Chapter 12
PRESENT DAY
"Are you in pain?" Liz asked the Brigadier as she checked his stats – placing two fingers to his wrist to check his pulse, before taking her stethoscope from around her neck to have a listen to his chest. His blisters were healing nicely now – his arm was still sore, but what remained of the seeping welts were finally beginning to dry up. The scars upon his chest were still evident against his pale skin, but the inflammation would abate eventually and they would fade in time – although she suspected that some of them would never clear up completely.
"No." The Brigadier shook his head, before stopping suddenly with a grimace – seeming to reconsider the motion. One hand reached for his throbbing head before he could stop himself. "A slight headache maybe." He confessed.
Liz nodded.
"That's likely to be a side effect of the drugs I've given you." She explained. "But I'll take your temperature and check your blood pressure whilst I'm here, just to be sure."
She smiled at him as she carefully unbuttoned the top two buttons of her friend's pyjama shirt and slipped the small bell of the stethoscope through the opening this created – as she did so she leaned over him. His breath tickled her ear, and it was reassuring to feel it caress her face – especially as he was now breathing for himself, and his lungs sounded healthy and clear for the first time in weeks. – even if they were still weak. They would be vulnerable to re-infection for a while yet.
"Doctor, come and have a listen." Liz beckoned the Time Lord over. The Brigadier looked on anxiously as the Doctor immediately stopped what he was doing and began to make his way over to the bed, before proceeding to take the pro-offered stethoscope from her. He placed the cold bell back against the Brigadier's chest.
"Anything the matter?" The Brigadier asked, trying not to appear too worried whilst the Doctor listened, but the Time Lord shook his head.
"On the contrary Brigadier," He smiled, "your heartrate's stabilising. Your lungs sound clear. I think we've finally beaten the infection."
"Does that mean I'll finally be able to get out of this blasted place then?" The Brigadier asked hopefully, "and stop wasting everybody's time?"
Liz smiled – now she knew for sure that he was definitely on the mend – but the Doctor shook his head gravely.
"You're still weak Alistair." He explained gently. "You won't be getting out of here for a while yet I'm afraid, and when you do you won't be going straight back to work."
The Brigadier sighed, and Liz's heart went out to him. This was the Brigadier they all knew and loved – it was a good sign that he was beginning to oppose and question them, but on the other hand he was bound to be bored and consumed with a restlessness befitting of a military man confined to his bed, and this would make it all the more difficult to keep him there.
She smiled as she leant over him to wrap the cuff of the blood pressure monitor around the top of his arm, and he responded to the gesture in a fashion of sorts but only gave her a half smile in return. With her free hand she also popped a thermometer under his tongue. The Doctor meanwhile returned to busting himself in the corner of the room, and the Brigadier silently wondered what he was up to. He seemed to be making a point of appearing engrossed in absolutely nothing.
The Brigadier felt the cuff tighten around his arm as Liz manually inflated it. The flesh where the lesions had been was still tender, and the cuff hurt where it squeezed his arm a little too tightly, but he didn't say anything. He watched as she put the stethoscope back in her ears and placed the bell to the strip of fabric around his arm to listen.
"Your blood pressure's still on the low side." She concluded finally, removing the cuff with a snarl of tearing Velcro. "But it's stable." She nodded. She took the thermometer from his mouth, and observed the tiny inky number as indicated by the level of the mercury. "Your temperature's still a little high." She told him. "But it's down from last time."
She moved away from the side of the bed, indicating to the Brigadier that she had finished with her examination for now, and he began to do his shirt buttons back up.
"I'm going to give you something for your headache." Liz then said to him as she prepared an injection. "It'll take the edge off the pain so you can get some sleep."
"But I don't want to sleep." The Brigadier protested. "I'm not tired. Why does everyone seem so preoccupied with how much sleep I'm getting?"
"Liz's right Brigadier." The Doctor interceded. "You may not feel tired but sleep really is your quickest route to getting out of here. We can't move you until you're stronger. It might be a cliché but sleep really is better than any drug we can give you now. We can continue to treat your symptoms. We can keep you comfortable. But the rest is up to your own body."
The Brigadier sighed, and Liz smiled.
"Tell you what Brigadier," She laughed jokingly, "when you finally do get out of here we'll throw you a great big party, how does that sound?"
In truth she was only teasing him and when on top form the man would have probably realised that she wasn't serious in her suggestion. On this occasion however he looked positively horrified by the prospect. The Doctor too looked at her disapprovingly. He didn't seem too enthralled by the idea either.
"Liz…" He frowned. "I really don't think…"
"I don't want a party Miss Shaw." The Brigadier interjected, looking quite serious however. "I'm not five."
