Okay, guys, a few more triggers: again, slight mention of blood, but also guns and a single instance of abuse (it's not very serious, but better to be over cautious than not cautious enough.)

Chapter 13- The Other Doctor

Despite my distrust of Briggs, I couldn't help but be glad that there were people from Earth on the ship. It's good to know that humans survive this long. Sure, it's not exactly the brightest future, but according to the Doctor, we get our own empire someday, and if that's not bright, I don't know what is.

Really, hearing any good thing about the future of your kind is amazing. I'm sure anyone in ancient Athens would've jumped for joy if they knew about television. That's the gift the Doctor always gives: showing you how bright things will be. He doesn't want me to tell you this, but this great economic recession we're in? Guess what: it ends! Someday it'll all end, and in a couple years' time, we won't be worrying about making sure we have enough coupons to get a week's worth of food. People will lose their jobs because they're bad workers, not because the company can't afford it! Parents can buy kids an extra candy bar without worrying about the financial repercussions. I promise it'll get better, reader. I promise.

The Star Ariel was horribly beat up—I don't know how long she's been in the air, but it's been a long time since she's been in good condition. The same went for the passengers: they were all wearing the same sort of clothes Briggs wore. Everywhere I looked, I saw baggy, dirty clothes, made of the same canvas fabric that could handle all weathers. The clothing reminded me of something, but I couldn't think what of. I pushed it to the back of my mind, looking for any other clues to what was going on.

The Doctor was asking technical questions I couldn't hope to understand, and Briggs was giving answers that were no less complex. (And they say my generation was born into technology.)We swung by the kitchen, where thousands of passengers sat in a cafeteria not unlike a school's, all of them eating the same less-than-appetizing stew. That was when I noticed the first sign that something was off.

"It's all men," I said to no one in particular. "There are only men." I hadn't seen a single woman or child anywhere else on the Star Ariel, and by then we were halfway through.

"Yeah, the women and children went before us," Briggs said. He rushed his words, as if he were eager to say them. "Best they got out of the filthy air before we did, don't you think?"

"They still do that?" I asked. "The women-and-kids first thing? You'd think the human race could move past the sexism."

The Doctor heard me (which wasn't surprising, since I hardly bothered to keep my voice down at all). "They wanted to get the women out first because they're the ones that have the ability to continue the human race," he explained under his breath. "Even without males: they've found a way to reproduce with a woman's bone marrow, so men can be rendered entirely unnecessary. And children shouldn't be breathing in the dust at all."

"Oh," I said. That's all I could say. I suppose I couldn't hold this one against Briggs. And it made me rather proud that men wouldn't be necessary to the survival of the human race. But I still didn't like being corrected (who does, in all honesty?) so I added a sulk to my walk to show my displeasure. I trudged after the Doctor and Briggs, watching everyone and everything with an eagle eye.

Soon enough, we came to a pair of doors with a plaque above them with the word Infirmary engraved onto it. Briggs pressed a button beside the doors and they slid open.

"If you wouldn't mind waiting out here for a moment," Briggs said, "I'll just brief our medic on the situation. After all, it would be awfully hard to explain the sudden appearance of two new passengers, wouldn't it?"

"Go right ahead," the Doctor allowed, gesturing for Briggs to go through the door.

"I'll only be a minute," Briggs assured, before proceeding into the infirmary and allowing the doors to slide shut behind him. When they were sealed, I rounded on the Doctor. He was reaching into his pocket and his mouth was open like he wanted to say something, but I beat him to the punch.

"Are you insane?!" I scolded, trying to keep my voice down. "They kidnapped us, pulled us into their ship, and you're going to help them?"

"You didn't need to be so rude!" the Doctor countered, his voice also a harsh whisper. Withdrawing his hand from his pocket, he continued, "Criticizing his methods of evacuation? Now he knows you don't trust him! What good is distrust when you're at the mercy of an entire ship's passengers?" All this was accompanied by wild gestures, but as he took a breath, his hands fell to his side. "In gathering information, trust is invaluable. Get as much of it as you can."

"Wait," I said. "Do you trust him?"

The Doctor glanced toward the door. "No," he said, satisfied that the coast was clear. "And also, good on you for making up a name like that. I would've given him a pseudonym if I could. How did you think of it so quickly?"

I was a bit taken aback. The entirety of my irritation at the Doctor was that he appeared to trust Briggs blindly from the start. Now that I know he doesn't, I'm left knowing that the Doctor is always two steps ahead of me. That, and his acting could give Meryl Streep a run for her Golden Globes. "Oh, um," I stuttered, trying to scrounge up an answer. "When Naomi was younger, she was fascinated by spies and espionage and that sort of thing. She began introducing herself with another name, just for fun. She wanted me to play along—she was only six, how could I refuse? We always used the same names: I called myself Emily Smith, and she was my younger sister Nora. We could keep our initials with those names."

"Smart," the Doctor praised, his lips in an impressed pout. "Very smart."

I opened my mouth to say something else, but the infirmary doors slid open and Briggs stepped through, cutting of our conspiring. Behind him was another man, looking significantly cleaner than the rest of the passengers. He wore a pair of white rubber gloves and a strange eyepiece that reminded me a bit of the False-Image Perception Suppressor, but with extra lenses and focuses. The eyepiece hung loosely around his neck and he looked up at me analyzing eyes, giving me a cursory examination.

"Doctor, Ms. Smith, this is our medic, Dr. Whittaker," Briggs introduced. The man behind him nodded in greeting. "He'll get you all patched up, Ms. Smith."

I nodded jerkily at Dr. Whittaker. "Nice to meet you," I said tersely.

