"Believe me, we've seen worse things than this," Lisbon said, levelling the Doctor with a pointed look Donna would be proud of.

But she didn't understand. And now that he'd had a bit of time to watch the room, the walls themselves, he had a feeling that he knew what it was. Not why, not how, but what, and perhaps, from there, he could find out the why and the how. Once he'd stopped it, and it was sorted. Or at least until he staunched the bleeding. Because that entire room was still bleeding. It wasn't gushing, not anymore, but it was still seeping. And that was most definitely not a good thing.

But he wasn't sure if he could explain all that to Lisbon or her colleague, who definitely looked like the type who didn't buy into anything that would, admittedly, sound like crazy ramblings. But sometimes humans surprised him, and saw more than he gave them credit for. Perhaps one of this lot would see it, too. It was possible. He had to try. "No, that's not what I mean. Look at them. Those walls are bleeding," the Doctor explained, reaching out one hand to gesture at, but not touch, the stained walls that opened into the bloodied living room.

"Sir, you may have authority to be on the crime scene, but you cannot compromise our investigation because of an imagined danger," Lisbon said. "Please stand aside and let us in."

The Doctor didn't move. "I don't think it's safe," he told her simply, praying that, just once, he'd be believed. "Not yet. We have to wait for the bleeding to stop."

"Cho," Lisbon called, looking over at him.

"I'm afraid you're going to have to step away, sir," Cho informed the Doctor simply, stepping up to lead him away.

"You don't understand," the Doctor insisted, dragging his feet as best he could. "As long as it's bleeding, we're all in danger. Well, we're safe enough out here, but in there? There's no telling what we'll be exposed to in there."

"We'll take our chances," Lisbon said bluntly.

"Who found them?" the Doctor asked suddenly, homing in on the one detail Officer Waterer had neglected to tell him. "Tell me, who came in here, into that room, and saw them all, what was left of them?"

"Why ask if you already know the answer?" piped up a new voice. It was a man, clutching a mug of what, the Doctor could tell from the smell, was tea.

"What makes you think I know?" the Doctor asked carefully.

The blond man smiled. "Because you chose that particular question to get Lisbon to stop. And it worked, just as you knew it would." He paused. "And, you've been blocking the entrance to the living room, so you've looked in and seen the prints in the blood, and you can look at the size and guess that most of those were made by a child's shoe, and you can look at the horror and just imagine how terrifying that would be to such a young, innocent mind. It makes you angry, and you know that almost everyone would feel the same response, so you simply asked that one question, knowing that Lisbon, once reminded of it, would stop in her tracks."

The Doctor grinned. "Oh, you're good."

"Patrick Jane," the man said, offering his hand.

The Doctor took it, still grinning, shaking it enthusiastically. "Doctor John Smith. You can just call me the Doctor. I take it you're with them?" he nodded towards Lisbon and Cho.

"Mr. Jane is a consultant," Lisbon broke in.

"Yes," agreed the Doctor, looking him up and down before turning back to Lisbon. "He's not carrying a gun. But he's clearly someone who's been looking more closely at the room than you, I imagine." The Doctor turned his attention back to Jane. "But you didn't go inside. Why?"

"Oh, I couldn't compromise the investigation just because I wanted to be the first person to get a good look around," Jane said—and from Lisbon's snort, the Doctor gathered that that was rarely the case. Which meant that it probably wasn't the reason here, either. But he had to be good, or they wouldn't keep him around.

"Why else?" the Doctor asked.

"Because I noticed something strange," Jane answered, smiling slightly.

"The walls?" the Doctor pressed. "You noticed the bleeding walls?"

"You keep saying that," Jane noted, avoiding the question. "The blood on the walls is dry, but you keep saying they're bleeding—why?"

The Doctor blinked. That was rather sudden. But there was no real harm in answering it. It wasn't as if he couldn't escape if they locked him up somewhere. It was only 2010, after all. "I never said they were bleeding blood," the Doctor explained. He hesitated, about to go on, to tell them about how he suspected there was a wound in time, but held back, just for a moment. If he went and got himself locked up before he staunched the bleeding, let alone healed the wound or at the very least stitched it up, things would get very bad very fast, and if they got too bad too fast, he'd find himself up against Reapers.

Again.

That was not an experience he cared to repeat.

"Then what are they bleeding?" Jane asked simply.

"That's not important right now," the Doctor said. "What is important is what happened to the child who found them. Who was it?"

"Emma's friend, Julia McDonald," Lisbon answered.

"And what happened to her?"

"She's safe, with her parents," Lisbon explained. "She'll be fine."

