Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

The Girl In The Fireplace

Chapter 15 – Spare Parts

Trigger warnings: blood, injury (starting midway through Delaine's section). It's mostly scrapes, cuts, and deliberately inflicted dislocations, but I just thought I'd give you all a heads up just in case.

"It's events like these that make me question how humans can come up with so many stories about robots killing people because of a mistake in the programming and still manage to leave such gaping holes in their programming."

Rose Tyler wouldn't admit out loud that the space ship was creepy, but it was definitely that. Forget the clockwork robots in the period drama costume and the creepy clown-like masks, there was also the little detail about the fact that there were bits of people in the machinery and the tiny little snag that the aforementioned creepy robots had access to short-range teleportation that could take them to any part of the ship.

"It's not hard to put in a failure condition or hardwire some sort of protection," the Doctor continued as if the two other people present were actually following his monologue. "If complete repair cannot be finished with current resources, do ABC to get the bare minimum functionality required to land at the nearest space port or habitable world. If ABC cannot be done with current safety, do XYZ to get crew to safety. At no point can you kill the crew and use their finger bones to make screws. Simple."

And then, like a little plastic figurine on top that cake of awfulness, there was the horse. A fully saddled, casually noisy horse that was following the Doctor around like a little lost duckling even after the Time Lord had stopped riding it, hooves deafening in the relative silence of the ghost ship.

"Instead, we end up with voice identifications thrown off by helium gas and parts of someone's nervous system replacing fried circuitry."

And the Doctor simply did not seem to care, instead complaining about humanity and sloppy computer programming of all things as they walked around the ship, looking for god knows what.

"Please Doctor, just… put the horse back where you got it," Mickey said, sounding extraordinarily tired. Another thing the horse was responsible for.

The Doctor stopped complaining about careless robot programmers to stare at the boy. "What? Just leave Arthur out in the hall all by himself, where those nasty robots can get to him and chop him to little bits?"

"You named it?"

"Don't be silly. I asked him what his name was. Took an evening course on speaking Horse. I wanted to take Mammoth, but Romana talked me out of it," the Doctor said before switching to a haughty female voice with all the effort most people put into a falsetto. "'Which is more likely to prove useful, Doctor; a large smelly animal that only exists in a time period you rarely visit, or something that's almost always around those humans you like so much?' Oh, she lorded that over me for weeks after, though I had my own turn after our little trip to the Ice Age."

Romana. Another name that meant absolutely nothing to Rose. Was she a former companion or something more? Clearly, no matter what she had been to the Doctor, she wasn't human. Was she another Time Lord or, in this case, Time Lady?

"So do you have any idea why this ship has all these holes going back to eighteenth century France?" Mickey asked.

"Ah, broadly speaking, yes. The little intricacies such as the why of the initial why are a bit out of focus at the moment, but I think I can make an assumption or two based on what happened to the crew and what I've seen in on the other side of that fireplace," the Doctor said before pointing to a window they were just coming up to. "It's because they're stalking her."

The 'her' in question was a woman could have walked out of a period drama, which made sense considering that she from that time period. All silk and perfectly styled hair and an understated smoothness of motion as she walked across the room they were watching from across time. Rose supposed that she was something of a natural beauty as well.

"So who is she?"

"Allow me to present Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, known to her friends as Reinette. One of the most accomplished women who ever lived. You might know her better as Madame de Pompadour."

Rose and Mickey exchanged looks. Rose didn't know the name and it was fairly clear that it didn't mean a thing to Mickey either.

The Doctor made a disgusted noise. "You both slept through history class, I just know it," the Time Lord muttered before raising his voice to normal tones again. "I'd say this is the night that she meets Louis the Fifteenth."

"Got her eye on becoming his queen, does she?" Rose asked, watching the woman smooth out some imaginary wrinkles in her dress. This 'Madame de Pompadour' did seem tailor made for such a role.

