Things were a mess, but not excessively so. Everything even remotely threatening seemed to have been smashed, and the fires were mostly contained. All in all, it had been a decidedly average adventure once all the explosions, running and shouting were taken into account. A job well done. All he had to do now was find Jamie and get out before the building caved in or the Cybermen got control of things again. If he was lucky, the Cybermen would get control and then the building would fall in on them, but the Doctor thought he had probably exhausted his luck for the day and was aiming instead for a narrow escape at a full run and perhaps a sandwich later.
Around a large support beam, he caught a brief glimpse of red tartan and triumphantly concluded that he'd found Jamie. Ducking under a few exhaust hoses and exposed wires, the Doctor excitedly stumbled over some broken consoles and tried to make his way to his friend. He was preparing to tell Jamie of how spectacular the explosion had been from his vantage point - he'd have to do it while applying some silly bandage or being admonished for blowing the place up so sloppily - and then they'd stumble away and onto the next ridiculous thing the Time Lords cooked up for them. They'd do the bit of running and sandwich eating and things would be just fine.
Jamie was not fine. As he stood before the Doctor, rooted to the wall, there was no trick of the light, nor were there bits of debris obscuring the Doctor's vision; the Cybermen had tried to convert Jamie.
"Oh, no. Oh no, ohno. Jamie?" The Doctor kicked some debris aside, shuffled closer, and tentatively reached out to touch a bit of what was still exposed of Jamie's skin. Cold. Or at least not warm enough.
Clearly an interrupted work-in-progress, Jamie was bloody and bruising with a frightening silver and purple tinge in his skin. Metal covered the left side his face, parts of his neck, and his left arm. A typical cyber-panel had been messily installed on his chest, and both legs showed no flesh at all at least up to the knee, where the Doctor could only assume the metal continued under Jamie's torn and stained kilt.
The Doctor found it hard to think of what to do next as he tried to sort out a proper reaction Jamie's condition. He was terrified more than he was angry, and more consumed with guilt than terror. There was something in the back of his mind poking at him and telling him how fascinating this all was, and it made him a little ill.
"Jamie," he said again, gently trying to shake a response out. "Can you hear me? Oh, what have they done to you…?"
Jamie didn't answer, but the Doctor saw him blink.
"Jamie! Can you move? Anything, a finger or-" He glanced down for a moment to see Jamie's feet entirely cased in metal and finished sheepishly, "Well, a finger."
A muscle in Jamie's neck twitched as he apparently tried to move his head. He squinted and grimaced a bit upon realizing that something was keeping his head entirely locked in its current position.
The Doctor exhaled, relieved. "Oh, thank goodness. Just hold on, I'm going to help you." He fussed with the cords and switches around Jamie, switching off the few things that were still working.
"Help," Jamie mumbled. His voice had taken on an odd tone, and the Doctor was unsure if the word was a request or clarification. Not that it mattered terribly.
"Yes! It's going to be okay. I… we'll find a way to fix you," the Doctor said determinedly.
The tangled tubes, cords and wires sprouting from Jamie's veins attached him to partially destroyed machinery. For a moment, until he realized the weight of them would pull his arms out of their sockets, the Doctor considered trying to haul the broken boxes of circuits out of the building right along with Jamie himself. He had to hope that once Jamie was free of the wall, that he'd be able to run or at least function.
Suddenly, a bit of the ceiling crashed a few feet away into a panel of circuitry, spewing a puff of dust and sparks. The Doctor jumped, accidentally tugging a small bundle of wires and tubes from the wall. He panicked for a moment, terrified that he'd done some horrible damage, but Jamie didn't so much as flinch.
"Jamie's in shock," the Doctor reassured himself as he watched a thick fluid spill from the snapped tubes. "It's only shock."
Somewhere across the warehouse, an automated message started up and immediately became stuck in a grating loop. "CYBER COMMAND WILL-CYBER COMMAND WILL-!"
"Jamie, I hate to ask this, but..." The Doctor ran his hands along the colored lengths of the wires rooted in Jamie's wrists, trying to get his eyes to see the colored strings as something other than a blur while the building continued to crumble around him. He wrung his hands helplessly for a moment before looking bank at Jamie's blank stare. "I don't suppose they've given you any knowledge about all of this…?"
Actually, the Doctor had already decided to do something stupid and potentially fatal and it didn't matter much if Jamie responded with a monotone recitation of an entire Cyberman instruction manual from 'Assimilation Tab A' to 'Homicidal Slot Z' or something accusing and clueless in a crippling Scottish accent. He reasoned that his track record put favor mostly on his side, and Jamie would at least make it to the TARDIS before panic needed to set in.
"I'll just find-"
"CYBER COMMAND WILL-CYBER COMMAND WILL-!"
"Oh, shut up!"
As the Doctor fished through his pockets for a book of matches, a lighter, or perhaps a curling iron, Jamie let out a groan that sounded like it was intended to be the Doctor's name.
"Yes, Jamie, it's me," the Doctor answered quickly. He snatched a handful of the wiring keeping Jamie rooted to the spot, squeezed his eyes shut and pulled. The heat and sparks that flew out startled him briefly, but they faded quickly and were not a problem. The real trouble was the liquid. Whatever it was - blood, oil, some sort of anti-rejection fluid - he wasn't sure Jamie should have it leaking out of him just yet, and the Doctor went back to searching frantically for a lighter or matches to heat and seal the tubes. He found only some extra strength super glue.
With a silent justification to himself that it was only until they returned to the TARDIS, the Doctor applied glue to the opening of the tube and squeezed it closed. It wouldn't be a perfect seal, but it didn't need to be.
