DRIVING LESSONS, EH, OLD THING?
by ardavenport
- - Part 1
"Come on, Sarah."The Doctor hustled Sarah Jane through the black stone archway, heaved the gate closed and barred it with a large wooden crossbeam.
Now it was Sarah's turn to urge the Doctor on. She nervously tugged at his arm to get him going. Through the holes in the copper grillwork, she could see the Gnasks approaching. The cannibals had already slaughtered the residents of Escin Castle and were planning on having her and the Doctor for dessert. Their bulging, eyeless heads betrayed no emotions that Sarah could read, but they looked plenty mean to her all the same.
The Doctor and Sarah sprinted across the mosaic courtyard, their footsteps sadly echoing on the castle walls. Occasionally, they had to detour around the mutilated bodies of the castle's former residents.
'I'm glad I didn't know anybody here' Sarah thought to herself.
"O000000aaaaauuukkk, 00000aaaaauuuukkk!" The Gnask war cries preceded them and bounced off the castle walls. Their acts of violence depended on numbers and brute force rather than stealth.
The courtyard smelled of sulphurous death. Sarah tried not to look at the yellow flesh, already decomposing in the humid afternoon air.
"O000aaaauuukkkkk, 000-000aaaauuukkkkk!"
They had almost reached the safety of the courtyard's central pillar when the first few arrows flew past them. The Gnasks were shooting at them through the ornamental grillwork of the barred gate.
Suddenly, the Doctor grabbed Sarah about the waist and pulled her sharply to the left. She felt something whiz past her right ear; he pushed her behind the pillar and rudely landed on top of her.
She lay still for a moment, but the Gnasks at the gate and the Doctor's weight prodded her into action. With the pillar between them and their pursuers, and the TARDIS now mere feet away, leaving became their prime objective.
"Doctor."
She put a hand on his chest to push him away and turned her head to the right. Her nose encountered a glistening, red arrowhead. It took her a few seconds to realize that the rest of the arrow was now protruding from the left side of the Doctor's neck.
He started to slide off of her, and she grabbed his arm to steady him.
"Doctor!"
"Aaaaahhhh...notthere,Sarah," he gasped.
Slowly, stiffly, he managed a sitting position.
"Get me to the TARDIS."
With her support, the Doctor got to the TARDIS door and unlocked it.
They entered the console room, the doors closing behind them. Seconds later, they heard the Gnasks pounding on the outer doors. "Looks like our friends crashed the gate," the Doctor commented painfully.
Sarah shuddered, "They're not my friends." Worried, she looked up at the Time Lord. The Doctor leaned on her heavily; she could feel the vibrations of his knees shaking, his left-arm was clutched tightly to his body, and he grimaced from the pain of moving anything on his left side. Unsteadily, he turned toward the console.
"Doctor..."
"We're going to have to go somewhere besides here, Sarah. Unless you want to try to take this thing out. I don't think I could do it myself."
Reluctantly, Sarah nodded. Almost anyplace was better than where they were now. She led him to the controls.
Where to go?
For once, the Doctor regretted his TARDIS's erratic navigation. He'd hate to aim for the Mayo Clinic, 3000 A.D. and end up in the outer Sirian Asteroids, 10,000 G.A.D.
'Can't last through too many tries,' he thought to himself.
Therewere a few places that he could aim for with a reasonable chance of actually getting , for one. 'But I'm not going there.' His best prospect seemed to be U.N.I.T. It had marginally adequate medical facilities, and he knew he could count on the TARDIS getting him there in a pinch. At least it had done, about a regeneration ago when he'd escaped from Metebelis III.
He tried reaching for the controls with his left hand, but lances of pain shot through his arm, the dizziness almost overwhelming him, but for Sarah's support. The arrow, going through the base of his neck on the left side just above the collar bone, was lying next to the brachial plexus nerve.'
'No good on that side,' he thought grimly.
"Sarah." He indicated that he would need his right arm to use the controls. She moved so that she was supporting him from behind on the right, leaving his arm free.
Painstakingly, he punched up the pre-programmed coordinates. Sarah, her arms wrapped securely about his waist, nervously watched him work. With her help, he shuffled to the dematerialization switch on the next panel and sent the TARDIS into the vortex.
"Help me sit down." She led him to the wall and lowered him until he sat with his right shoulder leaning on its surface.
"You should be lying down." The Doctor tried to shake his head, but the tiny movement tortured new nervepaths from the arrow wound to the base of his skull. He closed his eyes until the nausea passed.
