The immortal man stepped from out of the shadows of the building. They had landed behind a large building that only then Martha recognized as the back of a hospital.
"She's been here a while, you know." Jack continued with a raise of his chin at the young woman.
The Doctor didn't shift his gaze; he fixed the new comer with the same intense glare as when he first appeared. "We already know all of this, Jack, tell us some things we don;t know.:
Jack, noticing the discomfort of the clutch of people shifted his own perspective to the important. "They're in there." he nodded toward the large building.
The Doctor nodded and moved toward the door that Jack had emerged from. Jack placed his hand on the Doctor's shoulder and received an angry glare in response. "It's not good in there, Doc. " Jack spoke quietly.
The Doctor said nothing he turned more determinedly toward the small metal door and swung it open angrily. "It's always bad in there for me, Jack."
The group followed into the building, into what Martha could only surmise as the kitchens. Every hospital had a food system, feeding hundreds a day in various stages of care. The smell of institution food assaulted her nostrils as she made her way inside. Bt, it wasn't the smell that got to her. They had arrived there at the early morning, at a time when the entire area should have been ablaze with activity preparing trays for the noon crowd.
What assaulted =them was a silence, a dead silence that made them all uncomfortable. The Doctor thrust his hands deep into his pockets and gave a cursory glance around the large utilitarian room. "Well, guess this is the place," he said with no mirth.
Martha could hear it in his voice, she knew him well enough to know the discord in his demeanor. He was going to fry whatever he could find to hold responsible, they had their chance, he had even given them a second chance, something she knew he never did. Chances were over, and she feared the rage bubbling to the surface in the ancient man.
"This way," Jack broke the eerie silence and took lead toward the stairs. The small hospital was only for the immediate area, it had been more of a way station between intermediate care and urgent care. The hospital only had three floors, and Martha noted that Jack was making his way to the third floor. She nearly faltered her easy cadence as the signs pointed toward Maternity.
He motioned the four into a closet off the nursery. "It's worse than I told you." he whispered in the tight quarters.
The man in the orange coveralls finally spoke. "It was the plan all along." he assured them.
"They wanted as long a life as they could get, a way to stay alive."
"Just like on Zybthara." Martha said. "They are relentless."
"A hurricaine could take notes." The Doctor hissed. "I have a plan."
Jack shook his head, "All bets are off on this one, Doc."
The Doctor glared at him again, "what does that mean?"
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
It was from a perch typically reserved for happier occasions, a smiling family poinin=ting and taking pictures. The four of them peered around the large sheet window at the throng of people inside of the nursery. Women in gowns, men in lab coats, it was the entire maternity ward, all gathered inside of the large theatre. And the newborns.
It was a punch in the gut for Martha, she couldn't watch, but the soldier who had walked the earth could not turn away. The Doctor took a deep breath and angled back along the wall. "Ok," he nodded. "We need a plan."
"I had a plan." Jenny said with a fold of her slender arms. "You made me leave it on the TARDIS."
"Still hate guns, Doc?" Jack asked with an intolerant shake of his head.
The group huddled in the corner of the walkway on the other side of the nursery. "Of course he hates guns." Jenny said, shaking her head and looking up as if for strength.
Jack shook his head and made to give her his spare piece." You need a gun," he asserted, with a nearly apologetic look at the Doctor. "She's really good with them."
He slapped away the proffered weapon before the teen could reach out for it. "Be that as it may," he hissed. "No child of mine needs a gun to survive. Don't you dare give her one." It was venomous enough to be the final word on the subject, but Martha Jones was not privy to his ire, not on this. She reached into her coat and produced the weapon Jack had tossed her the day before. She was thankful she did not have to use it, and even more grateful to fob it off on someone else.
He fixed a glare upon her that would have frozen hell in June, Martha shook her head and hissed back at him. "She needs it, someone needs to guard against them coming back into the nursery once we get them out of there."
"We are gonna need a diversion. " Jack nodded.
"And I am going to need a gun to make that diversion." Jenny amended with a nod. She was the face of the Old West. Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty rolled into one.
"You can create quite the diversion without using a weapon." The Doctor insisted. With a murderous look aimed at Martha, he swiped for the gun held in the blonde's hand. She angled it away from her grasping father. With a smile of treachery at Martha, she placed the gun in her holster.
"Diversions can be made without a gun," Martha spoke to the Doctor, "But I would feel a hell of a lot better with someone armed guarding my ass while I am in there doing what needs to be done."
He looked at her then, in fact all eyes turned to the dark skinned woman. "Martha," The Doctor insisted icily. "No one is insisting you go on in there and treat all of those infants with that spray."
"No one did," she nodded, "But I am going to be the one to do it, I am the only one with any kind of medical training that can handle the situation."
