"J-Jenny?" He closed his eyes again and rested his head on her lap. "I was hoping you at least might do as I told you and stay at the house."
"I think I may be fired," she said. "I said a few things to Her Ladyship after Miss Alison left."
"Really? Oh well, if you're going to go..." His eyes snapped open. "Alison! Where... have you seen her?"
"Well, no. You're the only person I've seen here. Doctor, you'd better rest for a while. It looks like something hit you terribly hard..."
"Have I changed my appearance completely and do my clothes not fit properly?"
"Er, no."
"Then it can't be as bad as all that."
Limbs uncoordinated, he managed to roll off her lap and onto his front, but his attempt to push himself upright had him staggering helplessly forward and almost colliding head-on with the power core itself. Crouched, clinging on to the floor as if it were a sheer wall, he felt Jenny's hands on his shoulders.
"Let me help you."
"All right," he mumbled nauseously. "Can you get me into that chair?"
She stretched his arm about her shoulders, her small, wiry frame supporting his weight, and manoeuvred him into the chair. Caught him before he could topple off the other side and held him balanced in place while he stared blearily at the screen.
"Urgh. I was doing something. I was almost finished, I think. If I can just..." He reached out for the controls, but his fingers just rested motionless on the panels. His head sagged down onto his chest. "Someday, Jenny, I'll explain why it's so ironic that I'm attempting to do this with what feels like a world class hangover."
"Where is Alison?" she asked quietly, guilty at the thought of adding other problems to his list. "Should I go and try to find her?"
"No." Hesitantly, painfully, he began to press buttons. "Finishing this is the only way to help her now."
--------------------
Out in the open, the Tardis stood silent. Minutes passed, and then the door was torn open and Alison came diving out, dragging it shut behind her. Her shirt was torn at the shoulder and a dark bruise was swelling on her temple, but somehow, through hard running and blind luck more than anything else, she had got out in one piece. She leaned back against the secured door, panting for breath, eyes closed.
"Miss Alison!"
Jenny's voice brought her to her senses when she had been on the point of drifting into an exhausted doze. The maid was patiently assisting the shambling, concussed Doctor to climb up through the hatch out of the saucer.
"Doctor!" Alison ran towards them. "Are you all right?"
He fell forward onto his knees, raising his fingers to the sticky, clotted blood matting his hair.
"Just... just make up something sarcastic and pretend I said it."
"You're all right!" she smiled in relief. "So how are we doing?"
"Well, now. The three of us are alive, which is good." He stretched out his left hand to her and she took it, helping him up while Jenny supported him on the other side. "I think I've reconfigured the power core correctly so it'll cure the victims of their vampirism. Unfortunately the Tardis will be shielding them from its effects so the only way to test it is to open up the doors and see what comes out."
"Well..." She glanced uneasily at the dark, inscrutable form of the police box. "Since they're safely locked up in there, there's no hurry, is there? Why don't we just wait till you're feeling better and you can check to make sure you did it right."
"Where's Carstairs?"
"He..." Her voice faded guiltily and she looked over at the Tardis. She could feel the Doctor's vivid eyes upon her.
"Then we have to open it up now, don't we?"
In her mind, Alison heard herself attempting to argue with this.
"Yes," she said. But she thought of something else. "Doctor. After we open the doors, how long till your friendly radiation cures them?"
"Ah." He nodded slowly. "I was afraid someone would ask that. It'll be a couple of minutes before it starts to have an effect. Things might get a little bit fraught in the interim. You two had better take cover in the rocks while I do it."
"Don't be stupid. You're in no shape to run around dodging vampires. I'll do it."
She watched him try to muster a protest. Try to belittle her selflessness and send her flouncing away, leaving him to face the danger on his own. But he looked so tired. He reached out and trailed one of her braids between his fingertips.
"If you get yourself killed..."
"Then I'll come back and haunt you."
He smiled weakly and allowed Jenny to support him on a halting journey towards the cover of the rocks, moving like an old man. Alison walked up to the Tardis doors, her key held tightly in her fingertips, and swallowed.
Well, it wasn't as if she hadn't volunteered, but she was remembering the scuttling, seething, spitting creatures hard on her heels when she had escaped them just moments ago. Their hiss of fury when she slammed the door in their faces and thought herself safe. There would be no silent, empty console room this time. She pressed the key into the lock.
--------------------
From their vantage point amongst the rocks, Jenny and the Doctor watched the vampires come boiling out of the Tardis, scrambling and galloping, tumbling over one another as they dragged the doors open the instant Alison unlocked them and set off after her speeding form like a pack of hounds after a fox. The Doctor looked away.
