Disclaimer: I don't own Torchwood or Doctor Who. You know that.
A/N: Um..I'm sorry this has taking...two weeks? Three? I got stuck about halfway through and had to force it to write properly. The next update will probably be sooner, now that I'm over that bit.
The Doctor grinned and glanced back over his shoulder at Tosh. "HAL? Really? You know, if you take each of those letters and increment them by one letter, you get 'IBM'. They claimed it was unintentional, at the time, but I think Stanley Kubrick took a few ideas from that little trip I gave him. Mind you, I accidentally took him to the year 20001 and to the colony-planet Jupiter – not your Jupiter, the one in the Monwalk system – and admittedly, 'IBM' stood for 'Identical Blue Mice'…but still – Ah! Here we are!"
He stopped in front of a white door to his right. A circular pattern was marked into the door – the Doctor's native language, Tosh assumed. It looked too precise to be decoration.
Taking into account the slow, mysterious, almost apprehensive way the Doctor opened the door, Tosh rather expected something grand. Or at least, terribly modern and alien.
The Doctor walked into the white, seemingly empty room. "Ah!" He exclaimed happily, "It's just how I remember it!"
Tosh followed him into the room, slightly puzzled. "Ah…Doctor?"
"Oh! Ms Sato, of course. You've never worked with anything like this, have you? It's a little like a Zero room. Calming, restful, removed from influences of the universe. But this room is a little different too. It places more emphasis on what you think and what you know than what you see. For instance, I know there was a table here last time."
Tosh blinked, and suddenly, she knew there was a table there too. She could see it now. How had she missed that?
The Doctor grinned. "And, since we don't have much time to spare – odd words for a Timelord, really – I know how this place is actually meant to be. I know it's fully kitted out to be a medical room to comply with the old Gallifreyan High Council's standards."
And although Tosh didn't quite understand what he meant, she knew it now too. And the room now fulfilled all her expectations of grand, modern and alien.
The room was still white, the paleness broken only by little freckles of colour where buttons, labels, displays, handles, levers and one potted plant in the corner. Two of the four walls were lined with white machines or benches with some strange, and some recognisable forms of equipment on top and various monitors scattered across the space. The third wall had shelves, cupboards, drawers, continuing as far up as the eye could see. That was an interesting point too. Tosh couldn't tell if there was a ceiling. The space seemed to extend forever. She supposed that wasn't all that impossible for a ship that was already bigger on the inside.
The fourth wall, the one behind her with the door to one side, was the only wall left blank. But something in the way it shifted slightly under her vision told her that even that was probably an illusion. She felt it was some sort of display, like a screen with a projector, but more organic in nature. And then there was the table in front of her. On closer examination, it was something of a wood and metal hybrid, inanimate, and yet buzzing with energy. The entire room exuded the aura of a sterile, no-nonsense medical facility. That is, if you ignored the slowly swaying chandelier overhead that made no difference whatsoever to the unwavering white light the room was bathed in and the brightly coloured armchair in the corner by the pot plant.
In the time that Tosh had taken to take in her surroundings, the Doctor had pulled a device off a shelf and placed it on the table. It was shaped like a double helix, two clear tubes twisting around on each other, connected by thin rods and mounted on a faintly golden base.
"The thing about poisons from your future, they're all designed to go straight into the bloodstream and be effective almost immediately. It just soaks harmlessly through skin until it finds a vein or an artery. Only way to make sure they work on every species, see? But that makes it a little more predictable. Now, this little beauty, is from the 42nd century. It's very good. A bit ironic really, because all the developers died of poisoning. Which it why it's not so well known I suppose."
He looked up at Toshiko, unconsciously waiting for a 'but what does it do?´, and was momentarily thrown by the look of intense wonder on her face.
"It's beautiful." She whispered.
The Tardis almost purred.
The Doctor smiled, realising that –for once – he didn't have to explain. It was comforting really, having someone who understood him like – or at least, the technical side of him – like Tosh did. It was almost like having another Timelord around, Except, obviously, not. The Doctor smiled as he set the device up. Tosh smiled also, revelling in the silence. In her opinion, so much could be said and learnt from silence alone. It gave one time to take in the world around them, to discover the fine nuances that were otherwise finely cloaked. Sometimes Tosh couldn't understand why people liked noise so much. Yes, it was comforting sometimes, but a companionable silence was just as good. And you got the added bonus of being able to think and work in peace. Sometimes, silence just worked. For all the noise in the world, there had to be someone, somewhere to listen to it all, and silence to compensate. Everything balances.
The blank wall faded up into life and displayed a flickering string of numbers, far too many and changing far too fast for Tosh to do anything but briefly register the numbers. Occasionally, circular symbols appeared in the lower right of the 'screen' but they too flickered off like the string of numbers, fading in and out of existence as if comparing the samples to a database to find matches. Which, Tosh suppose, was probably an accurate 21st century Earth equivalent. The marks on the top left of the screen were the only ones that remained unchanged.
The Doctor, having finished what he had been doing, and lost in silence himself, sensed the question hanging in the air as if Toshiko had asked him aloud.
