OK, no evil cliffhanger this time, I promise.
"Martha?" The Doctor stepped forward, concerned, and put his hands comfortingly on her shoulders. "What's wrong?"
When Martha looked up at the Doctor, Rose somehow knew from the sad and hopeless look in her eyes what she was about to say. "It's Jenny."
The Doctor's face hardened, and he was inside the house in a flash. Rose gave Martha a quick hug before grabbing her hand, and the two women went quickly inside, Martha leading Rose into the living room.
There, lying on one of the sofas and covered with a blanket, was Jenny. Mickey was standing near with a basin of water and a flannel – he had clearly been watching over the little girl as she slept – and the Doctor was just kneeling down beside her.
Jenny looked awful. Her skin was pale and waxy, and she was frowning in her sleep. She was covered in sweat, beads of it on her forehead, and she was shaking. Her eyes were heavily shadowed and tightly shut, and small patches of her skin seemed to be turning purple, as though she were covered in bruises at various stages of healing.
"I've tried everything," Martha said as the Doctor smoothed Jenny's hair back from her forehead, "it's like nothing I've ever seen and she won't respond to anything I've done. I even contacted Jack to see if he had anything that might help, but there's been nothing. I couldn't take her to the hospital, the moment they saw that she had two hearts they'd lock her up. I think... I think she's dying."
Martha sounded tearful, and Rose wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "I'm so sorry, Mar, I shouldn't have left you to deal with this."
The other woman sniffed and wiped her eyes, which were almost overflowing with unshed tears. "Nonsense, it was the safest place for her to be. Besides, I'm a doctor."
Rose smiled, though it felt wrong on her face, before going over and crouching down next to the Doctor. She took one of Jenny's hands in her own, but was not rewarded with any sign that Jenny was aware of the contact. The Doctor was cupping Jenny's small cheek with one of his hands. "Jenny," he said softly," Jenny, it's me, I'm here." He sounded absolutely desperate, his voice tremulous even though he was trying so hard to sound calm and soothing. "Jenny, sweetie, me and Rose are both here. Can you hear me?" Her eyelids flickered a bit, but her body was still shaking. Rose couldn't tell if she was asleep or simply so feverish she could not respond. "Jenny? We're going to get you better, OK?" Rose noticed his voice break, and felt a big, cold lump settle in her chest.
The Doctor scooped his daughter up in his arms and stood up, turning around to face his friends. "Thank you for looking after her," he said to both of them, earnest and truly grateful, "we'll come back and let you know how she—what happens in a minute." Martha nodded, and Mickey put an arm around her, reaching out to grab one of Jenny's hands.
"Hang in there," he said, and Rose smiled. She and the Doctor just about sprinted to the TARDIS, the Doctor kicking the console on his way through. It appeared the TARDIS understood what was going on, because the central column started pulsing and Rose could tell that they were being flown into the vortex. They were in the medical room in a flash, the Doctor laying Jenny down on the bed and reaching into his pocket for his stethoscope.
Rose could barely process what was happening. After all the stuff she had been through today, she would have expected the moment they returned to pick up Jenny would have been full of triumph and relief – a celebration. Now she was unsure if she was ever going to see Jenny conscious again.
"Doctor, are you OK to be doing this?" Rose knew he had other things to worry about now, but she couldn't help herself. "They captured you, you got tortured. Are you up to this? We could go back, get Martha to help, get Mickey, Jack, anyone. You look like death."
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Rose wished she had not chosen to use that particular word. The Doctor looked up at her, eyes wide and sparkling with what she hoped were not tears. "I can rest later. Promise, I'll even let you take care of me, but I'm the only one who can do this. Time Lord physiology, it's completely different to humans. If I can work out what this is doing to her then I can get her better." He continued to work as he spoke, hands almost blurring. "Torture is one thing, but her dying is not something I am going to let happen. Once we're through this, you can worry about me."
Rose smoothed the hair on Jenny's forehead as the Doctor scanned Jenny with some device she had never seen before. "You'd better not forget our date." Her voice seemed sad and small and so unlike her. The Doctor spared her a tiny look, eyes crinkling with a smile he could not quite manage to show on his lips.
