trans_9 | Hanger

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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!))

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So much for charmingly vulgar. She shrugs one shoulder and snorts derisively. She's been brought to her knee by slugs, surely a library can be just as dangerous. Still, it isn't like her to admit weakness when she doesn't have to, or defeat. "I'll have that library's head. If libraries have heads. I'll have that library's dictionary."

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."

If the Doctor was bothering to try to read her mind, he probably would've smiled. Infectious? He'd just say she's coming around, because that dumbwaiter did have some cheek in it. Lucky for her he doesn't make it a habit to invite himself into people like that, the Doctor turning at her comment and tilting his head.

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?"

Edited 2011-08-23 16:48 (UTC)

When Eva was a young girl, her mother always said 'not everyone's going to like you', to which Eva would always respond 'why would I care if everyone likes me?'. This appears to be the case with the dumbwaiter, as Eva doesn't seem all that keen on softening her position to the klutzy thing, though she does wonder to herself if she's just imagining its dejectedness because she's been around the Doctor too long.

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.

The Doctor breaks into a great big smile. "There you are!" He claps her on the shoulder, pleased, and sets off down the trail. "I do love a good attitude."

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!

Edited 2011-08-25 10:10 (UTC)

Eva fidgets too. She's always fidgeting, or picking at something, or twirling her hair around, or humming to herself. Since the quiet is so overwhelming it seems almost sacrosanct, humming and singing seems out of the questions, so she's got her free hand tugging at the threads of her jacket. It's a nice little reminder - you are free, you can move, you can expend all your energy doing the stupidest things Edriss would never let you do - and it rarely fails to ratchet her internal tension down just a jot. And she's still tense.

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.

The movement Eva makes draws the Doctor's attention to the gun. He frowns at it all rather pointedly. Not much of a fan of guns in his ship, actually, but it's too late and at this point, he thinks he can make an exception.

"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.

If the Doctor were to do something besides frown at the weapon, Eva would give him a detailed run-down about why she chose it. A sort of poetic irony, actually, her little revolver. Edriss used Eva's body to make a speech to the Council of Thirteen and save humanity because 'if every human fired a single bullet, they could miss ninety-nine percent of the time and still destroy us'. Now Edriss is dead, and Eva's version of humanity might be lost forever to the Ohm, and she can think of no more suiting way to protect her own fragile body than a gun that only fires a single bullet at a time.

"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."

Edited 2011-08-27 19:09 (UTC)

"I have an inkling," the Doctor beams. "Who needs boring ideas when you can have inklings?"

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.

"An inkling's better than anything I have."

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.

Amazing? Oh yes, very very very amazing!

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.

Edited 2011-09-02 00:16 (UTC)

"Yes." She stays enraptured by the tree for a few seconds more, before averting her eyes self-consciously. She feels the Doctor's studying her again, or using her as some sort of measurement for himself. Accomplished: impressed one human today, very difficult human to impress, quite proud of myself. And yet she isn't angry, just pushed slightly away from being at ease. She gives him a soft, fleeting smile.

"Don't be too long. Who'm I going to berate without you here?"

Eva doesn't sit at the log. She, like the Doctor, is a little too suspicious at the moment of anything that looks too inviting. Instead, she spends a while picking through the shoes, noticing how her breath is foggy near the tree. It's as if the whole thing is radiating a slight chill. Not an uncomfortable one, but something like an ice pack on sore muscles. She thinks to herself that cold is just the molecules in the air moving more slowly, and after all this excitement, doesn't she deserve a moment of stillness?

That's what it is that entrances her so about the tree. Shoes...running shoes, hiking boots, stilettos, ballet flats, bowling shoes. Symbols of action. Shoes are made for people to run, to dance, to play, to walk around and get places, and yet here they are in perfect quietude, completely motionless.

She can't bring her body to still. She has to fidget and remind herself she's free. But this tree and all its myriad items of footwear is so at peace that for just a few seconds, she forgets to drum her fingers and bite her lip. Just for a few seconds.

She finally finds a pair of shoes in her size and gently pries them from the icy hold of the tree. Sneakers, not anything fancy. She may need to run. Oddly enough, she thinks she should have brought socks. A tree full of shoes, and not a single pair of socks?

She slips them on, feeling frost turn to damp at her toes, and waits for the Doctor.

Edited 2011-09-02 05:15 (UTC)

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Hanger - TARDIS

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You killed me at the dictionary part. Well played.

Glad I could amuse. ;)

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I figure we're getting close to Eleven getting tree napped for Victoria?

Wrap up thread here?