The Doctor made to raise his hand, but Martha quelched his argument. "Yes, Doctor. You will assist me in there." she hooked a thumb toward the nursery. "But I don;t want Sisko and Poncho in there with their itchy trigger fingers."
"Assist?" The Doctor nodded. "I can do that." he smiled at her then, a smile that brightened the dingy corner the group huddled into. He smiled at her and she felt it hit her like a punch in the heart. It was the look he had given her months before as they stood outside of the TARDIS after he had survived the hell of a unknown assailant on the planet Midnight. Absolute trust is what she saw in his eyes. Absolute trust and amazement and something else.
Love.
"Right," Martha went on, catching herself from falling into his gaze. "You two." she pointed at Jack and Jenny. "Stay outside the doors, be ready for the onslaught."
"No shooting." The Doctor insisted still fixing her with his gaze.
"Doctor, we have to-do what we must. There are infants in there, and while I would love to be able to save every person that has been infested with these things, my first priority is to the innocent. The ones that cannot fight for themselves."
The Doctor flashed a look of understanding. Words were exchanged among the five of them, a plan hatched.
"I can't believe you gave her a gun!" the Doctor railed, hands in the air and lips set on full manic sputter. "And, if I am not mistaken, it's the same gun you held on me!"
"You held a gun on him?" Jenny asked the older woman with what could only be described as wide eyed wonder.
Martha shrugged nonchalantly and fought against the smile tugging at her features. "It was the only way to get him to cooperate."
"Don't I know it." Jack added with a shake of his head.
"She holds a gun on you and I get lectured for just holding a gun?" Jenny flared suddenly.
"Probably not a good time for this." Martha nodded toward the nursery on the other side of the hall. "Unless we plan on this being the diversion."
"Why not," the Doctor fired, "Then my daughter doesn't need a gun." He tried again at the weapon now encased in leather at the hip of the young girl. She ducked behind the immortal man with the American accent and scoffed. "
"We really need to focus here, Doctor." Martha answer with a hand on his arm. The3 Doctor turned his brown eyes on her and nodded.
Jenny taunted the crew inside of the nursery, she ran like a daughter of the Doctor would. Most of them chased her, and while the others that stayed inside to mind the store were then accosted by a smiling gun toting Captain who led the rest out into the hallway.
Silently, but without missing a beat, the Doctor and Martha worked on each individual infant. She wondered if he was planning a way to remove her from the situation, to try and place her into that glass jar.
It was the first infant that nearly felled her. They figured out to spray the antidote into the face of the infant. Martha wanted to do the first one, insisted that if anything happened she wanted it on her conscience and not the already
She did not want to look the first time. They had figured, that is she and the Doctor, had seemed to understand, with the help of who they now called Chuck, the thing in the man suit. They had to spray into the face of the hapless newborns, though, as the Doctor pointed out as she held one of them in her arms the same way she once held Adric, before he had become a wriggly mound of mobility, that the beings inside were not as innocent as the bodies they were now inhabiting.
"But what happens to them? I mean after those things are evicted?"
"You ask this now?" the Doctor said, his head cocked to one side, his arms holding an infant.
"Yeah, I'm asking this now." Martha nodded and spoke again. "Are they going to, you know, be all right?"
The Doctor sighed. "This is sort of metaphysical, Martha. It's not as simple as just spray and their souls return. Before, in Farringham, they took those people and ate the souls. The bodies were there to do with as they pleased. " The Doctor jostled the infant he held nervously.
"But, what happens? I mean how do we know this won't kill them?"
"We don't know." he insisted. The Doctor turned and looked the woman in the eyes. "I don;t know, Martha I Have no idea. Do you understand that?"
Martha shook her head. "We should have tried this on one of them first."
He turned to her. "And if it didn't work, what were the other options, hmm?" he asked dutifully, still holding the tiny infant in his hands. "What were the other options again?"
She looked at him with the disbelief of an atheist at a baptism. "Are you serious?" she railed angrily. "You are telling me we have gone into this blindly, no resources except for a man we met driving an orange truck?"
"What would you rather do?" he hissed in the quiet of the nursery. "What are the alternatives to this?"
"But, that's just it, you always have a plan B. I have never seen you not have a backup plan."
"They killed them, Martha. That is the truth of it, the bodies they take, the original soul, being essences…whatever you want to call it, it dies." He sighed wearily. "The four, the Family. I sent their bodies into horrible existences. They were giving an eternity of life in those bodies because I knew what had been there before was gone."
Silence fell between them and hung in the air thick and heavy like a too hot day at the beach. She sighed then and hefted the bottle of hope that stood between them. "So, this is all we have?" She asked sadly.
