AN: Thank you to everyone who reviewed, followed, faved, etc.! I've tried to send thank yous to all of you who left reviews, but if you left a review anonymously or followed/faved the story, let me just thank you all here right now! You're the best!
I apologize for the short delay in posting. I had wanted to get this up before tonight's episode (which more or less canonballed certain parts of my last chapter in regards to the Icewarrior), but this ended up being a longer chapter than anticipated. Once you read it, hopefully you'll see why I didn't really want to break it up. It's pretty tense. :)
Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Don't own, but don't I just wish I did.
Previously in Do No Harm: Clara bids the Doctor goodnight after a full day of adventuring and heads home to dream of TARDISes and stars and sonic screwdrivers and anti-grav motorbikes. The Doctor follows the clues to the Cybermen hiding out in Heathrow Terminal 5, who're trying to hack the frequent flier system and give away free business class tickets. No, okay, not really. But that's sorta what happened. Sorta. You get the point.
Only a few minutes after exiting the pub by Clara's house, the Doctor landed at Heathrow Terminal 5. When he opened the door to the TARDIS, he was uncommonly delighted to find that it had parked itself out of the way inside an oversized storage closest. Of course, had his newest companion accompanied him on this trip, he would have assured her that he had maneuvered the disguised space ship with skill and precision. The reality was, in his relationship with his ship, he most definitely did not wear the pants. Metaphorically speaking, because ships didn't wear pants. Well, not usually. At least not in this dimension. Except for the Tesselectors, they almost always wore pants. Well, at any rate, the TARDIS didn't wear pants.
On second thought, maybe he wasn't so delighted. Taking a closer look around the room, he noticed a disconcerting number of empty body bags stacked on shelves next to medical supplies. He realized that the TARDIS must have parked them inside of a closet stocked with emergency supplies. Though the Doctor was hardly superstitious – no, he was certainly too old and too intelligent for that – he also knew that the universe had an odd sense of humor. Macabre, even.
He didn't like macabre. Not when he was carrying a suspect infostamp in his pocket while hot on the trail of the Cybermen.
"Body bags!" He exclaimed to the empty room, which was almost certainly listening. "Why couldn't it be shelves full of chocolates, or, or, or fluffy towels?" With a scolding finger he turned back towards his ship. "No. You landed us in a room full of body bags!" He scowled accusingly. "Here we are, off on another adventure, following clues that are almost certainly a trap!" He popped his "p"—usually a definitive sign of his nerves or agitation. "And you park us in a room for dead people?"
The air in the closet hung heavy as he glared at his ship. The TARDIS loomed over him, and he imagined it glared back. Finally, it gave an admonishing groan, dismissing him.
"No, you grow up." He gave a dignified sniff and turned towards the closet door. He knew he was being harsh on his beloved, sexy ship, but there would be time enough to soothe over their little lovers' spat when he returned. It was his nerves, really, that were getting to him.
From the moment he and Clara had watched the data on the infostamp, the Doctor had suspected the Cybermen of trying to lure him in. It was too easy, as though they had sent him an engraved invitation exclaiming "We Are Here" while begging him to stop by for tea. That was why he had sent Clara home. With people's lives almost certainly in danger, there was no question that he would investigate the stamp and its contents, even if it was a trap, but he would do so without risking his newest companion in the process.
Yet again he considered how fragile Clara seemed to him, more than Amy and Rory, more than Martha, Donna, Rose, or any of his past companions had ever seemed to him, at least when they had first been traveling together. Of course, inevitably, he would learn just how fragile and short human life could be when they left him, or he failed them. He had loved Amy and Rory with his whole hearts, but they had never seemed more impossibly precious, more irreplaceable than in that final moment when he realized that he would never see them again.
Clara was different. She was alive. She was here—vitally, dynamically so. Well, maybe not right here, at the very moment. She was at home now, safely tucked away in her room, dreaming of tomorrow's adventures and its endless possibilities. Point being, the Doctor hadn't lost her yet, but every time he looked at her he found himself reminded of her two previous selves who he had let down.
