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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.

Chapter Text

“We’ve got air,” Martha murmured incredulously. “How does that work?”

The Doctor shook his head. “Just be glad that it does.” He strode forward to lean against the low wall and look out across the moon to the Earth. Rose would be worried sick by now, and, he thought guiltily, would have no one to call, no one to turn to for help or comfort. He made a mental note to look up Jack as soon as he was back in the TARDIS. A man with his unique bio signature wouldn’t be at all difficult for his ship to find.

“I’ve got a party tonight,” Martha said, and the Doctor realized that she had come to stand by his side. “My brother’s twenty-first,” she continued. “Oh, my mother’s gonna be…” She trailed off, and for a moment the Doctor thought she might break, and he’d have to find someone else to be calm and rational and helpful. Then she pulled it in and schooled her features back into relative calm.

“You okay?” the Doctor asked carefully.

“Yeah,” she replied, her voice a little shaky.

“Sure?”

“Yeah,” she repeated, firmer this time.

“D’you wanna go back in?” the Doctor asked, belatedly realizing that standing on the moon without the benefit of a space suit or oxygen tank was probably incredibly disconcerting for her.

“No way,” she said instantly, and the Doctor’s respect for her went up a notch. “’Cos, I mean, we could die, any minute, but all the same…” She smiled at him and looked back toward the Earth, shining blue and green and white in the black sky. “It’s beautiful.”

The Doctor grinned. Rose would say the same, he knew. Come to think of it, he’d been meaning to let her see the Earth from the moon for some time. He added that to his mental list of things to do.

“What do you think happened?”

The Doctor glanced at Martha. “What do you think?”

Martha didn’t hesitate. “Extraterrestrial,” she said with a firm nod. “Got to be. I dunno,” she continued, “a few years ago that would’ve sounded mad, but these days…” She shook her head. “That spaceship flying into Big Ben. Christmas. And those Cybermen things, that battle in the sky.” She frowned. “I had a cousin, Adeola. She worked at Canary Wharf. Never came home.”

The Doctor watched Martha steadily, remembered vaguely a girl who had looked very much like her who had been one of the first victims. He thought of Rose, how close he’d come to losing her and how she had lost her family, and suppressed a shudder.

“I’m sorry,” he managed, and Martha shrugged.

“Yeah.”

“I was there,” the Doctor said, unable to stop himself. “In the battle, my friend and I, and her family. She misses them every day,” he added, regretfully. He looked back out at the Earth and shook his head. “Speaking of which, oh, am I in trouble.” He brightened a little as a thought occurred to him. “You wouldn’t happen to have your mobile on you?”

Martha rummaged in her pockets and pulled out her phone. “Doubt it’ll do you much good on the moon, but here.”

“Thanks,” he said, taking the phone and pulling out his sonic screwdriver. He opened the back of the phone and aimed the sonic.

“Oi!” Martha exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” he assured her glibly. “Little bit of jiggery-pokery. Don’t worry, I’ll put it back to rights when I’m done.” It wouldn’t do to have a superphone in the hands of someone who didn’t live with a Time Lord. A few seconds later, he finished his adjustments and replaced the back of the phone, then dialed a number.

Back on Earth, Rose had pulled herself together and given up her wordless staring at the hole where the hospital had been. She was skirting around the edges of the line of barriers the police had scrambled to set up, looking for a way to get closer. Without the Doctor or any of his gadgets, she wasn’t sure how checking out the hole would help, but it was something besides running back to the TARDIS and weeping, and that was better all around. Oh, she thought, the Doctor was in so much trouble. As soon as he got back, of course.

She was about to give up and walk back to the TARDIS after all — she might not know how to fly the ship on her own, but she’d been learning all sorts of things lately and figured she could manage a scan for the Doctor’s bio signature — when her mobile rang. She snatched it out of her pocket. The Doctor was now the only person in the whole of the universe who had her number, so she opened the phone without bothering to look at the display .

“‘I just want that bio-damper,’ you said, ‘you’ll only be gone for ten minutes, nothing will happen,’ you said. Well something bloody well happened!” She took a deep breath, her fear for the Doctor’s safety manifesting itself in anger.

“Hello, Rose!” the Doctor replied brightly. Martha raised her eyebrows. She’d heard the tone of the woman’s voice on the other end of the line, if not the actual words, and it didn’t sound like the Doctor had responded appropriately.

“Don’t you ‘hello, Rose!’ me!” Rose said sternly into her phone, pacing further away from a nearby policeman. “I don’t suppose you know where the hospital’s gone?”

“Oh, no, I do!” The Doctor glanced at Martha, then back to the Earth. He stared steadily at the small speck of land that was Great Britain and a sheepish look crept over his face. “We’re on the moon.”

Rose bit back a sigh. “The moon,” she said calmly.

“Yep! But don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll have everything sorted before too long.”

Martha couldn’t hear anything of the woman’s response, and wondered just how this Doctor expected to sort everything out. They were on the moon, for goodness’ sake.

“Yes, well,” he was saying into the phone. “If you could go back to the TARDIS and run some scans for me… yes, exactly. You can call me back at this number…” He paused, and then an indignant look crossed over his face. “I did not steal it! I borrowed it with every intention of returning it!”

Martha grinned at the affronted tone in his voice.

“I will so,” he insisted, and Martha noticed the glimmer of a smile in his eyes. “So back to the TARDIS with you, then,” he continued. “You remember what I showed you last week?” He nodded, smiling widely now. “That’s my girl. No, I don’t think it’ll come to that. You haven’t got your license yet.” He laughed. “I don’t need one. Just run the scans and call me back. I’ve got investigating of my own to do.” He paused, listening, and then something shifted, softened in his eyes. “Quite right, too. See you later.” He ended the call and slipped the phone into one of the inside pockets of his suit jacket.

“So who does one call when one is inexplicably transported to the moon?” Martha asked bemusedly.

The Doctor scratched the back of his head. “Oh, um, that was my friend.”

“Your friend,” Martha repeated doubtfully.

“Yes, my friend.” Again the soft look stole across his features. “Rose. We travel together and she…” he trailed off when he saw the speculative look Martha was giving him. “She’s my Rose,” he finished quietly, feeling silly. For a man with a gob like his, it was a little embarrassing to be so often at a loss for words when he spoke about Rose.

Martha shook her head a little. This Doctor was certainly turning out to be quite a strange man. A strange man who was now squatting down on the floor of the balcony, muttering to himself.

“Ah-ha!” he exclaimed suddenly, getting back to his feet. There was a small stone in his hand. “Might as well get started investigating.” He tossed the stone over the wall of the balcony. A few feet out from the edge, the stone’s progress slowed momentarily and, with a small popping noise, it passed through an invisible membrane of some kind, which rippled briefly around the stone and then disappeared.

“Force field,” the Doctor said confidently, “keeping the air in.”

Martha nodded, but then a worrisome thought struck her. “But, Doctor… if it’s like a bubble, sealing us in… sealing the air in… this is all the air we’ve got, yeah? What happens when it runs out?”

All traces of smile were gone from the Doctor’s face now. “How many people in this hospital?”

“Dunno,” Martha said. “A thousand, maybe?”

“Then what happens, Martha Jones, is a thousand people suffocating.” He glanced inside the hospital, then back at Martha’s face.

“Why would anyone — any thing — do something like that?”

A loud thrumming drew their attention to the skies above them. “I think you’ll be able to ask them yourself in a minute,” the Doctor said ominously. He gestured above them as three massive military-looking spaceships flew over their heads, landing a half-mile or so away from the entrance to the hospital.

The Doctor and Martha leaned against the stone wall and watched as the ships opened and lines of indistinct figures began to stream out in formation. Martha gaped in awe. “That’s aliens,” she said wonderingly. “Real, proper aliens.”

“Judoon,” the Doctor said darkly. He patted the pocket with Martha’s mobile in it and willed Rose to call back.

Chapter Text

Rose stood at the TARDIS console, flicking switches and pressing buttons and praying that she didn’t do something unfortunate, like blow up Belgium. She pressed one last button and then swung the screen around so that she could read the results of the scan, the captions for which the TARDIS had obligingly displayed in English for her.

“I thought the TARDIS didn’t translate Gallifreyan,” she’d said the first time she’d seen English on the display, during one of their post-Canary Wharf TARDIS-flying lessons.

The Doctor had shifted a bit nervously. “She doesn’t. She’s displaying it in English for you. I’m seeing English, too,” he clarified when Rose’s brow furrowed a little in confusion. “If it were displayed in Gallifreyan and being translated for you, I’d still see Gallifreyan. But I know English, and it’s being displayed in English, so that’s what I see.”

He’d stepped closer to her and lightly stroked her cheek. “She doesn’t do that for just anyone.”

Rose had smiled broadly. “I’m just that good, then.”

“You are that.” He’d pressed a kiss to her forehead and the lesson had continued.

Now, however, the Doctor had said he didn’t think it would be necessary for her to make an attempt at a solo flight up to the hospital to rescue him. So she concentrated instead on making sure she’d done the correct scan. She read the results and grimaced. She’d run the right scan, but there were hundreds of instances of the same kind of non-human bio signature.

