Wolf Moon: Chapter Thirty

[amberfocus]

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Nesting Grounds

 

Rose yawned, stretched and rolled over into emptiness when she woke the next morning.  Her eyes flew open and she sat up in a panic searching desperately around her for the Doctor.  Her eyes finally lit on his form down by the stream where he was filling the aluminum kettle with water and her heart rate began to calm.  She watched him zap the contents, wondering why his not being beside her had caused it to dance such a tizzy in her chest.

 

He turned back to the camp and offered her a little wave when he saw she was awake and watching him.  He set the kettle down on the camp stove and lit it with a brief pulse from the screwdriver.  Then he walked over and helped her to her feet.  Her arms flew around his waist and she hugged him tightly.

 

“Whoa, Rose, what’s all this?” he asked pulling away from her enough to see her face.  He tilted her chin and she looked at him abashedly.

 

“You weren’t there when I woke up,” she said.

 

“Thought I’d get tea on,” he said, “and start breakfast.”  He ran his hands down her back soothingly.  “What’s wrong?”

 

“I guess I’m still unsure of us after our fight,” she said hesitantly.

 

“I thought we’d worked that all out,” he said.

 

“Not all of it.  We’ve barely talked about it at all.  And…” she trailed off.

 

“And what?” he asked seriously.

 

“You haven’t kissed me since before we fought,” she said wistfully.  Her face flamed at her admission.

 

A slow smile swept his face.  “You haven’t kissed me, either,” he said gently.  “To be honest, I wasn’t sure you’d welcome it.”

 

She looked down suddenly feeling shy with him again.  “I’d welcome it,” she said softly.  He raised her chin again and brushed his lips against hers.  She sighed and melted into him, his hard lines sinking into her gentle curves.

 

He kissed her tenderly, taking a slow and thorough tour of her mouth with his tongue, smiling slightly when she made a somewhat garbled noise of contentment and her hands slipped underneath the fabric of his t-shirt to stroke the skin of his back.

 

It was the high-pitched whistle of the tea kettle that finally broke them apart from their gentle kiss.  He rested his forehead against hers for a moment and then moved to take care of the offending noise maker.  He poured water into mugs and bowls and arranged tea bags and opened oatmeal packets, while Rose made a quick run to their temporary loo and washed up in the stream.

 

They ate quickly but with no shortage of long, lingering looks that made Rose’s heart skip a beat every time the Doctor sent one her way.  It was nice having a normal, fluttering stomach without the extreme surge of lust that had been behind everything up to getting the dosage on the medication correct.  Not that she didn’t still feel lustful when she looked at him; she just wasn’t overwhelmed by it any longer.

 

“We should get a move on,” said the Doctor.

 

“Oh, erm…I need to do my…exercises,” Rose said trying her best not to blush again.  Honestly, she might as well just paint her face pink and be done with it.  She had taken the herbal supplements with her tea, but she didn’t want to fall down on doing the exercises.  She wanted to be ready physically as soon as she was ready mentally to consummate their relationship.

 

The Doctor gave a sensual laugh that sent shivers through her.  “In that case, I’ll take care of the clean up and you go do whatever it is you need to do.”

 

 

 

The Doctor couldn’t stop grinning.  If Rose still wanted to keep up with strengthening her pelvis and the interior of her female anatomy, that meant she still wanted to mate with him.  He had been so sure he’d blown it and stifled her desire.  But she was making it clear she still wanted him, first with her desperate hug and expressing her wish to kiss him, followed by that lovely kiss, and now this.

 

The heaviness he’d been carrying in his heart since their angry words began to let go.  She really had forgiven him.  It wasn’t just words.  A woman of any species didn’t plan to mate with a man if she hadn’t forgiven him.  That was pretty much a universal constant.  In any universe.  But she did want him.  He knew it now, especially seeing as her hormones were back under firm control.  His weren’t.  Not quite.  One of the reasons he’d gotten away from her this morning before she woke up was that he didn’t want her feeling pressured by his physical response to holding her all night.

