Sara hung up the phone and turned on the unsuspecting alien in the hospital bed. But by the time she turned around, she realized that he was no longer so unsuspecting. He knew, and Sara was sure he knew, that he'd heard absolutely everything that Grissom had told her. But he hadn't reacted in quite the way she'd expect from the man who'd frightened Gil Grissom. The Doctor didn't immediately throw himself at her in some desperate attack. He didn't grab at the nearest weapon-like object and brandish it in front of him. He didn't even do the evil villain laugh the way aliens did in movies. Instead he sat in the hospital bed, the green gown billowing around his skinny frame, his face looking more serious than she had ever seen it before. He sat there and met her eyes, and Sara thought those brown eyes looked so old, so ancient, so sad and alone. She didn't feel afraid of him. Not the way that Grissom was. She felt… sorry for him.

"Is it true?" she asked. "You're an alien?"

He blinked, his entire stature unmoving except for that one single action. "Yes."

Sara took a sharp breath in. "And you… destroyed your home planet."

"Yes," said the Doctor.

"Everyone?" she asked. "All your friends and family? Your entire… alien species?"

"Yes."

"How many billions of people is that?" she asked herself.

"Ten," said the Doctor. "Ten billion."

She just stared at him. She hadn't expected him to just say it. The last time she'd interrogated him, he'd managed to evade every single one of her questions. That was when she was accusing him of something he hadn't done. Now that she was accusing him of his actual crimes, she'd expected him to talk circles around her. But he hadn't. He'd just told her. Flat out.

"Why?" she asked.

The Doctor didn't answer. She looked at him as if trying to pull the answers from him, but they wouldn't come. His face remained just as somber as it had before. Unflinching, unchanging. Like stone.

"There was a war," he whispered eventually. His eyes left hers, and she could see them looking out the window, out at the sky, as if he were reliving those events in his mind. "And we lost. Everyone lost."

But that was no kind of answer. Sara knew it, and she was sure the Doctor knew it, too. You don't go all Darth Vader on a planet just because you were a sore loser. Although, considering Darth Vader… Sara let the metaphor drop, since it was clearly a bad one, and tried to shape her phraseology to match her ideas. She settled for her original, "that's no kind of answer."

The Doctor looked back at her, and there was such a horrible, lonely sadness in his eyes that Sara began to feel bad for the brusqueness of her questions. No, she told herself. Snap out of it, Sara. This is exactly what Gil told you. The Doctor looks at a situation and manipulates it, guilts you into doing what he wants. Into sacrificing yourself for him.

"I'd say I had no choice," the Doctor told her. "But that would be a lie. Because everyone always has a choice. And I made mine."

"And you chose to kill all those people?" Sara asked.

"I chose a universe without the Time Lords," said the Doctor, "because they chose Time Lords without the universe."

"Oh," said Sara. She couldn't really think of any further reply. It wasn't really the kind of thing you followed with words. No sane, reasonable person would pry further. Of course, Grissom had already confirmed that no sane, reasonable person would remain in the same room as the Doctor, especially not alone, but since Sara was already in a room alone with the Doctor, she had to assume that she was neither sane nor reasonable. And so she ploughed on. "So, you're an alien. Who can travel through time. And solves complex mathematical puzzles on the walls of his cell as a recreational hobby. Your planet was destroyed. And you've come to Earth to, what? Enslave humanity, restart your empire?"

"No," he said.

"So, you're here to dissect us, strap us down to operating tables, see what makes us tick?" Sara asked.

"No," replied the Doctor.

Sara sat down in the chair beside his bed. "Well, I'm stumped," she said. "Why are you here, then?"

He just looked at her, and for a moment he looked so young, as if he were just some little boy who'd lost his mommy. He told her, in a very small voice, "I have nowhere else to go."

That's when Sara finally decided to take pity on him, and stopped asking so many questions. Instead, she put a hand on his arm, and just watched him as he sat in bed, looking so lost and alone.

