Tuck Those Ribbons Under Your Helmet [Closed]

[economicalrhinoplasty]

Eva waits on the log for a very long time, until the chill from the shoe tree leaves her shivering slightly, her teeth clicking irregularly as a replacement for her normal twitching and jerking. She's become a very patient person, she thinks - she measured her life in three-day cycles for so long that she thinks she no longer views time like a normal human being, but rather in some extended and flimsy nature, like a rubber band with all the elasticity stretched out of it.

Given that she has no watch on her - Stacy's unique perspective on time, even more distorted and deformed than Eva's, has long since made watches useless - she can't properly estimate how much time she spends sitting there waiting, but she expects it must be hours, since she feels tired and bored and tiny icicles are starting to form around her eyelashes and bangs.

Somehow it seems strangely appropriate to sit around waiting for the Doctor. He doesn't seem to follow anyone else's schedule. She wonders how many people before have sat on this log, waiting for something, maybe for the Doctor or for deliverance or for God. Or maybe she's singularly unique, the sole passenger in this log's history, and this is the one moment in time where this log not only exists but is sittable, and has been seen by sentient eyes.

She's starting to think like him. All the silence in her own head is getting to her. Maybe she should get her Yeerk back. She misses conversation.

That's a terrible idea.

She gets up and twists her back some, eking little pops out of her spine. She wipes the ice from her eyes, careful not to harm her makeup, although it did get smeared somewhat during the dumbwaiter trip and library attack. It's the principle of the matter.

Tossing her hair up into a clip again, she walks in the direction the Doctor took off towards, her feet adjusting to the sockless interior of her new shoes. "Doc?"

Comments

[makeherblue]

The Doctor makes a rather un-Doctorly snort at Eva’s remark.

“I imagine being dead would be incredibly inconvenient.” Although for all they know, he could actually end up ginger, so maybe it wouldn’t be entirely inconvenient. Maybe. It’s another one of those “next time” things, like telling yourself you’ll remember to bring in the laundry from outside. “Twenty-seven bones!” The Doctor looks surprised, peering at Eva. Scars and loads of broken bones. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about any drops in here. The Zero Room is one of the safer places in the TARDIS.”

The gravity could be slightly glitchy in there but he doesn’t foresee any drops. The Doctor gives up trying to peer out of an eye that is slowly swelling up on him, squinting around and bobbing his head in that alien bird-like fashion of his. He follows after Eva, shaking water from his boots as he squelches along. Eva’s path takes them out of the museum lobby to another short corridor, the walls lined with vases dating from early man to some time in the mid-3000s. The pool beyond is Jamie’s pool: the one he discovered during that bout of spring cleaning and decided that the best way to bathe a Scot was to fall headfirst into a pool. Eva will find that the pool is empty now, sitting with a few sad puddles at the very bottom.

He points toward the opposite end at the door.

“The Zero Room. Provided it hasn’t turn carnivorous too, I think you’ll like it. Lovely place, the Zero Room!” The Doctor manages a tired, water-logged grin. “Very bubbly.”

He means it literally too. Unfortunately there isn’t much in the way of food or dry clothes there that he can offer Eva. It’s difficult not to think of her as “his” human. He’s done it so long with Jamie and the others that it’s almost the habit of an old man stuck to that same routine every morning, every decade – every century, even!

[economicalrhinoplasty]

"Funny, you say that and yet I don't get the feeling that you're a hundred percent certain we're safe here. What with your library being unexpectedly on the loose." She arches an eyebrow at his and taps the side of her nose. He can be as reassuring as he likes, but she isn't forgetting that half of the nonsense here was unexpected on his part too.

She takes a few moments to look at the mostly-empty pool, entertaining the notion that this is where the library stopped for a quick drink.

Even so, it isn't unusual for Eva to be headstrong about getting something done. She's never been terribly fond of sitting around and twiddling her thumbs - well, maybe the twiddling her thumbs part, but not the sitting around bit. She much prefers action. As such, she heads right over to the door to the Zero Room and shoves it open. She doesn't even wait for the Doctor before heading inside.

[makeherblue]

She’ll be the second human since the Doctor arrived on Stacy to see what the new Zero Room looks like.