"Promise."
There wasn't another word spoken in the infirmary for a long while. Rose helped to hold things for the Doctor, keeping an eye on Jenny's heart rate through the machine next to her, but most of the time she held the little girl's hand and simply hoped the Doctor could do enough to save her. She was so worried for both of them, and it felt as though her chest was being almost crushed with the weight of fear and suspense she was carrying.
After a while it seemed she could do nothing to help. The Doctor had taken some of Jenny's blood and was conducting various tests on it, swilling some liquid around in a test tube and frowning. Rose knew she could be of no more use to the Doctor for now, so with one final squeeze of Jenny's hand she took a seat in the corner of the room and waited.
Rose was almost asleep in her chair when she became aware that the flurry of movement had stopped. She blinked her bleary eyes and stood up. The Doctor had bottles of various coloured liquids in front of him on the desk, and he was very carefully mixing different amounts of each one together. The mixture in the main beaker was turning from yellow to green to red with each additional ingredient.
"Have you figured out what it is then, Doctor?"
He nodded, not taking his eyes from his work. "It's a toxin. A very specifically engineered toxin, designed only to affect Time Lords. It targets specific aspects of the binary vascular system – those things that look like bruises are actually bruises, they're a side effect of the poison that's destroying her system. It's a mix of different toxins but I've extrapolated each one. All I've got to do is mix together an antidote and she'll be fine."
Rose almost felt it was an anticlimax. "Just like that, she'll be better?"
The Doctor spared her a reassuring glance. "Yep. But what I still can't work out it how she got it, she hasn't been near anything like this in her life, never mind toda-"
He stopped, mouth still open, a bottle of deep purple liquid clutched in his hand. After a few seconds he suddenly came to life again, smacking himself in the head with such ferocity that Rose jumped. He turned to her excitedly, his entire face alight with the realisation.
"They gave her this! This thing, this disease she's got, those people, that society were the ones that gave it to her!" Rose continued to feel confused, but the Doctor was on one of his mega-rants, hands in his hair and pacing manically, so she guessed it wouldn't be too long before he explained it all fully. "When you went out after I was ambushed – they must have planted it on you, sprayed it or just released it into the air. It's a toxin that's harmful to Time Lords, it wouldn't have had any effect on you, you wouldn't even realise that there was anything wrong. But when you went in and touched Jenny..." He paused, staring into space, mouth hanging open slightly. "It was insurance. They needed to make sure that you would bring Jenny back to them, so they made her sick. They knew you'd figure out what had caused it eventually, that you'd have to bring her back to them to cure her, and then they'd have her." He began to fill syringes with the mixture of antidotes, working fast and furiously.
Blinking, Rose let this new bit of information sink in. "Wow, thats, that's thorough."
The Doctor nodded as he carefully injected Jenny with one of the syringes he had prepared. "Very thorough. Only they didn't count on one thing."
"What was that?"
He looked up at her with a magnificent grin and sparkling eyes. "The fact that you would be able to rescue me from there with both hands tied behind your back. As long as they had me they knew I wouldn't be able to cure her – it never occurred to them that getting me out of trouble is all in a day's work for you."
Rose returned his grin, standing up and walking to the bed where Jenny lay. "So you can fix her then? I mean, you can cure whatever it is that she's got?"
He brandished a syringe at her. "I just did. All done. Tricky, but once I'd figured out which toxins they'd combined, all I had to do was mix up an antidote. Simple idea really, it's the mixing that takes the time." He kissed Jenny's head and stood up again, bouncing on the balls of his feet in triumph. "It'll get to work on her now, and when she wakes up she'll be good as new. Brilliant."
He grabbed Rose up in a hug that lifted her right off the ground, and swung her around, laughing. The victory seemed to have filled him with energy and joy, and all Rose could really do was wrap her arms around his neck and laugh with him, almost weak with relief that he had managed to find a cure in such a reasonably short amount of time.
The Doctor put Rose down eventually, but kept his arms around her, fitting them around her waist so comfortably that Rose would have been happy for him to keep them there, possibly forever, despite the difficulties that would ensue.
"So when will she wake up?"