"And you, Ms. Smith," Dr. Whittaker replied. He gestured through the infirmary door behind him. "Shall we get on with it?"

I nodded and glanced back at the Doctor. "See you later," I said, keeping the shakiness out of my voice.

The Doctor's face blossomed into the brightest, most trusting smile I'd ever seen. "Oh, come 'ere!" he exclaimed, throwing his arms around me in a bear hug. He rocked me back and forth in a slow waltz, turning his back on Briggs and Whittaker. "You be good, all right?"

"Promise," I replied, puzzled. I was gonna rejoin him in ten minutes, what was with all the hugging? And why in the world would he turn his back to Briggs if he just admitted he didn't trust him? The Doctor unraveled himself from me and clapped his hands bracingly on my forearms.

"I'll see ya soon," he promised. He swiveled back around to Briggs and Whittaker, smiling amicably. "I'll leave her with you, then, Doctor," he said, sneaking a wink at me. Okay, now I knew he was hiding something—he never winked at me. That wink served two purposes: the first was simply to keep up appearances; but the second was to reassure me that everything would be all right. I would be okay.

I nodded to show I understood. "See you," I replied, leaving his side. I shouldered my way past Briggs and Whittaker into the infirmary, and Whittaker followed me in. I spun around to get one last glance at the Doctor before the infirmary doors closed.

"Welcome, Ms. Smith," Dr. Whittaker greeted. I turned back around to him a mumbled a faint reply, taking in my surroundings. It wasn't an infirmary so much as a doctor's office, and a small one at that. A desk with a few papers strewn over it sat in one corner, and a hospital bed sat in the opposite. A large cabinet filled most of the far wall. An x-ray glared down at me from above, explaining the light boxes situated on another wall. An office chair with wheels was shoved close to the desk, to free up as much space as possible. A scuffed-up folding chair was crammed into another corner, probably a seat for a worried relative. Overall opinion: very, very cramped.

"Seems like an awfully small infirmary for such a big ship," I said.

"There are several other larger infirmaries throughout the ship," Dr. Whittaker replied. "It's just I'm the only doctor on board that hasn't been killed, and this room has the best stock of supplies."

I mumbled a quiet apology and sat on the bed, moving my hair from my forehead. Whittaker pulled the office chair over and rolled it to a stop in front of me, sitting down. He lifted careful fingers to my forehead, examining the cut. "How did you sustain the injury?"

"I tripped and fell against my dresser," I answered. I wished I could've thought of something more impressive to tell him. He asked a few more questions about any allergies or conditions I had, the usual thing, before getting up from his chair and proceeding to what I'd assumed was a pair of light switches on the wall.

"Ms. Smith, I need you to keep still," Dr. Whittaker said, raising his hand to the switch on the left. "Stay still, and keep breathing."

I nodded, slightly confused: what, did he think turning on another light would send me into shock? Dr. Whittaker flipped the switch, and suddenly hundreds of tiny golden lights swirled around my head, giving off a comfortable type of warmth. There were tiny searing pains all around the cut, as if someone was touching it with their bare hands, but it felt good, in a way. I felt a few of those pains on my hand, where I found more lights healing a burn I hadn't even realized I'd sustained (it was probably from all the sparks shooting off in the TARDIS). The lights pulsed around the small burn on my hand, revolving in a ring around my wrist. They cleared away in another five seconds, revealing clean, unbroken, slightly-pink skin. The lights around my head vanished ten seconds after the others, and I reached up to feel my forehead; as I suspected, my injury was no more.

Whittaker flicked the switch back into place and walked back over to me, holding my head still for a final cursory examination. "Looks like they fixed everything," he muttered, taking his hands from my face.

"What were those things?" I asked. I was tempted to joke that they were fairies, but for all I knew, they might've been.

"Nanogenes," Whittaker answered. "They can repair any species they have a correct blueprint of. They make medicine a whole lot easier."

"Can they cure diseases?"

"No, and that's why I'm still in a job."

I smiled; like it or not, I was beginning to think this guy could be trusted. "Let's meet back up with the Doctor," I said, hopping off the hospital bed. Heading for the door, I added, "Briggs took him to the bridge, right?"

A series of clicks sounded behind me, and I stopped in my tracks. Heart beating like a drum, I turned around and found Dr. Whittaker standing there, pointing a gun directly at my chest.

"Forgive me, Ms. Smith," Whittaker said, hardly any remorse in his voice at all. "But I simply cannot allow you to leave."

You know how, in all those crime shows, if a police officer has a gun to their chest, they can make some witty joke to offset the tension?

Bullshit.

The only thing I could think of was get that gun away from me you son of a bitch I knew this was a bad idea we should've left when we had the chance.

"I knew I was right about you," I said, testing the waters. "I knew you couldn't be trusted."

"No use for it now, Miss," Whittaker said, with an air of oh, well. "Step away from the door."

"And closer to you?" I retorted. "I don't think so."

Whittaker marched closer to me, and I responded in kind by flattening myself against the door. Whittaker got up right in my face, wrapped a hand around my wrist, and roughly tugged me away, keeping the gun alarmingly close. He dragged me across the room and threw me into the folding chair, causing a horrible, grating sound to erupt from its legs as they scraped across the floor. I landed on the floor and stayed down, afraid to move.

"Get in the chair," Whittaker snarled.

Terror coursing through me, I climbed onto the chair as silently as possible. When I was situated, Whittaker pulled open the door to the cabinet and rummaged inside, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. He began cuffing me to the chair as several thoughts swirled around in my head, observations that had seemed unrelated before but now made sense when thought of together.

Only men on the ship…all the same one-size-fits-all clothes…horrible food…handcuffs and guns…

"Oh, God," I whispered. "It's a prison ship."