The Doctor steps in after her, still trying to wring water out of his clothes and looking around like the Time Lord version of a second-rate cyclops. The Zero Room looks untouched, probably one of the few places in the TARDIS capable of completely resisting the corruption that intruder has sent spreading like wild fire all over her poor insides. Bubbles rise up from the floor, billowing about the room in a non-existent breeze, several of them settling against the Doctor's hair.

"At any rate, I'd say we're entirely safe here. So long as we stay in this room," the Doctor says. He'd spent his time in the Zero Room way back when he was a younger man - the cricket version, he seems to recall. It'd looked completely different then, mind you. There's just something inherently calming about it still and he really, truly does like those bubbles. "Maybe I can come up with a backdoor to the engine room. Fold space and pull it from the old billard room. It might save us a few days."

The Doctor thinks Eva might appreciate those few days. She's strong, but she's also only human, and so far they haven't found much in the way of food or drinkable water for her species. It hasn't escaped his notice that conveniently all the food machines dotted around the TARDIS are missing, even the one with the setting stuck on lemon curd and toast.

[economicalrhinoplasty]

"Great. As long as we stay in a cage, we're totally safe." Eva wrinkles her nose with clear distaste - her upper lip curls and folds into that scar that only comes out when she opens her mouth. It's difficult, impossible, for her not to see being told to stay put as a cage. Given enough hours here and she'll happily trade the safety and restraint away for another adventure into the TARDIS, danger or not - one of the aspects she finds most enticing about the device is that you can walk forever and not run into the same thing twice. It's freedom, squared. The freedom of the unexpected rolling out for miles and miles.

"You don't really think it'll take days, do you?" She bites the corner of her lip, staring at the zero room and those bubbles that are doing their damnedest to catch in her hair, like ersatz flowers. She takes a seat in one of the chairs. "Marco will start looking for me. He'd tear this place up and find us having tea in here, I'm sure of it."

Although she prefers coffee.

She holds a hand out and pantomimes tracing the double helix staircase. "And where does that go to?"

[makeherblue]

The Doctor shakes his head. “I don’t think it will. Anyway, time’s wibbly this far into the TARDIS, so it could be either only hours or mo –” the Doctor has a moment of self-preservation and cuts himself before he says “months” to Eva’s face. Something about the expression on the human tells him that would be incredibly stupid. “That? I haven’t the faintest.”

He has no problems admitting that. He simply hadn’t had the chance to properly explode the TARDIS and with how her rooms have shifted, he has even less than an idea now. What with the TARDIS and Stacy herself demanding a good poking around, can Eva blame him? The Doctor tilts his head at the staircase, trying to think of some of the possibilities. Kitchens, possibly. He’d had a hell of a time trying to find those. Or it could go to his bedroom, the one he only used whenever he was bored and thought a nap was better than nothing. Possibly the Pond’s room, or Jamie’s. Hard to say!

The Doctor goes back to wringing the water out of his jacket, leaving puddles on the Zero Room floor. Give him a minute and then he’ll start nosing around for a console or anything he could try to use to take a look at the other parts of the TARDIS. There’s no telling just how far this infection has spread, or what it could still do to damaged time engines.

[economicalrhinoplasty]

Eva's face gets a little harder and scrunchier as the Doctor clearly backpedals away from telling her the truth. She doesn't even have to do the hand gesture - she's watching you, Doc.

Eva goes ahead without the Doctor's prompting to start poking at things. Whatever promise she made him earlier about not touching stuff is apparently completely forgotten, or, honestly, being outright disrespected due to his apparent inability to be forthcoming with her. She carries spite around like a battle axe.

She heads up the staircase without waiting for him, popping up inside what appears to be an extremely fashionable rest room. Marble showers, a huge bath, various levers on the wall that state 'bubbles', 'soap', 'perfume' and 'just for fun'. She takes a step back down onto the staircase and sets her mouth in a thin line. "If I take a shower here, you won't walk in on me or anything, will you?"

She does not trust him with boundaries.

[makeherblue]

Now that's scary. The Doctor shivers a bit at just the look. Yes, he can very much feel how on watch he is right now. Clearly he's toeing some sort of line with Eva.

He watches as she decides to investigate the double helix stair without him, his head craning to follow her. She pops her head in, seems to take a moment to take it in, and then pops back out on the staircase's stop landing.

