A/N: Sorry it's taken so long, normally I update pretty quickly but I hate school and school hates me and I think I'm going insane.
Chapter 10 – The Plague
Flashback…
"Wow!" Jack exclaimed, rummaging around in the casket. "There's some pretty nice stuff here! Is that an atmospheric defragmenter?"
"I dunno!" the Doctor replied with a sniff, looking over the thin white metal tube between his fingers with interest. They had followed the alien trace picked up by the scanner to a secluded area less than sixty metres from the village, only to find a crash alien vessel half in the dirt, hidden by a curtain of trees. Rose was stood next to the vessel and her boys, arms folded, breathing a sigh.
"Are you done yet?"
The Doctor turned his head to look at her, aghast. "Rose! You have no appreciation for the beautiful simplicity of Aroarian technology!"
"You bet I don't," Rose agreed, kneeling down next to him and taking the white tube he held out of his grip, looking over it. Opposite her Jack was still admiring the atmospheric defragmenter, a cubed silver device in his hand the size of a die. "So this means there's aliens runnin' round for definite, right?"
The Doctor pursed his lips in the strain of thought, picking up a black sphere and staring at it intently. "Not necessarily." He finally answered. "If you crashed your ship on an alien world wouldn't you think to hide it before you went exploring? The only thing missing, as far as I can see, is the medical pack. Every Aroarian ship has one. So logically we can say the occupant of this vessel crashed, was injured, was possibly threatened by something enough for them to flee with the medical pack… and since there's no sign of them returning to here they may have died."
"Rose, trust me, if you had a Limited Edition Atmospheric Defragmenter Generation 500 XZ Crytos version with NCSDPL adaptor with free keyring you would NOT leave it out in the open…" Jack said, still staring in awe at the device.
Rose handed the tube back to the Doctor. "Can we salvage anything for the injured?"
The Doctor shook his head, wiping his nose with his hand. "Like I said, medical pack's gone." He paused, looking around at the wreck. "We'd better hide the vessel for the moment, we can take back to the TARDIS a bit later."
"Here."
The Doctor sniffed and looked up to meet Rose's gaze, who was holding the cloth and bowl of warm water he'd asked for. He smiled gratefully, taking them and setting them down on the floor next to him before returning to his patient. The village was still recovering from the raid – many were still lying on the church floor, hanging between life and death with the severity of their injuries.
Rose watched him as he cleaned and redressed a stab wound to the abdomen of a middle-aged man in a coma; care and precision clear in his approach to the task despite having probably done it a hundred times over. Rose dropped to kneel down beside him, watching him work for a moment. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows with smudges of red contrasting drastically with the skin of his hands, his expression morphed into a look of deep concentration.
"You look tired," Rose commented after a moment's silence.
"Thanks."
There was a pause.
"If you need some sleep me and Jack can deal with things for a bit," she carried on. He didn't answer, seemingly absorbed by his medical duties. Rose sighed, cupping his chin and turning his face towards her. The whites of his eyes were red.
"I'm fine," he replied, turning his head back again.
Rose fumed. "Have you looked in a mirror lately?" she asked seriously.
"I'm fine," he repeated.
"Your eyes are red."
The Doctor suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder, gentle but firm. He turned his head back to meet Rose's gaze – one of worry and concern.
"Please," she whispered. Suddenly he felt something trickle out of his nose and run a path down towards his top lip. Rose was staring at him in shocked disbelief as he reached up towards it, wiped it with the back of his hand and rose it up to meet his face.
It was blood.
His own blood.
It could only mean one thing.
And just like that, a pain ripped harshly through his skull and he grunted, hand flying to hold his head as suddenly a wave of overwhelming dizziness washed over him. He staggered backwards to meet the wall, legs giving way beneath him as he slid into a disordered heap of limbs on the floor.
"Doctor?" Rose gasped and within seconds he felt a pair of arms wrap tightly around him. He daringly opened his eyes ever so slightly, only to find the world was now spinning.
"Doc, Rose, it's…" Through his swirling vision the Doctor managed to make out Jack's face as it fell from a comfortable smile to a look of pure shock. The Doctor's head was pounding so much it was hard to even think. He blinked to try and clear the fog, but it only seemed to get worse.
"Rose?" Jack whispered, refusing to accept the sight now presented before him.
"He got a nosebleed then collapsed…"
Jack cussed; already knowing what this was as he moved forward to gather up his Time Lord best friend in both arms. The Doctor tried to say something but instead launched into a coughing fit that didn't seem to want to end. Jack's eyes widened as he realised that he was coughing up blood. They'd seen so many people die from this since they'd arrived – conjunctivitis, the nosebleed…
"Larec!" Jack boomed as he stepped out of the church into the open air. Several people, taking the liberty of basking in the sun, turned and gasped, horrified by the spectacle of the Doctor lying coughing in Jack's arms. Within moments Martin had run up to them, staring with a sense of horror, fear and utter bewilderment.
"This way," he ordered, waving a hand to beckon them to follow him back into the church. They jogged up the aisle with a sense of urgency, turning right at the end to head towards a wooden door. They burst in to find Larec sitting at a desk with a quill in hand, writing on a piece of parchment. His head jerked up the moment they entered, his eyes instantly flickering towards the body in Jack's arms.
"By the Goddess!" he gasped, dropping the quill and jumping to his feet. "What happened?"
Martin was already moving over to the Healer's bed, throwing off all that was on it before gesturing at Jack to lie the Doctor down. He did so, making sure he looked perfectly comfortable before he let Rose put a blanket over him. Larec was already running around the room gathering herbs and potions of a million mixes in a desperate belief that he could somehow reverse the illness, as the Doctor launched into another coughing fit, bringing specks of blood with it. Rose instantly jumped forward to support him, fighting back the tears before he finally stopped and collapsed back down onto the bed, spent.
By the time his fever began to manifest but five minutes later, his skin was as pale as snow.
For two hours the Doctor lay shivering in the room of the Healer. His fever was refusing to break, simply continuing to spiral upward at an alarming rate with his shivering increasingly rapidly with every passing second. His head was throbbing as if someone was repeatedly hitting it with a sledgehammer; his muscles were dead; his joints aching and the overwhelming urge to just sleep completely unbearable. If he opened his eyes the world seemed to spin at one hundred miles per hour. He already knew what illness this was, and no doubt Jack and Rose did too.
He felt the cold cloth he had since come to look forward to drape over his forehead, the coolness a huge relief to the fever that had him in its tight and relentless grip. There were voices nearby, but even trying to figure out the words worsened the pain in his head.
"He's got the plague, Rose," Jack murmured gravely, dabbing at the Doctor's forehead with the wet cloth. The man in the bed was shivering dramatically; sweat lining his forehead as fever wracked through his weakened body. "But we're safe. The Doc's immune system will stop it from spreading to us, and at the same time fight it." He paused for a moment, dipping he cloth in the bowl of water and wringing it out before resuming his dabbing. "To infect a Time Lord so severely – whatever this thing is, it's probably not human."
Rose nodded. "He'll get through. We always do."
Jack couldn't quite bring himself to agree.