Episode: The Lives and Times of the Raggedy Doctor and Amelia Pond
Chapter: The Nurse Who Helped [3/5]
Summary: Amelia wanted someone to fix the crack in her wall. Rory wanted someone to look at the pictures. The Atraxi wanted to recapture Prisoner Zero. Eventually, everyone got what they wanted, though not in the way they wanted it. They got the Raggedy Doctor instead. Or the one where the Master wanted to fix the TARDIS but ended up saving the Earth.
Rating: T
Today is not Rory's day.
First, the coma patients start calling for Doctor Ramsden, so she comes down to see what's going on. Rory decides to show her the pictures he's taken of the coma patients just walking down the street the times he's seen them, but she refuses to look at them and tells Rory to 'take some time off'. Of all things, 'take a lot of time off starting now'?
So, no, Rory is not in a good mood, and it doesn't help that there's something weird going on with the sun. He would know what it is if he just turned around, but he's still determined to get those pictures to Doctor Ramsden. And that means taking one of Barney and his dog, who are, like everyone else around him, staring at whatever is making the sun go dark.
The first picture is blurry because of the shift in lighting, but the second turns out alright, so mission accomplished.
Rory's pretty sure there wasn't supposed to be an eclipse today, but it isn't like he's too worried about it at the moment. What's the worse it can be? Aliens? Hah! They only ever target London, and on Christmas, so why worry?
Still, that doesn't mean Rory isn't curious, but when he's about to turn around, someone walks past him and plucks the phone right out of his hand.
"Hey!"
"The sun's going dark and you're taking pictures of a bloke and a dog? I think we need to call the police," the thief muses nonchalantly, already rummaging through his phone, but before Rory can react, there are hands grabbing his arm.
"What—Amy?"
"Rory! Huh, hello?"
"Why are you dressed like that?"
"Oh, you know each other, good, whatever. Amelia, ask your boyfriend about his stalkerish tendencies," the phone thief tells them off-handedly, looking up from the phone with a mocking grin.
"He's not my – my boyfriend…"
"My stalkerish—Wait a moment, that's him!" Rory exclaims, finally processing the situation, as he looks between Amy and the familiar man who took his phone. "That's the Doctor, the Raggedy Doctor. But how—"
"Not the Doctor, and answer the question," the Doctor hisses threateningly, and Rory turns to Amy in worry.
"You never said – Is that actually—"
"Yes, it's him, he came back. And please, answer the question, it's important!" Amy asks him, squeezing his arm, and Rory takes a deep breath before turning to the Doctor.
The Raggedy Doctor is real, a part of his brain hisses, but Rory is a nurse, so he easily shoves that part somewhere he can deal with it later and focuses on that impossible man. This is just too weird…
"The people in the pictures, I photographed them because they couldn't be there. They are in the hospital I work in, they're coma patients," he tells the Doctor, who snarls before tossing Rory back his phone.
He scrambles a bit to catch it before it falls, but when he looks up to berate the Doctor, the blond man has already turned around and taken some long steps towards Barney, who is staring at them with his face twisted in a snarl that mirrors his dog's.
And then, they bark. Barney and the dog, that is, not the Doctor, but that doesn't make it any less freaky.
"Prisoner Zero," the Doctor calls almost amicably, stopping halfway between them and Barney and opening his arms in a kind of grandiose gesture. "What a pleasure to finally meet you face to face," he adds, voice carrying easily and not sounding the least disturbed by Barney's animalistic expression.
"There's a Prisoner Zero too? And he's Barney?" Rory asks Amy, who looks just a bit less startled than he is feeling.
"Yes, there is, but he isn't really Barney. I don't know all the details, but the Doctor called it a 'multiform'. He also said something about how seeing what it looks like would mean it would have to kill us, so I guess it can shapeshift or something," she explains, clutching his arm again as they both observe the standoff, tense and not knowing what to expect.
"Face to faces, sorry," the Doctor corrects, pressing his hands together and bowing a bit in an exaggerated apologetic gesture when Barney and the dog snarl in unison. "Quite fetching, I must add. Those jowls enhance your lovely personality," he mocks before straightening, arms dropping to his sides, and, even without seeing his face, Rory knows the Doctor's serious. "See that? That's your lift, and you're going to take it," he tells them—it—whatever, pointing somewhere behind Amy and Rory with a thumb over his shoulder, and, as one, the two of them turn to see what the Doctor means—
And something that looks like a giant snowflake made of diamonds swoops down from the sky, the eyeball on its belly scanning the ground with a blue beam.
