Waking to shouting was never pleasant, Melissa decided, especially when it felt like she had the mother of all hangovers. It was a chore to open her eyes, but she finally did in the hope that she could ask whoever was arguing to please keep it down. Groaning softly, she looked around until she saw Susan sitting next to her. Suddenly, she knew she was in the TARDIS infirmary; the chair Susan was sitting in still had the impression of the Doctor's hands on the metal armrest.
"What's the ruckus, Sue?"
"Um," her daughter stalled, trying to decide how much of the argument to share with her mother. "Matt's not happy with the Doctor at the moment, and I think he lost his temper."
Susan had been deliberately vague about which one had lost his temper, but Matthew's angry shouting made it quite clear.
"You're never here when we need you! Where were you when the Cybermen used some kind of magnet and tried to pull us out of the safe room? Mom was pinned to the door; she broke her shoulder! Where were you when those aliens attacked our school? You let Jack almost get killed; then you just left him after he saved your butt in the future! Why couldn't you save Rose? Let me tell you, getting stuck in a different universe sucks big time! She must hate you right now! Why can't you help Mom? You can't tell us that she's getting worse and just leave it like that! What are you good for, anyway?"
Melissa staggered to the kitchen, following the sound of her son's voice. She was afraid of the Doctor reaction to the boy's rant, and wanted to be there in case he needed protecting. She shouldn't have worried. When the Doctor looked at Matthew after the boy had finally finished, there was fire in his eyes, but he addressed her son quite calmly, although the tension in his voice was palpable.
"You are upset, and I am going to ignore what you just said to me because I care deeply for your mother, and don't want to upset her any more than necessary. However, your behavior is unacceptable, Matthew. I know you've lost your father and your home, but that does not give you the right to treat me, or anyone else, the way you just did. I think you should go back to the house and think about that for a while."
It looked like the teen was about to start another tirade when he caught sight of his mother. The disappointment evident on her face was enough to shame him, and he ducked awkwardly out of the room mumbling to himself. Too shocked to say anything, Melissa simply watched him leave. Susan, who was several feet farther down the hall, tried to give her brother a hug, but he just pushed away her hands and ran out of the ship. The door closed with a bang.
"I'm going back home to fix us some gumbo. Maybe eating something will help him." She looked apologetically at both her mother and the Doctor as she, too, left.
"Doctor, I'm sorry for the way Matthew behaved." Melissa wanted to take everything her son said back and leave it unsaid. It was so unfair to the man who had saved all their lives.
"Don't make excuses for him; it's not your place. Besides, I'm sure I deserved most of it."
He was still angry and attempting to control his emotions. With a sickening lurch, she realized that he was angry with himself. Surely, he didn't believe the twisted version of history that her son had shoved in his face?
Unexpectedly, he turned his full attention back to her. Snapping, he asked, "Now are you ready to start telling me the truth, or are you just going to continue to lie to me?"
As her head continued to pound, she gained another symptom to add to the hangover. Weakly she tried to make a joke out of it. "Can I be sick first?"
His annoyance instantly changed into concern as he held the kitchen trash can while she vomited what little was in her stomach. Marching her back to the infirmary, he picked up a few items from the drawers as she sat on the bed trying to will her hangover away.
"Here take this. It'll help your stomach and help you get some rest." Wordlessly, she obeyed, drinking the chalky liquid in one gulp. "Better?" he asked after a few seconds.
"Yes. You don't have anything in those drawers for my head do you?" Now that she wasn't nauseated, the pounding was harder to ignore.
"No, sleep's the best thing for that. Now, tell me exactly what your symptoms are. It's important, Melissa." He ran the sonic screwdriver over her head, slipping on his glasses and squinting at the results.
"I feel like I have a hangover, but I don't remember drinking anything. My head's just pounding, and the shouting was making it worse. I got up to try to get you all to keep it down. I didn't expect my son to go postal."
Paying no heed to her comment about Matthew, the Doctor asked, "What's the last thing you do remember?"
The sudden panic in her eyes told him as much as he needed to know, but she tried to answer the question anyway. "I woke up to screaming. You were having a nightmare. That's the last thing I remember, but that can't be the last thing, can it?"
"No, no it's not." Pulling off his glasses, he began to flip through pages of readouts that he must have taken while she was unconscious. Scowling at the papers, he put them to the side and sat next to her. With a sympathetic smile, he finally began to confess what he and Jack had learned the first time she entered the TARDIS. "Melissa, you're mind's unique."
"I'm well aware of that," she interrupted bitterly, not wanting another lecture.
"I don't think you are," he countered as he continued. "You see into other people's minds. You do it subconsciously, and you do it so well that even I don't know when you're there."