"Nah, he's got a queen already. Reinette's got her eye on becoming his mistress."

Ah. Camilla. Now there was something Rose was familiar with. "Bet the queen just loved her."

"Actually, yes. They got on very well," the Doctor replied, drawing surprised looks from both Rose and Mickey. He shrugged. "France; it's practically another planet."

He suddenly cut off, eyes focusing on something in the room past where the woman stood. Apparently, whatever it was made some noise, because she turned around as well.

Rose watched a figure step slowly out of the far corner, revealing itself to be yet another of the clockwork robots, though this one wore a dress instead of the embroidered suit that last had.

The Doctor didn't even hesitate before hitting the switch that rotated the window and pulling Mickey's fire extinguisher gun out of his hands. "Hello, Reinette. Hasn't time flown?" he said before dousing the robot with freezing liquid. "Slush hydrogen. Fun stuff… when the ice isn't gumming up your internal workings."

The robot twitched its head to the side before its arm snaked out at a speed Rose could barely follow. If not for the fact its hidden blade hadn't deployed, the Doctor might have been dead.

"…not entirely gummed up then," he corrected as he took a step back. "I'd admire the workmanship if not for the faulty programming and your literalist interpretation of 'human resources'."

The robot didn't respond to that beyond tilting its head with a series of tiks and whirrs, analyzing Rose, Mickey, the Doctor, and Reinette in turn.

"Oh, what I wouldn't give to know what you're thinking in that shiny metal mind of yours," the Doctor said, walking slightly to the side as he watched the robot slowly divest itself of the ice. "I mean, it's probably half nonsense, but it'll have a certain logic to it that will make the puzzle of 'why' slide all together. Why open up the time portals, why go through all this trouble, and why her?"

"One more part is required," the robot replied in a voice that barely registered in Rose's mind as feminine. Its head suddenly twisted to the side in a display of speed that it hadn't shown since the Doctor had doused it in ice, its empty eyes boring into Reinette's.

Rose noted the way the Doctor subtly positioned himself between the machine and the noblewoman. "Then why haven't you taken it?" he whispered.

"She is incomplete."

The Time Lord's head jerked back in apparent surprise. "What, so you're just going to keep punching holes in history, scanning her brain, and checking her mileage until it hits your ideal number? But that doesn't answer my last question; of every single brain in history, why do you specifically need hers?"

"Because we are the same," the robot replied.

"What?" Reinette asked, stepping back a bit. "No."

"We are the same."

"Get out! Get out this instant!"

The robot complied, teleporting away right as the Doctor told yelled for it to stop. He turned around quickly, pulling the mirror/window they'd come in through open.

"It's back on the ship," he said. "Rose, take Mickey and Arthur. Get after it. Follow it. Don't approach it, just watch what it does. I don't want any of you hurt."

"You're not keeping the horse!" Rose yelled.

"I let you keep Mickey," the Doctor countered as he shoved her through the door. "Now go! Go! Go!"

The window rotated shut, leaving Rose and Mickey alone on the creepy space ship again.

The horse – Arthur – whinnied softly, as if to confirm his presence.

Alright, Rose corrected mentally, so not completely alone.

I suddenly had the feeling I wasn't alone.

The door hadn't opened and the Zero Room was as empty as ever, but there was a sense of presence all the same. Muted perhaps, but still very clearly there like someone watching you from behind. Somehow, despite that and the creeping anxiety that something was happening somewhere I should have been, the presence itself didn't quite scare me.

Probably because it felt like a muted version of something I'd already felt during my stay in the TARDIS. Did the Zero Room mute even her 'voice' or was the limiter messing with my ability to pick up on her?

I looked up at the ceiling. "Something's gone wrong?" I asked her before trying in my head. 'Lady TARDIS? ...Idris?'

There was a passing sensation of amusement at the names and then her presence in my head turned insistent again. I was needed somewhere and now, which was going to be quite a trick considering I was locked in and shackled.

