Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [5]
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seemed to want to avoid the energy barrier. The Doctor had tried to escape a few times, yelling ‘Look! Over there!’ to the scary robot, or sticking out a foot to trip it up (the Doctor had limped for a while after that), but none of it had worked. On one bizarre occasion he’d shouted, ‘Anji! Quick! Number seventeen!’ and had then looked utterly confused. She hadn’t asked him what he meant. She was too busy being scared. What was this thing going to do with them? Where was it taking them? And, as a general addition to that, where were they anyway?
The TARDIS could travel anywhere – anywhere – in space and time. They could therefore be. . . anywhere. Anywhere at all. At any time. She hadn’t really had a chance to think about that up till now. It had all seemed so unreal, still, while they were actually in the TARDIS; she’d still been shell-shocked over her boyfriend’s death (a bit inside her gave an ironic laugh: how was this for a distraction from the grieving process?), and the bits of her mind that were available for getting a grip on her new situation were taken up with trying to ignore the increasingly irritating Fitz, who was not someone she’d have chosen to travel around the universe with. Then she felt guilty about having felt that because Fitz, for all she knew, could be dead now. For a few moments, in the far distant past that was her time in the TARDIS, she’d wondered how they’d cope living together, just the three of them. She’d been in shared student houses with people she’d not got on with, but there’d always been the option of escape: to college, bars, other friends’ houses. Now she couldn’t very well stay in her room with a good book while the others went out exploring the universe, could she. Could she? Perhaps she’d suggest that next time. If there was a next time.
You go and face the scary robots and dinosaurs, Fitz, I just want to finish Sense and Sensibility. Better be boring than die. She didn’t want to die.
She was travelling with the guy with the time machine, and she knew because Dave had been into that sort of stuff that that made her one of the main characters. Fitz, too – so no more worrying about him, either. Name near the top of the credits, tied up and gloated at by villains but never killed by them; you knew you were always going to make it to the end of the story, except that one time in a hundred thousand, where even so, you only ever, ever died in a grand heroic tragic blaze of final-episode glory, and this wasn’t one, so she shouldn’t be this scared. But would anyone else realise this? Would the real universe play by those fictional rules? Should she get a T-shirt printed with I’M
A MAIN CHARACTER, DON’T KILL ME? Would that help?
And then she’d thought (as she kept doing, however much she tried to stop it) of Dave. Dave, whose life’s ambition had been to he a main character and 14
EarthWorld
yet who, even at the end, hadn’t managed to progress beyond ‘incidental’. He hadn’t even made it to ‘guest star, one story only’. Let’s face it, he hadn’t stood a chance. Anji had shot a discreet sideways glance at the Doctor at that point.
He must have seen a lot of deaths. After a while it must really do your head in. Perhaps that was why he’d lost his memory. Couldn’t cope with it any more.
She shivered. Distraction. . .
Her feet. No time for grief, concentrate on the pain of each step, try to count the blisters you know have developed already, just think about one step after another after another. . .
And then she decided that right here and now she’d almost prefer to use grief to distract herself from the pain of her feet.
Need a different distraction.
Anywhere in time and space.
Was that likely to be true?
She’d travelled in space with the Doctor – excluding the possibility that the whole