"Let's go."
Jenny took his arm, still transfixed by the fast diminishing scene of the pursuit.
"She will be all right, won't she?"
The Doctor answered with a steely tonelessness.
"I've really no idea."
--------------------
Alison tore along the grass, her mind filled with nothing but the thunder of feet and flattened hands hammering against the ground behind her, the murderous hissing that seemed to rise up from all sides. Tiredness forgotten, cold, clean panic flowing through her veins, she pumped her arms like an Olympian, pounded along till the breath rasped in her throat and her teeth rattled from the jarring impact of every step. Something clipped the back of her knee and she stumbled, flinging her arms out to the sides for balance and somehow managing to hold her forward momentum without crashing to the earth. But a half step had been lost. From the corner of her eye she saw something. Something which a couple of days ago she might have thought the product of macabre imagination. Its scrawny frame hurtled along at her side and its great curled hand flailed sideways at her shins.
She was floating in the air. Just for a second, the grass beneath her seemed to rush past of its own accord as if she was hovering, remote, while the planet span beneath her. Then she crunched down onto the solid turf, taking the impact agonisingly on her shoulder. She was up right away, rolling to her feet, ignoring the throbbing pain of the fresh bruise on her arm and with a swift change of direction she sent the creatures steaming past her straight ahead. For a wild moment she thought she was in the clear again, then a pair of great feet struck her heavily in the back and a sticklike arm wrapped about her throat. Other hands seized her limbs and struck her body and she was tumbling down, struggling, into the dust.
She lashed out desperately. The heel of her boot connected sharply with a creature's jawbone and sent it rolling away, curled up in pain. But they were piling onto her now, pinning her down flat onto the ground, pressing forward with the twitching black holes of their mouths questing for exposed flesh. She flailed and strained uselessly as one of them forced itself down onto her jugular...
"I say. What the devil's going on?"
The puzzled, slightly resentful tone brought her to her senses and she focussed on the face which still loomed just inches from her own. It was that of a young man, quite handsome really, with scruffily tousled fair hair, blue eyes and rounded, amiable features. He looked back at her in bemusement, then sudden grasp of the position.
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry." He pulled back smartly, leaving her still flattened to the ground but at least now able to breathe. "I... I'm not quite sure what happened there. Did I fall on you? You'll think me the most dreadful fool, but I can't exactly seem to remember... oh my God!"
This was the moment when he realised he was naked. Alison sat up, blinking in the afternoon sun, and laughed helplessly at the sight of the Honourable George Carstairs hopping frantically about the field, searching for some means of covering his entire body with his hands. A couple of dozen elegantly slender blue-skinned aliens scattered around her, all exhibiting their own version of the same distress.
-------------------
The Doctor turned up the lights in the darkened console room and saw, unsurprised, the Master standing in the corner leaning against the wall with his arms folded.
"Ah, Doctor, there you are. I was going to tell you that something went slightly wrong with your great plan, but from the rather flattened condition of your skull I'm guessing you already knew that."
The Doctor straightened, unwilling to show weakness, with just one hand resting surreptitiously on the console.
"Where's Carstairs?"
"His noble lordship?" The Master smiled and let the silence hang for an instant. "I've got him here in this cupboard."
He stepped forward and the closet door against which he had been leaning swung open, allowing Carstairs' limp form to flop out onto the console room floor. His clothing was ripped and a dozen wounds had been torn in his flesh, but his sagging mouth took in and released great gulps of air.
"I believe he'll live," the Master said. "No doubt to inflict tedium and annoyance on future generations."
The Doctor looked down at the weakened, injured man on the floor and said half to himself, with an air of wonder.
"You saved him."
A slight crease touched the Master's brow as if he had been reminded of some embarassing youthful indiscretion.
"No need to rub it in."
"You did a good thing."
The Master blinked, and it took him a moment's consideration to come up with an answer.
"Well, technically speaking I suppose but he's not really much of a catch, is he? Hardly worth saving."
"That's the point!"
"That's the point."
"Yes."
"The point is..." The Master frowned and concentrated. "Not to save him because he deserves it, but to save him even though he doesn't deserve it."
"Exactly."
"I see." The Master pondered this and ruefully raised his eyebrows. "Being good is more complicated than it looks."
The Doctor nodded slowly.
"It really is."
For the first time in longer than either of them could remember, they both smiled at the same time.