AN: Relieved to have got this out at all. Half an hour before I was ready to upload, my internet connection decided it wasn't private anymore, for some reason, and the task of uploading without it, from my phone with data, has half killed me.
Anyway. I've always liked this episode. It's one of my favourites of Martha's, though I've heard not everyone feels the same way. (As a side note, you never realise just how OP the sonic screwdriver is until you're trying to write episodes without it.) Hopefully I've done a good job of it though, and I hope you all enjoy the nod towards what this "season arc" will be!
Changing into appropriate black tie attire in the TARDIS wardrobe, Rose and Martha played a game of truths to pass the time.
"Okay, confession," she said. "I'm not that into the Little Mermaid."
Martha gaped. "What? That's unacceptable."
Rose grinned and nodded. "It's just, when I was a kid I had this Ariel lunch box my mum got me from the charity shop, and I loved it, and carried it everywhere. Then, one day, I got into this fight with a girl from the estate, and she snatched it up and threw it under a passing van. It ruined the whole film for me."
"Ouch."
"Yeah."
There was a few seconds pause. "So… what's your mum like?"
A lump blocked Rose's throat. "She was amazing," she said. "Always did her best for me."
Martha's jaw flapped uselessly for a moment, before she cast her eyes down and said, "I'm sorry."
"Yeah, well…" Rose stared down at the floor for a few seconds, the sound of the TARDIS humming mournfully ringing in her ears, before she shook herself and picked the first appropriate dress off the rail. "What do you think of this one?" It was emerald green and chiffon, and she quite liked it.
"Looks good," Martha said, forcing a smile. "I might go burgundy."
Lazarus Industries was a modern building about a twenty minute walk from Martha's flat. The place had been decked out for the party but she could tell that normally it was one of those remarkably unremarkable places, just another bland spot in the ever plainer landscape of London.
She and Martha had each taken a flute of champagne upon arrival and were taking a look around the place as they were approached by the same young woman they had seen on TV earlier that day; Tish Jones, Martha's sister.
"Tish!" Martha exclaimed, looking delighted to see her sister again after the day she had had. Rose smiled politely as they reacquainted, and then turned to her. "This is my friend Rose. She's interested in this sort of thing, so I've brought her along."
"Hi," she said, "how're you doing?"
Tish stared at her, seemingly dumbfounded for a few seconds, then said, "There's no one called Rose on the list. How did you get in?"
"Martha's plus one," she said, moving quickly onto compliments. "Lovely event you've put together. Really impressive."
Tish's expression lightened and she smiled, nodding. "Do you think? I wasn't so sure; this is the first big thing I've ever actually done, so…"
"It's great," Rose was quick to assure. "Really."
Their talk was interrupted by the arrival of - Rose assumed - Martha's mother and brother. "Your father's caused me enough heartache already with his menopause and his trophy girlfriend," presumably-Mrs-Jones was saying.
"Yeah, Mum, I know," presumably-Martha's-brother sighed, glancing upwards. "It's just something he said last night…"
"Mum!" Martha exclaimed, throwing her arms around her mother.
Mrs Jones furrowed her brow further in her confusion, patting her daughter on the back. "Alright, what's the occasion?"
Martha blinked heavily, as if just remembering that back in the 'real world', almost no time had passed at all since the two last spoke. "What do you mean?" she asked, laying the innocence on a bit thick. "I'm just pleased to see you, that's all."
"You saw me last night."
"I know. I just missed you." Martha turned to her brother. "You're looking good Leo."
He snorted. "Yeah, if anyone asks me to fetch them a drink, I'll swing for him." Rose grinned and looked around at the guests in the room, trying to pick out any potential victims of Leo's discomfort.
"You disappeared last night," Mrs Jones said suddenly, pulling Rose's attention back to the family.
"I just went home," Martha said, sounding much more convincing. Mrs Jones' eyes narrowed and Rose decided it was time to divert attention away from her friend.
"Hi!" she said, beaming up a storm and offering a hand to shake. "How're you doing? I'm Rose."
The woman took her hand and gave it a terse shake, but her lips didn't so much as twitch upwards. "Francine Jones." She looked to Martha then, and her suspicious expression deepened.
Leo, however, did a double take, staring at Rose, then broke out into a charming smile. "Hi," he said, taking her hand to shake. "How're you -"
"Don't start," Martha groaned as Rose tried to suppress an amused smile. "Leave her alone!"
