Before You Die

“Something’s up with Ben,” I muttered to the Doctor when we were far enough away from him. Ben seemed to me in a meditative state but the Doctor was wide awake. As for me? I'd been awake for forty-eight hours and was living on adrenaline. But that wasn’t anything new. In fact, being one of those people who refused to sit still, sleeping was the most boring aspect of my life, so I tried to avoid it as often as possible.

“I know,” the Doctor replied. “No one with his attention span can sit still for that long.”

“Can you run a brain scan?”

“I already have,” he answered. “I've picked up battling brainwaves.”

“So, it isn’t Ben?”

“At the moment, he’s coming and going. In his own way, I think he’s battling whatever it could be.”

“Doctor,” I said leaning onto the controls. “Please. We’re in the middle of a near-apocalypse. Don’t you think now might be the time to call for help?”

“We called UNIT,” he murmured wearily. “They’re going to help.”

“Can’t you call in a favour from like, the Shadow Proclamation?”

“They’ve heard enough of me. Especially after that business with the Daleks’ reality bomb and me ‘declaring war’. I mean, I don’t even think I can declare war against the Daleks anymore. It’s sort of assumed knowledge nowadays. But, you can rule out the intergalactic police. And anyone else for that matter.”

“When was the last time you travelled with someone Doctor?”

“That’s a little beside the point Erica.”

“Is it?” I asked, turning around to face the walls. “Because you seem to be in a very one-man state of mind.”

“That’s because I like a challenge Erica,” he answered, turning to face me. “We could actually do this, you know.”

“But can we do it without people dying?” I asked. “I told Major Partrael that we stood for the planet.”

“That we do,” the Doctor answered honestly, surprising me by taking my hand. “Until the end.”

“However quickly it comes.”

“Let’s not think negatively Erica,” Doctor answered, giving my hand a pat in a demeaning manner. He may as well have given me a pat on the head. Stupid 1500 year old Timelord. Just because he’d faced an apocalypse a minute for most of his life didn’t mean he had to lord his age over me.

“So, should we leave him here or put him somewhere safer?” I asked the Doctor, pointing back to Ben whose head had begun to fall onto his chest.

“I'm not quite sure what we’re protecting him for, but you can lock him in your room if you want.”

I blinked a few times before I looked over at him. “You failed to mention that I have a room.”

“Yeah, once all this is over you can renovate it to your liking.”

“I have…a room…”

“Yes,” the Doctor said, pressing a few buttons and watching Ben flash out of existence. “He’s now trapped there.”

“You can’t tell me that there’re no holding cells anywhere around here,” I said, arms crossed.

“Oh, there were, but I was redesigning and may or may not have filled them in with tulips.”

I sighed at the Doctor’s words and made my way around him, pulling his phone from his pocket as I went. There I found a text message from the Gangores. How they managed to send the message was beyond me. Either way, it was pretty much telling us to leave the Tardis – unlocked – and meet the Gangores on some hill a couple of kilometres away.

It was like they actually assumed that we were going to take the easy way out. If we handed over the Tardis it was like giving the phenomenal cosmic powers of the universe to dinosaurs. They wouldn’t know how to use it, but I'd prefer it to not be in ruins or destroyed when I saw it again.

But without the Tardis, they were going to turn the entire West Coast’s brains to mush. So that was our job I suppose – stop them turning the entire West Coast’s brains to mush.

“Doctor,” I called, spinning around, expecting him to be standing over the controls exactly where he had been standing before. Only, he wasn’t. He wasn’t standing in this room, and according to a quick life-scan of the Tardis, he wasn’t here. There was only me and Ben, stuck in my room, which I quickly ran to.

“Where the hell is the Doctor!”
I stormed into the room to find Benjamin Brown sitting on the edge of his seat, gagged and bound. That in itself wasn’t baffling, it was what had been used. Both chains and rope connected him to the chair, and I was pretty sure that I hadn’t gagged him. The fact that he was battling them seemed natural, but his frantic and darting eyes weren’t. When he realised I was there, he began to stare at me pleadingly and flipping his hand at me in a motion that told me to go. I was quite certain that this was Ben.

So what else had been in him?

Walking over to Ben to attempt to ungag him, I heard the door slam shut behind me. Spinning around to look at who had closed it, I saw a familiar face with a knife in his hand.

“I should have known it was you,” I spat, standing up.

“But of course,” Helia answered. “After all, minus the human, we’re in a very similar scenario to last time.”

“I didn’t realise that Deknera had the ability to travel by human.”

“Faster and easier to get behind enemy lines. Oh, and by the way,” he held up his left hand, showing me the Corovian misilec he’d taken from the inside of my coat when I entered the room. There went my upper hand.

“Damn,” I muttered, holding my hands up in defeat. “I'm assuming you have the Doctor.”

Helia nodded. “That assumption would be correct.”