Well, he did say that the universe had a macabre sense of humor, didn't he?
Closing the door to the large storage room, he walked confidently into what turned out to be the main throughway on the ground level of Terminal 5. It was late evening, and it appeared that several flights from New York and Sao Paulo had just landed. The terminal was beautifully in-flux, a delicious medley of languages and accents running cross-purposes all over the throughway. For just a moment, the Doctor allowed himself a deep breath as he soaked in the rich complexity of the human species. He had forgotten how much he loved airports—really, he should visit them more often—they were such wonderful, liminal spaces, full of people just on the verge of adventure, of new and exciting experiences, and yet so full of mundane familiarities: tea, shopping, and yes, even chocolates. People were such delightful paradoxes.
He turned, looking for someone to hug, or to kiss the cheek of, as he reveled in the moment, but instead he found exactly what he should have been looking for all along: a clue. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a Cybermat darting in-between display cases outside the Harrods' store front.
"Really now, you're making this too easy." He tutted more to himself than anyone else as he switched back into sleuthing mode and pulled out his sonic screwdriver, scanning for unusual energy readings or other telltale signs of the cyborg menace. The entire set up smelled of something rank, as far as he was concerned, and yet he felt as if his hands were tied. If this was a trap, he could hardly walk away and abandon all these humans to the Cybermen's schemes. He needed to know more, more about what they were planning—well, besides the obvious. World domination pretty well summed up every Cyberman's endgame. Every time, all the time. They weren't very diverse in that respect.
Tracking the Cybermat, he broke into a brisk walk and then a full-out jog down the terminal throughway in order to keep up with the metal silverfish. After three right turns, down an escalator, and a left, the sonic began to register signs of large energy disbursements in short waves, almost as if someone were trying to send out a message in Morse Code. Modulating the screwdriver, the Doctor quickly traced the source of the energy bursts to the basement floor below.
At last letting the Cybermat disappear out of sight, he switched tack and instead started looking for a service stairwell that would lead him downstairs, making sure to keep his screwdriver locked onto the energy pulse. After trying several doors that led to office spaces and small storage closets, and after one particularly close call with an airport security guard to whom he had had to furnish psychic paper credentials assuring the man that he was conducting a routine safety inspection for the BAA Chief Constable, the Doctor at last found a service stairwell to the lower levels.
If he had seen one English industrial basement he had seen them all. Truly. It was amazing how similar basements were all across England. He could be investigating the back storage of Henrik's, hiding in the lower levels of the Royal Hope Hospital, or chasing aliens across the basement at H.C. Clements – it didn't matter. Without fail he would find himself walking down a long, dark corridor beneath steam pipes and ventilation shafts, and always toward something sinister. Really, he didn't like basements. There was never enough space.
At the end of this particular long, dark hallway the Doctor followed the energy pulse, turned a corner, and found himself in what was once, most likely, the steam pipe distribution room. "Once" being the operative word. Now it housed of a den of cyborg technology. At the center of the room stood the computer hub the Doctor and Clara had seen the Cybermen building in the infostamp footage. From the central hub, he observed a veritable rat's nest of wiring and fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the floor and walls.
A glimmer of sliver caught his peripheral vision and he turned to watch the Cybermat disappear beneath the central terminal.
"The rat returns to its nest." The Doctor slowly walked closer, beginning to circle the hub as he contemplated its purpose. "But where are your masters? Have they left you to tend the roost on your own? Collecting more energy for whatever it is they've left here in the basement?"
No answer. He hummed to himself contemplatively and stepped closer to the computer tower. At the same moment, he felt the infostamp in his pocket begin to vibrate.
"What? What's this?" Pulling the stamp out, he quickly inspected it, noting that it now pulsed with the same frequency as the hub's energy discharges. "Are you a message?" He shook his head quickly, looking back and forth from the small metal cylinder to the larger computer, distractedly tapping the stamp against his other hand. "No, no, no. There's no pattern nor syntax, no language—even rudimentary—to the pulses. You're nothing but energy, empty energy!"