“Okay,” she muttered. “That many aliens have got to be something the Doctor would have already noticed.” She bit her lip, thought about calling him with that news. She decided that wouldn’t be particularly helpful. “I guess I’ll have to run another scan within this data. Now, how to do that…”

She stepped around the console and looked for the right buttons and levers, and wondered how the Doctor was faring.

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“Look down there,” the Doctor said, nudging Martha as they crouched behind a low wall overlooking the main lobby of the hospital. “You’ve got a little shop. I like a little shop.”

“Never mind that,” Martha said, exasperated. “What are the Judoon? They look like rhinos, for God’s sake.”

“They’re like police,” the Doctor replied, watching as the Judoon, who did indeed resemble rhinos, scanned each person and marked their hands with the letter x. “Well, police-for-hire,” he corrected himself. He thought of the Shadow Proclamation and their slight propensity for bullying and cordially requiring action or a lack thereof. “More like interplanetary thugs,” he muttered mutinously.

“And they brought us to the moon?”

“Neutral territory,” he replied offhandedly, sounding more like a professor than a doctor. “According to galactic law, they’ve got no jurisdiction on Earth, you’re not advanced enough. So they isolated us.” He gestured a bit as he spoke, drawing invisible illustrations in the air. “That rain, the big flash of light, that was an H2O scoop. It was them, bringing us here.”

Martha laughed despite herself. “You’re barmy. Galactic law? Where’d you get that from?”

The Doctor ignored her and moved a few feet down the wall, trying to get a better view.

“If they’re police,” Martha continued, “are we under arrest? Are we trespassing on the moon or something?”

The Doctor grinned at her now. “No, but it’s a good theory! Good thinking, Martha Jones! Wish it were that easy,” he added with a shake of his head. “If they’re making a catalogue… ” — he pointed to the back of his hand to show what he meant — “that means they’re after something that isn’t human.” He sighed. “Which is very bad news for me.”

“Why?” Martha asked incredulously. The Doctor just stared at her and waited for the penny to drop. “No,” Martha said after a moment. “No, you are kidding me. You are kidding me.” She paused, waiting for him to laugh and let her in on the joke. When he didn’t she simply stared. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she finally managed. He just continued to gaze at her steadily. “Stop looking at me like that!” she exclaimed, feeling slightly ridiculous.

“Come on then,” he said after a last look at the Judoon platoon below them. “We’ll have to see if we can find what they’re really after before they find me.” Keeping low while still in sight of the balcony, the Doctor and Martha crept towards the bank of elevators down the hall. Once he was sure they were out of sight, the Doctor rose to his full height and began jogging.

“Best to avoid the elevators,” he said to Martha when she slowed as they approached. “Might be on the fritz, and anyway it wouldn’t do to have the doors open and be facing a Judoon. Where’s the nearest stairwell?”

“Round the corner to the left,” Martha said, pointing. “How are we supposed to figure out what they’re looking for?”

The Doctor reached the door to the stairwell and wrenched it open. The stairs were dotted with people in varying states of distress, some glassy-eyed with shock, others weeping uncontrollably. The Doctor grimaced and stepped around them, heading up. “The scans Rose is doing back on Earth will help,” he said. “Hopefully, anyway. And we’ll do a little research of our own. The nurses stations, they have computers with access to patient databases, right?”

Martha stepped around a middle-aged woman clutching a rosary and murmuring swift prayers. “Yeah, I think so. How will that help?”

They’d reached the fifth floor door, which was open. The hallway appeared to be free of Judoon, so the Doctor slipped through the doorway and headed towards the nurse’s station nearby without answering Martha, who had been waylaid by one of the people in the doorway. He reached the computer terminal in moments, pulled out his sonic screwdriver, and began working.

A minute later, Martha hurried up to the Doctor’s side. “They’ve reached the third floor,” she said, a bit breathlessly. “What’s that thing?” she asked, noticing the sonic screwdriver for the first time.

“Sonic screwdriver,” the Doctor responded without looking up.

“Well if you’re not gonna answer me properly,” Martha began in exasperation.

The Doctor looked up at her, affronted. “It really is! It’s a screwdriver! And it’s sonic!” He held it up closer to her face. “Look!”

“What else have you got,” Martha asked derisively, “a laser spanner?”

“I did,” the Doctor said seriously, “but it was stolen by Emily Pankhurst, that cheeky woman…” He cut himself and banged on the side of the computer monitor in frustration. “What’s wrong with this computer?” He frowned at it and scratched the back of his head. “The Judoon must have locked it down. Judoon platoon, on the moon,” he murmured, enjoying the way the words rolled around his tongue. He looked at Martha, slightly pleadingly. “’Cos, we weren’t looking for trouble, Rose and I…” He grinned a little. “We usually aren’t, of course. But this time we really were just stopping by — for milk, of all things, and she’ll never believe I admitted that…”

Martha smiled, because it seemed the only appropriate thing to do in the face of the Doctor’s disjointed rambling.

“But, honestly, we weren’t looking trouble,” he continued, “and then I noticed the plasma coils around the hospital.” He glanced at Martha, explaining. “Like, that lightning? That’s a plasma coil. I thought it was something inside, that’s why I got myself checked in, to investigate. Sent Rose back to the TARDIS to get my bio-damper — and wouldn’t it be dead useful right now — and then it turned out the plasma coils were the Judoon, above, not inside.”

“But,” Martha interrupted, “what are they looking for?”

“Something that looks human, but isn’t,” the Doctor said curtly.

“Like you, apparently.”

“But not me,” the Doctor insisted, “because they were here before I was. There’s something else here.” He stared at the computer screen as if willing it to start working.

Martha tilted her head in consideration. “Does it matter what it is?” she asked. “If they’re looking for something, can’t you just let them find it?”

The Doctor shook his head gravely. “If they find who or what they’re looking for, then it’s likely that they’ll find the hospital guilty of harboring a fugitive.”

“What happens then?” Martha asked, sounding very much as if she didn’t actually want to hear the answer.

“They’ll sentence the entire place to execution.”

“What, everyone?”

The Doctor nodded and turned back to the computer. He was about to start sonicing it again, when Martha’s mobile, tucked in his jacket pocket, buzzed against his chest. Rose was calling him back.

Chapter Text

Rose beamed at her newly-shortened set of results. Out of the hundreds of results she’d started with, she was down to three lines of data and matching graphical representations. One indicated a couple hundred of one kind of bio signature and one indicated the Doctor’s bio signature, leaving one other unknown non-human entity currently sitting on the moon.

“Thanks, girl,” she said, stroking the time rotor and smiling. The TARDIS hummed slightly in response, and Rose laughed a little. “Now who’s stroking bits of the TARDIS?” She shook her head and got her mobile out of her pocket. She hit the combination of buttons that would simply call the last number to have called her phone and waited for the Doctor to answer.

“Rose,” came the Doctor’s voice after two rings. Although he never managed to sound anything but pleased to be addressing her when he said her name, she could sense the tension behind the simple syllable.

“Doctor,” she said. “I’ve got some results for you.” She glanced at the monitor. “I’m guessing you have a large amount of company?”

“Judoon,” he said, uncharacteristically succinctly. “A whole platoon.”

“Judoon,” Rose repeated, searching her memory, trying to recall if she’d met them or heard of them before. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t those… aren’t those the rhino-things that you said work for the Shadow Proclamation? Like… enforcers, you said.”

Though she couldn’t see him, Rose imagined the Doctor was nodding briskly. He was. “Yes, yes, that’s them.” He ran his free hand through his hair in frustration. “And since they appear to be here in their role as enforcers, I’d like to get this wrapped up before they find me or the cause of all the trouble.”

“And,” Rose said patiently, “I think I can help you with that. I narrowed down the results, got the TARDIS to consolidate all the Judoon readings into one result, and that left me with just two others, one of which is of course yours.”

“Rose Tyler, you’re a genius,” the Doctor said gratefully. “Listen, Rose, I need you to send the data from the TARDIS to the hospital computer system. The Judoon have wiped the patient files, but the computer’s still working. If I can look at the bio signature I might be able to tell who or what we’re dealing with.” He turned to Martha. “Martha, how else could we find out about patients admitted in the last, oh, week or so with particularly odd symptoms besides checking the computer?”

Martha shrugged. “Dunno… maybe Mr. Stoker would know,” she said, referring to the hospital administrator. She glanced at the computer. “You keep working on that, and I’ll go ask him.”

The Doctor nodded and waved her away, already speaking to Rose again. “Okay, Rose, I just need you to press this sequence of buttons…” He rattled off instructions to her at a rapid pace, knowing she would keep up. Within a minute, he was looking at the readout of the mystery bio signature.

“Oh, brilliant,” he muttered sarcastically. “Brilliant.”

“What is it?” Rose asked, concerned.

“Looks like some sort of plasmavore.” Again he ran his free hand through his hair. “Probably one with decent shape-shifting abilities. Passing as a human,” he muttered. “Hang out in a hospital, loads of blood around, people dying all the time of all sorts of things, it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

“Blech,” Rose said, very clearly.

“It’s their biology,” the Doctor said, but he didn’t sound as self-righteous as he sometimes did when making such statements. “Of course, one couldn’t be faulted for wanting them to not kill quite so many people in their pursuit of nourishment.”