The moment only lasted until Nick Stokes walked into the room. "I come bearing fruit," he said, raising up the grocery bags.

The Doctor's expression suddenly turned around a hundred and eighty degrees. His eyes lit up, and he gave an enthusiastic grin. "Really?"

Sara had to resist the temptation to punch him in the arm. "You act like such a little kid," she said. "I mean, come on, how old are you?"

The Doctor began rummaging through one of the grocery bags as he said, "Oh, about 903." His head popped out of the bag, a banana in his hand. "Look!" he said. "A banana!" He put the bag aside and began peeling the banana. "You know, there's a wonderful banana grove on Villanguard," he said. "51st century. Or was it the 53rd? Used to be a weapons factory. Selling all sorts of nasty things. Blasters and lasers and plasma cannons…" he took a hardy bite out of the banana, and continued talking, despite his full mouth. "Then they thought, 'I know, let's make some nice big planetary busters and sell them to the highest bidder. We'll be just like Star Wars!'" He looked at the banana thoughtfully. "Bananas were a much better option."

"You killed them?" Nick asked. He had started backing away from the banana-wielding alien.

"Nah," said the Doctor. "Just burned down their factory, slapped them on the wrists a few times, and let them go." He shrugged. "I think they were scared of me. Probably for the best. I hate guns."

Nick hesitated. "Look, I know that you and Sara were talking, but I gotta know. How did you manage to be in two places at once?"

"There are a lot of times I've been in two places at once," said the Doctor, resuming his merciless attack on the defenseless banana in his hands. "You're going to have to be a bit more specific."

"I think he's talking about the incident with Joseph Trudge," said Sara.

"Oh, well," said the Doctor, with a sort of mock authority in his voice. "If you want to hear about Joseph Trudge, well that all depends."

"Depends on what?" asked Nick.

"On what president Dracula thinks," the Doctor told him.

"President Dracula?" Nick shot Sara a confused look, trying to work out how to take this. After a few seconds, he decided this had to be a joke, and gave a hesitant laugh. "Well, there are blood oranges in the bag."

"Are there?" asked the Doctor, absent mindedly. He dropped his banana peel on the floor, then pointed to it, looking back at Nick. "Don't you go tripping on that," he said.

Nick sighed and picked it up, and muttered something that sounded like, "nutter." As Nick threw away the banana peel, the Doctor turned and winked at Sara. Sara had, of course, already figured it out. He had been doing precisely the same thing to Nick that he had done when Sara had first questioned him. He had led him around in verbal circles, trying to see if he would notice. And Nick, being Nick, did.

"So," prompted Sara. "How'd you do it? How'd you know all about Joe and what he was going to do before he did it?" She eyed the alien suspiciously. "You're not going to tell me you're God now, are you?"

"Nope," said the Doctor, taking out an orange. "Not omniscient, not omnipotent, not any of those other omni words. Just… well… lived the whole thing backwards is the best way to put it."

"Wait, what?" asked Nick.

The Doctor began peeling his orange. "Well, for you this happened… oh, three months ago? Two and a half? Something like that. But I first met Joseph Trudge about two years ago. You see, I was with my friend Martha at the time…"

"Martha Jones?" Nick asked. "That's the woman who brought Mrs. Trudge into the police station."

"Yeah," said the Doctor, wrinkling his nose. "Figured it would probably be a bad idea for me to come in with her, since apparently I was already in jail. But, I digress! Martha. Yes, you see, she had never been to the States before, and her first trip was not exactly pleasant." He grimaced. "I hit the Great Depression. Never fun wandering around hoovervilles in the Great Depression."

Nick looked baffled. He was clearly trying to work the chronology out in his mind. And just as clearly failing. Sara, who had long since determined that chronology was useless when you were dealing with a time travelling alien, just nodded at the Doctor to continue.

