The road less travelled...

Title: Finding A Way Home: Monster in the Dark 3/3
Author: katherine_b
Rating: G
Summary: The Doctor is still in trouble.
Characters: The Doctors and Donna Noble

Games?

All right, if the Hongorat wants to play games, he’s up for that!

The Doctor grins as he backs away from the cave and fishes in his pocket.

It takes a little time, but eventually he finds what he’s looking for.

Several hundred metres away from the cave, he puts down the small carving of the TARDIS and then eases back to hide behind a large rock just inside the cave where he can see what’s happening.

However the Hongorat clearly hears his movements and spins around to face him. The Doctor points the sonic screwdriver at a point on the far side of the space, activates the red settings and briefly depresses the button.

A small amount of rock tumbles to the ground, sounding for all the world like a muffled footstep.

The Hongorat spins around to face the new sound.

The Doctor points the screwdriver at a different wall and repeats the process.

The Hongorat turns so fast that it staggers and has to recover its balance.

What’s going on out there? the other Doctor’s voice demands anxiously.

I remembered something very important about Hongorats, the man with one heart thinks, unable to help the somewhat smug tone that carries across.

What’s that?

Chuckling inwardly as he continues to have this particular Hongorat almost falling over his own feet, the Doctor replies, They have a terrible sense of direction!

Releasing his hold on the button of the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor holds his breath so that he won’t make any noise. The Hongorat recovers its balance and lunges for the direction of the last blast from the sonic with a roar, its arms outstretched, but stops short when it doesn’t find the wall it clearly expected.

Placing his hand over his mouth, which will have the effect of dispersing his voice in the echoic chamber, he speaks.

“You didn’t think I’d be that easy to catch, did you?”

Giving another roar, the Hongorat rushes back into the middle of the cave, but it can’t immediately make for the TARDIS because it clearly can’t work out which direction it should be facing.

“You think you know about TARDISes,” the Doctor continues mockingly, “but you’ve forgotten one important feature, Hongorat. They can change – even if they can’t fly. They can change shape and size. You might never find it again.”

Pulling the apple out of his pocket, he takes aim at the tiny model of the TARDIS and bowls the shiny red item, only just managing to suppress a yell of delight when it hits it and the Hongorat, with another roar of anger, rushes out of the cave towards the source of the noise.

Running out from hiding place as soon as the creature has left the cave, the Doctor backs up against the boulder in front of the TARDIS and aims his screwdriver at the rock above the entrance, pressing down to activate the red beam.

A moment later, before the Hongorat can even turn around, the rock comes crashing down, blocking the entrance completely, but leaving the TARDIS, the rock in front of it and the Doctor unharmed.

However those inside the TARDIS are clearly worried about the last part.

Are you all right?

Never better, he replies cheerfully, turning and aiming the sonic at the massive rock in front of the TARDIS door, which quickly crumbles to dust.

Sliding the key into the lock and turning it, he steps into the TARDIS, closes the door and then turns to grin at the two people standing on either side of the console. “Did you miss me?”

“Doctor!” Donna rushes down the ramp and throws her arms around him.

“Hello,” he says cheerfully, returning the hug.

“What’s going on?” the Time Lord demands. “What did you do?”

“Almightily confused the Hongorat,” he replies with a chuckle, taking Donna’s hand as they walk up to the console. “Caused the mouth of the cave to collapse so that it can’t get to the TARDIS – or us. I figured we could wait here until the TARDIS was recovered and then leave.”

“But won’t the Hongorat just dig us out?” Donna demands anxiously.

“You give it credit for too many brains,” the Doctor tells her. “I left it something to play with – a little model of the TARDIS I happened to be carrying around. As far as it knows, that’s the real thing, not this. By the time it realises the truth, we should be long gone.”

“Good job,” the man in brown says approvingly from his place on the jumpseat, before adding, “Except there’s a problem.”

Rolling his eyes, the Doctor leans against the console. “Go on,” he says, rather wearily.

“The gravitic anomaliser can’t resume normal levels in this environment.”

The Doctor pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. “Because it’s dark?” he suggests, although it’s not really a question, as he already knows the answer.

“Mmm hmm.”

“Brilliant!”

“What does that mean exactly?” Donna asks suspiciously.

“Means we’d fly into the nearest black hole,” the man in the blue suit tells her.