 

Thankfully she wasn’t dumping pheromones left and right like she had been the other night.  It made it easier to keep control.  His body’s response to her had in no way been abated by their fight.  He’d still wanted her as much as he ever had.  Maybe more so because he thought he might be losing her.

 

But he wasn’t losing her.  She was still right there with him emotionally, preparing for him physically, and wanting him.  If he wasn’t careful he might just start bouncing up and down like a hyperactive school boy.  He suddenly realized he was happy.  Oh, Rassilon he was so happy.  He loved this woman!

 

He froze dead in his tracks.  He’d known, admitted as much to Rose when he’d first used her thoughts against her, that he’d been falling in love with her, too, but this was so far past that.  Just a few short days later and he’d completely fallen down that slippery slope and he loved her!  It overwhelmed him, the sensation almost physical as it took him over briefly.

 

He came back down to earth as he tried to figure out how he was going to tell her how he felt.  Admitting it to himself had been the easy part.  Knowing she loved him helped a little.  But how was he going to get the words to come out of his mouth?  He sighed and finished packing up the cleaned breakfast items.

 

He glanced back at Rose and she was rising from the ground and folding up the aluminum blankets.  She put on her pack and came over to stand next to him.  He swung his own bag into place and then reached out for her hand.  She took it immediately, smiled up at him this time with no hesitation at all, and followed him happily towards the drayguin nesting grounds.

 

 

 

“I don’t see any nests,” Rose said.  It was probably the tenth time she’d said it in the last four hours.  She was even starting to annoy herself so she was rather grateful that the Doctor hadn’t commented on her repetitiousness.  In fact, he hadn’t spoken much in the last hour at all and he’d been giving her some rather adoring looks.

 

They’d covered a lot of ground, found several likely places for nests to be, but not a single one, or any sign of eggs or shell shards, or a hatching ground could be seen.  What they had seen were male drayguins, many of them woven together in wallows like baskets full of hissing, wriggling snakes.

 

The Doctor had been right to call the females dull in appearance she had realized when the brilliantly colored males had come into view.  When she’d seen the females words like red, blue and yellow had come to mind.  When she saw the males words like scarlet, turquoise, canary yellow, kelly green, aquamarine, teal, indigo, cobalt, blazing copper, and violent orange came to mind.

 

The hues before her eyes were possibly the single most beautiful thing that had ever dazzled her vision.  She turned to share her opinion with the Doctor and realized he was looking at her rather dumbly and petting her hair.  His eyes seemed glazed over.  “Doctor?” she said.

 

“Hmm?” he murmured.

 

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

 

“Your hair’s pretty,” he said.

 

Rose frowned.  “Doctor!” she said sharply.

 

He shuddered under her harsh tone, shook himself, and the veil seemed to lift from his eyes.  “Rose?  Why’ve we stopped?” he asked in a normal voice.

 

She looked at him oddly but continued on.  “There aren’t any nests.  Unless they’re under the wallows.  Are you sure they lay their eggs in nests?”

 

“Where else would they lay them?” he asked her.  “They’re reptiles.  Pretty basic behavior across species.”  He took out the sonic screwdriver and scanned beneath the writhing bodies.  “No, there are no eggs under those drayguins.  They’re immature hatchlings.  They wouldn’t be on nests anyway.”

 

“And those are the males.  Wouldn’t the females be on the eggs?” Rose asked.

 

“The females would lay the eggs, but remember it’s a matriarchal structure amongst these creatures.  The males would be left with nest guarding duties, particularly during hunting or playing periods,” he told her.

 

“Okay, then.  I guess we need to find the mature males and find out which one is guarding the queen’s egg.”  Rose hesitated and said, “You’re sure she won’t know when we steal her egg--.”

 

“You’re not going to start that again, are you, Rose?” he asked.

 

She gave a frustrated hiss of air and his expression immediately softened.  “Sorry, I just thought we’d hashed this out already.  It’ll be fine, Rose.  I promise.”

 

She pursed her lips and then nodded.  He was the Doctor after all and he had the knowledge.  She just wished her instincts weren’t jumping around trying to get her attention so hard.  “Let’s go,” she said and tugging his hand they began making their way forward once again.