"So I told Martha, how would you like to see the Empire State Building when it's, you know, finished?" He paused, regarding the orange in his hand. "Well, finished and no longer being overrun by megalomaniacal alien monsters bent on enslaving humanity and then destroying the world?" He looked over at Sara and grinned. "See? Beat that lot off, didn't I?" He plopped an orange slice in his mouth. "Anyways, must have taken a bit of a wrong turn, because instead of New York, 2007, I got Las Vegas, 2003. But, well, still no monsters, so I called that a success."

"And that's when you first met Joe?" asked Sara.

"It's not like I was seeking him out or anything," said the Doctor. "Martha and I were just headed back to the Tardis, when I heard this woman screaming. So we ran out to help. Disarmed the man, took apart the gun. Martha took the wife off to the police and I told the man very politely that he really should stop threatening women with guns and really, had he ever tried just sitting down and talking to her over a nice cup of tea? And that's when he told me that I couldn't be there, because I was in prison. Of course, that was still two years in my future, but, well, I'm a bit curious. 'Oh, really?' I said to him. 'Wonder what I'm doing there?' But instead of just talking like any normal human being would do, he ran off. I found out all about him later when I talked to his wife. Poor woman. She really didn't deserve someone like Joe."

"She's living out of state now," said Nick. "Under a new identity. Not that Joe would try anything. Last time I talked to him, he seemed pretty much convinced that you were God, and if he did anything wrong, you'd come down and smite him."

"Hm," said the Doctor. "I didn't think I was being too terribly menacing at either point in time, but I suppose both of them together might have been a bit unnerving." He plopped another orange slice into his mouth. "Funny thing is, while Martha was in the police station, I started thinking about it and, you know, that date did seem familiar. And then I remembered, I'd gone there a year and a half ago with Rose, so that we could break into the prison and steal that key."

"Hang on a minute," said Sara. "That was you?"

The Doctor grinned. "Yup."

"That older guy with the leather jacket and the big ears—he was you?"

"Well, don't sound so surprised," said the Doctor. "When there are large numbers of you running around all of space and time, it's not like it's unheard of for you to run into yourself. Thought you lot would have figured that out by now. And you know it's possible. After all, you're the one who worked out regeneration," he said to Sara.

Nick began to voice his confusion over the previous tidbits of information that the Doctor had let slip. Neither Sara nor the Doctor were listening to him. Sara was watching as the Doctor stared out the window beside his bed. His expression was getting more and more troubled.

"I really, really think we should leave," he said, eventually.

"Why?" asked Nick and Sara at the same time.

The Doctor pointed out the window. "Because I recognize that man," he said, indicating one of the policemen who had just surrounded the hospital. "He's the one who asked me for my sonic screwdriver the day I was arrested."

Nick stayed with the Doctor while Sara went back to see what had freaked Grissom out back at the crime lab. She told the Doctor she was going to try to talk some sense into the guards, but he caught her arm, and looked at her with pleading eyes, and begged her not to. "They'll know you're my friend," he said. "And they'll try to hurt you. Everyone always tries to hurt my friends. I hate it."

Sara wondered if he knew that Sammy was dead. It was one of the things he'd asked her in the ambulance—whether they had found Sammy. He wouldn't have asked that, of course, unless he'd known. Would he? After all, if Sammy had escaped, the Doctor would hardly want them to come looking for him. Grissom had worked something out about Sammy, and Sara needed to know what it was. Because she had this growing suspicion that they were all overlooking something very important.

It took Nick a while to convince the policemen to stay outside the door to the Doctor's hospital room. They seemed so certain that the Doctor was about to destroy them all. Nick assured them that he had official crime lab questions to ask, and he needed the Doctor to be alone when he asked them. They eventually accepted this explanation and stayed outside the door.

The Doctor was not terribly talkative after Sara left. He was much more prone to sleeping. "Healing coma," he corrected Nick. "Mends my body right up." Then he asked for a towel, and began to scrape off the film of gunk that had covered his skin.

"That's the poison," he told Nick. "Secreted out of the skin, body's good as new."

