A/N: This is a detailed side story for my Doctor Who AU 'Verse. It's 'All About' Jamie and the Doctor. How they met, what adventures they had, and finally why they were parted. It's a prequel to Doctor Who and the Great Eclipse even though I'm writing it now, and mean it to be read in conjunction with Doctor Who and the Tangled Web. This is meant for those folks with no exposure to the second Doctor. This chapter covers the serial "The Underwater Menace". Scenes that don't have either the Doctor or Jamie directly involved will not be included. Transcripts of the episodes are used as reference for dialogue, along with photonovels where the BBC has lost / destroyed them. Inspiration and Titles come from the T.a.t.u song "All About Us" that was used for the video featuring this ship. See TARDIS Parking for the links to both Transcripts and video.
OtherMeWriter, thanks for the review.

Part Two

So we'll fall, If we must, 'Cause it's you, me…

It was an interesting thing, walking into the TARDIS the first time. The Doctor never got tired of the amazed reactions he got from his companions when they entered his ship. Well, not this regeneration anyhow. And not this particular companion. He'd agreed to bring the Scottish piper, Jamie McCrimmon along with them at the request of Ben and Polly if the lad taught him the pipes. Moments before they stepped through the doorway he'd made a hasty decision and erected a shield around Jamie's mind to block the TARDIS from him. No one needs know that he's done it. Not a soul. Maybe someday he'll tell Jamie, but for now keeping him safe from the threats the psychic power might draw to him is far more important then worrying about how the lad feels about tampering with an ability he's not even aware of.

The small dark haired, twin hearted alien is set to watch the soft-faced lad as he enters and looks around. If the reddish brown haired lad is shocked by the size difference it doesn't show. Unlike others he scarcely pauses on the threshold before striding into the room, showing no signs of needing back out to look at the outside of the ship. He seems unafraid. Curious, yes, but not in the least scared. The Doctor watches him in delight. Jamie walks around the room, then stops in front of the central control bank. "What's this?" he asks as his light greenish blue eyes watch the central column rise and fall.

He grins at the lad's reactions, thrilled at how readily he's accepted this. Then again, the lad's accepted his mental touch with scarcely a blink and seems to find the exchange of mental energy between them to be rather acceptable too. He wonders how far that can go for a moment before pushing it aside. "You'll find out," the Time Lord tells him as he fiddles with the controls, once again fighting with the ship over where to go, and resisting her press to complete the imprinting process that will bind them together. He nearly misses the conversation between the companions as Ben and Polly explains that the ship travels in time as well as space because of his focus on resisting the TARDIS.

Jamie says, "Och, now, I don't believe it."

He quotes, "Nae man can tether time nor tide - Robert Burns."

"Hey? Who's Robert Burns?" the lad asks.

"Oh, I should have remembered. To you, its 1746. Robert Burns wasn't born until 1759." Jamie seems to deal with this rather well, and the Doctor knows he's smart enough to get that someone's been quoted that hasn't been born yet in his time. Maybe though he's letting the 'impossible' roll off him like rain on oilskin at the moment. Instead he wants to know what the ship is doing. "We're just beginning to land. Hold tight, everyone."

"Land?"

"Don't be scared, Jamie, it's alright, really," Polly tells him.

"I get a sort of queer feeling. See, we never know what we're going to find, do we?" Ben quips.

Gleefully the Time Lord says, "Ah! That's the fun. Stand by, here we go."

Jamie wonders what he's stepped into as the TARDIS comes to a stop, then realizes that maybe this won't be so bad. He reaches over and puts a hand on the Time Lord's arm establishing the tingling sensation for a moment, "That wasn't too bad. Lets go outside, Doctor." He catches the man's gray brown eyes and watches them twinkle for a moment. Prove to me that I'm not on the Moors anymore, huh? No matter what they find, the strange little man is more than able to deal with it, the Scottish piper figures.