The sound of a lock clicking open suddenly rang through the silence.

"Suppose that handles one problem," I muttered, casting a quiet 'thank you' towards the ceiling again before I started running for the console room and the door beyond that.

Empty space ship. High ceiling. Dim lighting. No soul like the TARDIS and no sense of home or purpose like most mundane vessels. The place smelled like an abandoned mortuary but with more grease and polish worked in around the edges of smothering smell of dust and embalming fluids.

I didn't give much more mind to the details, because there was yelling down the hall. It had to be Mickey and Rose. It wasn't like there was much else in the way of options.

I sped up, skidding around a few corners as I tried to maintain a balance already thrown off by the position my arms were locked into. That didn't stop me from twisting around to kick one of the droids away from Mickey.

"How'd you get here?" Rose asked angrily.

"Time machine," I said quickly as I twisted around an incoming blade and shoulder checked the robot on the other end of it. It fell over, twitching slightly before something teleported it away. "Also, running towards the sound of screaming."

"The Doctor had you locked up!"

"And now I'm not." I slid past her and kicked the droid that had been sneaking up behind her away, keeping a series of needles full of something blue and clear out of her back. "Also, you're welcome."

A blast of absolute cold went right past me, freezing some of my hair where it came too close, and I heard the previously silent machine that had been in my blind spot stutter to a stop as ice ground in the space between its gears.

"You could consider that something of a 'thank you' then," Mickey said, adjusting his grip on the fire extinguisher gun in his hands.

I smiled.

And got a slice of burning pain along the line of my ribs as the robot reactivated.

I rolled forward, hissing as the cut moved with the rest of me. First blood. Great. That only meant more blood from here on out.

And all because I let my situational awareness slip for a second.

I managed to get my legs under me and stood up again, eying the robot that had done the damage. Ice crystals still hung on it heavily, but they were melting rather quickly. "Mickey, give it another blast," I said, ignoring the feeling of warm blood trickling down my side.

He did, the white stream of freezing condensation covering the droid again, and as soon as it stopped pouring out, I kicked the robot as hard as I could. It hit the wall without grace, the internal parts breaking off at the joints to hang loosely by the clothes it was disguised with.

That was one down at least. I didn't know how many more there was left to go.
"We need to relocate. Somewhere there's more space to work with," I said, reaching around to put some pressure on the wound. Clean cut, so it would heal halfway decent, but didn't do jack for the bleeding now.

"How bad is that?"

It was relatively shallow and it wasn't near any problem bleeding areas I could remember. Nothing to be immediately concerned about, even for a normal human, provided it didn't become infected and the timeframe we were working with probably wouldn't allow for that. My shoulder would probably end up hurting more from shoulder checking a robot. "I'll live. Let's keep moving."

We slunk through the halls, but no robots reappeared. Was that because they were otherwise occupied or were we walking into an ambush? I doubted the machines had the brains for that, but I'd been unpleasantly surprised before.

The room we ended up in was probably the worst we could have found. Smaller than the massive space the TARDIS was parked in, this one was a tangle of wires and equipment, all surrounding a pair of futuristic exam tables… that came with straps attached to the places where arms and legs would go.

"Uh, I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say this is very not good," Mickey said.

"Understatement of the year right there," Rose muttered before turning her attention on me. "So was this your plan? Keep us safe by walking right into the place we don't want to be?"

"I'll admit it; I was in too much of a rush to save your lives to remember the directions back to the TARDIS," I replied, most of my attention on the machines in front of me and all the luminous screens dancing with data. There was a pattern here, something I could do… but what? With the limiter on, I didn't have the computing power or the innate understanding of what I was looking at, so I was stuck trying to pry the answer off the tip of my tongue.

But there was one thing that was clear; step one to using these control panels was getting these cuffs off. I twisted my arms, trying to see where or if I had any give. There was a bit around my left hand, but the limiter was still trapped in the vice grip of the right cuff.

