Dalek Sec's knowledge of genetics might not have been quite as good as the Doctor's, but it was impressive enough that the Doctor spared several stray thoughts mourning the loss of such a mind as he raced to fix Laszlo's failing genetic structure.
It had been impossible to reverse the gene splice, but the Doctor was able to stop the system failure cascade and stabilize the genome, ultimately saving Laszlo's life.
While they waited on the edge of Central Park for Frank to return with the decision from the Hooverville Citizens, the Doctor and Martha watched Tallulah and Laszlo bask in each other's presence.
With a time-period-appropriate hat and a little bit of caution, Laszlo might even be able to live something close to a normal life, and the Doctor hoped one of the glimmering timelines filled with hope that he was careful not to look at too closely, was the one that took precedence.
When they finally heard Frank approaching, all four of them stood straight, watching the young teenager rubbing his hands together to ward off the chill. The tension in the air could have been cut with a knife, and the Doctor watched Frank sigh as he came to a stop before them, shoving his hands into his threadbare pockets.
"Well, I talked to 'em," he started seriously, "an' I told 'em what Solomon would've said. An' I reckon I shamed one or two of 'em too," Frank admitted, but when Laszlo didn't look like he was going to ask, the Doctor stepped forward instead.
"What did they say?"
"They said yes," Frank told them, starting to grin now as he watched Tallual gasp and fling herself at Laszlo, wrapping the man in a hug as he began to smile in response to Frank's grin, his trepidation turning to shock and then melting into gratefulness.
"They'll give you a home, Laszlo," Frank reiterated. "I mean, er... don't imagine people ain't gonna stare. An' I can't promise you'll be at peace," he warned gently, "but in the end, that's what Hooverville is for. People who ain't got no place else," Frank finished, and the Doctor couldn't help but beam at the teen who'd grown into a man overnight.
All it had taken was facing down a Dalek invasion.
"Thank you," Laszlo said, voice strangled with emotions, "I— I can't thank you enough..."
The Doctor and Martha said their goodbyes and made their way back to the Tardis. They didn't speak much on the journey, both lost in their own thoughts, but the silence was comfortable and it didn't seem to take half as long to get back to the ship as it had to reach Central Park the day before.
"Do you reckon it's going to work, those two?" Martha asked the Doctor quietly as the Tardis came back into view, the time ship's comforting hum brushing against his mind.
"I don't know," he answered the woman, turning around to gaze back across the water at Manhattan. "Anywhere else in the universe, I might worry about them, but New York?"
The Doctor shrugged and shook his head. "It's what this city's good at," he admitted, feeling Martha come to a stop beside him. Her eyes weren't fixed on the skyline like his, but staring at the side of his face as he spoke quietly.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... and maybe the odd pig-slave-dalek-mutant-hybrid too," he mused, frowning in thought as he considered whether he should have peeked at the timelines to see what the future might hold for the pair, but he'd never liked endings so when Martha laughed softly, he allowed himself to be distracted.
"The pig and the showgirl," Martha said, grinning up at him, and he couldn't stop a soft laugh in response, turning a smile on the young woman at his side.
"The pig and the showgirl," he agreed, allowing her humour to push back the darkness still clouding over the edges of his mind.
"Just proves it, I suppose," she said lightly. "There's someone for everyone."
With that, his laughter evaporated and the Doctor turned his eyes back to the New York skyline, smile slipping at the stabbing pain in his left heart as Rose's tongue-in-cheek smile flashed through his mind and he sighed.
"Maybe," he answered quietly and he turned to the Tardis, Martha following at his side.
"I meant to say... I'm sorry," she continued, as he reached into his pocket searching for the key.
"What for?" he asked, frowning, but Martha just shrugged.
"Just 'cause... that Dalek. It got away. I know what that means to you," she said softly, and he turned away with a non-committal hum.
She might think she knew, and the Doctor appreciated the sentiment, but there was no way that Martha could truly understand everything that the Dalek's escape had meant. Not just for him, but for the rest of the universe too.
There was no telling where Caan had ended up.
"Think you'll ever see it again?" She asked as he finally located the Tardis key and slid it smoothing into the lock, opening the doors with a deep, relieved, sigh at the sensation of being home once again.
"Oh yes. No doubt," he told her, and let her enter the time ship first, before stopping over the threshold and turning to shoot New York one last look over his shoulder.
Briefly, the Doctor let his barriers drop, a short unguarded moment with the gentle and reassuring telepathic hum of his Tardis pressed against his bruised mind.
"One day..." he whispered, and the Tardis gave him the equivalent of a mental hug before he managed to summon the ghost of a smile to his face for Martha and entered the ship properly, closing the wooden blue door on 1930 New York and moving to the console to set them into the vortex.
"If you don't mind, Doctor, I think I'm gonna go get some sleep," Martha said and he lifted his eyes from the screen he'd been peering at, blinking at her for a long moment before the words registered and he realised that the woman had been awake nearly a full twenty-four hours.
"Of course! You humans do need your sleep," he said with a smile that she returned, and only a touch of his usual manic presence. "Off you go then. I'll just leave us floating in the vortex until you're up and about again," he offered and Martha nodded her thanks.