"Oh my God," Rory manages to choke out, clutching Amy's hands around his arm as tightly as she does him, his knees feeling weak.
"You get one chance to get out of my hair. Just one. Give yourself up now and go with the nice prison guards, or I won't be held accountable for what happens next," the Doctor continues, voice dropping into a cold hiss that is nevertheless still easily heard, and which makes Rory shudder.
Bloody Hell, Amy never said he was this freaky, back when they were kids.
Prisoner Zero snarls once more, Barney and the dog doing so in unison, and the Doctor puts his hands in his pockets and rocks on his heels like a bored child.
"No? Are you sure?" he asks, the pout on his face practically audible, and when Prisoner Zero barks he finally stills. "Well, then I can only say this… I told you so," he adds in a singsong tone, bending forward, before straightening and pulling his hands out, a metallic cylinder with a blue light at the tip in his grasp—
Prisoner Zero flinches back, with Barney and the dog once more reacting in unison, as the cylinder is aimed at it—them—with a high-pitched whine. And Rory finally recognizes it as being the famous screwdriver of light, the tool that opens and closes doors to other worlds.
Only, instead of opening doors, it drives Prisoner Zero to its knees, bizarre as it is to see a man and a dog move so synchronized as to look like one being split in two bodies.
The Doctor laughs, a somewhat childish triumphant laugh, as he turns the screwdriver off, fiddles with it, and points it at the sky.
"Come take the trash away, boys!" he calls, sending a way too toothy smirk over his shoulder to the ship still scanning around, and activates the screwdriver again.
Lamps blow up, car alarms go off all around, a mobility chair starts wheezing around with its rider barely managing to get off with the help of some bystanders before it can take any speed. A fire truck drives slowly away, sirens on, while the firefighters chase after it, shouting for it to stop.
It's equal parts amusing, amazing and disturbing, though it tips towards the last one when the Doctor laughs again.
"Sonic screwdriver! Can't get any more alien in such a backwards planet. So, come on, you pathetic excuses for prison guards! Come get your prize!" he calls, pressing something that makes the screwdriver extend, the whine growing in pitch—
And it explodes with a blinding shower of sparks and a loud fizzle, the Doctor dropping it with a yelp immediately followed by a litany of curses as he drops by the smoking tool.
"No, no, no! No, you can't do that!" he shouts at the charred and heat-bent screwdriver, grabbing it after a couple of fake starts due to how hot it must be, and looking far more devastated than the loss of a fancy tool would warrant.
The eyeball ship finishes its scans, turns around and flies away, not having approached enough to detect the mess the screwdriver made.
"Don't you dare leave like that, you band of incompetents! Are you telling me you won't do a worldwide scan for alien technology?! You're looking for an alien escapee, that's the first thing you should do! Come back here!" the Doctor roars at the departing ship, pale eyes ablaze, as he gestures madly with one hand while cradling the burnt-out screwdriver close to his chest almost tenderly with the other.
Rory looks from him to Prisoner Zero, not sure whether he should be more unnerved and wary about one or the other, just in time to see the kneeling figures of Barney and the dog dissolve into a stream of golden liquid-dust mix that rushes down a drain cover.
"It went down the drain! Prisoner Zero sort of melted and went down the drain!" Amy calls, getting the Doctor's attention, who scowls darkly at where Prisoner Zero once stood.
"Of course it did. But it's made a mistake, a terrible mistake, and it's going to pay dearly for it."
"What mistake?" Rory asks warily, not sure if he can believe his memories of Amy's stories way back in the day, because she never made the Doctor look this frightening.
His thoughts are cemented when the Doctor smiles, the gesture looking more like a shark grin, too full of teeth, and with his pale amber eyes looking extremely dark regardless of color.
"It pissed me off," he answers simply, before his expression vanishes as if it was never there, leaving only uncertainty and hesitation behind as he covers his lower face with a hand and starts pacing.
"Doctor, what are we going to do now? Prisoner Zero is gone and the aliens are going to burn the Earth in twenty minutes if we don't get it to them," Amy asks, worried, as they watch the Doctor go round and round glaring at the grass.
"Wait, they're going to burn the Earth?" Rory repeats with a squeak, turning to Amy and grabbing her shoulders.
