. If she makes so much noise that the library tracks them down, he's going to say she only has herself to blame. The Doctor ducks into a corridor that looks two parts access hatch and one part actual corridor, forced to drop to a crawl after only several meters. Does he know where he's going? Only vaguely, but considering how cross Eva is with him right now, he's certainly not going to admit he's barely better off than she is. The access shaft/corridor goes on for quite a bit and he can practically feel Eva's anger from behind him, like this solid little cloud of Eva-ness.
It's probably one of the most awkward times he's had to crawl through a tunnel, actually.
The dumbwaiter senses them before they pop out of the tunnel, its doors already opening with a friendly ding. The Doctor is out first to check on the dumbwaiter. Eva's left free to crawl out on her own as he mutters to the dumbwaiter and fiddles with a control box, sonic buzzing away. Incredibly enough, it seems to be beeping and blooping at him, almost as if it's talking back.
"Right!" The Doctor clasps his hands and rubs them together. He's even more fidgety than before, thanks to the near miss with the library and Eva on the warpath for the worst things of all: explanations. "Not every bit of the TARDIS is like the library. Good! The dumbwaiter can take us to the forest but that's as far as it can go. We'll have to find a shortcut through there back to the console room."
The dumbwaiter gives Eva a big friendly bloop. It even flutters its door lights, rather like it's flirting just a little bit. Apparently it hasn't had many -- read; any -- occupants for quite some time and now it's positively ecstatic to finally have some passengers. Make that also an opportunity to make a pointed jab at that damned library and the dumbwaiter is having a very good day indeed.
That library had it coming. It knew it would show its true colors someday.
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"See, you say these things, like 'fine', and then you give me a bare bones explanation and don't exactly bother to tell me what these 'other things' are. You tried to tell me there wasn't any danger and then twenty seconds later I was violated and nearly eaten by one of your carnivorous rooms. Is communication just not something people care about on your planet, or is it something only special people like you get?" She continues to berate him as she follows him through the access shaft, though in a hushed voice. "I'm not a toy, or a charming pet, or some lower life form that can't think properly. If there comes a situation where I need to defend myself, the best thing I can arm myself with is information."
She discards the spare shoe, too. Not going to do much good without the other, and she doubts that'll ever get found.
Having nearly been eaten by part of his home, she doesn't respond all that appreciatively to the dumbwaiter's innocuous advances. She gives it a sharp look and stands in it with her arms crossed and her body slightly hunched. "Well?"
It only strikes her as slightly strange that he has an entire forest in here somewhere.
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"My planet." The Doctor echos in a level voice. His face goes still. He leans forward, tilting his head slightly, and gets up close to Eva. "Bit of a moot point, my planet. Not worth phoning home! You know how bad days are, I'm sure you've had your share."
Not that she watched her own world burn, nor watched as her people used Time as a weapon and killed countless others, only to resurrect them all over again to suit their purposes. Of course her planet will burn further down the line -- solar flares, stylish way for Earth to go; he was there to see it off, of course -- but at least she won't have to live with thinking she could've prevented it somehow. Probably has to be something comforting in a human's limited perceptions. It must be peaceful not to see Time and its tangents. The Doctor is oddly still and quiet, just studying Eva, as if he's seeing her for the first time. Sometimes he envies humans. They're such a young species, all promise and potential and all those great things they're destined for, all those beautiful, amazing things!
It doesn't erase what happened with Gallifrey. It does make it easier to soldier on, for the most part, or at least try to push it to the side and wait for that fresh hurt to hurt a little less. The Doctor's mouth quirks in a quiet smile, almost private. Bad day indeed. Probably the worst bad day he's had, in a collection of bad days, and it's times like those that you really, truly need to remember the good days. Despite wandering into a stolen TARDIS and getting Eva almost eaten, he's still trying to count this as one of the good days. They're all good days in comparison.
Matter of perspective, really.
"You're none of the above, Eva. You're human. Brilliantly human! Not a bad thing to shoot for, I'd say." The Doctor leans back, playing with his bowtie in that unconscious habit of his. "I thought I'd save you the effort of a good panic," he adds. "Obviously that didn't work out. My mistake."
He still thinks Plan Get Eva Out Of The TARDIS ought to work. Telling her that the other rooms are going through their own strange changes isn't going to do anything to help her right now in the present. Behind the Doctor, the dumbwaiter closes its lift doors, trying to break the tension as politely as it can.
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Human. The way he says 'human', as if it's something unique, some rare spice in the universe that could never be replaced, may be a genuine expression of affection for her species, but it makes her skin crawl. 'Human' is what got her into this mess in the first place.