Liz chucked good naturedly and shook her head. It was actually quite satisfying to see the two men get so wound up over something so simple as a party. Their reaction reminded her of times gone by – before they had crossed paths with the Silurians, and before the Brigadier's subsequent illness. It reminded her of a time when their interactions hadn't all evolved around injections, and IV's and the endless stream of medical testing – when one would have enjoyed teasing the other, all in the nature of good humour. It was well known that the Doctor especially took great pleasure in winding the Brigadier up on occasion, but that, if it came down to it, he would die before he let any real harm come to him.
"I'll leave you two to it." She smiled, once she'd finished giving the Brigadier his injection and had tidied away the soiled dressings and used needles. The Brigadier nodded his gratitude to her – despite his earlier frostiness – and Liz knew that he'd meant nothing by it. He'd been guided by them both up to now, and although hardly a model patient he hadn't opposed either of them too strongly, and had done everything they'd asked of him. He knew that both the Doctor and Liz only had his best interests at heart – but since he'd recovered his mental capacities she'd noticed him becoming increasingly frustrated by his lack of physical form.
"Doctor, I'm going off sight for a while." She explained. "If you need me I'll be back in about an hour."
"Very well my dear." He turned to her, and nodded. Now that the Brigadier was out of danger they'd finally been able to relax the watch they'd been keeping over him, although they both still made sure that at least one of them remained on site at all times – just in case.
The Silurain plague was still an unknown phenomenon, and they couldn't be entirely sure that he wouldn't suffer a relapse – there were of course other known infections whose pathology had been observed and carefully monitored and a relapse hadn't been unheard of – such as in the case of malaria. The Doctor and Liz preferred the veer on the side of caution, although this did sometimes make things difficult - they'd both been pent up for weeks now, and it was likely that they would need to remain close to base for a while yet. Neither really minded - both of them felt that this was a small price to pay, knowing that things could have been very different - but knowing this, didn't make their own natural restlessness any easier to deal with, and they'd had to come up with new and often quite inventive ways to learn to cope with their excess energy.
The Doctor especially was beginning to feel somewhat like a caged animal. Liz had noticed that he had taken to pacing as a means to work off his unspent energy, and this would lead to occasional outbursts of frustration - of which she realised that she could also be just as guilty of.
Today Liz was only going to collect an order of medical supplied for the lab – she and the Doctor had used up so much of the hospital's resources over the past few weeks that Liz especially felt that replacing them and taking collection of the orders was the least they could do – and she relished the opportunity this presented for her to get away from the base for a while.
The Doctor understood this – recognising that on this particular afternoon her need to get away from the hospital for a while was a lot stronger than his own, and he didn't begrudge her the time to herself, if it meant that she would return a little more refreshed.
He looked forward to tinkering with his TARDIS later.
When she'd gone he turned back to the Brigadier and made his way back over to the bed. There was a serious expression upon his face the likes of which the Brigadier had seen many times before. He had known his friend from old, and he recognised the expression as one he often wore when something was troubling him.
He sat down in the chair which had been pulled up beside the Brigadier's bed, and appeared absorbed in deep thought for a while.
"Penny for your thought Doctor?" The Brigadier asked him, when after a few moments he still hadn't spoken or made any attempt at unburden iing himself of what was clearly preying upon his mind.
The Doctor smiled weakly.
"I've just been wondering Alistair," He said, leaning forward in his seat and clasping his hands together beneath his chin – two fingers coming to rest against his bottom lip thoughtfully, "you must have known for a while how ill you were, before you collapsed?"
The Brigadier sighed. He'd slipped down slightly in the bed after Liz had examined him, and he now tried to raise himself back up a little - flinching uncomfortably as he was suddenly made aware of just how much his body still ached. Not much escaped the Doctor's notice and he'd almost expected to have to provide some kind of explanation to this effect sooner or later. He'd hoped for a little more time before somebody broached the subject with him – but whether he'd asked him now or he'd waited a few more days the Brigadier's response would still have still been the same.
He nodded.
"Of course I did Doctor." He replied, resigned to the fact that the time had now come to tell the Doctor about everything which had occurred in the lead up to his illness – and he wasn't sure that the Time Lord would like what he was about to hear. It was hard for the Brigadier to have to admit that he'd actually been ill for several hours before the poison in his blood had finally overwhelmed his system. He still remembered how frightened he'd felt when he'd discovered the first of the lesions, the pain he'd felt when it had burst, and how hard it had been to keep his symptoms hidden from the Doctor and Liz as he'd grown increasingly sicker as the hours ticked by.