“But you said everything was fine!” Donna protests, turning on the suddenly silent Time Lord, her eyes flashing. “You said, as soon as he turned up,” with a nod at the other man, “we’d be able to leave right away!”

The man on the jumpseat mumbles something incoherent.

“What was that?” Donna demands suspiciously.

“Terminal inexactitude,” he repeats, rather more clearly this time, but still not meeting her gaze.

“What?” Donna asks, puzzled.

“It means he was lying,” the other Doctor tells her obligingly.

“It sounds like fatal disease.”

“Could be if we don’t get out of here soon.” He moves around the console and pulls the scanner towards him, activating it so they can hear what’s going on outside, even if his blocking of the cave mouth means they can’t see anything. “That Hongorat is still busy with my little model TARDIS, but he won’t be fooled forever and then he might just try to dig us out after all.”

“So – what?” Donna demands. “We just stay here until then?” And when neither of the others in the room speak, “Isn’t it just our luck to get stuck on the only place in the whole universe where the sun never rises?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Donna,” the Time Lord shoots back. “The sun rises here sometimes!”

“Well, when then?”

“Actually,” the other man says slowly, mentally checking the planet’s trajectory in line with the rest of the galaxy, “seven and a half minutes from now!”

“What?”

“Hey, you’re right!” The other man leaps up from the jumpseat. “Only sunrise for seventy-two years local time and it’s going to start any moment now!”

“And it took you that long to realize?” Donna rolls her eyes. “Call yourself a Time Lord!”

However the two Doctors ignore her comments and stare at each other in excitement.

“We need to get light into the core to reflect it into the anomaliser,” the man in brown says, running down the ramp to the doors.

“Magnified,” the other Doctor reminds him. “We’re a long way from the sun!”

“We’re in a cave,” Donna says as she follows them out. “You know – with a roof? So how does the sun get in?”

“We make a hole,” the half-human Doctor tells her, fishing out his sonic screwdriver and aiming it at the roof. “Cover your eyes!”

Tiny chips fly into the air as he begins drilling a series of tiny holes that he can eventually widen so that fresh air rushes into the formerly stuffy space. Scaling one of the rocky walls, the Doctor is able, eventually, to climb onto the roof of the TARDIS and continue increasing the size of the hole from his new vantage point.

Once the space is big enough, he reaches down to give Donna a hand while the other Doctor scrambles up the other side.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the TARDIS from this angle before,” he says, glancing at the blue roof beneath their feet before turning to the others. “Now what?”

“How are we going to aim the light into the TARDIS?” Donna asks. “Surely it’s just going to shine onto the roof?”

“The central core is linked to the light,” the man in brown tells her, removing the cap so that they can see down the tube of blue-green light into the coral-coloured room. “Usually we wouldn’t need to do that, but the only source of light will be coming from above. We are going to need to magnify it, though,” he agrees, turning to the other Doctor. “But how?”

“With one of these?” the other man suggests with a grin, flourishing the magnifying glass.

“Oh, that’s brilliant!” the Time Lord declares, taking it from him and examining the entrance to the TARDIS core. “It’s too small, though, and we can’t stand here holding it because it’s going to get hot as it recharges the anomaliser.”

However the Doctor had discovered something else while digging around in his pocket for the magnifying glass and now holds up the long shoelaces he found.

“Would these do?”

“But won’t they burn in all that heat you mentioned?” Donna demands.

“Not when they’ve been molecularly enhanced to handle both extreme heat and cold,” the laces’ owner says proudly as he watches the Doctor strap the glass over the glass box. “They should be fine!”

“Which is more than you are,” a horrifyingly familiar voice growls from the other side of the hole. “Thought you could trick me, did you, Doctor?”

The three people stare at each other in horror, frozen for an instant before the sight of the Hongorat’s arm reaching through the hole above their heads prompts them into action.

Clambering down the sides the TARDIS with more speed than grace, they are about to secure themselves in the blue box when there is a sudden, tortured scream from outside that stops them all dead in their tracks.

“What is it?” Donna demands anxiously.

“It burns!”

The voice is that of the Hongorat, and then there’s the sound of something large and heavy sliding and stumbling down the mountain wall behind the TARDIS.

Heavy hands scrabble at one of the sides of the cave the next moment.

“Let me in,” the Hongorat bellows. “It’s killing me! So much light!”

“Of course!” The Time Lord stares at the others. “If this world is always dark and the Hongorat lives in a cave, it could have hidden every other time the sun rose. But now it can’t because you destroyed its sanctuary.”