“Quite,” Rose said dryly.

The Doctor scratched his chin. “I wonder if there’ve been any suspicious deaths in the last week. Maybe Martha will know. Oh, no,” he said suddenly, a realization hitting him like a ton of bricks.

“What?” Rose asked, alarmed.

“Plasmavores are already very humanoid in appearance, it would be as easy for them to visually pass as a human as it is for me. But inside, that’s a different story, except they’re absorbing the blood of another species. Not just drinking it, absorbing it.” The Doctor nearly groaned. “It’ll register human when the Judoon scan it.”

“So…” Rose said, curiously, “isn’t that good? Won’t they leave? If you just hide and they don’t find any non-humans, won’t everything be fine?”

The Doctor was silent for a moment, and it was all Rose needed. “They’ll leave you there, won’t they? They won’t return the hospital.”

“I’ll sort this, Rose, don’t worry.”

“Doctor, I can bring the TARDIS, I can do it, she’ll help me…”

“No, Rose,” the Doctor said. He was trying for stern, but the fact that she was willing to risk that for him had him smiling in spite of himself. “We have to be careful with the timeline now that we’ve landed in it.”

Rose held her phone out from her ear for a moment and glared at it, then returned it to its place. “You’re just saying that because you’re afraid I’ll be better at TARDIS-flying than you. You’ve crossed our own timeline before to save the day. Remember Rome? My statue? We used the TARDIS plenty on that trip. Not to mention the genie.”

“That… was… different,” the Doctor mumbled. “And let’s not mention the genie, really.” He groped for an explanation. “I know what I’m doing. It’s my ship.” He sighed. “It’s not safe for you, Rose. I’ll finish teaching you to fly the TARDIS, I promise, but I want to be there. In case something goes wrong. And I really, really don’t want you to not be there to welcome me back to Earth once I sort this out. Besides, it’s entirely possible that if they decide the hospital isn’t guilty, they will return it.”

Rose sighed and willed herself not to show how worried she was. “Okay,” she finally said. “But call me if there is anything I can do to help. I hate being down here doing nothing while you’re up there in trouble.”

“I’ll be fine,” the Doctor assured her, all bravado and confidence. “I’ve got help, a fantastically level-headed doctor-in-training called Martha Jones. You’ll like her, I think.” He glanced around. Where was Martha? Shouldn’t she be back from checking with Mr. Stoker by now? “And speaking of Martha, I should go find her,” he said. “Thank you for the scans,” he added. “Very helpful, and definitely not nothing by any measure.”

Rose smiled. “Right. Keep safe up there,” she murmured. “Come back to me.” I love you, she didn’t say.

“I will,” he promised, his voice warm. I love you, too, he didn’t say back.

They both heard it anyway, and disconnected with smiles on their faces in spite of their worries.

The Doctor tucked his borrowed phone back into his jacket pocket. He aimed the sonic screwdriver at the computer terminal, erasing the data Rose had transmitted and returning the terminal to its original state. He’d go find Martha, he decided, and then give restoring the back-up files another try if her Mr. Stoker had been unhelpful.

He set off in the direction he thought Martha had gone, checking offices and rounding corners carefully lest he be caught off-guard by a wandering Judoon. Armed with the knowledge of what they were dealing with, he found himself hopeful that he’d actually manage to get out in one piece and with relatively little trouble — considering, of course, that he was already stuck on the moon without the TARDIS or Rose and with a limited air supply. He was smiling at his own measure of “relatively little trouble” when Martha suddenly burst out of a door down the corridor.

“I know what we’re looking for,” he began, but Martha was sprinting towards him and shouting.

“I found her!”

“You did what?” the Doctor said dumbly as she caught up to him. Before she could say anything, the door she’d burst out of flew off of its hinges and what looked like a motorcycle courier dressed all in black leather and still wearing his darkened helmet strode out into the corridor. Reacting purely by instinct, the Doctor grabbed Martha’s hand. “Run!” he shouted.

Relatively little trouble, he thought wryly. As if.

Chapter Text

The Doctor and Martha ran through a corridor, the silent courier never far behind. They skirted round — and in some cases jumped over — the people crouched around doorways and stretched out across the floor. The Doctor dropped Martha’s hand at some point, needing the extra maneuverability. When they reached the stairwell, the Doctor and Martha hurried in and started going down, the courier still close on their heels.

On the fifth floor landing, they skidded to a stop at the sound of marching Judoon on the stairs below them.

“Bloody hell,” Martha muttered as the Doctor tugged her through the door to the fifth floor.

They staggered out into a deserted corridor and immediately began running again. Martha’s legs were burning and her lungs were protesting, but though she’d never been much of a runner before, she supposed she’d just never had the proper motivation. With the courier still in uncomfortably close pursuit, she allowed herself absolutely no slowing of the pace.

After a few turns, the Doctor seemed to decide it was time to take a stand. He skidded to a halt in front of an x-ray suite and pulled Martha inside. In one smooth motion, he slammed the door, aimed the device he’d called a sonic screwdriver at it, and shoved Martha back towards the technician’s area, behind a wall with glass panels.

“When I say so,” he told her, leaning against the doorframe but bouncing on the balls of his feet as he did so, “press the button.”

Martha shook her head. “I don’t know how to work this machine!”

“Then figure out how!” the Doctor said, annoyed. Then he rushed back into the main room and began doing things to the x-ray machine with his screwdriver. Martha jumped at the sound of the motorcycle courier hurling himself at the door to the room, and groped around frantically for a manual. Finally — bang! — she found one. She flipped hurriedly through the pages — bang! — until she found the right page.

Bang! The door shuddered on its hinges and Martha was certain it would give on the next push. Triumphantly, she located the proper button to press and nodded at the Doctor, who was holding the x-ray camera at chest level facing the door, his screwdriver stuck in some hole or crevice.

With one last mighty BANG, the door flew free of its hinges and landed on the floor. The motorcycle courier stepped calmly on top of it, and the Doctor shouted, “NOW!”

Martha hit the button, and was shocked by the blindingly bright flash of light that followed. By the time she’d recovered a few seconds later, the courier was on the floor, stone dead, and the Doctor was shaking his head a little, as if there were water in his ear.

“What was that?” Martha asked incredulously from behind the glass.

“X-ray,” the Doctor said, his tone suggesting it was painfully obvious. Martha just stared at him expectantly. “I increased the radiation by 5,000%,” he said. “Killed him dead.”

“And why aren’t you dead?”

The Doctor made a pffft noise and screwed up his face derisively. “It’s only Rontgen radiation,” he said. “Children played with bricks of it in their nurseries where I came from.” He gestured her to come out into the main part of the room. “Come on out, it’s safe. I absorbed all the radiation.”

Martha slowly came out, and to her surprise the Doctor began to twitch around in earnest, almost dancing in a strange rave sort of way, as if he were being illuminated by a strobe light every half-second or so and she was only seeing part of his motion.

“I just need to expel it,” he explained. “Ooh, Rose’d love to see this,” he muttered. “She’d never let me hear the end of it. But if I concentrate…” His head and shoulders stopped twitching, then his arms. “Shift the radiation out of my body and into a handy receptacle…” Now only his left leg was twitching. “Like, my left shoe for example…”

He began to hop around exclaiming things like “ooh” and “ow” and “itchy” and a slightly squeaky tone, and Martha was really starting to think this Doctor person was absolutely insane. Then he whipped off his left shoe and sock in one grab and shoved them into a nearby waste/sharps bin. “Done!” he said proudly, a goofy grin on his face.

“You’re absolutely mental,” Martha said, shaking her head.

Rather than get insulted or hurt, the Doctor nodded. “Yes, yes, of course you’re right.” He reached down and slipped off his other shoe and sock. “I look daft with just one shoe.” He tossed the second shoe in the bin with the first and wiggled his toes happily. “Barefoot on the moon,” he said with a grin.

Martha raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes. “That thing,” she said, gesturing to the courier, “where’s he from, the Planet Zovirax?”

The Doctor narrowly managed to resist the urge to roll his eyes as he knelt down next to the motionless body on the floor. “It’s called a Slab,” he said. “Nothing but a slave drone,” he continued. He poked at its arm. “Solid leather, that is.” He glanced out the door. “Somebody’s got one major fetish going on.”

“Oh!” Martha exclaimed as the Doctor got to his feet and turned back to the x-ray camera. “I didn’t get the chance to tell you, I know who it is! It’s this woman, Mrs. Finnegan.”

The Doctor let out a cry of dismay. “My sonic screwdriver!”

“She was a patient,” Martha continued, “but she killed Mr. Stoker!”

“The radiation burnt out my sonic screwdriver,” the Doctor said mournfully, as if Martha hadn’t spoken.

“She had this straw,” Martha said, a little more forcefully. “Like some sort of fangless vampire.”

“I love my sonic screwdriver! And Rose will never let me hear the end of it, ruining another one after I said this one would last forever!”

“Doctor!”

Martha’s frustrated shout finally got through to the Doctor and he blinked, tucking the remnants of the screwdriver in his pocket absentmindedly. Martha wondered if he even realized that he’d done it.

