"Can we take the baby out of the lab?" I asked after the Doctor had typed frantically on a computer and flipped through about half a dozen giant stacks of paper. He looked up at me.
"What?" He asked.
"The baby is down in the lab all by itself. I feel bad about it so I wanted to know if it would ruin your plan if we brought it up here?" I asked and he blinked at me for a few seconds before his face softened.
"Emma, we don't even know if the baby can perceive the outside world," he said but the look on his face was telling me that he was going to let me go down and get the baby.
"But what if it does and it's not only in a strange weird scary place, but it's also there alone?" I asked before I leaned forward towards him pointedly. "There's no sense trying to pretend that you haven't already decided to let me go."
"Oh, you know me too well." He said and I smiled as I bounced towards him to press a kiss on his cheek. He picked up a nearby pen and wrote directions on the back of my hand. "Please don't get lost. Kate, Sarah and Mark would all not forgive me."
"Mark would, he knows how bad I am at directions," I said, and Mark laughed.
"That's true. I accepted long ago that she's hopeless," he said. The Doctor's lip quirked up as he smoothed an errant curl behind my ear.
"Well I'm hopelessly optimistic so I haven't given up yet," the Doctor said, and I rolled my eyes teasingly at his sappiness.
"Okay I'll be right back," I said, moving towards the door but Mark caught me by the elbow smoothly.
"Do you want me to come with you?" He asked and I smiled while shaking my head and holding my hand up towards him.
"It's all good I have directions and I'd rather you be here with Sarah. Plus, you're the most senior ranking person here technically so you need to call Kate," I said before I jerked my thumb towards the Doctor. "Don't let him do anything stupid."
"Emma Bradley!" I winked at Mark over the Doctor's affronted tone and gently stepped out of his grip. As I exited the room, I made a mental note to sit down with him when I got back because the way he was acting made me think that he wanted to talk about something serious. I followed the directions on the back of my hand diligently, so I managed to find the lab with no problems.
"Hey little thing," I said as I walked up to the meteor and smoothed my hand over it comfortingly. It was rougher than I had thought it would be and seemed to have small speckles of green over the grey surface, which wasn't the black rock that I had been expecting from a volcanic rock. "You ready to get out of here?"
"Well not out of here exactly. The Doctor is working on contacting the person trying to find you, but until then I didn't think it was fair to leave you down here all by yourself," I said as I lifted the baby off the table and cradled it in my arms in such a way that I wouldn't drop it. "I don't know if you can understand me, but please don't heat up if that's a thing that you can do."
"Sorry my fellow humans are kind of idiots sometimes otherwise they would have tried to get you back to your parents sooner." I was aware of the fact that the Doctor was probably watching me on the cameras, but I was also equally confident that he wouldn't say anything about the fact that I was mostly babbling to myself.
"Emma excellent timing," the Doctor said as he pulled the door open just as I walked up to it and I raised an eyebrow up at him.
"Do I actually have excellent timing, or have you been standing here waiting for me to come back since I left?" I asked and Sarah laughed while the Doctor looked affronted.
"Excellent timing of course." He took the baby from my arms and placed it in the middle of the centre table and then moved a few contraptions into place around it.
"I see you've been busy," I said, and he flashed me a grin.
"I don't want any further surprises," he said as he pulled out the sonic and started using it.
"How about you tell me what everything does while you put on the finishing touches?" I suggested as I glanced over to Sarah and Mark. "I am assuming he told you what it all does while he was putting it together."
"He did," Sarah confirmed.
"Well then I would hate to be out of the loop." I leaned pointedly on the table and fluttered my eyelashes at him dramatically, which made him snort before he patted the one that he was working on.
"This one is to monitor the baby to make sure it doesn't hatch. Or to give us advance warning if it does start hatching," he said, and I gave the baby a sideways glance.
"They hatch?" I repeated.
"That's what I said," Mark muttered, and the Doctor gave us both unamused looks.
"Not like a chicken, but that's the most relevant comparison." He moved his hand over to the second contraption. "This one is to send out a signal to any Lherzovillians that might be out there letting them know that the baby is safe, and opening communication to find a good place to drop the baby off."
"I'm quite a fan of not the middle of London myself," I said while waving my hand around vaguely. "Especially since I know that Lherzovillians leave heaps of lava and volcanic ash lying around."