"That's what they mean by 'the human residence'. I thought they meant my house, but they are talking about the planet. The Doctor said we had twenty minutes until their weapon was charged," she explains, grimacing, and Rory forces himself to take in more deep breaths.
Too much, too much, too much! London usually deals with those things, why can't this happen in London instead of here? They have nothing here to take care of this!
"London, of course!" the Doctor exclaims, and, for a moment, Rory wonders if he said that out loud, before discarding the thought when the Doctor's amber-green eyes meet his. "Your phone, now!"
"What? Why?" he asks, startled, but hands it over anyway, because it isn't like he has any better ideas.
"I have a contact, high up, and I need his help sending a message," he answers absentmindedly, typing fast and stilling, as if waiting for an answer—a beep and he beams at whatever's on the screen. "Oh, aren't I clever," he chuckles, writing a quick answer, and, when the phone beeps again after some seconds of silence, he cackles and looks up at Amy and Rory like a child on Christmas morning. "To the hospital! Prisoner Zero will return to the ward with the coma patients and we need to make sure it's empty. I'm changing Doctor Rule Number Five to no letting people die even if it means stopping the idiot of the day – title still in progress. Get a car or something, I need to write this," he tells them, once more looking down at the phone as he types madly.
Amy and Rory exchange a look and, a second later, they rush to the line of now silent cars and their confused drivers, with Amy getting them a vehicle by passing herself as an actual policewoman thanks to her costume.
"Doctor, come on!" Rory calls, opening the back door so the man can rush in, looking up from the phone for just a second so as to climb inside, before he takes the shotgun seat and Amy sits behind the wheel. "Who are you writing to, anyway?"
"Political contact," he answers with a huge grin, almost as if it was a joke, and Rory scrunches his nose.
"Political contact? What, like the Prime Minister or something?" Rory asks, wide-eyed, actually turning in his seat to see the Doctor's full face instead of just the sliver he can see through the rearview mirror.
"Or something," he repeats with a grin that is too wide for a human, and that is mockery in his eyes, an inside joke that, judging by Amy's frown, she doesn't get either. "Pretty influential in military and communications, and I know just which buttons to push to get the reaction I want as fast as I want it. I need to send a message worldwide, and that guy definitely knows how to do it. You could say he's a master when it comes to alien problems," he adds before breaking down into crazy giggling that soon dissolves into cackles when he catches their bewildered expressions, but he never stops typing for more than the second it takes to glance at them.
Rory gives Amy a 'where did you find this psycho' look and decides to face the road for the rest of the way.
The Raggedy Doctor is way crazier than he expected, and that's saying a lot because, until two minutes ago, he thought the man was a character taken from a little girl's imagination.
They get to the hospital just a minute after the Doctor's sent whatever he was typing and pocketed the phone despite Rory's protest, saying he still needs it, and they rush inside without delay.
The door past the waiting area is blocked by some of the personnel, but the Doctor grins widely like it isn't a problem and turns to Amy.
"Get us in, constable," he tells her confidently, and, after giving them a grin, Amy pulls her hair up into a quick but professional bun and starts telling people to move aside for the police to get through.
Rory takes point once they're past the doors, guiding them at a run to the coma ward, but they're too late.
The whole floor is a mess, equipment on the ground like a quake has shaken the building, and, while Amy and Rory slow in surprise, the Doctor walks past them—and stops, forcing them to do so too or slam into him.
A woman walks out of a side corridor, a little girl holding to each of her hands, and Rory recognizes her as one of the coma patients, a new one whose name he can't remember.
"Officer. There was a man, a man with a dog. I think Doctor Ramsden's dead, and the nurses," the woman tells them, but the reason Rory's horrified is not because he knows she shouldn't be awake and walking like she just got out of the office.
No, the creepiest thing is that the woman's voice is coming out of the littlest girl's mouth.
"We need a place with windows. Does the coma ward have windows?" the Doctor asks, voice low but clear, and Rory focuses back to the present.
"Yes, yes it does. We can get there this way," he answers, gesturing to the corridor by their side, and the woman blinks and drops the scared face.
"Oh, I'm getting it wrong again, aren't I? I'm always doing that. So many mouths," Prisoner Zero says, this time using the woman's mouth, before her and the two girls snarl to show long and sharp needle-like teeth.
