FIC: The Amazing Team TARDIS 3/4
Dec. 21st, 2007 06:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsTitle: The Amazing Team TARDIS 3/4
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
neadods
Written for:alilamba
Rating: G
Summary: When the Doctor, Jack, and Rose think they're freeing a slave, they end up in the middle of the universe's biggest reality game show.
Betas:dark_aegis, mechturtle, maureen_the_mad, and persiflage_1
Disclaimer: This is not a licensed BBC tie-in. Doctor Who, Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness, and the TARDIS all property of the BBC.
Part 2
CHAPTER THREE – "YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO FLIRT WITH THAT!"
Rose swallowed hard as their cars turned into a very familiar scrapyard the next morning.
"Thought so," Jack grunted. "That drawing looked like one of those rickshaws to me. If a kid drew it, y'know?"
"Are you sure, Jack?" the Doctor asked softly for the fifteenth time. "You didn't want to play in the first place."
Jack shrugged. "I want to now. I'd hate to give up first place without even trying." He suddenly grinned. "Think those high heels will suit me?"
It was a somber set of teams assembling before Hanro, who skipped the adverts and went straight to business.
"Today's task does not have a time limit. No team that completes it will be eliminated, no matter how long it takes. The first part of the challenge is to find all the parts for and assemble a two-wheel cart. Make sure you build it well; two of you will be riding in it.
"Once you’ve built it, the Ultimate Trust challenge begins. The team member who was assigned this task's card will pull the cart out of here and back to the arena. That person will be hobbled, and in a hood that covers their eyes and ears. They must trust the other members of their team to guide them safely without voice or visual cues. Of the two remaining people, one will drive and one will navigate.
"You will have five minutes before the blindfold goes on to work out your signals. After that, none of you can speak. If anyone speaks, you will be eliminated. If you physically lead the person pulling the cart, you will be eliminated. If you touch each other, you will be eliminated. These are all you can use to for physical contact, and one of you will have it." Hanro held up a fistful of the white canes. "Anything else you can work out on your own. Telepathy is strictly forbidden." He paused. "Does anyone want to drop out?"
Rose could hear a few gulps, but none of the teams volunteered.
"Good luck. Oh, and Team TARDIS? Don't come to the rescue of anyone else."
There were a few chuckles at that, none from Team TARDIS. The Doctor lost a lot of lead time as he stared silently at the canes before he finally, reluctantly, took one.
It was easier to concentrate on building the cart when she wasn't thinking about what it was being built for. Leaving the Doctor at a cleared area for building, Rose and Jack charged into the mountains of junk. After a brief mixup when they brought back mismatched wheels and realized that whole carts had been disassembled and scattered through the yard, the Doctor asked if they could build their own.
"You'll be disqualified if there's a motor, but otherwise it's not against the rules." Hanro told him.
"Good," the Doctor told the others. "I trust our work better than theirs." Within a few hours, as other teams searched frantically for a complete matching set of pieces for their own carts, a recognizable rickshaw was starting to appear in the Team TARDIS building area, made of a door platform, a bench seat stripped from a car, and other odds and ends.
The purple team was the first to get their cart built. Team TARDIS, and many of the others, watched silently while they took a test run. Then one of their people was chained, blindfolded, and sent off uncertainly.
"Jack, are you sure?" the Doctor asked again.
Jack shrugged. "I've had to march in chains and I've pulled rickshaws and I've been blindfolded. It'll be the first time with everything at once, but none of the separate pieces scare me."
Rose found herself trembling a bit as the final joints were screwed together. Part was excitement – they were the second team to complete this part of the task. Most of it, though, was knowing what came next. Jack took his place between the shafts, Rose got into the seat, and the Doctor stood in front of her, his feet straddled wide. As Jack tentatively pulled forward, the Doctor shifted his weight to the right.
"I feel that, that works!" Jack shouted back, turning right. The Doctor leaned further and Jack made the turn tighter, until the Doctor shifted back the other way, Jack following his lead as the poles shifted in his hands. The Doctor stomped and Jack, feeling the vibration, stopped. It was so simple and silly that Rose couldn't help giggling, holding tight to keep from being shaken out of the seat.
"It's been five minutes," Hanro said, appearing out of the piles of junk. Behind him was an assistant carrying a bag that clinked. Suddenly choking on her laughter, Rose watched as Jack philosophically pulled the blindfold on, then fumbled for the poles, holding them as the assistant buckled large leather cuffs to each wrist and looped on the chains. He even tamely lifted each leg so that his ankles could be cuffed.
"The period of silence starts now," Hanro warned them, handing Rose a map. "Your goal is a large painted area on the ground in front of the arena. Someone will meet you there with the key for all his locks."
In the somber silence – the other teams had stopped to watch – the sound of the last lock clicking shut was horribly loud. Rose unfolded the map with shaking hands as the Doctor gently poked Jack in the back.
Jack took a step, almost tripped, and took a moment to test his limits, standing on one leg while stretching his other foot gingerly out. The chain was slightly shorter than his natural stride.
