A/N: I'm back! And, as promised, here's your Doctor/Pond chapter. It might not make immediate sense, but stick with it. Enjoy :)

After what felt like an age of darkness, the Doctor managed to summon enough inner strength to draw open his lead-heavy eyelids. He simply laid and blinked back tears for a moment, allowing himself to adjust to the change in lighting, before pausing as reality hit him. What the hell had happened? He couldn't remember falling asleep, and it certainly didn't feel as though he was laid in his bed, so where the hell was he?

A frown of confusion etching itself into his face, he pulled himself up into a sitting position and glanced around. He appeared to have been placed in a dark, dank, empty stone cell. The only thing keeping him out of total darkness was moonlight shining in through a glassless, barred window placed high in the wall and well out of even his reach. What was this place?

"Think, Doctor, think," he muttered to himself, running a hand through his messy hair. The last thing he remembered was travelling with Jenny. She had just gotten over her latest brush with death, and he had decided to treat her by taking her to... where had he taken her? Space Florida? No, they never actually seemed to end up there- things always got in the way. Klom, then? No, why would he take her to Klom? Klom was boring...

A zoo! He had taken her to a zoo! He laughed aloud as he remembered, before quickly sobering as he realised that he had no memories from that point on at all. Worse than that- he still had no idea where he was or how long he'd been unconscious. And, now he was thinking about it, where was-

"Jenny?" he called aloud, getting to his feet to step anxiously over to the bars keeping him in confinement. He peered out into the corridor beyond his cell, but found it empty. "Jenny, where are you?"

An odd sense of disconcerting perplexity clutched at his hearts as he reached out for the door and watched it easily swing open with hardly any pressure. Something felt very, very wrong about this... Why go to the trouble of putting him in a cell if it wasn't even locked? And where was Jenny?

"Jenny? Are you here?" he called again, taking a step out into the corridor to peer into the cells opposite his own. Nothing.

The Doctor quickly reached into his inside coat pocket to pull out his Sonic Screwdriver, but found it wasn't there. What? Now he was really beginning to panic. His hands flew to every pocket he could find, but the screwdriver was nowhere to be seen. Why take his screwdriver, yet leave his cell door open?

"Doctorrr..."

The Doctor froze, hands placed flat on his chest in an attempt to pat the screwdriver into existence, and slowly span on the spot. At the other end of the corridor, silhouetted thanks to the dim light, stood two figures.

"Oh, hello!" the Doctor cried with relief, clapping his hands together and taking a step towards the figures. "I'm the Doctor. Sorry, but I'm a bit confused- you wouldn't happen to have seen my daughter, would you? It's just-"

He stopped talking suddenly as, simultaneously, the figures stepped into a shaft of light pooling on the floor from another window nearby. They had been human, once- he was certain of it- but now their skin bubbled and fell away from their frames with the consistency of molten lava. Organs, bones and muscles peeked through the melting outer layers, giving them a horribly disfigured appearance. He could tell one was male, and the other female, because of their body shapes- or what was left of them- and the difference in the length of their hair. The figure to his left had long, matted, coppery hair, whereas the one to his right had short, greasy, sandy locks, but both looked equally grotesque as it fell from their heads in gunky, bloody clumps. Their blank, milky eyes widened but saw nothing, and they suddenly staggered forwards as fast as their decomposing bodies would allow them- a blood-curdling scream escaping their lips in the process.

"Right..." the Doctor managed to croak, before, swallowing the fear and bile rising in his throat, he turned quickly again and glanced hurriedly around for an escape route. If he could just give them the slip, and maybe find the Tardis in the process, he'd be able to do a scan and find out where Jenny was.

There were no exits in immediate sight, but he spotted that there was a sudden, ninety degree bend in the corridor some distance ahead of him. Hoping it would lead him to the Tardis and/or Jenny and his screwdriver, he set off at a run, very aware that the creatures behind him were a lot faster than he had originally imagined, and quickly gaining on him.

"Look, I'm not sure what I've done to upset you- probably broken a couple of thousand laws without realising, as per usual- but I can assure you I mean no harm!" he cried over his shoulder, risking a glance behind him as he made it to the sharp turn in the corridor, hearts racing. The creatures either couldn't understand what he was saying, or weren't listening, because they continued to surge towards him without even a pause.

The Doctor sighed with frustration, and peered down the new stretch of corridor to his left. He spotted a door around two hundred feet from him. It wasn't his Tardis, screwdriver or daughter, but at least he'd be able to, maybe, put a good few inches of solid metal between himself and the still approaching creatures screeching behind him. With that in mind, he took off at a sprint again, focusing solely on the door now, and not the creatures behind him.

"Docccctorrrrrrrr," he heard the creatures yell in unison again, distinctly closer now, but still he didn't look back.

He was less than fifty feet from the door now. He could make out a flashing green light on a keypad beside it that made him believe, with a hopeful flutter of his hearts, that it had been left unlocked- just as his cell had been. That was why, therefore, he was so shocked when the full force of his body hurtling into the solid surface did absolutely nothing to move it.

"What? No, no no!" he cried frustratedly, ignoring the pain now rippling through his entire body and banging his fists against the door. Of course, that achieved absolutely nothing except yet more bruises.

Instead of panicking like he quite easily could have done, however, the Doctor glanced at the creatures again- now only about forty feet from him and rapidly catching up- before turning towards the control panel to the left of the door. He had no screwdriver, no plan, and basically no time, but that didn't matter. He was the Doctor- he'd been in worse situations and scraped through them relatively unharmed... ish.