He worked quickly, trying to seal as many leaking tubes as possible as he tore them from the machines they were strung to. The glue stuck badly to wet surfaces, and more of it ended up on the Doctor or dripped onto Jamie's skin and kilt than plugging leaks. The Doctor had to resort to shoving tiny bits of paper, shreds of Jamie's kilt, and in one case a piece of candy into the leaks to hold the rush of fluids back even for a minute. With each attachment gone, an un-traumatized Jamie would have been cheering the Doctor on, encouraging him and eager to run, but there was nothing but the sound of the building falling apart and the constant loop about Cyber Command to urge the Doctor to continue.
Jamie's left arm, covered entirely in metal, stayed in the position the Doctor had found it in when he had disconnected it from its surroundings. Jamie's other arm, however, flesh but for a few wires, fell limp to his side when the Doctor freed it. With nothing more to sever, someone he loved dearly being held together like a model plane with metal, bits of paper, plastic, and superglue, the Doctor had to face something a bit more frightening than Jamie's appearance. Two of the Doctor's fingers were frozen in place with a mixture of adhesive and blood, he and Jamie were alone and handicapped, surely, and the Doctor was left to confront whether it was still Jamie in the metal casing at all.
"Jamie, can you move?" he asked tentatively.
The tips of the metal fingers twitched in response, movement rippled to the wrist, the elbow and the shoulder, where metal was connected with muscle-mimicking wire to torn, bruising, and bleeding flesh. The arm made soft clicking and whirring sounds, noticeable over the broken announcement only because they shouldn't have been there.
"CYBER COMMAND WILL-CYBER COMMAND WILL-!"
"Not finished," Jamie said.
"No," the Doctor replied, trying to crack a triumphant smile. "They didn't quite make it. But you'll be alright. I'm going to help. I'm going to fix you." What he was going to fix, or how he was going to do it he didn't yet know, but he thought to try to make use of a few of the portable devices that lay on the table nearby for a start. He didn't know what they did, but they were small, complex, mechanical, and might have been used to get Jamie into his current state. If the Doctor was clever enough, he thought there was a chance he could reverse engineer them to undo everything as well.
"You will fix this?" There was no emphasis on any of Jamie's words. No way to tell if he was bitter, or joking, or doubtful, or defeated, or hopeless, or even Jamie. His accent sounded mostly intact, but it now had an added undercurrent of soft metallic reverberation. It might have been dangerous to deny that Jamie could have been converted enough to be hostile, but the Doctor was going to go on denying it anyway.
"Yes," the Doctor answered, tucking everything that looked useful and wasn't bolted to the wall away into a pocket or under his arm. "Yes, of course I will. But I can't here - you've got to move, Jamie, you've got to come with me. We've stayed too long already."
Jamie took a step down and away from the wall and tried in vain to look at himself. The Doctor grabbed his hand - the still-flesh one, the one that didn't scare him - and tugged.
"Jamie, we don't have time to look. I know it seems bad at the moment. We'll get you fixed, I promise, but this building isn't stable and we're -"
"Fixed."
"Yes. Please, Jamie. I'm not leaving you here, and I can't drag you. You're far too heavy, even without..." He trailed off and finished the sentence with a few flaps of his hand rather than make any uncomfortable mentions of metal. Jamie appeared to be either not listening or not caring. The Doctor gave one last desperate pull on Jamie's arm.
"Jamie, come on!"
As though someone flipped a switch, Jamie suddenly responded to the Doctor's pleading, gripped his hand, and began walking confidently in the direction the Doctor had wanted them to run. When the Doctor picked up speed, silently begging Jamie to go faster, Jamie matched the pace easily. Jamie's stride wasn't quite his usual, even if one ignored the clangs as his feet hit the floor and the intermittent snapping sounds of snagging wires. Jamie could easily outrun the Doctor now, and it no longer had anything to do with his youth or enthusiasm. The speed at which they were traveling was likely little more than a brisk walk for Jamie's enhanced legs.
"I can't drag you," the Doctor said, managing a laugh, "but I don't suppose you feel like carrying me?". There was no response from Jamie, and the Doctor's voice was left to blend into the relentless repeat of Cyber Command's broken message.
"CYBER COMMAND WILL-CYBER COMMAND WILL-!"
More and more of the building crumbled around them as fires and electrical failures spread quickly. Jamie was missing half of his peripheral vision and some of his bounce and he avoided obstacles badly, though he crashed right through and destroyed most of them. When Jamie crashed into a support beam, a large piece of the ceiling's metal tiling snapped loose above them. The Doctor instinctively tried to pull Jamie away, but his metal legs were not as easily re-routed as flesh and bone. The metal crashed into Jamie's left side, tore him from the Doctor's grip and pinned him to the floor.
"Jamie!"
The Doctor dropped to his knees, scattering bits of machinery as he tried to pull the fallen piece of the ceiling away. It was far too heavy to move, and he couldn't even pretend he was having any effect on it. His hands flew through his coat, desperately feeling for something useful. A pry bar, a pulley, a crane, a forklift, a piece of string, anything. He found breath mints and the small machines he'd stolen from the table near where he'd found Jamie and none of them could have ever felt more useless.
"Jamie! Can you hear me? Can you move?"
For several agonizing seconds, the Doctor listened only to the words of Cyber Command and nothing at all from Jamie.
"CYBER COMMAND WILL-CYBER COMMAND WILL-!CYBER COMMAND WILL-! CYBER COMMAND WILL-!"
Suddenly, he could once again hear the soft mechanical sounds of the sort that shouldn't be happening at all. Muscles on Jamie's shoulders twitched violently, and he bled from some of the connections of wires and machinery there. The sounds of Jamie's arm warped into a skipping whine as the arm strained against the weight. Slowly at first, and then quite quickly, the fallen ceiling tile rose and Jamie pulled himself out from underneath, the only apparent damage a few scratches to the shine of his metal leg and the small trickle of blood now running down his back.
The Doctor was frozen in horror and fascination for a moment, staring blankly even with their fate still so uncertain.
"You will still help?" Jamie asked.
"Of course!" the Doctor cried, snapping back into panic. "But we need to get out of here, come on!" He scrambled to his feet one more and reached back to take Jamie's hand, which wasn't on offer. Grabbing it anyway, the Doctor pulled, finally inspiring Jamie to run once again.