The Doctor's eyes narrowed, and he took a breath. Rose was positive he was about to speak and tell Jack to give it up, but Jack started moving again in a march that brought his knees up high but didn't take his ankles past the length of the chain. After a few steps without tripping, he fell into an easy rhythm and the cart picked up speed. The Doctor stood confidently, shifting his weight to guide Jack through the piles of rubble.
Rose was so fascinated that the Doctor had to poke her to find out which direction to go as they reached the gate. She pointed, the Doctor leaned, and Jack swung out into the street.
The people running the game had cut off the traffic, she noted with relief. Oops, not all the traffic – the Doctor guided Jack around a bus idling at a stop – but there weren't a lot of cars to dodge. A good thing too, as traffic would be almost as dangerous to the people spilling off the sidewalk as it would be to them.
It was surprisingly hard not to shout encouragement to Jack when another cart started to pull up to them, but the Doctor just silently tapped Jack in the back again, spurring him to march faster… until he suddenly stopped.
The Doctor poked him. Jack stomped his foot. The Doctor poked him again. Jack stomped twice, shaking his head, and she saw it – the chain had looped around one of his ankles. He kicked, but it just pulled tighter. Rose turned to the Doctor, palms up. Now what?
The Doctor jumped out, tapping Jack gently behind the knee. He raised his fouled foot and the Doctor, standing well back to keep from inadvertently touching him, gingerly untangled the problem with little flicks of the cane. As soon as Jack shook his leg free, he started forward again, and the Doctor swung back on board as the cart came by.
They passed the first cart that had made it out of the junkyard; it had started to come apart from the stress and the two riders were trying to make silent, frantic repairs. The cart that had been racing them had long since passed while they'd untangled Jack, and another one was drawing near. Jack cocked his head slightly as they drew up, and Rose wondered if he could hear it even through the hood. He might have; he put on an extra burst of speed and managed to pull just ahead. The Doctor, with a grim smile, maneuvered Jack into cutting them off.
That bottleneck took care of most of the competition, leaving only the one team ahead of them. Their leader looked back, saw what the Doctor was up to, and used the reins he'd fashioned to swing his cart into the middle of the street, keeping them from passing. The Doctor tried, but he couldn't get Jack around them. He was guiding Jack ever closer when they heard a clatter behind them.
The cart with the feathered team had been following another too closely; when the lead cart stopped abruptly (the person pulling it had fallen), the feathered woman dragging the cart behind had run right into it before she could be stopped, knocking the wind out of herself. The Doctor squinted at Jack, less than a foot behind the cart ahead of him, and stomped hard. A mere moment later, when a few yards of breathing space had been opened up, he poked Jack again. There was a definite "What the hell?" set to Jack's shoulders, but he immediately started his mincing march again.
Jack was panting by the time the arena came in view. The Doctor didn't urge him forward as he started to slow, obviously content to take second place.
Second place… but not third. When another cart started overtaking them, Jack got another poke and put on a final burst of speed that got him into their landing area mere inches in the lead. People swarmed out, one of them stopping Jack, who flinched back in surprise as he was grabbed. The Doctor and Rose bailed from the cart, running to him and stripping off the blindfold as fast as they could, almost getting in the way of the person with the keys in their eagerness.
And then they were in a sweaty group hug, Jack safely sandwiched between them. He put his arms around them, but Rose was frightened how weak his returning squeeze was.
"You can talk now," Hanro said.
"Fine. I'm saying bring him some water," was the Doctor's answer. He pulled one of Jack's arms over his shoulders, Rose shouldered his other arm, and the two of them half-led, half-carried Jack to the seats in the arena. Rose noted that there were places for only four teams. Who hadn't made it? Was it cart failure, or had something happened to the people?
Water was there. While Jack gulped it down, Rose looked around. The last of their opponents, the purple people with tentacles were just now limping in. They were also supporting one of their own, who was holding up a leg from which something dark dripped.
Hanro was talking, giving a spiel to the unseen crowd, mostly commentary for the highlights being shown on the big screens. That explained one absence – one team couldn't get their cart to stay together long enough to drive it out. The second was more worrying: as the screens showed a slow-motion version of the crash, it looked as if the feathered woman had been seriously hurt. Rose wondered if her species had ribs to crack. She hoped they were a resilient race. Her team leader had thrown his cane down, made an odd head-bobbing motion to the monitor, and gone to her. As the monitors came in for a closeup, he kept pointing to her and bobbing his head.
"Team Leader Ki'irth voluntarily withdrew his team from the race," Hanro explained as Ki'irth's face filled the screens.
"The mark of a leader is to know when to put his people first," Ki'irth announced. "Ki'i'rlh tried most honorably. She did her best for us. I do my best for her by conceding. Good luck to the remaining teams."
There was a big round of sympathetic applause, from the teams as well as the hidden audience. Then Hanro switched on his over-cheerful mode again and started giving their rankings.
Team TARDIS had won extra points for building their own cart, but not enough to beat the team that had actually come in first. This round had been the hardest, but it was also the most lucrative; Hanro announced that they would be given their choice of items from a sponsor whose name meant nothing to Rose. As the screens showed a selection of jewelry and Hanro started the usual advertising speech, Rose turned back to the Doctor and Jack.