He tapped experimentally at a few keys, but quickly calculated that the probability of him cracking the code in the time he had was very slim at best. And so, with that realisation, he simply grabbed the front of the panel and, with a grunt, tugged it clean off the wall, exposing dozens of brightly coloured wires underneath.

"Doccccctorrrrrrrrrrr."

They were close now; he could almost feel their breath on the back of his neck.

"Erm... eenie, meanie, minie, mo..." He debated with himself for a few more seconds before, sighing closing his eyes, he grabbed a random wire and tugged.

A pair of calloused, cold hands gripped at the back of his shoulders and he felt them tighten around his neck, then, in a blur, he swung out blindly and felt his fist connect with something solid. He whipped around just in time to witness the female creature go careening into the male, causing them both to stumble and fall.

Making most of the moment he had inadvertently created for himself, the Doctor turned back towards the door and saw, with another hopeful flutter of his hearts, that it had slid open a fraction. With a triumphant yell, he managed to prise his fingers into the gap between the door and its frame, and yanked it open. Any icy gust of wind met him- immediately chilling him to his very core- as he peered out into the barren, snowy wilderness beyond the door.

This new revelation only caused more potential problems to pop into the Doctor's head. He wouldn't last very long out in the icy conditions, but, glancing back at the quickly recovering zombie-like beings behind him, he knew he couldn't go back either. He had to decide, therefore, which was the more preferable option- venturing out into the cold and probably freezing to death, or pitting himself against the zombies and probably ending up with his limbs being forcibly removed.

"Doctor!"

The Doctor's head snapped up- suddenly alert. That was Rory calling out to him! But where had it come from? It couldn't have been inside- there was nobody there apart from the creatures and himself- and so- knowing he couldn't very well leave one of his friends to freeze, and taking a deep breath- he plunged into the snow.

"Rory?" he cried out into the white abyss. "Where are you?"

He couldn't see the centurion anywhere, and was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that each step he took through the waist-high snow sent a stab of cold from the tips of his boots right to the top of his head, where it settled to rest as a mind-numbing headache. Why was Rory here? The cold was making him feel very strange now, and he found he couldn't order his thoughts for long enough to figure out an answer to his question.

Quite suddenly, his right foot caught on something stuck under the mass of snow around him and he staggered slightly, before falling forwards into the powder. An explosion of pain ripped through him upon impact, and he was momentarily blinded by its intensity. His head throbbed and his hearts were pounding painfully hard against his already bruised ribcage. What was happening?

"DOCTOR!"

With the last scream, everything suddenly went eerily silent, and when the Doctor raised his head the entire landscape around him seemed to flicker, fluctuate and change. He wasn't face down in the middle of a snowy wilderness, but stood- in nothing but his boxer shorts, no less- in the Ponds' garden. How had he gotten there?

"Doctor?" The call came softer this time, and the Doctor turned back towards the house. Rory stood, silhouetted, in the light that spilled out through the open door.

"R-Rory?" the Doctor asked, voice cracking with confusion and a sudden exhaustion. "How... how did I get here? I was in a prison-"

"-You're not well, Doctor," the younger man sighed, concern now overtaking the wariness that had filled him only moments before. "You've got a fever- you were just seeing things, mate."

And then a burst of recognition rippled in the Doctor's mind and he remembered everything- the psychic paper message, the Galacta Rhinos... the Chen 7...

"No," he whispered, before any remaining strength left his body and he found himself on the floor.

He heard Rory curse from the door- something he usually would have scolded him for- but found he didn't care. Anxious footsteps came pattering down the path, before a pair of strong arms wrapped around him and pulled the shaken Time Lord into a gentle embrace.

"What's happening to me?" he whimpered into Rory's chest, shivering violently.

"It's alright, you're safe," Rory replied soothingly, trying to hug as much of the Doctor's bare skin as he could reach in an attempt to warm his body as his temperature rapidly dropped. "Jenny's gone to search for something that will make you better. She'll be back soon, and then everything will be fine."

The Doctor nodded his head an inch, even though his hearts had dropped into his stomach. He knew that Jenny had set out on a pointless journey. There was no cure for him.

"Where's Amy?" he croaked quietly, suddenly noticing the absence of the other Pond.

Rory stiffened slightly, a rather sheepish look spreading across his face. "Well, you er... you lashed out at her in your delusional state. She's fine, I promise... she's just cleaning up the blood."

If possible, the Doctor fell further into a tired depression as he heard those words. In his hallucinogenic state, he had mistaken his best friends for hideously deformed beasts. And, what was worse, he had harmed Amelia as a result of that.

"I- I hit her?" he stammered, still not quite able to believe it. He tried his hardest not to be a man of violence, yet he had managed to attack one of the people he cared about the most.

"Don't worry; she's not angry with you, Doctor. She's just worried about you- we both are."

Rory didn't realise that that just made everything worse. After everything he had done to them, the Ponds' would be loyal to the very end, and that made the Doctor feel sick. They deserved so much better than him.

"Alright, fun time's over," Rory told him with an almost believable cheer, taking note of the ill man's depressed expression. "Let's get you inside, or you'll catch your death."

And so, allowing Rory to half carry, half drag him back towards the house, the Doctor sighed. "I already have, haven't I?"

A/N: I hate myself right now. Poor, poor Doctor. :(