 

It took another hour to find the mature males, and two hours more to realize that there simply weren’t any nests to find.  When the reason for this finally became clear the Doctor and Rose looked at each other in a kind of fascinated horror.  Tucked between the bellies of the drayguins, and their long, splayed, heavily clawed feet, lay a single egg per creature.

 

“They’re like penguins!” Rose said.

 

“Penguins,” the Doctor echoed.

 

She gave him a strange look.  “Yeah.  Penguins with foot long toenails and big, scary teeth, but yeah, penguins.  Keeping their eggs on their feet, off the ground and under the warmth of their bodies.  No wonder we couldn’t find nests.  They don’t have nests!”

 

She felt his hand in her hair again and turned to look at him.  That dull, veiled look was back in his eyes and she frowned.  “I like penguins,” the Doctor announced apropos of nothing.

 

“They’re nice, yeah,” she agreed and he nodded glassily.  Suspicion welled up in her and she decided to test him the way she’d done on occasion with her old Doctor when things had gone weird with his cognitive abilities in the past.

 

“Doctor?”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“What’s the square root of 814?” she asked him.

 

“What’s a square root?” he wanted to know. 

 

She tried again.  “Can you tell me Pi to twelve decimal places?”

 

“I like pie even better than penguins.  Preferably lemon meringue.  Though chocolate crème is quite nice, too.”

 

Rose closed her eyes.  There was no escaping it.  He’d gone stupid on her.  But why?  And why wasn’t she suffering from the same effects?  She tugged on his hand and pulled him along behind her, shushing him when he made loud exclamations from time to time.  When he barged up to a two story tall rock and started examining the little specks of mica buried in it’s surface and stroking the sides of it and talking to it like it was the TARDIS, well not the one he currently had, but the one that had been his before the disjunction, she got scared.

 

Going stupid was one thing, but having hallucinations was another thing entirely.  She had hoped that she’d be able to keep him with her in the search for the queen’s egg, but she was pretty sure she was going to have to take him back outside the range of whatever it was that was causing the stupidity field.  Hallucinations would make him useless.

 

The only problem with that, was if her past history with the other him was any indication, the minute they were out of range and his brain kicked back into gear, he wouldn’t remember or believe her that he’d been affected the way she described.

 

She sat down on a rock and stared up at the sky, watching the female drayguins soaring the thermals.  It occurred to her that in all the time that they’d been in sight of the animals she’d not once seen the males flying.  Yet the Doctor had made it clear that the ones who had appeared on earth had usually been males.  So they had to be able to fly and yet, they weren’t.

 

She pondered on that for several minutes.  Was it possible the stupidity field was in place not as a defense mechanism against aggressive male animals that might wander into their territory, but that it altered the mind of all male creatures?  Altered the minds of the drayguins themselves?

 

But why?  Again she thought hard.  The Doctor has said it was a matriarchal society.  Well, not society, but arrangement.  What if that wasn’t the actual nature of these creatures at all?  What if the field that was affecting the Doctor was altering the behavior of these animals to keep the males protective of the eggs and from ranging out to make vicious attacks elsewhere?

 

The Doctor had said the females were the smarter of the two sexes but he’d made it clear they weren’t smart enough for this sort of thing.  This meant that someone or something was doing it to them.  Someone was changing the nature of these animals to make the males less intelligent than the females.  And that was wrong.

 

This had to be why they were sent here.  Not to steal the queen’s egg alone, but to right whatever wrong was being committed against these creatures.  She tried to think back to where it was they had been when she’d first noticed the Doctor was a little off.  She thought it was by the pit of immature male drayguins.

 

They’d come so far since then, dragging him back when he wouldn’t understand why they were no longer going forward and might turn stubborn on her was not something she looked forward to.  Any Doctor in stubborn mode was bad, but the first incarnation she'd known?  He’d been the worst.  Still, she had to do something.

 

Rose stood up and turned to walk back over to the Doctor.  She froze.  He was gone.

Ch. 31:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/18369.html