Archive of Our Own

The Doctor came out of his healing coma on the third day of them being left alone, looking alarmingly pale but seemingly capable of moving his limbs. The first word out of his mouth was, “Turlough?”

“Doctor,” he cried, hope and relief and something he couldn’t quite identify spilling out of his mouth. It was—too much, too transparent, too—if their captors had still been there, they would—they had been alone for three days. “They said you were brain dead. No activity.”

“Hm?” the Doctor said, frowning as he tested his bindings. Their captors had loosened them on their brain-dead subject. “No, just a coma. You know I can do that.”

“It’s just—unsettling.”

“Now, shall we see about getting out of here? What did I miss?”

*

The Doctor and Turlough had been in the process of slipping quietly away from a destruction by virus the Doctor assured him they could not prevent when the TARDIS scanners detected new lifeforms.

“What’re they doing?” Turlough had asked.

“They’re intergalactic body snatchers,” the Doctor said. “Anytime there’s a mass interspecies death event, they arrive to take as many bodies away as they can. To advance their grasp on medicine.” His fingers tapped at the TARDIS console. “They’re also known for killing anyone who tries to stop them.”

“So, we should leave?”

“The virus particles aren’t going to dissipate by themselves,” the Doctor said. “They’ve just condemned themselves and every doctor they train to a slow and painful death.”

*

“They said you were brain dead,” Turlough said, trying to keep his voice steady. It didn’t help that it was cold in the lab, and he had always gotten cold easily. “Then they said they would return for more tests.”

“And?”

“They didn’t.”

“They never came back?”

He shook his head.

“They must have exposed themselves to the virus.” The Doctor wriggled his hand out of the cuff with an unsettling pop. His hand sat oddly, thumb at the wrong angle. “I don’t think they will come back. I wonder if we’re off the records?”

*

After triple-checking both of them were definitely inoculated to the virus, the Doctor set the TARDIS down in their laboratories. “A little later than planned,” he said with a frown. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. As long as they listen to reason they’ll have enough time to figure out a cure.”

“What if they don’t listen to reason?” Turlough asked.

“Then they will all die.”

*

The Doctor freed himself from the rest of his restraints with more grace than dislocating a thumb, then began to poke about for something to free Turlough. “I wonder,” he said, poking at a computer. “Aha!”

Turlough’s restraints snapped open.

“We are in the system,” the Doctor said. “The last thing logged was the recommendation of half-rations for the specimens…” He frowned. “There’s nothing on it actually arriving. It’s as if all transmission just—ceased.”

*

“It’s asymptomatic, you see,” the Doctor was saying earnestly. “Eight days after initial exposure, the host’s organs begin to dissolve. It’s over in less than four hours. Barely more than three, really.”

“And you were saying it can be contracted off corpses?” the scaled woman at the front desk said, typing onto her computer. “Specifically, the corpses of XE-74?”

“We were there for the outbreak,” the Doctor explained. “We came straight here when you heard—”

“There were no records of any humans on XE-74.”

The Doctor blinked. “Dr. Farrah, neither of us are human.”

“You’re not?” She straightened, smiled. “Excuse me. I must alert the others.”

“Thank you,” the Doctor said with obvious relief. “I appreciate it. Now, we really must be going—”

A taller figure stepped in front of him. “I don’t think so,” it said. Its eyes were bigger than Turlough’s fist, either side of its head. Prey animal. What kind of prey animal was built like that? “Your species must first be registered in our logs.”

“I really don’t think that’s necessary—”

“If you do not cooperate,” it said, “force will be applied. Please, come with me.”

*

Turlough pushed himself gingerly up on his table, weak and shivering. “Doctor,” he said.

“There’s no transmissions at all since only a few hours after I went into a coma,” the Doctor continued. “That’s odd. I wonder if the quarantined patients are on their own frequency, and our team was the only outside batch.”

“Doctor,” Turlough said again, and mercifully received a helping hand, warm against his cold flesh. The Doctor tucked him into his side, where Turlough was able to use him as, functionally, a radiator.