So how to get them off? No power tools were visible here, I didn't have a key…

Ugh, bad solution.

"Any ideas on how to get out of these?" I asked Mickey and Rose, not expecting much from either but willing to take a gamble on the off-chance they did.

"Why would I let you out?" Rose asked, crossing her arms as she glared at me. "The Doctor must have put those on you for a reason."

On the other side of the enthusiasm coin, Mickey's eyes lit up. "That robot broke after I froze it and you kicked it. Why not do that to the handcuffs?"

I grimaced. "Because while that would make the metal brittle enough to break fairly easily, exposure to those kinds of temperatures will literally turn my hands to solid ice which would not only be incredibly painful, but also would defeat the whole purpose of the 'get the cuffs of me so I can use my hands' thing. Thanks for trying though."

It'd be a way of getting the limiter off, sure, but I wasn't quite desperate enough to go that far yet. I'd already been locked up and questioned for knowing too much. How well regrowing a lost limb would go over was not territory I wanted to try exploring just yet.

A better solution would to be find some kind of pick or shim to get around the lock. That, however, would take time, effort, and an unreasonable amount of my attention as I tried to talk Mickey through the process, and there was no guarantee that Rose would allow him to go through it. After all, 'the Doctor must have put them on me for a good reason'.

So I'd settle for the stupid and painful – but not as stupid or painful as actively losing a hand – way of getting free.

Ignoring the immediate explosion of pain from pulling my thumb out of socket and the gasp of horrified surprise from my audience, I folded my thumb up into the palm of my hand and began to pull it out of the cuff.

It was a tight fit, though not impossible to escape at the cost of a little blood and tears. I finally pulled my hand free with a pop, feeling my wrist go out of joint as my control of my fingers suddenly started lagging.

Well, that was inconvenient, but at least I could make decent use of the other hand. I could work around the pain, but the blood loss… well, unless the robots got in a luckier shot than all their previous attempts, it'd be messy but it wouldn't be lethal.

Probably.

"Why the hell did you do that?" Rose asked, looking horrified.

"Need to access computer. Couldn't type with the cuffs on. Didn't have the key and didn't have time to teach either of you how to get past handcuff mechanisms," I explained through gritted teeth as I waited for the adrenaline to kick in properly. There was a reason this type of injury sent people to the emergency room and then on into surgery not too long after that. "So that left the coyote solution."

Would it be worth it to try fixing the hand? Probably not. The pain would still be there and if I did it wrong, it would only get worse.

"I would have helped if that was your Plan B!"

"Really?" I asked, lacing my tone was as much sarcasm as I could get around the pain. "That wasn't the reading I was getting from you at all."

I shuffled over to the computers and flexed my fingers, wincing a little at the pain and slow response in my left hand. Yeah, I could do this. Probably not as well as I could have with the limiter off and with my left hand not fucked to hell, but beggars can't be choosers.

"Now, let's crack this walnut."

The Doctor stumbled back through the window he'd gone out through, careful not to spill any of the contents of his cup. Part of the drunkenness was an act, because that was his excuse to leave the debauchery earlier than the French nobility would have accepted, but despite the total absence of ginger beer, he had a feeling he'd be paying for what partying he had done in the morning.

Oh, it probably wouldn't last long – one of the many perks of Time Lord physiology – but even if it only took five minutes for him to recover, every second promised to be unpleasant.

Right now, however, his problem was of a strictly mechanical nature.

The Doctor very carefully stepped over a piece of discarded machinery, noting the embroidered sleeve it was wearing. Ah, so Rose and Mickey were doing some percussive maintenance.

The thought distracted him long enough to stumble into another elegantly dressed droid, knocking it to the ground where it broke to pieces.