“Sorry,” he said with an impish grin. “Back to business. Mrs. Finnegan, you say?” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “She’d killed Mr. Stoker, and she had a straw? Well she is a plasmavore, according to the scans Ro—” The Doctor stopped mid-word and smacked his forehead. “She wasn’t drinking the blood, Martha.” His voice turned grave. “She was assimilating it.”

“And what’s that mean?” Martha asked when the Doctor paused, as if expecting her to continue working through the theory.

“If she gets the blood assimilated by the time the Judoon get to her, she can imitate the biology.”

“Oh, no,” Martha breathed, terribly afraid she understood where the Doctor was going with this explanation.

“She’ll pass as a human,” the Doctor said. He waited a beat, solemn-faced, and then his face was suddenly animated again, already exhilarated by the running they were about to do. “Come on!” he yelled, tugging once on Martha’s arm and then running out of the room ahead of her.

They had only gone a few feet when they caught sight of a second motorcycle courier-Slab. “Doctor!” Martha did her best to shout at a whisper.

They skidded to a halt and ducked behind a conveniently-located cart loaded with equipment. Through cracks between boxes and devices, they watched as the Slab turned and looked down the corridor. It watched for the space of a few breaths — or it would have been a few breaths if Martha and the Doctor hadn’t been holding their breaths tensely. Finally it seemed to decide the corridor was deserted and moved on.

Martha and the Doctor stayed where they were, waiting in case the Slab came back.

“That’s the trouble with Slabs,” the Doctor muttered, his annoyance conveyed even through his hushed whisper. “They always travel in pairs.”

Martha glanced at him speculatively. “And you?”

“What?” The Doctor, who had been watching the end of the corridor intently, whipped his head around to look at Martha.

“What about you?” she asked. “You mentioned someone back on Earth, yeah? That person you called? Your... friend.”

“Rose,” the Doctor said succinctly.

“Yeah, Rose.” Martha tilted her head. “Are you and she traveling… in a pair?”

The Doctor blinked at her, opened and shut his mouth a few times as if groping for words. He thought about all he and Rose had been through together, thought about the way he’d actually asked her how long she was going to stay — something he never did. He thought about how she’d promised to stay forever, even though they both knew her forever was a lot shorter than his forever. He thought about how she’d made good on that promise in the face of millions of Daleks and thousands of Cybermen and one government organization bent on destroying their very lives. How could he put words to what he and Rose were to each other?

“Humans!” he finally whispered in exasperation. “Here we are, stuck on the moon with an entire platoon of Judoon and a blood-sucking plasmavore who might have already managed to pass as a human, I don’t even have my sonic screwdriver anymore, and you’re asking personal questions!” He took one last glance at the end of the corridor and stood up, gesturing for Martha to do the same. “Come on,” he added. “We’ve got to find a really good hiding place.”

Martha got to her feet and followed the Doctor toward the end of the corridor. “Oh, how nice, ‘Humans!’” she scoffed, managing a fair mimic of his tone. “You still haven’t convinced me you aren’t just mad,” she began as they turned the corner.

And met, head-on, three Judoon warriors. The Judoon closest to them held up his scanner, and before the Doctor even had time to curse himself once more for not bringing his bio-damper, the scanner’s wip-wip-wip noise had given way to a rather alarming beeping noise.

“Not human,” the Judoon grunted.

“Oh my God,” Martha gasped. “You’re really an alien!”

The Doctor groaned inwardly and grabbed her hand. “Yes, I am. At the risk of repeating myself excessively, RUN!” He launched himself back down the corridor with the x-ray room, dodging red shots of light from the Judoon’s guns. Small explosions went off where the beams hit the walls and floors, but the Doctor and Martha kept running, veering off in the direction of the stairwell.

The Judoon were nowhere near as fast as the Slab had been, and the Doctor and Martha were out of their sightline by the time they reached the stairwell. Gratefully they hurried in and started up. The Doctor seemed tireless, and Martha cursed herself for huffing and puffing a little, even as she kept up with his pace. They burst through the door to the sixth floor. The Doctor slammed it shut behind them and pulled out his sonic screwdriver, only to mutter incomprehensibly — Martha suspected he was cursing in some alien language — when he tried to use it and was immediately reminded that he’d broken it.

He glanced wildly around, but there was nothing heavy enough to impede anyone’s progress through the door, so he stuffed his sonic screwdriver back into his pocket, grabbed Martha’s hand and took off down the hall, dodging the people who filled it, unlike the empty corridors of the floor below.

Chapter Text

Back on Earth, Rose was pacing in the TARDIS console room, concentrating on staying calm and rational instead of panicking like a helpless wimp she had the mortifying urge to be. She’d tuned the TARDIS console screen to the BBC and had the coverage of the incident playing at low volume, barely audible over the TARDIS’ constant hum.

“I should be there,” she said aloud. The time rotor pulsed once, and for a very brief second Rose almost considered trying to open the console again. Then she remembered the consequences of that particular rescue attempt and decided, quite firmly, that if she was going to hurry to the rescue at all, it was going to be by actually trying to imitate the Doctor’s complicated flying-the-TARDIS dance.

Even with her strong desire to keep her Doctor safe, she didn’t particularly relish the idea. However frustrating it was to be stuck on the Earth, with her luck it was likely she’d end up in the Cretaceous period instead of on the moon, and then what help would she be?

She flopped down on the captain’s bench and gazed numbly at the console screen, fiddling unconsciously with her mobile. She wished the Doctor would call. She wished her mum was there, or Mickey, or even Captain Jack. She missed Jack. Thinking of Jack allowed her to take a minute to wonder how he was faring in the year 200,100 before she returned to worrying about the Doctor.

She stared at the screen and sent up a silent prayer to anyone who was listening that the Doctor — and all of the people in the hospital — would be okay.

“I need him,” she whispered.

A single tear slipped down her cheek, but it was all she allowed herself.

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The Doctor and Martha had made their way down a couple of corridors, taking random turns in hopes of reducing the likelihood that the Judoon would track them down right away. Suddenly, Martha stopped, kneeling down next to her friend Julia, who she hadn’t seen since just after they’d found themselves on the moon.

“Julia!” she exclaimed. The woman was helping an older patient with an oxygen mask, and her own breathing was noticeably more shallow than normal. “How much oxygen is there?” Martha asked gravely.

Julia shook her head. “Not enough.” She looked as if she’d gone far beyond panic and into numbness. “We’re going to run out. Soon.”

The Doctor, who had stopped and come back when he’d realized that Martha was no longer behind him, knelt down next to Martha and touched her shoulder to get her attention. “How do you feel?” he asked. His respiratory bypass system was helping him deal with the lower oxygen levels, but Martha wouldn’t have the same advantages as he did. “All right?” he added hopefully.

Martha grinned, and the Doctor felt a touch of pride. “Who needs oxygen? I’ve got adrenalin to spare.”

“Welcome to my world,” the Doctor said cheerfully.

“The Judoon?” Martha asked, clearly hoping the low oxygen would affect them adversely.

The Doctor shook his head. “They’ve got great big lung reserves, unfortunately. This won’t slow them down at all.” He straightened and glanced around the hallway, on the alert for signs of Judoon. “Where’s Mr. Stoker’s office?”

Martha got to her feet and started forward. “This way.”

They jogged to the office and practically threw themselves through the door when they arrived. They were dismayed to find only Mr. Stoker’s motionless body.

“She was here,” Martha said despairingly. “She’s gone! How can we find her now?”

The Doctor ambled over to the body and examined it. He found the marks showing where Mrs. Finnegan had inserted her straw and took in the pale cast of Mr. Stoker’s skin. “Drained him completely dry,” he said softly. “She’ll have assimilated the blood already, gotten herself scanned and marked… but where’s she gone now? What’s her plan?” He paced a little. “The Judoon could still decide to execute the whole hospital, or they could find the hospital innocent but neglect to put it back on Earth…” He headed back towards the door. “Come on,” he said to Martha.

She looked back at Mr. Stoker’s body. “Wait,” she said softly. The Doctor turned to look at her curiously. She crossed to the body and tenderly shut Mr. Stoker’s sightless eyes. The Doctor nodded solemnly. It was something Rose would do, an impulse for which he respected both of them.

Then the moment was broken and they were hurrying out of the office, the Doctor’s head whipping around as he turned in circles trying to decide which way to go. “Think, think, think,” he muttered, more for his own benefit than for Martha’s. “I’m a wanted plasmavore, I’m surrounded by the police in a hospital on the moon. What do I do?” He stopped spinning and caught sight of a sign down the corridor. “Ohhhh,” the Doctor said, almost sounding impressed. “She’s as clever as me.” He tilted his head to the side, frowned. “Well, almost.”

He grinned, and started to race off towards the MRI department, Martha following bemusedly in his wake. Then he heard, distantly, the sound of a door crashing off its hinges and screams in its wake. He stopped in his tracks and Martha almost ran into him. He turned around and grabbed her by the shoulders, glancing behind her to be sure there weren’t any Judoon in their corridor yet.

“Martha Jones, this is very important, I need time. You need to stay here and hold them up.”

She shook her head, bewildered. “How in the hell am I’m supposed to do that?” she asked.