X
Doors closed, buttons and levers hastily fussed with, and the TARDIS on her way to somewhere completely unimportant, the Doctor turned to Jamie and wondered which painfully stupid question to ask first.
"How do you feel?" was the best one, probably. Better than "Are you alright?", anyway.
"Feel?"
"Are you in pain? Can you…" The Doctor took in the full extent of the metal additions for the first time as Jamie stood before him. Staring without even the tiniest spark of engagement with his surroundings, Jamie hardly blinked. Wires and tubes sprouted from the back of Jamie's neck, the base of his skull, and, terrifyingly, what appeared to be his spine. Fortunately, there weren't too many, certainly not enough that it would be difficult to find someone who could remove them. There were probably not even enough for some remote cybercontroller to steer Jamie around like an awful cyborg puppet. Unfortunately, this didn't make them any less disturbing.
"Can I what?" Jamie asked.
"See!" the Doctor blurted. "Yes. Can you, uh, can you see?" It was a silly question, but also the only one he was sure he'd get a nice positive answer for. He tried to make himself look relaxed. Casual. Normal. Busy. He produced a lighter easily now that the situation wasn't so dire and bent down to address some of the dripping tubes at Jamie's elbow.
"Of course I can see," Jamie replied, robotically bending an elbow to put the tubing at a better height for the Doctor to work with. Shreds of his torn shirt swaying in front of the Doctor's vision were covered in blood and dirt. "Are you going to fix me?"
"Yes! But I can't do it all by myself, I don't have the… well, the anything, really, to fix this. And…" He extinguished the flame.
"And what?"
The Doctor straightened, repocketed the lighter, and flailed his hands a bit over the lapels of his coat. "Oh, Jamie, this will take time! I couldn't possibly undo all of this in a single evening, even a week if I had it, and what with the Time Lords and-"
"Undo it?"
"Yes?"
"You said you were going to help. You said that you would fix me."
Suddenly, the Doctor was wary of being too close to Jamie and took a small step backwards. Brilliantly logical, even when performing wanton experimental damage to the timeline, the Cybermen had of course gone for Jamie's mind before touching any of his flesh.
"Jamie…do you know who I am? Do you know who you are?" He had himself poised to back up and run, ready to be cautious of Jamie, of all things in the universe. The notion would have been ridiculous even an hour ago.
"You're the Doctor. You said that you would fix me."
"And?" the Doctor prompted nervously.
"You're the Doctor," Jamie repeated. "You said that you would fix me."
"What about you?"
"You said that you would fix me."
Fear quickly melted into pain and worry. "Oh, Jamie."
It would have been unwise to assert that Jamie that was not a Cyberman at this point, and equally unwise to show too much fear, as either would likely result in intense pain both physical and emotional. With no other option open to him, the Doctor assumed the role of scientist. Straightening his posture, attempting to convey authority, and trying to turn off the urgeto comfort Jamie, the Doctor pulled a few small test tubes from his pockets.
"I'm going to take a few samples, so keep still will you? We'll never fix you if I don't know what you need."
Jamie's eyelids twitched. He would have nodded if his neck was mobile.
The liquid that had been leaking from Jamie's wiring was concerning, and the Doctor thought it best to discover what sort of substance it was, especially if it was what was keeping Jamie in this monotonous, repetitive loop. Jamie let the Doctor take the samples with no fuss and even seemed to have forgotten that he and the Doctor differed on the definition of the word 'fix'.
"You can help, you know," the Doctor offered. He held up the vial containing the fluid from Jamie's joints. "You can tell me what this is, if you know."
Jamie said nothing.
"It would save us some time," the Doctor said, wiggling the vial in his fingers as though it were a tasty snack that Cybermen liked.
Jamie remained silent, and the Doctor's hope that Jamie would recognize him on his own faded.
"Will you be all right here for a minute?" asked the Doctor when he'd finished. There was still no response. Concerned and worried he'd been stuck in a vocal loop of his own, the Doctor gathered all his samples and rushed them to the next room to set them aside for testing later. At the moment, addressing Jamie's physical problems to ensure that he would survive the duration of the testing was far more important than the testing itself.
When the Doctor returned to the console room he found Jamie staring blankly at the metal attachments to his body. He couldn't move his head to see the additions to his chest or shoulders, but he was feeling them slowly with his intact hand.
"Jamie?" The Doctor thought to follow this up with, "Can I get you anything?" or "Do you need help?" or "Is something wrong?" but each question felt frivolous, and Jamie didn't seem to have enough control of his emotions to have answers. "Will you let me help you?"
Jamie turned - an inelegant and clumsy motion - and stared at the Doctor, almost inquisitively. "Doctor."
"Yes," the Doctor said. "And I'm here to help."
"Help."
"If you'll let me."
"Wrong."
"Yes, well," the Doctor said, clapping and rubbing his hands together over the console in a mockery of enthusiasm and routine. "We'll just be on our way to find some people who can fix you, then."
"Doctor," Jamie whispered. "I'm… wrong."
"Jamie?"
"This … isn-is not right."
Jamie's voice was hovering between his familiar tones and a slight, buzzing, robotic tone that seemed to be accompanied by the inability to contract words. Abandoning the controls, the Doctor stepped closer to Jamie, unable to conceal the sound of hope in his voice. "I can help, Jamie, just tell me what you need."
"I d-don't need anything. I should hurt."
"And you don't?"
"No. Am I dead?"
"No, absolutely not," the Doctor answered. "We're on our way to get help, and you'll do just fine."
"Help," echoed Jamie. His voice buzzed with metal. "You will help me?"
"Shhhh. Don't do that, we'll just loop for hours. Talk about something else," the Doctor urged. "Would you like a new shirt? Or a… bath maybe? I don't know, would you like a cup of tea?"
"I am… broken."
"Broken?"
