The Empty Child: I'm a Con Man

The Doctor was using some pretty advanced binoculars to examine the bomb site, Rose was playing with her fingers and occasionally looked up to stare at the area, and Nancy was directing the Doctor of where to look. They were still by her shack; the bomb site just happened to be a few hundred yards in front of it.

"The bomb's under that tarpaulin," Nancy pointed to what she vaguely saw was a sheet covering something up with five soldiers guarding it well. The site was surrounded by an electric fence and look-out towers. "They put the fence up over night. See that building? The hospital?"

The Doctor moved his head slightly to the left and located a tall, rectangular building that was hardly lit up except for one floor, "What about it?" He zoomed in on it.

"That's where the doctor is," Nancy said. "You should talk to him."

"For now, I'm more interested in getting in there," the Doctor peeled his eyes away from the binoculars and pointed to the bomb site. He wasn't saying that he didn't want to see this 'doctor,' but one problem at a time. Besides, what if it was a future version of him? Nancy hadn't said any names yet, so he could possibly create a paradox by stepping into the same room as the doctor. He wanted to see if he would regenerate in the near future, and if he did, he wanted to see what he would look like.

"Talk to the doctor first."

"Why?"

"Because then you won't want to get inside," Nancy smirked then turned to leave, all too ready to get back to the Lloyds' house. The feeling of being watched (not from the Doctor or Rose) was still nagging at her, and she had a feeling she knew exactly who it was.

"Where're you going?" Rose asked her with furrowed eyebrows. "I thought you were gonna come with us."

"There was a lot of food in that house," Nancy told her. "I've got mouths to feed. Should be safe enough now."

The Doctor looked back into his binoculars and studied the bomb site once more, "Can I ask you a question? Who did you lose?"

"Doctor," Rose stared at him like he had two heads and in disapproval.

"The way you look after all those kids," the Doctor ignored her. "It's because you lost somebody, isn't it? You're doing all this to make up for it."

Nancy pursued her lips and was silent for a moment or two before she finally gave in, "My little brother, Jamie. One night I went out looking for food. Same night that thing fell. I told him not to follow me. I told him it was dangerous, but he just..." She sighed and stared at the ground in guilt, "he just didn't like being on his own."

"What happened?"

"In the middle of an air raid? What do you think happened?"

"I'm sorry," Rose sincerely said, unable to imagine how painful it must be to lose someone so close. A parent was bad enough, but a sibling? Which one was worse? "I lost my dad a few years ago, if it makes you feel any better."

Nancy only smiled sadly at her.

"Amazing," the Doctor suddenly chuckled after a few moments of silence, whether it was intentional to mourn the losses or not.

"What is?" Nancy asked him in confusion.

"1941," the Doctor said thoughtfully, staring out at the bomb field again. "Right now, not very far away from here, the German war machine is rolling up the map of Europe. Country after country, falling like dominoes. Nothing can stop it. Nothing. Until one, tiny, damp, little island says no. Not here. A mouse in front of a lion... You're amazing, the lot of you. Don't know what you do to Hitler, but you frighten the hell out of me! Off you go, then. Do you what you've got to do. Save the world."

Nancy nodded and waved goodbye to them. As she was walking back to the neighborhood, she didn't see a child in a gasmask follow her.

"Well that's a first," Rose smirked at the Doctor. "You're actually complimenting the human race. I should probably award you with something after we're done here."

"Ha ha," the Doctor said dryly and walked toward the hospital. "I can easily take that back. You better savour what I just said because you're probably not gonna hear something like that for a long while."

.l.l.l.

It was a bit of a long walk to the hospital, but the Doctor and Rose eventually made it. On top of that, they wanted to avoid being spotted by any soldiers that were stationed at the bomb site. The Time Lord didn't want to risk getting arrested without knowing how dangerous the child in the gasmask could possibly get.

The time travelling duo bumped into a metal gate during the impossible mission of getting into the hospital, that was no issue at all. Nope, just get the sonic out and unlock the gate. Easy-peasy.

After a journey through some dark, abandoned corridors, the Doctor and Rose stumbled into the only room with the lights on. On all the beds were patients that had two things in common: they weren't breathing and were wearing gas masks.

"Why are they...?" Rose began to ask but trailed off when someone else entered the room.

He was an old man leaning heavily on a cane as he walked; since he was wearing a white cloak, it didn't take a genius to guess that he was some kind of doctor. This must be the doctor that Nancy was talking about, not the Doctor but a doctor. The doctor made his way over to a lone chair in the middle of the room next to a random table.