"And I'm not paying for that," the Doctor told the empty hallway before spinning around and breaking into song. "I could've danced all night, I could have danced all night…"

The not-so-distant sound of metallic crash informed him that he was dancing in the right direction. Suddenly, one of the droids hit the hallway wall opposite the door, falling to the floor where it lay with its legs impotently pedaling through the air in a jerky walk cycle.

"…and still have begged for more. I could've spread my wings and done a thousand things or mo–" he sang as he danced around the wreckage, only to cut off as he saw Rose standing on the other side of the doorway in question with one of the fire extinguishers in hand. He grinned at her annoyed expression. "Have you met the French? My god, do those people know how to party."

"Oh, look what the cat dragged in," she said flatly. "It's the Oncoming Storm. The day is saved."

"I take it things haven't been going well," the Doctor said mildly, swirling his cup as he looked around the room. It looked like a likely candidate for the droid's 'chop shop', what with the tables with straps and all the tubes of suspect stuff.

Mickey was watching the other entrance, fire extinguisher gun in hand, while Delaine over by what looked very much like a computer, studying it intently. The Doctor started a bit as he reprocessed that bit of information. Delaine standing over the computer. Hadn't he left her in the Zero Room? In handcuffs?

'Yes,' his Fourth replied. 'Most definitely. That makes her not being in the Zero Room right now…'

'Questionable?'

'Among other things. How did she get those handcuffs off though?'

"So just what happened while I was out?" the Doctor asked, ignoring the litany of unpleasant possibilities building in the back of his head.

Rose looked slightly uncomfortable for a moment. "Well… after we left you, we got attacked by the robots straight off."

'Is Arthur okay?' his Eighth asked before he was shushed.

"And Delaine just runs in from out of nowhere and starts kicking them around!" his companion said with a distinct note of frustration. "No clue as to how she got out but she just took over after that, telling us we needed to move to some place we had some space to move. Then we ended up in here and Delaine's just like 'oh, I'm going to take a crack at this computer, don't let the robots in'."

At this outburst, the subject of their conversation looked up from what she was doing and – after seeing the Doctor – went back to it. For the first time since he'd met her, her sleeves were rolled up to her elbow, showing off a number of angry red slices on her forearms, some seemingly fresher than others. More eye catching, however, was some chain of bruises forming along the line of her jaw and a small slice along riding along her cheekbone above that. If there was any more damage to be seen, he'd have to be closer to appreciate it.

"Do you think Mickey let her out?" he asked.

Rose scoffed at that. "He doesn't even know where the toilet is, how would he know where to find the Zero Room?"

"You both know that I'm standing right here, right?" Mickey noted from the other side of the small room.

"Anyway," the Doctor said loudly. "I've found out what they've been following Reinette for."

He pointed at the computer Delaine was working at. "Right there, that big old mess is the primary computer for this ship. You could say it's the brain of this whole ship. Navigational computer, star coordinates, power regulation… and command center for the repair droids."

The Doctor turned around to look back at Rose. "Long story short, the tin men need a brain and apparently the question they've been trying to answer every time they scanned Reinette's brain was 'how old are you?' and the magic number is…"

"Thirty-seven," Delaine answered.

Well there went his dramatic reveal. "How'd you know?"

"The ship is thirty-seven years old and its name is the S.S. Madame de Pompadour. It's not a big leap," she said flatly, giving him an unimpressed look. "And, according to the mission statement, the S.S. Madame de Pompadour is a scientific research ship, home to some experimental time viewing technology that was being tested in neutral territory to avoid any intergalactic incidents should anything go wrong."

Which it did, the silence she let follow the statement seemed to say.

"Oh. So the repair robots aren't just picky, they're smart enough to use what tools they have and just thick enough to decide that breaking history is the best way to solve their problem," the Doctor said as he walked over to her. He leaned over her shoulder to look at the blood streaked touch screen before looking down. "What did you do to your hand?"

"She took the 'coyote solution' to the cuffs," Rose said.