And then a new idea occurred to him.
"Ah!" He changed the settings on his screwdriver to a broad spectrum sweep and scanned the computer core. As computers went, the impressive structure before him was little more than a giant energy sink, drawing power from across the whole terminal and dispersing it at regular intervals back into the building's superstructure. "You really are empty energy, aren't you? Albeit, on a massive scale, but empty all the same. No wonder you need a Cybermat to babysit you."
"That is correct." An all too familiar voice answered from behind. He hated the voices of the Cybermen, their squashed, electronic tones hit his ears in all the wrong ways. It struck the Doctor that perhaps he could reprogram one of them with an autotune; it might be an improvement. Turning, he noted the small army of Cybermen teleporting into the room around him.
"Hello!" He cheerily greeted the Cyberman who had first addressed him. "I got your note." He waived the infostamp at his audience. "But you really didn't have to go to all this trouble. A simple welcome, and maybe some tea and jammie dodgers would have sufficed. You just can't go wrong with jammie dodgers."
Really, nothing killed the Doctor's humor more than playing to a dead audience like the Cybermen. He supposed a small, mechanical laugh was too much to hope for. On second thought, no, he didn't want to know what it sounded like when Cybermen laughed.
"Right. Well, now that you're here, I best be on my way. Things to do, people to see." He started to move towards the central computer. "But perhaps you could answer a question for me first, a small, tiny inquiry if you will?"
The stoic tin soldiers met him with more silence. Not for the first time did he consider the advantages of traveling with companions, ones who could laugh at his jokes, or—as he had most recently found with Clara—join him in his banter as he played for time.
"This computer that you've built here, this computer that you have gone to some rather extraordinary measures to draw my attention to, well, you see, the thing is..." His voiced trailed off as he surveyed the ring of Cybermen around him, his eyebrows raised critically. "It doesn't do anything."
"That is incorrect." The lead Cyberman stepped forward. "The computer's function is to attract the Doctor."
"Right." He rolled his eyes as his adversary restated the obvious. "Got that. But why?"
The Cyberman took yet another step forward, this time flanked by two more of the cyborgs.
"It is well-known to the Cybermen that the Doctor will appear when the Earth humans are threatened." Oh dear, was he really so terribly predictable? "The Doctor also shares the Earth humans' weakness of curiosity. We have built a trap for the Doctor, a trap he cannot refuse." Yes, he supposed he was exactly that predictable.
"Hmm." The Doctor furrowed his brow, as if deep in contemplation, before switching the setting on his screwdriver, quickly shorting out the central computer and then pointing it directly at the Cyberman. "I've changed my mind. I don't care what you're doing here, the computer's broken, and I'm about to reverse your teleport and send you all packing." He felt the tension gaining in his voice, mirroring his own building anxiety at having his suspicion confirmed, while the Cyberman's indirect response only served to confounded him further. He was missing something, he was certain, but he couldn't wait to figure it out any longer.
"You will not succeed. We have the advantage."
"Just try me." He remodulated his screwdriver again and began advancing, successfully sending back two of the other Cyberman. The leader of the Cybermen remained impassive, which was not at all a remarkable feat, the Doctor realized, when one had no facial muscles. "The thing about a trap is, is it still a trap if the quarry knows he's being hunted?
"Yes." The Cyberman monotoned, unmoving despite the Doctor's advance. "The Doctor has another weakness."
The Doctor gave a moment's pause, and wondered if it was possible for cyborgs to be smug. The tin soldier certainly sounded smug, but perhaps that was just the Doctor projecting his own sense of foreboding.
"Oh?"
"The girl."
The Doctor froze, clenching his screwdriver with a white fist. With those two words it was if all the air had been sucked out of the room all at once. Lead, hot lead. That was all he felt. Tons and tons, and buckets and buckets of hot lead poured, steaming all through his system, frying his nerves. How dare they!