"I'm inclined to agree with you," the Doctor said before moving his hand to the third contraption. "Hence this one's purpose of detecting the arrival of a Lherzovillian before they arrive."
"Which will?" I asked and he smiled.
"Ding." I rolled my eyes at him in faux exasperation as I fought to hide a smile. He hadn't made a machine that goes ding since the thing with the Zygons and I was worried that the whole experience had put him off.
"Of course, it's another machine that goes ding. No, I mean why do we want to know that a Lherzovillian is going to arrive?" I asked.
"So that we can meet it at one of the sites that I'm going to set up to contain it and any volcanic activity it brings with it," he said, and I raised my eyebrow up at him.
"So, my excellent timing had nothing to do with the baby getting here so that you could put the finishing touches on the baby monitor. It had everything to do with the fact that now you would be able to convince me not to come with you, or so that I wouldn't just come running after you when I got back and found out you'd left," I said with a knowing smile on my face and he sighed deeply as he reached up to rub his hand over his face and into his hair. I let my smirk grow wider when his gaze finally fell back on me.
"You are the most frustrating woman I have ever met," he said, and I laughed.
"I've fallen from tenacious to frustrating," I said teasingly in delight before I fell serious. "I'm not about to let you do anything dangerous by yourself."
"And I am not letting you come along because I don't know what the containment field will do to the time energy," the Doctor said.
"Time energy?" Sarah and Mark repeated at the same time.
"Long story I will tell you in a second I promise. Why would the containment field affect the time energy?" I asked because as much as it gave me pause, I still needed to make sure he wasn't just making that up.
"It's designed to contain things that aren't exactly Earth natural." I opened my mouth to say something about how he had two hearts, but he held up a finger to get me to wait. "My hearts don't count because the containment field isn't that exacting. Your time energy in your human body is broad enough to be unnatural."
"God dammit it," I said as I ran out of arguments that made logical sense. "I still don't want you to go by yourself. Bad shit happens when we separate."
"I'll go with him," Mark said and smiled at the Doctor and I's surprised blinks. "Well now someone can go with the Doctor and someone can stay with Sarah."
"That makes sense to me," the Doctor said and waved Mark over. I wandered over to Sarah and took her hand tightly, because she had an expression on her face that I was very familiar with since I'd seen it on my own face many times.
"Easy Sarah. The Doctor won't let anything happen to Mark," I said under my breath, and she locked eyes with me.
"How do you know?"
"Because he would never be able to look at either of us ever again if something happened," I said, which got me a weak laugh. "Tell me how to make it better."
"What?"
"You think I don't know what panic looks like? Tell me how to make it better," I said, and she sucked in a deep breath.
"It would be better if I could know what was happening while they were gone," she said shakily, and I nodded while giving the room a quick glance around before my eyes fell on a phone. I sent the Doctor a glance over my shoulder, but luckily he was buried in science talk with Mark over top of what looked like oversized tent stakes, before I lifted the phone out of the receiver and dialed my cell phone, which I picked up before it could ring. I set the phone down on the desk next to its cradle and tapped my phone against my hand gently before slipping it carefully back into my pocket.
"There we go. Now all we have to do is slip this in the Doctor's pocket and we can hear what happens when they're gone," I said, and Sarah blinked at me in mild astonishment.
"Emma that's a brilliant idea," she said.
"I'm not just a pretty face. Do you feel better?" I asked, even as I made a mental note to ask for a brilliance kiss later.
"I do," Sarah said in what sounded like surprise and I rapped my knuckles against hers gently.
"I learned quite a few tricks in therapy," I said with a wink. "How's the plan going Doctor?"
"Perfectly well thank you Emma. I'm just going to run up the stairs and set this one up and then come back for Mark and head for the next sight," the Doctor said as he ducked out of the room. I rolled my eyes as I moved away from Sarah so that Mark and Sarah could have a moment.
"And somehow he still manages to run off on his own," I said and leaned against the table to wait for him to come back. I cracked a smile at him when he did arrive. "You know if I did something like that, you'd be making a whole bunch of noise about Rule One."
"Well," he drawled before he grinned. "I believe that we have previously discussed the fact that I am full of double standards."
"That's certainly true," I said and held my hand out to him which he took without question and stepped into my space.
"You okay?" He asked and I nodded.
"I told Sarah the whole truth about my parents and I didn't lose it. It feels good," I said before I smiled up at him slightly. "But also weird."
"Doctor. We should go," Mark said.