"Run!" the Doctor shouts, and Rory doesn't think twice, grabbing Amy's hand and rushing down the corridor towards the coma ward.
The three of them get inside and barricade the door with a broom through the handles before stepping back, looking around at all the comatose patients on the beds.
"Now what?!"
"Four minutes," the Doctor whispers, looking at the clock over the door, and Rory exchanges another wide-eyed look with Amy.
Are they seriously waiting for this madman to save them from an alien shapeshifter and a whole fleet preparing to incinerate the Earth? He doesn't even have his screwdriver anymore!
The door rattles a couple of times as Prisoner Zero tries to get inside before the broom finally gives, and the three of them move further back as the woman and the two girls step inside.
"Oh, look at this. Twelve years watching dear little Amelia Pond grow up, never knowing I was there. Waiting, always waiting for her magic Doctor to return. And what happens now that he's back? Well, now you're all going to die together," Prisoner Zero says with the woman's voice, mocking with its overtly sweet tone before baring its needle-like teeth once more.
The Doctor puts his hands in his pockets and huffs in laughter, head tilted back and eyes half-lidded, so calm and serene that it's like he knows something Prisoner Zero has no idea about, which stops the alien trio in its tracks.
"That's what you think, isn't it? Oh, but you're wrong this time, widdle Zewo," he mocks, babbling the last words like a little child would as he leans forward with extremely exaggerated baby doe eyes and pouty lips, dropping the expression a moment later in favor of another shark-like grin. "You have three minutes left, Prisoner Zero. Drop the disguise and give yourself up and they might go easier on you."
"The Atraxi will kill me this time, regardless of how they recapture me. And if I am to die, let there be fire."
Oh, that does so not bode well for Earth…
"See, that's what I don't understand," the Doctor muses, straightening up once more with a pensive frown. "You came to this world through a spatiotemporal rift. I get it, you just escaped prison, you needed some time to recover and regroup and whatever. But why not leave the same way? Why didn't you escape through another crack during these twelve years? What's keeping you on Earth?"
"I did not open the crack," Prisoner Zero answers, and Rory exchanges a worried look with Amy.
Aliens capable of opening cracks between worlds? Scary, really scary. But someone else opening the crack to unleash convicted alien criminals on Earth for who knows what reason? Even scarier. They have Prisoner Zero now, in a manner of speaking, and, as far as they've seen, it only wants to hide. But what is to say the next one won't have darker intentions?
"Then who did?" the Doctor asks, more serious now.
"The cracks in the skin of the universe, don't you know where they came from? You don't, do you?" Prisoner Zero asks through the woman's mouth, sounding almost pitying, before changing to the older girl's. "The Doctor in the TARDIS doesn't know. Doesn't know, doesn't know!" it chants mockingly, and the Doctor's shoulders tense threateningly, as if he's barely holding himself back from reacting to the teasing. "The universe is cracked. The Pandorica will open. Silence will fall."
And silence falls, ironically enough, as Rory holds his breath and waits, alongside an expectant Amy, for the Doctor to answer to that.
"Right. Completely bonkers," the Doctor deadpans, all tension bleeding off him to leave him looking almost disappointed, before he cheers up with a clap of his hands and a huge grin. "But would you look at that! It's time!" he chirps, nodding towards the clock atop the door.
The same clock that a second ago read 10:59, but that now says 0:00.
"Oh, I know, it's just a stupid clock. But wait, there's more! Because it's this clock, and the ones in the other rooms, in the rest of the building, the town, the country, the world. Thanks to my contact, every single clock in the world is spreading the same message. Really simple message, something even the most primitive minds would be able to comprehend. Want to take a guess? No? Then let me translate, for the sake of your underdeveloped brain. It's Zero. Every single clock in the world is saying zero," the Doctor explains, shark grin back in place, and Rory feels his jaw dropping of its own accord as he realizes what that means. "Now, I can't certainly expect the idiots up there to be as clever as me, so I left a really obvious trail, a virus they could easily track to the source when they got the message, something that would take them, oh, less than a minute. Care to guess what would that source be?" he asks, pulling Rory's phone out of his pocket and wagging it enticingly in his hand, and Rory exchanges a hopeful smile with Amy.
Oh my God, he's doing it. He's really doing it!
A blue light fills the windows, and Rory's smile widens to the point it starts to hurt, because he did it!