Weak, fragile, emotional, sentimental human. Edriss used to call her that, when she was too busy weeping inside her prison of a body to entertain her slave-driver's desire for idle chit-chat and political analysis.
Clever, ambitious, rebellious little human. Edriss called her that too sometimes. The little coo of frustrated admiration had felt like an insult the time she broke her own ankles during the feeding times to spite her Yeerk, or when she tried to leak Edriss' secrets to other hosts and ended up getting them sentenced to death.
Human, a quaint enough little species to be admired, but never smart enough or strong enough to be a threat. Never an equal. Just little humans playing with fire and other forces far beyond their ken, a flash of a race in a very old, very wise universe, children and toys for species that knew better and longer than they did. It makes her want to vomit.
And yet for all her defiance and revulsion, she doesn't miss the undertone of loss to the Doctor's commentary. For the first time it occurs to her that he must be a very long way away from home, and what makes him so eccentric and individual here also makes him isolated. He's probably separated from his race entirely, and she briefly wonders if he's the last of his kind. Whether he is or not, being alone on Stacy would explain why he's come to treat his own ship as much like a partner as a vehicle.
So despite the challenge of her upturned nose and stern face, her gaze falls a bit. She gently takes his wrist in her hand and gives it a brief squeeze, not long enough to turn from touch to restraint. Then she returns her hand to her pocket, making no impositions with the physical contact. "Alright, fine. Whatever that's supposed to mean. Anything I should know about this forest?"
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If the TARDIS was working, he would have offered to take her traveling with him.
Eva Salazar is the type of person he'd like to count as a friend.
She's an exceptional woman. Human. Human; woman; obvious survivor of some sort. That much he knows or it's evident from the things she simply hasn't said, how she holds herself. How she moves. That look on her face when he pretends he's busier than he is. Once you've gone through that sort of thing, you can't just shut it off, not entirely -- you could get as good at hiding it as you liked, but there would always be a little something. It's like engineering, with the bits and bobs left over. The Doctor watches her for a moment longer before angling his body away and clearing his throat, turning back to the business at hand as the dumbwaiter's overhead lights brighten cautiously.
It might just sense that things are looking up, as much as things could look up in a sabotaged TARDIS.
"This forest? Well, it's an Everything Forest! That's what I like to call it, lovely little name." The Doctor pauses to think, one hand resting on a rather pretty marble globe jutting from the wall. "All sorts of stuff there. Loads of it! I think at one point I used it to store things, but..."
The Doctor bites his lip. Obviously this is so far back he can't quite remember. One of the problems about getting old is he's noticing (very, very) slight memory problems, or that he takes just a few nanoseconds longer to figure out a Brilliant Plan than he used to or he forgets where he put that second favorite chair. Even things like why that library wants his blood are getting a bit hazy around the edges. Anyway, he's about 90%-ish sure he did use it as storage at one point. The Doctor rotates the globe as the dumbwaiter they're standing in positively vibrates with excitement.
And they're off! The dumbwaiter bolts through the little slips of space between the TARDIS's dimensions, sliding horizontally as everything flashes past the grating. It gives a bumpy jerk and then jitters diagonally before it smooths its course. He can't blame the dumbwaiter for being rusty and it's a good thing he hasn't told Eva that it's lucky it operates at all).
The Doctor glances at the human next to him. What could be stars or a corridor of ancient Christmas lights flit past, pinpricks of color blurring together.
"It's very easy to get lost in the Everything Forest. Stay close, no matter how exciting it is down there! Actually, I used to get lost in there accidentally-on-purpose," the Doctor gives a nostalgic sort of sigh, eyes looking at something faraway, and in the same breath suddenly says, "I'm sorry."
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Now she's free and the whole world still moves too damned fast for her. Her son grows up and her friends move on and she's stuck here, suspended in chloroform, an artifact from a war slowly getting relegated to the history books, if it's remembered at all.
"I'm sorry, too." She wraps her arms around herself. She is, truly. Sometimes she forgets that she's not the only one with sensitive subjects. That she should be as careful where she treads in a conversation as people are around her. "Just, you know, like you said. Bad days."
Then she thinks she knows the Doctor well enough that it wouldn't be entirely improper to swear in his presence, and says "it's not every day I get earfucked by a hungry library". It's not a sentence she ever really foresaw herself saying.
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Bit of a lost cause.
"Probably trying to get a sniff around. It's never had human, I suspect. Rather hoping to keep it that way, actually," the Doctor tries to recover and reaches up to touch one of his burning ears. He can only make a guess at her bad days. The Doctor glances over, taking in the way she's hugging her arms to herself as if she can root herself to that one spot. "Eva, you'll get out just fine. What's one little library compared to you?"