Jack looked like he was starting to recover. His color was better, his breathing was slower, and instead of drooping in his seat, he was watching pictures of jewelry flick by on the large screens.
"That necklace would suit you," he said conversationally.
"Feeling better?"
His smile was pure sin. "I have excellent stamina and better recovery time. You know that." Rose felt herself blushing.
Beside him, the Doctor snorted. "Still think it was worth it, Jack?"
"You know I love it when you poke me." That devastating smile flashed again as the Doctor rolled his eyes. "Maybe this wasn’t my favorite method of getting all breathless, but you can't have anything."
"Hmmm." The Doctor was looking the grimmest he had since they'd landed.
"Hey," Jack said, nudging him. "I thought you always wanted to play this game?"
"I did," the Doctor sighed. "But Ki'irth's right. The leader should step back when things are too hard on his people."
Jack stared at him, offended. "I know I didn’t want to play, but I changed my mind. I’m having fun. Was I hurt? No. Was I humiliated? No more than anyone else. Was anyone in any real danger? No. Not like we usually are."
"He's right about that," Rose chimed in, determined to help lift the Doctor's mood. "Usually by now we've had to run for our lives at least three times."
"Possibly four." Jack nudged the Doctor again. "You're slipping."
There was a brief flash of a smile, but the Doctor looked down at his hands, then over at Rose, his expression somber and a little bit scared. "Gonna be you next."
"And I'm gonna make up my mind when I know what it is." Rose shrugged. "Don't have to if I don't want to."
"Remember that." The Doctor looked back at his hands and sighed again. "I don't want you two knocking yourselves out because you think you have to to make me happy."
"I don't know about Rose," Jack said blithely, "but I'm doing it to win."
Rose grinned at him. "Me too."
Until now they'd had a rare moment of privacy, all the monitors having gone to orbit around the winners. Now one noticed that they were talking and buzzed over to have a look. The Doctor ignored it, but Jack smiled and lifted his water glass in a toast. Rose followed his lead, and after a moment, the Doctor did too.
***
Rose had expected that her trust challenge would be the next morning, but instead the remaining four teams were driven out of the city, this time to what looked like a farming town on the plains. Instead of a town square, they were taken to a huge pasture, where Hanro met them accompanied by a smaller, less flamboyant man whose outfit was particularly… something. Rose would have called it extra-kinky with all those studs and things, but suppressed her giggles as she noticed that the remaining native family looked starstruck.
“I am Mr. Bredendo, the Mayor of Roganstalt. Congratulations for making it this far in the challenge, and welcome to my town.” He was answered with a variety of polite nods and bows, with the purple people doing something complex with their tentacle fingers.
“To show your appreciation for Mr. Bredendo’s hospitality,” Hanro told them, “you must bring him four kinds of tribute. In order to know what it is and how to get it, you must decipher a series of clues. You will not get your next clue until you have finished each task. These tasks will show you the kinds of things that have made Roganstalt a model farming town. Not only is it the primary supplier of food to our capitol city…” Which was where Rose tuned out again.
Each leader pulled an envelope at random from Hanro’s hands. The Doctor’s contained a drawing of an animal with four legs. Rose had never seen anything like it.
“Is that a horse or a cow or what?” she asked.
The native family had taken one look at their picture and headed off at a run; Jack squinted sourly at them as he shrugged. “I wasn’t a farmboy. No clue.”
“It’s got four legs. That means it lives in a stable,” the Doctor said. “We can figure out the rest when we get there. Let’s move before anyone else gets the rush on us.” The other teams were milling around, showing their pictures to the monitors and anyone they could catch, asking questions. Jack climbed a fence and balanced on the post, scanning the horizon. “Those look like stables,” he said, pointing, and Team TARDIS was off at top speed.
It was best, Rose thought later, to simply think of it as a cow, as their job was to fill a container of she-hoped-it-was milk to take back to the mayor. While Rose and the Doctor looked at each other and the shaggy, disgruntled-looking thing with horns with dismay, Jack started to smile at it.
“You’re never going to flirt with that!” Rose gasped.
“You wanna milk it?”
“Er… no.”
Jack grinned, starting to walk up to the animal, which regarded him dubiously. “There isn’t a breast in the galaxy I can’t handle.”
“Oh, ta! See if you get to handle mine any more!”
***
The cow hadn’t been Jack’s most compliant conquest, but they’d filled their pint container without being gored or stepped on and been packed off to the henhouse for a dozen eggs. Well, sort of henhouse - if hens had fangs and a strong sense of personal boundaries. The Doctor did that task, nimbly whipping the eggs out and into the basket almost before the birds knew an intruder was in the nest. Seeing him get the dozen safely into his basket in moments put the other team in the henhouse into tears, as they were breaking two eggs for every one they put safely by… and if they stopped guarding their basket for one second, the hen-things would come fluttering over to try to reclaim their property.
"He's going to win if we don't stop him," one of them muttered darkly.