"I do not make sense."
The Doctor braced for another long loop about being fixed and how he would be the one doing it. Exasperated, he pulled himself away from Jamie and returned to the console to do some repetition of his own. "Jamie, I promise, I'll do what I can to-"
"Bleeding."
"Oh!" The Doctor turned quickly and saw Jamie's eyes flickering between blank staring and desperate need like an old lightbulb. "Oh, I… Will you let me help you? Please?"
Jamie raised his hands, looking at one flesh and one metal, and then slowly dropped them again to look at the Doctor. "Bleeding," he repeated.
The Doctor took this as an acknowledgment of need, finally, and he was determined not to waste the opportunity. "Wait here," he said, holding up his hands. "I'll be right back."
He returned a few minutes later kicking a small stool in front of him, and carrying a sponge, some water in shallow bowl, several towels and a new shirt to replace the one the Cybermen had torn to shreds. It only took looking at Jamie again, however, to realize that with the large chest-unit, the shirt was not going to fit.
"Here, sit down." The Doctor kicked the stool toward Jamie. It slid across the console room floor to make a soft clang when it collided with Jamie's unresponsive legs.
"Sorry," the Doctor said sheepishly.
Jamie nudged the stool with his foot a few times and seemed to be considering how he would use it. The Doctor watched him, curious, until he realized that without the ability to move his head and one of his eyes seeing out of a tiny window in the plating over his face (if it was seeing at all), Jamie was having trouble processing where the stool was and how to sit on it. It occurred to the Doctor then that he'd rarely, if ever, seen a Cyberman sit.
"Here, Jamie, let me." The Doctor approached him, hands out, ready to guide Jamie's shoulders, but Jamie's metal arm automatically smacked his hands away. After a few tense seconds, Jamie managed to get himself on the stool while the Doctor sadly regarded his stinging wrists.
"Bleeding," Jamie said again, apparently stuck on the word.
"Right, let's take care of that then," the Doctor said. He paused and took stock of the situation with a few fingers perched on his lips. "We'll need to get rid of this old shirt, all right?"
"Yes," Jamie answered.
There wasn't much left of the shirt, and what was there was stained with blood, oil and glue. The Doctor touched it gingerly, prepared to be swatted away at any moment. When Jamie did nothing but blink, the Doctor continued removing the shredded fabric. He pulled gently at first, seeing that the shirt had sunk into wet wounds and partially dried there, but then remembered that Jamie had reported that he felt nothing at all. When the Doctor tugged a particularly stubborn bit of the shirt free of a blood-caked wound, Jamie only rocked slightly in response to the force.
The Doctor wrung the wet sponge out over the bowl and set to work on cleaning the products of Jamie's attempted conversion. There were no parts of Jamie not covered in something awful. Where he wasn't encased in metal, he was peppered with cuts, dirt, oil, blood, bruises and wiring. Water from the sponge ran down a channel of oil on Jamie's back and soaked into the fabric of his kilt. The Doctor held the sponge on Jamie's back, and watched the fabric darken while he considered exactly how much of Jamie had been subject to the conversion.
The Doctor tugged gently on one of the buckles at Jamie's hip. "Jamie, can we take this off?"
"Not bleeding."
"Oh, well, um, that's good then, isn't it? Still, it's important to see how much damage they did and prevent infection where we can. Would you mind?"
Jamie said nothing, but responded by clumsily pulling at the buckles and belt with fingers too hard and imprecise to operate them. Despite having used it earlier, it seemed that he had entirely forgotten about his non-metal right arm. The Doctor watched him struggle for only a few moments before he reached out to help.
"Oh, here, Jamie, let me."
As he unfastened the soaked and stained kilt, the Doctor tried to divorce his mind from what his hands were doing. Even with permission, even as a medical check-up, even though he needed to see everything, removing Jamie's clothing like this stabbed at his conscience.
TheDoctor found himself remembering the first time he had seen Jamie wearing nothing. Then, it had all been a comical accident.
"Be careful with that, Jamie."
"I won't break it. I know not to cut myself."
"I'm not worried about the glass," the Doctor had said. He'd been intensely concentrating on a slide in his microscope and had managed a drink of water without looking away from the eyepiece.. "It's the acid inside I'm worried about."
"Acid again, eh?" Jamie had sniffed the tube. "Just how much of this do you have?"
The Doctor had not looked up. "Don't inhale it, Jamie."
"It doesn't smell like anything."
"You should never inhale strange chemicals."
"Everythin's a strange chemical with you. You'd have me scared to eat my breakfast if I listened to everything you say about chemicals."
The Doctor had sighed, irritated. "Jamie, if it's in a laboratory, don't inhale it. How's that?"
"I think this is just water," Jamie had said suddenly.
"What?"
"You don't really know what this is, you just don't trust me in here. For all I know you're drinking the acid and what I have is just water."
"You'd be easier to trust if you weren't trying to breathe it all in, now give that here."
The Doctor had turned to hold out his hand and demand the acid, only to watch the scene unfold in slow motion. Jamie had leaned over a table for the glass that did, in fact, contain water, presumably to prove a point, and dropped the vial of acid in his hand into a vat of mysterious liquid that the Doctor had been investigating for weeks. The resulting foamy explosion had covered Jamie in soft pink bubbles, and for a moment, it was quite funny. The Doctor had laughed at Jamie's expression until it was no longer one of surprise.
"Water!" Jamie had shouted.
"It clearly was not!" The Doctor had countered.
"I mean get some, Doctor! This burns!"
"Oh!"
The Doctor had splashed the glass he'd been drinking into Jamie's face and pushed him toward an emergency shower that had rarely been used.
"You need to get out of those clothes, Jamie, quickly now!"
"What?"
"Your clothes are only holding the chemicals against your skin, now hurry!" The Doctor had begun pulling at buttons on Jamie's shirt, while Jamie had attempted more protest. Whether it had been bravado in the face of burning pain or an exaggerated attempt at modesty, the Doctor had not known, but neither had particularly mattered. He'd pulled a soaked and burned ascot off of Jamie's neck and flung it to the floor, while Jamie had struggled with the buckles at his waist.