“Is it really going to die in the light?” Donna asks anxiously. “I mean, that doesn’t really seem fair.”

“Donna, that thing was going to kill us!” the Doctor snaps. “It threatened to eat me!”

“Yes, but it never went ahead with it,” she argues. “I don’t think it was ever going to do that at all. It just wanted…”

“All of the power of the TARDIS,” the other Doctor reminds her. “And that’s not a small thing, let me tell you! It could take over the Universe if it got that!”

“Still, I’m going to look,” she says, climbing the rock wall again and finally getting back onto the roof of the TARDIS.

The Doctors exchange glances before following her and pulling themselves up through the hole onto the top of the mountain where the Hongorat had made its home.

The creature is lying on the ground, pounding its feet and hands on the ground in obvious pain as the light strengthens and a tiny ball of fire rises in the sky.

“No, Donna,” the man in brown says softly, grabbing her arm as she prepares to slide down the hill, “we can’t do anything for it.”

Glancing down into the hole, the other Doctor sees that the light is being beamed into the heart of the TARDIS and he can feel the ship beginning to recover.

His attention, however, is quickly drawn back to the two people beside him. Donna’s eyes are glistening in sympathy, and the Doctor has placed his arm around her shoulders.

“How long is this going to last?” she asks almost desperately.

“Not long.” The Time Lord glances at the sun, which is already more than halfway along the tiny arc it traverses every seven decades. “It’s going to be gone soon.”

“Good.”

She buries her face in the Doctor’s neck as the Hongorat gives a particularly loud scream of pain, writhing on the ground and beating its hands against the rocks, crushing them to dust.

“Almost gone,” the man says suddenly, his eyes fixed on the sun, which, even as the other Doctor turns to look, slips beneath the horizon.

The Hongorat, however, continues to cry out, even as the world around them returns to its former state of darkness.

“It’s wounded, but the sunlight didn’t last long enough to kill it,” the Doctor suggests.

“It will die eventually,” the other man tells him.

“But – that’s awful!” Donna protests. “Inhumane! You can’t leave it to suffer like that! It’s in agony!”

“Donna, there’s nothing we can do,” the Time Lord reminds her. “Be thankful we’re just safe from it now.”

“But it’s not fair!”

“No,” the other man agrees as an idea strikes him, “it’s not – but I think I know a way I can help.”

Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out his notebook. Ripping out handfuls of paper, he crumples them into loose balls and builds a pile on a small, flat area of hillside next to him, adding the bundle of fluff he finds in his other pocket, and then pulling out his sonic screwdriver.

Activating the setting he used on his socks when he was trying to clean them, and which had such an unexpected result, he aims the screwdriver at the pile, which promptly bursts into flames.

“Add paper,” he orders, tossing the notebook to Donna and then fiddling with the screwdriver so that the fire increases in intensity. Donna hurriedly rips out sheets of paper, scrunches them up and tosses them into the fire.

The other Doctor, meanwhile, has pulled a lump of wood out of his pocket and places it on top of the paper, where it quickly ignites.

The world around them is suddenly filled with bright red, flickering light and a huge rush of heat.

Those two elements together quickly take care of the Hongorat, which gives one final groan before falling silent and still.

In the light from the fire, it’s clear that the beast is dead.

And as the world around them falls silent, apart from the crackling of the fire, a cloud of furrenvliege suddenly make their presence known by activating their lights and flying about them in a great mass.

All three people remain silent for some time, staring into the dancing flames, processing what they have just experienced.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s Donna who breaks the silence.

“I want to ask you two to do something for me,” she says in the end.

“Anything,” the Doctor in brown says at once.

She fixes the two Doctors with a stern eye. “I want you two to promise each other that you won’t do anything like that again!”

The Time Lord beside her looks suddenly uncomfortable. “Like what?” he asks, attempting to sound innocent.

“Oh, I think you know!” she says firmly. “Will you do that for me?”

That man turns to the Doctor in blue. “Deal?”

“What, that we won’t deliberately dump each other on planets, whether we believe they’re completely safe or not, without warning?” The half-human man stretches his hand across the dying fire. “I think that’s a pretty fair deal.”

They shake on it, grinning at each other across the embers. Donna smiles in satisfaction as she moves to sit between them. Two arms, one clad in brown and one blue, curl around her shoulders as they wait for the TARDIS to be ready for them to leave.

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