DW OC 5_Fear of the Dark 2:5

Full title: (DW OC adventures) Holly and the Doctor adventures~ Fear of the Dark
Featuring the 10th Doctor
My OC: Holly Rosenburg
Rating: G

The TARIDS goes haywire and the DOctor is is forced to land without any navigation or guidance. What he and Holly find outside the doors is an impossible adventure and danger. Don't cross into the shadows, you may not make it out alive.



Part 2

         Holly waited around the corner of a small public park from where the Doctor had turned in a few moments ago. It was his idea that he should go first to make sure there was not anything dead or otherwise gruesome to add to his friend's bucket full of nightmares.
         "It's clear," he shouted.
         Holly entered the site, not knowing exactly what to expect, but Torchwood had done a fine job cleaning up the place. If she didn't know better, she would have thought nothing out of the ordinary happened here a few days ago.
         She found the Doctor nosing around and crawling on his stomach to look under a green painted park bench. As she watched him making a fool of himself while people passed by with muffled whispers and sideway glances, Holly felt a sudden chill down her spine. She spun around half expecting to see the shadowy creatures engulf her, but there was nothing there. Rubbing her arms to smooth the goose bumps away, Holly turned back around and caught the Doctor watching her with his brow knitted up in confusion, but his eyes were soft with concern.
         "You okay over there?"
         "Yea...It was just a sudden chill of the air or something."
         It was partially a lie. Sure, it could have been the wind, but not a single leaf on the trees around them stirred, everything was too still, too calm for her liking. There was also that feeling in the back of her mind that something bad was coming, like a sixth sense or just that dormant primal instinct trying to warn her to be alert.
In any case, she shook off the chill and then stepped to where the Doctor was crouching and joined him.
         "So, what are we looking for?" She asked, feeling completely useless, but at the same time itching to do something other than waiting around twiddling her thumbs.
         "Well, they were here and they had a bit of a feast by the look of things."
         He answered as he ducked his head under the bench, screwdriver buzzing away in his hand as he scan the around in a quick wave over the ground.
         "Like a drive-through fast food chain, they were here for a moment and then off again. There's a very weak trace, which is understandable being that it happened a few days ago."
         "A feast? You mean there was more than one person that was... eaten here?" She asked, feeling her face pale a few shades just thinking about the horror of other bystanders that had to face these creatures.
         "No. There was only one person here. There's a shoeprint here, a bit weathered too, but it's the only one. Strange, you would think more people would take a load off and enjoy the park. Anyway, the shoe print shows that the victim wore small wedge heels, so that would mean a smallish woman, which matches the description of the victim in the files Rose gave me."
         "Okay, then why did you say 'feast'? Makes it sound like more than one person was here."
         "Holly, it's all right here, just look."
         With an irritated sigh, Holly knelt down even lower, nearly pressing her cheek to the sidewalk concrete to see under the bench to where the Doctor was looking. At first glance she didn't spot anything that proved useful, but then something clicked in her mind when she saw the spilt over paper bag with bread crumbs inside. Suddenly she saw the whole picture in her head.

         An elderly woman was spending a quiet moment away from the hustle and bustle of the busy city, feeding the local pigeons that gave her company. Then a great shadow fell on her. She never knew what hit her it happened so quickly.

         Holly shook the nightmarish image from her head.
         "Hold on. So you're saying that it ate the pigeons too?" She asked, looking up at the Doctor.
         "Yep. The Vashta Nerada are not picky eaters. If it's meat, they'll eat it, including road kill. Usually they stay in small numbers and can be found on any planet with a meat source. If they swarm, it's very bad news and they can create a mass extinction pretty much in one day if given the right conditions."
         "Okay, that's not good to hear. Now if Torchwood already knew about this victim, why are we echoing their footsteps?" Holly asked as she picked herself up from the ground.
         "Well, it's good to have a set of fresh eyes. Plus," the Doctor reached under the bench and grabbed something, "they don't know what they're looking for. Here, catch."
         Holly caught the small misshapen rock, about the size of her palm, and rolled it around in her hand, feeling the numerous dimples and valleys that covered its surface.
         "It's a meteor chunk." She bounced the rock lightly, testing its weight. "Its super light. I thought meteors were much denser."
         The Doctor stood up and snatched the meteor chuck out of the air on the third toss.
         "I'll hang on to that thank you. I know how clumsy you can be."
         Holly stuck out her tongue and pulled a face.
         "Really grown up of you." The Doctor said. "Come on, let's see if there's more bits of space rock scattered about."