"You'll find them everywhere," he spoke tiredly. "In every bed, in every ward. Hundreds of them."

"Yes, we saw," the Doctor said warily, glancing at the patients every now and then. "Why are they still wearing gas masks?"

"They're not," the doctor countered mysteriously, coming closer to the chair by two inches every five seconds. "Who are you two?"

"That's Rose," the Doctor pointed to her and she waved at him a little. "I'm, er... are you the Doctor?"

"Doctor Constantine," Constantine added, completely missing the disappointment on the Doctor's face. "And you are...?"

"Nancy sent us."

"Nancy? That means you must've been asking about the bomb."

"Yes."

"What do you know about it?" Constantine asked him, looking pretty bored. That was probably because of how many times he had to go through explaining the patients and the bomb.

"Nothing," the Doctor shrugged absently. "Why I was asking. What do you know?"

"Only what it's done," Constantine informed him distantly.

"What's happened to these people?" Rose asked Constantine with a hint of worry in her voice. She was merely expecting them all to sit up suddenly and start coming after her, like a zombie would.

"I think they were all caught up in the blast," the Doctor told her, though he didn't sound very certain of himself.

"None of them were," Constantine chuckled for some bizarre reason, but then the laugh turned into a bad cough that sent him crashing onto the chair. He coughed about five more times before he was able to clear his throat and swallow down tiny coughs creeping up.

"You're very sick," the Doctor analyzed him.

"Dying, I should think," Constantine sighed. "I just haven't been able to find the time. Are you a doctor?"

"Sort of," Rose said, but it sounded more like a question. While the Doctor was called the Doctor and had his moments as one, he wasn't a proper one. He didn't have any kind of qualification that said he was, but then again she had no idea how much the Doctor actually knew. He could be very capable of being the best doctor there ever was and she would never know it.

"Have you examined any of them yet?"

"No," the Doctor shook his head and was already fishing for his screwdriver because he was that curious.

"Don't touch the flesh," Constantine warned him, giving him the okay to examine the patients.

"Which one?"

"Any one."

The Doctor walked over to a male patient on the left side of the room, the closest to where he and Rose had entered. He ran his screwdriver along the lines of the gas mask then trailed it down to the chest. Rose, having no idea if the patient was even alive or dead, simply studied the scar on the man's hand.

"Conclusions?" Constantine asked them, not bothering to turn his old head toward them.

"Massive head trauma, mostly to the left side," the Doctor listed off. "Partial collapse of the chest cavity, mostly to the right. There's some scarring on the back of the hand and the gas mask seems to be fused, but I can't see any burns."

"Examine another one," Constantine told him, and so the Doctor did.

The Time Lord turned around on the spot to scan the patient who was next to the one he just examined. The only difference here was that this patient was a woman, so the Doctor gaped, "This isn't possible."

"Examine another."

The Doctor scurried to the last patient in the row, and guess what he said next, "This isn't possible."

"No," Constantine agreed, hiding a smile at the Doctor's reaction.

"What is it?" Rose asked the Time Lord worriedly. "What's wrong? What 'isn't possible?'"

"They've all got the same injuries!" he exclaimed in shock, then double-checked to make sure he wasn't going mad... okay, more mad than he already was. But to have the same exact injuries in the same exact places... it's hardly coincidental. Now he had to ask this: did the child in the gas mask cause this or was it something to do with the bomb?

"Yes," Constantine nodded.

"Exactly the same!"

"Yes."

"Okay, so how does that even happen?" Rose wondered aloud. She might have not have gone to medical school, but she knew enough that having the same injuries for an entire ward of people was amazingly impossible.

"I don't know, but they're identical, all of them," the Doctor admitted and read the results on his screwdriver for the third time. "Right down to the scar on the back of the hand." Constantine glanced down at his own scar on his hand before looking back at the Time Lord. "How did this happen? How did it start?"

"When that bomb dropped, there was just one victim," Constantine explained in a way that was once again vague.

"Dead?" the Doctor guessed.

"At first," Constantine continued. "His injuries were truly dreadful. By the following morning, every doctor and nurse who had treated him, who had touched him, had those exact same injuries. By the morning after that, every patient in the same ward, the exact same injuries. Within a week, the entire hospital. Physical injuries as plague. Can you explain that? What would you say was the cause of death?"