Thankfully they had all been stretched to the full length of their limits, and it had been easy enough to put the tell tale sweat of the fever and his obvious lethargy down to stress and exhaustion. It had been much harder to disguise the pain of his broken skin beneath his uniform, but just as nobody seemed to have noticed the colour draining from his cheeks in increments as the day went on, it seemed also as though no one had been paying him enough attention to notice his increasingly awkward gait, or the way he occasionally flinched when he moved. All of this had ultimately worked to the Brigadier's advantage.
He was somewhat grateful however that he had only a very vague recollection of the moments leading up to his collapse - when he had started bleeding internally. He remembered the Doctor storming back into the base, and how angry he'd been over the death of the Silurians. He remembered the intense dizziness which had washed over him once the adrenaline had worn off, and Liz lowering him to the ground, before becoming vaguely aware of the Doctor leaning over him - but he couldn't remember the pain he'd felt as the first of his internal organs had began to rupture, despite knowing that he must have been in absolute agony at the time.
"I knew the risk I was taking – don't for a second think that I wasn't aware of what I was doing!" He bristled defensively.
This caused the Doctor to lean even further forward in his seat. He still felt angry with himself that he hadn't spotted the Brigadier's symptoms sooner - and despite Liz's insistence that it wasn't his fault, he still could't shake the guilt he felt over the fact that he believed that it was still his ultimate responsibility.
He'd put his fascination with the Silurians over his responsibility to their victims, and as a result had come very close to losing his closest ally and friend. It was too easy to blame the Brigadier for not telling them how sick he was sooner, when, with the future of the entire planet and her inhabitants in jeapody where else would he be - not confined to a hospital bed that was for sure.
"Then, tell me Brigadier," he pressed him, concerned by the thought of how long he must have suffered, "when did you first start to feel unwell? Just how long was it before you collapsed that you began to suspect that you may have been infected?" He asked.
"Well, to be honest with you Doctor," The Brigadier confessed, "it started around the time I asked you whether you thought any of us might be at risk… In fact," he faltered, "when I asked you specifically whether you thought I myself might be a carrier it was because I was already beginning to feel rather unwell... and being throttled by Doctor Lawrence didn't exactly help either!" He added, almost as though in after thought, as his hands reached up subconsciously to rub at where he'd been grabbed - remembering how the dying man's cold and clammy hands tightening around his neck had made his already sore throat worse, and being shaken had made his aching head throb.
"Then why on earth didn't you say something sooner Alistair?" The Doctor pressed him. "Why did you carry on working knowing full well how ill you probably were? You almost died!" He exclaimed.
The Brigadier sighed and shifted uncomfortably in bed, trying to change position and get more comfortable. He hadn't quite managed to sit up fully, and as a result his current position was making his hips and the top of both of his legs ache viciously.
"To be fair I didn't know for sure how sick I was." He said, in his own defence as the Doctor helped to lift him before leaning him back against his plumped pillows. "At least not at first Doctor, but I am an officer in Her Majesty's armed forces. My duty is to protect my country and its people, but above all else I am a father and a husband and there is nothing more important to me than making sure that I keep my daughter safe!"
"Your daughter?" The Time Lord frowned – whatever he'd been expecting it certainly hadn't been this. "But Alistair, Katie was never in any real danger." He assured him.
"There were isolated cases reported as far afield as France." The Brigadier reminded him. "If that disease had got out into the general population Doctor then nobody would have been safe. Its effects could have had catastrophic consequences for not only this country but the entire world. Can you guarantee that you could have found the antidote all by yourself, and in time to stop the Silurians?" He asked him.
The Doctor considered this for a moment.
"Well, no, of course not…" He faltered, finally having to confess that he could not, "but…"
Whilst the Time Lord was fairly confident that he would have come up with the antidote eventually even he had to be honest with himself and admit that he might not have achieved results quite so quickly if it hadn't been for the Brigadier and Liz's own efforts and their handling of the situation – which had been pivotal in preventing any unwelcome interruptions from interfering with his work.
"The Silurians wanted to exterminate the whole human race Doctor! I couldn't take any chances!" The Brigadier explained. "I only did what any other loving father would have done in the same situation, and I'd do it again."
The Doctor thought that he looked pained.
"From that very first moment that I held my precious little girl in my arms I knew that no one would ever be more important to me than her! Everything I believed to be important before then – my wife, my career – paled in comparison to her! Nothing or no one else has ever come close. I swore then to protect her in any way I could, no matter what, and I would give my life doing just that Doctor, if it ever came down to it!"
"You very nearly did." The Doctor sighed sadly. "But tell me this Alistair," he asked him, "were you not even scared?"