The Doctor swallows. Jamie's figured out the thought speech works both ways already. And he didn't even have to teach him how. He catches the lad's hand. All right, I promise you that we're not on the Moors, my boy. Jamie sucks in his lower lip and flicks his eyes away before looking back and blushing faintly. No, Jamie. Not in here. He lets go of the hand.

Ben is roaring to go, "Yeah, Come on, Jamie, you and me first. You never know, you know." Jamie gives him a confused look. Ben explains, "We don't know what could be waiting for us out there, do we? Come on, Doctor, open up."

He consults the scanners, "Yes, I don't see why not. It looks alright to me," the Doctor said. He opens the doors then exclaims, "Wait!" This causes Ben, Polly, and Jamie to freeze, " -- For me," he laughs. Once out on the black sand beach they go through the normal guessing game of 'where-n-when' and quickly decide that they need to explore some more to determine it. What he does know is that they are not in Britain. Then he points out the volcano and the three companions go wandering off. Really he wished that Jamie had stayed. But it seems decent enough a place, no large animals or signs of danger so he figures it's alright for them to explore a bit. And this is new to Jamie, so he might as well have his curiosity stoked. In the meantime he explores the beach, finding interesting things that don't quite fit, "Mediterranean. Ooo, no, tidal sea. Funny, hasn't been fired long," he mumbles as he looks at a shard of pottery. Next thing he knows he's being jumped, bound, and hauled away up the mountainside, having not seen his assailants. He wonders if his companions are all OK as he's dragged into a cave then thrown into a cage. He lands on something firm and warm that sends a pleasant buzz through him.

"That's all we needed," Ben says.

"So they caught you too," inquires Jamie. He looks up at the lad, noticing that he's more or less slung across him, in his lap, his hands against the bare flesh of his legs. The intense tingle of the contact rather takes his breath away. He turns his head and forces his face away from Ben and Polly's line of sight. Jamie shifts to regain his eye contact. The Doctor knows his cheeks are flushed, rather brightly. The piper openly flirts with him shifting so his hands are touching up in his thigh above his knee. Oh… He closes his eyes and lets the sensations Jamie's feeling from the energy flow wash over him. Oh, this is just… too much. He lets the throbbing he's feeling build for a moment more and then lifts, with difficulty, his fingers off the boy's skin.

Bloody Tease. Jamie thinks to him.

I've no idea what you're implying.

Oh, yes you do. But I suppose you have your reasons, we're not exactly alone here.

He's still having trouble breathing. Or maybe it's the descent of the cage they are in. He gets the flush under control and looks back at the piper. Jamie smiles at him and winks. Suddenly he remembers that he's just assumed Polly was there. He wonders if she is.

Ben complains about the rapid air movement and then Polly wonders, "Where are we going?"

"That, we shall find out very soon," he sits up a bit, or tries to, being that he's tied. But to do so, means touching Jamie again, skin to skin. This makes the lad shutter, and the Doctor sees fireworks behind his eyelids for the few moments that he's firmly applying his weight to the lad's leg. Jamie twists to his side, dumping the Time Lord's hands against the bars of the floor. After a breathless moment of recovery he replies to Polly's comment that they've gone a very long way down and they are still going, "Yes, we must be below sea level already."

Jamie sits up and leans against his back. "It's difficult to breathe," Jamie wheezes near his ear. The hot puffs of air makes the Doctor tremble.

"This cage. I don't feel very well." Polly adds.

He is, oddly, unaffected by the descent alone. His breathlessness is caused by the lad against his back. Now he remembers how much trouble he had breathing before -- Oh that's right, he's got better lungs now that he's regenerated than the humans do, he needs less oxygen, and his blood does not adsorb gas it can't use. Then there's a sudden shift in the pressure, "Don't be frightened anybody. If we pass out it's compressed nitrogen. It's called caissons disease." Ben asks Polly to try to slip her ties, which she does and then she manages to get Jamie undone, who gets the Doctor untied while she is freeing Ben. One by one the humans pass out. The Doctor takes several deep breaths of the air, then turns to Jamie, makes sure his mouth is open, and carefully places his own mouth over the lad's. He uses his own lungs to stabilize and maintain the boy's blood and dissolved gas into a ratio that won't kill him. Why was he so moved to do this with Jamie? … well it scarcely bore thinking on, really.