         They spent roughly half an hour scouring in the flowerbeds and poking around the trees, but they found no other meteor chucks.
         "Well, that was a bust," Holly remarked sourly.
         "Aw, it wasn't a bust," the Doctor said in his indestructible sunny attitude. "We found a bit of meteor exactly smack dab in the center of the action, and there's not a single scorch mark. Now how would a small object that is plummeting from the outer atmosphere at terminal velocity, land without making so much as a dent in the earth. And, lest we forget, how did our mysterious space rock get under the bench without going through it?"
         "You're enjoying this too much." Holly sulked bitterly, crossing her arms over her chest.
         "What, I can't enjoy a good mystery when one lands on my doorstep. Well actually I guess we landed on its doorstep."
         "No, we can't. Not when people have died," Holly answered quietly.
         She glanced over to the empty green bench and shivered.
         The Doctor's expression softened as he reached out to hold Holly's shoulders. She flinched from under his touch, not because of her 'no touch' policy, but because his touch burned her, like hot red coals.
         "Holly." He said when she first flinched. "You're shivering like a drowned mutt. Are you sure you're okay?"
         Holly did not trust her voice so she merely nodded and strained to smile. After she swallowed down the lump in her throat, she spoke without falter.
         "Let's move on, shall we? This place is giving me the creeps."
         "Sure. Absolutely."
         With that, together they stepped out of the park. The Doctor noticed that Holly no longer shivered as soon as they were away from the bench. Furthermore, she was back to her old self, which meant she was trying to pickpocket the meteor rock from his coat and pestered him with questions about Rose and his other half –Handy, as she liked to call him. This drastic change over Holly got the Doctor wondering if there was more then she was telling him about her fear of the dead.
         'Maybe she actually does have a thing around dead people,' he thought quietly. 'A sixth sense of some sort. I wonder if she even knows it.'


         Shadows became fuller as the sun dipped down pass the tall city towers while the Doctor and Holly were on their way to meet back with Rose and John. They –mainly the Doctor, Holly choose to sit out this time– had finished scouting out the recent victim site, where he found another fist size chunk of meteor rock behind a rubbish bin. How it got there was just as a mystery as the other one they found in the park.