"Fine?" the Doctor repeated. "After seeing that? After looking in and seeing that her friend and her friend's family were torn to shreds, every inch of the room bathed in their blood? How can anyone be fine?"

"She's going to be getting counselling," Lisbon allowed.

"Because of what she saw," the Doctor asked, "or because of her partial amnesia?"

"How do you know about that?" Lisbon asked, frowning slightly.

"It's an understandable response," Jane cut in, sounding almost nonchalant. "You see something terrible and your mind can't handle it, so you suppress it."

"But that's not all, is it?" the Doctor continued. "Have you had time to talk to her, any of you? Because I'd guess that she's suppressing a lot more than just what she saw."

"What makes you say that?" Cho queried. The Doctor wasn't entirely sure he liked the look he was receiving. It was business-like, yes, but he suspected there was a touch of suspicion in there, and a touch was too much for his tastes.

"I'm clever, and I've seen this sort of thing before," the Doctor explained. "So I highly suggest that you go talk to her about what she does remember, and you can leave Officer Waterer and me to seal off this room."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Jane asked, sipping his tea. "You'd like for us to go off and leave you alone here."

"Yes," the Doctor cut in swiftly. "I would. But I have a feeling you're not about to oblige me."

"Well, not all of us," Jane admitted. "Cho, you can go talk to the McDonald family. Lisbon and I will stay here."

"Jane!" Lisbon exclaimed. "You can't just…." She trailed off, shaking her head. "Never mind. It's not worth it. Cho, go see what you can find out. We'll meet you there once we've finished here."

"Right, boss."

The Doctor had moved so that he was blocking the entrance to the room again, knowing his words wouldn't keep them trapped in position forever. "I still can't let you in there," he said.

"Because the walls are bleeding?" Lisbon asked in tone that told the Doctor she thought he was nuts, no matter what the psychic paper had said. Not that he'd checked, but it had evidently sufficed, whatever it was.

Well, if it was too late to be thought sane, perhaps she'd humour him. "Yes," he said. "Because, from what I've seen and from what you've confirmed, it's not bleeding in, it's bleeding out. And it's not very strong anymore, but from what I can see, it's strong enough, and it would still be damaging to you."

Lisbon rolled her eyes. Jane caught her glance and shrugged. "He's not lying," he said. "He believes what he's telling you. Now his name is a bit questionable, but I'm not about to quibble over formalities, are you?"

"What's wrong with his name?" Lisbon asked sceptically. "I've seen his ID, Jane. He has as much right to be here as you or me."

"Really?" Jane set his tea down on a shelf and walked closer. "And you believe everything you see?"

"I am still right here, you know," the Doctor said quietly.

That proved to be a mistake. "Okay, you know what?" Lisbon said suddenly, throwing up her arms. "I have a job to do, and I don't need you two holding me back. I want to find whoever did this, and I can't do that unless I go into that room." And before the Doctor could stop her, she dodged around him and slipped inside.

"No!" the Doctor cried out. He dashed in after her, gritting his teeth, and grabbed her arm. "You can't!"

"Let go of me," Lisbon ordered, trying to twist her way out of his grip as he started to pull her out. "You're ruining the evidence. You can't just—"

"Listen to me," the Doctor said, very clearly, his voice dark. He'd pulled her clear of the room now. "It's not safe, not yet."

"It's fine," Lisbon said simply. "I'm perfectly fine, except for a sore arm. Now let me go."

"Not until you promise not to go in there again."

"Of course I'm going to go in there again," Lisbon protested. "I need to. It's my job."

"And what's mine?" the Doctor snapped. "What did my ID say?"

"I—" Lisbon stopped fighting him, frowning. "I don't remember."

"Precisely," the Doctor said. "And that's why you can't go in there again, not until I tell you it's safe."

Jane looked intrigued now, and he wasn't bothering to hide it. "How did you do that?" he asked. "The mind trick?"

"It's not a mind trick, and it's not my doing," the Doctor answered simply, giving Lisbon a gentle push towards Jane. "Now get her out of here."

"No, no. I don't mean the memory loss. That's impressive, yes, and I'll be questioning you about that later, but right now I want to know how you convinced her to listen to you in the first place," Jane said. "Because as much as you're acting like you belong, you don't, and yet you managed to convince these people that you do. How?"

"I'm going to seal this off," the Doctor said pointedly, gesturing to the living room behind him, "and then I'm going to meet you at the McDonald residence. We're going to talk to Julia, and I'll see if I can recover anything, and if I can't, I won't have any reason to delay fixing this, and once I'm done in here, you can spend as much time in here as you like. Understand?"

"You didn't answer my question."