"You didn't." There was violence in his whisper, all pretense of humor now gone.
"The girl is the future." The Cyberman answered in his monotone and turned. "You will follow."
Swallowing the rock-hard lump that had formed in his throat, the Doctor bridled the rage building inside of him, not that it was easy, and reluctantly fell in-step with the Cyberman as it led them into an adjacent room.
She was there, laying crumpled and unconscious in the middle of the damp, concrete floor, the dark light of the basement making her already pale skin appear ghostly and ashen.
"Clara!" He ran forward, past the Cyberman, and knelt down at her side, inspecting her with his hands and his screwdriver all at once. "What have you done to her?" He demanded, turning to look at the cyborg while gingerly cradling the sleeping woman's head in his hands. There was a small incision, already healing, on her neck just below her left ear. The screwdriver indicated that they had implanted some sort of sub-dermal node at the incision site, though to what end he couldn't tell. The sight of it made his blood boil. "I asked, what have you done to her?"
"Nothing yet." A new voice entered the room; it was the security guard the Doctor had run into earlier when he had been searching for a way into the basement. "Not really, at least." The young man's blue eyes smiled coldly at the Doctor. "They just gave her a bit of hardware to make her compatible." That last word rolled off the man's tongue with a bounce, highlighting his slight northern accent and making the Doctor cringe as he watched him step nearer. Then the guard stopped and leaned down, showing him his own neck and the small scar that ran down it just below his ear. "They've done it to a number of us here at the terminal. It makes us better."
The Doctor looked down at Clara and then back to the security guard before glaring at the Cyberman.
"You undo this. You undo it now."
"We cannot. She has been made compatible." The Cyberman stepped forward and raise his arm, pointing at Clara. As if on cue, the Doctor watched with horror as Clara's whole body convulsed, her head shaking in his hands, before her eyes shot open. A short-lived wave of relief swept through him as he noticed her eyes were lucid, her pupils reactive as they focused on him, searching his face. She did not have the glazed look of someone under the Cybermen's thrall.
"Doctor?" She called his name so quietly, he doubted anyone else in the room could hear it. He smiled down at her and indulged the impulse to kiss her forehead. Precious. Impossible. Fragile. "The Cybermen-"
"Shh, shhh." He hushed her, sparing a brief glance at the rest of the room. "I know."
"But they-" With a sudden movement she push herself up, beyond his supportive embrace, and clutched her head. "They did something to me." She stared at him, wide-eyed. "What did they do to me?"
He bit his lip and pulled her in for a hug, as much to reassure himself as to reassure her.
"Clara, I don't know what they've done, not yet, but I promise you that I will fix it." He whispered against her ear. Inside, he was raging against himself. In the back of his head he could hear little Amy Pond, her voice level and unforgiving, piercing him: Only make promises you can keep, Raggedy Man. You promised.
Clara sighed at his reassurance, hugging him back.
"Right, well then." She pushed away, nodding at the security guard. "In that case, who's he? And do you have a plan?" She turned back to the Doctor, bestowing him with one of her incandescent smiles. "And you might have warned me something like this was going to-"
"Enough." The cold voice of the Cyberman cut through her nervous chatter. The Doctor reached out and pulled Clara closer to him as they both stood up to face the menacing cyborg. He noticed her hand trembling as she gripped his shirt at his chest, yet she raised her chin and defiantly stared down her abductor. "If the Doctor does not surrender, we will reprogram the girl. Do you surrender?"
"No." Her voice was clear and loud, like a bell. Clara, ringing like a bell. Clara. Bell. It was a strange thought to occur to the Doctor as looked at his companion with surprise, and more than a little respect. It was a rash declaration on her part, yes, and very, very human, but Clara Oswald had courage for a woman so small. Actually, her size and gender had almost no bearing on anything. Clara Oswald had courage, period, and he couldn't help but admire her for that in this moment.
