It's Just a Scratch
by
xXx MissHaun†ed-MoonLigh† xXx
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Thank you shouts go out to izzfrogger, Shrink To Be, Tai Greywing (big hugs, love ya girl), Emela and Cute Gallifreyan!
'Human Nature' tonight! (Giddy Dance)
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2.
The ground was moving.
Pain would usually have been the first thing to trigger movement from an unmoving life form, but this time it lost the fight to something so bizarre, so normal that it was almost happy to resurface in second place.
The Doctor groaned, his mind a hazy mush of pain and … strangely enough, blood lust.
He was hungry.
Famished, even.
Starving.
Starving and in pain.
…
And they were moving.
The TARDIS was in flight …
Now generally, when his ship decided to take matters into her own engines, there was a problem. But what was the problem this time?
It couldn't be him … could it?
With a faint whimper, he shuddered against the harsh coolness of the metal grating beneath him and let his eyes flutter slowly open, blinking them into misty focus.
The first thing he spotted was his companion, lying motionless feet from him, her chest rising and falling slowly as she curled in on herself, shivering, hands over-crossing one another at their position beside her face.
The blue veins at her slender, ashen wrists were standing out against the delicious paleness of her skin…
Gasping slightly and snapping himself from a horrifyingly morbid stupor before it could envelop him completely, the Doctor shook his head a fraction, willing the fuzziness to diminish.
It took him a further few seconds to notice the big mistake that was going completely against his natural metabolism too.
There was a faint, pinkish tinge to his vision.
Which was weird.
Sure, he was struggling to focus on one object for much longer than a couple of seconds at the moment, but that was still no reason for his eyesight to have changed colour!
Perhaps it was down to the headache he'd more than likely gained from hitting his head against the floor when they'd practically flown into freedom before.
Or maybe it was a side-effect to one of the many experiments he'd been subjected to over the course of the past week…
… …
Poor Martha.
His aching eyes spotted the bruises that littered her once flawless skin, the abrasions that maimed her, and the half-healed cuts that would need to be cleaned before infection could spread.
Had she been put through it all, as well? She didn't deserve it. Nobody did…
And it was nothing short of a miracle that neither he nor Martha had been bitten during the course of the week. Hell knew there'd been more than enough close encounters. Even with the foggy memory, he could count their four failed escape attempts, not to mention the unexpected aid from Ophelia that had resulted in her death for treason but little reward for himself and his companion.
One truly genuine vampire amongst an army of blood-thirsty psychos … and he'd been forced to stand there and watch as her heart was stabbed clean with one of the pointiest stakes he'd ever seen in his life.
Martha had been inconsolable, bless her.
And even now the guilt was nothing short of overwhelming …
With a grim smile of satisfaction, the Doctor recalled the dying screams of a failing planet, and could only thank Rassilon that he'd managed to put a stop to those 'experiments' before anybody else suffered at the hands of the Haemovamps.
Lodemai was no more.
Just another planet contributing to the rocks, rubble and dust of deep space.
For a whole week, damn near, the Doctor had struggled against his inhibitions. He didn't want to have to resort to genocide.
He didn't want to be the destructor of yet another planet. Yet another civilization.
But as the 'experiments' became more and more sadistic, and as his worries for Martha's welfare reached the forefront of his mind, those inhibitions were soon quelled into non-existence.
And Ophelia's murder had tipped the balance sky-high, destroying said inhibitions without a second thought.
This planet deserved to die.
And now it had.
And if he felt even a twinge of remorse, Martha's look of vulnerability soon crushed it.
He could feel an irrational anger bubbling beneath his veins, but he stilled it, struggling instead into an upright position and dragging himself slowly to her side, placing a shaking hand on her shoulder.
"Martha?" he whispered softly.
Then he frowned, straightening up a little.
Had his voice always sounded like that?
There was a tantalizing, mesmerizing thrum to it, a low rumble of hoarse beauty that sounded chilling yet soothing at the same time, even to his own ears.
Surely that wasn't normal?
Clearing his throat slightly, he tried again, deciding to shake Martha's shoulder at the same time.
"Martha, can you hear me?"
No.
And there it was again.
The Doctor wasn't sure whether he should consider it as being weakness or beauty.
While it had an underlying tone of weakened distress about it, the almost ethereal quality that overrode it was haunting.
"Oh dear," he half-whispered, then jammed his mouth shut as the hoarse, freakish words fluttered like butterflies around his head.
This was a problem.
And the TARDIS didn't trust him enough at the moment to allow him to fly her – explaining why they were moving without his say so.
Not sure whether to take that as brilliance on her part or as an insult to his driving skills, the Doctor shuddered, an aching need amassing somewhere just beyond the tip of his mind.
An aching desire to feed.
With a despairing glance at the TARDIS console, which bleeped back at him in concern but otherwise did nothing, he strengthened his shaking grip upon Martha's shoulder and shook her with a tad more urgency than before.
'Don't speak, don't speak, don't speak!'
To his well-disguised relief, Martha finally stirred, her eyes fluttering sluggishly beneath closed lids and a soft moan escaping her parted lips.