It's times like this he wishes he could make her understand just how he sees her.
He sees the signs of hurt on her. Recognizes it, survivor to survivor. But there's everything else, there's just...well, everything! She's wonderfully human. He would like to say she's the best kind of human, despite the - the impressive vocabulary that to be perfectly honest he doesn't care for. Trying to ignore that (and wondering how she doesn't burn everyone's ears while she's at it), the Doctor sees more potential in her than faults. He gazes at her for a moment longer, as if waiting for a sign, and then abruptly turns back to the dumbwaiter's panel to slap his hand back on the marble ball.
The dumbwaiter stops, only it doesn't, because what it does next can hardly be called a proper stop. It careens sideways, skids, whirls, and then comes to a rickety stop just as it starts to tip over. The Doctor throws his hand out to catch himself, his shoulder slamming into the side of the dumbwaiter. The next second it's over and he can pick himself up, rubbing at his shoulder ruefully. Maybe he needs to install pillows in here, come to think of it; can't go wrong with pillows, you can use pillows in everything and maybe that's something safe for Eva. Pillows! Nothing even vaguely library-ish about pillows!
The Doctor stoops to try to help Eva up and out the door as the dumbwaiter dings open. The ding sounds vaguely sheepish.
He fusses over her for a moment, checking for anything broken. "You okay? Sorry about the landing, it's been awhile. Well! Here we are: the Everything Forest."
They've landed in a small meadow outside of the forest, tall dark trees towering above them. Skid marks scar the red grass in long streaks. A few safety lights flicker on around them, set into old gas lamps with their glass panes frosted over and scratched. It's an oddly lonely picture -- nowhere near as exciting as the Doctor promised.
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Eva goes crashing into the side of the dumbwaiter and then to the floor as it comes to a stop. She ignores the Doctor's hand, brushing herself off and getting up herself. It's not that she doesn't appreciate the gesture - especially after he was no help at all when she was exiting the tunnel to the dumbwaiter a few minutes back - but simply that she has enough pride to want to show that cheeky dumbwaiter what's what.
Oh, God, she's even thinking like the Doctor. His eccentricity is infectious.
"I'm fine. Been through worse than a clumsy dumbwaiter." She redoes the clip in her hair, bringing her bangs out of her eyes. Hard to run around with hair obscuring your vision, and who knows what might attack in this Everything Forest? It certainly looks like something violent has been here, what with the skid marks. A crash landing, maybe?
"It's..." She tries to find the right word. Underwhelming, maybe, after all the madness ten minutes ago. After the coffee cups a few months ago. Sad, almost. Like it hasn't been as well-tended as other areas of the ship. "Quiet. It's quiet."
You killed me at the dictionary part. Well played.
If a dumbwaiter could wilt, Eva's comment just about does it. That was one crash landing it hadn't quite planned.
"Quiet," the Doctor repeats after Eva. He pulls a face and makes a move to sweep his floppy hair out of his eyes. "I was going to say 'dull', but let's go with quiet. I don't understand why it's like this. It's so...so...so quiet."
He says the word like it's disgusting. Quiet and restful and so dull it makes his eyes want to cross, that's how annoyingly quiet it is! Eva has a way of summing up the situation in her particularly human way. In this case, she's entirely right, the Doctor wandering a few feet away from her and looking lost as he turns on the spot, listening for that jukebox he tossed in here to start playing "Heartbreak Hotel". Nothing. Not even the trees rustling in that breeze he used to like. Just their own voices, only carrying so far before they simply stop. It's soul-suckingly dull. He has to blink to focus, trying to work past what has to be a Leadsworth level of peaceful and it's one of those times he's glad he has a human to help him through this. The Doctor peers around suspiciously but the fact is nothing so far is coming screaming for their blood or using his second favorite chair as revenge, like that library, so there's really nothing to do about it but keep moving on.
"We'll head north," the Doctor says, after licking his finger and waving it around like a divining rod. "You like north? North's a lovely direction. Oh yes, here -- "
The Doctor fishes around in his pockets, shoving his arm right up to the elbow and blindly groping around until he comes up with an "ah-ha!" and what looks...oddly enough like a perfectly normal torch. Considering the cups and the horrid, tacky handkerchiefs he gave Eva some time earlier, it's so normal it looks weird all over again. He tries flicking it on and off a few times before he passes it to Eva with a smile.
"Ready?"
Glad I could amuse. ;)
Eva actually wouldn't mind the quiet, except that she's on edge from all the chaos earlier. In a more sound state of mind, she may enjoy the loneliness here - she's never been a fan of silence, but between her fondness for singing and her tendency to talk to herself, she's more than capable of filling the air with mindless noise. The only problem is that, with her ear still feeling horrible dirty and itchy with the touch of the library, quiet just signals a calm before the storm now.