"The head trauma?"

"No."

"Asphyxiation?"

"No."

"The collapse of the chest cavity?"

"No."

"He doesn't know and neither do I," Rose butted in, done with hearing these hopeless guesses. "What was the cause of death?"

"There wasn't one," Constantine revealed. "They're not dead." He whacked his cane against a waste basket, tipping it over in the process. The noise caused every patient with a gas mask to sit up straight and stare curiously at the three people in the room. The Doctor and Rose backed away from the patients that they were near and ended up moving closer to Constantine. "It's all right. They're harmless. They just sort of... sit there. No heartbeat, no life signs of any kind. They just don't die."

"So, what, they've just left these poor people?" Rose said and watched as the patients slowly laid back down. "They left them to rot away in here?"

"I try and make them comfortable," Constantine pointed out and stared at the ground. "What else is there?"

"Just you?" the Doctor asked him. "You're the only one?" Apparently there was only one kind heart out of about a hundred doctors and nurses during the London Blitz. Thank goodness that times change and people become more good.

"Before this war began, I was a father and a grandfather," Constantine admitted sadly. "Now I am neither, but I'm still a doctor."

"Yeah, I know the feeling," the Doctor swallowed, thinking back to Susan and his wonderful children that he had abandoned on Gallifrey. He wasn't exaggerating when he said that he would do anything to even say hello to them again.

He could feel Rose's curious stare on his body; neither a good thing or a bad thing. At least she was paying attention to the conversation enough to have caught his little comment, so he'd probably had to have a little talk with her about it later. Was this how Virgo felt like when she found out that Rose had been eavesdropping on her with Jackie? Maybe so, and now he understood that this feeling wasn't nice to have. He had to hope that Rose would simply forget about this and move on with the rest of their lives.

"I suspect the plan is to blow up the hospital and blame it on a German bomb," Constantine brought him back to reality.

"Probably too late," the Doctor shrugged, trying to act normal.

"No," Constantine disagreed. He definitely liked to simply say 'yes' or 'no,' huh? "There are isolated cases. Isolated cases breaking out all over London." He coughed into his fist so hard that his voice was starting to leave him. The Doctor and Rose, both growing concerned about the old man, stepped closer to him to try to help him. "Stay back, stay back. Listen to me: top floor, room 802. That's where they took the first victim, the one from the crash site. And you must find Nancy again."

"Nancy?" the Doctor frowned. Of all people, why her? Well, he could already guess why because the child in the gas mask seemed very intent on following her around.

"It was her brother," Constantine desperately told him, but his his desperation well. He was sensing that his time was ending very, very soon. "She knows more than she's saying. She won't tell me, but she might-" He looked like he was about to say more, but it sounded like he was choking.

"He's choking!" Rose sprinted forward to try to help him, but the Doctor held her back. "We've got to do something! He's going to die if we don't help him!"

"Mu... Mummy?" Constantine croaked and Rose ceased in her struggling. "Are... you... my... mummy?" His mouth opened and his eyes grew wide as a gas mask slowly formed on his face, like flesh and blood. After the gas mask was completely on Constantine's head dropped down and hung next to his shoulder, looking like he was asleep after a long day of taking care of the patients.

"Okay...," Rose spoke after a long silence, "probably the weirdest thing I've ever seen." She saw the look on the Doctor's face that just screamed, 'Are you serious?' "Okay, the weirdest thing I've seen recently."

"Hello?" a man's voice called out, a voice that sounded quite familiar to the Doctor but he couldn't place where it was from. It was an American accent, he knew that much.

"Hello?" another voice called out, and this was one that the Doctor definitely knew of. It was Virgo's voice.

"Hello?"

"Is that Virgo?" Rose wondered aloud, turning her body toward the corridor where she and the Doctor heard the voices coming from.

Seeing no reason to risk waking up the patients and Constantine, Rose and the Doctor strolled out of the ward and into the deserted corridors in an attempt to find Jack and Virgo. It didn't exactly take very long since the journey between the ward and entrance wasn't that far away from each other. All everyone had to do was follow the sound of footsteps and shouts to locate each other; call it a version of Marco-Polo where everyone had their eyes open.

Jack's head popped out from around a corner and Virgo's head eventually appeared as well. His eyes landed on the duo, so he ran over to them and held his hand out to shake either one's hand, "Good evening. Hope we're not interrupting. Jack Harkness. I've been hearing all about you on the way over. It's a real pleasure to meet you, Doctor Donald, and you, too, Rosemary." He winked at them both before running into the ward where the gas mask people were resting.

