Trust (Doctor Who Fanfiction-Complete)

Stranger Lands (5)

Cass lay in her bed without opening her eyes. She felt the sun streaming in the window on her forehead. Daily diagnosis: depression at a 6. Headache, check. Body ache, check. Weird, she thought. She almost felt as though her entire body was bruised. God, and her head hurt so much. She tried to shake herself from her dreams as she got out of bed.

She pulled on a dirty sweatshirt and pair of overalls. Picked up her bag and paused at her bedroom door. The hallway. The damned hallway. She looked back at her bed. She could just lay there all day. Then she remembered the stubborn piece that she was having trouble taking apart. Ah, that explains the headache. She needed to find a sledgehammer and a blowtorch. I'm fairly positive the sledgehammer is in the shed but I have no idea what I'm going to do for the blow torch. Taking a deep breath she opened her door.

And screamed before shutting it just as fast. She blinked her eyes a few times then slowly opened the door again. She didn't open the door to her hallway she opened it into...something altogether different. She cautiously stepped out into a huge room that was quite noisy. There were weird round things on the walls and a metallic staircase leading up in front of her.

Then, yesterday came flooding back to her. The hallucination with the man that she had thought was just a dream. Either she is still hallucinating –which could very well be the case– or this had something to do with him. She slowly walked up the staircase and found herself staring at a cylinder going from floor to ceiling. The whole cylinder was glowing and there were poles...or pods...or something inside that moved up and down. Around the cylinder, was a large console with radars and buttons and pulleys and levers. She looked around but nobody else was there.

Cass had started to suspect that the hallucination wasn't just a hallucination, but where was she? Where was the man? How was she alive? She looked around wildly again but she was, indeed, alone. She spotted a door at the opposite end of the room. She started to walk towards it when her eyes landed on a table. On the table was the metal thing that man called a screwdriver, a knife, a baseball bat, and a weapon she had never seen. It looked like one of the sci-fi guns that disintegrated people into nothing but dust.

Cass wondered if she should take something to protect herself with. No way was she touching the gun thing nor the metal thing but the baseball bat was looking pretty good to her. If he left himself unarmed then it was possible she stood a sizable chance against him. She put her hand down on it but then thought about the metal creature and why she was taking it apart. Cass realized that if today was her day to die then it would be as good as any day. Maybe the sooner the better.

She felt her breaths coming in short and uneven. This was all too hard. I'm such a coward, she thought, I knew long ago that the creature from the metal structure was dead. I should've stopped working and just ended everything then. I haven't got anything else. No job. No money. Nobody. No family.

She felt everything start to slow. The prison she kept inside herself full of everything she was. It all moved so fast all the time. It started to slow as she felt her pulse grow further and further apart. She knew it was noisy, but she couldn't hear anything but her own thoughts as her gaze refocused on the gun. She reached out and picked it up.

She felt a rushing behind her eyes and her skull now more urgent than ever. "Do it," it seemed to say. "You want to be free, you know you do." She shut her eyes tight and tried not to think about dying in a foreign place with a foreign man lurking close by. She knew he had no intention of returning her home. He wanted information from her that she did not have. This really was the only logical thing to do, yet she knew that was a small comfort because she wasn't doing this for any logical reason whatsoever. She started to turn the gun on herself.

Then she heard a loud bang that made her simultaneously jump and drop the gun. She spun wildly trying to find the source of the noise. It didn't take her long to realize the door has swung open. But there was still no one in the room. Maybe he was letting her escape? She longed to be back at home for what she was about to do anyway.

She put the gun back where she found it and ran for the door. She had to blink rapidly as she stepped out because the light was blinding. She turned around to see where she came from. It was the box! The little box that the man had appeared in. Getting a better look at it, she saw it was a police box from way back in the day. How on Earth did her bedroom get in a police box? How did it fit?

Then she noticed that she wasn't alone. No, there was a lot of noise behind her. She turned around and her mouth dropped open. She was standing in front of a crowd of people all walking around stands of...well, stuff. It looked kind of like the farmers market her town held each Saturday except a bit bigger.

She was struggling to breathe. She hadn't been around this many people since...well, for that matter she hasn't been around anybody since...since....damn this breathing! It took her a while to gulp down enough air when she noticed people were beginning to stare. That's when she saw it. Their eyes were purple. Every last one of them! She barely even had time to register this when she noticed two of them were coming toward her. She put her head down and started to walk towards one of the stands trying to blend in.

She went up to the nearest stand and looked at what was on the table. They were toys made out of different colors of sand and mud. She looked up at the vendor but he was talking to another person. She started to look at the people. They were all dressed in robes of similar sandy colors. She felt like she stuck out in her overalls, she glanced over her shoulder but the two men hadn't followed her. She needed to find a robe similar to these people to wear.

She kept walking through the stands but things became less and less familiar. Little trinkets she didn't recognize or food that was completely foreign. At one of the last stands, she swiped a green oval thing that she had seen a younger boy eating earlier. Walking off, she took a tentative bite out of it hoping that it wasn't poisonous. It was a fruit! Or so it seemed like anyway, but she couldn't put her finger on the taste. It was good regardless, and she was hungry.

Soon, Cass had walked away from the shops into what seemed like a large town but it was weird. She could see buildings way off in the distance that struck her to be apartments but surrounding those were hundreds of sand huts. She almost laughed at an absurd thought of the city line of Chicago being surrounded by dinky mud huts. She had visited Chicago once when she was younger and this was exactly what it looked like just on a much much smaller scale.

She was about to walk through the surrounding huts. People dressed in the cloaks walked in and out of the mud homes going about their own business but she didn't see any of them looking at the buildings. In fact, Cass realized that the people were actively avoiding looking in the direction of the buildings.

That made the decision for her. She started walking towards the nearest one when she looked up at the sky and saw that...yes, there were two moons. Right over some distant mountains there were two moons. Cass stopped and sat down. She grabbed her sketchbook and pencils from her backpack and was about to start rapidly sketching away when she realized what she was doing. In horror, she threw the book away from her. She forgot? How could she forget? She carries the book as a reminder not for pleasure.

Cass couldn't tell how long she sat there staring at the sketch book but when she looked back up the sun was dipping below the mountains and the moons were well overhead and she could actually see three of them now. She gathered up the sketch pad with new determination. If that man hated her so much then all she had to do was find him and maybe he could end it for her. Since she was obviously too weak to do it herself. Never mind this for now. She started walking briskly toward the apartment buildings. Something told her the man would be there.

She wanted to go to sleep. This was the only way.