amberfocus | Wolf Moon: Chapter Thirty-One

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Queen’s Egg

“Doctor!” Rose called out urgently. She kept her voice low despite wanting to scream out his name because she did not want to draw undue attention to herself in the heart of drayguin territory. She ran back to where she’d left the Doctor standing then walked around the rock pinnacle to the other side. She sighed in relief. She didn’t see him but she saw evidence of his presence. The contents of his backpack were spread across the plain in front of her.

She followed along, stooping to pick things up at first, but when her hands were too full she decided she best find him and the backpack first so she would have something to shove all the stuff in. “Doctor,” she called again as she strode forward in the wake of his debris path. She found him at the edge of a small pond looking back and forth in confusion. The backpack dangled from his hand.

“Doctor?”

He whirled, saw her, and his face was washed over with relief. “I couldn’t remember what I’d lost,” he told her. “I was looking and looking and it wasn’t in my bag.”

She hurried to his side. “What were you looking for?” she asked.

“It was you,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have been in your bag, Doctor,” she told him.

His face clouded then cleared. “That’s right. Rose doesn’t go in my bag. Rose goes in my bed.” He moved towards her and pulled her into his arms, kissing her sloppily and without his usual finesse. Despite that, and despite his current lack of brainpower, she still couldn’t help kissing him back or the way her body responded to him.

When she pulled away he grinned goofily at her. “My Rose,” he said. She smiled at him and nodded her head.

“Yes, Doctor, I’m your Rose. Now I need to talk to you and I need you to really listen to me, okay?” She waited until he nodded before she continued. “I need you to stay with me, understand? Stay with your Rose. There’s something affecting your mind and you can’t go wandering off.”

He smiled at her happily. “Stay with Rose. I like that. I want to stay with Rose forever.” He clutched at her hand swinging it back and forth between them. She seriously hoped he didn’t remember this. He was acting like an idiot. A lovesick idiot. He would be so embarrassed if he had an inkling of what he was doing right now. Her poor, brave, beautiful, brilliant Doctor reduced to this, nearly brought tears to her eyes.

“Help me pick up your things,” she said. Immediately the Doctor bent to start gathering the things that he’d chucked from the backpack as he’d wandered. Finally when she saw nothing more scattered about she asked him, “Is that everything? Did we get everything you took out?”

He looked at her blankly for a minute as if trying to remember who she was. “Doctor, please, focus. Do we have everything you took out?”

The Doctor’s face showed his intense concentration and for a moment he broke through. “Rose?”

“Yes. It’s me. Are you back?”

“Rose, the serum…” He struggled to find the words. “The serum’s not…” And his face went blank again. Rose searched through the contents of the bag carefully but couldn’t find a trace of the pre-loaded syringes he’d been carrying. She looked through the pockets of his jacket, a fifteen minute task in and of itself, before folding it back up and stuffing it in the bag.

“Are you sure it’s not in your jeans?” she asked. “Doctor, please, we need to find it!”

The Doctor felt his pockets. “Empty,” he said. “Rose, it’s gone.”

“Help me look for it,” she said. He did his best to help her, he really did, but his focus kept going in and out as he searched around him. She quartered the ground as best she could on her own and tried not to let her fears rise up. Without that serum the Doctor’s sex drive would start ticking over. Even if they left the nesting grounds right now and drove hard to get back to the TARDIS there was no way they’d make it back before the effects of the serum wore completely off.

She had just about given up when something shiny caught her eyes. The sun was glinting off glass. She ran to the source of the flash and stopped in shock to see the shards of the shattered syringes littering the ground. They looked like they’d been thrown down, stepped on and ground into the dirt. The boot prints were the right size for the Doctor’s feet, too. He’d destroyed the serum.

Rose fell to her knees. He’d destroyed them! But why? Why would he do that? His brain couldn’t be so affected that he’d do something like this, could it? But she knew it had to be because he never would have done it in his right mind.

“I broke them,” he said and she realized he’d come up to stand behind her.