"Come on lad," he whispers, as he caresses the piper's arm and repeats the process. The elevator stops. He sighs as the decompression chamber they've ended up begins working. He lays back and closes his eyes. "Oh," he moans. Did that just qualify as a kiss? Surely not. But then, why does he want to do it again. He catches Jamie's wrist and feels his pulse through the jolt of the energy that he's coming to think of as natural. He does not want to think about what prompted him to act in such a way.

Shortly thereafter Ben woke up, "What's this? Polly? Jamie?" Jamie clutches the Doctor's arm before he can pull his hand away and moans, part of his mind wondering about the faint taste of honey on his lips. Ben pushes his shoulder, "Come on man, rise and shine."

"You disturb the dead," Jamie complains. He'd been having the most pleasant dream of clover and honey and summer storms across the moors, and lips on his own that seemed to be giving him breath instead of taking it away…

"Oh you're not dead, you just got a touch of the submariners', that's all." Ben then looks around, ignoring Jamie's questions, "This must be some sort of compression chamber."

The Time Lord gets his arm back finally and begins consulting his notebook/diary to see if he's encountered this before, or anything similar. But it is Polly that produces evidence of the date, sometime after 1968, when she shows them a dated piece of pottery. Jamie hasn't quite got the 'travels in time' bit down yet in spite the evidence in front of him. One thing it confirms is that they are on Earth, at least.

Then they notice the waiting guards. They try a number of languages to communicate, but in the end are ordered through motion to proceed from the room. The first location they are taken to provides the Doctor with some astonishing clues… It's a dining hall, and there's a feast of dishes made of plankton. He knows that they are likely dealing with a possibly unstable scientist, genius, but perhaps stark raving mad. Although it's often said that the line between precocity and insanity is a razor thin one. What he uncovers is that there's more than one insane loon about. The head of the priests is against the scientist who has the backing of the political figures that matter. To top it off, the priesthood thinks they are there to be sacrificed to Amdo, their goddess, during their festival of the vernal equinox. Who is Amdo? He's never heard of her. Ah well. He knows who has provided the food, and that's going to have to be enough. He does manage to get a message promising a great secret to Professor Zaroff, the scientist responsible for food supplies here.

They are taken to the temple and set to be sacrificed, and the entire while he feels that Jamie has total faith in his ability to get them out of this. He's personally not so sure. All he can hope for is that the fellow he knew of would be interested in a secret promised. And with luck, it is his note to Zaroff that saves them in the nick of time. He uses this to get his friends out of becoming shark food and ends up separated from them as the Professor takes him back to his lab because he's amused by the Doctor's antics. The others he learns are sent off to the mines and or to be converted into farming slaves with fake gills.

He's able to not only discover where the TARDIS has landed them, being Atlantis much to his amazement, but what the exact insane plot being pushed is. He also learns that there are enough individuals who wish to sabotage Zaroff that he has plenty of helpers. One, Ara, he sends off to rescue Polly before she becomes converted into a water breather, after he bumps into the controls for the electric output to disrupt the operation. Then he finds that Zaroff considers him a pet of sorts… Drat. But the advantage is that he finds out Zaroff plans to drain the ocean into the core of the planet, in an effort to 'raise' the lost kingdom. And he wonders if his TARDIS brought him here on purpose, because he knows the earth didn't explode in 1968 or 1970, so something must stop this plot. Now he just needs to figure out how.

