Watch Us Run |1| The Ascension | A Doctor Who/MCU Fanfiction

Chapter Forty: Fear Her

The TARDIS materialised early in the morning of the 27th July 2012, in an outdoor storage facility near some train tracks. The Doctor went to check outside, but found that he'd parked with the doors facing a blue cargo container; he couldn't get out. Grateful he'd checked before the girls saw, he went back inside to rectify his mistake.

Rose and Alex were still asleep, but he'd decided to surprise them by choosing the destination early. That gave him time to get lost in his thoughts.

Though it didn't seem like it, it had been two years that the girls had been travelling with him. Two years since Autons at Hendricks. Twenty one months since Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, and fifteen since Captain Jack Harkness, and who are you? The Doctor had seen so much with the girls. Autons, the Face of Boe, the Moxx of Balhoon, the Gelth, the Slitheen, a Dalek, the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe, Reapers, Chula warriors, Nanogenes, Catkind, a werewolf, Krillitanes, Cybermen, the Wire, a pack of Hoix, an Absorbaloff, and even the Devil himself. He was so glad he'd given them a second chance to come with him.

***

It was another half an hour before Rose and Alex stumbled into the console room.

"Oh, good," the Time Lord said and led the girls outside.

Rose looked at a Shane Ward poster as the Doctor locked up. "So, near future, yeah?"

The Doctor grinned. "I had a passing fancy. Only it didn't pass, it stopped." He grabbed the girls' hands and walked to the nearest street: Dame Kelly Holmes Close. There were banners announcing London 2012, and the girls looked delighted. "Thirtieth Olympiad."

"No way!" Alex gasped, laughing.

"Why didn't I think of this? That's great!" Rose marvelled.

"Only seems like yesterday a few naked Greek blokes were tossing a discuss about, wrestling each other in the sand with crowds stood around baying." The Doctor pulled up short for a second. "No, wait a minute, that was Club Med. Just in time for the opening doo dah, ceremony, tonight." At Alex's smile, he grinned. "I thought you'd like that. Last one they had in London was dynamite. Wembley, 1948. I loved it so much, I went back and watched it all over again." The sisters' attention was snatched away by some posters of missing children on a telegraph pole, but the Doctor was oblivious. "Fella carrying the torch, lovely chap, what was his...? Mark? John? Mark? Legs like pipe cleaners, but strong as a whippet."

"Doctor," Rose interrupted.

"And in those days, everybody had a tea party to go to."

"Doctor!"

"Did you ever have one of those little cakes with the crunchy ball bearings on top?"

"You should really look at this, Kas," Alex told him, rolling her eyes and shivering. It was unusually cold.

He veered off his course, still talking. "Do you know those things? Nobody else in this entire galaxy's ever even bothered to make edible ball bearings. Genius!" As he joined the girls, he slipped straight into seriousness without a hitch. "What's taking them, do you think? Snatching children from a thoroughly ordinary street like this." He noticed Alex's goosebumps and lent her his trenchcoat. "Why's it so cold? Is someone reducing the temperature?"

Alex frowned. "It says they all went missing this week. Why would a person do something like this?"

"What makes you think it's a person?" The Doctor raised an eyebrow, and she tilted her head, acknowledging his point.

Rose watched as a woman hurried in taking her rubbish out and going back inside. The only other people on the street were the council road-menders and their white van. "Whatever it is, it's got the whole street scared to death. Doctor, what—?"