         The Doctor glanced over to his right and noticed they were passing a memorial cemetery of those who had died during the raid of the Cybermen a few years ago.  Just through the memorial was the Tower, still standing proud among the other spiraling steel and glass structures. An entertaining thought came to him and it would test his earlier curiosity of Holly's recent shivers.
         "C'mon, let's take a short cut through here."
         Holly looked up and froze when she saw the black iron rod gates and the static quietness of the stones that lined in rows upon rows, each etched the names of those lost or missing. The dreading sense of uneasy stillness of the gravesites made the hairs on the back of Holly's neck stand.
         "Holly, you okay?"
         She hadn't realized that she was nearly hyperventilating and she slowed her breaths.
         Once she could swallow pass the tight knot in her throat she said, "There is no way you're getting me through there."
         "Oh come on, they're just stones with names on them. It's a memorial, not a gravesite. Most of these poor souls didn't have a body left to be buried. Anyway, the Tower is just there."
         "Nah, listen, I'll just find another way there. I don't mind the walk."
         Holly tried to dash away, but the Doctor was too quick and held her arm.
         "Please let go of me." Holly said quietly but her tone was strong and authoritative, like a threatening growl. She did not even look at him, but held her eyes on his hand as if she could forcibly remove his hand without moving
         "Nothing's going to happen to you," he pleaded for her to see reason. "The dead stay dead, they don't rise from the ground to eat people or whatever, and they certainly don't want to eat your brain. Why can't you face your fear?" The Doctor asked, his voice smooth and comforting.
         Holly finally looked up at him and he released his hold on her arm.
         "I don't know," she answered. "I just... It's... It just scares me okay, I can't explain why."
         "Are you sure it was just a bad horror movie you saw, or is there something else that you're not telling me."
         Holly immediately went defensive, arching her eyes and glaring at him. "You just think I'm just a scared little girl that needs her hand held all the time. Well guess what bucko, I'm not a little girl and I don't have to tell you anything that you don't need to know. You want me to face me fear? Fine! I'll show you."
         She then tore away from the Doctor and ran into the memorial at full pelt.
         "Holly!"
         She ran nearly halfway through the memorial grounds before realizing what she had done, and then she froze, too fearful of her own wild imagination of what might lay six feet under her trainers.
         'Well, good job you stubborn hard-headed null skull, look what you got yourself into,' She grumbled in her thoughts.
         Closing her eyes, Holly imagined that she was in a forest or walking down one of the corridors in the TARDIS; anything to prevent herself from thinking of the dead names around her. She took a few steps forward and -thanks to her amazingly clumsy feet-, she tripped on a loose rock and fell on her hands.
         She looked down at her feet to see what she tripped over and inhaled a quick breath. A meteor rock.
         "Doctor? Hey, I'm sorry I yelled but you better come over here. Like now."
         She looked around and an unnatural fog slowly blew in from nowhere, swirling around her and preventing her from seeing anything more than couple of feet ahead of her in all directions.
         "Okay, defiantly now would be a great time."
         Not wanting to wait around in the open, she scrambled to her feet for another attempt to get away. She took a few small paces before something flickered in the corner of her eye. Holly looked back down to the rock and a black shifting shape was flowing out from it.
         "Oh, that's not good," she muttered. "Doctor!"
         A tingle of cold shivers ran down her back. The same shivers she had only when she was near...
         "Oh crap."
         She turned back forward to run away, however her foot caught onto something else and she fell right back down. Holly kicked and shuffled away from the reaching black shadows and found herself pressing her back against a stone slab. She had no idea which way was the closest to the exit and decided that she was stuck -quite literally- between a rock and a hard place.
         With the shadows growing ever so closer to her, Holly pulled out her pocket torch and held it out in front of herself in a shielding manner. For a moment, it seemed to stall the shadows, however, the shadows then blossomed out and began to circle around her as it closed in on it prey. She screamed as she felt the cold nipping of billions upon billions of tiny teeth on her outstretched hand and huddled into the tightest ball she could muster while still holding the light out before her.
         Just when her vision was graying out from breathing too rapidly and she thought she was done for, two bright beams of light tore through the shadows like javelins, causing the creatures to receded back towards the meteor.
         Holly turned towards the light and scrambled to her feet, running wildly towards safety. The Doctor ran out from behind one of the bright lights and met her halfway. He grabbed for her hand and together they ran as quick as the wind back to the lights.
         Rose and John were there operating the giant spotlights, both looked awfully shaken, but relief lit their faces when they saw the Doctor returning with Holly.
         "Get inside," John ordered the two as they passed by.
         The Doctor nodded in agreement and led Holly along towards the doors of Torchwood Tower. Once inside the brightly lit lobby floor, the Doctor escorted Holly to a chair and sat her down.
         "Holly, are you okay? Did they bite you? Are you hurt?" The Doctor knelt in front of her as he fired his questions, giving her no time to respond. Then more calmly he said, "Holly, you need to calm down and breath or you'll faint. Just breathe. Can you do that for me?"
         She tried to calm herself down, but all she could do was think of the other Holly and knowing how close she came to meeting the same fate.
         The Doctor chewed on his lip, thinking what he can do to help. He then placed his outstretched hands on both sides of her head, near her temples.
         "What are you doing," Holly gasped in-between shallow breathes. "Don't you dare."
         "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "Now sleep."
         Holly instantly became limp and her breathing steadied to a peaceful rate as the Doctor gently laid her head propped up on a pillow. He glanced around her to make sure he did not miss any serious injuries, but she only had a few rash markings on her hands and wrists of where they were nipped by the Vashta Nerada's tiny teeth. A light wrapping of ointment and her hands would heal just fine.
         The hissing sound of the automatic doors opening and closing made the Doctor look up to see both Rose and John dashing in and bolting the door locks. John went to talk to the confused woman at the front desk and Rose came toward his direction.
         "Is she alright?" Rose asked, looking at the slumbering girl in the chair.
         "She's fine. Just had to make her sleep a little. The shock was too much for her to handle." The Doctor answered back. "She'll be out for an hour or two, which is good for her anyways. The pass day or so she hasn't been sleeping well. Something about a nightmare keeping her up. Before that it was headaches. I'm starting to wonder if she has time sickness."
         Then seeing the confused look on Rose's face he continued.
         "Sort of like getting sea sick, but it's when you travel too rapidly in time. The odd thing is that the TARDIS has a designed feature to protect all travelers from it. Guess she's just more sensitive than the norm, or I need to recheck to make sure it's actually working."
         Standing up, he then asked, "Anyway, so how was the trip to the observatory? Get any interesting stuff, like how there were small bits of meteor at all of the sightings?"
         Rose and John silently looked at each other, both of them with grim and somber expressions.
         "What is it?" The Doctor asked. "I'm guessing it's bad news from the silent looks. How bad?"
         Rose started to open her mouth, but John beat her to it.
         "The astrologer, Dr. Stein or what's left of him, was found dead shortly after the interview we saw. No eyewitnesses, but, he was found with a chunk of meteor in hand in his study. We were told that he recently got the rock as a gift from his lab partner, Ms. Wilkinson, who is currently missing, possibly dead. You think the Vashta Nerada came from the meteor chunks?"
         "That's the only connection these deaths seem to have," the Doctor answered. "And I happen to have two samples of the meteor rock. Shall we run some tests of it and see where it came from?"
         "I think that's a brilliant plan Doctor. And you know what they say–"
         "Two heads are better than one," they said in unison.
         The two of them started heading towards the lift to reach the labs, both with beaming grinning faces.
         "Boys and their science tech toys," Rose muttered to herself." She glanced over to Holly, who was still sleeping deeply, and then stepped over to take a seat across from her. "Guess it's just us girls."