"Let these things sort it out!" Another team member threw an egg at the Doctor, who caught it and stared at it just long enough for the birds see it in his hands.
Team TARDIS bolted at the head of an angry flock. Rose just barely slammed the door on the pointed, toothy beak of the leading bird.
The fruit-picking was easy – at least the trees didn’t have teeth or horns – but tedious. After the Doctor lost them points by breaking a branch while clambering up the tree, Jack had Rose climb onto his shoulders to reach up to the fruits and toss them down to the Doctor. It was a big basket they had to fill, and it lost them time. Then trying to carry all their booty without spilling, bruising, or breaking anything was becoming a challenge all by itself. They’d seen two teams sent back to repeat tasks when something happened to their tribute, so Team TARDIS was treating their various containers as if they were made of spun glass.
The picture of a fish sent them to a series of spawning ponds. “You must capture two good fish and present them, still living, to our Mayor,” the person there had told them.
The Doctor grinned. “Did I ever tell you two that I’m champion at tickling trout?” He stripped out of his jacket, rolled up one sleeve, lay down by the side of one of the ponds, and slowly slipped his arm under the water. Just what he was doing, Rose didn’t know, because moments later he shouted and jumped back upright. “It bit me! No wonder people eat these animals, it’s self-defense!”
It helped neither his pride nor their speed that Jack and Rose laughed so hard that they had to cling to each other to stay upright. But once their whoops died down to chuckles, they were still left with the same problem.
The purple team was at a pond of its own, fishing with a branch and a bit of string. Rose wondered what they were using for a hook – whatever it was, it worked, because they landed a huge, ugly thing and presented it to their watcher. But their jubilation turned to anger as he shook his head. “What’s wrong with fishing?” the Doctor asked the game official watching them.
“Tribute with a hook in it? Tribute that bleeds? This is fit to honor our mayor?”
“We need a net.” The Doctor was scanning the area. “See anything we can use as a net? Something porous enough that the water can go through, but strong enough to catch a fish."
“Nothing like that I can see,” Jack said glumly.
“I can think of something.” Rose refused to blush. Absolutely refused, no matter how personally embarrassing this was going to be. She headed around the corner of the nearest building, her monitor buzzing beside her interestedly.
“Do you mind? A little privacy, please,” she told it, and it backed away a foot or two. Still resolving (and failing) to not blush, Rose slid out of her shoes, reached up under her skirt, and yanked off her tights, hoping that she wasn’t flashing her knickers to thousands of viewers. Throwing her head high, she marched back around the corner to the men, warning them, “Not one word about how far they stretch!”
“Fantastic!” was all the Doctor said.
Rose noticed her monitor starting to slide from ear level to knee level; she jumped into the pond to foil it. The men rolled up their trousers and joined her. While she and Jack held the tights as wide as they could – Jack was dying to say something, she could tell, but she shut him up with a death glare – the Doctor splashed around, scaring the school of fish towards them. Rose had to bite back a scream as they brushed past her bare legs, but two of the big, ugly things swam right down the tights and were caught.
With a jubilant look at the purple team, still floundering in the water, they presented their healthy fish to the watcher. He nodded his approval, but his eyes never left Rose's legs.
"Oi, my eyes are up here!"
"Nevermind, get a move on!" the Doctor ordered. They tipped the fish into a waiting bucket, left the ruined tights on the ground, and ran as fast as they could back to Hanro and the mayor.
There was nothing on the ground in front of them as yet. Carefully Team TARDIS set down their tribute. "Thank you, this is most acceptable," Bredendo said, never bothering to even look at the containers in front of him. He and Hanro couldn’t stop staring at Rose's knees.
"What is their problem?" she whispered in the Doctor's ear.
"All the time we've been on this planet, have you seen a woman with bare legs?" he whispered back. "I haven't."
Rose gulped. Seriously? These women dressed like bondage fetishists and it was naked legs that were taboo? Jack edged in front of her, and Hanro's eyes finally came up. "The judges have been very impressed. Not only are you the first to return, but Rose has earned you many extra points through her willingness to sacrifice her reputation for the sake of your team. Congratulations! You're back in first place and have won today's prize. You will all have your choice of the latest fashions from the house of Grebeppa. Five-time winner of the modern fashion design awards and outfitter of all the most discriminating celebrities…"
Rose noticed that the further he got into his spiel, the further his eyes dropped. The monitor was starting to slide down her body too, but she could kick that. So she did.
Hanro cleared his throat. "Representatives of Grebeppa are waiting for you at their flagship store back in the city. A car will take you right away." Although he managed to not actually say "so you can be decently dressed as soon as possible," they could all hear it.
The Doctor and Jack made sure Rose sat between them for the drive back.
Part 4
Author:
neadodsWritten for:
alilambaRating: G
Summary: When the Doctor, Jack, and Rose think they're freeing a slave, they end up in the middle of the universe's biggest reality game show.
Betas:
dark_aegis, mechturtle, maureen_the_mad, and persiflage_1 Disclaimer: This is not a licensed BBC tie-in. Doctor Who, Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness, and the TARDIS all property of the BBC.