He closed his eyes, and Nick thought, for a moment, that he was asleep. He sat next to the man, the Doctor's own personal bodyguard, started thinking about time travel and timelines and the whole convoluted mess. Meeting people for the first time when they're already old friends. Or finding an old friend only to realize that they have no idea who you are.

"Guess that's what happened with Rose Tyler," Nick muttered.

The Doctor's eyes popped open, and he jerked his head towards Nick. He had a very stern expression on his face. "What did you do?" he asked, like a parent scolding a naughty child.

"I called her up and asked her some questions," said Nick. "She didn't know anything, so I told her to have a nice night and hung up." He was trying very hard not to look guilty, but he knew he must. He was never very good at hiding those sorts of things. "I didn't say anything about you, I promise!"

The Doctor broke into a grin. "You tried to warn her to stay away from me, didn't you?"

Nick didn't answer, but the Doctor had obviously seen right through him.

"Yeah," said the Doctor. "I tried that when I first met her. And when I met her again. Come to think of it, I kept warning her to stay away from me the whole time I knew her, but she never listened. Rose has this terrible habit of warping the fabric of reality to get what she wants. Nearly caused the end of the universe… at least twice. Well, twice that I can think of, anyways." He tilted his head to the side. "Granted, one of those times, the universe was about to end regardless…" He shrugged. "I don't just abduct people, you know. I'm the nice kind of alien. You know, the kind that… well… fights the bad kind of alien…" He made a face. "You know, that makes me sound not very nice at all." For a moment the two said nothing at all. Nick watched the alien in fascination, trying to work him out.

"Why'd you drag Sammy into this?" Nick asked.

The Doctor thought about this for a long moment. "Sammy is… complicated," he said, and Nick noticed how he used the present tense. Which seemed odd. The Doctor ran a hand through his hair. "Sara said you managed to find him, even though you didn't find the Tardis."

Nick jumped at the offhanded way the Doctor had put this. He looked back at the Doctor's face, which was suspiciously blank. Nick suddenly had his guard up again. "Yeah, we did."

The Doctor's face didn't change from the blank mask. He just nodded. "And where is he now?"

"Still in the morgue," said Nick. "We're waiting for his family to pick him up for burial."

The blank mask melted and Nick could see a sudden look of horror flooding across the Doctor's features. "He's…" the Doctor trailed off. He closed his eyes, and leaned back against the pillows. "You know, it just makes everything seem so much more… pointless."

"Were you…" Nick hesitated, "romantically involved?"

The Doctor opened one eye. "No."

"Oh," said Nick. That certainly discounted certain stories he had heard.

"We knew each other for one week," the Doctor explained, closing his eyes again. "And most of that time he was either trying to pummel me or engage me in… another aggressive, nonconsensual action that I'd really rather not think about. To be quite honest, I'm really not sure what our relationship was. I'm fairly certain he has—had—a different idea than I."

"But you shared a cell together?" Nick asked.

"For a week," said the Doctor. He furrowed his brow. "Like I said before, Sammy is… was… complicated." He paused. "Maybe, for the sake of his memory, I should just leave it at that."

Nick was about to reply, when he felt a sudden, terrible stabbing at the back of his eyes. It began searing through his corneas into his brain, as if someone had dunked his whole head into ice cold water. He got up. "I'm going to go see if I can find some aspirin, or something. For me, not for you," he quickly added.

Before Nick could go anywhere, the Doctor reached out and grabbed his arm. Nick looked over his shoulder, and found the alien hunched over in the bed, his eyes squeezed tight as if in pain, his mouth gasping for air. He looked like he was having some sort of attack, but Sara had warned Nick not to call in any of the other medical doctors when these sorts of things happened. They'd kill him, Sara had said.

And so Nick went back to the chair by the Doctor's bed, surprised that, in all the excitement, the pain in his head seemed to have vanished. Odd, that. It was nearly two minutes before the Doctor let go of his arm, his face relaxing, and his torso falling back onto the pillows.