"Hi...," Virgo nervously laughed and waved at them. She hadn't seen the Doctor or Rose since she was forced to tell the Doctor about her little story, so now it was... very weird. She cleared her throat and gestured toward the ward. "Suppose we should go in there, then?"

"Doctor Donald?" was all the Doctor could say to her.

"Rosemary?" Rose was also frowning at her cover name. She didn't like it, it was too much of an old name for her liking. Why couldn't it have been a more pretty name, like Rosetta or Rosalina?

"Oh, come on," Virgo rolled her eyes at them. "Jack would never have accepted John Smith and I really wasn't in the mood to answer 'Doctor who?'. Why not spice things up a bit? Besides, I like it. You're like my own Disney Donald."

"Okay, so why couldn't you tell him I was Rose?" the said girl asked. "Why'd you say I'm Rosemary?"

"The Doctor was getting a nickname," Virgo shrugged, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Why shouldn't you get one, too? Mister Mickey, Doctor Donald, and now Rosemary. I've got my gang all set up."

"Where've you been?" the Doctor blurted out suddenly with hard eyes. "We're in the middle of a London Blitz! It's not a good time for a stroll."

"You know, I kind of noticed that the moment I stepped outside," Virgo crossed her arms and started to head into the ward with the Doctor and Rose following her. "I got a nice trip on a barrage balloon then I was transferred to Jack's spaceship. It's a Chula warship, by the way."

"What's a Chula warship?" Rose asked her. What kind of name was 'Chula' anyway?

.l.l.l.

Back at the Lloyds' house, Nancy stepped inside it to find that the entire house still had no sign of any Lloyd in sight. She wasn't that surprised since the air raid was still going on, but she wondered how long it would be until one of them wanted a midnight snack... Well, work quickly, then.

She walked into the dining room and took some random food off the table and stashed them into her sack to keep for later. They were very cold now, but that didn't matter to her. If it was food, it was food. She'd eat anything... except for pears. There was something about them that she absolutely despised, but she didn't know what it was; the shape, the color, the taste. It could be anything.

The radio suddenly switched on saying, "Please, Mummy. Please let me in. I'm scared of the bombs, Mummy. Please, Mummy."

Nancy stared at the radio with horrified eyes and then her worst nightmare occurred: the child broke down the door and was inside the house. She could hear his voice loud and clear, and that brought tears to her eyes. Knowing that she couldn't run to the back door, she did the next best thing: hide under the table and steady her breathing.

.l.l.l.

Jack and Virgo were using their own version of scanning the gas-masked patients in the ward and both were staring at the results in shock. The Doctor was keeping his distance from Jack and was staying near Rose and Virgo. Even though he didn't know Jack for more than five minutes, he couldn't help but feel a bit hostile toward him. It wasn't Jack's fault that he talked to the pesky Time Lord from the future... in fact, that shouldn't be a bad thing at all. It was as if the Doctor's self-consciousness was screaming at him to stay away from Jack.

"This just isn't possible," Jack said in disbelief and double-checked his results to see if there was any kind of error. There wasn't any. "How did this happen?"

"I'm just as baffled," Virgo muttered thoughtfully and tried snapping her fingers next to her patient's ears to try and see if she could wake him up. "I saw a child in a gas mask earlier. Is he apart of this?"

"I think he started the entire thing," the Doctor nodded, remembering the child that had invaded the Lloyds' home. He turned to Jack. "What kind of Chula ship landed here?"

"What?" Jack frowned at his question. Why was he asking about the ship when there was an entire ward of patients with the exact same symptoms? There's a time and place for everything!

"It was a warship," Virgo answered him. "It's a ship he stole, apparently. Sounds a bit like you." She nudged his arm and the both of them laughed. "He said that some bomb was going to land on it in a few hours unless we make him a 'deal.'"

"What kind of warship?" the Doctor repeated his question, but this time it was really meant for Jack.

"Does it matter?" he asked, exasperated. "It's got nothing to do with this!"

"This started at the bomb site. It's got everything to do with it. What kind of warship?"