Part 2
CHAPTER THREE – "YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO FLIRT WITH THAT!"
Rose swallowed hard as their cars turned into a very familiar scrapyard the next morning.
"Thought so," Jack grunted. "That drawing looked like one of those rickshaws to me. If a kid drew it, y'know?"
"Are you sure, Jack?" the Doctor asked softly for the fifteenth time. "You didn't want to play in the first place."
Jack shrugged. "I want to now. I'd hate to give up first place without even trying." He suddenly grinned. "Think those high heels will suit me?"
It was a somber set of teams assembling before Hanro, who skipped the adverts and went straight to business.
"Today's task does not have a time limit. No team that completes it will be eliminated, no matter how long it takes. The first part of the challenge is to find all the parts for and assemble a two-wheel cart. Make sure you build it well; two of you will be riding in it.
"Once you’ve built it, the Ultimate Trust challenge begins. The team member who was assigned this task's card will pull the cart out of here and back to the arena. That person will be hobbled, and in a hood that covers their eyes and ears. They must trust the other members of their team to guide them safely without voice or visual cues. Of the two remaining people, one will drive and one will navigate.
"You will have five minutes before the blindfold goes on to work out your signals. After that, none of you can speak. If anyone speaks, you will be eliminated. If you physically lead the person pulling the cart, you will be eliminated. If you touch each other, you will be eliminated. These are all you can use to for physical contact, and one of you will have it." Hanro held up a fistful of the white canes. "Anything else you can work out on your own. Telepathy is strictly forbidden." He paused. "Does anyone want to drop out?"
Rose could hear a few gulps, but none of the teams volunteered.
"Good luck. Oh, and Team TARDIS? Don't come to the rescue of anyone else."
There were a few chuckles at that, none from Team TARDIS. The Doctor lost a lot of lead time as he stared silently at the canes before he finally, reluctantly, took one.
It was easier to concentrate on building the cart when she wasn't thinking about what it was being built for. Leaving the Doctor at a cleared area for building, Rose and Jack charged into the mountains of junk. After a brief mixup when they brought back mismatched wheels and realized that whole carts had been disassembled and scattered through the yard, the Doctor asked if they could build their own.
"You'll be disqualified if there's a motor, but otherwise it's not against the rules." Hanro told him.
"Good," the Doctor told the others. "I trust our work better than theirs." Within a few hours, as other teams searched frantically for a complete matching set of pieces for their own carts, a recognizable rickshaw was starting to appear in the Team TARDIS building area, made of a door platform, a bench seat stripped from a car, and other odds and ends.
The purple team was the first to get their cart built. Team TARDIS, and many of the others, watched silently while they took a test run. Then one of their people was chained, blindfolded, and sent off uncertainly.
"Jack, are you sure?" the Doctor asked again.
Jack shrugged. "I've had to march in chains and I've pulled rickshaws and I've been blindfolded. It'll be the first time with everything at once, but none of the separate pieces scare me."
Rose found herself trembling a bit as the final joints were screwed together. Part was excitement – they were the second team to complete this part of the task. Most of it, though, was knowing what came next. Jack took his place between the shafts, Rose got into the seat, and the Doctor stood in front of her, his feet straddled wide. As Jack tentatively pulled forward, the Doctor shifted his weight to the right.
"I feel that, that works!" Jack shouted back, turning right. The Doctor leaned further and Jack made the turn tighter, until the Doctor shifted back the other way, Jack following his lead as the poles shifted in his hands. The Doctor stomped and Jack, feeling the vibration, stopped. It was so simple and silly that Rose couldn't help giggling, holding tight to keep from being shaken out of the seat.
"It's been five minutes," Hanro said, appearing out of the piles of junk. Behind him was an assistant carrying a bag that clinked. Suddenly choking on her laughter, Rose watched as Jack philosophically pulled the blindfold on, then fumbled for the poles, holding them as the assistant buckled large leather cuffs to each wrist and looped on the chains. He even tamely lifted each leg so that his ankles could be cuffed.
"The period of silence starts now," Hanro warned them, handing Rose a map. "Your goal is a large painted area on the ground in front of the arena. Someone will meet you there with the key for all his locks."
In the somber silence – the other teams had stopped to watch – the sound of the last lock clicking shut was horribly loud. Rose unfolded the map with shaking hands as the Doctor gently poked Jack in the back.
Jack took a step, almost tripped, and took a moment to test his limits, standing on one leg while stretching his other foot gingerly out. The chain was slightly shorter than his natural stride.
The Doctor's eyes narrowed, and he took a breath. Rose was positive he was about to speak and tell Jack to give it up, but Jack started moving again in a march that brought his knees up high but didn't take his ankles past the length of the chain. After a few steps without tripping, he fell into an easy rhythm and the cart picked up speed. The Doctor stood confidently, shifting his weight to guide Jack through the piles of rubble.
Rose was so fascinated that the Doctor had to poke her to find out which direction to go as they reached the gate. She pointed, the Doctor leaned, and Jack swung out into the street.