"Alright, alright!" Leo said, throwing his hands up. "Don't shoot."
Francine's frown hadn't lessened. "Martha's never mentioned you before," she said, glancing at her other two children again. "Has she?"
Tish and Leo shook their heads, looking considerably less concerned than their mother, and Rose said, "Oh, we met in the hospital when those aliens took it to the moon yesterday. We stuck together, and since Martha was coming here tonight she invited me." Martha beamed a false, tense smile and nodded along to the story, and Francine seemed to relax somewhat - but not completely, she noticed.
Francine opened her mouth to retort, and at that moment, Lazarus tapped a fork to the side of his champagne glass and drew the attention of the room to himself. "Ladies and gentlemen," he called. "I am Professor Richard Lazarus and tonight, I am going to perform a miracle." Rose tilted her head at the wording, something about it making her eyes narrow. "It is, I believe, the most important advance since Rutherford split the atom, the biggest leap since Armstrong stood on the moon. Tonight, you will watch and wonder. Tomorrow, you will wake to a world which will be changed forever."
She was sure he was right about that, at least. As he stepped inside the great machine, she tensed up with nerves, holding herself so stiff that she was sure if someone were to bump into her, she would topple like a bowling pin - but she couldn't help it. Everything about this experiment screamed 'wrong!'
She waited with bated breath, then felt it shorten as the whirring of the machine rose to levels that couldn't have been safe. The columns were oscillating around the chamber at faster and faster speeds.
"Something's wrong," she muttered. Was it supposed to be making that much noise? Generating that much heat? She could feel it where she stood, waving over her like the air of a foreign country when you first stepped off a plane.
Martha glanced worriedly at her, seeming to agree with the assessment. "Maybe we should say something."
"To who?" None of the security detail seemed to think anything was out of the ordinary, and maybe that meant it really was just Rose's paranoia sparking to life, but she just - she didn't think so.
And then, inevitably, an alarm began to blare, and when the computer controlling the chamber began to spark, she decided it was time she stepped in.
"It can't be the same guy," Martha said a little later as they watched the young, champagne blond man that was now Lazarus shmooze around the room. "It's impossible. It must be a trick."
Rose shot her an appraising look. "A trick how?"
"Like - like someone hiding under the floor or something!" she said, gesturing at the chamber again. "It's up on a platform, someone could easily have been waiting underneath. They swapped places."
"Why gather all these people together for a trick?" she asked. "Why bother with the light show? Why would it start sparking and smoking if it was all fake? No." She shook her head. "It was real. I just wish it wasn't." Eyeing Lazarus as he and his wife, who now looked decrepit stood next to him, moved off towards the stairs, she asked, "What do you say we find out how?"
Tailing the couple up a few flights of stairs to the office labeled 'Richard Lazarus' was easy enough. She had grown rather adept at sneaking in her two short years since joining the TARDIS and Martha was an excellent study. They made it up without being detected, though as the door to the office swung shut they moved with more caution.
"It's me who made this all possible," they heard Lady Thaw saying on their approach to the office. "This is my triumph, and I will not be denied, not by you, not after everything I've done."
"You backed me because you saw a profit," Lazarus said disdainfully. "Your concern was financial." Rose and Martha pressed themselves up against the doors, ears pressed to the wood and eyes narrowed in concentration.
Lady Thaw said, "Well, you want the money as much as I do. We had a plan." Rose wrinkled her nose and shook her head to herself; it always came down to money, didn't it? "When the device is ready, I'll be rejuvenated, too. We could be rich and young and together."
"You think I'd waste another lifetime on you?" Lazarus asked. Martha visibly cringed at the callousness in his tone and the two girls exchanged another look. She couldn't imagine their marriage had ever been a happy one.
"Did that process make you even more cruel?" Thaw asked, and she couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for the woman, however cold she may have been herself - though, she noted, Thaw hadn't sounded all that cut up about it.
"No, my love. That I learnt from you. You have a gift for it."
"Then you know that I'll protect my involvement in the project. I'm sure Mr Saxon will be interested." There was a sharp gasp then and Rose's spine straightened. "What's going on?"
"It must just be - ah!"
"What is it?"
Lazarus sounded breathless as he said, "I'll be fine in a moment. It's probably just cramp." Then, with a nasty cracking sound that made Rose's skin crawl, they heard him drop to the floor. She and Martha backed up from the doors a little, halfway between wanting to burst into the room to see what was wrong and not wanting to give themselves away.
