For the last time, Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Taking care not to stumble too much as she made her way through the forest around her, Rose kept her hand tightly closed around the small key. When she had first stood in the street about an hour earlier, she had realized that she had no idea where to go. She had at first expected the TARDIS to be outside, in plain view, but there were no signs of it. Among other things, that instantly made her wonder how far the Doctor had dragged himself in his condition!

Luckily, the key made a slight tug in one particular direction. Not a hard tug, the kind that would fling it from her hand and into the street, but a gentle tug, the kind that seemed simply to tell her to go that way. The kind that one might mistake for a hallucination. Especially when dealing with time travelling aliens!

And this was where it led to. Epping Forest. Had it been a sunny day and she been simply out to relax and enjoy herself, the place would have been a delight. As it happened, London was cold enough that she regretted wasting time getting things into her fridge at all earlier, and evening was making its way over the forest, making it horribly creepy. She had a torch along, but she would still prefer a comfy sit on the couch and something bad on the telly, maybe even an unhealthy snack. Dark forests were in neither of those categories.

Having left the man-made paths once the key tugged in a direction impossible to follow in any other way, she had been making her way through branches and brush for a good few minutes, cursing every one of them that slapped her in the face or grapped her foot enough to make her almost trip and fall. Then, without warning, she stepped into a clearing. Not a public clearing, it was too crude and clumsily shaped for that. There was broken wood everywhere, and the brush was still strong as ever as she tried to move forward.

The one very fine thing about it, however, was that there were no more shadows of tall trees blocking her view of the land. The late sun was able to pierce through or slip over most of it, making it no less spooky but a lot more visible.

What was odd was that there seemed to be no real pattern to the destruction. Patches of trees were levelled or ripped apart halfway up, then a bigger area seemed more pushed aside, trees leaning with roots coming out of the ground. It seemed less like something had been on a rampage, and more like a good handful of things had been on a series of each their own little rampages. Finally, the key stopped tugging on her hand gently, and she stopped walking.

Tilted against a large rock in the forest, the TARDIS seemed largely unharmed, but dirty as she had never seen it before. It had black stripes from superficial burns, dirt and mud smeared everywhere, leaves and small branches sticking to it all over. It looked for all intents and purposes as if someone had dragged it through someone's collection of filth, then rolled it down a nearby hill. Everything seemed intact, even the windows, and the light on the top was on and spinning, but it looked more like an accident of fate that it was not bits and pieces strewn across the forest floor, like many of the trees were!

-

Stepping into the thing was unusually discomforting. Rose had piled a few bits of broken trees outside its door to reach, using the key to open the door, but the oddity of it was the tilt. As her foot passed through the door, gravity shifted from the outside direction to the inside one, making her feel as if she was about to fall down a flight of stairs. Supporting her hands on the doorframe, she managed to make the transition, only to very nearly bang her head on... something.

The inside of the TARDIS looked insane. To an unfamiliar eye, it would look like it had been badly damage inside during whatever had happened. Rose, however, could see that however chaotic things looked, they were largely intentional. "Redecorated, have we?" she mumbled to herself as she made it comfortably inside the tilted doorway. Turning around, she could see the destruction of the forest from the perspective of the TARDIS, and it gave a slightly clearer view of what might well have happened! The patterns swirled out from it, patches forming almost the equivalent of crop circles. The TARDIS had crashed, and in a messy, chaotic, and probably rather spectacular way.

She looked at all the strange new things inside of it, letting her hands run over the surfaces of new features that filled the control room, almost to test that they were real and physical. It was not just a modification here and there, it was everywhere! What looked like support beams of colorful metals ran across the room from every angle, and thick cables followed and jumped between them. It looked like how a bored child might decorate the TARDIS, and knowing the Doctor, she would not be surprised to find out that was more or less the nature of it.

As she made her way closer to the controls, she felt uneasy. She had felt something like it before, but not quite like this. The TARDIS was hurting. Psychic energies were leaking out somewhere, filling her with a horrible mix of sadness and worry, as if she was sensing the suffering of a wounded animal. Out of nothing but instinct, she looked around to find something in clear need of repair, but she soon realized that even if something was damaged badly enough for her to spot it, that would only mean that it was too badly damaged for her to do anything about.

The button. The big button. It had been the one instruction that the Doctor had insisted on giving her. Rose looked around the controls in the center of the room, desperately hoping that whatever this button was, it was not part of the many and confusing additions that had been made to the TARDIS since last she saw it. As luck would have it, three big buttons to her far right seemed to match the description! Moving through the modifications, taking care not to hit her head or snag her hair on any of it, her mind was filling up with worries about how she would know which one was the right big button of the three. Reaching them, she looked at them one by one. The last one had a paper note put on it with scotch tape. "This one!" it proclaimed, the dot over the eye drawn as a smiley face.

"Well, I guess..." was all she said before making the flat-handed slapping motion that the Doctor had shown her, pushing the big button down.