FIVE

The hotel was tough to find, as Prince's Square was actually L-shaped. But once he asked for directions, it's not as though the place was off the beaten track. He checked in, checked his e-mail, and while he was online, looked up the mobile phone line registered to Martha Jones. He had to do a bit of hacking to find it, but it wasn't hard – it's what he did. After showering, he sat down on the bed and thought about what he would say. He turned his phone over and over in his hands, wondering what his exact words would be. In the end, he knew it wouldn't matter, the Doctor would come. But still, he wanted to convey the gravity of what he'd seen.

He took a deep breath and dialed.

After the line clicked open, there was a palpable pause. Then, "Hello?"

The great and wonderful words he'd hoped for never came. So he said, "Doctor."

A sigh on the other end. "Jack."

"Sorry, my voice probably isn't the one you wanted to hear."

"No, but..." said the Doctor. He hesitated, then, "...it's nice to hear from you anyway."

"Thanks," Jack said. "What are you up to?"

"We're in Pompeii. Vesuvius blows tomorrow," the Time Lord told him, casually.

"We? Travelling with someone new?" Jack asked, attempting to sound casual, but not hiding the apprehension in his voice very well. He couldn't help it – today's events had caused him to realise once again that the Doctor really did leave sadness in his wake.

"Yes," the Doctor said, sucking in air. "Her name's Donna. She's fantastic."

"They're all fantastic, Doctor."

There was a long pause. Jack could hear him exhale exhaustively.

"Are you calling for the reason I think?" asked the Doctor, trying to cut to the chase.

"Yeah."

"Been to see Francine, have you?"

"Yeah."

"Thank heaven. I've been waiting for someone to get close enough to do... something. Does Francine know you're calling me?"

"God, no."

"Good. So how is... her daughter?" asked the Doctor, straightforwardly, though carefully.

"Insane," Jack told him, shrugging. "I don't think much has changed since you last saw her."

"When I last saw her, I made everything worse."

"I heard."

"I couldn't even be in the same room to figure out what exactly was wrong with her," the Doctor confessed, with obvious remorse in his voice. Jack swore he heard a little catch as the Doctor spoke.

"Well, I could," Jack announced. "Some years ago I stole a Nevolish Consciousness Visor off a dead guy who'd been smuggling them anyway. It came in handy."

The Doctor in his TARDIS sat up and leaned forward. "So you actually saw what was going on in her head?"

"Yes."

"Did you see who attacked her?"

"No. But what I did see was almost as revealing," Jack told him. "I'm at the Reem Hotel in Prince's Square. Come over at five. Bring a bottle of bourbon, and I'll get us some room service."

"Make it for three, if you don't mind."

"Sure."

Right on time, Jack heard the grind and whoosh that signaled the Doctor was nearby. He saw the blue box materialise on the other side of the street, and waited for the Doctor and his new companion to join him. He was relieved when he met Donna, he had to admit. The tall dashing Time Lord, it seemed, was only just starting to realise his power. He had always been one with destruction and death, but lately he'd been leaving a neat little trail of broken hearts as well. It was nice to see that Donna was not a hot little twentysomething who was bound to be annihilated by a tilt of the Doctor's eyebrow. Donna might actually have a chance.

Introductions made, they ate a tight dinner together in Jack's cramped room. Another meal taken in near silence, weighed down by the revelations of Martha's 1599 nightmare. Jack had told the story as they began eating, and the meal finished beneath a dark cloud. The Doctor hadn't looked either of his friends in the eye since hearing the tale and hadn't uttered a word, though Donna and Jack had exchanged pleasanteries about the food.

Once the plates and cart were cleared, Jack attempted to engage eye contact from his taciturn friend. "Doctor. Say something."

"What would you like me to say, Jack? That none of it's true?" He still wouldn't make eye contact.

"No, I already know that part," Jack assured him. "Tell me something I don't know."

"That was the day Peter Streete died," the Time Lord mused absently. "The Carrionite killed him – one of the older ones. The younger one tried to do it to Martha as well, but couldn't... Martha was out of her time, she said."

"And? What about Bedlam?"

"I think that bothered her more than anything," he continued. "She's the one who was taking Shakespeare and the jailer to task for the conditions there, not me."

There was another long silence. Jack had been hoping that from the characteristics of this tale, the Doctor would be able to figure it all out. He'd recognise the stamp of a particularly nasty alien, and know exactly how to reverse the effects. But no such luck. He too now seemed to be imprisoned inside his own thoughts.

Finally, Jack whispered, "Doctor? There was another vision as well. I went back up after lunch and hooked up the device again."

The Doctor snapped out of his state. "Well, let's hear it, then."

Jack crossed the room to where his coat hung in the wardrobe. He reached into the pocket for his dictophone and tossed it to the Doctor. Donna and Jack sat side-by-side on the bed as the Doctor paced. The Doctor stared at the little machine for about thirty seconds, ceremoniously hit play, and then set it down on the desk. They all listened to Jack's recording of Martha's afternoon vision.

"Okay," the voice on the tape said. "This vision is much less coherent than the last one, and I can't make heads or tails of it."