“No,” the Doctor said, scrolling through messages sent and received. “That’s not it. They all just stopped. What were you saying?”

“How many days has it been,” he said, “since the bodies were brought to the facility?”

The Doctor stilled. “Oh.”

*

“Please step into this cubicle,” their guard said. “It will take x-ray scans, blood samples, hair samples, and tissue samples. It will attempt to identify your species. If this fails, please log your species into our computer. Failure to cooperate will result in use of force.”

“Yes, yes,” the Doctor said, stepping forwards. “We heard you the first time. I’ll go first, shall I?”

“There are multiple cubicles. You may both go at the same time.”

“Very well. Brave heart, Turlough.”

And then Turlough was pushed, abruptly, into the cubicle in front of him.

*

“What if we’re the only ones left?” Turlough said, and hated himself for saying it. He hated himself more for the strange, crawling feeling it brought over him; these people had abducted them, tortured them, and, worse, made him believe his Doctor was dead. “What if all those people in their quarantine cubicles—”

“We’ll just have to check,” the Doctor said, firmly. “Let me get this door open.”

*

It only hurt a little, which Turlough was grateful for, but his heart was in his throat as the screen read TRION. There was some record of what he was, which meant that the Doctor—

No need to think about that now

He stepped out of the cubicle, and there was the Doctor, smiling. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? We’ll be on our way, now, I should think.”

“No,” their guard said. “You will not. You are needed in Middle Office C4B.”

*

The door opened with an alarm, much to the Doctor’s embarrassment. He pushed Turlough back against the wall, shielding him with his body, chest pressed to chest; Turlough could feel him breathing a little harsher than Turlough’s own, but no one came. The Doctor released him, stepping forwards to peer out into the gloom of the corridor. Turlough chased the warmth, grasping the Doctor’s arm, only a little embarrassed about the motion even as the Doctor shot him a confused look.

“I thought you were dead,” he said.

“Come along, then,” the Doctor returned, and did not pry himself free of Turlough’s grip. They ventured down the corridor together, the Doctor turning on each light after Turlough stumbled, apparently realising that Turlough could not see in the dark.

He supposed he never had told the Doctor what his species was capable of.

All the desks and workspaces were empty. The facility lay before them, dull and quiet and empty, and no one came to stop the alarms before Turlough was able to identify an off switch.

“Doctor,” he said.

“Hm?”

“The alarm. We can turn it off here.”

“No one’s coming, are they?” the Doctor said. “Hopefully everyone is just too afraid to leave their quarantine chambers.”

“My ears, Doctor.”

“Ah.” He had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. “Shall we?”

“Please.”

*

“What, exactly, are we needed for?” the Doctor was saying. He seemed fairly irritated, which was good, because Turlough had been irritated for a while. “We informed you of the risk—”

“No one of your species entered this planet via proper modes of transport,” Dr. Farrah said. She had an eerie smile on her face. “That means you arrived here illegally.”

“We were in a bit of a rush to warn you about virus contamination.”

“Everyone on this planet is to be quarantined until the length of the disease has passed,” she said easily. “You cannot be permitted to leave regardless.”

“That’s all very nice, but we have our own—” The Doctor broke off, frowned. “Do you not intend to try and discover who has been exposed to it?”

“I expect we’ll find out when they drop dead in six and a half days.”

“Your entire institution is for healing! Do you not care?” The Doctor slammed his hand on her desk, but she didn’t flinch. Not visibly, anyway. “You’re cutting apart these bodies to assist medicine. You can’t just leave your own people to die.”

“Can’t I, Time Lord?” she asked, her strange scaled mouth pulling lips back to bare teeth.  “This research institution imports and acquires as many corpses from as many different species as possible, and teaches as many different species as possible how to save them. If people die here, we have more bodies for our banks. We always have more applicants. It is harder to get bodies.”

Turlough’s arms were abruptly jerked behind his back by the same tall guard that had been following them.