"The Atraxi are limited. While I'm in this form, they'll still be unable to detect me. They've tracked a phone, not me," Prisoner Zero tells them, calm and confident, but the Doctor is fiddling with the phone and only answers with a distracted hum.
A beep and he finally looks up, eyes widening in a clearly fake deer-in-the-headlights expression.
"Oh, sorry, were you saying something? I was sending some pictures to my new friends. Ah, that's right! I forgot to mention this phone held pictures of all the forms you've learned to take, didn't I? Oops. Silly me," he tells Prisoner Zero with a triumphant grin, straightening proudly. "I love it when plans work out. And with two minutes to spare! How's the hospital food here, nurse boy? Always heard it was awful, but I am feeling kind of peckish," he muses mostly to himself, tilting his head back so far that he's actually staring at Rory upside down.
He's trying to make sense of the question, startled by the nonsensical turn of the conversation, when Prisoner Zero speaks again.
"Then I shall take a new form."
"What new form? It takes months to form the kind of psychic link that would allow you to do that," the Doctor scoffs derisively, giving Prisoner Zero a deadpanned look.
The woman and the two girls smile, showing needle-like teeth.
"I've had years."
Amy collapses.
Rory catches her before she falls, calling her name and checking her vitals, but she is, to all accounts, merely asleep. He looks up with fearful wide eyes and meets the Doctor's gaze, full of dread and denial and loss, just before they pale and fill with a terrifying dark anger as he turns to glare at Prisoner Zero, hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides.
"Let her go," he hisses threateningly, and Rory looks at the alien.
It has taken the Doctor's form, bizarrely enough, looking just like the one towering menacingly before Rory and Amy but far calmer, and with seven-year-old Amelia peeking from behind his back with a triumphant smile that does not belong on that face.
"Poor Amy Pond. Still such a child inside. Dreaming of the magic Doctor she knows will return to save her. What a disappointment you've been," Prisoner Zero mocks with Amelia's voice, and the Doctor stills so completely that he's not breathing anymore.
"I know," he answers in a voice barely above a whisper, as still and emotionless as his frozen body, and for a moment, Rory is not sure if it is the actual Doctor speaking or Prisoner Zero's copy, so out of character that voice is for the man he's been with for the past ten minutes. "And that's why I won't fail again. I'm not losing anyone again, ever again. Release her."
"Or what?" Prisoner Zero asks defiantly, lifting little Amelia's chin.
"Or you'll wish the Atraxi had been the ones to get to you."
Rory shudders almost violently, cradling Amy's unconscious form closer as he stares wide-eyed at the Doctor's back. He hasn't moved at all, doesn't even look like he's breathing, but Rory is truly and sincerely terrified of this man, even more than of the threat of planetary destruction from the aliens outside the window.
"Never," Prisoner Zero answers, and all the tension in the Doctor's body vanishes with a sigh.
"Nurse boy, whatever your name is. Close your eyes, close Amy's eyes, and don't look, no matter what you hear. Don't even turn until I touch you, and don't let Amy face this either, eyes closed or not. Do you understand?" the Doctor asks, sounding too calm, and Rory manages to let out a croak that sounds like agreement. "Five seconds."
And Rory curls around Amy, pressing her face against his chest and burying his own in her hair, slapping a hand over his eyes for good measure even as he keeps his back to the Doctor.
"Five seconds, Time Lord? Is that all it will take?" Prisoner Zero asks mockingly, its voice easy to hear even over the loud beating of Rory's heart in his ears.
"You say that almost as if you know what it means," the Doctor comments almost conversationally, and the hair on Rory's arms and the back of his neck stands on edge.
"What?"
"Time Lord."
The shriek that pierces Rory's ears is ungodly and makes him feel almost as if his eardrums are exploding, drowning his pained shout and Amy's scream as she startles back to awareness and starts thrashing against Rory's chest, which distracts him from whatever might be happening at his back as he shouts into her ear to stop, to not look, to stay in place.
Amy grabs him tightly, burying her face in his chest, a moment before the shriek cuts suddenly.
For a second, and despite his loud breathing and the hammering of his heart in his head, Rory thinks he has gone deaf.
And then, a loud voice comes from outside the building, making him tense and hug Amy tightly.
"Prisoner Zero is located. Prisoner Zero is restrained."
A hand lands on Rory's shoulder, squeezing almost reassuringly.
"You can look now."