As his crisp American cadence filled up the London room, like a red paint spilled on a yellow floor, Jack's mind rolled back to the horror he'd witnessed, after the sensation of falling...


She'd seen some pretty incredible things in her time with him, but this gave her a sense of almost unreasonable awe. It was the moon. She peered outside of the spaceship to see the moon.

"It's real," she said to herself.

Four men were outside, which she felt was awesome as well as unnatural. They were bouncing around like slow beach balls. Two of them are in white space-suits, and two seem to be in street clothes with red helmets. If they could have seen her face through the tiny round window, they would have seen a big smile, perhaps the first one since...

A noise behind her made her turn. One of the men in the red helmets was standing there. The smile on Martha's face faded all too quickly. She knew that this meant death, but she could not help but try to engage him. She opened her mouth to say something, and he interrupted her.

He croaked out the phrase "Burn with me." His voice was menacing, predatory, and all at once, she found herself bathed in a searing glow. It forced her skin into retreat, and she could feel that in a moment, it would begin melting from her bones. Martha wanted to run, but she could not. She had gone from euphoria to panic all in a few seconds – actually, she found that the two sensations were remarkably similar. There was nowhere to run, no way to run, so she did the only thing she could do. She screamed for help, and tried to cover her face with her hands. Suddenly, he was there. As she screamed and shielded her eyes, all the Doctor had to say was, "Beware... the weeping angel."

As the glow became all-consuming, just when she thought she would fly apart into nothing, she was in another room. There was a woman, dark and pretty, in the small room with her. She's called Abby. The room had what looked like an MRI chamber, but... it couldn't be – this was not a hospital, it was a spaceship. And there was graffitti, which Martha read as she turned round the room. "Duck. No, really duck!" it said. "Sally Sparrow, duck, now!"

And then the graffitti was gone. It went away as if it were never there, and all that was left was an old, blue and yellow scalloped wallpaper. Martha blinked several times – had she really seen that?

"Did you see that?" she asked Abby.

"See what?" Abby asked back, as she made some notes on an important-looking clipboard.

"The walls, they..."

When Martha looked back, the walls were again sporting their graffitti. This time, the giant block letters said, "Life is short, and you are hot."

Abby chuckled. "I'm what?" And then she went back to her work.

And then he was there again. The Doctor, looking very un-Doctor-like in a red space suit, was in the room with them. His head was uncovered, and he wore his glasses, but his eyes were closed. She remarked briefly, and inappropriately, how silly it is to wear one's glasses if one is simply going to walk about with one's eyes shut.

He spoke, and as he did, the room went orange and Martha's vision was blurred- no, not blurred. More grainy like an old film.

"Don't blink," he said firmly, his voice sounding far away, as through a speaker. He seemed to be looking at Abby, though not so much at her as through her. "Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back. Don't look away and don't blink."

While he was talking, he was opening his eyes and the same world-swallowing light came out of them. Right at Abby. The solid stream burning her, burning her skin off the bones, as Martha had felt a bit earlier... come to think of it, why was Martha even alive now? Surely Abby would die.

Martha screamed at the Doctor to close his eyes, for God's sake, close them, but he kept repeating his "Don't blink" speech. Eyes must stay open, focused, murderous. Abby was screaming now too, joining Martha's misery in the air, as well as the Doctor's unrelenting, cold, distant oration. Finally, just as the skin spread from the bones of her face and her skull became visible, Abby disintegrated into nothing, leaving only a silhouette on the wall.

When he turned on Martha, she felt her skin singeing again, she stumbled backward, her eyes spilling over now. "Doctor, please," she begged. "Close your eyes. Let me stay!" She found that she was sobbing. After all they had been through, she still had a will to live, and a desire to be in the universe with the Doctor.

"No second chances, that's the kind of man I am," he said.

"But I love you!" she screamed. Her voice wasn't even recognisable as her own anymore. It had become a sandblast in the form of language. "I love you! How could you do this to me? Please let me come back with you! Let me come with you!"

"I let you come with me," he rasped, mocking. "And I called you Rose."

She was up against the wall now, hysterical, destroyed, helpless, with nowhere to run.

"Blink and you're dead," he told her, burning her alive.

"I'm already dead," she insisted, lowering her voice. She croaked, "You killed me long ago."

As she put her hands up in front of her face in a futile gesture to stop the end of the world, suddenly she turned to stone. And the searing heat stopped.

She was cold as ice now, and trapped within her granite prison. She couldn't see him, as her eyes were forever affixed in front of her face, but she could hear him still, feel his hot, angry breath on her cold stone skin.

"It's your fault!" he screamed at her sullen form. "You should have scanned for life!"

His voice was high-pitched and penetrating. If she had been alive, it would have hurt her ears. As it was, his fury threatened to shatter her.

"If you don't get rid of it, I could kill you! It'll use me to kill you!"

She feared no threat any longer. Breathing hard and baring his teeth he stepped away from her. He was back in his pin-striped trousers and dress shirt. No tie, no jacket, no top button, no shoes. In exasperated rage, he turned away from her. As he did, her stone body seemed to loosen, and she reached out and touched him.

A blast, a pop. Then nothing.