“And,” Dr. Farrah continued, “as undocumented aliens, we can also experiment on you. We have no bodies for either of your species. Perhaps it will hurt you a little, but the ability to examine live bodies will save so, so many.”

Her assistant, a small creature with a wrinkled face, added in a small voice, “Thank you for your sacrifice.”

*

Fifteen minutes of seemingly aimless wandering later, they came across a large, sealed door with a computer screen beside it, which lured the Doctor in surer than light lured in moths. It took a moment of fiddling for the Doctor to declare this was the door to the quarantine zone, and another before they began to open with a hiss.

“Do you really think anyone is alive?” Turlough asked.

The Doctor shrugged and shook his head at the same time, Turlough’s eyes tracking the motions of his hair as it brushed his shoulders. “I can’t say for certain. But if there’s a chance—”

“You can’t just leave them there,” Turlough filled in, then sighed. “You could, you know.”

“I won’t.”

“I know,” Turlough said, then folded his fingers through the Doctor’s, and squeezed. “Shall we?”

*

They were hauled to a laboratory and stripped in an almost perfunctory manner. Turlough fought like a beast when they reached his shirt, scratched at them and bit until someone hit him over the head and he fell, a dull ringing sound echoing through his skull. He was relieved of his shirt, but the Doctor had sensed some reluctance on Turlough’s behalf and looked away. Turlough had loved him for that. He had not refrained from looking at the Doctor, at the smooth lines of his pale skin, smattered with freckles, at the way his nipples pebbled with the cold, at the curve of his muscles in his arms and thighs. All those hours playing cricket, he assumed. It had made the Doctor even more beautiful.

There were small scars, of course, littering that skin; the Doctor did not live a life free from agony. Perhaps if they ever made it out—when, he corrected himself, when they made it out—he would try and persuade the Doctor to pose nude for him for a portrait. Then again, he wasn’t certain the Doctor was capable of staying still.

They already had their x-rays and their blood samples and the like, so when they strapped him to the table, there was very little left that Turlough could think of to happen. When they pulled out the scalpels, he thrashed.

“Relax,” one of them said, brushing down his arm. “We will catalogue first.”

And catalogue they did. They touched every area of their bodies that they could conceive of, and Turlough was too distracted with gloved hands on his skin to pay attention to how the Doctor was faring, with his endless stream of protests. If he struggled too much, his head rang again, unhealed from the blow he’d taken. He heard someone note it down.

A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped. A hand touched his chest, pushing him down. “Relax,” someone said again.

The person who had touched his shoulder said, “Scarring to the shoulder. Some kind of burn tissue, seemingly deliberately inflicted.”

Turlough closed his eyes and tried to wish he didn’t exist. He wanted to look for the Doctor. He couldn’t bear to see his face. He felt sick.

*

No cubicles answered any attempts at calling, and Turlough rather suspected, as the Doctor attempted to hack the doors open from the computer, that the Doctor had forgotten their respective nudities. He had only been out of his coma a few hours, and before that—

Turlough closed his eyes.

“Aha!” the Doctor cried. “Cubicle one, opening.”

It took only a little longer to track down cubicle one. The cubicles were arranged seemingly nonsensically, but seven cubicles in, the Doctor began rambling about some pattern and set off with more purpose, dragging Turlough along with him. From there they could see the cubicle with the open door. No one had left.

“Hello?” the Doctor called. “Is anyone there?”

They approached the cubicle.

*

On the second day, or what Turlough had assumed was the second day, they secured them better. Then they brought out the scalpels properly. Skin was peeled back to find the organs the x-rays had spotted, and then the organs were tested, exposed to different substances. The Doctor had been making these strange breathy noises, like someone determined to be too good to scream but still an animal in pain, and Turlough, who had no such ideas, had just screamed. In between these explorations their captors would stop and patch them up remarkably well, occasionally warned away from certain substances by the Doctor. Then they would dim the lights and leave them alone.