         Half an hour passed and Rose was still trying to work out the puzzling facts of the death reports of all of the victims, as well why the creatures attacked them. There had to be a pattern, it could not just be random attacks, yet she could not see it. The only link between all of the victims was the rocks, which was another mystery yet to solve.
         She sighed wearily and dropped the files on the small coffee table in front of her.
         "So, when did you two get married?"
         Rose nearly jumped out of her seat when Holly spoke up. She had not known that Holly was sitting awake and watching her for the past few minutes.
         "Sorry?" Rose said. Her voice was flush from having been startled, though she did well to hide it.
         "You keep rubbing your ring," Holly went on, "like it's new and you have to touch it to remind yourself."
         "Aren't you supposed to be sleeping?" Rose asked as she hid her ringed hand under the other.
         "Suppose to, but I'm obviously not. Something woke me up." Holly shrugged and pushed herself up in the chair to get the kink out of her back and neck.
         "A nightmare?"
         "Sort of. It started some time ago, shortly after traveling, along with the occasional headache. Strange though, it's starting to feel more real every time. Anyways, you're avoiding my question."
         Rose looked down at her hands, her eyes glossing at the sight of her ring.
         "Very recently," she answered with a smile. Then she looked back up at Holly.
         "And John's half human and was originally the Doctor's hand in a jar?" Holly asked.
         "Yeeaaah, kind of paints a different picture doesn't it."
         "Ever tease him by calling him Handy?"
         "That was one of his first rules, to not tease him when we were trying to get a name for him," Rose said with a light giggle. Then she asked, "Does he know? The Doctor I mean?"
         "About your marriage? You kidding? He's usually completely oblivious to what's in front of him."
         "Yeah, he usually is." Rose said with a laugh.