"You have to leave," said the Doctor.

"We'll get back to the lab in the morning," said Nick. "Just get some sleep."

"No," said the Doctor. "You don't understand. I didn't say we. I said you. I'll distract the men outside while you get away. They won't hurt you if they're intent on making sure I stay put."

Nick faltered at this. "The moment I leave, those men outside are going to haul you out of here and start torturing you again. And they won't let you get away with that fake-dying trick this time. Is that really what you want?"

The Doctor considered this. "Good point," he said. He leapt out of bed, then wavered on his legs. He ran over to the window. "Hm," he said. "Long way down." He eyed Nick's bag suspiciously. "I don't suppose you have some sort of rope in that bag of yours?"

"No," said Nick. "Just equipment for documenting case evidence."

The Doctor considered this, then shrugged. "Well," he said, walking over to the bed and stripping the sheets off of it, "if it works for Hollywood, I guess it'll work for us."

The Doctor and Nick frantically began knotting bed sheets together, as they heard heavy footsteps and shouting behind the door.

"Here come the cavalry," said the Doctor, throwing the makeshift rope out of the window. "Well, best be going. Humans first. Allons-y!"

When Sara got back to the lab, Grissom was nowhere in sight. She wondered where he could have gone without letting her know, but she didn't have to wait long. Within five minutes, Grissom was through the door, carrying his CSI bag.

"Sara," he said. "Follow me."

They both walked into his office, and he closed the door carefully before facing her. "We've been had."

"We've been what?"

"Manipulated," Grissom said. "Played like pawns on a chess set. We're not seeing the real story. We're not seeing any story. There is no case, because there is no evidence!"

"You think those tapes in the office, the cell, and the basement were red hearings," said Sara. She had half expected as much. They were a little too convenient, a little too useful.

Grissom was pacing the room, anger clear in his face. "Everything's a red hearing," he said. "The Doctor is a red hearing." His eyes traced the floor beneath his feet. "I went back to the prison to gather new evidence. There is no new evidence, Sara. He's gone and destroyed it all. We've found a criminal who can manipulate time and space to make anything he wants a reality. Did he tell you who stole that key?"

"He did…" Sara said, and only realized after she said it what it meant. "He did," she repeated in a whisper.

"And the cameras leading to the basement?" Grissom said. "Completely nonfunctional. I gave Greg some fingerprints but I'm fairly certain I know whose they are. The bars? Certainly the Doctor. He's been feeding us facts, Sara. He's trying to get us to do something."

"The evidence all points—"

"There is no evidence," said Grissom, "except the evidence that he left for us. Don't you see?"

"But he was tortured," Sara pointed out. "You can't deny that, Gil. There were electrical burns on his body. You could see the bruises around his neck."

Grissom stopped pacing and considered this, still staring at his shoes. "This case isn't about the Doctor," he said. "That's all we've heard about since we started. But he wasn't the only victim we found at that crime scene."

"Sammy?"

"Sammy," Grissom agreed. "Somehow this whole case is about Sammy. And you know what? Ask any prisoner about Sammy, and they clam right up. Now, why would they be reluctant to talk about Sammy, and not the Doctor? If they feared retribution from some unseen power, it would be the other way around, wouldn't it? They'd tell us all about Sammy and say nothing about the Doctor."

"I don't understand," said Sara.

Grissom looked up at her. "Neither do I," he said. "That's the problem. None of this makes sense. This whole case has been completely fabricated. People who aren't really people. Guards who leave the prison unguarded. Victims who aren't really dead. It's like we've all been dragged into someone's bad Hollywood screenplay."

"But Sammy really is dead," said Sara. "And Verity…"

Grissom pulled out the autopsy report. "She's dead, but nothing caused her death. It's like she had an on/off switch, and someone switched her off."

"Which leaves us with Sammy," realized Sara. She looked back at Grissom. "You're right," she said. "This isn't about the Doctor at all. This whole case is about Sammy." She thought back to her brief time with the Doctor. "He mentioned Sammy, you know."

