Warnings: References to torture, blood, references to surgical procedures

Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who

Chapter 2 – Blood On Steel

Two hours. That's how long he had been missing: two hours. How much of that time had been spent sitting on the floor of this dark and dingy cell, his only restraint being the knife plunged through his pinion and stuck into the wall behind him?

Rose didn't know what to do. She had no medical training, she didn't know if Jack did – and, even if he did, she and the Doctor were separated from the ex-Time Agent by a thick metal door cutting the corridor outside in two – and the only thing that came to mind when she saw that brutal dagger was 'don't pull it out!' She wasn't sure exactly how the system of veins, arteries and capillaries worked inside a wing, but judging on the steady flow of blood from the wound, she was sure that there was every chance that the Doctor would bleed to death if she tried to remove it.

But if she couldn't pull the knife out, then what was she supposed to do?

"Take it… out of the wall," the Doctor told her, his chest rising and falling deeply with the effort of drawing in enough oxygen to speak. "Not… the wing. Just the… wall…" His eyes began to drift shut again, but Rose couldn't have him falling asleep. Not only was she sure that loss of consciousness was disastrous in situations such as these, but she was fairly certain that she wouldn't be able to support all his weight long enough to get back to the TARDIS.

Hoping that a shock would force him back into reality, she pushed herself up off of the ground and walked around the tip of the wing, curling her fingers around the bright red secondary feathers and gently moving the wing out of the way, so that she could reach the knife set into the wall.

From this angle, Rose could see that the knife was bigger than she had originally thought: there was a gap of about an inch between the Doctor's wing and the wall, filled with the gleaming blade. Yet the dim light pouring into the cell from the corridor outside was not shining off of a silver metal formed into a sharp weapon: it was gleaming off of the red substance coating the outside of the blade, a thick covering of blood that was itself dripping onto the floor behind the Doctor.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped closer to the knife, trapped between the wing and the wall, and reached over the top of the feathery appendage to grasp the handle of the knife protruding from the other side. She placed the palm of her other hand on the back of the wing, and gently began to move. She pulled at the handle of the knife while pushing against the back of the wing, so that the wing moved with the knife and the weapon stayed buried in the limb.

The Doctor cried out in pain, hopefully now fully awake, as the tip of the knife was yanked out of the wall, but the rest was still hanging from his wing.

Rose stood up quickly, walking out of the small corridor between the wall and the wing and circumnavigating the Doctor's body until she reached the other side. His eyes were now fully open as he gasped in pain, though what little colour he had had in his face before had now almost completely disappeared.

She knelt down by his right side, wrapping an arm around his middle and holding out her palm.

"Give me the sonic," she told him, and he did – his movements were slow and laborious, but eventually she had the metal cylinder in her hand. The Doctor reached around her waist, and – with no small amount of effort – she heaved them both to their feet. The Doctor was a little unsteady at first, and Rose stumbled slightly as the weight of his right wing began pressing down on her back. The left, she noticed, drooped sadly by his side, the feathers scraping against the dirty ground.

The trip from the TARDIS to the cell had taken a few minutes at most, but the return trip was much longer, the pair of them shuffling down the empty corridors one step at a time. When they reached the door that had separated Rose from Jack, Rose lifted the sonic, filling the corridor with the familiar buzzing sound until there was the click of the lock and the door slid open to allow them to pass.

The TARDIS had been parked in a store room, filled with crates with indeterminate contents that Rose and the Doctor had to navigate to reach the familiar blue box. Jack was nowhere to be seen; Rose could only hope that he had had the sense to wait inside for them to return. Once they reached the door, Rose lifted her hand as high as she could, so that the sonic was visible through the window above the door, and pressed the button on the side.

Inside the TARDIS, Jack either heard or saw the sonic, for a moment later, the door was wrenched open.

"What happened?" the familiar American accent reached Rose's ears, but her gaze was fixed on the floor as she sagged beneath the Doctor's weight. Remembering that Jack couldn't see the Doctor's wings and therefore had no idea why the Time Lord looked so sickly and pale, she desperately wanted to explain to him what was going on, but found that she was far too tired to do so.

Jack stepped out of the way as the two of them stumbled into the control room, closing the door behind them when they were sufficiently out of the way. They had only taken two steps onto the ramp on the other side of the door when the Doctor's knees buckled beneath him, and Rose, unable to hold up his entire weight, crashed to the ground beside him. She managed to prevent them falling completely to the floor, but she couldn't hold back a cry of surprise and pain as her knees collided with the metal grating on the floor.

Jack was by her side in seconds, offering to take over from her. The Doctor rested his forehead on her shoulder, his breathing deep and laboured. Even through the shoulder of her top, she could feel the perspiration on his forehead as the agony coursed through him. She had never seen the Doctor like this, for he had always seemed to brush pain off rather quickly (physical pain, at least), but she supposed that he had had nothing to do for the last two hours but succumb to the pain.

She turned to Jack, who was now kneeling next to her. "Can you take him to the infirmary?"

Jack nodded, as Rose moved out of the way and he took her place. Heaving the Doctor to his feet, he stopped only to ask of Rose, "What are you going to do?"