Within a minute or two, Jamie had been reduced to wet, naked and very grumpy, but at least no longer in danger of severe burns.
"Are you all right?" the Doctor had asked, as he inspected Jamie's arms. "Any burns?"
"Just find me a towel," Jamie had snapped. He'd pulled his arm away and hugged both close to his chest.
"I see." The Doctor had stepped back and folded his hands together. " And what have we learned about strange chemicals?"
"That you're daft for having them lying about everywhere."
The Doctor had smiled deviously while Jamie glared at him. "I think you can find some new clothes yourself, then. Perhaps I'll see you at breakfast? Unless you'd rather have more acid?"
Now, with Jamie so much unlike himself, it felt wrong to be pushing the kilt out of the way. Unfortunately, assessing the damage was critical if the Doctor was going to get Jamie any kind of help. When the fabric fell away, the Doctor was relieved to see that the Cybermen hadn't been removing anything, just adding. So while Jamie had metal up to his mid-thighs, nothing would have to be regrown later.
Completeness aside, Jamie was still smeared with oil and dirt under his kilt and would need to be cleaned off there as well. If the Doctor was going to avoid getting water in the bits of machinery that seemed be sprouting from all over Jamie's body, the process would take some time. At least Jamie no longer possessed the ability to feel strained or bored by tedium.
The Doctor gingerly dabbed at the bloodiest bits of Jamie's skin with the sponge. "Tell me if I hurt you, all right?"
"I do not feel pain."
The Doctor frowned and his shoulders drooped. "Yes, you're right. How silly of me."
"I felt pain once. I was improved."
"You're bleeding, Jamie," the Doctor snapped. "And you can't move your head. Does that sound like improvement to you?"
Jamie was silent. A few minutes of wordless maintenance on Jamie's wounds passed and the Doctor had given up expecting a response until Jamie latched onto his elbow with his metal hand, prompting momentary panic.
The Doctor expected Jamie to launch into a loop of robotic horror like the Cyber-Command message back at the base, but instead, Jamie simply said, "No."
"You see?" the Doctor said gently. "This is why I wanted to-er…" He trailed off, unable to think of words that were not 'help' and 'fix' fast enough to stop Jamie from leaping to them himself. Jamie pulled his hand away.
"You will fix this?"
The Doctor returned to cleaning. "Yes. We've been over this."
"Doctor."
"Yes," the Doctor sighed.
"You are not the right type of doctor."
"Oh?" The Doctor leaned away from his methodical sponging, interest piqued, and looked at what was visible of Jamie's face. "Do you know that?"
"I know you."
"Who am I?"
"Doctor. You know me and will fix me."
Frustrated, the Doctor tossed the dirty sponge away and left it to sink into the water as he dried his hands quickly on his trousers. "Look at me," he instructed, though Jamie had little choice. He placed his fingertips softly on Jamie's unobstructed temple and as he pressed their foreheads together, he added, "I'm sorry in advance for this."
He'd had to do this to people he cared about before, and just as in this circumstance, it had always been in an attempt to preserve sanity, but he never wanted circumstances to come to any form of hypnosis. Unfortunately, this was the only way the Doctor could think of to crack the Cybermen's programming even a tiny bit. He took a deep breath and looked intently into Jamie's eyes. There were dark bruising circles around them and looking into them now, the Doctor saw no trace of light or life in them.
Jamie twitched at the close mental contact, and tried to pull away.
"Jamie, relax, I'm not hurting you. I'm going to-" Suddenly he thought Jamie's new habits were going to be useful. The Doctor put very deliberate stress on his next word: "Help."
"You will fix me," Jamie droned. "You will help."
"No, Jamie, listen to me. You don't need to be fixed, do you understand? You are quite tired, and you have been asking to be fixed because you need rest."
"Tired," Jamie repeated.
"Yes, that's right. You'll close your eyes, and then you'll rest. When I wake you up, you won't need to ask to be fixed anymore." If all went as the Doctor hoped, Jamie wouldn't suddenly believe nothing to be wrong with him and then very abruptly go mad at the sight of his body being clearly to the contrary, he'd just stop needing to ask about being fixed.
"Won't... need to ask."
"Yes. Go to sleep, Jamie."
The Doctor pulled away as Jamie's body went as limp as it was able. Jamie's left shoulder was pulled sharply downward by the weight of his arm, making him resemble a broken marionette. Even as Jamie's shoulder bled anew, the Doctor did his best not to react and let Jamie sit quietly asleep for a few moments before prodding him gently.
"Jamie. Wake up, Jamie. It's me, it's the Doctor."
The light hadn't returned to Jamie's eyes, but some amount of recognition had. With his hands again on Jamie's face, the Doctor waited to see if his suggestions had taken. Jamie said nothing, but his eyes scanned the Doctor's face frantically.
"It's all right," the Doctor said. He put them nose to nose for a moment, trying to connect with Jamie and jog something back to normal. A whining sound came from Jamie's throat and his eyes widened as though he were suddenly in pain. The Doctor pulled away quickly, concerned. Jamie sat before him, only part-way through a sponge bath, and rather than sitting in agony, was simply blinking as though he'd been startled by sudden bright light.
"Jamie, are you all right?" It still seemed such a ludicrous question, given Jamie's condition, but the Doctor felt it needed asking anyway and kept himself close.
"Doctor?" The metal twang in Jamie's voice had lessened, and there was even a proper hint of emotion.
"Yes. Can you remember now?"
"Not complete…ly."
"No, it wouldn't be," the Doctor said softly, smudging some blood off of Jamie's cheek with his thumb. "Do you know who I am now?"
"I knew before."
"And?"
"I could not say more. You were my Doctor, but I could-couldn't say." Jamie was still struggling against the Cybermen's programming.