It was these moments Turlough remembered the most, both loved and hated them. He could see the shape of the Doctor through the little light that remained, and the Doctor was always looking at him. Never ogling, as Turlough would’ve hoped, but looking at him in that calm and steady way, and Turlough’s heartbeat would slow accordingly.

“Are you alright?” the Doctor would ask, and for a little while Turlough would be the centre of his universe.

And Turlough would swallow, bite back his initial, sharper response, and say, “As good as I can be, considering the circumstances.”

And then he would strain to pick up the curved edges of the Doctor’s smile.

“I’m glad of that,” the Doctor would say, or something along those lines. It was never quite the same. “I am sorry, Turlough. I brought you here.”

“You only wanted to save lives,” Turlough always said, except for the day before they cut through the Doctor’s complicated lung system to see how it worked and dropped him into a coma, when he said, “Just for once, I wish you’d think about me.”

That one time, the Doctor had said, “I do,” but it had sounded like a lie.

Every other time, he had said, “You’re trembling,” and Turlough had said, “It’s cold.”

*

The person in the cubicle was dead, of course. So was every other person in every other cubicle. After they’d opened and checked twenty, one by one, the Doctor had found a way to check life signs.

There were none.

Turlough had refrained from complaining only because the acute devasted look on the Doctor’s face had turned his stomach.

“Doctor,” he’d said, and touched his elbow to ensure his attention. “We should find our clothes.”

The Doctor looked down at himself like he’d just noticed. “I suppose we should,” he murmured. He moved like he’d been shellshocked, the way those boys at Brendon would describe it after dark, trying to scare the new members of the CCF. He looked detached from himself. Turlough remembered those dull days after his exile had been decided, moved from cell to cell. He remembered flashes from before then, from when his mother had been murdered, but he remembered very little; grey smears, a terrible part in a terrible life. In his mind his childhood was bright and halcyon, and everything after the first wall had broken flat and dreary.

Everything except the Doctor, his golden creature, who moved now like a broken thing.

*

On the third day, they were done with Turlough far sooner than they were done with the Doctor. They had learnt that the Doctor had a hardier constitution than Turlough did, so often Turlough would come around from the horrible haze of pain bandaged and disinfected and the Doctor was still having those grunts torn from him, those agonised gasps, as they worked their way through understanding the contents of his chest cavity. On day three they were rougher than most, and sparks and swirls of golden light twisted through the air. The Doctor, Turlough realised, with morbid fascination and horror, was crying silently.

And then they cut upwards, through the membrane of the Doctor’s overly complicated lungs.

Turlough had thought his Doctor was dead, when he went still and silent. The golden light hung around him. Their captors worked to repair him, clumsy though they were, and he did not burn up. He just lay there, still.

A scan was taken.

“There are no brainwaves,” someone said. “The shock of it must have killed all brain activity. It’s—someone write that down, we need to understand how that works. Leave him to heal for tonight. We can examine his spinal cord tomorrow.”

*

Now dressed, the Doctor used the computer to seal the facility and label it as under quarantine. Their corpses will kill you, he wrote. This disease does not die.

Turlough pulled his blazer tighter around himself and shivered. “Are we ready to go?” he asked.

The Doctor looked up. That defeat hadn’t left his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”

He startled when Turlough took his hand again, looked at him like he was strange. When he didn’t let go, the Doctor guided him back to the TARDIS.

The TARDIS hasn’t changed, but it felt alien to him all over again. The console room was white and sparse and cold.

*

For three days Turlough, alone and afraid and hungry and cold and thirsty and tired, tried to wake the Doctor. For three days he failed. He slept some, and then he wept. He wept as he hadn’t wept in years.

*

“Doctor,” Turlough said, stopping the Doctor short. “I don’t—I don’t want to be—” Alone, he couldn’t say, but the Doctor understood it regardless. Telepathic, he remembered.

“It’s alright,” the Doctor said, and held out a hand. “Come with me instead.”

Turlough took his hand, and they went.