"Oh! Richard! Is it some sort of seizure?" Thaw cried. "What should I do? I don't understand what's happening. Richard."
That did it; they needed to help. Exchanging a decided nod with Martha, she ripped the door open -
In time to see some inhuman, skeletal creature looming over the terrified woman, open its - mouth? - and lunge at her in a split second.
They were gone before the thing that used to be Lazarus could notice their presence; Lady Thaw might have been too late to help, but there was an entire party full of people downstairs just waiting to be culled. What could she do though?
As she and Martha ran back down the hallway towards the main reception room, she tried her best to think of something - and then it hit her.
Fire alarm.
There was one at the end of the hallway, and she sprinted to it, jamming her elbow into the plastic sheet cover, shattering it and triggering the alarm inside. Immediately, sirens and sprinklers whirred from overhead and the faint sounds of panicked screaming reached them from the ground floor.
"Think that's Lazarus?" Martha asked as they moved to storm the labs. "Or just the alarm?"
"Suppose we'll find out soon," she muttered.
"You know you can be prosecuted for falsely pulling a fire alarm," she added jokingly.
Rose grinned faintly and said, "Maybe when they see the giant scorpion bloke rampaging through the building they'll let me off."
"I still can't believe it though," Martha said as they started down the stairs. "What could make him change into that - that thing?"
"God knows," she said. "It's like that machine warped his DNA, only it was too much for him." Remembering that Spiderman film Mickey had made her watch with him all the time, she said, "He miscalculated. The power he needed was there, obviously - he just couldn't handle it."
Like the Bad Wolf, really. She had absorbed all the power of the time vortex and had used it to her own end, but it had been rapidly killing her. A chill shot down her spine at the comparison, and she tried not to make it again.
They dashed down three staircases until they came out into the reception hall again, just as the guests were finishing evacuating. Water made the tiled floor tricky to traverse and make up had begun running down the faces of some of the women in attendance, but no one noticed these things as they made a mad dash for escape.
"We'd better get out too," Martha called over the blaring alarms. "We don't want to stick around when Lazarus might burst in any second."
"Come on."
They headed outside, Rose sparing the transformation chamber a side eyed glance and quietly cursing it. Some guests had dropped flutes of champagne and glasses of wine in their shock, which made the floor even more dangerous, and she had to concentrate on not just going flat on her back.
As they emerged into the night air, Martha asked, "You don't suppose all that champagne would make it fall over, do you?"
"I wouldn't count on it saving the day for us, no."
Martha huffed out a deep breath. "I can't believe what I just saw. I can't believe…"
Then, before Martha could say another word, the door to the building opened again, and Richard Lazarus stepped outside, face youthful, dressed in a sharp suit and all. He stared around at the gathering of guests shivering out in the cold night, until his eyes landed on Rose and Martha, and they narrowed. He quickly moved on from them, but that look of loathing couldn't be mistaken; he knew they had seen what happened.
She took in the sight with disbelieving eyes as beside her, Martha asked, "But how can he be there? I don't - it doesn't make any sense!"
"What doesn't?" someone behind them asked, and they turned to see Leo had spotted them and come over. "Bloody typical that an event Tish organised ends with a fire alarm being pulled, isn't it?"
"Leo!" Martha exclaimed, checking him over. "You're - are all of you okay? You made it out just fine?" She was looking wildly around for her mum and sister, then relaxed when she spotted the two of them stood some metres away.
"Of course." He frowned and peered more closely at his sister, with a momentary glance at Rose, who barely noticed, so consumed was she with keeping track of Lazarus. He was widely circling the crowd of scared, shivering guests with an unpleasant grimace on his face. "Are you feeling okay?"
"O-of course!" she said, smiling unconvincingly. "The alarm just freaked me out."
"That trip to the moon's got you all turned around, is all," he said. "You'll be thinking everything's aliens for months now."
Well he wasn't wrong.
Rose hissed under her breath when, unnoticed, Lazarus managed to slip back into the building, having apparently deduced that there was no fire at all. She had to follow him, because though he had, apparently, changed back into a human, if his scorpion inspired transformation had happened once it could happen again and when it did…
Well, she had just witnessed him staking out his next meal, hadn't she?
"Back in a minute," she said to Martha, then she took off for the doors before her friend could formulate a response.
She was just slipping around one of the security guards, distracted by a woman demanding to know "just what the fuck" was happening, when at the same time, the sounds of ambulance sirens and Martha calling, "I - hey! What the hell are you doing?" reached her.