“Why?” she asked not quite keeping the wailing edge out of the word. When she looked at him he shrugged. “Not good enough, Doctor.” He recoiled from her sharp words and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

“No more waiting,” he said. “Tired of waiting. I wanted you now.”

Rose sighed and climbed to her feet. So he was stupid and without anything to inhibit his baser desires. Great. She wondered if he could take the pink tablets, too and if he did would it make any difference at all? She buried her face in her hands and felt his hand on her shoulder.

“Rose?” She glanced up at him warily. “Did I do something wrong?” he asked looking very much like a little boy who was about to be scolded.

Rose made up her mind. “No, Doctor. You didn’t do anything wrong.” She laced her hand with his and a beatific smile spread across his face. “Come on. We have to find whatever it is that’s messing with your brain.” If she needed to sleep with him ahead of schedule so be it, she decided, but it was going to be with him having all his faculties back and not like this.

She reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out his sonic screwdriver. “Okay, Doctor, what setting does it need to be on for me to scan for alien tech?” she asked him.

He struggled to remember, taking the device from her hand and running his thumb along the little buttons that programmed the settings. “Think,” she said. “This is important.” He frowned and fought against the fog. She saw his eyes focus and he set the screwdriver. Rose took it from her and held it out. It beeped. She moved it around in different directions until the beep got stronger. When she settled on the proper direction she took a firm grip on the Doctor’s hand and tugged him forward.

It was dark when they reached the base of a tall pinnacle that was bathed in some kind of unnatural light. A loud screech ripped through the air above them and Rose sought the source of the sound. There at the top of the pinnacle, its long tail snaking down and around the rock was the biggest drayguin Rose had seen yet. It was the color of blood in the pale light. The queen. She’d found the queen.

As the moon rose, Rose studied the creature, her hand gripping the Doctor’s tightly. After awhile she began to notice a pattern. Suspicious, she began to time the drayguin’s shrieks. Every five minutes on the dot the queen’s warning sang out into the darkness. Not a second more or less elapsed from one scream to the next.

She gazed up at the thrashing tail. Loose rocks were everywhere on the pinnacle and yet when she thrashed her tail nothing fell to the ground. It was as if the queen wasn’t actually touching the pinnacle at all. She stared hard, refusing to turn her gaze away until she saw it. A faint telltale flicker, a fade out and back in again, and the image reset itself on a loop. It was a hologram. The queen wasn’t real. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to put this in place.

The Doctor, who had been content to hold her hand and stroke her hair while she was thinking, said, “It’s up there.”

“I have to go up there, Doctor,” she said.

“It’ll eat you,” he said his grip on her hand tightening.

“It’s not real, Doctor,” she said. “It’s a projection. A hologram or something. It’s not real.” She tried to tug her hand away but he slipped his grip down to her wrist and held on.

“I’m not losing you, Rose. Won’t let you go,” he said stubbornly.

“Doctor, please! Whatever is making you like this; it’s got to be up there. I want you back. I need you back the way you’re supposed to be. Let me go.”

“No,” he said. “Keep you safe.” He brought his mouth down on hers and kissed her possessively, his free hand coming up to tangle in her hair. Despite herself she responded to him, wishing fervently that he was okay, that he was still himself. Her unencumbered hand reached up to stroke his head, her thoughts begging him to remember the brilliant man that he was. Her fingers strayed across his temple and the fine tracery of spider webbing that had flared across her mind before shone gold in front of her eyes and shot forward and she was in darkness.

Darkness it was, but in the midst of it she saw a faint silver beacon and she zoomed towards it. As she approached she saw silver tendrils reaching out for the gold ones she was projecting and then as they met the Doctor was suddenly standing beside her.

“Rose?” he asked incredulously. “You’re in my mind. How?” His voice echoed loudly in the blackness.

“I don’t know. It felt like I got pulled in,” she said. “Doctor, are you aware of what’s happening?”

“I’m under the influence of some kind of behavioral modification field,” he said. “It’s interfering with my ability to turn thoughts into actions and making me placid and docile and stupid,” he told her.