"If I lie down, I don't think I'm going to want to get up. Get the first-aid kit, Sarah."
Sarah quickly left and came back with it. She laid it on the floor next to him and then looked at the arrow.
"This isn't going to be much good," she told him, after looking through its contents.
"It'll have to do for now. You'll have to cut away the clothes.I don't think there's much bleeding, but you might as well stop what there is."
Sarah nodded. She gently removed his scarf, which had miraculously not been hit, and laid it aside. The coat was another problem. The arrow had gone in at the back of the left side of the neck and was sticking out the front, effectively pinning his clothes to carefully as possible, she cut away coat, vest, and shirt and tossed the bloodstained remains away. The Doctor was right; there wasn't much bleeding, but the wound was plenty gruesome to look at. She gently padded the entry and exit points with cotton and taped it in place.
'Not much, but it's only meant to hold until we can get to some medical attention. Wherever that is,' she thought to herself.
On cue, the time rotor stopped moving and went dark.
"Doctor, we've landed."
He opened one eye to acknowledge the fact.
"Better check where we are," he suggested.
Sarah went to the console and turned on the scanner. It showed her the Doctor's laboratory at U.N.I.T.
"Well?"
Sarah sighted. "U.N.I.T."
She went back to him and knelt.
"I'm going out to get help. Will you be alright here?"
"Don't take too long," he smiled weakly. "We don't want to be late for tea." Sarah ignored the joke and left.
He sat there, quietly, studiously ignoring the pain and thinking about how exceedingly lucky he'd been this time.'Just barely able to work the TARDIS controls, Doctor,' he thought to himself.
'What would poor Sarah have done if you hadn't been up to it? She may have had the protection of the TARDIS, but she'd have had no way of getting back to Earth.'
In the past, the Doctor had never, ever let any of his companions touch the TARDIS controls while it was in operation. But now, this no longer seemed to be an acceptable policy.
He was just beginning to draw up a plan of action to correct this, when Sarah returned with Mr. Benton and Harry Sullivan. Harry immediately went to the Doctor's side, put down his medical bag, and started prodding him with cold, clumsy hands.
"Owwwww...Harry, you have the finesse of a gorilla tuning a piano."
After a brief examination, Harry and Benton helped him out of the TARDIS to a chair in the laboratory. Harry called for a stretcher, and soon they had taken the Time Lord to the sickbay.
While the arrow was being removed, Benton got the story from Sarah about their latest adventure.
"So, after we escaped from the holding pens, we went to Escin, but it was too late. We just barely made it back to the TARDIS in time."
"The Doctor does get into a lot of these scrapes, doesn't he?"
The door to the waiting room opened and Harry stepped in. "How is he?" Sarah asked.
Harry answered Sarah's question with professional calm. "Rather good, actually. Took the arrow out without a hitch."
"Well, that's a looked a bit serious when I saw that thing sticking out of him like that." Benton's voice reflected his Doctor always managed to come through the tough spots.
"Oh, well, it could have been tricky there. The shaft was pinching the major nerve in his left 's what was causing all the pain. As it is, there's no serious damage, though he certainly complains enough about it."
"I'm not surprised," Sarah commented."Can we see him?"
"I don't see any reason why not." Harry ushered them into the small, sterile-smelling surgery.
The Doctor was lying on a table, eyes closed, his left arm in a sling. He was feeling quite relieved, having discovered that Harry Sullivan's chronic clumsiness did not extend to his professional skills. The operation had gone off smoothly, and he was almost himself again. His neck, left shoulder and arm were still numb from the local anesthetic.
"Doctor?" Sarah was standing next to him.
"Hmmmm..."He didn't feel lie opening his eyes, so he didn't.
"Doctor?" Benton this time.
"Hmmmm...," he answered,- still not opening his eyes. He appreciated their concern, but wondered why humans felt that injury needed an audience.
"Doctor?" Harry put a hand to his face to check his eyes.
"Ugh." He cringed away from the physician's fingers. Harry's surgery skills were fine, but his bedside manner was hopelessly intrusive. "Stop poking at me, Harry." Sullivan retreated.
"I'd say the patient doesn't want any visitors," he concluded.
"I'd say you're right." Sarah leaned over to speak to the Doctor.
"i'll see you in the morning, Doctor." She got a grunt of acknowledgment before the three left the room.
"Well, Miss Smith, where to now?" Benton followed her to an exit.
"Home, I think. Better go and make sure my life hasn't fallen apart like last time."
