Truth be told, it was a terrible plan. For one thing, it depended entirely too much upon the Gelth trusting them. Considering what liars they’d already proved themselves to be, Charley thought it unlikely they’d be too trusting of others. There’d also been the part where Mr. Sneed’s home and livelihood would likely be destroyed. Sneed hadn’t cared for that part at all, but the Doctor had persuaded him by pointing out it was either his house or his planet, and the latter would render him dead as well as homeless.<\/p>\n
What concerned Charley more, though, was that once again the plan involved the Doctor remaining behind to blow things up whilst she and the others escaped to safety.<\/p>\n
They were nearly to the house again when Charley caught the Doctor’s arm. “Doctor, I don’t like this,” she confessed, unable to keep the concern from her voice.<\/p>\n
Whatever understanding they’d reached earlier in the TARDIS now apparently at an end, his eyes narrowed and his voice came out snide when he answered her. “You can stay behind safe in the TARDIS if you’d rather.”<\/p>\n
“Oh, that’s not what I mean and you know it!” she snapped in return. “I just…Doctor, be careful.”<\/p>\n
The smile he gave her wasn’t warm, but it was determined and that was nearly as reassuring. “I saw the fall of Troy. World War Five. I pushed boxes at the Boston Tea Party. I’ve no intention of dying in a dungeon in Cardiff.”<\/p>\n
He held out a hand to her. “Ready?”<\/p>\n
Two answers to that question leaped to mind. One was “always,” the other was “never,” and both were equally true. So, instead she just accepted the offered hand and followed the Doctor down to the morgue. Sneed turned the key to let them in.<\/p>\n
It was just the three of them now. One thing they’d decided early on was that it was far too great a risk to allow Gwyneth so close to the Rift. The Gelth might find some way to manoeuver her where they wanted her before the plan could be put into effect. So she and Dickens had been sent upstairs to turn off as many of the lights as they could, thus allowing the house to fill with gas.<\/p>\n
“Talk about Bleak House,” the Doctor murmured as they stepped into the dim room with its plethora of corpses.<\/p>\n
Charley shivered and not just at their surroundings. The temperature in the room had dropped by several degrees in the time it took them to step inside. It was almost as though the Gelth drew all the warmth out of the air with their presence.<\/p>\n
And here they came. The Gelth flooded into the room like some sort of ethereal river of souls. You’d never guess the threat they posed just to look at them, Charley admitted to herself. Particularly not the leader, who looked like a little girl with long, flowing hair. She positioned herself beneath an archway and spoke in the same echoing, childlike voice that had pleaded for help during the s\u00e9ance.<\/p>\n
“You have come to help! Praise the Doctor! Praise him! But where is the girl?”<\/p>\n
Charley held her breath but the Doctor didn’t blink.<\/p>\n
“Had a bit of an upset stomach,” he told them blithely. “Nerves, most like. Not to worry, she’ll be down presently. Where’s the weak point?”<\/p>\n
“Here, beneath the arch,” said the leader. “Hurry, please! So little time. Pity the Gelth.”<\/p>\n
“‘Course,” the Doctor agreed readily. “Sorry to take so long. Some of us took some convincing. Not long now.”<\/p>\n
He shot a premeditated glare in Charley’s direction and she scowled in return, also as planned. “I’m still not entirely convinced, if you must know,” she grumbled. They’d all agreed it wouldn’t do for her to seem too enthusiastic. Not as adamantly distrustful as she’d been earlier.<\/p>\n
The Doctor stepped over to the arch, withdrawing a gadget from his pocket and laying it on the stone.<\/p>\n
“What is this machine?” the Gelth leader asked warily. Without realizing it, she slipped just the smallest bit out of the innocent, eager persona she’d projected so carefully.<\/p>\n
“Rift monitor,” the Doctor answered. Which was true: what he neglected to tell her was that the monitor was primed to overload. “Can’t go trusting something so important to human technology, particularly this century.”<\/p>\n
He straightened up and looked the Gelth right in her transparent eyes. “I’ll take you somewhere else after the transfer. Somewhere you can build proper bodies. This isn’t a permanent solution, all right?” Then the Doctor turned to the mortician. “Mr. Sneed, if you’d be so kind as to bring Gwyneth down to us?”<\/p>\n
Mr. Sneed bobbed his head nervously. “Of course, Doctor.” He then turned and fled up the stairs in obvious terror.<\/p>\n
Too obvious, Charley thought. The Gelth were suspicious, they had to be. But that was the signal. Sneed would get Gwyneth and Dickens out of the house while she and the Doctor took care of the Gelth.<\/p>\n
Charley moved quickly to one of the lamps in the room and turned down the flame.<\/p>\n
“What is she doing?” the Gelth cried out in alarm, fortunately distracted from the Rift monitor.<\/p>\n
“Not to worry,” the Doctor said in the same calm voice. He crossed the room to another lamp. “Thought it might help the rest of your people cross over, turning up the gas.”<\/p>\n
“No!” the Gelth leader cried in alarm. Whatever element of surprise they’d had, it was lost now. “Give yourself to glory. Sacrifice your lives for the Gelth!”<\/p>\n
“No! You’ll not take this world away from its people,” the Doctor informed the leader matter-of-factly, dropping all pretence. “Not while I’m alive!”<\/p>\n