“Just… forgive me for this,” he said urgently. “It means nothing, absolutely one hundred percent nothing, and it could save the lives of everyone in this hospital.” He glanced down the corridor and added, once more, “Honestly, it means nothing.”

And then he lunged forward, clutching her face, and kissed her. A good long kiss, if completely chaste apart from the length. Without another word, he ran off down the corridor, taking the turn for the MRI department.

Martha swayed a little on her feet, smiling dazedly. “That was nothing?” she muttered. What would Rose of the indefinable relationship think, she thought smugly.

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The Doctor sprinted full-pelt towards the MRI department, skidding through the turn around the corner at the end of the corridor in which he’d left Martha to hold off the Judoon. He really hoped he wouldn’t regret that. But he was fairly certain that they wouldn’t harm her before he got the chance to make sure that they didn’t. At the end of the corridor he’d turned into, a room with a sign next to it that proclaimed it was an MRI exam room pulsed with bright blue light. The Doctor increased his pace, doing his best to think up an elaborate but workable plan in the few seconds it took him to reach the door.

He burst into the room and took quick stock of the situation. The MRI machine was already going at more than 100% output. Electric blue light pulsed from the machine, occasional arcs of electricity spanning the circular opening. An older woman, who he immediately pegged as Martha’s Mrs. Finnegan, was standing in the observation room surrounded by wires. She was sorting through them swiftly and efficiently, obviously in the middle of rewiring the whole MRI machine. At the Doctor’s entrance, she put down the wires and looked over at him. She smiled tightly and came out into the exam room, her movements calm and slow.

The Doctor wished he’d had time to call Rose one more time before putting his plan into action. He firmly believed it was going to work — he had to, didn’t he, or how would he ever get though any of his adventures alive? Still, it would have been nice to hear her voice one more time. Just in case.

He took a deep breath and launched into his best panicked and rambling mode. “Do you know what’s going on out there?” He gestured wildly. “There’s rhinos! Big, massive space rhinos in spacesuits! Big, massive space rhinos in spacesuits with guns! And we’re on the bloody moon, did you know? On the moon, with armed space rhinos!” He took another breath and glanced down at his bare feet. “I only came in for my bunions! They’re gone now, excellent treatment here, I told Rose, my…” He stumbled a bit over his words, as unbidden he wondered again if he’d see her when this was over, or if she’d be stuck on Earth with no one to help her. “My friend, I told her I’d recommend the nurses here to anyone. Well, not just the nurses. The whole place! But now we’re on the moon!” He was beginning to feel daft, but Mrs. Finnegan still hadn’t moved. “I mentioned the space rhinos, right?”

Finally, Mrs. Finnegan nodded to someone behind the Doctor. “Hold him,” she said mildly, as the second Slab he and Martha had avoided earlier stepped out of the shadows in the corner of the room.

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Martha stood in the center of the corridor where the Doctor had left her, willing herself to be strong. Hold off the Judoon, that’s all she had to do. The Doctor needed time, and he needed her, Martha Jones, to buy it for him. Everyone’s lives hung in the balance, and she knew it.

She figured that the fact that the sound of a number of Judoon marching closer and closer to her position had her hands trembling and her knees feeling slightly rubbery didn’t detract from the courage she was showing by standing there at all. She had a few more seconds to contemplate her fate, and then the Judoon appeared, rushing towards her as fast as their bulky armor and heavy bodies would allow.

“Okay, listen,” she began as they approached. “I know who you’re looking for! I know who the non-human is! Her name’s Finnegan, Florence Finnegan, she’s this woman—”

One of the Judoon shoved his scanner in her face, cutting off her hurried attempt at explanation. The scanner made its usual wip-wip-wip noise, and the Judoon grunted “Human!” Suddenly, however, the wip-wip-wip changed to a different tone, a sort of cross between the noise it made for human and the noise it had made when it had scanned the Doctor and declared him to be a non-human. “Wait!” the Judoon shouted. “Partial non-human!”

The Judoon behind the one who’d scanned her all raised their guns, and Martha gulped in a nervous breath of air. The Judoon with the scanner focused his scan on her mouth, and the odd noise intensified. “Non-human element confirmed! Perform full scan!” He shoved Martha against the corridor wall, and she really, really hoped this was working the way the Doctor planned for it to work.

Chapter Text

The Doctor struggled perfunctorily against the iron grip of his Slab captor while Mrs. Finnegan moved nonchalantly around the MRI machine, tinkering as she went. He could mostly tell what she was doing and how by watching, but it couldn’t hurt to see if he could get her to mention some of the details. Besides, phase two of his plan, if one could call what he had a plan with phases, depended on a conversation.

“Um,” he said, tugging uselessly against his captor. “That machine, it’s not supposed to be making that, er, noise, is it?”

Mrs. Finnegan smiled in a way that made the Doctor think of Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter books, which reminded him that he’d promised Rose they’d go pick up book seven before they’d been distracted by an invasion of Daleks and Cybermen. He forced himself to focus as Mrs. Finnegan answered his question. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, her voice as syrupy-sweet as the fictional character to whom the Doctor had compared her.

“But, it’s a, what’s it called? Magnetic… resonance… imaging, thing, yeah?” He gave another ineffective tug for appearances’ sake. “A ginormous magnet?”

Mrs. Finnegan smiled again. “Yes, a magnet. And I’ve increased its settings to 50,000 tesla.”

The Doctor grimaced inwardly, and allowed a look of confused surprise to pass over his face. “That’s a bit on the high side, isn’t it? I mean, failed my magnetics GCSE, but still…”

“When I activate it, it will send out a magnetic pulse that will fry the brainstem of any living thing within two hundred and fifty thousand miles,” she said proudly. “Except for me,” she added, with that same venomously sweet smile. “Safe in the observation room.”

The Doctor didn’t need to run any calculations in his head, he already knew precisely how much reach that gave her, but he questioned her anyway. “Doesn’t that distance include the Earth?” He glanced over his shoulder at the Slab holding him. “Passed my geography GCSE, I did.”

Mrs. Finnegan shrugged. “The side not facing the moon will be fine. My little gift to humanity.”

“But…” the Doctor said, feigning confusion. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he lied, “I’m a bit out of my depth. I mean, I’ve spent the last, oh, fifteen years working as a postman, hence the bunions, and were they ever painful…” He saw Mrs. Finnegan roll her eyes and bit back a grin. “Why would you do that?”

Mrs. Finnegan calmly continued working on the machine. “Once everyone is dead, the Judoon ships will be mine. I can make my escape.”

The Doctor tilted his head. “You’re talking like you’re a… an alien. Like the rhinos.”

“Not quite like the rhinos, but yes.”

“No!”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Finnegan insisted, putting down her wires.

The Doctor ceased his struggles as if in shock. “You are kidding me!”

“I am not.”

“You’re saying I am talking to an alien? In hospital? Don’t tell me this hospital has an E.T. Department!”

Mrs. Finnegan picked up another wire and attached it to the MRI machine. “There’s no more perfect hiding place,” she explained. “Blood banks downstairs, if I get peckish at night, and all this equipment.” She gestured widely at the machine behind her. “Always ready in case I need to arm myself against the police.”

“So,” the Doctor said dumbly, “those rhinos, they’re looking for… for you!”

Smugly, she held out her hand, marked with a thick black x. “But I’m hidden.”

“Ahh,” the Doctor said, feigning a sudden understanding. “That must be why they’re increasing their scans.”

“What?” Mrs. Finnegan said sharply, her eyes narrowing.

The Doctor shrugged, or did what was as close as he could get to a shrug with the Slab still holding his arms tightly behind his back. “Big Chief Rhino Boy, he said there was no sign of a non-human,” he paused as if trying to remember. “And then he said… that they had to increase the scans up to, uh, Setting Two. Two-point-five?” He’d have scratched his head if he could, but he settled for tilting his head. “No, two.”

Mrs. Finnegan began to shuffle towards him. “Well, in that case, I’ll have to assimilate again.”

Had Rose been there, or perhaps even Captain Jack, they’d have known in that moment what the Doctor had been planning all along. To anyone else, though, the panic in his eyes masked the victorious gleam lurking behind it. “What does that mean?” he asked, stuttering a little over the words.

“I have to appear to be human,” she said, still advancing slowly.

“Welllll,” the Doctor said, “you can come ‘round to my home and meet Rose, she’d be delighted I’m sure, and we can have cake…”

Mrs. Finnegan picked up a handbag she’d left on a table and reached into it. “Why should I have cake,” she said, all traces of syrupy sweetness in her voice gone now, “when I have my straw?”

“That’s… nice,” the Doctor replied, grinning. “We can have milkshakes instead. Rose makes a brilliant banana…”

Mrs. Finnegan chuckled. “You really are quite the funny man.” She gazed at him steadily, as if she were studying him under a microscope. “And yet,” she continued, “something tells me you laugh purposefully. Beating back the darkness with a vain attempt at gaiety, are we?” She was within a foot of him now. He swallowed convulsively and this time, it wasn’t an act. “I think it’s time you found some peace, young man. You can’t fight the darkness forever.” She looked to the Slab who still restrained the Doctor. “Keep him still!” she snapped.