Slowly, Rory obeys, and his mouth goes dry.
Where the copy of the Doctor and little Amelia once stood there's a creature that reminds him of the pictures of the fishes in the depths of the ocean. It has a long segmented white body with huge eyes and a mouth full of needle-like teeth, which seems to grow from the ceiling if not for the fact that its body vanishes into thin air before it can touch it. Bizarre as it is, though, the worst part is how it is frozen, curled on itself, jaw unhinged and eyes wide and kind of bloodshot, unfocused but full of something that, alien or not, Rory identifies as pure and unadulterated terror.
"What did you do to it?" Rory whispers as Amy sits up, using him as support, and looks up at the Doctor.
Standing at their side with his hands in his pockets, appearing almost bored if not for the intensity with which he's staring at Prisoner Zero, the Doctor shrugs nonchalantly.
"Cut the psychic link. Of course, you can't just cut this kind of link, not after years nurturing it, so I had to do some rummaging to find and destroy the anchor instead."
It takes way too long for Rory's terrified brain to decipher the meaning of that, during which Prisoner Zero disappears with a rush of air as it is taken aboard the alien ship.
The brain. The anchor of the psychic link that allowed it to take Amy's form is in the brain. Which, judging by how Amy is awake and healthy, if a bit shaken, means that the Doctor broke in and destroyed Prisoner Zero's brain.
No time traveling blue box, no screwdriver of light capable of controlling electronics and opening doors to different planets. Just a really clever man with a political contact, and the bizarre and terrifying ability to get into people's heads.
Rory gulps, but not even that manages to get rid of the ball of fear caught in his throat.
What is this guy?
The light in the windows vanishes, sunlight replacing it and flickering as whatever was done to it is reversed, and Rory relaxes despite himself.
The aliens are leaving. The Earth is safe.
"What? Oh, no, you're not getting away from this just like that. Who in Skaro do they think they are, coming here like that—" the Doctor growls under his breath, glaring at the windows for a moment before turning his attention to Rory's phone, still in his possession, and tapping madly.
"What are you doing?" Amy asks him, her voice soft but far calmer than anything Rory would be able to accomplish.
"Tracing the signal back," he tells them with a scowl before putting the phone against his ear, pacing for a couple of steps before stilling. "Did I say you could go? Because we are not done here, not after what you just did. Article fifty-seven of the Shadow Proclamation, and don't try to weasel out of this, because that? Trying to burn a fully established level five planet? And just waltzing off after, like nothing was wrong? Oh, trust me, there's a lot wrong here, starting with your attitude, if you think you can do whatever you please just because you think no one is watching. And coming from me? You know you're in—" he says, garbling something completely incomprehensible that sounds like a cat chocking on a furball, before he takes a deep breath. "Clear? Good. Back here, now."
And, without another word, he pulls the phone off his ear, ends the call and tosses it back to Rory, who almost drops it as his clumsy hands and startled brain try to coordinate.
"Did he just bring them back? Did he just save the world from aliens and then bring all the aliens back again?" Rory asks Amy as they get to their feet to hurry after the Doctor, who's striding down the corridor like a man on a mission.
Amy gives him a wide-eyed look and a shrug in answer.
"Where are you going?" she asks as they catch up, just in time to see him peek into a room and walk inside.
"I'm going to put on a show, and I need to play the part. You think anyone would take me seriously in these rags? Oh, no, I need to look sharp," he answers, going through the lockers like it was a shop, checking the clothes inside and tossing them aside if they are not to his liking.
"You just summoned the aliens back to Earth. After that whole mess with Prisoner Zero and them trying to burn the Earth down you brought them back! And now you're taking off your clothes. Amy, he's taking off his clothes," Rory manages to get out, all his indignation vanishing as the Doctor strips to his underwear without a care in the world, having found something he likes.
When the bloody psycho gives them a sharp smirk and a wink, Rory turns around and decides he's not paid enough to deal with this.
Amy, to his relief, turns a moment later to give him an amused look, but fortunately, it's over before she can comment, with the Doctor rushing past them while buttoning up his shirt.
He's wearing smart brown shoes and pale tan suit pants, with a jacket of the same color hanging from his arm. He has a deep blue shirt on, which he's buttoning up as they climb to the roof, and a couple of ties in different colors and patterns lying atop the jacket. His old clothes have been hastily stuffed in a brown leather bag, a sleeve trailing out of it like a tiny flag, mockingly waving at Amy and Rory as they follow after him.