"Why would I walk in on you?" The Doctor asks, honestly baffled. It seems like it's a human thing to be concerned about things like that, and he's not sure why she'd worry about that. Was he supposed to? He doesn't think he was and at any rate, he doesn't need to see naked humans - not quite his thing, thank you! He gives her a puzzled look and turns his back on her so he can continue with his jiggery pokery, something that he feels is loads more important than worrying about showers.

[economicalrhinoplasty]

"You might find a shiny object you want to share with me and forget how humans feels about having aliens show up while they're showering to show them a three-tined fork or a whatever else."

And with that, she disappears back up the stairs. Not as if she hasn't been wet enough recently, but the warm water and actual soap is soothing, and the conditioner allows her to pull her fingers through her hair without yanking off half her scalp. The towels are even nice and fluffy, if adorned with particularly homely rubber duckies, and soon she discovers that there's a wardrobe nearby.

Satisfied that it won't lead her to Narnia, she helps herself to some clothing that isn't crusted in salt and sand, a t-shirt that says 'Banjos!' on the front and a floor-length skirt made of various fabrics. Unfashionable, but comfortable, at least. To top it off, she finds some shoes to make up for what the library stole from her, a pair of sensible white sneakers.

She heads back down the staircase again, with a gift from the wardrobe for the Doctor. "Here. Suspenders with sequins on them. I want to see if there's a limit to the amount of tackiness you can handle."

[makeherblue]

"I'd only bother if it was a one-tined fork," the Doctor says with a disdainful sniff. "Three-tined forks are very common place."

He turns his back as Eva goes about her business, rifling through things and pulling up a few screens, his eyes roving as he almost - almost - forgets he has a companion to look after. It's the smell of lavender and sage that makes the Doctor turn around, his nostrils flaring and ah, there's his human. Well, not his, persay. He suspects she would kill him long and slowly if he let one of those slip, unlike Amy or Jamie. Very touchy about that sort of thing, Eva! Anyway, he thought the BANJO shirt was a lovely touch and she had even found herself a nice set of trainers to go with it. He beams up at her and gives her one of those little waves, waiting until she's made it down the double helix stairs before waving her over to the screen he's put up. It looks nothing more like an old tv from the 1950s, complete with a flickering screen and what looks like far too much fuzz and noise - noise that apparently means something to the Doctor, as he glances over to consult it and then points at one particularly stubborn batch of static.

"Right there. That's where the infection started," The Doctor says with triumph. "I'm not sure why he'd start in the Wardrobe, but yes."

He falls silent, frowning deeply at the monitor. A bubble drifts down and settles in his hair for a moment, right before it pops with a faint scent of fresh popcorn.

Slowbro tag is slowbro 8|

[economicalrhinoplasty]

"Three-tined forks remind me of weapons of war rather than silverware," she says with a prim little pout.

She comes over to the control panel with the strange snowstorm static that the Doctor's watching. She can't make heads or tails of it, and for a brief moment that frustrates her, as if she should be able to just because she spend so many of her prisoner years at the helm of a battleship. But she figures the Doctor probably does actually know what he's doing, so she defers to his judgement of the salt and the pepper.

"Alright. So, now that we know the root of the problem, how do we fix it?"

She still has the damn gun, and honestly she's a little itching at the idea to shoot something over all this - but while she may not be a patient woman, she is practical, and she can't just go in and put ammo through the Wardrobe.

She amends her statement. "And can we fix it?"

[makeherblue]

“I think so,” the Doctor says, distracted. He bobs his head, thinking. “Obviously we’ll have to jettison the Wardrobe after, since it’s likely there’s going to be trace amounts of infection even with my fix.” He sounds sad about that, mostly because he’d started becoming rather fond of that version of the Wardrobe. His scarf collection was still in there. “And I suppose at that point we’d be too busy holding onto something to worry about if the Wardrobe falls anywhere it shouldn’t. I hope it doesn’t land anywhere…awkward.”

He really, truly hopes not.

