Author's Note: Sorry about the unexpected hiatus. I do have more chapters for this story to put up. But, I don't have an ending yet, so don't get your hopes up. I'm in the middle of several other projects so this one slipped my mind.
Remember, if you read Freeze then you'll know, reviews DO help!

Chapter Ten

Return to Cardiff?

Martha jolted awake. She blinked and looked around; she was in some kind of ship. And she was a little sore from sleeping in a chair. But most of all, she felt an eerie vibration coming from a storage closet. It was really small, and pretty far back in her mind, but it was there, and it was eerie.

She got up and smoothed out the Doctor's pinstripe suit - remembering with a second of shock that she was the Doctor - and walked over to the closet. When she opened the door, she was slightly surprised to find the TARDIS sitting there.

This was most definitely where the vibrations were coming from. They didn't make her feel off-put or dizzy, like she expected; quite the contrary, she felt like it were perfectly natural to feel these things. But what the vibration brought, a dull, offhand sense of being rubbed with sandpaper, wasn't so comfortable.

When she opened the TARDIS door, the dulled pain only increased.

"Martha!" Jack's voice shouted in her head. "Where have you been?!"

She blinked and took a step back. He sounded like he was at the end of his rope. "Sorry, I-" She paused to remember what had happened, and her nose became irritated again with the rough assault of smoke. "You took me out of here!" she answered, coughing through the thick air and her eyes watering.

The cloister bell still tolled, and she had the feeling that it had been the entire time she was asleep. In spite of this, Jack's voice rung loud and clear in Martha's head. "I what?" he asked her.

"You - the other you you - came in and -" She covered her ears, sideburns feeling odd and unnatural against her palm, but that didn't do any help. She breathed hot, burnt air. "Could you stop that bell?" she shouted, and coughed.

"No!" Jack replied. "I'm in too much pain! And I don't know how to anyway! Concentrate on me again - I can't calm down!"

"I don't know if I can!"

Captain Jack's head chose this time to pop in the door. "Gwen! Martha! Doctor! Get out of there!" he shouted, grabbing Martha's sleeve and pulling her out of the TARDIS and just outside of the storage closet.

"What'd you do that for?" she asked him irritatedly, coughing again to the side.

"You don't know how the TARDIS works," he explained, "Jack doesn't even know how the TARDIS works. If you touch anything in there you might end up back in the Time Vortex and we might never be able to find you."

She scrunched her eyes; it nearly hurt her eyes to look at him, and the dulled second-sense pain vibrating from the TARDIS didn't help. "But he's in pain!" she exclaimed.

"Yes, and what are you going to do about that? You don't know how anything in there works!" He motioned toward the door.

"Yes, but I was helping!"

"How? How could you possibly help?"

She shrugged angrily, glaring at him in spite of his errant wrongness. "I don't know, I just concentrated and he began to feel better!"

He turned his head to the side. "How'd you manage that?" he asked in a normal tone.

"I don't know," she explained, looking away again.

"It took me years to figure out how that worked, and even then I was a heck of a lot smarter than you." He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, defeated.

"Doctor?" Martha asked hesitantly, glancing back at him warily.

He looked up at her. "Yep, that's me," he said, smiling. "And you're either Gwen or Martha, correct?"

She nodded. "Martha. But what happened to us?" she asked, putting a hand over her eyes to rub her temples. The pain from the vibrations only seemed real in the back of her head, where it nagged at her incessantly.

"Beats me." He shrugged and crossed his eyebrows, looking at her. Then they widened. "Oh, right! Sorry. Got used to it. Let's go over here, shall we?" He led her to the opposite side of the room, where the vibrations lessened, becoming more akin to the nagging sensation commonly associated with the idea of having left something on.

"Thanks," she said simply, leaning against the wall and lowering herself to the floor. "We almost at Cardiff?" she asked.

He sighed. "Actually, it's taking a surprisingly long time to get there. We've run into some, ah, technical difficulties. Easily fixed."

She lifted an eyebrow.

"Well, easily fixed compared to other things I've fixed in the past. Won't take long."

"Then what were you doing getting me out of the TARDIS?" she asked.