“Then live no more!” the Gelth hissed, her form shifting and changing as though it had caught fire. In reaction, the other Gelth sprang into corpses, which immediately rose from their slabs and began moving towards the Doctor and Charley.<\/p>\n
Charley turned up the gas. A heartbeat later, the Doctor did the same.<\/p>\n
The reaction was almost instantaneous. Shrieking in defeat, the Gelth were one by one drawn from their hosts back into the increasingly poisonous air. As the corpses collapsed empty behind them, the Doctor grabbed Charley and pulled her towards the stairs. “Go!” he shouted.<\/p>\n
Charley ran. Up the stairs, out of the house, out into the snow. Behind them, the rift monitor overloaded, igniting the gas in the air. The mortuary exploded, the windows blowing outward in a fiery shower of glass.<\/p>\n
The Doctor crowed triumphantly. “That’s it, then. We all here? Everybody alive?”<\/p>\n
Sneed looked as though he were about to cry. “You may as well have ended my life, Doctor,” he answered bitterly. “You’ve certainly ended my livelihood.”<\/p>\n
“So pick yourself up and start over,” the Doctor answered without sympathy. “A man can build a livelihood over again. Not many get another life.”<\/p>\n
“It’s not that, Sir,” Gwyneth explained more respectfully. “I can find another position, sure enough, but Mr. Sneed…what folks will entrust a man with their dearly departed after such a scandal as this?” She gestured to the flaming building.<\/p>\n
Dickens turned to Gwyneth and took her hands in his own. “My dear girl, I shall personally see to it that neither you nor your master find yourselves consigned to the work house. On that you have my word.”<\/p>\n
Charley smiled at Gwyneth. “And there’s that butcher’s boy you mentioned too. If he’s half so sweet on you as you are on him…”<\/p>\n
Gwyneth blushed. “Yes, Miss. And thank you, Sir. That’s very kind of you.”<\/p>\n
“See?” the Doctor answered gleefully. “Happy endings all ’round.”<\/p>\n
+++<\/p>\n
It was a euphoric pair that made their way back into the TARDIS. But then, saving the world was a bit like that, Charley’d noticed. There was no other high quite like it. No wonder the Doctor couldn’t give it up.<\/p>\n
And no doubt he’d be name dropping Charles Dickens to all and sundry now they’d met. Charley couldn’t help but smile at that. When she’d first met him, she’d thought he was just full of it. Now she knew he was, but she also knew that he really had met most of the historical figures he’d claimed to meet. Or at least, judging by how many she’d met whilst travelling with him, he probably had.<\/p>\n
“So, that was Charles Dickens,” she voiced the thought. “I’d always read in biographies that he was quite the friend to the poor, so I think we’ve left Gwyneth and Sneed in good hands, at least for now. It’s a pity he won’t live to tell his story, though. You did say it was December, 1869, right?”<\/p>\n
“Yup,” the Doctor answered, although far too cheerfully, if you asked her, for a conversation about a man who was dying. “Never quite recovers from that stroke back in April of this year. Wouldn’t worry about that, though. He’s more alive now than he’s ever been.” He grinned at Charley. “Let’s give him one last surprise, shall we?”<\/p>\n
He threw a switch and the rotor began to move. The TARDIS shuddered and they were off, leaving Charles Dickens and Cardiff and Christmas and the nineteenth century behind. “So. Where to next?”<\/p>\n
Where to? There was a question she could spend a lifetime answering. Honestly, she could probably live to be a hundred, die a feisty old woman and still not have finished answering it. But she wasn’t eighteen anymore, and as such had responsibilities and people she’d no choice but to answer to. “Oh, God. I think I’d probably best go home.”<\/p>\n
Immediately the emotional temperature in the TARDIS plummeted. “So, that’s it then? Couple of adventures, and then back home, nice to see you again, Doctor? Whatever happened to not leaving whilst I needed you?”<\/p>\n
It took Charley a moment to realize her mistake, so bewildered was she by the 180 degree turnabout. “I meant<\/em> to pick up a spare change of clothes and see to the lease on my flat. Besides which, I really ought to let the Brigadier know I’ve swanned off with you and not been killed by Autons. I don’t mean to stay<\/em>.”<\/p>\n “Oh.” The Doctor looked embarrassed, then defiant. Once again, he huddled in that jacket as though it were a shell to protect the vulnerable turtle inside. “And why not? Maybe you should. You were right not to trust me, back there. I nearly gave the world to the Gelth. Stick with me and I’m liable to get you killed.”<\/p>\n Circling around the console to his side, Charley laid a hand on the Doctor’s arm. “I’ve been living on borrowed time since I was eighteen. I’m not afraid to die.” His muscles tensed beneath the heavy leather of the coat and he refused to look at her. “But you saved me. Time and again, even back when it might’ve still unravelled the fabric of the universe. It’s not me I’m afraid for, Doctor.”<\/p>\n She fumbled for his hand and gripped it tightly. “But that’s why you need me. And as long as that’s true, you’re not getting rid of me, not unless you were to open up the TARDIS doors and shove me out into the vortex.” A little smile caught the corner of her mouth and tugged it upwards. “And even then, I’d probably just grab hold of Ramsey or another of his kind and follow you anyway.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Truth be told, it was a terrible plan. For one thing, it depended entirely too much upon the Gelth trusting them. Considering what liars they’d already proved themselves to be, Charley thought it unlikely they’d be too trusting of others. … Continue reading