The Slab pulled the Doctor’s head backwards, exposing his neck. “What are you doing?” he sputtered, though he knew perfectly well and had absolutely every intention of allowing her to do it.

“I’m afraid this is going to hurt,” she said, her voice calm and cold. “But — and I hope this will come as some consolation to you — from what I can tell, the dead don’t remember all that much.”

As Mrs. Finnegan leaned forward and pressed the end of her straw against his exposed neck, the Doctor’s already active Time Lord brain went into overdrive. Would his plan work? Had he accounted for every detail? How hard would Rose hit him when he told her about it — if he survived? Shouldn’t he have specified to Martha that she should hold off the Judoon for a little while but not long enough that Mrs. Finnegan would kill him? How upset would Rose be if he survived but had to regenerate? What if he actually died? What would Rose do then? (He really ought to have looked up Jack before now.) And Rassilon, Mrs. Finnegan was right — it hurt.

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Rose was sitting on the captain’s bench staring at the console screen, which was running the BBC’s coverage of the missing hospital with a small in-picture box depicting the sine waves of each variety of bio signature on the moon. The human one had been wavering for the last half hour, which Rose assumed had to do with the worsening lack of oxygen. Everyone’s bodies would be slowing down from the oxygen deprivation. But the three non-human signatures had remained strong — she assumed the Judoon and the plasmavore were either well-suited to low-oxygen environments or had found or brought equipment to compensate, and knew that the Doctor’s respiratory bypass would give him some advantage over his human fellow captives.

Now, however, his bio signature was wavering.

Rose leapt to her feet and switched the screen to showing the bio signatures in the large picture and the news feed in the corner. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

The sine wave indicating the Doctor’s bio signature faded to almost nothing, far lighter than the total strength of all the humans in the hospital.

“Don’t you dare die on me,” she whispered helplessly. “Don’t you dare.”

Chapter Text

Martha Jones told herself that there was no shame whatsoever in just how much her hands were shaking, circumstances being what they were. The Judoon who had first scanned her was drawing a thick black x on her hand, as he had for all the other humans.

“Confirm,” he said gruffly. “Human. Partial traces of facial contact with non-human.” He dropped her hand and turned to his fellow soldiers. “Continue the search!”

His cohorts quick-marched down the corridor. Martha noted, with mixed relief and trepidation, that they were headed for the MRI department. Mrs. Finnegan was there, and if the Doctor had managed to do whatever it was he had intended to do, the Judoon would find her. But what if they found him as well? And what if they didn’t choose to return the hospital to Earth when they were done?

She was startled out of her ruminations when the first Judoon shoved a piece of A4 paper into her hands. “For you,” he grunted.

“What?” Martha looked from the paper to the Judoon’s rhino-like face. “Why?”

“Compensation,” he said succinctly, before following his companions.

Martha gaped at him for a moment before balling the paper up and tossing it over her shoulder as she jogged after the Judoon. Whatever the Doctor had done — or tried to do — if there was a way for Martha to continue to help him, she fully intended to be there and help. Halfway down the corridor, she was forced to slow her pace, the lack of oxygen finally starting to push past the adrenalin rushing through her system. She shook her head and pressed on resolutely. “I’m not letting him down,” she muttered. “I’m not.”

She was only a few yards behind the Judoon when they burst into the MRI room, still pulsing with bright blue light. She saw the second Slab drop the Doctor’s limp form and Mrs. Finnegan jump backwards, straw in hand. “Oh, no,” Martha whispered, rushing forward.

“Now see what you’ve done?” Mrs. Finnegan exclaimed. “This poor man just died of fright!”

“Scan him!” one of the Judoon yelled. All of the soldiers in the room held out their scanners, which made a slightly lower wip-wip-wip noise than before. “Confirm,” the leader said. “Deceased.”

“No!” Martha rushed past the first few Judoon, only to be grabbed by two more. “No!” she shouted again. “Let me see him! I can help!”

“Case closed,” the Judoon leader grunted.

“But it was her!” Martha yelled desperately. It was up to her now, she knew it, and she only had one card to play. She had to convince the Judoon to scan Mrs. Finnegan again, despite the black x on the back of her hand. “She killed him,” Martha yelled. “She’s a murderer, you’re police!”

“Judoon have no authority over human crime.”

“But she’s not human!” Martha insisted wildly.

Mrs. Finnegan beamed sweetly. “Oh, but I’ve been catalogued, dear.” She held up her hand, and for a moment Martha felt like breaking every one of Mrs. Finnegan’s fingers. She hissed air through her teeth, frantically searching for a way out.

“But she’s not,” Martha said, “she’s assimilated—” She broke off mid-sentence, staring down at the Doctor’s pale face. “Oh,” she whispered triumphantly. She looked up at Mrs. Finnegan. “You drank his blood.”

Martha whipped around and grabbed the scanner of the Judoon who was lightly restraining her and aimed it at the old woman. It wip-wip-wip-ed like normal for a moment, and just as Mrs. Finnegan opened her mouth to once again insist she was human, the scanner made the same squealing sound it had made when the Doctor had been scanned. Martha broke out in a wide grin.

“Non-human!” the Judoon leader shouted.

“What?” Now Mrs. Finnegan sounded distressed, clearly this was not the result she was expecting.

“Confirm analysis.” All of the Judoon in the room aimed their scanners at the old woman, who babbled about how she was most definitely human even as every scanner gave the same result — non-human.

“He gave his life so they’d find you,” Martha murmured. She knelt down next to the Doctor as the Judoon edged closer to Mrs. Finnegan.

“Confirm: Plasmavore!” said the leader. “You are charged with the crime of murdering the child princess of Padrivole Regency Nine!”

Mrs. Finnegan let out something resembling a growl. “She deserved it! With her rosy cheeks and pretty blonde curls and that ridiculous little voice! She was begging for it.”

“So you confess?”

“I’m proud of it,” Mrs. Finnegan said, lifting her chin. Suddenly, she made a break for the control booth of the MRI machine. The Slab moved as if to stop the Judoon, but a single shot from their guns took it down. “Enjoy your victory,” Mrs. Finnegan shouted from the control booth. “You’re going to burn for it. You’re going to burn in hell right along with me!” She jammed two cables together and the blue light from the MRI machine got even brighter, bolts of electricity leaping around and out from the tunnel inside. Then she was engulfed the red light of the Judoon guns, and screamed as she dissolved to nothing.

“Case closed,” the Judoon leader said calmly — or as calmly as Martha figured their guttural voices ever sounded.

The group of Judoon turned toward the door, obviously intent on leaving without further resolution of the situation — namely, the MRI machine that was very obviously not currently running in its normal manner.

Martha surged to her feet. “But she’d done something to the machine, don’t you see?”

The Judoon leader stopped, turned back, and for a shining moment Martha thought he might actually try to fix things. He aimed his scanner at the MRI machine, listened to the tone of the wip-wip-wip, and then stowed his scanner in a pocket. He turned to Martha. “Scans detect lethal acceleration of mono-magnetic pulse,” he informed her.

“But, wait!” she exclaimed, as he immediately headed for the door. “You have to do something, you have to fix it!”

The Judoon shook his head. “Our jurisdiction has ended. Judoon will evacuate.”

“Evacu—” Martha gaped at him as he made his way through the doorway. “You can’t just leave it!” she shouted. Winded, she leaned against the doorframe and watched the Judoon march through the halls. She sucked in a deep breath against the thinning air. “It’s gonna explode,” she yelled at their retreating backs. “It’s your fault!” she added angrily. She rested against the doorframe for the space of another couple of breaths, gathering her strength against a wave of dizziness. She was running out of air, everyone was running out of air. But the Doctor had trusted her, was depending on her still.

She straightened and reentered the MRI room. The machine inside had gone wild now, and Martha flinched slightly as sparks flew from the tunnel and arced all around the entire machine. Then she squared her shoulders and knelt down next to the Doctor once more.

“We need you, Doctor,” she muttered, starting CPR compressions. “Come back and save us.” She breathed into his mouth, counted off the compressions again, checked his pulse. There was nothing, and she felt panic rising in her throat. And then she remembered checking him over that morning, before the upward rain and the space rhinos and the alien vampire woman. “Two hearts,” she whispered.

She shifted her hands and restarted her compressions.

----------------------------------

Rose stared at the faint sine wave representing the Doctor and willed it to get darker, stronger. She barely registered the disappearance of the plasmavore and only managed uncharacteristically low levels of concern over the more and more rapid weakening of the human bio signatures. The Judoon, she noted, were still going strong.

Surely, she thought, surely with the plasmavore gone and the Doctor probably appearing dead, the Judoon would leave.

She couldn’t bear to guess whether or not they would bother to return the hospital to the Earth when they did so.

And then her only thoughts were of the Doctor, as his bio signature darkened slightly. Still weak, she thought, but fighting it.

“Stay with me, Doctor,” she whispered. “Stay with me.”

----------------------------------

Martha blew what felt like her very last reserves of air into the Doctor’s mouth and slumped to the floor next to him, staring through bleary eyes as his own eyes blinked open slowly.

“The machine,” she rasped out. “She… did something.”