The Doctor wants to say that this shouldn’t trigger any time or space travel, especially with how the TARDIS has been grounded since he woke up on Stacy, but he’s also quite sure the old girl can get finicky at times like this as well. Probably didn’t help he’s rewired bits and pieces of her so much over the centuries that even he can’t entirely remember what goes where anymore. It’s possible they might end up careening loose from the Hanger or – worse – falling back through time somewhere and when. The Doctor picks at his lip, tugging at it as he frowns.

[economicalrhinoplasty]

Eva lifts an eyebrow, wondering if the Doctor's insistence on getting rid of the whole kit and kaboodle extends to her rather eclectic current outfit. "I'm fairly certain that's the most convoluted way any man's ever suggested I take off my clothes."

She reaches over and tugs at his wrist, pulling his fingers away from his mouth. "Stop that. It's a disgusting habit." Hypocrisy, thy name is Eva. Her own lip bears quite a few markers of compulsive biting and picking. She claps her hands together and then slaps one on her thigh. "Right then, what should I be doing while you're jettisoning your entire wardrobe?"

Eva doesn't even need to mention that it might be wise for him to torch his entire clothing collection and start over for reasons unrelated to a malfunctioning TARDIS. She's seen his handkerchiefs. She's wearing his banjos shirt.

[makeherblue]

Eva’s remark is startling enough that the Doctor doesn’t resist her meddling (or mothering. With her it could be both), his hand pulled away as he gapes at her for a moment. He manages to catch the gape, closing his mouth and fussing with his bowtie nervously. “Well! I’d say the best thing to do would be to hold onto something and try not to get jettisoned into space. Or any time vortexes that might open up.”

He has to at least warn her about that. Realistically he thinks her odds of falling into an alternate dimension are low, but he’s had companions with that sort of luck and so he can’t rule out that possibility. He shifts his feel, his mouth pressing into a line, for a moment withdrawn. Maybe he should focus on finding the door and scooting her out into the Hanger before he attempts this. The Doctr does remain blissfully unaware of Eva’s (incorrect) fashion judgments, because look at that banjo. The pinnacle of fashion! And the handkerchiefs were all rather nice once you’d trained your eyes to resist the urge to cross just looking at them.

The Doctor reaches out to make some more modifications to the monitor. His fingers press against the side and suddenly the parts of it spread apart like a slowly expanding galaxy, allowing him to rearrange it to a different sort of console. He does so like an artist, without even thinking, his hands flashing.

“Did you want to keep looking for the door?” He suddenly asked, swiveling toward Eva with a deep frown.

[economicalrhinoplasty]

"And wander around alone in this giant deathtrap of a spaceship?" Her upper lip quirks upwards - with the scar on her mouth, it gives the appearance of a crumpled piece of wire. "Sure, why not?"

She spends a few moments watching the Doctor work the console like a conductor in an orchestra, then decides that this is a profound waste of her time - not that he's all that helpful here anyway, but she dislikes admitting that she's out of her league.

It's hard to carry yourself with much grace in the outfit she's in, but she does her best to look somewhat dignified anyway as she skirts out of the room and back towards the marble fountain outside. "Just let me know when you're going to turn off gravity, will you?" she yells back.

[makeherblue]

The Doctor gives her about a few seconds warning, yelling something garbled out from the Zero Room that sounds an awful lot like “I’d suggest holding onto the safety railing” or even “well, at this point anything might work – oops!”

It’s the oops that should probably be worrying. There’s a vaguely ominous sound to that oops, like he hadn’t quite meant for her to hear it.

The world suddenly stretches around Eva, time and space and everything in between howling and bouncing around like Play Dough. It’s the first time the TARDIS has been capable of anything but sitting there in the hanger looking beautiful and right now the results aren’t pretty – the jettisoned bits come screeching off, the wall next to Eva spinning off and shattering as a small time vortex opens up. It’s hauntingly beautiful, in that way the Bleed is. Clothes are spinning around into a spiral toward the vortex, some of it scattered into the 90’s on Earth, others probably burning up in the atmosphere over Halgon (which is unfortunate, because it would’ve been the next closest thing to taste on that horrid planet if they had survived re-entry).

The Doctor hangs on himself for dear life. His legs are kicked out from under him as he clings to whatever he can, the hurricane currently off Cuba slapping him in the face with rain through the time vortex. It’s not quite how he wanted to show time travel to Eva.