"It says 'Human. Sol 3. 21st century." The Doctor said quietly, "in the top left, anyway."
Toshiko turned to look at him, smiling. It seemed they had more in common than she thought.
"What language is it in?"
The Doctor paused. When his eyes met hers, Tosh noticed a sudden depth to them, a hidden sadness she hadn't noticed before.
"Gallifreyan. The Tardis, she translates alien languages. But written Gallifreyan, even in other models, is never translated. A bit of a security measure, I suppose. Especially if someone left TARDIS flying instructions around!"
Tosh looed at him for a moment. "So Doctor, are you speaking English now, or Gallifreyan? And do you hear us as English or..?"
The Doctor beamed. "I think you might be the first person who has ever asked me that Ms. Sato."
"Please, Toshiko will do fine."
He nodded and continued, "To be honest with you, originally everything was translated. But after I'd spent long enough on Earth – with a non-functioning TARDIS, too sometimes – I actually learnt the language. And, well, once you know a language well enough, the TARDIS knows it doesn't have to translate for you. If you don't know it well enough, it sort of rebounds at you. Say I didn't know much English, but I said something in English to you, somebody fluent in English. The TARDIS would still translate, but you'd hear Gallifreyan, or your closest known equivalent of it. Actually, I don't know what that would be… Anyway, what you hear now, is me speaking English. Hello!" He waved at her briefly, "Sometimes, I'll slip and revert to what's natural for me. TARDIS translation circuit kicks in, you hear the same thing, just with a slightly different accent."
There was a slight twist in his accent as he explained, showing Tosh the subtle switch between the Doctor's English and the TARDIS' English. To be honest, she couldn't quite put her finger on the difference.
"So, besides English, what other languages are you fluent in?"
"Oh...I don't know. Been around as long as I have and you start losing track. I remember learning the Judoon language way back when. And Common One through Five, well, the 51st century versions of them, anyway. Had to get around for a bit without a TARDIS. Long story. Japanese, I did Japanese for awhile. I think I've forgotten most of it by now though. Great language. Lots of quick thinking involved. I've never been great at Welsh though. Especially written Welsh. I think I misread a street sign once as 'On holiday, be back in a week' instead of what it was meant to say. Oh well."
He shrugged, and then Tosh could tell, just by looking at him, that he had an idea. His smile had widened and taken on an almost 'mad scientist' persona. It was as if a lightbulb had suddenly gone off in his head, or he'd made a connection he never knew existed.
"Ooooh…" he exclaimed, "Ms Sato, do I have something to show you!"
He rushed out of the room excitedly.
"Doctor?" Tosh called, instinctively following him. Really, the man – Timelord – was just like Jack, dashing off at the drop of a hat. "Where are you going? And I thought I told you to call me Toshiko!"
She found the Doctor three doors down, back to the door. "Doctor?"
He spun, still blocking the room from her view. He really did look like a mad scientist now.
"I just remembered!" He grinned. "Toshiko Sato, how long has it been? Oh…lifetimes ago. Well, one to be specific…Do you remember? Spacepig?"
Tosh just stared at him. "Doctor…?"
"Oh. Of course. You wouldn't have recognised me. I had a different face back then. Bigger ears. Less hair. Different teeth. Anyway, the point is, a few years ago I stumbled across a farming ship orbiting a planet in the Syroon system. Their HR department gave me a holovid of the animals. So, Toshiko..." He stepped aside. "Spacepig!"
Tosh stared at the holographic pig from the doorway. It looked enough like the one she had once described as a 'spacepig' for her to step into the room and walk around it curiously.
"You mean they actually exist? It wasn't just aliens faking aliens? I mean, it wasn't just a once off…experimentation?"
"Apparently not." The Doctor shrugged, running a hand through his hair. "I tell you what though, it was probably the first. Someone probably just sold the plans off."
"But how can you eat something with that level of technology fused into it's brain?"
The Doctor looked at her for a moment, wondering briefly if her protest was against eating meat with foreign objects in it, abusing technology, or eating technology. He shook his head.
"Nah, they're not being farmed for food. The planet they're on is mainly fluid based, both in composition and in diet. They're an energy source. Like electricity. Except electricity on that planet would do more harm than good. Like I said, fluid based."
Tosh blinked for a moment, processing the idea. "So that was you I met back then? Wow. Small world." Her head tilted momentarily to the side as she smiled at him.
He grinned at her for a moment and neither said much until they heard what could only be described as a 'ting' echoing down the hallway from the other room.
"Ah, it's finished. Let's go see what we need to fight that poison."
They ran back to the medical room. The Doctor ran because he liked running. Toshiko ran because she had almost forgotten Ianto and felt quite guilty for it. Ianto was close to being the best friend she (ever) had. The Doctor made it into the room before her and had pulled on his 'brainy specs'.
"Ooh…" he muttered, looking at the 'screen'. "This isn't going to be good… Right Tosh, time to go."
"Wait, what about the antidote?"
"I'm sure there's some of it in the Hub. Trust me. We just have to get back to them."
Naturally, the Doctor ran the rest of the way out of the TARDIS, leaving Tosh with no option but to run after him or get lost in the never-ending maze.