"Sorry Marth," she mumbled, grimacing. "No time to explain." With that, she was back inside Lazarus Industries and on the scent of the man himself.
In the end, he wasn't at all hard to track down. Despite currently being human, the man mournfully circling the transformation chamber in the main reception room was hard to miss.
Her heels swished through the thin layer of water, champagne and wine and she took a moment to regret wearing chiffon heels. They were surely ruined by now. But never mind that.
"What are you doing, Lazarus?" she asked, her voice ringing through the now-silent hall. He was turned away from her, but she saw him stiffen at the sound of her voice. "It's not safe. Whatever's happening to you, it could happen again any moment. There're loads of people outside in danger if that happens."
"Well what would you have me do, Miss Tyler?"
Ice water flooded through her. "How do you know my name?"
He finally turned to her then, his pale face a mask of apathy. "I know without doubt that I am not the only one whose body, whose DNA, underwent a change it shouldn't have done. Who are you to lecture me?"
"H-how do you know about that?" she asked, shouting now. Panic laced through her veins and rooted her to the spot, and there was nothing she could do, because how. How the hell did he know?
A cold smile overtook Lazarus' features. "He told me you wouldn't be pleased to know that others are aware of what you did. Tell me, Bad Wolf girl, do you think your Doctor thanked you for ending his life?" Utterly lost for words, Rose couldn't have replied if she wanted to, and at her silence Lazarus sighed to himself and turned back to the chamber. "My greatest creation." He stared at it through wary, exhausted eyes.
Firmly on the defensive now, Rose's jaw unstuck itself and she asked, "Who told you about me? How did you know about Bad Wolf? Tell me!"
The ghost of a grin appeared on his face. "Oh, wouldn't you like to know."
She was gearing up to interrogate him when the sound of the fire engine outside reminded her that there were bigger things going on than her, and she tamped down her fury with no small amount of difficulty. "Look, if you don't do something now, innocent people are going to die, Lazarus."
"A consequence of progress."
"You call that mutation progress?"
He smiled at her, but it was utterly flat. "I wouldn't have expected you to understand."
She flushed with shame at that and tried to formulate a response, but she didn't need to bother; someone was walking up to them. "Look mate," Martha said, her tone harsh and angry. She wondered how long her friend had been listening. "Rose might not be a rocket scientist but she's smart in other ways. Ways you obviously aren't, so I'd think twice before you dismissed her."
Lazarus' smile turned condescending. "I think I've heard of you, too. Martha Jones. Your sister did a wonderful job with the party, didn't she?" Behind him, a banner came unattached from the wall and fell to the ground with a loud scraping noise.
Martha pursed her lips. "The firemen are outside," she said. "Unless you want to change in front of them and have half of London's emergency services swooping down on you, I'd think about reversing the changes."
"There is no reversal," he snarled. "It doesn't exist."
"Seriously?" Rose asked, almost wanting to laugh. "After all this, you didn't think about what to do if something went wrong?"
"Nothing was supposed to go wrong," he said, sounding pained as he forced the words out through gritted teeth.
"Doesn't mean you don't prepare for something going wrong," she said, then she stopped and frowned. He was groaning and hunching in on himself. Dread seeped into her bones. "Lazarus? Are you okay?"
He never answered, but he didn't have to. Even before the transformation was complete, Rose and Martha were running for the stairs, ready to lead the monster away from the unassuming crowds gathered outside.
"What are we supposed to do?" Martha cried as they led the scorpion creature on a wild goose chase around the corridors of Lazarus Industries.
"I don't know! We have to stop him somehow - knock him out, or - or -"
"Kill him?"
Her instinctive response to the suggestion was to balk and deny it, over and over because the Doctor didn't kill. He found other ways to solve the problem, and that's what she would do. Maybe if they could subdue him, she could get in contact with UNIT! They could do something, she was sure, or maybe she could use the TARDIS to find a hospital somewhere that could reverse the change. There had to be someplace, somewhere in the universe that dealt with DNA stuff, right?
But the more she thought and tried to think of alternative solutions, the more ludicrous they sounded, even to her own idealistic ears.
"Rose?" Martha cried. "We kill him?"
With a heavy heart, she nodded. "If we have to, we kill him."
With a deafening roar and crash the doors behind them were ripped off their hinges as the Lazarus creature continued its pursuit of them, pincer jaws snapping and limbs cracking in badly fitting joints.