[economicalrhinoplasty]

Eva's instantly swept off her feet, and downright attacked by what seems to be a chair from another room that seems deadset on getting past her and into the time vortex itself. She covers her head from death-by-furniture, getting her other arm wrapped around the railing at an uncomfortable, but firm angle. Her feet slide around the floor and then just fling mindlessly through the air, as the floor itself rolls up like a carpet and slips off to some other side of the room.

Eva is, fortunately, the type to find some sort of chaos in beauty. Unfortunately, she is not the type for whom beauty is some sort of analgesic to legitimate irritation. When the time vortex finally stops, her hair is in sopping wet ropes, her knuckles are white, and she's fairly sure she's sporting a pretty nasty bruise on the inside of her elbow.

She looks at the Doctor and scrunches up her mouth as if she's gathering an army of invective to launch at him, and just comes up short.

"Now can we go home?"

bses so hard 8D

[makeherblue]

That is a good question. He’d like to say yes, but he’s expecting no, until he looks at the screen, and his mouth drops open. Enjoy that look of pure surprise, Eva, because it’s not often you will see it on this Time Lord’s face.

“Weird,” he says, and leaves it at that.

The Doctor doesn’t seem like he’ll elaborate, instead staring intently at the screen and pulling at his chin. He’s oblivious to the rain water dripping down into his eyes. The noise on the screen is resolving into the same image the window from the console room is picking up right this very second – they’re currently in a gentle orbit around Earth’s soft blue glow, the moon swinging into view as the TARDIS rotates in its drift. After a moment, he glances up to meet eyes with Eva, bedraggled human and all. Continents are in the right place for a mostly-present Earth and he’s happy to say he hasn’t missed the (accidental) mark by several hundred million years. Whew!

He sweeps his hair out of his eyes again and moves to check for any signs of the library laying in wait anywhere. “Well, there you have it. You wanted home, and here we are!”

[economicalrhinoplasty]

Eva's seen this before, many, many times. Aboard the decks of Yeerk ships, a few times as an ambassador among Andalite ships. The latter made her skin crawl; the former only put revulsion in her mind, while her body remained calm and detached as ever. The view doesn't impress her, not the way it would someone who's never seen it before, or an astronaut who's seen it only in the throes of a victorious lift-off.

"Home?"

She wipes rain from her face and clenches one fist over the fingers on her other hand. Her front teeth dig into the back of her lower lip.

"Do you mean home away from Stacy? What about Marco? He's still on the ship?"

She stares not at the blue and white orb, but instead at the blackness surrounding it. In a way, oblivion seems more comfortable, and she wonders how much she invested in using outer space as a way to escape everything she didn't want to go back to.

[makeherblue]

Ah, Eva isn’t quite reacting like his typical humans. It’s only another reminder that she’s anything but typical.

“That’s what I meant. Earth. One of them, anyway.” The Doctor looks somewhat uncomfortable. “I’d imagine so, yes. Unless he’s somehow snuck in the TARDIS while we were lost.”

It’s possible, but not likely. He wouldn’t be able to tell anyway without doing a lifeform scan. The Doctor reached out to poke a few controls and then decided to reach in and rip out the wiring. His hands came up with a bunch of wires that looked like they’d seen better days, the Doctor blowing on them and giving them a good frown.

“Either way, we’ll have to land and look about making repairs before we start thinking about any more jumps.”

[economicalrhinoplasty]

"Right, no need to have this thing blow up on us before we get home. We've already nearly been eaten and been soaked to the bone." She smiles a bit to let the Doctor know that for the most part, she doesn't have any hard feelings. She knows how much she cares for this deathtrap of a box.

She straightens out her Banjos! outfit, on the off chance that they've landed somewhere public. She's probably only famous on her Earth, but it's worth looking as meagerly presentable as one can while wearing the contents of the Doctor's wardrobe. She can only hope that any photo evidence that she wore this that is taken will be burned.

Funny, how she can go from fighting for her life against a library and calling the shots in a war to worrying about her t-shirt.

"You might want to let me out first, because you'll scare the locals. With your you-ness."