The first bit of information that he gathers is that the farmers are slave labor, and converted human shipwreck survivors. They grow cheap plentiful food from the sea. But why do are they worked so? He escapes in an attempt to speak with the political leader, and ends up making another ally in the process. Then he learns that Zaroff's food process produces supplies that cannot be stored, meaning that the mealtimes are set and last just twenty minutes. In fact, there's a constant stream of food coming in, going bad, and being discarded. His speech to the leader about the impending 'raising' doesn't go over well and he finds himself back in the scientist's clutches. Little else has changed. Well, except for the fact that he's no longer Zaroff's pet. Instead he's to be sacrificed after all.

But then… He really needs to tell Polly that she's fantastic one of these days. She engineers his rescue. They have a joyful reunion, and he's most happy to see Jamie again. Quite frankly, Jamie seems rather happy to see him again too. He pats the lad on the shoulder giving in to his urge to establish the flow of energy again with the boy. This seems to settle him, and he smiles. They rest for a bit in a hidden chamber behind the idol to confer with the priest and two escaped miners.

"The point is, where do we go from here?" Polly asks.

"Aye, tell us, Doctor," Jamie bids him.

He looks at them and the others besides, "Our course is plain. We must attack Zaroff. He has gone mad. He's bent on destroying the whole world. We've only a short while in which to stop it." He reveals that the food supplies, while plentiful, cannot be stored, and thus every meal is fresh and there are no leftovers. Getting the converted farmer-slaves to stop working is given to the pair that Jamie and Ben escaped the mines with.

Then the Doctor sets up the rest of them to kidnap the Professor in an effort to stop him. This plan proceeds and is successful, sort of. Well… They discover that the impending explosion is closer to happening than they thought. Ben, Jamie and the Doctor set off back to the lab just to make sure that the threat of the explosion occurring even if Zaroff is not there is a real one. After nearly getting lost the Doctor reluctantly sends Jamie back to Polly, but before he can get far the priest stumbles into the tunnel, wounded. In the confusion, the Professor gets away. Jamie ends up with Polly with Ara, Ben and the Doctor end up rescuing the head of the underwater kingdom before returning to their safe spot. The wounded are left there.

A new plan is devised, although Jamie and Polly are not there to hear it. The last act of desperation is his plan to flood the air dome. He does not know if the boy can swim, and that bothers him almost as much as the destruction and death that he's about to engineer. He hates to do it, but it's that or the world. So they set back out, some to warn the locals, and he and Ben to mess up plans. They head to the generating station, where he starts doing some random destruction. Then they turn on the sea wall. He hopes to Time herself that Jamie and Polly realize what is going on and flee.

"No one, I repeat, no one will leave his place. Everything goes according to schedule, except that the time of the big detonation has been advanced. The whole project will be activated from this control point. That is all until zero minus five," Zaroff orders in his desperation. Not that it matters. The Doctor convinces all his help and guards that this is the end and they run off. It's the high priest who in the end stops the button from being pushed as the ocean forces first Ben then the Time Lord to escape the lab.

He wants to go back and save Zaroff, who is, in his opinion, the greatest scientific mind since Leonardo Di Vinci. Ben doesn't let him. The delay means that they must run and climb all the faster to the surface. It's a race against the floodwaters on their tail. All along the shore survivors are emerging from fissures in the rock as they do. Ben finally asks the question that he's been avoiding, "Doctor, what about Polly?"

The Doctor listens, puts a finger on his lips and points. He and Ben set off that way.

Polly and Jamie hear the echo. "It can be anyone," she says sadly.

But Jamie feels the little Doctor fellow becoming closer, "Wait."

"Boo!"

Jamie turns and sees him, "You?!" He almost hugs the odd little man. Instead he manages to contain himself with a hearty clap on his shoulder. Something snaps back into a comfortable distance where it had been strained before.

He's answered with a broad grin, "Me?"

The Piper has never been so happy to see the Doctor as he is at this moment, "We thought you were dead."

