This was written late one night while at Starkreactor's house.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually own DW...
"Are you going to sit still this time or am I going to have to tie you down?" Martha asked. Medically speaking she wasn't nervous; on the contrary, she was confident she knew what to do even if she hadn't actually done it before. But looking at the dozen or so quills sticking out of the Doctor's thigh she didn't really think she was ready for another bout of getting the squirmy ten-year-old he became when he was injured and she had noticed to be quiet, sit still and, for lack of a better term, suffer quietly. Plus, though this was going to hurt, the empathy she felt for the Time Lord's inability to process human pain medicine was waning with every passing attempt at patching him up. He had the pain tolerance of a toddler. She took another close look at the leg. There was very little blood, but that could change when she started pulling them out. She wished she could sedate him.
The Doctor evaded her question, looking guiltily between the barbs and something unspecific on the infirmary's wall.
"Doctor?" Martha asked firmly. The Doctor got up and started pacing, barely favoring the leg and still ignoring her. Okay, Martha thought, wincing, maybe not the pain tolerance of a toddler, but there was something wrong with him; trust issues maybe?
"I am perfectly fine, Martha. They barely penetrate. I can do it myself later."
"Do what later? Porcupine quills begin to travel the minute they are introduced to tissue. They are already two centimeters deep. If you wait even another twenty-four hours there may not even be any way to extract them outside of surgery." Martha pointed out, thinking it was very much something that the Doctor would have known. So why be so evasive, particularly if the reason really was pain? He was intelligent enough to know that the longer he waited the worse it would be for him.
"They aren't porcupine quills." He said, falsely indignant. "For all you know they could work in a completely different way."
"What evolutionary advantage would that possibly serve? The quills are meant to be a defense mechanism, right? So what type of defense is it if they don't inflict the maximum amount of damage and/or pain?" Martha asked. She was still trying to use logic, look at him as an unruly, illogical patient rather than a highly intelligent alien being she could finally do something for. "Besides, just because this porcupine was also humanoid doesn't mean that the quills work in any other way. My opinion, my medical opinion" –she hated to use that phrase, but he was giving her little choice and she was not going to be reduced to begging him to sit still for the next half hour- "is that we pull them out now. If you can sit still for ten minutes –that's all I ask- it will be done, and the amount that I worry about you will be greatly reduced." He looked at her, but she couldn't read his face. She'd even pulled the 'I worry about you' card. If that hadn't at least guilted him into the ten minutes she needed, she didn't know what would.
"I said I could do it myself. And if you want to know the truth, it wasn't a porcupine, it was a porcupire. And I caught it at a bad time."
"I'll say." Martha nodded, looking at the quills which had, even though only minutes had passed since her last check of them, perceptibly worked themselves deeper into the Doctor's leg. He needed to stop moving, fast. "Wait, did you say porcupire?" Martha asked, wondering if this was just something he had thought of off the top of his head or if there was really such a thing; and he, as he said, had caught it at a bad time.
"Yes" The Doctor explained. "Porcupire. A 51st century evolutionary crossbreed between three independent humanoid life forms and a hedgehog. Actually, it isn't even related to the porcupine come to think of it. You humans and your names, Martha, you should really get your act together as far as a scientific naming system.
"We have one!" Martha exclaimed, and then realized she was allowing him to distract her. "But that doesn't matter now. Get back up on the bed and stay still. I'm asking for ten minutes of moderate pain and you'll be free to do whatever it is you do around here when I'm not around. For Pete's sake stop moving!" For a second he stopped, startled by her outburst. "You're working the quills in deeper. It will only hurt more when I take them out." She amended, slightly more professionally this time.
"Martha, please. If you were hurt would you let me help you?" Martha thought for a second.
"Of course." She said adamantly.
"Would you really?" he looked expectantly at her face.
"Yes, of course, why are you asking?"
"Think about it. If you did something embarrassing, like, say, tripped over a rock and landed on another alien and this alien just happened to be covered in sharp pointy things and some of those sharp pointy things got embedded in your leg…"
"You mean like what you just did?" Martha asked, folding her arms.
"Exactly," the Doctor grumbled, and then continued in a more thoughtful tone. "But you knew it was something you could handle on your own. Something that you weren't dying from and had the skills and the equipment to fix by yourself. If that were the case would you necessarily want someone else, someone who wasn't even well versed in your species; would you want them to fix you?"
"So you're afraid that I might mess up?" Martha asked. The comment had hurt slightly, but it was not like it wasn't well founded. No, she supposed, stuck in an alien hospital somewhere she would prefer to treat herself than an alien doctor that had never seen a human before. But at the same time, she was beginning to see the real reason the Doctor didn't want her help. It wasn't because of pain, wasn't because of trust and it wasn't because of a perception of incompetence. It was sort of because of, well, pride. She was a human, a thirtieth of his age, and she was about to show him up in a field that his name or title or whatever it was could not allow. He was afraid that she would think him incapable of something. A chink in his armor would show. That would just be unacceptable to someone who was supposed to be the good guy, forced to be the savior of the universe. Showing weakness, even in front of someone he knew well was, in his own perception, inappropriate.
She smiled slightly and handed him a pair of pliers. "Then do it. Next time you do get hurt though, even if it is something minor that seems stupid or embarrassing, could you let me know?" He looked at her, wary of sarcasm or frustration or any other reason she had given up the fight. He could find none.
For a second the Doctor smiled oddly, then took the pliers from her hand. "Yeah." He said, turning his attention to the quills. He looked at them for a second and then looked back up at Martha. "Er, how do you..?"
Martha sighed. At least he was brave enough to ask.
Thanks for reading, please review!