"Not too long," the Doctor smiled, "it's quite fast acting, it'll only be about ten minutes before the toxins are neutralised."
The next ten minutes were load with anticipation, but Rose was not tense in the way she had been for almost the last 24 hours. She leaned against the wall next to the Doctor, her head leaning against his shoulder. He rested his head upon hers, and they stood that way without saying anything. Rose was just rejoicing in the fact that the Doctor was back, and that she could feel him and smell him and he was safe with her again. She had been more shaken by him being knocked out and dragged away than she had let on earlier.
Jenny began to stir after not too long, flinging her arms out wide and kicking her legs a little. She had barely moved for the entire time that the Doctor had been working, and so even the mundane movement of waking was so comforting for Rose. She sneaked a peek at the Doctor and could see just from the way his eyes were shining that he noticed every tiny movement. Jenny's skin was still covered in bruises, but even in ten minutes the dark purple and black blotches on her skin had faded to lighter purple, and some to green and yellow around the edges, indicating that they were well on the way to being healed.
Jenny's eyes opened wide all of a sudden, brown and the spitting image of her father's, and she gurgled with delight. "Daddy back!" She seemed to have no idea of the danger she had been in, something which Rose was very relieved about.
"Yes I'm back," the Doctor grinned, picking her up off the bed and wrapping her in his arms, the blanket she had been sleeping under still trapped between them. Her little chubby arms went around his neck and he nuzzled her head affectionately. Rose knew that he was taking in her smell and the feel of her in his arms again – she had done the same when she had found him again, and knew what it was like to feel as though you would never see someone again. The Doctor's eyes were closed and he gently rocked Jenny back and forth, his arms locked around her. He was murmuring something that she could not make out, though from what she could hear it did not sound like English. It occurred to her it might be Gallifreyan, and she felt a momentary pang of sadness that she would never be able to understand the Doctor's beautiful native language.
"Wose! Wose here Daddy!" Jenny was leaning away from the Doctor now, hands grasping at the air and stretching towards Rose so hard that she was going to fall out of the Doctor's arms if she wasn't careful. Rose walked over and took one of Jenny's hands in her own.
"Hi." Jenny gave Rose a clumsy hug, her legs and body still held by the Doctor while her arms clutched at Rose and her head lay on Rose's shoulder. "Missed you, you know. It's not half as noisy round here without you, even with your dad talking non stop."
"Oi."
Rose just gave the Doctor a look as Jenny burbled something unintelligible, though Rose was sure she made out the words "car" and "hippo" somewhere in the mix and the Doctor gave up feigning hurt and grinned. Jenny reached up a hand and patted Rose's cheek, so Rose reached out and did the same, her hand stroking Jenny's smooth cheek and feeling the warmth and life that had been missing when the little girl had been lying on the bed only hours before, weak and unconscious.
When Jenny began to grapple with Rose's hair and squawk, the Doctor surmised that she was hungry – he told Rose that that was the only time the telepathic link seemed to really be used by her, when she needed food – so they made their way to the kitchen and the Doctor made her some dinner, whirling around the room at a speed that seemed almost dangerous. Rose entertained Jenny while he worked and made herself some toast, sitting down at the table just as a cup of tea came sliding towards her across the wooden surface, skidding to a halt right in front of her with only minimal mess.
"Bullseye!" the Doctor yelled in triumph, holding up a hand for a high five from Jenny, who stared at his hand blankly for a few moments before leaning forward and sucking on one of his fingers. "That is not how it works," the Doctor told her in all seriousness, before taking her hand and teaching her the intricacies of a high five.
Rose was laughing and trying not to spray toast crumbs everywhere as she watched them interact. Everything just seemed happier and funnier and brighter now that they were all OK again, and the entire terrifying ordeal of that day was behind them. Rose was sure it would come back to her in her nightmares, but right now she was basking in the utter joy that, was filling the TARDIS kitchen.
Halfway through her meal Jenny began to wilt, even the lure of food was unable to stop her from just about falling straight into her dinner. The Doctor smiled fondly at her as her eyelids continued to droop, and pulled her out of her high chair. "The illness and the healing will have taken a lot out of her," he explained to Rose, "she'll need to sleep for quite a while."