"Of course I was scared Doctor!" The Brigadier exclaimed. "I'm not a complete fool! I don't want to die any more than the next man, but it was a risk I felt I had to take. That's what being in command is all about at the end of the day, taking chances, and making choices you wish you didn't have to make."
'Well, at least that was something.' The Doctor thought to himself - the man obviously hadn't taken complete leave of his senses - and these words appeared to strike a chord with the Time Lord.
"You know Brigadier," he sighed, "I think we're more alike than either of us really care to admit."
He smiled. "You're a good man Alistair. Katie's a very lucky girl, to have you for a father."
"Try telling that to my wife." The Brigadier scoffed.
The Doctor looked at him as their conversation now turned to the woman he'd met when she'd brought their daughter to visit her father whilst he'd been in isolation. He'd still been in the grip of the worst stage of the plagues manifestation at the time. They'd been fighting to keep him alive, but he still remembered how cold she'd acted towards him, staying away and often not wanting to look at him - but perhaps this had been just her way of coping, and that seeing him in that state had been just to difficult for her to deal with. In comparison Katie's compassion for her father seemed to have blindsided her to the state he'd been in - but that didn't mean that his wife hadn't cared.
"She just doesn't appreciate the nature of what the job entails." The Doctor shook his head – although he realised even as he said it that this wasn't strictly true. If seeing her husband laid out in bed – his body covered in dozens of swollen and weeping lesions, pregnant with infection, as he fought for every breath – didn't tell her of the sacrifices the Brigadier made for his family, then nothing ever would.
"To be honest Doctor, I don't think she even cares anymore." The Brigadier confessed. "That's if she even ever did…"
"Then why do you stay with her?" The Doctor asked, confused. "If you hate each other so much?"
He didn't understand human relationships – he never really had. He'd never quite got the grasp of what it was that kept two people together who absolutely despised each other, and yet many humans seemed to regard living with someone whom they didn't like, and who made them perpetually unhappy and dissatisfied with life, as a perfectly acceptable way to live. It had always seemed to him that for humans, any relationship with another person, no matter how destructive, was better than no relationship at all.
"For my daughter!" The Brigadier responded – as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. "The same reason I suspect that she stays with me too. We may make each other miserable Doctor," he admitted, "but we don't hate each other. The one thing we both have in common is that we'd do anything for Katie. As soon as she's old enough to understand and make independent choices about her own life I don't foresee us staying together for very long after that, but until then neither of us want her to become the product of a broken home. We want her to have happy memories of her childhood, and we do our best not to argue in front of her for the most part."
"But there must have been something which brought the two of you together once?" The Doctor asked him.
"Convenience mostly, I think." The Brigadier sighed, thinking back to the time when the two of them had first got together. These were happier memories, which neither of them revisited very often anymore. "We moved in the same military circles, and we were friends for a while before we got together. We were young, and I think we both misinterpreted our feelings for each other as love, but we just didn't have enough in common to sustain a long term relationship. Had we remained just friends we'd probably have drifted apart a long time ago, but our marriage seemed to work for a while. We were both so happy when we found out she was pregnant – we hadn't been trying for a baby but that wasn't because neither of us wanted children – but her priorities changed after she gave birth to Katie. She gave up work, and she didn't approve of me not being there anymore. She wanted me to give up the army, and I couldn't. Our marriage has been one long battle since then, each of us growing increasingly more resentful of the other."
The Doctor suspected that this was sadly the way that many marriages went once children came along - but just because what each parent wanted from life changed it didn't mean that either loved their child any less, nor that ones methods of parenting were better than the other. Throughout the galaxies there were men and women who, for whatever reason, couldn't be a part of their children's lives - some through choice, and some through circumstance, and some simply because they were not permitted to raise their own children themselves.
"There's more than one way to parent a child though Brigadier." The Doctor told him. "Not every man can be there to see his child grow up, but that doesn't make him any less of a father. I think it's different for a mother somehow." He considered.
"Well, I wouldn't know anything about that Doctor." The Brigadier responded, stifling a yawn. He was beginning to tire – but he wasn't about to admit to it.
Nothing escaped the Doctor's notice however.
"You're tired." He observed. "I'll leave you to rest."
He began to get steadily to his feet.
"Oh, I won't be able to sleep." The Brigadier shook his head.
"You will once you've got this in you." The Doctor said, and as he stood he pulled a pre-filled hypodermic from his pocket. The Brigadier now realised that this must have been what he'd appeared so busy with whilst Liz had been examining him earlier, and he made a mental note to have a word with him about keeping sharp and dangerous objects in his pockets once he was feeling better.