The people running the game had cut off the traffic, she noted with relief. Oops, not all the traffic – the Doctor guided Jack around a bus idling at a stop – but there weren't a lot of cars to dodge. A good thing too, as traffic would be almost as dangerous to the people spilling off the sidewalk as it would be to them.
It was surprisingly hard not to shout encouragement to Jack when another cart started to pull up to them, but the Doctor just silently tapped Jack in the back again, spurring him to march faster… until he suddenly stopped.
The Doctor poked him. Jack stomped his foot. The Doctor poked him again. Jack stomped twice, shaking his head, and she saw it – the chain had looped around one of his ankles. He kicked, but it just pulled tighter. Rose turned to the Doctor, palms up. Now what?
The Doctor jumped out, tapping Jack gently behind the knee. He raised his fouled foot and the Doctor, standing well back to keep from inadvertently touching him, gingerly untangled the problem with little flicks of the cane. As soon as Jack shook his leg free, he started forward again, and the Doctor swung back on board as the cart came by.
They passed the first cart that had made it out of the junkyard; it had started to come apart from the stress and the two riders were trying to make silent, frantic repairs. The cart that had been racing them had long since passed while they'd untangled Jack, and another one was drawing near. Jack cocked his head slightly as they drew up, and Rose wondered if he could hear it even through the hood. He might have; he put on an extra burst of speed and managed to pull just ahead. The Doctor, with a grim smile, maneuvered Jack into cutting them off.
That bottleneck took care of most of the competition, leaving only the one team ahead of them. Their leader looked back, saw what the Doctor was up to, and used the reins he'd fashioned to swing his cart into the middle of the street, keeping them from passing. The Doctor tried, but he couldn't get Jack around them. He was guiding Jack ever closer when they heard a clatter behind them.
The cart with the feathered team had been following another too closely; when the lead cart stopped abruptly (the person pulling it had fallen), the feathered woman dragging the cart behind had run right into it before she could be stopped, knocking the wind out of herself. The Doctor squinted at Jack, less than a foot behind the cart ahead of him, and stomped hard. A mere moment later, when a few yards of breathing space had been opened up, he poked Jack again. There was a definite "What the hell?" set to Jack's shoulders, but he immediately started his mincing march again.
Jack was panting by the time the arena came in view. The Doctor didn't urge him forward as he started to slow, obviously content to take second place.
Second place… but not third. When another cart started overtaking them, Jack got another poke and put on a final burst of speed that got him into their landing area mere inches in the lead. People swarmed out, one of them stopping Jack, who flinched back in surprise as he was grabbed. The Doctor and Rose bailed from the cart, running to him and stripping off the blindfold as fast as they could, almost getting in the way of the person with the keys in their eagerness.
And then they were in a sweaty group hug, Jack safely sandwiched between them. He put his arms around them, but Rose was frightened how weak his returning squeeze was.
"You can talk now," Hanro said.
"Fine. I'm saying bring him some water," was the Doctor's answer. He pulled one of Jack's arms over his shoulders, Rose shouldered his other arm, and the two of them half-led, half-carried Jack to the seats in the arena. Rose noted that there were places for only four teams. Who hadn't made it? Was it cart failure, or had something happened to the people?
Water was there. While Jack gulped it down, Rose looked around. The last of their opponents, the purple people with tentacles were just now limping in. They were also supporting one of their own, who was holding up a leg from which something dark dripped.
Hanro was talking, giving a spiel to the unseen crowd, mostly commentary for the highlights being shown on the big screens. That explained one absence – one team couldn't get their cart to stay together long enough to drive it out. The second was more worrying: as the screens showed a slow-motion version of the crash, it looked as if the feathered woman had been seriously hurt. Rose wondered if her species had ribs to crack. She hoped they were a resilient race. Her team leader had thrown his cane down, made an odd head-bobbing motion to the monitor, and gone to her. As the monitors came in for a closeup, he kept pointing to her and bobbing his head.
"Team Leader Ki'irth voluntarily withdrew his team from the race," Hanro explained as Ki'irth's face filled the screens.
"The mark of a leader is to know when to put his people first," Ki'irth announced. "Ki'i'rlh tried most honorably. She did her best for us. I do my best for her by conceding. Good luck to the remaining teams."
There was a big round of sympathetic applause, from the teams as well as the hidden audience. Then Hanro switched on his over-cheerful mode again and started giving their rankings.
Team TARDIS had won extra points for building their own cart, but not enough to beat the team that had actually come in first. This round had been the hardest, but it was also the most lucrative; Hanro announced that they would be given their choice of items from a sponsor whose name meant nothing to Rose. As the screens showed a selection of jewelry and Hanro started the usual advertising speech, Rose turned back to the Doctor and Jack.
Jack looked like he was starting to recover. His color was better, his breathing was slower, and instead of drooping in his seat, he was watching pictures of jewelry flick by on the large screens.
"That necklace would suit you," he said conversationally.
"Feeling better?"
His smile was pure sin. "I have excellent stamina and better recovery time. You know that." Rose felt herself blushing.