Benton nodded in understanding. Almost the first thing that Sarah had looked for upon returning to U.N.I.T. had been the calendars and clocks. She was delighted to find that the Doctor had landed them in the late afternoon of the day after they'd left, though the time she'd actually been away had been considerably longer. The last time she'd returned home from one of the Doctor's extended journeys, she'd gotten stuck with a time gap of a month-and-a-half. When she returned to South Croydon, she found herself facing six weeks of mail, bills, missed deadlines and angry editors.
Her landlady and a few neighbors sent a missing person report to the police. She'd dug herself out of it all only by getting the Brigadier to cover up with a story about her doing some top secret, hush-hush work for the British government and the United Nations. That excuse and a few official looking documents had solved most of her problems. She'd sworn that she would never travel in the TARDIS again. But the Doctor had extremely good powers of persuasion,and a promise that they wouldn't land more than two days after they left had conned her into going off with him again.
Now, Sarah was at least glad that he'd kept his word.
Back at U.N.I.T., the Doctor had come to a minor decision but was prevented from carrying out his plans when he was told that Sarah had gone home.
"Gone home? Why would she want to do that?"
"People do go home sometimes, Doctor," Harry explained patiently.
"But I was going to show her something."
"Well,I'm sure it can wait until tomorrow morning," Harry soothed."Now, I think you'd better lie down and . . . "
"What?"The Doctor immediately got to his feet."I've got better things to do than lie around her." Frustrated, he paced up and down the room. Harry hung back from caging his angry patient. He remembered what happened the last time he'd tried to put the Doctor to bed.
But the Time Lord couldn't tie him up again, not with one arm in a sling. Could he?
He was thinking of going to get help when the Doctor stopped storming about the room.
To Harry's inutturable surprise, he walked over to one of the beds in the next room, lay down and closed his eyes. Not wanting to question his good fortune, Harry simply wished his patient a good night and left. The Doctor, having already slipped into his healing trance, didn't notice him leave.
All was quiet at U.N.I.T. H.Q. that night save for the early return of the Brigadier from Geneva. Upon learning the details of the Doctor's return, he went to the infirmary to look in on him personally. He got no response from the sleeping Time Lord and, grumbling something about irresponsibility, he let him lie.
Sarah was back early the next morning only to find the Doctor had gotten up even earlier, dressed, and was impatiently waiting for her.
"What is it?" she demanded. Then she noticed that he was steering her towards the TARDIS.
"Oh, no! You're not going out again."
"And why not?" he demanded in a childish tone of voice. "It's my TARDIS, isn't it?"
Sarah was furious with him.
"Because you haven't recovered from the last place we went to." She deliberately poked him in the shoulder, where she knew it would hurt. He flinched, and momentarily regretted that in his haste to educate Sarah he'd broken out of his healing trance early.
"And I'm not going anywhere, either," Sarah concluded.
Taken aback by her outburst, he changed his approach.
"I wasn't really going anywhere. I just wanted to show you something."
"What?" Cautiously.
He grinned and nudged her toward the TARDIS again. She put her foot down.
"You can show me out here."
"No I can't. It's in the TARDIS."
Sarah glared at him.
"Please?" he insisted.
She faltered. It sounded like he just wanted to trick her into the TARDIS.
"Please?" His eyes were open very wide, his expression earnestly expectant.
"Well, just for a minute."
He grinned again, and hustled her inside.
Now in the console room, he went straight to the console and started rapidly twiddling things. She questioned him about what he wanted to do.
"That little trouble we got into at Escin got me thinking about what you'll do if I ever get hurt like that again." Stopping, he rested a hand on the console and looked down at the controls.
"What do you mean?"
"I think it's time I showed you how to pilot the TARDIS in case I'm not able to." His eyes rose to meet hers.
Sarah was shocked. "What?" she looked down at the myriad of technology on the console and then back at him. "I can't fly the TARDIS."
"You might have to." His tone went quite serious. "If that arrow had been a bit more on center, you might have found yourself stuck on Kadez."
She still wasn't willing to believe him. "But you said the controls were isomorphic, that they'd only work for you."
He brushed the argument aside."Oh, I've already fixed them so they'll take your commands. And if I'm here, there shouldn't be any problems at all." He put his free hand on her shoulder and positioned her in front of the console. Sarah stepped forward uncertainly, then she turned back to him accusingly.
"You said we weren't going anywhere."
"Oh, well, we don't have to go anywhere. Just pop into the vortex for a few seconds, then back again in the same spot," he reassured her. "Now, for a displacement like that, you're only going to have to reset three of the coordinates on the space/time locator." He pointed her back to the controls.
- - End Part 1