For now though he was feeling rather fed up with the seemingly endless course of injections – even if the Doctor and Liz still gave him most of his medicine whilst he was asleep, through his now disconnected IV line, he just wanted a break from their constant reminder that he was still ill.
Only a few of the injections needed to be delivered directly into the muscle, but it wasn't the discomfort this caused him, nor the inconvenience of it all which bothered the Brigadier the most, it was the fact that he was beginning to feel like a drugged up mess.
His own body served as a constant reminder of the damage the plague had done. He had never felt as ill in his life before as he did now.
"Another one?" The Brigadier exclaimed in protest as he observed the tiny needle in the Doctor's hand, filled with a few cc's of pale, tinted liquid. "Come on Doctor, I'm beginning to feel like a human pin cushion!" He appealed to him. "Surely even you realise that there is only so much one man can take?"
"I want you to sleep for a couple of hours." The Doctor told him, as he leaned over and carefully injected the contents into the small cannula in the back of the Brigadier's hand. Despite his evident reluctance the man offered no opposition – he merely sighed in frustrated resignation as he felt the warm trickle of the liquid up the length of his arm and the tingle in his veins, as the drugs entered his bloodstream.
He looked at the Doctor through darkened, sunken eyes. The Time Lord thought that his friend looked sad, and he didn't like the helplessness he saw within them. Their twinkle had gone, but he thought he could still see something burning bright deep within the Brigadier's soul, and it gave him hope that the Silurians obviously hadn't broken him completely.
It wouldn't take long once he was back on his feet again for the man's fire to come back. They just had to find new ways of keeping his morale up in the meantime, and not let him slip into melancholy. It was sometimes too easy to let a man's mind drift, in the process of healing the body.
"It won't take long now Brigadier." The Doctor told him as he stood back. He disposed of the now empty hypodermic in the appropriate sharps bin in a corner of the small hospital room. "I can stay and keep you company until you fall asleep if you like?" He offered.
But the Brigadier shook his head.
"No thank you Doctor." He thanked him gratefully. "That won't be necessary. I think I'd prefer to be alone now anyway if you don't mind." He said.
The Time Lord appeared a little unsure at first and regarded him sceptically. He didn't like the idea of leaving the Brigadier alone until he'd fallen asleep in case he reacted badly to the drugs he'd given him, and they made him sick or something. He currently had so many chemicals coursing through his system - drugs to bring his temperature down, stabilise his blood pressure, antibiotics, painkillers, and sedatives - that they could never be sure that they wouldn't react. They were taking huge risks with the amount and combination of drugs they were having to give him - but the Brigadier's long road to recovery had been entirely based on trial and error, and with every decision the a Doctor and Liz had made there'd been an element of risk involved.
The Brigadier had also appeared a little too quick and eager to decline his offer, but upon reflection the Doctor could see no legitimate reason to deny him the privacy he'd asked for, and he had no right to force him to have to put up with his company if he'd prefer to be alone.
"Very well." He finally nodded. "I'll be back in a couple of hours to check on you then," he said, "and I'm sure Liz will be in to take a look at you once she gets back."
He smiled at his friend as he opened the door to his room, and a cool draft drifted in from the empty corridor outside. He watched him with a combination of curiosity and concern, but he didn't say anymore.
The Brigadier had already started lowering himself back down into bed, and the Time Lord slowly pulled the door closed behind him, being careful not to let it bang. He still felt on edge though and unable to shake the worry which had suddenly and inexplicably gripped him he asked a young nurse – who happened to be passing him in the corridor on his way out – to keep a close eye on the Brigadier.
In truth he had every reason to be worried.
The Brigadier had wanted the Doctor out of the way for a reason. He wanted to see for how long he could fight off the effects of the medication he'd given him, before it completely overwhelmed his system, if only to prove to himself that he still had some semblance of control. But either he was more tired than he'd first thought, or he'd underestimated the strength of the drugs that the Doctor had been prepared to give him.
The Brigadier fought against the powerful chemical cocktail in his system for as long as he could, but to his dismay be quickly began to realise that he wouldn't be able to override it for long. He hated feeling so helpless – and he guessed that this came part and parcel with being an officer. He wasn't used to feeling so powerless, and his lack of control over his current situation was making him feel uneasy.
His eyelids became more heavy, and began to close as soon as his head came into contact with the pillow. It lolled gently to one side, as the sedative finally reached his central nervous system. Thinking became more difficult - like wading through thick, sticky treacle - and so he gave up trying. His heartrate slowed and his breathing deepened, until finally he lost consciousness.
The Brigadier was asleep before the Doctor had even left the infirmary.