"Goodnight, Doctor," she called, moving deeper into the Tardis, and as she left the smile that he'd summoned faltered and vanished, being overtaken by a frustration fuelled sigh.
"There's no night in the Tardis," he whispered to himself, running his hands over his face, fingers rubbing against tired eyes.
In the last twenty-four hours, he'd been chased by pig slaves, gotten his favourite coat filthy in the sewers, faced Daleks and Dalek hybrids, been electrocuted and watched a genocide.
He could really use some sleep himself, the Time Lord decided, but the last thing he wanted was to see the memories of the Time War. The memories that facing a Dalek always brought to the surface.
The Tardis groaned and flickered her lights in disapproval, but the Doctor ignored her protests. Instead, he pulled out his sonic screwdriver and dove beneath her console, burying himself in the time ship's complex circuits to while away the hours until Martha awoke.
By the time the team arrived back at the hub, Rose was almost bouncing by the door and Ianto was struggling not to laugh at her outright.
She let them move the fragile collection of bones into the morgue first, before she practically pounced on Tosh and commandeered the alien device, cooing over it with sparkling eyes.
"Oh wow, this is something else," she murmured, cradling the alien tech carefully and moving it into the lab area she'd prepared for it, Tosh still on her heels.
"Have you seen anything like it before?" she asked, and Rose shook her head.
"No, nothing quite like this, but I started out as a technology archivist in the parallel world's Torchwood. This won't be the first time I've worked on unknown artefacts to find out what they are and how they work," she told Tosh, her bronze eyes moving over the metal, caked in dirt and what looked like rust.
She'd need to clean it up and get a proper look at it before she could start to make any progress on what it might actually do.
"It might take a few weeks, but I'll figure it out," Rose added with a grin while she gently placed the object onto her table and ushered Tosh out of the room, shutting the door behind them both.
"I'll just make a fresh tea, see if Jack needs anything else done, before I settle in," The blonde explained in answer to Tosh's questioning look. "How's that translation program you wrote coming along?"
"With your help? Brilliantly," Tosh answered with a grin of her own as the pair headed towards the kitchen area. "I don't know how you can read so many alien languages, but it's been very helpful getting the program's coding right. I've had it running all night, but I'm hoping it'll finish cataloguing everything we've got by the end of the day, and maybe then you can check it over for any mistakes?" Tosh asked, and Rose nodded.
"First priority needs to be what this new object is, but I'll take a look over the translation results on my breaks," Rose offered as they moved across the hub. Her smile slipped slightly when she spotted Gwen and Owen poking at each other with some of Tosh's computer tools, before darting away from each other when they heard her and Tosh approaching.
"I'm really sorry, I think your computer might be dead," Owen offered as a greeting and Rose watched Tosh's face fall.
"What? No! You're kidding!" She exclaimed, lengthening her strides to reach her computer station quickly, and Rose came to a stop, frowning.
"What happened? We've not lost power to any of the other systems," she asked, and Owen cleared his throat, tossing a football between his hands, making Rose's eyes narrow in suspicion.
"Okay, so... she said I was no good at sport, hello?" Owen explained quickly, indicating a nervous-looking Gwen and Rose felt frown deepen as she studied the pair.
"So I said, throw something to me and—"
"What happened to the computer!" Tosh snapped after pressing a few power buttons and tapping at her keyboard hadn't produced any results.
"Oh... I, uh, kicked the plug out," the doctor admitted.
"You did what?" Rose asked, genuinely shocked at the man, and her jaw dropped slightly even as Tosh began to break down, her frustration turning to hurt and anger in a moment.
"What?" She snapped, "I was running a translation programme I'd written with Rose. It had taken us hours! We'd collated every scrap of alien language we've got and it's English counterpart, broke it down into binary threads to see if there was a common derivative!"
"That's a bit of a mouthful," Owen said, and while it made Gwen giggle, it was the thing that made Rose's temper fray.
"Excuse me, where exactly do you think you're working?" Rose snarled, taking a couple of slow steps towards the pair, and crossing her arms to stop her fingers curling into fists.
"Sorry, private joke— Uh, stupid joke—"
"I don't care about your private jokes, or your stupid jokes," Rose growled, cutting Gwen off and shifting her glare between the two of them. "If the hours Tosh and I spent working on that program are meaningless to you two, then consider this instead. There's a device in the hub right now, and we don't know what it is or what it does. What if you'd set that off and blown a hole in the planet the size of belgium?" She chastised, eyes flashing, and Gwen shifted uncomfortably.
"It's not like we've never kicked a ball around the office before," Owen snarled, defensively and Rose ground her teeth together.
"There's a body down in the morgue. What would the football landing on those bones have done?" She demanded instead, and he quickly fell silent. They both knew with the age of that skeleton it could have reduced it to meaningless shards, and Rose shook her head.
"You and I both know that we only play games here once all the tech is locked up safely. You're both usually more professional than this, so what the hell were you thinking?"
"I'm sorry. We're sorry. You're right," Gwen mumbled softly, nodding. "Sorry Tosh," she added, before picking up her files and moving back over to her desk.