"Hope." He nodded. "Best thing in the universe. The whole thing could collapse without it." He tried. But, Martha could see through his forced smile like the man behind the curtain. He didn't have all the answers. Maybe, most times, he was the smartest man in the room, or even the smartest man in the whole building. But, there were things he could not fix, things he could not right.
As if reading her mind, he spoke then, breaking the palpable silence and marring the shroud of distance that they had carefully constructed over their time together. . "I'm not a god Martha, my people are not gods. We don't build and level civilizations. The keys to time? We stumbled upon by accident because of the Untempered Schism. These infants, these precious little creatures who I cannot help but put Addy's face unto; I don't know what will happen to them, but I do know that it's the only options we have left. "
She nodded in his pause; what else could she do, except keep her eyes upon his as he spoke again with that same tone of frustration. "There is no easy fix for this one, Martha. I am as in the dark as you are."
She said nothing to the man beside her, she looked down onto the infant in her own arms; admitting silently that she too could find an unmistakable resemblance to Addy. The Doctor had been both vulnerable and correct; there was nothing else, and these were the smallest victims they had ever to save.
"Let me do the first one." He insisted suddenly placing his long slender hand onto the spray bottle.
"No glass jars," she returned, pulling it out of his grasp so easily that Martha knew then it was not an offer, or a command. He had said the words out of polite guileless abeyance, and, in truth, she could see that he wanted her to do the first one; needed her to do it. For the first time ever, |Martha began to see that the Doctor was truly no god, just a man from a different planet. He was fallible and flawed, had weaknesses and strengths. "I got this."
His nod and sigh of relief told her all she needed to know and gave her the strength to do the first infant. The spray nozzle was adjustable and metered out the correct dosage for the infant. The greenish cloud that rose off of the baby and dissipated was expected, but the two people in the nursery held their collective breath as the infant stirred after the dosage and let out a fitful wail.
XXXXXXXXXX
It was almost comical watching Jack and Jenny run past the large nursery window in sporadic bursts. They had been given the order to only shoot feet and knees, and after the last infant was dosed, the Doctor stepped out of the room and gave the bottle to Jenny. He made a point to rub his hands together vigorously before speaking. "Now they can put the guns down."
Martha shook her head but decided not to comment on his distaste for weapons. "Good, why don't you come and help me get them all settled, then. " She smirked.,
He leapt into it; Martha was surprised at how natural he was with the infants, feeding then burping them with all the care of a practiced midwife. "Don't look so surprised, Martha." The Doctor grinned from the rocking chair where he held a set of twins, holding two bottles in one hand and feeding them easily. "Aside from Addy, I have had children before."
She nodded, she had assumed as much and it was obvious. "Yeah, it's just. Man, do you have to be so good at it? You are sorta giving me a complex over here." Martha smiled from the changing table where she had lined up three infants.
"It's like riding a bicycle. Well a bicycle that hits you across the head loudly and wakes you at odd hours of the night. You know, that sort of bicycle."
"Addy was that bad for a time." She nodded.
"I know, " he said leaning closer to her. "I remember you know. I remember it all. "
"Well, Addy was as human was as rubbish as you are. Colic, awful sleep patterns…" she shook her head. And I have this constant nagging feeling that I am doing everything wrong, and he will wind up in need of some intergalactic form of
"Gets easier as it goes, I suppose." He said with a sigh, placing one twin on his shoulder and patting the back of the other sprawled on his lap. Maybe next time will be much easier; you know practice being what it is on the road to perfection."
The silence returned into the nursery again, and Martha felt her back stiffen and her heart race. "You seem bothered by that idea." The Doctor said evenly.
"I never thought that was something on the table." She answered as casually as possible.
"Anything's on the table, Martha. Everything." He looked out the nursery window for a moment as if searching for strength. "We don't have to be these strangers that we have imposed ourselves to be. The roles are ours to choose." The Doctor gave an odd sniff and settled back into the chair.
Martha relieved him of one of the twins, ignoring the pointed look he gave her. He watched her as she cared for one then the other. After a few minutes all of the children were calm, a dozen infants cared for by them slept in their bassinets.
"The table," she began "You think there are many possibilities with it?"
"Endless, Martha. Endless." He emphasized it with a reach for her hand she let him take it int his and bowed her head suddenly shy. "Chairs plates spoons..."
"All kinds of settings for it." She agreed.
"And let's not forget how the table is mad, hundreds of different types, shapes, orate, plain." He raised her head with his hand and met her eyes. "The point is to not be afraid of sitting at it, of choosing which one to make."
"Maybe we should talk about that soon."
He nodded. "As soon as all of this is under control."
As f on cue, Jack popped his head through the nursery door and grinned wolfishly. "Ok, we got a handle on them all, great work getting the stuff Doc, did the trick. We got the baddies back to goodies, found the rest of the hospital staff in the basement. Its a real mess, gonna take a lot of Retcon to fix this one."