Grissom raised his eyebrows. "Did he?"

"Yeah—brought him up, actually," said Sara. "He asked me if I'd found the Tardis. When I told him I hadn't even looked, he seemed sort of panicked. Then he asked if I found Sammy. I said yes, and he was relieved." She paused. "Did he die before or after Sammy was shot?"

"He wasn't dead," said Grissom, "so it hardly matters."

"But if…" Sara trailed off, and frowned. "You're right." She considered all the evidence at hand. "The only thing you seem to have overlooked is Catherine."

Grissom paused, sighed, and sat down at his desk chair. "Yes," he said. "Catherine."

"I don't get what's happened to her, but it fits the Doctor's story," said Sara. "And she's one of the only real pieces of evidence we have."

Grissom folded his hands on his desk. "Let's list what we know," he said. "Evidence that we can actually see, evidence that was not filtered through a tape recorder or cherry picked for our convenience. We have Catherine."

"Those burn marks and lacerations on the Doctor's body," said Sara. "They don't look fabricated."

"Then we have Sammy," said Grissom. "Sammy, who shared a cell for one week with the Doctor. And after that one week, a whole string of cameras completely ceased functioning."

"Between his cell and the basement?" Sara asked. "What's in the basement?"

"What was in the basement, you mean?" asked Grissom. "That blue box. I figure that was the Doctor's escape route. I'm assuming Sammy had found another."

Sara thought for a moment. "Hang on," said Sara. "We heard Sammy's voice on those tapes the Doctor left for us. Content of the tapes aside, the fact that his voice is on those tapes is proof that he managed to get out of his cell."

"And not just out of his cell," said Grissom. "But out of his cell and into the medical wing. And, geographically, the medical wing is situated right between the cell and the basement."

"Well, that's convenient," said Sara.

"Yes," agreed Grissom, "but for whom?"

"So, here's what we've pieced together so far," said Sara. "Sammy meets the Doctor, and they have some sort of fight."

"Or not," said Grissom. "No concrete evidence, just hearsay and guesswork."

"Or not," corrected Sara. She frowned. "So we're just left with Sammy meets the Doctor, they share a cell." She thought for a moment. "We can't even confirm that someone poisoned the water, can we? After all, we found the bottle of liquid aspirin in the basement, right beside that tape player. It could have been a plant."

"Yes," said Grissom.

"So we have absolutely no idea what their relationship is," said Sara. "All we know is that they met, they shared a cell, and Sammy appears to be assisting the Doctor to set up his little scheme. So maybe they were friends?"

"If they were friends, why not help the Doctor to escape?" asked Grissom.

"On the tapes, he said…" Sara stopped herself. "Right, discount the tapes. Like you said, planted evidence." She thought for a moment. "Enemies?"

Grissom shook his head. "If they were enemies, or if they simply didn't care that much about one another, Sammy would have ditched the Doctor and escaped himself."

"Assuming he could find an escape route," said Sara.

"Oh, he found one," Grissom insisted. "I saw it. He'd even made a nice little hole in the fence."

"Well," said Sara, "could they have been lovers? Or at least bedfellows?"

Grissom just looked at her, raising his eyebrows.

"Think about it," she said. "The Doctor isn't bad looking. When he's in prison, he's… well, Sammy's. But outside, who knows? Maybe Sammy didn't want to take the risk?"

"Interesting," Grissom said, leaning back in his chair. "Bedfellows… or maybe even nonconsensual bedfellows? I think the logic would still work with that thrown in. And we have to consider it, seeing their difference in stature." He nodded. "It does seem a bit unusual to feel in possession of someone when they're being tied up and tortured by someone else. But, as you said, it could be some type of power play."

"So why was Sammy killed?" asked Sara. She hesitated. "And why did the Doctor let Sammy be killed?"

Grissom didn't reply. He just leaned forward, and played Sara the tape.