Beside him, the Doctor snorted. "Still think it was worth it, Jack?"
"You know I love it when you poke me." That devastating smile flashed again as the Doctor rolled his eyes. "Maybe this wasn’t my favorite method of getting all breathless, but you can't have anything."
"Hmmm." The Doctor was looking the grimmest he had since they'd landed.
"Hey," Jack said, nudging him. "I thought you always wanted to play this game?"
"I did," the Doctor sighed. "But Ki'irth's right. The leader should step back when things are too hard on his people."
Jack stared at him, offended. "I know I didn’t want to play, but I changed my mind. I’m having fun. Was I hurt? No. Was I humiliated? No more than anyone else. Was anyone in any real danger? No. Not like we usually are."
"He's right about that," Rose chimed in, determined to help lift the Doctor's mood. "Usually by now we've had to run for our lives at least three times."
"Possibly four." Jack nudged the Doctor again. "You're slipping."
There was a brief flash of a smile, but the Doctor looked down at his hands, then over at Rose, his expression somber and a little bit scared. "Gonna be you next."
"And I'm gonna make up my mind when I know what it is." Rose shrugged. "Don't have to if I don't want to."
"Remember that." The Doctor looked back at his hands and sighed again. "I don't want you two knocking yourselves out because you think you have to to make me happy."
"I don't know about Rose," Jack said blithely, "but I'm doing it to win."
Rose grinned at him. "Me too."
Until now they'd had a rare moment of privacy, all the monitors having gone to orbit around the winners. Now one noticed that they were talking and buzzed over to have a look. The Doctor ignored it, but Jack smiled and lifted his water glass in a toast. Rose followed his lead, and after a moment, the Doctor did too.
***
Rose had expected that her trust challenge would be the next morning, but instead the remaining four teams were driven out of the city, this time to what looked like a farming town on the plains. Instead of a town square, they were taken to a huge pasture, where Hanro met them accompanied by a smaller, less flamboyant man whose outfit was particularly… something. Rose would have called it extra-kinky with all those studs and things, but suppressed her giggles as she noticed that the remaining native family looked starstruck.
“I am Mr. Bredendo, the Mayor of Roganstalt. Congratulations for making it this far in the challenge, and welcome to my town.” He was answered with a variety of polite nods and bows, with the purple people doing something complex with their tentacle fingers.
“To show your appreciation for Mr. Bredendo’s hospitality,” Hanro told them, “you must bring him four kinds of tribute. In order to know what it is and how to get it, you must decipher a series of clues. You will not get your next clue until you have finished each task. These tasks will show you the kinds of things that have made Roganstalt a model farming town. Not only is it the primary supplier of food to our capitol city…” Which was where Rose tuned out again.
Each leader pulled an envelope at random from Hanro’s hands. The Doctor’s contained a drawing of an animal with four legs. Rose had never seen anything like it.
“Is that a horse or a cow or what?” she asked.
The native family had taken one look at their picture and headed off at a run; Jack squinted sourly at them as he shrugged. “I wasn’t a farmboy. No clue.”
“It’s got four legs. That means it lives in a stable,” the Doctor said. “We can figure out the rest when we get there. Let’s move before anyone else gets the rush on us.” The other teams were milling around, showing their pictures to the monitors and anyone they could catch, asking questions. Jack climbed a fence and balanced on the post, scanning the horizon. “Those look like stables,” he said, pointing, and Team TARDIS was off at top speed.
It was best, Rose thought later, to simply think of it as a cow, as their job was to fill a container of she-hoped-it-was milk to take back to the mayor. While Rose and the Doctor looked at each other and the shaggy, disgruntled-looking thing with horns with dismay, Jack started to smile at it.
“You’re never going to flirt with that!” Rose gasped.
“You wanna milk it?”
“Er… no.”
Jack grinned, starting to walk up to the animal, which regarded him dubiously. “There isn’t a breast in the galaxy I can’t handle.”
“Oh, ta! See if you get to handle mine any more!”
***
The cow hadn’t been Jack’s most compliant conquest, but they’d filled their pint container without being gored or stepped on and been packed off to the henhouse for a dozen eggs. Well, sort of henhouse - if hens had fangs and a strong sense of personal boundaries. The Doctor did that task, nimbly whipping the eggs out and into the basket almost before the birds knew an intruder was in the nest. Seeing him get the dozen safely into his basket in moments put the other team in the henhouse into tears, as they were breaking two eggs for every one they put safely by… and if they stopped guarding their basket for one second, the hen-things would come fluttering over to try to reclaim their property.
"He's going to win if we don't stop him," one of them muttered darkly.
"Let these things sort it out!" Another team member threw an egg at the Doctor, who caught it and stared at it just long enough for the birds see it in his hands.
Team TARDIS bolted at the head of an angry flock. Rose just barely slammed the door on the pointed, toothy beak of the leading bird.
