A/n : Okay, this is really just a bit of fun – I’ve scribbled this down and it’s really for Wiltshireman more than anyone (he’s said he’s a “Doctor Who” fan!). I do know where the story is going, and I think I’ll continue it when I want a break from other things. I just had an idea, you know?

Fairly obviously, this is David Tennant’s Doctor, and is set during the 2006 series, some time after “The Age of Steel”.

“Doctor Who” and all related characters are owned by (I think) the BBC. They certainly aren’t owned by me!

The Harvesters

Pre-Titles

“What’s it like out there?”

Rose Tyler pulled her head back into the TARDIS and turned and looked at the tall, sparely-built figure in the brown pin-stripe suit pointing a sonic screwdriver menacingly at the central console. His eyebrow was raised as high - figuratively speaking - as his cheekbones. She smiled a dimpled smile.

“Jungle-y," she answered. The Doctor grinned.

“Archetypically Jung-ly?" he asked, slipping the 'driver back into a pocket, "Or more kind of, ‘Boo-yakka, boo-yakka, spinnin’ ‘ardcore on da decks, ai’?" He made every concession to dialect, but none to accent and that - combined with the hand gesture that could have been a salutation on a distant world (and, in fact, probably was as they might not even be on Earth) - made Rose bite her lip to keep the disapproval from being chased off her face by amusement. "Is it because I is a Time-Lord?” he asked plaintively.

She sighed, shaking her head, her bell of blonde hair swinging pendular, and took a light cotton jacket from the coat stand near the door. Pulling it onto her shoulders, she gestured at the hat that the Doctor had produced from nowhere.

“Are you taking the pith?” she asked, her sensual lips twisted into a retorting grin. The Doctor looked impressed as he put the off-white helmet on his head.

“Oh, good one.”

oOo

The TARDIS had materialised in the bottom of a bowl-shaped valley whose sloping sides swept upwards around them like a green wave. Above them, the raised horizon ran in a undulating ring as a gentle breeze rippled the tree canopy. The ground underfoot was marshy and wet and a soupy river gurgled to their left. By good fortune or fate they had landed in a clearing made by the collapse of a rotten tree - eaten through by what looked like termites the size of bees - but beyond the edges of this little clear space the forest canopy spread as far as the eye could see, creating a low verdant roof.

It was hot and humid - within seconds Rose was sweating into air too wet to dry it - and an incessant drip-drip-drip of false rain came from the leaves above, sappy and clinging. The trees were thick-trunked but primitive, and the undergrowth was great fronded ferns, buzzing with the hum of insect life. Iridescent dragonflies with wings like stained glass and bodies as long as Rose's arm hovered lazily past and the leaf mould of the floor rippled with crawling life.

Rose stopped, panting heavily and leaning against the bole of a cycad. Her limbs felt heavy and there was a tightness in her chest and temples, a light-headedness behind her eyes. She giggled, although she did not know why. Her mind dimly processed a tickling sensation on her leg and she glanced down through vision that wasn't as sharp as she might have expected.

Crawling up her leg was a huge black segmented sausage, gleaming like oiled slate, with a fringe of sine-wave legs on each side. Antennae waved incuriously as the millipede trundled up her calf, waving its blunt, featureless head from side to side. Rose's reaction would have been to start and slap the thing away, but she was foggy and took a few seconds to assimilate and process the information - by which time the blind head had reached her hip.

The Doctor reached down and grasped the creature gently where its neck would have been if it had one, plucking it off her thigh, its legs disengaging like the teeth of a zip. The millipede was as thick as his wrist and a good two feet long, a heavy coil of fringed chitin as it curled into a spiral in instinctive defence.

"Aren't you lovely?" cooed the Doctor, holding the gleaming black disc, curled like liquorice, in both hands and admiring it intently. "Wonderful creatures, millipedes," he continued, "All those legs - tramping like Cybermen on the march. Marvellous!" He carefully put the creature down on the ground where - after a second - it uncoiled and trundled into the undergrowth. The Doctor turned to Rose. "Are you alright?" he asked.

"Just . . . a little . . . tired," she panted. Her light-headedness was passing, but the tightness in her chest and temples remained. Her body felt tired and heavy and she felt starved of air, as if she had run a marathon. But all she and the Doctor had done was walk halfway up the gentle slope of the valley side. The Doctor nodded.

"Mild anoxia," he said decisively. He sniffed. "There's less oxygen in the air than you're used to - not too much less, but enough. And the gravity's a wee bit stronger here as well - we must be on a planet that's heavier than Earth." She noticed that even he was breathing heavily, but not panting like she was. Not for the first time, she envied him his two hearts and respiratory bypass system. "If we take it easy, you should be okay - stay here long enough and your body'll start to produce more haemoglobin." The Doctor sighed, lost in his appreciation for the human form. "Wonderful, amazing creatures, you humans. Adaptable, elegant, striving - even down to your physiology! Gosh, darn it, but you're-just-so-good!" Rose heaved more air into her labouring lungs, and then pushed herself off the tree trunk and began to walk - slower now - up the hill.

"It's like . . . a lost world," she said with the neophillia the Doctor still hadn't lost in nine-hundred years, "Like something out of Jurassic Park."

"Or Ray Bradbury," smiled the Doctor, batting a dusty-winged insect - carefully - from his face. "Don't tread on any butterflies." He stepped over a fallen tree, fuzzy with fungus and lichen growth and crawling with insects and glistening molluscs. "It's very close to prehistoric Earth - which probably means it's going to be awfully dull." Rose turned to him. "Oh, come on - nothing but ferns and crawly things. No aliens, no machines, no people."

They had reached the top of the valley and stepped out into sunshine, looking out from a raised promontory over a waving sea of green forest canopy. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but primitive leaves. Rose shielded her sweat-smarting eyes with her hand as the sun beat down onto the misty clouds rising from the wet forests.

Through one of those banks of cloud, a shape burst. A huge - impossibly huge - shape; long and lithe with a saw-ridged spine and bat wings, lashing tail and face out of a nightmare. It was flying, but with lazy, gliding beats of its titanic wings - swooping and diving elegantly and swiftly. It banked in the air - a hundred yards or more of gleaming, serpentine monstrosity stalling in the air with wings that blotted out the sun. Somehow, it didn't tumble out of the sky as it stopped nearly dead, but twisted like an eel and - with a terrible screeching roar rumbling from its cavernous throat that made Rose's diaphragm vibrate like a tambourine - bore down on them.

As it folded its wings and dived, flame shot forth from its jaws - ravening, hideous flame, blue edged with golden red. It kissed the forest canopy beneath and it leapt into crimson ruin, steam and smoke rising from a ten meter wide swathe of burned greenery.

For a telling second, with the sulphurous heat-wash from its breath battering their senses, the Doctor and Rose stood slackly as the enormous dragon swooped down on them, absolutely and unmistakably and definitely hunting.

A/n : Because I stand on the shoulders of giants (which is fanfiction speak for “I steal people’s ideas) I must admit that I am using Peter Dickinson’s conception of Dragons (from The Flight of Dragons).

This little “chapter” is called “Pre-Titles” because I am writing the story in the style of a TV episode – so this section is the bit that runs before the music and whatnot! Each chapter after this will be a single episode of the series, and so will end on the required cliff-hanger!

If there is some interest in this, I might be persuaded to write the next section a bit sooner!