Withdrawing slightly, the Doctor risked it once again, feeling hungrier by the second.
And now he understood why.
"Martha? Can you hear me?" he whispered, cursing himself for adopting that creepy ethereal vampire voice.
Much to his own distress, Martha's head nodded obediently.
She simply couldn't stop herself.
"Good," he murmured as quietly as he could, willing himself to keep the seductive tones to a bare minimum. It didn't work too well, though. "Can you open your eyes for me?"
They shot open submissively, blinking rapidly against the dim light of the Console Room.
The Doctor sighed heavily but said nothing, choosing to nod his appraisals instead.
Well, that was until she screamed and scurried desperately away from him, eyes wide as dinner-plates and a blistered hand flying to her mouth in horror as all memory of sleep, illness and the death of a distant planet vanished from her mind.
"Doctor?" she whispered fearfully, staring at him in shock.
The Doctor half-nodded, struggling to tear his gaze from the pulsing azure veins that seemed all the more pronounced now that she was up and about…
"Doctor, your eyes!"
She pointed a quivering finger at him, and the Doctor responded by blinking rapidly and turning away, hurrying to his feet and focusing solely on ridding his mind of the desire to taste her.
Of the insatiable ache to feel her blood trickling like water down his parched throat…
'No, damnit! Snap out of it!'
"Doctor, your neck!"
Her tones were anxious, her gaze unsteady. She'd stumbled haphazardly to her feet by now and was sorely tempted to put as much distance between herself and the Doctor as possible. Yet the other half of her refused to budge an inch.
"It's just a scratch," he offered tentatively, but was quickly forced to slap a hand over his mouth yet again when he spotted Martha making forwards as though she'd been pulled to his side by invisible wire.
"No!" he snapped, stumbling backwards and hurrying around her to stand beside the console instead, putting it between himself and her.
Martha blinked and stepped away, backing up until she found herself pressed firmly against the closed door, her eyes in great danger of jumping right out of their sockets.
"Doctor, please tell me you're just messing about," she asked of him fearfully.
But the Doctor remained silent this time.
And Martha already knew the truth because it was staring right at her.
"But … b-but I thought they could only turn you if they bit you!" she demanded, faintly awestruck by this new revelation, yet at the same time attempting in vain to fall straight through the closed door behind her.
"Apparently not," he risked, turning away from her in the hopes that his words may have less of an impact if he wasn't staring right at her.
It half-worked. She only took a couple of steps towards him before she managed to catch herself and hurry backwards again.
"So … so like in the stories, there's an automatic pull. I'd always wondered how that worked," she murmured forced-calmly, more to herself than to him, trying to make sense out of an impossible situation. "In, like, books and stuff, they reckon a vampire in need of food has an unpreventable knack for drawing in their next meal. Seems they were right."
The horror was gradually diminishing now. Now that she was fully awake and capable of assessing the situation, this was simply yet another adventure for them. Yet another marvel for her to wonder over.
Waking up to see the Doctor staring hungrily at her through scarlet orbs that had, at last sight, been a beautiful shade of brown was quite a disturbing image. But the shock was wearing off now as the seriousness of their predicament hit home.
But an underlying fear was soon rearing its ugly head as she spotted the lustful stare he was mutely sending her way, despite his best efforts to ignore her presence completely.
Beneath her ribs, her heart was racing.
But she ignored it.
"So um … is there any way to reverse it?" she asked false cheerily, trying to lighten the mood slightly but failing abysmally as the weak quiver penetrated her words. She swallowed hard, then tried again. "I've never heard of a vampire's scratch converting someone. Like, with a bite, you have to kill the vampire that bit you or take out the coven's king or queen, I remember that much … but does the same apply for scratches?"
It sounded so weird, her voice being the one to do all the talking for once.
Almost unnatural in this fast-becoming-familiar environment.
This was the Doctor's territory, and yet she was the one going off on the mad ramble when it was usually his trade-mark.
Still, the less talking he did right now, the safer she'd be.
To her relief, he seemed to have grasped onto that fact as well, because his response was a half-shrug accompanied by a mad dash to the monitor on the central column. He stood gazing raptly at it for a few seconds, and then started typing furiously on the keyboard beneath it, tongue between his teeth and his ruby-red eyes aglow.
Martha released a slow breath of respite and ran a quivering hand across her forehead.
He'd sort this out. No worries.
He'd be back to his eccentric self in a minute, and then Martha needn't worry at all about her becoming a vampire's lunch. 'Best leave tales like that for children's stories,' she decided.
Yes, the Doctor would fix this. He was part vampire right now for some unknown reason, apparently converted not - as the legends had lead her to believe - by biting, but by scratching.
Different certainly, but even so he wouldn't be a vampire for long.
He'd fix this.
…
Right?
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Not exactly a cliffie ... that comes next chapter ... which in turn comes tomorrow ... (Grins)
Oh, and I love reviews … (hint hint)
Blessed Be!
Hugs,
xXx MissHaun†ed-MoonLigh† xXx