So caught up was he in considering the impossible girl beside him, that he failed to first notice the Cyberman raising his arm again. The guard tsk-ed at both of them and walked nearer, leering at Clara.
"You'll wish you hadn't said that in a moment." He smiled ironically, suggesting that he knew exactly what would come next. "Or maybe not. Maybe you'll be right as rain. Depends on what program they write for you, I guess."
The Doctor could feel Clara shrink against him, and he suspected that she didn't like the tone of the guard's voice anymore than he did. Quickly, he flicked out his hand holding the screwdriver and pointed it at the Cyberman.
"Stop. Stop whatever you are doing right now."
The stoic robot said nothing but he could feel Clara begin to shake next to him.
"Doctor." Her voice whispered to him uncertainly. "Doctor, I feel..." Suddenly her trembling stopped, as did whatever thought she had been about to give voice to. Panicked, the Doctor grasped her chin in his hand, turning her face towards him, and he inspected her clear brown eyes closely. He was relieved to see her face as expressive as ever, but something was still wrong.
He watched looks of surprise and then fear move across her features as she swatted his hand away, stepping back. And then she stepped back again. And again. The Doctor scowled; there was suddenly a great deal of space between him and his Impossible Girl.
"Oy!" She practically scolded him with her exclamation. "What do you think you're doing? Who are you? And what-" She paused in her hurried questions and looked around the room, pointing at the Cyberman. "What is that?"
"We have reprogrammed the girl."
Really, the Cybermen had a talent for stating the obvious in a way so lacking in irony that it was almost painful. On another day, under different circumstances, the Doctor might have found it darkly amusing. He was not laughing now.
"Clara. Clara Oswald." He caught her attention, ignoring the Cyberman and his security guard lackey for the moment, and focused on her. He was hard-pressed to not move towards her, as he was better able to protect her the closer she was. Even so, he didn't want to frighten her more than she already seemed, particularly since she seemed to be suffering from a rather large lapse in her memory. Damn the Cybermen. "Clara, what's the last thing you remember?"
She looked around the room cautiously, eyeing the Cyberman and the guard suspiciously, particularly since he seemed to be smirking at her, before looking back at the Doctor. "I, I was at home, trying to get on the internet, but the wifi wasn't working and the IT line I called put me on hold."
The Doctor sighed. This was not good. So very, very not good.
"We have erased her memories of the Doctor." The Cyberman stepped forward. The Doctor matched the cyborg's step, making sure to keep himself between the silver menace and Clara, but the security guard out-flanked him.
"Of course, she still has other memories she can lose." The guard taunted. "Other people she cares about. Friends. Family. They can program her to forget them all." He smirked. "I wonder if a person is still the same person if they can't remember a single thing about their life? Do you think they turn into a new person then? Do you think they feel the pain of memories they don't even know they forgot?"
The Doctor could hardly hear the man. Instead rage, pure and unadulterated rage, assaulted his senses from every angle. Rage at himself for knowingly walking into a trap, so cock-sure of himself that he had not sensed the danger to Clara; rage at the Cyberman for using her against him; and yes, even rage at Clara for getting caught, for being so precious and fragile, for giving him a reason to be scared, to be vulnerable. He was steeped in rage. And guilt, so much guilt.
"We will reprogram the girl if the Doctor does not surrender."
He took the Cyberman at his word, knowing that it would do just that, quietly destroying Clara with one of its programs.
"Hold up." Clara's perplexed voice called out from behind him, not really recognizing the gravity of what the Cyberman was threatening. "Are you a doctor? Who's a doctor? Doctor Who?"
"Me. I'm the Doctor, just the Doctor." He turned a quarter turn towards her and smiled a grim smile, straightening his bow-tie in the process. "And to answer your earlier question, Clara—although I have good reason to doubt that you remember asking it now—Yes, I do have a plan."
AN: Well, what did you think? I don't know about you, but I need a cuppa tea. Or several. Whatever your thoughts, let me know in the reviews - and thanks for reading!