Rose pushed open the door and they headed down towards Jenny's bedroom, but the Doctor stopped a few steps from the door. "I need to phone Mickey and Martha," he said, "they need to know she's alright." It occurred to Rose than the Doctor was not always this considerate of what other people were feeling. In the past it would have been her reminding him that he needed to make that call. It must have been having Jenny around. It had changed him in a lot of little ways – nothing massive or immediately noticeable, but Jenny had made him better. In some ways she was the best thing that could have happened to him.
"Yeah, you'd better let them know, they were so worried." The Doctor passed Jenny over to Rose, and as he pulled Martha's old phone out of his pocket and pressed a few buttons, Rose felt Jenny curl into her body, blonde head buried Rose's neck. "I'll take her," she said to the Doctor, and he shot Rose a grateful smile just as it was apparent that Martha had picked up the phone.
"Martha? She's fine. Really, she's just fine, eating and talking and pulling people's hair again, she's really alright." She could tell he was grinning even though his back was turned to her, and Rose set off down the corridor with a smile of her own covering her face.
Rose changed Jenny's nappy and got her into her pyjamas without too much hassle, though a couple of games of peek-a-boo and a bit of a distraction when Jenny managed to hide herself under the bed stopped Rose from saying she had managed it easily. She had helped the Doctor so much with Jenny over the past weeks that she had managed to pick up all the skills she needed to take care of Jenny's needs without even noticing it.
Rose laid a subdued Jenny down in her bed and pulled the blanket gently over her. The little girl still had her eyes open no matter how much her body seemed to need to recuperate, and Rose thought that this was the point at which a lullaby might be used to lull the child to sleep. At least, it was all that she could think of to do to help Jenny drop off.
Opening her mouth, Rose was surprised to find herself singing "Moon River" softly and gently, and was somewhat relieved to see that it had the desired effect on Jenny. She yawned and wriggled around for a few moments, but soon she was lying on her back with her eyes closed, and Rose could see her chest moving up and down slowly. She still found it surprising how quickly Jenny could go from wide awake to deeply asleep. Looking away from the bed, Rose found the Doctor leaning against the door frame, watching her with very intense eyes.
"Couldn't think of anything else to sing," she mumbled, hands half gesturing before simply falling to her sides. He was still just looking at her, which was strange because normally any silences would have been filled by his gob before she had even had a chance to register that there was a silence to begin with.
She walked to stand next to him in the doorway, and his gaze flicked from her to Jenny. He seemed unwilling to leave her, especially after what they had been through that day, so Rose leaned on the wall and stayed put for a few minutes, watching Jenny sleep, with the Doctor's slow, even breathing almost loud in the practically silent room.
Eventually he took her hand, and Rose went with him out through the door, shutting it behind her. Now that the light was brighter, Rose found her eyes drawn down to their joined hands. She had noticed the spots of blood on the Doctor's cuffs quite a lot earlier, around the time that she had asked him whether he was alright to be saving Jenny's life on his own, but she had put it out of her mind when he had insisted on soldiering on. Saving Jenny had been their priority. But now that was over with, and the little girl was sound asleep in her bed, Rose's eyes were drawn to the Doctor's sleeves which were spotted with much more blood than she had noticed a few hours earlier.
Standing outside Jenny's room again (they seemed to do a lot of talking just outside her door, Rose noted) the Doctor turned to face her and smiled.
"Can I have a look at your hands?" she asked, trying to be casual. She sensed that if he knew why she wanted to check him over he would fob her off with a rubbish excuse.
He stuck out his hands towards her, looking slightly puzzled, but just as her fingers closed on his skin he seemed to shudder. His long body convulsed before beginning to fall, as though all the bones were gone from his legs. Rose caught him and held his weight, arms wrapped around him in a crude imitation of the hugs she had grown to crave.
"You are not OK," she told him, trying to help him find his feet again. Rose draped one of his arms over her shoulders, and wrapped her arm around his waist. She looked at his face – he was paler than usual, freckles standing out against his skin.
"I'm just a bit woozy," the Doctor said, voice somewhat more breathless than usual, "they did a lot of brain scanning and poking and prodding in my mind. Couple that with a bit of torture and everything else that's happened today and I think I've been a bit overloaded. Just help me to my room, please Rose, I'll rest there."