Owen didn't apologise, but Rose could see he wasn't thrilled at having been pulled up on his behaviour when he threw the football at her, and she was forced to snatch it out of the air or let it go careening off unchecked.
"Right. Back to work then," he said, offering a cold smile as his anger bubbled in his eyes, but he turned and headed back into the morgue before Rose could answer.
When she turned to Tosh with a frustrated sigh, she saw that the woman had her computer back online and the program running again.
"Is it okay?" She asked, tucking the football under her arm, and Tosh sighed.
"It lost all progress, so I've got to start it again, but there's no file corruption at least," she admitted before shooting Rose a soft smile.
"Thank you. I'm usually the only one around here who seems to care about doing the job."
"I don't care if they make jokes and have a bit of fun," Rose said with a shrug, "but there's having a bit of fun, and being dangerous, and a football flying around alien tech is just a disaster waiting to happen."
She put the black and white ball on Owen's computer station before continuing on into the kitchen for her tea before she had to start working on the strange device that they'd retrieved from the construction site.
Rose spent most of the first afternoon carefully cleaning roks, mud and rust from the alien device.
She had to move slowly, not entirely sure what was alien and what was detritus picked up from being buried for decades. Since they also didn't know what it was or what it could do, Rose wasn't willing to accidentally trigger the device either.
Hours passed with her chipping and scrubbing away at the thing, bit by tiny bit, and she only realised how late it had gotten when Jack came to her with a hot pizza in hand, warning her that she needed to eat and sleep if she didn't want him locking her in her room.
She was about to tear the man to pieces when she realised that he'd been joking and she sighed. Her back screamed at her as she stood straight, but she followed her friends' advice, accepted the pizza and dragged it and herself to her room.
She devoured her meal before sinking into her soft, warm bed, but the purpose of the alien device continued to swirl around her mind in her dreams.
The only thing that stopped Rose from getting back to her lab the next morning, was Jack's insistence that she had breakfast with him, tempting her with the tea that she was in desperate need of. It only held her back for half an hour before she made herself another large mug and retreated to her lab, Jack shaking his head in exasperation as she went.
"Hey, Tosh," she heard Owen call out. She'd not realised anyone else was in yet, and Rose paused halfway across the hub to greet the team.
"Morning," Gwen called out as well, and Rose moved to hover beside Tosh's computers, waiting to see if she needed anything for the translation program before Rose got stuck into testing and identifying the mystery device.
Tosh was silent for a long moment, before moving up the stairs towards her desk with a hesitant smile.
"I've got something to show you," she announced, without even returning the greetings she'd been given, and Rose tipped her head curiously.
"Sure," Owen said, standing and wiping his hands on a cloth.
"Have I got time for a pee first?" Gwen called from her own station, and Rose cleared her throat.
"I'm sure we can wait for you, Gwen. What've you got, Tosh?" Rose asked, grinning at the woman, but Tosh had paused on the stairs, looking sort of startled and unsure of herself, and Rose's grin faded slightly.
"I, er... I found this thing..." Tosh stumbled over her words as she slowly climbed the last few steps but she stopped dead at the top, staring at Owen like she'd seen a ghost.
Rose turned her own eyes on the doctor, looking for something that might have warranted Tosh's reaction, but Owen was just frowning back at Tosh, looking just as confused by her behaviour as Rose was.
"Okay... uh, I don't know if this comes under actual technology—"
Once again, Tosh's words were cut off, as though someone had interrupted her, and Rose's eyes narrowed as she lowered her tea from her lips.
Tosh's eyes turned to stare at Gwen then, and Rose took a few steps towards her, worried.
"You alright, Tosh? You look like you've seen a ghost?" Rose asked, frowning slightly but she kept her voice soft, but Tosh just shook her head sharply, her gaze flicking back to Owen.
"Tosh?" Rose called again, and the woman finally settled her attention on her and forced out a smile.
"Yeah, no, fine. I'm fine."
"You wanted to show us something? Might be technology, might not?" Rose prompted carefully, laying a hand on Tosh's elbow, her eyebrows raised expectantly and making sure that voice was still gentle, but Tosh just laughed and Rose blinked at her in surprise.
"No. You know what? Just forget it. It's, uh... I found an article on... something. I'll bring it in tomorrow," she said quickly, brushing off the hand Rose had settled on her arm.
Before Rose could ask anything else, Tosh was moving past her and heading towards her computers, and the others seemed happy enough to let the matter drop.
"No worries," Owen offered, turning his attention back to his own computer, and settling back into his seat.
Rose kept her attention on Tosh, watching until the other woman had put her bag down and begun pulling her coat off before asking her again.
"You sure you're feeling alright?" she said, but Tosh just smiled.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks Rose," she said, and Rose held her gaze for a moment before nodding, satisfied that if she needed help she'd ask.
"Alright then. Need me to translate anything?" Rose offered, but after being interrupted the previous day, the translation program was still running, so Rose went back to her lab and continued to carefully study the strange new device, pushing her worry for Tosh to the back of her mind.