"I can explain later," the Doctor promised, "when I have the time. But right now, I don't."

"Fair enough," Jane agreed, backing off a good deal more quickly than the Doctor had expected. "Come along, Lisbon." He put his hands on her shoulders and started to steer her away.

"But…." Lisbon glanced back at the Doctor and the room over which he stood guard. "What exactly—?"

"All in good time," Jane said cheerily.

The Doctor was thankful when they were gone. It gave him time to think. A wound in time would account for the bleeding, yes, and the draining of the occupants of the room, siphoning off recent, rather inconsequential memories first, to be converted to energy. At least, that's all it took from an unshielded mind now. Back when the murders had first occurred, on the other hand….

But that was another thing, those murders. He didn't know what had caused them. Not a result of the wound in time, not if he had to guess. It was probably whatever had caused the wound in the first place. He would need to find out what was lost, and whether or not anything out of place was found. Just because the wound was bleeding out, after all, it didn't mean that nothing could slip in. And if the wound was drawing on past memories to heal itself, then it was bleeding history. It was bleeding out whatever it was taking in, trying to replace what it was losing—in this case, recent history. Little things, but history nonetheless. The trouble came in defining recent. If he was lucky, it was limited to the last hundred years. If he wasn't….

He hadn't known what he had been walking into when the TARDIS had first landed. She hadn't told him, beyond hinting at some curious reverberation readings she'd been getting, and all he'd checked before heading out the doors was the time and the place. She must have noticed that something was wrong and decided he needed a challenge. Not that he blamed her. He hadn't exactly been himself lately, allowing himself to mope—well, not mope, exactly; just…reminisce, thinking about past and present and future—around the TARDIS a bit, trying to convince himself that he had done the right thing in turning Christina down. He didn't regret his decision, of course. He just…. Well, he was lonely. But that was no excuse for putting someone in danger by letting them travel with him. Still, the TARDIS had evidently had enough of his wanderings around in her corridors, muttering to himself about this and that, recalling his different companions and their reactions to one thing or another. But he'd found loads of things in there that he'd thought he'd lost. The swimming pool. The sick bay. What had once been the Central Library, before it had moved. And, among other things, one of his gardens, which he had spent the next day and a half weeding and sprucing up as best he could, but, unfortunately, he seemed to have lost his touch for horticulture.

Still. When the TARDIS had landed and encouraged him, in no uncertain terms, to go off and investigate, he'd done just that. He'd taken some readings on his sonic screwdriver, but it had kept cutting out on him, and he'd suspected that someone, nearby, had been using a hair dryer. But he'd gotten enough to know that something was wrong, and he'd followed the signal, spotty as it was, until he'd spotted the crowd. From there, it had been as simple was going up and demanding information.

And once he'd seen the room, well, then he'd noticed the bleeding. A bit of guesswork, dropping terms here and there as he tested the waters, and he'd gotten a better picture of it all. And then he'd opened his mouth and reminded the arguing humans in front of him of the situation, and things had gotten worse, quickly. He was just glad that Jane hadn't come in after Lisbon. He would have had trouble dragging the two of them out, and who knew how much would be bled out of them by the time he got them to safety. His shields had held, thankfully. Well, he hadn't, at least, spotted any gaping holes in his memories. Not that it was exactly easy to find holes that he hadn't put there, but for a quick assessment, he'd say he was fine. He hadn't been exposed for an extended period of time.

He was interrupted from his internal musings when Officer Waterer returned, bringing with him boards to block off the doorway. "I take it Agent Lisbon has finished her assessment of the scene?" he asked.

"She's seen it, yes," the Doctor replied truthfully, neglecting to say that Lisbon wouldn't, by any stretch of the term, say that she was finished her assessment. He took hold of a sheet of plywood and grinned, taking in everything else the police officer had brought. "And you have everything we need, I see. Good lad! Now, let's get to it."

Cho met Jane and Lisbon just outside the door of the McDonald residence. "Julia's not talking. It's a complete blank now. Her parents aren't eager for her to have company, so they request that we see her individually. Perhaps you can make more sense of what she says than I can. But in the meantime, I've talked to Rigsby and Van Pelt to see what they can find out about Dr. Smith."

"You don't think he's legitimate?" Jane asked, sounding amused.

"I don't know why he would be here," Cho answered simply.

"So you don't think he's legitimate?"

"Let's just say that I want confirmation."

"You don't think he's legitimate."

"Jane," Lisbon broke in, sounding exasperated. "Just…go make yourself useful. Elsewhere. I'm going to talk to Julia and her parents."

"Yes, of course. Do you know, I just realized that I'd forgotten something, back…over…." Jane trailed off, pointing in the direction of the Williams' residence.