She follows the Doctor on quiet, delicate feet, trying not to disturb the silence. She's not unlike a gun-shy deer in the way she anticipates danger, except that she's armed and fully capable of fighting back.
When the Doctor hands her the torch, she actually has to stifle a sudden laugh. It only figures that now he hands her something useful, after all those well-intentioned but paternalistic and pointless platitudes pre-library. She takes it and holds it in front of her. The lights make her scars seem like deep canyons in her face.
"Am I ever not?"
It's an honest question. She hopes that she's impressed the Doctor, and that he'll tell her such without making her feel like a product of her helpless little species.
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If she wanted to impress him, she's done a good job of it...foul mouth aside. At least his ears have stopped burning, so that's a small plus. She'd probably handle herself very well on a proper adventure that didn't involve man-eating libraries and he promises himself that once this nasty little business with the Ohm is over and done with that he'll offer her a trip or two in the TARDIS. He thinks a proper adventure could do her loads of good. Actually, it could do anyone ever in existence good, as far as he's concerned, and he thinks that needs to be some sort of motto somewhere. LIFE OF ADVENTURE - WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED sounds about right to him.
At the very least having someone here with him keeps him from that spiral. It's not often something can get into the TARDIS like this. It's almost too personal.
The Doctor marches down the little trail with Eva, the gas lamps splitting off after a point and dotting the area with no rhyme or reason. He can see their lights through the silent tree trunks, winking and flickering at him, and they don't see to have any idea where that jukebox got to either. Most of the trees look like a mix of Earth trees, tall and old, and there's no telling how long they've been there. A few look decidedly alien, the Doctor pausing at one of the red ones to poke at it almost fondly. Old reminder. Extremely very old reminder. He picks up the pace again as they reach a split in the path.
"Ah," he says, non-perturbed.
He glances from left to right and back again, trying to pick a path because as far as he can tell, they both go north and that's what bothers him, because the thing is...
There shouldn't even be a path in the first place. He never put one in.
The Doctor waffles between the two options, not liking either, and certainly not liking that silence that feels like it weighs down on him. How Eva can stand it is beyond him. The Doctor fidgets with his hands. He clasps and unclasps them, then stuffs them in his pockets. He thinks both paths aren't worth going down, even if they look quiet and peaceful and he's having a hard time concentrating when he can practically feel that damned quiet hovering in the air like that!
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She has the feeling that the Doctor doesn't fidget to remind himself of freedom.
"What's wrong?" she asks, hushed.
There's a Robert Frost poem that she doesn't especially like that starts a little like the scenario they've found themselves in. The more she thinks about it, the more she feels that the quiet isn't the unusual part of this place - it's the normality of it. It's almost mundane, and the Doctor's abode never seems anything like that. She puts her hand to the gun in her holster, just in case.
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"Well," the Doctor turns toward her, his hands clasped in front of him like he's a professor lost on his way to his own class. "They're both going north and not north. We could split up and each take a path or we could stay together."
He turns slightly to eye that gun, distracted by it, and then back at the paths. The truth is right now he's feeling less than brilliant right this very moment and anything less than brilliant is no good, in his opinion. You didn't get anything for Close But Just Shy of Brilliantly Amazing, after all! Considering how the encounter with the library turned out, the Doctor doesn't fancy splitting up. He likes the idea of sticking together and besides, in a forest as dreadfully dull as this, he could use a friend to talk to -- it's either that or he'll end up talking to himself and that generally tends to get old, fast. Gun and bad language aside, he finds Eva good company, so he's hoping she'll want to stick together too.
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"Do directions make much of a difference here? Do you have any idea what made these paths, perhaps?"
The Doctor probably doesn't, she thinks. He seems surprised by the whims of the Phantom Tollbooth almost as much as anyone else, only to him it seems to be a quirky, unpredictable friend rather than an intimidating environment. And even the Doctor seems shaky now, although she can't be sure if that was because of her mentioning his home planet earlier or the dangerous violation of his home.
"We should probably stay together, if only because I don't have any crumbs to trail behind me to find my way back."
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He can't quite keep the relief from his voice. So she doesn't want to split up either! Works for him. The Doctor pauses, fishes about in his pockets, and finds that he doesn't even have any bread crumbs to use. Or lint. Or even any Jelly Babies. Nothing aside from a ratty old sock and some bits and bobs even he thinks aren't very useful. The Doctor finally makes his decision with a snap of his finger. He chooses -- left! He likes left. Good choices all around going left. Besides, right looks entirely too inviting and if there's anything he's learned over all his lives, it's that "suspiciously inviting" is simply just "suspicious". He thinks Eva might think the same way, considering that...that gun.