         "How could I have been so oblivious!?"
         The Doctor and John had been running multiple tests to try to find the origin of the meteor chunks, as well as their relationship to the Vashta Nerada in one of the spare lab rooms no one was using at the time.
         John looked up from the page he was glancing through of the report copies of Dr. Stein's pass time research of the rock.
         "What?"
         "These aren't meteor rocks at all," the Doctor said, "they are in fact wood -petrified wood- and they have been charred around the surface as if they have been through a fire, therefore giving them the appearance of a meteor rock. Holly did note they were unusually light for a rock."
         "Wood?" Then a horrifying thought struck John and his face slacked with cold realization. "No. You're not saying it's spore infested wood."
         The Doctor nodded and said, "We have to warn the others."
         "I'll lock these up safely. They could still be in there waiting for their perfect moment."


         The Doctor was walking to where he left Holly when he heard her and Rose giggling and laughing.
         "Three Viking girls? And they stole his shoes?" He heard Rose asking as she laughed.
         "Holly, you're supposed to be sleeping. Rose, why isn't she resting?" The Doctor said, slightly crossed that he was the center of their teasing.
         "Oh take a chill pill Doc," Holly said, "Rose and I were just sharing some stories. You know, girl talk. Plus I needed a good laugh."
         The Doctor stepped over to Holly and knelt down nearly eye-level with her. His eyes were watching her with quiet curiosity, whereas the rest of his expression remained cold and stone face. The way he looked at her made her sit back further into the chair and her smile fade from her lips.
         Rose remained silent and watched the Doctor, not knowing what exactly was going on.
         "Holly," The Doctor said quietly. "Was it another nightmare?"
         "Yea. Well, not exactly, it's the same one, just slightly clearer than before."
         The Doctor watched her for a brief moment, as if he could look into her eyes and see what she saw.
         Then he said, "Something's coming."
         Holly thought it was a question, but she did not know what he meant, so she merely shrugged.
         "Describe your nightmare."
         "There's not really much about it. There was a lot of darkness and I couldn't see where I was. I'm sure it's nothing."
         It was a small lie, there was something else there, but she could not tell what it was, only that she had a feeling, like there was something else alive in her nightmare and it sulked in the darkness, waiting for her.
         "I'm not so sure of that, which is why you need to tell me. Dreams and nightmares are more powerful than you would ever imagine. Now, please tell me what was in your nightmare."
         Holly looked away, not wanting him to see how truly frightened from the nightmare she was. She took a breath as if to speak, but then the lights flicked, making Holly nearly jump out of her skin.
         "Tell me that wasn't the lights flickering just now," she said in a panicked squeak. Her voice was so tight and quiet that she barely heard herself speak.
         "What do you mean? There's nothing wrong with the lights?" The Doctor answered.
         Holly just sat there and gawked at him in disbelief.
         "You didn't just see the lights turn on and off a moment ago," she asked.
         The Doctor looked at Rose and she shook her head.
         "Holly, the lights have not flickered or switched off. Are you all right? Was this part of your dream?"
         "No."
         Holly then climbed out of the chair and pushed pass the Doctor. She took a few wobbly steps away from him before the lights flickered once more, becoming dimmer than before.
         "There, again. It's dimmer! You have to have noticed that just now." She said as she turned around and pointed to the light above her.
         The lost expressions on both Rose and the Doctor were enough of an answer.
         "I'm not crazy!" She shouted fiercely.
         "No one said you were." The Doctor said cautiously and slowly stepped towards her. "Is there something in your eye?"
         Holly looked from the Doctor, and then she looked to Rose who had her hand covering her mouth in shock or horror. Maybe a bit of both.
         "What's going on? Why are you guys looking at me like that?" Fear crept back into her voice, making it squeak drily.
         The lights flicked once more, however this time they remained off and darkness filled her world.
         "Your eyes Holly. They're black."