"Didn't want you messing with anything. Stay out of there." He shook Jack's finger at her. "Now, I'm going back to fix this ship. Make sure to stay out of the TARDIS." With that, he sauntered out of the room.

Martha felt slightly relieved now that he left and leaned her head back against the wall, dark brown hair obstructing her view. She held her hand - the Doctor's hand - in front of her. "How did this even happen?" she mumbled to herself.

"Every problem has a solution," Gwen's voice told her, and Martha looked up. She was muttering something under her breath. "Don't worry about it," she said normally.

Gwen walked slowly, concentrating on each step. "You humans are so complicated," she remarked. She always muttered, it seemed. She only stopped to say something in a normal, slow voice to Martha.

"What do you mean?" Martha asked warily.

"Odd way to move about. My way is much preferable - it makes more scientific sense." She fell into a chair.

"Do I want to ask who you are?" she asked, eyeing Gwen's dark-framed face.

"If you can't figure it out by what I've been saying, it's no wonder I'm in the state I'm in." She glanced, muttering, at the storage closet.

"The TARDIS?!" Martha exclaimed incredulously.

"You don't have to say it like that," Gwen said, glancing at Martha oddly as she went back to muttering gibberish.

"How is that even possible?"

Gwen looked over at her, eyebrows creasing automatically in irritation. "Oi! Watch what you're saying! I'm a perfectly organic creature." She leaned her head back in the chair and continued a little more quietly. "Spent most of my life sticking to Gallifrey and rotting in a cellar before the Doctor picked me up. Illegally." She shrugged and began mumbling again.

Martha was about to ask about that - but suddenly noticed something, and gasped.

"What is it?" Rose asked, walking in from the cockpit and looking very much like Martha.

"I don't know," she said truthfully, "There's something..." she put her hand up to her head, the Doctor's lofty hair foreign between her fingers. "In my head."

"There's who in my what?" the Doctor popped in, Jack's voice heightening in pitch.

"I dunno," she defended. "There's... something out there." She shrugged.

"So it's external?" he asked.

"Must be."

"But it's in your head?"

"Yeah."

He paused for a second, then pulled away from the door and out of sight.

"He hurts to look at," Martha remarked to Rose.

"The Doctor's mentioned that about Captain Jack," she agreed. "Why is that, d'you think?"

Martha looked at the herself currently sitting by Gwen, who was still muttering gibberish. "You really don't know?" she asked.

"What?" Rose asked irritatedly. "What don't I know?"

"Don't tell her yet," Jack's voice called in from the cockpit.

"Tell me what?" Rose demanded.

"Only when you're older."

Rose scowled. "Thought I was through with people tellin' me that."

Suddenly the ship rocked like a stormy sea, then shuddered and creaked before the lights went out with a crackle. The three beings in the main room sat up, alarmed, as the ship became still again.

"Sorry," the Doctor called and poked Jack's head in again, barely visible in the dark. "Seems to be a bit worse than we previously thought."

Mickey muttered something intelligible.

"Oi!" the Doctor protested, "I'm doin' the best I can!"

The lights came back on and Mickey sauntered into the main room. The Doctor glanced up at the lights and scowled.

"Luck," he remarked, then re-entered the cockpit.

"Where exactly are we?" Martha asked Mickey as he sat down. He glanced at her and hesitated before answering.

"Nowhere near Earth," he told her. "In fact, Doctor Cheesecake in there says we're in a different universe altogether."

"He keeps sayin' it's impossible, but it keeps on happenin'," Rose remarked, raising Martha's eyebrows.

"You lot!" the Doctor shouted suddenly from the cockpit, "Get in here!"

There was a millisecond of curious glances before Mickey, Rose, and Martha quickly shot up from their respective seats and made their way to where the Doctor stood, holding up a finger for silence and grasping the ship's makeshift radio.

"...will board," a commanding voice continued. "You will put up no fight nor attempt to escape, or we will destroy your ship and all of its inhabitants."

They looked up as a group at the massive silver warship arriving directly to the front, all of its numerous weapons trained on them.

Gwen appeared at the doorway. "Bloody twats."