Fight or Flight ( Doctor Who Fanfiction )

Curse of the Black Spot

Listen to me when I tell you that this was not my idea.

As soon as I heard the word "pirate", I was out of the game, but the Doctor is hard to persuade. He didn't seem concerned about the prospect of barging out onto a distressed pirate ship and throwing all caution to the wind. His enthusiasm caught on with the Ponds like a plague, as usual.

Maybe it was just difficult for me to persuade him, lately.

Neither of us had spoken much to one another for a while - it was impossible to know exactly how long when we hardly had a sense of time on the TARDIS.

The price of this seemed to be our standing before the captain of a pirate ship, trying to explain our way out of execution.

"Our sensors picked you up," the Doctor explained jovially. "Ship in distress."

"Sensors," demanded the captain, all dolled up with a sailors hat and an impressive salt and pepper beard. Textbook.

"Yes. Okay, problem word. Seventeenth century. My ship automatically, er, noticed-ish that your ship was having some bother."

"That big blue crate?"

The Doctor snapped his fingers and pointed one at the man, a non-verbal affirmation.

"That is more magic, Captain Avery," one of the men asserted with wild eyes. "They're spirits. How else would they have found their way below decks?"

I raised my eyebrows. "More magic?"

"Well, er, I want to say multidimensional engineering, but since you had a problem with sensors, I won't go there. Look, I'm the Doctor. This is Amy, Rory... Omara," he got my name out all right despite a pause of hesitation and a quick diverting of his eyes, and then returned to his normally bubbly self. "We're sailors, same as you! Arrr."

Captain Avery drew a pistol on us and I couldn't say I blamed him after the Doctor's abysmal pirate growl.

"Except for the gun thing," the Doctor amended. "And the beardiness."

"You're stowaways. Only explanation. Eight days, we've been stranded here, becalmed. You must have stowed away before we sailed."

"Damn, eight days?" I glanced at the Ponds. "I don't know much about sailing, is that a lot?"

"Going on the general vibe I'm getting, the answer is likely to be yes," Rory replied.

"Now what do we do with 'em?" Asked a sailor, and the captain lifted his chin.

"Oh, I think they deserve our hospitality."

We were restrained before any of us realized the pirates behind us were moving forward, and jostled outside into the salty open air, fully restrained. The Doctor was then thrown forward to walk the plank.

"Omara, isn't this, like, your scene?" Amy asked from a ways away, calling above the cackles of the pirates around us.

"I don't have my arms at the moment, love! I can't work miracles!"

"I suppose that laughing like that is in the job description," the Doctor quipped from the edge of the plank. "Can you do the laugh? Check. Grab yourself a parrot. Welcome aboard."

"Stocks are low. Only one barrel of water remains. We don't need three more empty bellies to fill. Take the doxy below to the galley. Set her to work. She won't need much feeding."

"Rory? A little help?" She asked as one man backed her away from us.

Oh, if only they would let me go the way they'd let her go, I could show them help.