He didn't bother to tell her how much that had horrified him when he first realized what she was doing, or later, how much it had hurt hearing her relive some of his most painful memories.
"That's crazy! I wouldn't do something like that; it's sick!" Her head was splitting, and she didn't understand why the Doctor was telling her such horrible lies.
"You can't control it; it's not your fault," he told her gently as he laid her back on the pillows. "Maybe this isn't the best time; you should rest."
"No way are you going to tell me that I'm some brain sucking vampire and then tell me to rest!"
He ran his fingers through his hair, thinking. "Well, telling you now probably wasn't the brightest thing I've done. You do know I can be rude sometimes, don't you? I should have let you recover first."
"Too late now; you're going to have to explain yourself. I need to know why I'm two sandwiches short of a picnic." Oh God, she was a living member of the Twilight Zone.
Snorting in spite of himself, he reassured her. "You aren't crazy; I promise. You have a unique . . . ability." He was really going to have to come up with a better word.
"Don't you dare call me special," she snapped, and for an instant he wondered if she were reading his mind even then.
"Wouldn't dream of it." He smiled at her warmly, hating that he was upsetting her, but desperately needing to warn her. "Actually, I think we're losing the big picture here. I have no idea what causes you to do what you do. I can theorize it has something to do with your, ah, unusual brain structure."
Instantly grave, he admitted, "Melissa, I believe you were experimented on when you were a child. The man you say is your grandfather, the one that ran in your own words, 'a special school for special people', I think he caused this."
"What? That's ridiculous! Yes, Grandfather was cruel, but he never hurt me."
Gently, he reminded her, "You don't even know if he was your mother's or father's father. You don't remember the fire. You don't remember your parent's deaths."
Ignoring his logic, she desperately ranted, "Why can't you believe this is just some fun house mirror? Maybe everyone on my Earth has a brain like mine."
Hating to shred her argument to pieces, he nevertheless quietly answered, "Then your children's brains would look like yours, and they don't."
"Oh." She deflated. He wasn't simply telling her she was some freak; he was telling her someone created her to be a freak. It was a little much to accept.
Seeing her distress, he tried to allay her fears. "It doesn't matter. Whether you were born like this or someone made you this way, doesn't matter. You're still you, all strong and courageous and spirited. The problem is what happens while you are remembering snippets of someone else's life."
Again, he was serious, rapidly losing her in lecture mode. "The human brain isn't equipped to process that amount of new information in such a short amount of time. You compensate by using areas of your brain that are normally dormant in a human, but that causes flaring of electrical impulses in every lobe. When your brain activity reaches a critical point, your mind starts to shut down, and you lose consciousness. It's simply your body's way of protecting you, but reaching that point is dangerous. The longer the spike in brain activity, the more likely your mind won't recover."
His explanation finished, he watched her stare unblinking at the ceiling. "Melissa?"
Counting the tiles, she idly wondered why the TARDIS had chosen to have a conventional ceiling in the infirmary when much of the ship was made up of vaulted coral. Maybe it was to make the sick and afflicted more at ease, and maybe she was again avoiding things. Finally, she looked at the Doctor, who was waiting patiently for her reaction.
"So, I'm a walking time bomb."
"Well," he drawled, stalling for time. "According to your children, your blackouts are getting more frequent. I won't lie to you and tell you that's not troubling. However, the headaches you get before you blackout are a warning. If you can distract yourself somehow before the headache gets too bad, you should be able to interrupt the electrical impulses before they become too dangerous. Remember when Rose touched you and you passed out? That might have just saved your life."
"Oh, good, a time bomb with an off switch."
"More like a pause button," he conceded. Suddenly, the grief and despair of losing Rose overwhelmed him. "Your son's right, I'm not good for anything. I couldn't save Rose; I can't make you better, and it breaks my hearts to see you suffer while you remember the horrible things I've done. After you've rested, I'm going to leave. At least you won't have to pick things out of my head."
She knew he was serious because he was at the door in four long strides, intending to let her sleep.
"Don't do this to me," she begged, bursting into tears. "You're not the cause of this. You know that! I don't know what I said to upset you so much because I don't remember it. And I'm sorry; I'm really, really sorry. I know your nightmares are horrible, and I would never want to dredge up another one, but I'm so scared right now, and you think you're trying to protect me by leaving, but I feel so alone, and I can't take it. Please, Doctor, please don't run away from me." Her fear was making her almost hysterical, and she sobbed uncontrollably, curling into a tight ball on the bed.