The Doctor groaned and sat up, his whole body in pain. Replenishing nearly an entire body’s worth of blood took a lot of effort, particularly in such a low-oxygen environment. Beside him, Martha was mumbling something about the last of the air, and the Doctor leaned over her, concerned.

“I gave… you…” she managed, but then the words all slid together as she slipped into unconsciousness.

The Doctor bit back an oath and took a quick survey of the situation. The MRI machine was very close to exploding, and the oxygen levels were low enough that he was concerned that even with his respiratory bypass system he wouldn’t have much time. He scrambled to his feet and nearly fell into the mess of wires in the MRI control booth.

Every movement causing some muscle in his body to scream with pain, he managed to crawl his way to the biggest mass of circuit boxes and wires. He reached into his pocket only to once again find himself holding his burnt out sonic screwdriver. He tossed it aside in frustration and stared at the wires, overcome with a wave of hopelessness.

And then he thought of Rose. The way her tongue poked out of the corner of her smile when she was feeling mischievous. The way she laughed with him every time the TARDIS took them somewhere completely unexpected, even if it was more horrible than wonderful. The way she’d looked at him when she’d come back to him from across the Void at Canary Wharf, insisting that she’d made her choice long ago and she was with him forever.

The way her lips had felt against his when he’d kissed her desperately after the last of the Daleks and Cybermen had disappeared into the Void and they were safe.

He couldn’t leave her. He wouldn’t leave her. He blinked rapidly, recited the first tenth of the Gallifreyan periodic table to clear his mind, and picked up the mess of wires. He zeroed in on two that were the most likely to stop the machine from exploding — one red, one blue. Pull the right wire, and provided the Judoon chose to return the hospital to its rightful place on Earth, everything would be fine.

Pull the wrong one, and the Doctor knew he would only be accelerating the destruction.

“Red or blue,” he muttered. “Red or blue, red or blue.” He closed his fingers around the blue wire, thinking of the jumper Rose had been wearing when he kissed her properly for the first time, of his beloved TARDIS. “Blue, then,” he said, and prepared to tug.

At the last second, he changed his mind and yanked out the red wire.

He could have wept for joy when the room went dark, the machine returning to normal with no destructive explosion.

Then he gathered what was left of his strength, picked Martha up, and carried her to the nearest window.

He watched as the last of the Judoon boarded their ships. The doors closed and the ships began to take off. “Oh, please,” he chanted. “Oh, please, oh please.” Then he smiled. He set Martha down carefully, reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled Martha’s phone out of his jacket pocket and hit redial.

“Rose,” he said when she’d answered, choking out his name through tears, “good news. It’s raining on the moon.”

Chapter Text

Martha sat quietly on the back of an ambulance, watching the chaos swirling around her in the surprisingly organized way that it always seemed to when the danger was over and it was time to pick up the pieces. While one paramedic checked her over, others hurried around checking others, handing out oxygen tanks, and finding the patients who were worst off and bundling them away to other hospitals to recover. The police were everywhere, scribbling in their notepads and nodding skeptically whenever someone mentioned the words “rhino” and “moon.”

Martha herself could still scarcely believe what had happened, and she’d been in the thick of it — she and the odd man she still only knew as the Doctor. Surely, she thought, surely he had a name in addition to the title. Everyone had a name.

Then again, she had also been certain of the idea that everyone who looked human was human, and she’d been proven wrong there twice over. She shuddered slightly at the thought of Mrs. Finnegan, and the paramedic tending her asked her if she was cold. She shook her head and held out her arm for the blood pressure cuff the paramedic held.

She had no idea what the Doctor had done to stop the MRI machine from blowing up, since she’d been unconscious the whole time. By the time she’d woken up, the Doctor had carried her to the lounge by the balcony doors she’d first taken him to when they’d found themselves on the moon. He’d laid her on one of the stiff couches and had been staring at her when she opened her eyes.

“Oh!” she’d exclaimed, startled by the intensity of his gaze.

“Oh, good!” he’d said, smiling brightly. “You’re awake! I was really hoping you’d wake up without needing help. You’re brilliant, you know. Couldn’t have done it without you.”

Martha sat up, dazed. “Done what?”

“Welcome back to Earth, Martha Jones! The police and whatnot should be arriving shortly, so I’d best be off.” He patted her shoulder. “Do us a favor and don’t mention me, all right?”

Martha nodded slowly. “Of course,” she said. “Not a word.”

“Brilliant!” He braced his hands on his knees and got to his feet, wincing a little as he did so. “Replenishing all those pints of blood is hard on the joints,” he muttered. Then he smiled again. “Right, as I said, best be off. Authorities and I aren’t always on the best of terms. Besides,” he added, his eyes gleaming warmly, “Rose will be waiting.”

“Right,” Martha said. “Rose.” She thought of how the Doctor had kissed her before, and even though he’d said it was nothing, she still wondered just how close he and this Rose person really were if he was off kissing other women.

Now, sitting on the back of an ambulance, she thought of how he’d raced off without looking back — not even once — and thought maybe he really hadn’t meant anything by the kiss. After all, hadn’t the Judoon leader said something about traces of facial contact being what caused them to run a deeper scan on her, buying the Doctor precious minutes with Mrs. Finnegan in the MRI room?

The paramedic checking her over interrupted her ruminations with a pat on the shoulder. “You’re good to go, luv,” he said.

“Thanks,” Martha replied, gingerly dropping to her feet. She made her way through the crowd, eyes peeled for her sister. She reached into her pocket, intending to get out her phone and call Tish. But the phone wasn’t there. Martha grinned. “Every intention of returning it, eh?”

“MARTHA!”

At the sound of her name, Martha caught sight of Tish pushing her way through the mass of people, a look of incredible relief on her face. Martha started forward, smiling, and then a flash of brown caught her eye.

It was the Doctor, walking towards a funny-looking blue box labeled “Police Box” that was standing nearby. He sketched a half-wave to her, but then, inexplicably, the door to the box flew open and a young blonde woman catapulted out. The Doctor broke into a run, and in spite of herself, Martha’s smile widened as the two of them collided in a joyous hug.

She felt she couldn’t be faulted if the smile slipped a bit when their joyous hug turned into an even more joyous kiss.

Tish reached her and enfolded her in a tight hug, babbling a mile a minute. By the time Martha had extricated herself from Tish’s grasp and looked again in the direction of the strange blue box, it was gone, along with all traces of the Doctor and his blonde companion.

----------------------------------

The TARDIS drifting placidly in the Vortex, the Doctor and Rose sat cuddled together on the captain’s bench as the Doctor recounted everything that had happened in the hospital after Rose left to retrieve the bio-damper.

“So I knew if I could just get her to assimilate my blood, chances were Martha could convince the Judoon to rescan her after they’d finished verifying that Martha was a human.”

Rose snuggled closer against the Doctor’s side, burrowing her face into the hollow of his throat and inhaling the comforting scent he always seemed to carry with him — part man, part something else, all Doctor. She lifted her face and kissed his jaw line. “I’d say something about risky plans and not wanting to lose you, but I know I’d be wasting my breath. Besides,” she added as their eyes met. “I wouldn’t love you like I do if you were any different.”

The Doctor leaned down and kissed her softly. “I thought of you, and that kept me going.” He squeezed her gently, pressed another kiss to her forehead and then rested his chin on the top of her head as she leaned back down against his shoulder. “I’ll always come back for you,” he murmured, and it sounded like a promise even though both of knew it couldn’t be, not really.

“You better,” Rose murmured against his neck. Then she smiled mischievously. “Especially when you’re going around kissing complete strangers when I’m not around.”

The Doctor pulled back, agape. “I told you, that was a genetic transfer! It meant nothing!”

Rose grinned, her tongue poking out of her teeth. She reached up and ruffled the Doctor’s hair. “Silly Doctor,” she said affectionately.

The Doctor’s cheeks pinked a little. “You humans and your sexual hang-ups. Makes it hard for a bloke to tell when you’re kidding.”

Rose chuckled and settled back against the Doctor’s side. “Speaking of Martha,” she said after a moment, “did you give her back her phone?”

“Of course I…” the Doctor began, only to trail off after Rose reached up and pulled the phone out of his jacket pocket. “Oh. I forgot. Didn’t have the sonic so I couldn’t put it back to rights.” He snatched it out of Rose’s hand and then leapt to his feet. “But! It’s okay, because I have my spare sonic right here!” He pressed a button on the console and a smaller version of his old sonic screwdriver popped out of some hidden compartment in the console. He caught it deftly and in moments was fiddling with Martha’s phone.

Rose peered over his shoulder. “It’s red!” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Eh?” the Doctor said, focused on his work.

“The sonic! It’s red.”

“Oh. Yes. This one is,” he said off-handedly. “It’s just my spare. Sort of obsolete, the red settings.” He made one last tweak of the phone and snapped the back of the casing back in place, then dropped the phone back into his jacket pocket. “But it does the job in a pinch. Until I get a new sonic built, that is.” He dropped the spare sonic back into the console and launched into a series of leaps and lunges that meant he was setting a new destination for the TARDIS.

“I told you I had every intention of giving her back the phone, and so I shall.” He grinned. “Back to London, Rose Tyler! But no rhinos this time.”

Rose returned his smile. “Show me how. And yeah, hold the rhinos.”