"Don't," Lisbon said. "Don't even think about it. No," she added, as Jane opened his mouth again. "I don't care. Don't."

"But I—"

"Cho, make sure he doesn't do anything stupid."

"Sure thing, boss."

Lisbon groaned, rubbing her temples for a moment. Some day…. But not anytime soon, and dreaming of it wouldn't help. Cho and Jane had wandered off towards the school when she opened her eyes, so she turned her attention to the task at hand and rang the doorbell.

"Mr. McDonald?" she asked when the door opened. Displaying her badge, she continued, "I'm Agent Teresa Lisbon with the CBI. I'd like to speak with your daughter, if I may."

"Of course," he said, opening the door wider to allow her in. "But I don't know how much use you will find it. Julia's not been the same since…."

"I understand, Mr. McDonald, but I still need to hear what she has to say."

Lisbon may not have been a mother herself, but she knew Julia looked ill the moment she saw her. "Julia?" she asked, slowly approaching the bed with a bright smile on her face. "My name is Teresa Lisbon. I'm going to ask you a few questions, okay?"

Two large blue eyes stared at her for a moment, and then slowly the girl nodded.

"Can you tell me what you remember about the last time you were at Emma Williams's place?"

"We'd just dropped her off," Mrs. McDonald answered. "It was twenty after eight. Mark and I were going to be out of town, and Marianne, bless her, had agreed to keep her for the night, and she was going to go there for lunch as well, and—"

"I appreciate that you mean well, Mrs. McDonald, but I'm afraid that I need Julia to answer for herself."

"Oh. Yes. Of course." Mrs. McDonald looked a bit taken aback, a bit flustered, but she didn't protest.

"What did you see, Julia?" Lisbon continued.

The mouth opened, but no sound came out. Lisbon waited, and finally caught a faint whisper. "Bleeding."

"Can you tell me anything else?"

A slow shake of the head. "Only bleeding. Don't remember anything but the bleeding."

"We've spoken with her," Mr. McDonald put in. "I thought she'd fished the key out from the cubbyhole in the shed around back when no one answered the door, but when we looked later, it was still there, and Julia couldn't remember touching it. The door must have been unlocked. That's how the murderer got in, we figure. No signs of forced entry, the police said. And Jenny Blake swore up and down she didn't hear anything, and she was right next door. Ears like a bat, that woman. Not like old Jim and Ellie across the street, or Peter Mae from around the corner."

"Please, Mr. McDonald," Lisbon said. "I'd like to hear what happened from Julia herself."

"It's still bleeding," Julia muttered, restless now. Her eyes were wide and unfocussed. "The bleeding hasn't stopped. I'm still bleeding."

"Sh, sh, honey, it'll be all right," Mrs. McDonald said. She looked apologetically at Lisbon. "Dr. Brin's checked her over twice now. He thinks she's just reliving what she saw."

"Jenny was the one who found her," Mr. McDonald explained. "She was in the living room, screaming. Jenny said she was just frozen, standing there, staring, screeching like a banshee. She hadn't touched anything. Just…walked in and stopped. Jenny carried her out and phoned the police, then us."

"So much bleeding," Julia whispered, nervous fingers clutching at the blanket that covered her. "Too much bleeding."

"It's nightmares, we think," Mrs. McDonald added. "She just gets into these states. That's all she's been saying to us now. She told us more at first, when we picked her up from Jenny's, but she's just been getting worse. We can't get anything out of her now, not until the spells are over, and they're becoming more and more frequent. I'm sorry that we can't be of any more help to you."

"Need to stop the bleeding," Julia cried. "Have to stop it. Too much too soon. Stop the bleeding!"

"Hey, hey, Julia," Lisbon called softly, placing a hand on the girl's shoulder. "Don't worry, honey. I'm going to stop the bleeding, okay? Everything will be all right. I'll stop it."

Julia had focussed on her, but now she shook her head, violently. "You can't," she insisted. "You can't stop it."

"Of course I can," Lisbon said. "My friends and I will be able to stop it."

"Maybe they can," Julia said, sounding doubtful, "but you can't."

"I'm going to try, all right?"

"But it won't work. You can't."

"Why not, Julia?" Lisbon finally asked, smiling through her confusion at the child's antics. "Why do you think I can't stop it?"

The answer was simple, and just as definitive as the earlier decree. "Because you're bleeding, too."

A/N: So, just a quick thanks to everyone who reviewed! It's much appreciated, and also the reason I decided to write another chapter of this before finishing up my other story, as I had wholly intended to do…. But it wasn't a terribly long wait, so it was worth it, wasn't it?