He was at her side in an instant, patting her back and cursing himself for being both a coward and incredibly cruel. "I would never run away from you," he reassured her. "I made a promise a long time ago, and I intend to keep it." He sat next to her until the sedative he had given her with the nausea medication took effect, and she drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The Doctor was performing routine maintenance on the TARDIS when Matthew knocked loudly on the door. Banging his head in his haste to get up, he pushed the outer door open. "Hello, Matthew. I didn't expect to see you this soon." It had only been three hours since the teen had stormed out of the ship.
"Where's Mom?" the boy asked gruffly, not quite ready to make the apology he had every intention of making.
"She's still in the infirmary sleeping. If you're intent on yelling at me some more, perhaps you should do it outside. She could use the rest." The Doctor wiped some grease off his hands, seemingly untroubled by Matthew's presence.
"I wasn't planning on yelling again," the teen replied sullenly. "I just thought that, well, maybe I owed you an apology."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, well, I said some things that were pretty ugly, and I guess I wanted to say sorry. It's not your fault that Mom is having all these blackouts. She has them when you're not here, too." Arms crossed defensively in front of him, he looked down at his tennis shoes, up to the ceiling, anywhere but at the Doctor. Pausing, he shuffled around, gathering his courage to finish. "And, um, I'm really sorry I said anything about Rose. That was way out of line, and by then I just wanted to hurt you."
"It wasn't the nicest thing anyone's every said about me," the Doctor conceded, noting that Matthew had not apologized for anything he had said about his treatment of Jack. "Still, I've heard a lot worse," he added evenly, determined not to let the boy know just how much that comment had hurt him.
Finally, Matthew looked at him. "Like I said, sorry."
"Apology accepted." Grinning, he offered, "How would you like to help me oil the crystal connectors while we wait for your mother to wake up?"
His awkwardness around the Doctor quickly forgotten, Matthew agreed enthusiastically. When Melissa finally woke up two hours later, she found her son covered in oil, lying underneath the grating of the control room. The Doctor was watching him with an amused expression on his face as he once again checked the parking brake.
"That shirt's going to be ruined," she said ruefully as the Doctor and Matthew scrambled to their feet.
"Oh, but it was so cool under there! It's worth a ton of shirts, Mom!" he enthusiastically protested, wiping his dirty hands on his jeans.
"I guess enjoying greasy engine repairs is a guy thing," she teased, glad to see that the Doctor had allowed Matthew to work on the TARDIS.
"It's a mechanic thing," the Doctor corrected cheerfully. "And Matthew has quite an aptitude for it."
"Thanks," the teen replied, embarrassed. "Um, Mom, I've already told the Doctor I'm sorry, but I guess I owe you an apology, too. I shouldn't have lost my temper like that. I know it's unacceptable behavior, and I'll try to do better."
Wondering what her son was talking about, she remained noncommittal for fear of upsetting him. "No problem, Matt." She glanced at the Doctor and saw that he was looking shrewdly at her. He knew that she was clueless, and it made her uneasy.
"Now that your mother's awake, maybe we could all go out for dinner. Why don't you and your sister get ready, and we'll meet you in a bit. I'm sure your mum wants to change."
Patting Matthew on the shoulder, he thanked him for all his help. "I meant what I said about you having a mechanical aptitude, Matthew. I hope you can use your abilities in whatever you decide to study." Suddenly switching topics, he asked, "Is that Mexican restaurant still open? Their pork tamales were muy bueno."
"Mexican sounds a lot better than the raw corn I ate last night!" I'll go tell Susan we're all going out to eat. See you in a bit!" Matthew jogged out of the TARDIS, happy that the Doctor had forgiven him and relieved that his mother had not grounded him for a month.
"You going to tell me what that was about?" Melissa asked the Doctor as her son left.
Rubbing the back of his neck, the Doctor quickly decided that he would not make the same mistake twice. "You had a migraine. Matthew blamed me for not being able to help you, and said a few things that he now regrets."
"He yelled at you before I passed out?" Melissa was confused; the Doctor's explanation wasn't making perfect sense. He was leaving something out.
"Um, no. When you woke up, you still had a headache, and took a nap to try to make it go away. It seems you've forgotten what happened between losing consciousness and sleeping again. Has that ever happened before?" How close had she come to permanently injuring her mind? Her brain activity had spiked for thirteen point two minutes, much longer than he had noted on previous visits.
"Oh, goody, that's a new symptom," she answered sarcastically. The fear in her voice was apparent when she continued, however. "How dangerous is all this? Ever since the invasion, I've felt different, almost like I'm being stalked. Am I going crazy?"
"No, I can assure you that you are not going crazy."