By the time they exit onto the roof, he has put on the jacket and is looking over the ties with a frown, trying to find one that he likes and dropping those he doesn't on the ground.
One of the diamond snowflake ships is already hovering there, so Amy and Rory stop halfway between it and the door while the Doctor walks to the middle of the roof, almost right underneath the ship.
Dropping the last of his ties and simply adjusting the collar of his shirt, the Doctor puts the bag on the ground and takes one last step, looking at the alien ship.
"How was this a good idea? They were leaving," Amy asks, loud enough that the Doctor hears and looks at them over his shoulder.
"You're right, they were. And I'm going to make sure they never come back again," he answers before turning his attention back to the ship, clasping his hands behind his back in a relaxed stance. "Alright, Atraxi. Let's talk."
The giant eyeball on the belly of the ship drops, attached to it by a thick metallic cable, and hovers until it's floating in front of the Doctor. It runs a blue light over the immutable Doctor for a moment before it speaks, and Rory tenses at the words.
"You are not of this world."
Rory had suspected, of course he had, especially after what he'd done to Prisoner Zero, but after seeing its true form and these Atraxi, he had expected the aliens to be a bit more, well, alien. Then again, Prisoner Zero had been perfectly capable of looking human, even if its acting hadn't been the best.
"No, I'm not. But I'm not letting all the effort that has been put in it go to waste."
"Is this world important?" the Atraxi asks, and the Doctor stills, the same absolute stillness of before whatever he'd done to Prisoner Zero, so Rory takes Amy's hand tightly in his before he can think better of it.
"Important," the Doctor repeats, voice emotionless, before he lets his hands fall to hang almost relaxed at his sides. "Six billion, seven hundred and twenty-five million, three hundred and ninety-two thousand one hundred and fifty-four. No, fifty-five. That's how many sentient beings this planet holds, and we're just talking about the dominant species. Is that important? Or would you rather have a list of how many timelines ride on the integrity of this planet? How many of them are tied with the development of your race? No, let's skip the stupid questions, shall we? Which means I ask the questions now. Is this world a threat to the Atraxi?"
The eye lets out a beam of light once more, but this time it's a holographic projection of Earth instead of a scan.
"No," the Atraxi answers when the image vanishes.
"Are the peoples of this world guilty of any crimes by the laws of the Atraxi?"
A different projection, this one showing images of humans almost too fast to comprehend, before stopping.
"No."
"Oh, I see. One more question then. I'm sure you know you aren't the first aliens to come here with your over-the-top threats and 'thou shalt obey mine demands' and all of your 'mightier than thou' spiel. I mean, you are monitoring all communications, have access to every single database on Earth, so you must be aware of that fact," the Doctor comments, gesturing a bit with a hand, and the Atraxi's next projection shows a bizarre collection of monsters and aliens, including the Cybermen from last year, some peppershaker-shaped robots, and other strange creatures that flash so fast that Rory has no time to recognize them. "Ah, good, you've done your homework. So, here's my last question. What happened to them?"
More holograms, these ones showing brief clips of different men, some more extravagant than others but all of them clearly human, while different voices repeat the same sentence, sometimes even in different languages.
I'm the Doctor.
A serious young man in a pinstriped suit, hair spiked but eyes as dark as their own Doctor's when Prisoner Zero pissed him off, is the last who is shown before the Raggedy Doctor steps through the hologram, dissipating it.
When he speaks, Rory can hear the shark grin in his voice.
"Now that we're done with introductions… Run."
The eyeball retracts and the ship zooms away faster than Rory has ever seen them move.
"Is that it? Are they gone for good?" Rory asks Amy, still too shocked by the clearly terrified retreat the Atraxi pulled at the mere realization that this man is the Doctor.
God, to think all those stories they made up when they were kids, about the Doctor being so well known that his title was more than introduction enough, are real… To think that the Raggedy Doctor is real…
Amy smiles, slowly at first, but when Rory returns the gesture, she cheers loudly and engulfs him in a hug, with Rory returning the gesture as tightly as he can while he laughs breathlessly.
"They're gone! Doctor, you did it!" Amy calls once they separate, looking at the center of the roof—
But the Doctor is gone, bag of old clothes and all, with the only sign he was ever there being the discarded ties on the ground.