He finds himself eyeing it again.
Guns in his TARDIS! Well! It's too late at this point to turn her away until she's put that horrid thing away, so they'll have to keep moving forward. Hopefully she won't think she needs to use it. Why she even carries a gun in the first place is something he'll ask when they're not trying to outrun that man-eater of a library. That, and a forest full of dullness and boredom.
The Doctor heads down left, his boots crunching on leaves and twigs. All of it is painfully pretty. Bit sad. But most importantly there's no library waiting around the paths bend as he leads them deeper and deeper. Eventually there's an odd flash of color through the trees, the Doctor pausing.
"Oh, I like the look of that," the Doctor says. At this point, anything remotely interesting and out of the ordinary is suddenly attractive. He reaches out to pat Eva's hand and springs forward without waiting for her.
When she decides to catch up, she'll find the Doctor standing in front of a tree that's...somehow made of shoes. And boots. And trainers. And just about everything footwear related you could imagine. It's also wilting, but he doesn't want to focus on that. He instead stands there, hands primly on his hips, and turns toward Eva to gauge her reaction. Even now he can't help but want to show Eva all the wonderfully interesting things out there. Big weakness to want to impress lovely humans like Eva, especially after he knows perfectly well there's that hurt that's hovering over her, maybe even stronger than Jamie's paradox.
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She can tell he's staring at the gun, so she takes her hand off the holster and adjusts her jacket to hide it from view. Part of her wants to question exactly why he thinks it's some sort of aberration for her to want to travel around armed, especially on this ship where people can probably shoot lasers out of their nostrils, but they've clashed enough today. She's clashed enough with everyone, lately.
She follows, walking on the balls of her feet to protect her soft skin from sharp little branches and stones. When he pats her hand and rushes off, she follows a little bit slower, at a pace that won't force her to accidentally trip or injure herself. She's not used to walking barefoot, especially in this terrain.
She gives a coarse little laugh, the kind of laugh you can only really muster up once you've had a recent near-death experience would find just about any gift from the heavens both absurd and sublime. "A shoe tree. It's a tree full of shoes."
As she walks up to it, seemingly unafraid, she notices that this section of the forest is colder, too. Tiny dewdrops have left the greenery immediately surrounding the tree with a delicate layer of frost. She reaches out and touched the 'bark' - which seems to be some sort of cross between thinly-layered strips of birch and light-colored leather. A thin layer of ice melts under the warmth of her fingertips.
"This is amazing." Somehow, it inspires so much more awe in her than a prod-happy library or an uncoordinated dumbwaiter.
I figure we're getting close to Eleven getting tree napped for Victoria?
Only he's not talking about the shoe tree. Watching Eva light up at the sight of the tree is worth the killer library and the Most Boring Forest Ever: he can't help but smile himself when Eva laughs and moves closer to investigate the shoe tree. The Doctor loops around the tree a few times, hands rubbing together as he bobs his way around its trunk like a bowtie wearing pigeon, right up until he comes to a stop next to Eva and cranes his neck.
"It is, isn't it?" The Doctor can't imagine where it came from. He sounds proud anyway. It's almost worth the near-death experience to see Eva's expression.
Despite those deep scars carved her face, the Doctor thinks Eva's remarkably pretty.
He busies himself by poking at the tree, reaching up to pull down an oxford with spats on them. They're not quite as shiny as they should be. Scratches scuff the surface and he's sure they're several sizes too big for both Eva and himself. A drop of frosty dew rolls off the oxford's tongue as he lets it go. To him, it's normally just a tree with shoes instead of proper leaves. That's it, really. Easy enough to wrap your mind around. But trying to see it the way Eva and all his human friends see it, and suddenly he thinks he can understand why it's just so amazing. It's new all over again. Hiding his smile now, the Doctor waves for Eva to take whatever she needs from the tree.
"Get yourself sorted. I'm going to pop out." The Doctor buttons his tweed jacket against the very slight chill. "I'm a very good scout! Scouting and scouting around and scout-y things. Back in a mo."
The Doctor straightens his jacket with a flourish. As luck would have it, there's a fallen log near Eva, practically inviting someone, anyone, to have a sit. It looks like it hasn't gotten much more action than the dumbwaiter back there. The Doctor picks a direction and heads deeper into the forest, until soon enough his footsteps crunching against the needles and twigs fades off into that same peacefully dull silence as before. There's no way the library could get here without Eva hearing it come first.
Wrap up thread here?