Deciding not to upset her twice, he did not attempt to explain her abilities yet again. Pacing around the console, he did try to warn her, however. "Melissa, I don't think you should ignore your headaches any longer. I told you they were dangerous when we first met, and they still are. When you start to get one, just go lie down for a while. Try not to ignore the pain. You were hurting long before we got to the TARDIS, weren't you?"
Still fearful, she admitted, "I don't remember going to the TARDIS. I don't remember anything since, well, since your nightmare. I'm sorry. Suddenly, the image of him screaming under the desk overwhelmed her. "Are you okay? It looked like you were having a rough time of it last night."
He smiled at her, and for once she was fooled by his performance. "I'm fine. Really, I am. I'm sorry you don't remember, but you gave me some very wise advice, and I am very thankful the TARDIS brought me here."
"She knows what's best, don't you girl?" Melissa stroked one of the coral struts, pleased to feel a pleasant thrum under her fingertips. Turning back to the Doctor, she smiled. "She likes me."
"'Course she does. What's not to like?" Throwing the oily rag on the console, he added, "I'd best wash up before we go out. Don't want to eat tamales with engine grease on my hands. There's a bag in the infirmary with some of your clothes if you don't want to use the wardrobe."
"Like the new suit, by the way," she called out as she walked to the infirmary to change clothes.
Fifteen minutes later, they were both ready to go. Dinner was pleasant because the Doctor made it so. He acted like his old self, even though Matthew's rant was constantly in his mind. Could he have saved Rose? Had he done everything he could do to help Melissa? Maybe he should have told her what she was capable of, again. Whatever he decided, he knew it was time to leave in the morning. He couldn't stay here, not with Matthew's accusations, made all the worse because they were only too true. He was worthless to them.
Fighting another nightmare, the Doctor woke up in the guest bedroom at three in the morning. Going into the kitchen to put the kettle on, he wondered if it would be better to leave now, without all the goodbyes. Coward, he thought bitterly as he let the tea bag steep in his cup.
"Is the water still hot?" He stiffened at the sound of Melissa's voice and merely nodded, watching her fix a cup of hot chocolate as he sat pensively at the kitchen table. She vigorously stirred her drink and then she, too, sat down.
"You're leaving." It wasn't a question; she knew him too well for that.
"Same old life. Can't stay in one spot for long." Taking a sip of tea, he added seriously, "I've got to go." She nodded, concentrating on drinking her hot chocolate before it became lukewarm.
Desperately wanting to help her in some way, he once again made her an offer. "I could still look in your mind, you know. If we could find what triggers your headaches, it may be easier for you to avoid it."
Running her finger along the rim of her cup, she once again refused. "I know you mean well, and I trust you, really I do, but looking into other people's minds seems like such a violation. There are so many dark things in my head. I wouldn't want you to see all that." She added quietly, "I wouldn't want you to judge me for the things I've done and the thoughts I've had.
He decided not to press her. "I would never judge you, you know. If you ever decide to change your mind, I still think it's a worthwhile avenue to explore."
"Maybe another time. You are going to come back sometime aren't you?"
"I'm sure you'll see me again. The TARDIS seems to like it here," he allowed with a small smile, wishing not for the first time that his ship would stop meddling in his life.
Relieved, she smiled back. He still looked like he had been through hell, but least he was not running away from them permanently. "If you don't mind, I'm going to try to go back to sleep. I can't exist on a few hours every few days like you can. Lock the door when you leave, okay?" She gave him a tight hug, hating goodbyes almost as much as he did.
He watched her walk back to her bedroom, and then put his empty cup in the sink. His coat was on and he was halfway to the door when she suddenly reappeared.
"I just have to ask you one thing. If Rose suddenly appeared, and it had been a long time for you, would you still want to see her, even if you've moved on?"
"Blimey, Melissa, that's a lot of ifs, and I know Rose can't get back, so I don't know how to answer that." He really didn't understand what she was trying to ask.
"I just, well, if you had someone in your past and they showed up, would you be happy about it?"
He thought for a moment, seriously considering her question. "I would always be glad to see an old friend, even if I had, as you said, moved on. Why?"
She didn't answer him, but gave him another hug. "Au revoir, Doctor."
"Au revoir, Melissa," he replied as he slipped out the door.
Sitting blearily at the kitchen table, she was already regretting her decision not to tell the Doctor again about Major Marshall and his increasingly frightening behavior. But, her friend didn't need the trouble, not now, not when he was so torn up after losing Rose. There was no telling what he might do. The threats the man had made several months ago still terrified her, however, and she knew she needed help.
Finally getting enough courage to act on the decision she had made weeks ago, she sat down in front of the computer in her office. It took only a few minutes to purchase three tickets to Cardiff. Now, she just had to pack and find a plausible excuse for the kids.