Together, Rose and the Doctor flew the TARDIS back to London the evening after the hospital went to the moon.

Chapter Text

The TARDIS landed with a jerk that sent the Doctor and Rose stumbling backwards, though both of them managed to keep their feet.

“Not bad,” the Doctor said proudly. He stepped back to the console and pulled the screen around, checking to see when and where they’d landed. “Not bad at all,” he added.

Rose came up behind the Doctor and peered over his shoulder. The screen was once again displaying its data in English, and Rose grinned happily. “Same day, yeah?”

The Doctor turned his head and kissed Rose’s temple affectionately. “Same day, in the evening. Excellent navigation, Lewis.”

Rose grinned. “Thank you, Sarge.” She peered at the location readout. “City centre somewhere, yeah?”

The Doctor nodded. “I was able to get a bio signature off some skin cells on the phone, so Miss Jones — well, Dr. Jones, I suppose — ought to be ‘round here somewhere.”

Rose patted the Doctor’s jacket pocket. “Still got the phone, yeah?”

“Of course I have,” he said brusquely. Rose merely smiled cheekily at him and then crossed the console room pick up his coat. He followed her and shrugged into the coat. “Shall we, then?”

“Lead on,” Rose said. The Doctor took her hand and they slipped out of the TARDIS and into a dark London alley. Around the corner, they could hear the sounds of voices raised in a loud argument. They peered around the brick building and saw a group of people standing outside a pub, talking and shouting over each other.

“That’s her!” The Doctor pointed to Martha and grinned. “Martha Jones, who helped save the hospital and half the population of the Earth.”

Rose returned the Doctor’s smile and leaned against the corner of the building, watching as the group of people Martha was with began to fracture, different people going off in different directions, still yelling as they went. “Good for her.”

The Doctor stood behind Rose, one hand braced on the wall above her head and the other resting lightly on her waist. She leaned back against him and he pressed a kiss into her hair.

A moment later, all the people Martha had been with — the Doctor thought they were probably her family, judging from their resemblance to each other — had dispersed, leaving Martha alone in front of the pub, shaking her head. She heaved a great sigh, her shoulders slumped. The moment she caught sight of the Doctor and Rose, they saw a big smile spread over her face.

The Doctor gave her a two-fingered salute and a smile, then wandered back into the alley to wait by the TARDIS. Rose gestured for Martha to come along before following the Doctor. By the time Martha jogged into the alley after them, they were leaning against opposite sides of the TARDIS. She gazed at them awkwardly for a moment, and then managed a grin.

“I went to the moon today,” she said to Rose conversationally. “Your friend was there.”

Rose nodded. “Thanks for helping ‘im out.” Her tongue poked out when she flashed a smile. “He’s a bit helpless without me.”

“I am not!” he said indignantly. “Well,” he said, correcting himself judiciously, “maybe a bit.” He shrugged. “I never run out of milk any more, and she’s much better at the domestic side of things.”

Rose shook her head and mouthed at Martha, totally helpless.

The Doctor reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out Martha’s phone. Holding it out, he stepped forward until he was within her reach. “Told you I’d return it,” he said smugly. Rose coughed. “Okay, Rose reminded me. But I’m returning it! Good as new!”

Martha turned the phone on, and sure enough, it appeared to be in complete working order.

“I programmed Rose’s number in,” the Doctor said. “If something happens you think I might be able to help with…”

“Something alien, you mean?”

“Well, yes,” the Doctor responded. “To put it bluntly. If there’s something you think I need to know about, call us. You’re clever, you’ll keep an eye out, yeah? We travel a lot. Sometimes we’re… very far away, and won’t hear about things ourselves.”

Mickey and Jackie had always called them when something came up before, but with them in the parallel world, the Doctor thought it was prudent to have someone else looking out for them. Martha had proven herself to be a capable and level-headed individual in the hospital, so as far as the Doctor was concerned she fit the bill quite nicely.

“You never told me who you are,” Martha said suddenly.

“I did,” the Doctor said, surprised. “I’m the Doctor.”

Martha shook her head. “No, I mean, like… what sort of species?” She grinned incredulously. “Not a question I ever thought I’d be asking, but then again I never expected to go to the moon, either.”

The Doctor glanced back at Rose, who nodded encouragingly. “I’m a Time Lord.”

“I see,” Martha said, sounding bemused. “So, not pompous at all then.”

Rose let out a sound that was perilously close to a snort, earning her a glare from the Doctor. She stepped up to his side and took his hand, squeezing it. “That shoe fits you more often than you like to admit.”

The Doctor bumped Rose’s hip with his. “Cheeky.”

Rose giggled, and Martha’s gaze focused on her. “And you,” she said to Rose. “Are you…?”

“Oh, I’m human,” Rose said quickly. “Human as they come.”

“But how’d you end up with him, then?”

Rose shrugged. “He blew up my job, I was at loose ends, he promised me the universe…” She squeezed his hand again and looked up into his eyes. “He followed through on that, so I thought I’d stick around.”

“And you’re just gonna keep travelin’ with him? Don’t you have people waitin’ for you?”

Rose looked back at Martha, her expression darker. “I used to have. They’re somewhere else now. Safe and happy,” she said, forcing a smile. “But not where I can see them.”

“I’m sorry,” Martha said, slightly embarrassed.

“S’alright,” Rose replied. She smiled again, this time more genuinely. “But listen,” she began earnestly. “We really mean it about keeping a lookout for us. We could use eyes and ears in London — we’re quite fond of the place, and we’d like to make sure it stays safe.”

Martha nodded, scrolling through to the R’s on her contact list. “Rose Tyler,” she read out. “And it won’t matter where you are?”

The Doctor shook his head. “Superphone, hers. Works anywhere, any when.”

“Any when?”

“Oh, didn’t I mention?” He gestured back at the TARDIS. “It also travels in time.”

“You’re mental.”

“I am not! It does!”

Martha looked at Rose, doubt written all over her face. Rose laughed. “Sorry, it’s true. The first place he took me was the day the Earth gets burnt to a crisp by the sun. Not the most romantic first date, but we did have chips afterward so it wasn’t a total disaster.”

“Maybe you’re both mental.”

The Doctor and Rose just grinned. “Well,” the Doctor said then. “We’d best be off. I’ve got to build a new sonic screwdriver and Rose wants to go pick up the seventh Harry Potter book.”

“Hold on, they only just announced the title for that!”

“Told you,” the Doctor said, “time travel. Wait till you read it,” he added. “I cried.”

Rose stepped forward and took Martha’s hands in hers. “Thank you,” she said seriously. “For helping him when I couldn’t, for getting him home in one piece.”

“You’re welcome,” Martha said, and Rose squeezed her hands lightly before letting go.

“Keep well, Martha Jones,” the Doctor said when Rose had returned to his side. “Have a fantastic life, and be sure to call if you need us.” He waved cheerfully and then he and Rose walked straight into the odd blue box, closing the door behind them.

Before Martha could wonder what the two of them were doing inside a box that small, a harsh grinding noise filled the air, and she was left staring at one of the many campaign posters pasted on the wall behind.

----------------------------------

After a quick stop in a London bookshop for a midnight Harry Potter party — the TARDIS had provided costumes for them which would have made the filmmakers proud — the Doctor set his ship to drift in the Vortex. He collected up the things he would need to rebuild his sonic screwdriver and headed for the library, where Rose was curled in his cushiest armchair, already well into book seven.

She looked up when he came in, accusation in her eyes. “Hedwig!” she said angrily, then shushed him when he opened his mouth, going straight back to her reading.

They sat in comfortable silence for some time, the Doctor tinkering away and Rose reading her book. Finally, his sonic finished and better than ever if he did say so himself, the Doctor looked over at Rose. He sighed. He should do it. He should ask her if she’d like to see Jack, he knew he should do it.

But she wasn’t going to like it, the news that there had been no reason for them not to go back and rescue Jack Harkness from a space station full of Dalek dust except for the Doctor’s cowardice. She would be angry with him for his lies of omission, and then when he explained about Jack’s inability to die she would probably feel guilty or sad, and he didn’t want that.

She was nearing the end of the book, and her eyes were damp but she was smiling, her gaze darting back and forth across the pages with a speed that belied her lack of A-levels. Surely, he thought, surely there would be a better time than now to deal with the Jack problem. He ignored the voice in the back of his mind that asked if it was anything like how there had always been a better time to bring up the topic of regeneration, or the Time War.

Saving the universe, he thought wryly, that was easy. But he was rubbish at the domestics. And so when Rose finally finished the book, and they’d exhausted all avenues of discussion of the fates of Harry and his friends while sitting cuddled together on the library couch, the Doctor took the easy way out.

“So,” he said, getting to his feet and holding a hand out to Rose, “where to next?”

Rose smiled and took his hand, allowing him to draw her to her feet. “Why don’t we let the TARDIS decide?”

The Doctor beamed. “My favorite destination. Do you remember when I hooked in your iPod and used your music collection for navigation coordinates?”

Rose laughed, and as they made their way out of the library the Doctor told himself he’d tell her soon. But now, after the Judoon and the moon and almost not making it back to her, he just needed to hear her laugh.