The fruit-picking was easy – at least the trees didn’t have teeth or horns – but tedious. After the Doctor lost them points by breaking a branch while clambering up the tree, Jack had Rose climb onto his shoulders to reach up to the fruits and toss them down to the Doctor. It was a big basket they had to fill, and it lost them time. Then trying to carry all their booty without spilling, bruising, or breaking anything was becoming a challenge all by itself. They’d seen two teams sent back to repeat tasks when something happened to their tribute, so Team TARDIS was treating their various containers as if they were made of spun glass.
The picture of a fish sent them to a series of spawning ponds. “You must capture two good fish and present them, still living, to our Mayor,” the person there had told them.
The Doctor grinned. “Did I ever tell you two that I’m champion at tickling trout?” He stripped out of his jacket, rolled up one sleeve, lay down by the side of one of the ponds, and slowly slipped his arm under the water. Just what he was doing, Rose didn’t know, because moments later he shouted and jumped back upright. “It bit me! No wonder people eat these animals, it’s self-defense!”
It helped neither his pride nor their speed that Jack and Rose laughed so hard that they had to cling to each other to stay upright. But once their whoops died down to chuckles, they were still left with the same problem.
The purple team was at a pond of its own, fishing with a branch and a bit of string. Rose wondered what they were using for a hook – whatever it was, it worked, because they landed a huge, ugly thing and presented it to their watcher. But their jubilation turned to anger as he shook his head. “What’s wrong with fishing?” the Doctor asked the game official watching them.
“Tribute with a hook in it? Tribute that bleeds? This is fit to honor our mayor?”
“We need a net.” The Doctor was scanning the area. “See anything we can use as a net? Something porous enough that the water can go through, but strong enough to catch a fish."
“Nothing like that I can see,” Jack said glumly.
“I can think of something.” Rose refused to blush. Absolutely refused, no matter how personally embarrassing this was going to be. She headed around the corner of the nearest building, her monitor buzzing beside her interestedly.
“Do you mind? A little privacy, please,” she told it, and it backed away a foot or two. Still resolving (and failing) to not blush, Rose slid out of her shoes, reached up under her skirt, and yanked off her tights, hoping that she wasn’t flashing her knickers to thousands of viewers. Throwing her head high, she marched back around the corner to the men, warning them, “Not one word about how far they stretch!”
“Fantastic!” was all the Doctor said.
Rose noticed her monitor starting to slide from ear level to knee level; she jumped into the pond to foil it. The men rolled up their trousers and joined her. While she and Jack held the tights as wide as they could – Jack was dying to say something, she could tell, but she shut him up with a death glare – the Doctor splashed around, scaring the school of fish towards them. Rose had to bite back a scream as they brushed past her bare legs, but two of the big, ugly things swam right down the tights and were caught.
With a jubilant look at the purple team, still floundering in the water, they presented their healthy fish to the watcher. He nodded his approval, but his eyes never left Rose's legs.
"Oi, my eyes are up here!"
"Nevermind, get a move on!" the Doctor ordered. They tipped the fish into a waiting bucket, left the ruined tights on the ground, and ran as fast as they could back to Hanro and the mayor.
There was nothing on the ground in front of them as yet. Carefully Team TARDIS set down their tribute. "Thank you, this is most acceptable," Bredendo said, never bothering to even look at the containers in front of him. He and Hanro couldn’t stop staring at Rose's knees.
"What is their problem?" she whispered in the Doctor's ear.
"All the time we've been on this planet, have you seen a woman with bare legs?" he whispered back. "I haven't."
Rose gulped. Seriously? These women dressed like bondage fetishists and it was naked legs that were taboo? Jack edged in front of her, and Hanro's eyes finally came up. "The judges have been very impressed. Not only are you the first to return, but Rose has earned you many extra points through her willingness to sacrifice her reputation for the sake of your team. Congratulations! You're back in first place and have won today's prize. You will all have your choice of the latest fashions from the house of Grebeppa. Five-time winner of the modern fashion design awards and outfitter of all the most discriminating celebrities…"
Rose noticed that the further he got into his spiel, the further his eyes dropped. The monitor was starting to slide down her body too, but she could kick that. So she did.
Hanro cleared his throat. "Representatives of Grebeppa are waiting for you at their flagship store back in the city. A car will take you right away." Although he managed to not actually say "so you can be decently dressed as soon as possible," they could all hear it.
The Doctor and Jack made sure Rose sat between them for the drive back.
Part 4
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2007-12-21 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-21 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-21 12:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-21 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-21 05:57 pm (UTC)(But that's just because I'm a stubborn cuss when it comes to friends...)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-21 07:28 pm (UTC)“There isn’t a breast in the galaxy I can’t handle.”
“Oh, ta! See if you get to handle mine any more!”
Established relationship. Nice! :)
Jack. My hero. And the Doctor and Rose instantly rushing to take care of him afterwards, and the Doctor willing to drop out so that neither Rose nor Jack get hurt... aww :)
Rushing on now to read chapter 4!
no subject
Date: 2007-12-22 03:08 am (UTC)Oh, yes. I just needed to keep it G considering what else is going on in my life (it may be time for a journal name change), so I had to keep them busy outside the TARDIS for a while. :>