Rose pushed herself to her feet and gestured to the control panel. "I'll get us out of here. Park us on Pluto or something. Just… somewhere safe." In the growing absence of adrenaline, she was beginning to feel absolutely exhausted. Yet she knew that she couldn't crash right now: she had to get them somewhere safe, and then she would have to sort out the Doctor's wing – because Jack couldn't see them, and the Doctor was in no position to open his eyes to them.

As Jack took the Doctor off to the infirmary, Rose trudged up to the control panel and stared at the vast array of buttons and dials before her. They looked as confusing as ever, but she was sure that she had seen the Doctor operate them enough times to be able to take them somewhere far away from this planet and that dreaded cell. At least, that's what she hoped.

Taking a deep breath, she interlocked her fingers and held out her hands so that her palms faced outwards from her, stretching out her arms and cracking her knuckles. Then she sprang into action.

Putting everything that she had remembered over the past weeks and months into practice, Rose rushed around the centre console, pushing buttons and pressing dials and flicking switches. She wasn't one hundred per cent sure that she knew what she was doing, but the familiar screeching sound began to fill the TARDIS as the blue tubes in the central cylinder began to move, and suddenly they were off – hopefully somewhere as safe as could be.

Once the noises that she had always associated with flying the TARDIS began to quieten down, she wondered briefly where they had landed. They were no longer in the Time Vortex – of that she was certain – but just exactly where they were in all of time and space was a little less obvious. She rushed down the ramp to the front door, wrenching it open…

To be faced with the vast expanse of open space: dark matter as far as the eye could reach, broken only by the occasional light of a far-away star some unimaginable distance away. There were no planets or spaceships for light years around – and if that wasn't safe, then she didn't know what was.

Breathing a soft sigh of relief, Rose closed the door and turned on her heel, staring passed the centre console to the door that led to the rest of the TARDIS – somewhere beyond that door, Jack would be laying the unconscious, prone form of the Doctor on a bed in the infirmary, still clueless as to what misfortune had befallen the Time Lord.

Walking as fast as she could, she reached the infirmary in less than a minute. Jack was still standing just outside the door, looking through to the Doctor on the bed with one hand on his hip and the other running worriedly through his hair. When he heard the sound of Rose's approaching footsteps, he turned to face her, his expression creased with concern and confusion.

"What's wrong with him?" he asked, still staring at the Doctor as he slumbered on, far away from the pain of the knife sticking out of his pinion.

Rose knew that she didn't have enough time to explain the situation to the ex-Time Agent – not to mention the fact that she wasn't entirely sure that the Doctor would want her to. He had not told her about his wings until she had discovered them for herself, and she had often wondered in the weeks that had passed since then if he would have told her at all if it had not been for their Waybuh hunt in the hall of mirrors.

Besides, Jack would be of no help to the Doctor at this moment if he couldn't see what was wrong in the first place, and if Rose didn't fix the hole in his limb soon, he was likely to bleed out, for the knife wasn't doing a terribly good job of plugging the wound.

"It's… complicated," Rose sighed, looking up at Jack's face to catch his eye. "You'll just have to trust me for now. I can fix this." 'I think,' her mind added, though she chose not to vocalise that part.

Jack looked over at the Doctor one last time, then down at Rose. He must have seen the determination within her at that moment, despite her growing exhaustion, for he nodded in response.

"Okay," he said, taking a step back from the door so that Rose had enough room to get by. The blonde pushed her way through the door, forcing herself to look at the knife sticking out from the Doctor's wing as it hung off of the side of the bed. She quickly retrieved another bench that was sitting idly near the wall, carefully lifting the feathery appendage so that it was lying across the surface of the bench rather than hanging limply.

She gathered thread, a needle, gloves, and several other silver instruments that she wasn't sure of the function of but she didn't want to leave out in case they came in handy later, grabbed hold of the dagger's handle, and pulled.

The blade slid smoothly out of the hole that it had created, releasing a large globule of blood that spilled across the black feathers, marring them with a liquid that she now saw was darker than the red secondary feathers at the top of the wings.

She knew she had to move fast. Quickly getting the needle and thread ready, she began wiping the blood away so that she could see the inch-long gash in the limb and begin to sow it up. Instantly, the tips of the fingers of her white, latex gloves were bright red and slippery, but she didn't stop working even when she developed an almost blinding headache. She was vaguely aware of the heavy sound of pacing footsteps outside the door, but she ignored them.

She wasn't sure how long she had been working when she ran a wipe over the stitches one last time, ridding the feathers of the last drops of blood to be spilled. There was no more oozing from the gash – on the front or the back of the wing – and Rose considered her work done.

As she turned away to peel off her now almost completely crimson gloves, the headache that had been plaguing her almost since she had begun her ministrations transformed into a full-on migraine. Her vision was suddenly filled with a blinding white light, and – when it disappeared – all she could see was the ceiling, from her new supine position.

"What was that?" Jack called through the door, his voice muffled by the metal pane separating them, but loud enough for Rose to detect the near panic within it. "Rose? Rose!"

The world was now fading away from her, the darkness consuming her as her vision darkened. She was barely aware of her eyes slipping closed, and the last thing that she heard before she faded away was Jack calling her name.