Chapter Text
Rose Tyler rummaged through one of the storage compartments under the TARDIS console, muttering good-naturedly to herself as she did so.
“Bloody Time Lord. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Rose, I’ve got everything we’ll need, Rose. It’ll be in-and-out, easy-peasy lemon squeezy, Rose.’ Well you forgot something, didn’t you?” She let out a small cry of triumph as she located the small gold ring the Doctor had sent her back to the TARDIS to retrieve, calling it a bio-damper and saying it would make it much easier for him to pass as a human. She pulled herself to her feet and shook her head, remembering the disdainful look he’d given her when she’d suggested that since she was already a human, it might have been more prudent for her to play patient.
He didn’t choose to dignify her suggestion with a verbal answer, and instead pulled his overcoat on over his striped pajamas — very Arthur Dent, he’d said with a smile — and patted one of the pockets to be sure the spare suit he’d tucked in for the occasion was in place.
Somehow or another — and Rose wasn’t quite sure how — the Doctor had managed to get himself entrenched in a bed. He had just pulled out his sonic screwdriver and started to do a scan when he caught sight of his own hand and promptly sent Rose back to the TARDIS to retrieve the bio-damper.
After locking the TARDIS door behind her, Rose set off down the busy London street. She idly wondered what the date was — since her mum and Mickey were no longer there and they didn’t have to worry about preventing further year-long absences or out-of-order visits, she and the Doctor paid much less attention to the exact date they landed, provided they didn’t land too close to the terrible day at Canary Wharf. Rose suspected the Doctor had set some sort of buffer zone even the capricious TARDIS couldn’t — or wouldn’t — violate, as so far they’d yet to come within six months in either direction. She pushed her thoughts away from Canary Wharf and decided they were still fairly close to what had once been her present day.
She was almost back to the hospital when she noticed dark clouds building up in one particular place while everywhere else simply had the usual London misty rain and damp. She’d chalk it up to naturally wonky weather patterns, except when she rounded a corner, her suspicions that she knew exactly which particular place was involved were confirmed as the hospital came into view.
“Bugger,” she muttered as the rain around the hospital started moving up.
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Inside the hospital, the Doctor sat in his hospital bed taking in his surroundings with a cheerful smile on his face and trying to decide whether or not he should tell Rose about his brush with discovery earlier, when a young doctor in training had listened to his heartbeats — both of them — during rounds. Thankfully, a wink and a smile had been enough to convince her not to say anything, but he was sure Rose would say she’d told him so in an annoyed tone that wouldn’t quite manage to cover her worry. It was the worry he wanted to avoid more than anything else; Rose was never cross with him for long.
The Doctor was just thinking about slipping his sonic screwdriver out of the pocket of his coat — which was tucked under the pillows — and doing a scan or two under the covers when all hell broke loose around him. It was as if there was an earthquake trying to tear London apart. Centuries of experience had him throwing his weight left and right to keep from falling out of bed as it shifted back and forth underneath him. Then, as suddenly as the chaos had begun, all movement stopped. The whole hospital seemed to hold its breath for a split second, and then there was a flurry of activity, as doctors hurried to attend to their patients and hundreds of people began trying to figure out what had just happened.
In the confusion, the Doctor slipped out of bed and drew the privacy curtain closed around his bed. He began to hurriedly pull his beloved pinstriped suit out of the pockets of his coat, listening carefully to the commotion around him.
“Let’s see what all the trouble is about, then,” he murmured as he changed clothes and wondered where Rose was.
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Rose stared incredulously at the gaping hole where the Royal Hope Hospital had been just moments before. After the rain started falling up, she’d quickened her steps in the vague hope of reaching the hospital before something weirder happened, but then there had been a few upward lightning strikes followed by a blinding flash of white light and a brief earth tremor that jostled Rose against other onlookers. When her vision had cleared, the hospital had simply vanished.
She took her mobile out of her pocket and stared at the display mutely. Before, she’d have called Mickey or her mum, not that they’d have been particularly helpful, but now who could she call? The Doctor didn’t carry a phone.
So she stood there, still and silent, as people rushed around her. She hadn’t felt this helpless since the Daleks had poured out of the sphere at Canary Wharf.
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The Doctor finished stowing his pajamas in his coat pocket and, through the noise around him, zeroed in on the voice of one woman close to his curtain who seemed to be calm and making sense. Rose hadn’t turned up, and the Doctor decided this meant she was still back on Earth, because if she’d made it to the hospital before the commotion, she’d have made her way back to his bed by now. He’d need someone who could stay calm in the crisis to help him out if that was the case.
“Julia, if the air was gonna get sucked out,” the woman was saying, “it would’ve happened straight away. But it didn’t, so how come?”
With an admittedly theatrical sense of timing, the Doctor pulled open his curtain with a flourish.
“Very good point!” he exclaimed, putting on his brainy specs and moving to stand with the woman and her colleague, who appeared to be a good deal more panicky. “Brilliant, in fact,” he continued, and he recognized her as the doctor who had kept mum about his two hearts earlier. “What was your name?”
“Martha.”
The Doctor grinned, remembering. “And it was Jones, wasn’t it?” She nodded, and he pressed on. “Right then, Martha Jones, question is: how are we still breathing?”
The panicky woman Martha had called Julia let out a sob and wailed. “We can’t be!”
The Doctor huffed impatiently. Where was Rose when he needed her? “But obviously, we are, so don’t waste my time.” He turned more fully to Martha. “Martha, what have we got? Is there a balcony on this floor, or a veranda, or…?”
Martha took a deep breath and nodded. “By the patients’ lounge, yeah.”
“Fancy going out?” the Doctor asked, a slight grin toying with the corner of his mouth.
“Okay,” Martha said calmly. The Doctor tilted his head slightly and watched her face, gauging her reactions.
“We might die.”
“We might not,” she replied, and the Doctor beamed proudly. Rose’d like this one, he thought.
“Good,” he said. “Come on.” He glanced at the shaking woman next to them and shook his head. “Not her, she’d hold us up.” He turned and began heading towards the patient lounge without looking back. With a last glance at Julia, Martha strode after him.
“I’m the Doctor, by the way,” he said to her when she caught up.
“You too, huh? And it’s Smith, right?”
“Er, no,” he said. “Just the Doctor.”
“How d’you mean, just the Doctor?”
“Just… the Doctor.” He paused at an intersection and Martha gestured to the left, and they continued on.
“What, people call you ‘the Doctor’?”
“Yep.”
Martha would have replied, annoyed at his appropriation of a title she felt needed to be earned with copious amounts of hard work and study, but they found themselves at the glass doors to the balcony and stopped to stare out at the lunar landscape. The Doctor put his hand on the door handle and looked to Martha. She took a deep breath and nodded wordlessly.
He pushed the door open. When there was no sudden rush of air out the doors or change of pressure, the Doctor exhaled and stepped out onto the balcony, Martha trailing behind.