"What?" He looks insulted. "Polly, good to see. Come on, you two," the Doctor slings an arm around each of them and steers them toward the TARDIS, Ben trailing behind.

He does double-check his mental shield around Jamie before opening the door, but quite frankly he wants away from here. He ushers them inside, "Right. Off we go, go -- into the wide blue yonder, as someone was once heard to remark."

"Hoo-ray," cheers Polly.

Ben nods, "Yeah, I'm not sorry to be out of that place. Poo, Jamie you don't half stink of fish!"

The Scotsman looks at Ben from where he's taken up post to watch what the Doctor is doing, "Oh, you want to take a wee sniff of yourself, Benjamin." He grins over at the Doctor; "He's not exactly a bonnie bunch of heather." This makes the sailor laugh.

Looking over at him, the Time Lord can feel the radiant joy off Jamie. It's humbling, "You sound very happy, Jamie."

"Oh aye, Doctor, I am now. You know I never thought I'd say this, but well it's great," Jamie can feel the warmth of the TARDIS at their safe return, enveloping him in a glow of affection. He's not sure why he feels this way, but it hardly matters. He wonders if the Doctor feels it, and figures that he must.

"What is?" Polly asks.

Jamie ponders that she doesn't feel it, "All this." He gestures around the room. "I'll never know what makes it go, mind you, but, well at least I feel safe in here." The lad catches the Doctor's eye; "It's only the wee things outside that are, well, alarming." The Doctor picks up his acceptance of the ship's overturns. He frowns and turns her down again when she suggests that they complete the imprinting and bonding process. Jamie gives him a look and the thought, Why are you fighting it, don't you trust her? She is your ship after all.

He frowns, I'll – think about that, lad. Jamie makes a slight nod. "You've got a point there," he says out loud.

"Yeah, you can say that again," Ben agrees.

Jamie tries to give the Doctor just a bit more to think on, "It's a fact, though, Doctor? You can't exactly control the TARDIS?"

"Control it? Course I can control it." He tries the hurt expression. It doesn't work.

Jamie's taken her side of the conflict, "No, no what I meant was, can you not exactly make it go where you mean it to?" And is it possible that if you gave into what she wants you might be able to?

Hush, boy. You don't know what it is demanding of me.

Demanding? Nay, she loves you, you stubborn old man.

Impossible.

Then prove it. Control her, make her go where you want to go.

Oh I could. He thinks before switching to speech, "If I wanted to. It's just that I've never wanted to." The Doctor fixes Jamie with a grumpy frown. Ben and Polly both take up taunting him. "Right! Just for that, I'll show you. Now, where shall we go? I know, let's go to Mars." He begins wrestling with the TARDIS for control, finally overriding her goals and forcing a time and place into the console. Narrowing his eyes he toggles a switch and plays with the various controls, serious about going where he wants to go, if only to impress Jamie…

The TARDIS, however, laughs at him in his mind, fudges the coordinates, and makes some creative interpretations of the input data. She lurches. Scolding him for his headstrong insistence on not bonding with her, she forces them into where she can see they need to go. Polly screams, "Doctor, what's happening?"

"Can't you do something?" asks Ben.

Jamie's on the floor, listening to the ship scold the Doctor in his head, wondering why she's not speaking to him too, even though he can feel her, and he's laughing. The entire thing is just too funny. Fortunately he's being ignored.

"Do something?" The Doctor rounds on Ben and Polly, "I seem to have done something." The ship flings them about, pressing its need to bond at him again. The Time Lord throws up his mental shields against her and yells at his companions, "It's all your fault, wanting me to tamper with the steering." She jerks and rolls, angered at his locking her out of his mind so strongly, "I'm very sorry, everybody, but I'm afraid the TARDIS is out of control!" Verity shakes and lurches again, trying to knock him to the floor so she can get back into his head. The human female screams as she's pitched to the ground. Damn stubborn Time Lord!