Bolting the doors to the stairwell shut behind them, Rose tried to formulate a plan. Maybe a good fall would - deal with him. If they could lead him up to the roof and trick him into going over the edge…
But that idea was cut short as the doors one flight above their heads crashed open. "How did he get above us?" Martha cried as they turned tail and headed back down.
"No idea!"
They quickly found out though; a crumbling, sparking mess of concrete and wiring hung down in front of them when they stepped back into the corridor they had just left. Lazarus had burst up through the ceiling.
That was determination if she ever saw it, and the thought that the creature was capable of such strength made her shiver. The sight of the electrical wires gave her an idea though. It was awful and she already felt guilt for it, but desperate times called for desperate measures and they needed to do something.
"I've got an idea," she said breathlessly as they clambered unsteadily over the mess left behind by Lazarus' work. Continuing down the corridor, she said, "We need to lead him back to the room with the chamber."
The firemen's hoses had been brought in with them in anticipation of a fire to put out, and though they had been moved out of the main room as the firemen themselves went searching for the disaster, more water had joined the small sea gathered on the floor. Good.
"Help me rip out the wires," she said to Martha, running to the chamber. "We need them live and exposed."
Martha, of course, put two and two together. "We're electrocuting him?"
She couldn't bring herself to confirm it out loud, but she managed a nod as they grimly got down to work. Lazarus was approaching; they could hear him and feel him in the shaking of the building.
A fireman burst back into the reception room, hose in hands and scowl in place. "Oi, you two!" he shouted. "What's going on in here?"
Before they could answer Lazarus burst into the room, answering more effectively than they ever could have, and the man's jaw dropped open.
"We need water!" Rose shouted, drawing his attention back to her. "You fire hose - please!"
He understood what she meant, because he dropped it to the ground and dashed for the front doors. Lazarus never noticed, so caught up was he with the sight of she and Martha desecrating his great creation from the safe vantage point within the thing itself. He roared and charged them as finally the wires were ripped out and left to dangle in the water.
The fire hose was turned on and more water joined that which was already there, flooding the room rapidly then, and the sea sparked with danger -
As the creature that was Lazarus leapt at Rose and Martha, not noticing anything but them and his machine, his pride and joy. He landed in the water…
And roared and flailed as electricity shot through him in thousands of volts, finally collapsing to the ground from where he moved no more.
The body of the creature seemed to smoke where it lay and the sight made her feel sick. It made her not want to be in her own skin, and the creeping horror of what he had done, what she had done, was overwhelming.
"Well done," Martha said shakily. "That was pretty quick thinking."
"Yeah," she said, but she couldn't get out anything more than that.
Richard Lazarus was dead, and Rose Tyler had killed him.
She had at first had at first felt considerably guilty for dragging the fire services fire services out on false pretense, but it had been the only plan for a rapid evacuation that she could think of. She doubted people would have left on their own, not without proof of the danger, and by the time they got that proof it would have been too late. As it turned out, the fire services being there probably saved them all.
As it turned out, the fire services being there probably saved them all, Rose and Martha included, because she didn't know about her friend, but she certainly hadn't felt like being stranded amid a sea of electricity for hours with Lazarus body.
"I'm heading back to the TARDIS," she said to Martha. "I'll wait for you if you want a while with your family."
"Not sure I do, thanks," she said, staring with a small grimace at her gathered relatives.
Feeling a spike in her chest, she said, "Earlier, when I said my mum was dead… I was lying." Martha turned back to her, eyes blowing wide. "She's still alive, just in a place where I can never speak to her again. Just like the Doctor, and my mate Mickey."
"I didn't know," Martha said. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be," she said. "Point is, even though your family can drive you mad sometimes, it's always worth going to be with them for a while longer, even just five minutes, 'cause you never know when the universe is gonna take them away from you forever."
Martha stared at her for some seconds more, then said, "If you stay parked at my flat, I won't be long. An hour, maybe…"
"Take your time," she said, smiling softly. "I would if I could." Martha nodded, rubbing her hand down Rose's arm for a moment before she turned and walked back to her mother, who appeared surprised to see her again.
Staring at the ambulance as it drove away, the body of Lazarus beginning to grow cold within, Rose wondered whether that would happen to her. Lazarus had meddled with power he didn't understand, done things to himself that he couldn't control… and look what had happened to him.
If she was right in her suspicions about Bad Wolf, Rose was in serious danger, and the worst part of it was that this time, the monster after her blood might already be inside it.