"An ambulance!" Jack shouted at him. "Look." He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a futuristic bracelet and pressed a few buttons. A hologram of an oval-shaped container appeared. "That's what you chased through the Time Vortex. It's space junk. I wanted to kid you it was valuable. It's empty. I made sure of it. Nothing but a shell. I threw it at you. Saw your time travel vehicle - love the look, by the way, nice panels. Threw you the bait-"

"Bait?" Rose raised an eyebrow at this.

"I wanted to sell it to you and then destroy it before you found out it was junk," Jack finished up his ramble and turned off the hologram.

"But Virgo said it was a warship," Rose furrowed her eyebrows in confusion and pointed to said Time Lady.

"'Warship' is a general term," Virgo shrugged absently. "They have ambulances in wars."

"It was a con," Jack sighed in annoyance and paced around. "I was conning you. That's what I am. I'm a con man! I thought you were Time Agents. You're not, are you?"

"Sorry, I lied," Virgo waved him off. "I just wanted to hear what you had to say. We're just a couple more freelancers."

"Oh, should have known," Jack scoffed and laughed at himself as if he was ashamed that he let himself get fooled. "The way you guys are blending in with the local color. I mean, Flag Girl and Little Miss Panda were bad enough, but U-Boat Captain? Anyway, whatever's happening here has got nothing to do with that ship."

"I'm still confused," Rose said. "What is happening here?"

"Human DNA is being rewritten by an idiot," the Doctor informed her with a cold tone in his voice.

"What do you mean?"

"There's some kind of virus converting these people and that child into these things," Virgo added on. "But why is it doing this? What could it possibly gain from a mindless human race wearing gas masks?"

.l.l.l.

Nancy was still hiding under the table concentrating on keeping her breathing quiet, but she couldn't help but quicken it when the child had entered the dining room and was slowly walking around the table. It was like he knew she was there, but he was playing around with her, like a child does.

"Mummy?" he asked the question that still wasn't answered. "Where's my mummy? Mummy?"

Nancy crawled forward toward the arch to try to run for it, but her traitorous head bumped into the table hard enough to make an apple fall off and roll right up to the child's feet. He picked it up and his head cocked, like he was examining a strange new item. Nancy suddenly got up and ran for the arch, but the child pointed at it and a door suddenly shut in front of her face. Apparently the arch was a giant doorway.

"Are you my mummy?" he asked once again and Nancy slowly turned around to face him.

.l.l.l.

A silence was settling in the ward, but it was quickly broken when all of the patients sat up stiffly and stared dead-like at the group. The Doctor, Virgo, Rose, and Jack all huddled up together toward the back of the room in an attempt to keep away from the gas-masked-people.

"Mummy?" they all asked over each other. "Mummy? Mummy? Mummy?"

"What's happening?" Rose asked with wide eyes.

"I don't know," the Doctor admitted as the patients and Constantine all stood up at the same time and walked toward them, like zombies, and kept on murmuring, 'Mummy?' "Don't let them touch you."

"What happens if they touch us?" Rose asked, but even she could guess by now what would happen if they did.

"You're looking at it," he simply said.

The four of them backed up into a wall as the patients got closer and closer saying, "Help me, Mummy. Mummy. Mummy. Mummy. Mummy. Mummy. Mummy."

To Be Continued In... The Doctor Dances!

A/N: You know what I really hated about Saturday last week? I was simply watching Hell Bent waiting for if the Doctor was seriously going to wipe Clara's memories of him, but then my TV just had to break. Well, not break, it was like... It was basically like once you got up to a certain point on the orange bar thing-y that you see when you fast-forward or rewind or pause/play, it simply stopped. You couldn't fast forward or hit play, but you could rewind. Eventually I did something, I don't know what, that made it "work," but I had to miss about 5 minute of it. I had to look up a transcript to see what actually went down during those last 5 minutes, and that pretty much ruined it for me. On the bright side: River Song is coming back! Big yes! I'm so watching it!

Anyway, if you don't care and skipped that whole thing, I don't blame you because I know that I whine about a lot of things. Give me a break, I don't wanna grow up just yet. I still want to hold onto childhood imagination for as long as I can... and it's pretty much gone now, but I don't care. I have dreams!

I'm also getting mixed feelings about this chapter and the last one because there wasn't a whole lot of Rose and Jack scenes (anyone else think of the Titanic?), but I think that's gonna make it up when we get to the dancing part... the non-dirty version.

Thanks for the reviews, favorites, and follows! Infinitely thankful for them and I feel bad because it's been about a week since the last update, but I'll give you five stars for simply sticking around :D