Rose walked slowly down the corridor, taking as much of the Doctor's weight as she could. She left him leaning against the wall for a moment when they passed the infirmary again, while she nipped inside, reappearing with bandages and some antiseptic cream, which the Doctor told her sped up the process of healing quite dramatically. When they got to the door that led into his room, Rose suspected that he might have insisted she leave him at the door and he could cope from there. Not allowing him even a second of hesitation in which to strike, she twisted the handle and pushed the door open.
The lights were on – the TARDIS was very helpful with things like this – and Rose helped the Doctor forward before sitting him down on the bed. He sank into the mattress with a sigh of relief. Rose knew that he was not used to actually feeling truly exhausted.
He shrugged off his jacket while Rose dumped her armful of medical supplies on the bed. "Right, roll up your sleeves then." The Doctor just looked at her, but she held her nerve and stared him down, until at last he rolled his eyes and smiled, unbuttoning his cuffs.
Pulling the ends of the sleeves up his arms, Rose could see that his wrists were red raw, presumably from pulling at the chains or restraints they had used on him. She tried not to bite her lip – she knew that the Doctor knew that she was worried when she did that – but simply picked up the antiseptic cream and beginning to apply it to the broken skin.
"I could do this myself, you know." The Doctor was watching as she cleaned his wounds, and Rose suddenly became very aware of her fingers on his wrists. His arms were very nice. She seemed to be noticing them a lot, but they were very nice arms and she could not help it.
"Yeah, you could, but you wouldn't. You'd just leave it and wait for it to heal and pretend not to notice when all your shirts were covered in blood."
He grinned. "I'm sure you'd point it out."
Rose lifted any eyebrow. "Oh yeah. Just before you fainted from blood loss I'd just lean over and whisper that you might want to grab a plaster." He laughed at that, and seemed to become a lot more willing to let her help him once she had managed to make him laugh.
As she helped him put bandages around his wrists, the Doctor leaned forward to hold the end of one in place, and Rose noticed markings on his neck. "Doctor, what are those?" She reached up a hand to pull back his collar, but he shifted away.
"It's nothing, Rose."
"Yeah, OK, nothing my arse."
Having finished securing the last bandage, Rose reached up and carefully undid his tie, pulling until the strip of silk slipped through his collar and hung from her hand. She put it to one side and unbuttoned the top two buttons on his shirt, trying to breathe evenly as she did so.
The way he was looking at her as she worked was not helping.
Rose pulled his collar out of the way and saw what she had caught a glimpse of a moment of so ago. Burns and red blistering marks marred his skin, his neck and collarbones and parts of his shoulder looked red and sore, and there was some blood here too. She gasped.
"Doctor, what the hell?" She quickly undid a few more buttons until she could push the shirt completely off of his shoulders. "Is this what they did to you?"
He nodded, not meeting her eyes. "They attached pads, electrocuted, just about did everything smaller than sending a bolt of lightning through me." He glanced up, but Rose didn't even manage a smirk. She could feel the itchy feeling that indicated tears building at the corners of her eyes. They had done this to him for no reason. They hadn't even needed him, they had said so. "They know quite a bit about Time Lord physiology, the skin's quite sensitive in this area so that was where they concentrated it."
Rose raked shaking fingers through her hair and kept her breathing even. Seeing Jenny sick and possibly dying had been awful, but what she was feeling now was pain of a totally different kind. Ever since the Doctor had been ambushed she had been battling feelings of helplessness and guilt. And now he was hurt, they had tortured and burned him and rooted around inside his head and she hadn't been able to do anything to stop them.
"I'll go get some more supplies, we'll fix you up, yeah?" Rose turned and walked out of the room, heading for the infirmary. By the time she was back with more of the cream the Doctor had said sped up healing, and an armful of plasters and bandages, the Doctor had given in and unbuttoned the last of his shirt buttons. He was just shaking his arms out of the ends of the sleeves when Rose entered the room. He laid the shirt beside him and was doing his best to appear casual about the whole affair. Rose gulped, certain that he could hear her from across the room.