“I think I’ve found the source of it, Doctor. But you won’t let me go take care of it. And at the moment you’re not bright enough to climb up something that high without getting distracted by something and letting go. You need to either make yourself let go of me so I can go up there and shut off whatever is affecting you or you need to push through this and come back to me.”

“I’m not sure I can. I’ve been trying all afternoon.” He ran a hand over his face. “Rose, about the serum, I--.”

“Later,” she said. “There'll be time for that later. Right now I’ve got to do this. So make yourself let go of me.” She reached up and kissed him desperately and when she opened her eyes again she was back in the real world and the Doctor’s hand had gone slack at her wrist.

“Go,” he muttered against her mouth. She pulled away and she could see some kind of battle being waged in his eyes. She ran to the base of the pinnacle and without a backwards glance she started climbing upwards. It was a long trek and it wasn’t long before she heard the Doctor’s voice calling out in the darkness. He sounded broken and frightened as he begged for her to stop hiding from him. It about broke her heart that even a befuddled Doctor would think she’d deliberately keep herself from him.

Still, she didn’t have time to think about that. She needed to get up to the top and face whatever it was that was stupefying the drayguins and the Doctor. Stupefy, she mused. It almost was like magic, like being under a spell. First drayguins and then stupefaction, if Harry Potter suddenly showed up she was so crawling into a deep, dark hole and hiding from life for a long time. She grinned wryly at her own rambling mind, hoped it was a byproduct of her weird sense of humor and not her own brain getting weird this close to the alien technology.

She reached the first length of the drayguin’s tail and very slowly she reached out to touch the thrashing coil. Her hand went straight through it and her heart started beating again. She had been pretty sure of her theory, but still… She moved upwards more quickly now, hesitating only when she sliced her palm on a rough shrub clinging to the rock face. Tears pricked her eyes at the sudden intense stinging but she forced herself past it. It didn’t make her hand useless but it sure hurt to use it.

Finally after what seemed like an hour of climbing and listening to the frightened voice of the Doctor below her and the chilling shrieks from above she clambered onto the surface of the top of the pinnacle. Instead of the pointed spire she’d been expecting she had stumbled into a flat, open room that was a pulsing red. She was inside the holographic projection and she could see out into the beautiful Guinyoc night.

In the center of the room was a large silver ovoid object and from it projected the screams and the hologram. She moved towards it and the device suddenly opened, revealing a control panel. It was fairly straightforward. She was able to make out the writing and hardly believing it could be so simple she pressed the red button that simply said OFF.

The object powered itself down and the queen drayguin disappeared. She fished the sonic screwdriver out of her pocket and turned it to the torch setting. The ovoid had shut back up after it had powered down and she could read very clearly on its casing the words: Quyenseg Behavioral Modification Field Generator and Holographic Projection Unit.

She closed her eyes. Queen’s egg. Quyenseg. Bring Ambigere back the Quyenseg of the Drayguins. She sank to the floor and started to laugh with her relief, her eyes opening and her head shaking from left to right. Never let it be said that the universe did not have a sense of humor.

Ch. 32: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/19091.html

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: home
Current Music: If You Don't Mean It by Dean Meyer

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lostwolfchats.livejournal.com

Eggcellent!! Sorry ;-)

Didn't think her helper would make Rose steal an egg ... but on dear - Huston, we have a problem... does this mean sex now? looks hopeful, even though suspects not ...

From:

ageless-aislynn.livejournal.com

I always think the same thing at the end of these chapters: No, it can't be the end yet! O_O It just comes too soon! ;)

Oh, I loved the twist about the Queen's egg/Quyenseg! So awesome! And oooooooooo, naughty Doctor getting rid of that serum... *huge grin* And I have to say, I totally "Awwwwwww"-ed when he said he was looking for her in his bag. No matter how befuddled he gets, he'll always be looking for his Rose! *fangirly sigh*

Now, to wait for the next chapter! *grabs some snacks and settles in to wait* ;) ♥!

From:

Not Rose-Colored Glasses

Wolf Moon: Chapter Thirty-One

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