The Doctor settled his hands on Jamie's shoulders and attempted to look into his eyes with some measure of calm. He had formed the fragments of a plan, and they were rapidly coming together. "Jamie, I'm going to take you to have all this looked at. Can I trust you with strangers?"
"I do not know."
"Can I trust you at all?"
"I do not know."
"Do you trust me?"
"…Yes."
The Doctor flinched, pained that for the moment there was no 'Aye,' no banter, no mock-offense, none of that casual familiarity that made Jamie so wonderful. Jamie, for now, was reduced to a plain, toneless 'Yes.' The Doctor rolled up his sleeves and sighed. He wrung out the sponge, and started in again on carefully removing the patches of filth on Jamie's skin.
"Sit still for me," he said gently. "This may take a little while."
X
In retrospect, there should have been some way to make this trip sound reasonable, and even helpful to the Time Lords, but the Doctor never stopped to consider it until well after it happened.
He'd chosen the facility the TARDIS was headed for completely randomly from a pool of candidates who possessed sufficiently advanced technology to comprehend Jamie, but also had no significant time-locked events to navigate through. The facility in question was simply called Outpost, and it completely covered the moon it had been built on. It was used for experimental treatments, testing, and teaching by the people of the parent planet and its neighbors. The Time Lords had not mandated a stop here, but that did not stop the Doctor from deciding to go and plotting the course.
Jamie stood rigidly against the wall behind him and said nothing. The silence made the Doctor wary, but he hoped that his gentle treatment of Jamie would mean there was less of a chance he'd be attacked later. Even with his mind opened a bit, Jamie had been subject to cyber-programming and it was still in him somewhere. There was a very real chance it would force Jamie to do something frightening rather than simply suppress his personality.
The TARDIS materialized with her usual turbulence, but without the usual Jamie desperately clinging to the Doctor. Instead, Jamie remained unflinchingly still and silent against the wall, blinking in a fixed pattern on a fixed schedule.
"Jamie," the Doctor said softly. "We've arrived. Will you come with me?" He was ignoring the flashing protest from some gadgets the Time Lords had installed in the TARDIS to keep an eye on him at the start of his service.
Jamie attempted to nod. His eyelids twitched, but he made no sound. The Doctor offered his hand, but Jamie would not take it.
"Lead the way," Jamie said. It was almost a command.
The Doctor dropped his hand and sighed. He motioned for Jamie to follow him out of the TARDIS doors and into a brightly lit, white and sterile-feeling corridor. The bright sheen of the hard polished floor reflected everything, including the cameras quickly turning in the Doctor and Jamie's direction.
"Oh, it seems they already know we're here, Jamie. Saves us some time finding them!"
Jamie's metal feet made an unpleasant and very loud clanking sound when he walked on the floors. The sound was quickly followed by voices from somewhere far off.
"Hellooo!" the Doctor called into an echo. "No need for alarm, we're not going anywhere! Here we are! Come and-! " He waved his arms comically at the camera, grinning broadly. He stole a quick look back at Jamie, who was entirely unaffected, and his arms and expression fell. "… get us."
A few moments later, a trio of people the Doctor assumed to be security officers approached, all holding sharp and blast-y items he hoped were only meant for show. He smiled brightly and greeted them enthusiastically. "Wonderful to see you all!" The Doctor bowed slightly, and tried to tip the hat he was not wearing. "Would one of you fine fellows care to tell me where I may find the research laboratories?"
"Do you have identification, sir?"
"Well, yes, um-, " he coughed softly, still smiling. "Which kind are you after?"
"We don't have time for games. You're in a high security area, and you need clearance to be here."
"Well, I'm sure we can find something to satisfy you," the Doctor replied, fussing with his pockets.
Jamie's metal feet clanged as he took a step toward the Doctor. He said simply, "Doctor."
"My God," one of the officers marveled.
"Sir, your bot is…"
"He's not a 'bot', thank you," the Doctor said, flashing an out of date Prydonian Technical Library card at the group before quickly re-pocketing it. "His name is James and he is a patient here. Now, for the last time: Would you please direct us to the research labs?"
The guards nodded and stepped back, clearly more disturbed by Jamie than concerned with the Doctor's photo ID looking nothing like his current self. They motioned with their weapons for the Doctor and Jamie to follow and the Doctor did so cheerfully. The clangs of Jamie's feet sent a repeated shiver through the smallest guard.
The Doctor hooked his elbow around Jamie's, pleased that Jamie had thought to distract the guards. "Well done!" he whispered. He patted Jamie's shoulder and then jumped away with a quick jolt once he realized he'd been attached to Jamie's metal arm. Jamie said and did nothing but follow the guards, but the Doctor's guilt at his own horror prompted an apology. "I'm sorry, Jamie. It's a bit new to me, you see, and-" He stopped short when it became apparent that Jamie was not listening, had not noticed,and had probably not intended to distract the guards at all.
The guards stopped abruptly in front of a set of double doors marked 'Authorised Persons Only,' and turned to challenge the Doctor. None of them would look at Jamie.
"Here are the labs, Doctor," the tallest guard announced.
"Thank you all. You know how easy it is to get lost in a place like this, I'm sure. Now if you'll excuse us, gentlemen, we've got quite a bit of work to do. Good day to you."
The guards gave each other skeptical glances, but each nodded in the Doctor's direction, cast their eyes away from even Jamie's feet, and disappeared around a nearby corner.
"I'm afraid there's an awful lot of that in store for you, Jamie."
"I do not understand."
The Doctor let a smile form where a wince was meant to go. "Perhaps that's for the best, then."