[makeherblue]

“My you-ness?” The Doctor echoes, the point sailing happily over his head. Really, he’s had loads of experience making excellent first impressions, Eva! That said, if Eva wants to go out first, then by all means. “Okay. I think. You do have a very nice shirt, at any rate,” he adds. "You look like the perfect ambassador."

Somehow he’ll get her back to Stacy and Marco. The details of how are still something of a work in progress, but if there is anything he can say he's very good at it, it's juggling works in progress. The Doctor fumbles and fiddles with the TARDIS, ducking and bobbing as he checks the readings and generally giving an impression of a giant tweed-wearing groundhog popping up. Something he sees makes him frown.

"We'll have to make something of a traditional landing," he tells Eva. At least it's not the crashing variety? "The old girl won't be able to materialize like normal until I've had a proper look and acquired some better supplies."

[economicalrhinoplasty]

"Yes, I'm the perfect ambassador to Dr. Seuss's Whoville," she says, rolling her eyes. "Let's just hope no one recognizes me. I'm famous in my world, you know. It's painfully inconvenient."

And naturally, she feels the invasion of privacy that comes from media attention much more keenly than most would.

"Please tell me that you mean something more like a hot air balloon coming to rest and not a jet plane nosediving into the Pacific." She looks at the knobs, but this sort is all foreign to her. She thinks about how she still can't figure out a desktop computer but can pilot a Blade Ship, thinks of how in his element the Doctor looks right now. "I'll hold onto my hat anyway."

And with that she goes to visit the half-jettisoned wardrobe, rooting through until she returns with a baseball cap. It'll help cover the beast the trip has made of her hair. "And for that, I'll need a hat."

[makeherblue]

"There you are," the Doctor says, not quite sure what Whoville has to do with this and wondering what would happen if they did happen to land on Eva’s Earth. Complicated things, he’d assume, what with Eva being one of those complicated humans. She has that slight sharpness to her voice that causes him to glance up with a puzzled frown.

The fact Eva has the presence of mind to get a hat while she’s at it makes him fall a little in love with her. It’s almost a good enough excuse to pretend he didn’t hear her question. Not so much a hot air balloon! Even a jet nose diving into the Pacific might be softer! Glancing up from the controls, he knows he can’t lie to her. Granted, she’s come this far.

“It’s not quite like a jet nosediving into the Pacific. Think bellyflop,” he says, which really is true. At this point the Doctor is something of a connoisseur in crash landings and he can say that this was more of the bellyflop variety. Gave off that sort of vibe, really. “I’d hold onto something.”

The TARDIS gives a spinning lurch as it bellyflops through Earth’s atmosphere. The Doctor takes his own advice and clings to the control console with his arms and legs.

[economicalrhinoplasty]

She straightens her hat. No backwards caps for her.

"Oh, fantastic." Eva knows it's a thin line to walk between being irritated at this whole ordeal and becoming one of those troublesome people who whines about everything, so she's doing her best to stay competent, but he makes it so difficult for her when he says things like "oh it's just a bellyflop". It's as if the Doctor's transformed into a lifetime's worth of Famous Last Words these days.

She scrambles over to the control console, figuring that bony as he is the Doctor's at least softer than the wall, and braces herself. Hopefully her stylish hat will protect her from splattering her brains everywhere, although, she thinks, maybe it would be horribly suiting for her to die from a brain injury. A few seconds until impact. She whispers a prayer that she makes it back to her kid.

[makeherblue]

It probably help that the Doctor has had a very, very long list of memorable last words better than those.

The Doctor glances over as Eva joins him. There’s just enough time for him to throw a few levers, steam spitting out of a crack in the TARDIS’s control console with the sound of a whistling tea kettle (possibly enough time to throw in a prayer), before the ground rushes up impossibly large in the viewscreen. The TARDIS smacks into the ground, seems to skid and then flips end over end until it comes to a rest upside down. As it spins out of control, the Doctor tries to cushion Eva as best he can – easier said then done as the room lurches out from under their feet and does a very good hamster-ball impression.

When he’s able to make sense of which up is up and which one’s all very relative, he’s been thrown to the ceiling, the control console far overhead and dangling bits and pieces of wiring that he thinks might be important. A cloud of smoke hangs there, the Doctor coughing and swiveling around, trying to find out where Eva’s gotten tossed to.

“Eva?”