Mun's here. Big cool Mun, with a bullet graze on his arm that, frankly, he doesn't even seem to notice, and his little goatee. Just oozing cool. Dark, dark eyes that burn and no doubt have worked some wonders on Frankie in their time and don't show up the drifting black in behind.
As I arrive, Frankie is running to him. This is the cherry on top, for her. If he's still here and Soul-free, I can sort him out with another inhibitor. Better, stronger, longer-lasting. If he's still here she can have him. Trouble is, that's not Hamunaptra Jones. She's too caught up to notice, cries out, "My God! How the hell'd you do it?"
He hasn't taken his eyes off me. Rather embarrassing, really.
"Yes, Mun, old bean," I add, "How'd you get rid of the blessed menace?" Soul doesn't answer. It swings Frankie out on Mun's arm and kisses her fiercely. "Oh, come on, now, that's not cricket."
"I take, Doctor," Soul begins. Frankie, as she tears herself away and scuttles back is watching, jaw slack. No fear or sadness in her, but rage. Soul continues, "Where would I have learned to take, Doctor? Who would have taught me just to take, and keep taking, and take anything I want just because I want it, or just because I decide somebody else doesn't deserve it, where would I have learned that, Doctor?"
Soul's got Mun.
Soul, if it so chose, could snap me in half like a twig. I believe I've discussed the concept before.
But Soul doesn't want to kill me anymore.
Before I quite realize what's happening, with Mun's sidearm and Mun's perfect aim, without hardly even a glance in her direction, Soul has fired at Amy. And hit.
God forgive me, I freeze. Amy falls and Rory and River go to her. Jessica has both arms bladed and places herself in front of me. But I freeze.
In all the screaming, all the chaos, without a single word, Captain Francesca Holly cocks her gun and places it against Mun Jones' temple. Simple and terrible and beautiful.
Soul smiles around at her. "C'mon, little woman. Put that thing away. I'll flash back in and we'll dance, you and I."
Frankie doesn't move.
Somewhere on my left, Rory is a surgeon this time. Without question or hesitation. Amy is gasping and River is, I believe, shouting at me, but I'm not quite sure. I'm underwater. The usual answers don't fit.
Frankie, by the way, still motionless. Except for her lips. Those move, and I know to look at her she's counting. Her expression is helpless, and Soul mistakes this for hesitation. It says almost kindly, "You won't do it. Don't trouble yourself, Chessie. Nobody's gonna blame you."
"Three," she says, almost out loud.
"Three what, honey?"
Frankie says, "Two." Some horrible little reflex in the back of my mind says, 'Mississippi'. "One." Not enough time for Soul to vacate.
Frankie fires as Mun vanishes. No body, not a drop of blood, all of it gone. And Soul split from itself, cast without a shell into the vortex alone.
Clever that. Terrible way to go about it, but clever.
The gun falls from Frankie's hand, and with the clatter, everything jumps into focus. Soul is gone, Francesca will live, Amelia has been shot. It's clear where I should be.
But as I try to go to her, River stands and shoves me back. Follows the shove with a stinging backhand slap which, once I get over the fact that I don't think I've done anything to deserve it, I realize was intended to wake me up. "What do you think you're doing?" she cries out. Turns me and places both my hands on entirely random and useless parts of the console. "You are the wrong kind of Doctor for her right now. In less than ninety seconds the atmospheric shell on Demon's Run is going to be cleft in twain, and what isn't crushed by the gravity default will be torn to pieces by the vacuum. Make us move!"
Another empty second. The answers start to come. Escape and a hospital and the Tardis. Thinking is for another time, a safer time.
"Point, set and match to River Song! Levers and buttons and instruments, yes, now this I can do." Pretend there's no blood on the floor and Rory isn't single-handedly compressing a chest wound, and this is just any other Tuesday afternoon. "Francesca!" No response. I try again, louder, but gentler, "Francesca." Jessica helps. With her weapons folded back, she uses her shoulder to nudge Frankie forward, and this time she looks up at me. "Come and hold this lever down or we're all doomed. I'd ask Jessica, but she's got her nails on."
And here, in chaos, in pain, things crystallize, and start to make sense in spite of themselves. This is the moment itself; we're all still here and still fighting for it, and the point is to keep it that way. Frankie steps up and I give her a lever to hold that'll feel like it's resisting and is actually completely pointless, but it stops her thinking about what she just did. Those thoughts aren't safe right now. Later she'll mourn and later we'll comfort her but this is the moment. This is where we define ourselves and she needs to be part of this.
"Rory?"
"Busy!"
"Good! I've never had anybody shot dead in my Tardis, don't make it two at a stroke. River, you should be fetching pressure dressings and the purply-pink fluid from the medical room and that's about a minute ago."
Me, I'm recalibrating the entire take-off process to compensate for the internal gravity of Demon's Run compensating for all the power getting drained away from it, which actually is rocket science, but is pretty much a background concern, unless I get it wrong, in which case we'll all be dead anyway and who'll care?
"Jessica Apple, drop your weapons, please. Rory needs you to help hold Amy still for take-off."
"Meant to ask," he shouts to me, "but is there any chance-"
"Take-off, Rory, will be much smoother than usual if it ki-… if it's the last thing I d-… oh, you know what I mean." Lowering my voice, I tell the console, "And you, old girl, I know you heard that and this is not the time to show me up." This is my part. After this, when we're in the air and haven't been turned into a big squishy Tardis pancake, I'm home and dry and all I have to do is take the rest of them with me. A millisecond, a heartbeat, just enough time to breath, I linger over the brakes. "Oh, please, Sexy, just this once."
Smooth, gentle, a pussycat rather than a tiger, oh, beautiful Tardis, I'll never love another, I promise you-
"Hallelujah, he found the stabilizers. Only took you, what, five, six centuries?"
-Except River, of course. Have to love River.
River comes down the stairs and direct to Amy. The pressure dressings, in theory, should be the stopgap we need until I can get her to a hospital, but from the corner of my eye I see Rory shaking his head, starting to get flustered and call, "Problem?"
"I can't get the bleeding slowed down to get it dressed."
Damn. Think, man, a solution. A coagulant will take too long, wadding isn't working, what else can we find?
"Jessica?"
"Doctor."
"You've got a rather interesting big scar on your shoulder since you came back, what happened?"
"Tall person opened her for punishing."
She doesn't see what I'm getting at, and from all the frustrated noises I'm guessing neither does Rory, but River does.
She lifts one of Jessica's discarded stakes, snaps off the end and holds it out to her father.
"Oh. Yes, Rory. Not hurts, only fills, and am to be taking on blood."
"Wonderful!" I tell them all. "Solved!"
"I'm not staking my wife through the heart!"
"Jessica does?"
"Oh, Daddy, give it here."
"Excuse me, I will stake my wife through the heart, thank you very much."
And he swears and he prays about it and all sorts of little human rituals, but he does it, he really does. Takes that blunt little ash plug and pushes it gently into the wound. The blood doesn't stop, but it eases. The dressing goes on and seals it up. The pinky-purply fluid is injected and, over the wordless, lethal minutes that follow, Amelia's pulse strengthens.
I've been jumping Frankie from distraction to distraction, but she's still around the console. I don't mean to do it in front of her, but I can't help but sigh my relief when Rory says that most beautiful of all your earth words, 'stable'.
And River, joking it all away, says, "That'll be the day." Nobody laughs. We might if we had the breath, but for now we're all just breathing. I wish it wasn't enough just to be breathing, that the moments that make us could be about more than just surviving, but they're not. And breathing, when it has to be, is perfect.