A small box marked 'ACCESS' stuck out from the wall on the right side of the doors. The Doctor had no keycard, and no borrowed retinas or fingerprints to use to gain entry to the labs so he reached into his coat for his screwdriver instead. "Now," he aimed the screwdriver at a weak spot in the access panel's cover, "all we have to do here is-"
In a motion far quicker than any the Doctor had ever seen from him before, Jamie lunged forward with his metal arm and simply crushed access panel in his hand. The Doctor let out a small cry of alarm and watched as Jamie uncurled his hand. The circuitry fell out from between his fingers like crushed leaves and, a moment later, the sound of a strong bolt lock releasing echoed through the hall. The door to the lab now betrayed a sliver of light from within.
"W-well done, Jamie," the Doctor managed. "Do give me some warning next time, though."
"Yes, Doctor."
The Doctor pushed open the large doors to reveal a pair of medical personnel sporting baffled expressions. The pair, a young man and woman - students perhaps - took the Doctor in for a few moments before the young lady spoke.
"What in the world was that?"
"Terribly sorry," the Doctor said, smiling. "I had a bit of an accident with the door. I'll get someone to come look at it. Not interrupting anything are we?"
"Do you have clearance to be in here?" the young man asked.
"Well, I'm in, aren't I?" The room around him was full of computers, equipment, testing areas, long tables full of specimens, charts, and large books open on chairs and filled liberally with bookmarks. "Oh, this should do quite nicely. Jamie, why don't you get comfortable on that table over there?"
Jamie took a few slow steps forward.
"Hey, you can't-," the woman started, before she stopped short at the full sight of Jamie. "Oh. Oh, my."
"It's alright my dear, I don't believe he'll do you any harm," the Doctor reassured her. "Now, would you two mind doing me a favor?"
X
An hour later, after a frantic game of intercom tag, the room was filled to bursting with doctors, researchers, curious specialists and a single deeply annoyed maintenance man, and the focus of the room was firmly on the Doctor and his frightening metal boy. The room hummed with chatter, some of it scientific, some of it horrified gossip. When the room had filled enough that onlookers were straining to see Jamie from outside the broken doors, the Doctor tried to bring his voice above the crowd.
"Hello! Hello!" He waved his hands in the air, attempting to take up as much space as possible. "Thank you all for your interest!"
The whispering ebbed away, and the group fell into silence.
"I've brought you something very special," the Doctor explained.
"It's a bot, isn't it?" cried someone in the back.
"No," replied the Doctor. "And he isn't an 'it,' either. This is my friend Jamie, and he is a glorious opportunity for all of you." The Doctor reflected that there was something a bit sick in telling a group of people that Jamie was not an 'it,' and then going on to say he was just that. Jamie would be fiercely protesting being treated like a science project in most any other circumstance. "You all have an opportunity in Jamie to change the future, and I'm proposing that we help each other."
The young woman from earlier stood at the front of the crowd, and shifted nervously on her feet even as the Doctor tried to smile at her. She was focused entirely on Jamie and the reflection of light from his legs was bouncing off of her glasses as she stared. The Doctor glanced back quickly, to be sure nothing was wrong. Jamie's eyes were scanning the room frantically, but he was otherwise still.
"Jamie is a human being, like all of you," the Doctor said.
"Hey!"
"Oh!"The Doctor plucked his handkerchief from his pocket and waved it at the blue-skinned man in the center of the crowd. "Terribly sorry. Didn't see you there! Palotian, yes? Lovely place, I'll have to drop by again sometime." He tucked the handkerchief away and smiled pleasantly. "Anyone else?"
There was an awkward collective laugh, and then the Doctor was allowed to continue.
"As I was saying, Jamie is human, and should continue to be human. He's been subjected to some obvious trauma recently, as you can see, and he's not quite himself. What you're looking at is a failed attempt to convert a human to a machine, so there have been no pains taken to preserve any humanity. This was all involuntary and..." The Doctor wrung his hands with guilt as he imagined the pain and terror Jamie must have experienced. He coughed, regained his composure and continued, "What's been done to him is… beyond my own ability. I suspect, and do correct me if I'm wrong, that he is beyond all of yours as well."
A few whispers bubbled up from the crowd, and the Doctor grinned with delight at the predictable human response to a challenge. He clapped his hands together and smiled broadly at the crowd. "And so enters opportunity! None of you in here will be the one to directly cure Jamie, but some small group of you may be the ones who pioneer the process that eventually will. I'm giving you all the chance to examine him, record and deduce all you can, and begin some work that may well last a hundred years."
A woman protested over the newly growing murmur. "You just said the boy is human!You expect him to last that long?"
"You can let me worry about that," the Doctor assured her. "I want you all to look at Jamie as though you will need to pass his information on to someone who will never be in a room with him. What I need to know is, who wants to get a look?"
Most of the hands in the room went up, with a few grumpy-looking skeptics abstaining. The Doctor smiled, pleased with himself, and turned to Jamie to fuss with some not-actually-out-of-place hair. "Excellent. I'll set up a few shifts for you all to see him, and -"
"Who are you to be setting all this up?"
The Doctor turned to the group, all traces of glee and amusement gone from his voice and demeanor. "I'm his Doctor. You see him on my terms, or you don't see him at all."
X
He had to make a sign up sheet, and he was given far more fervent requests to page busy researchers when it was their turn to look at Jamie than he could ever reasonably accomplish, but within two hours, the first group of six researchers was ready to have a look at Jamie, and the Doctor's plan to exploit time travel for personal gain was set in motion.
At the start of the session, he gave as much basic knowledge as he could think relevant: what had happened ("Yes, really."), when it happened ("At least a thousand years from this relative time spot, but less than twenty-four hours ago."), Jamie's age, his general health and personality before the incident, the weird allergy that had popped up in the form of purple freckles on the planet Gerro, and the fact that he was from 18th Century Scotland.
An argument quickly broke out about whether Jamie should be vaccinated for several centuries worth of diseases, and the first signs that this was not going to go as swimmingly as the Doctor had hoped began to appear. As the sound in the room grew louder despite the protests from the Doctor, Jamie began to speak.
"Stop," he said.
No one but the Doctor seemed to hear him. Over cries of how dangerous vaccinating Jamie for the Neptunian Night Worm might be in comparison to preventing polio and a host of other things, the Doctor attempted to settle the room.
"Everyone, really, this is not the productive workshop I had hoped for, if we could just-"
One participant panicked. "He could infect us all! That's hundreds of years of germs and-!"
Another countered, "You don't really believe he's that old, do you? This is all a joke! And even if it isn't, we'd be the ones infecting him!"
"Let's just take a sample and -"
"Stop," Jamie repeated.
The researchers ignored Jamie's protest and continued with their excited hysteria. "His diet would be a fascinating study, just think! He's probably never had corn syrup!"
"He's covered in metal! Think, man!"
"Please, you really need to listen to me-," the Doctor tried again.
"Stop!" Jamie demanded.
"If we pumped his stomach, and then hooked him up to a carburetor…"
"If you'd all just shut up!" the Doctor thundered.
The arguing ceased, and the Doctor felt a bit foolish to have made so much noise. He coughed once, and tried to look as if he were in control of the situation. "Please," he said softly, "the last thing you want to do is make Jamie tense. Look at the state of your table…"
The small crowd in their white coats peered around Jamie's side to where the Doctor was pointing. Under Jamie's fingers, the metal of the table now sported a mangled and twisted handprint. "I would hate for something similar to happen to a limb in here," the Doctor said sweetly. "I doubt he's too keen on stressful new environments, so perhaps we can all work together, hmm?"
Quietly and diligently, work finally began. Jamie was weighed, measured, and scrutinized. Samples of his blood and the Cybermen's strange fluids were taken and laboriously labeled for more testing. The Doctor again asked for Jamie's permission to have his kilt removed, and once again was met with no personal objections, only logical disrobing. The Doctor tried to offer comfort or reassurance, but Jamie had no need for either. No matter how often the Doctor failed to inspire a reaction in Jamie, he never failed to feel disappointed immediately afterward.
In the midst of one experiment, Jamie expressed some concern about the effectiveness of what was happening to him.
"Doctor."
Immediately, the Doctor was at his side hoping for some flash of emotion. "What is it, Jamie?"
"These are not all doctors."
"Well, no, I think a few of them are students," the Doctor admitted. He attempted to pat Jamie's shoulder reassuringly. "But they won't hurt you, I promise."
Jamie blinked in substitute for a nod and returned to silence. The Doctor sighed and let his hand rest on Jamie's shoulder for a few moments.
The next team filed in and, with a few protests from the people being shooed away, replaced the first group. The Doctor repeated most of the basic information, and encouraged them to ask new questions based on what he'd learned from the first group. He allowed photos and multi-dimensional scans to be taken, but only after asking for Jamie's permission. Jamie allowed it without question and complied automatically to even the most tentative command.
Seeing the teams treating Jamie as a specimen and not a human pained the Doctor, though he learned a few things about Jamie's condition from the prodding, chief among them that Jamie's legs and arm had not been replaced, just plated over. Frighteningly, however, he was missing some organs. The Doctor hoped that Jamie would forgive being put through all of this if it ever turned out that Jamie re-gained the ability to be upset by something that needed forgiving in the first place.
The research was exhausting, long, and probably a bit painful for Jamie. When the Doctor called an end to it all, Jamie had spent most of the day naked and full of needles.
"That's all we can handle, I think," the Doctor told the remaining team members as he helped Jamie with the buckles on his kilt. "I should like to see what you all come up with. I'll be keeping an eye on what comes of all of this and, eventually, Jamie and I will be back."
There was some uproar about Jamie staying for overnight observation, and about when or if the Doctor would be back for follow up visits, but he brushed it all off. "I'm afraid very few of you will ever see me again, and it won't be for many years if you do. You're just going to have to work hard and trust me." He patted Jamie's hip when he finished with the adjustments to the kilt. "Now then, we really must be on our way."
The Doctor and Jamie hurried down the halls under protests that they should be visiting the facility's director, going on the airwaves to make announcements and at least trying to be made into a major motion picture.
With people still on his heel as he closed the door to the TARDIS, the Doctor gave his pursuers a strained smile. "What you're saying is very nice, but I'm really rather short on time. Jamie hasn't had his breakfast, and I could do with a nap. So goodbye, thank you all, and I hope you work very hard!" He shut the doors completely, putting the weight of his back against them and bracing himself to let out a long breath.
"The door won't hold them all out," Jamie said.
"Yes it will, it's perfectly safe. You know that." The Doctor pushed himself off of the doors and dusted his hands off on his coat as he walked to the console.
"Do I?"
The Doctor fussed with some buttons and swatted the indicator that had been busy betraying him to the CIA while he'd had Jamie examined. "Yes, you do. Look for it. Try to access the memory." He wiggled his fingers over the console for a moment before diving into an often-attempted but never properly executed sequence of buttons. "Now to see if we can't avoid some trouble…"
Jamie was still on the subject of the door. "I do know. I do n- don't understand. But I know."
"There you are, see?" He thought to ruffle Jamie's hair for a moment, or to put more exaggerated pride into his words, but both gestures would have meant nothing to Jamie at best or angered him at worst, and so both were abandoned before they even started. "Were you all right with all of that? I know it was quite a bit to go through…"
"It didn't hurt," Jamie answered. The metallic twang left his voice when he contracted words, which, to the Doctor's relief, made Jamie sound less hostile.
"We're going to monitor what they do with the information they have about you. Hopefully, someone will write an impressive thesis and then we can get started, hmm?"
Jamie blinked at him.
"Right, then," said the Doctor. With any luck, the Doctor would steer the TARDIS around the Time Lord's recall algorithms and gain free control of his ship again, leaving no need for the web of excuses and lies he was weaving together just in case his next stop was Gallifrey. He closed his eyes and dramatically threw the final switch in the sequence.
Seconds later, the voices of protest from the mob outside faded in favor of the sound of the TARDIS dematerializing.