'Gnawed off her leg to get out of the trap,' one of his other selves muttered as the Doctor surveyed the injury with a barely concealed grimace.

From the way her hand was hanging off of her wrist and starting to swell, it was clearly a dislocation. The areas skinned raw and bloody were probably from pulling her hand out of a cuff still a hair too small despite her best efforts, but…

"What about your side?" he asked, eying the blood that colored the side of her button down shirt a very bright, very human red beneath the dark fabric of her waistcoat.

"Got distracted and got the sharp side of a knife," she replied tersely, clearly in pain and making an effort not to show it. "It's a clean cut, not deep. Barely even bleeding now. Nothing to worry about."

One of the droids then. "Same with the face?" the Doctor said, reaching up to touch the scratch.

Delaine pulled away before he could come close to touching it. "Just a scratch."

Ugh. It looked like all that work he'd put into bridging the gap with her just fell through to the bottom of 'Don't Touch Me Ravine'. Ah, it was a process. "Still, I'm going to have to pull you into the infirmary to look at that hand. I have a duty of care to my companions, after all."

He looked down at the bloodied screen and – trying to ignore the fact that it was his companion's blood sticking to his fingertips – pulled up the index file, looking for anything he could find on the repair droids. If he could find some scrap of identification or an override code, this entire mess could be over – ah, and there it was.

"'Certified repair expert AI in mechanical, electrical, and biological technologies, repair drones immune to every possible environmental hazard from anti-oil to ion storms'. Well, that covers just about every base you could possibly need in space," the Doctor said before scanning further down the contract, which seemed like it was half written by an advertisement executive. "And it did have failsafes against the whole 'killing people thing'. Unfortunately, that was part of the system baked by the ion storm. Take out the restraining bolt out of the AI, you end up with robots preforming to their tasks to the letter… which spells trouble when the book they're going by is Alice in Wonderland."

"The braaaaain is compaatable," one of the ruined droids on the floor sang in a voice like a broken music box.

"Oh, shut up." And here was the master control to the androids. The Doctor turned it off and was satisfied to see the robots stop twitching. "And now onto the time-windows. All I need are some Zeus plugs…" he said as he patted his breast pocket down and then worked his way through the other possible locations. "I know I had some on me; I was using them as castanets not that long ago…"

"But if they needed her brain when she was thirty-seven, why'd they do all that hopping around?" Rose asked, interrupting his search. "Why not just open a window to when she was 'complete'?"

"Rose, their circuits are so cooked I'm amazed they even got the right century. Probably got as close as they did through trial and error. And that should –," the Doctor stopped and tried to flip the switch again. "It's not closing."

"What's not closing?" Mickey asked.

"The time-windows. I don't understand why they aren't –"

A little bell rang, and then a series of clicks and scratches came through a clockwork machine.
"Ah," the Time Lord realized. "Report from the field. One of them is still out there with Reinette. That's why I can't close the windows, there's an override!"

The droids on the floor suddenly started clicking and whirring. "She is complete," they sang in their broken, inflectionless voices. "She is complete, she is complete –"

"Shut up!" the Doctor yelled. "So she's 'complete'! None of you are in any condition to do anything about it! Message from one of your little friends, what are you going to do?"

"There are enough resources. She is complete. It begins."

Of course they had reserves. Big ship, lots of repair drones. Nothing could be simple, could it?

"Come on, we've got to find the right time window! Rose, you go through this one here," the Doctor said as they passed one place where the future bled into the past and left a definite year its wake. "Warn Reinette that in five years from that point, the droids will be back for her head. Tell her that when that happens, she needs to stall them for as long as they can."

Rose nodded, ducking into the window while the rest of them ran on.

"Why can't we just use the TARDIS instead of these windows?" Mickey asked. "I'm sure you could land it where you needed to faster than this."

"Can't," the Doctor replied as he searched for the next time window. "The way these time windows leak and with so many crammed into such a relatively small area, there's no definite temporal location to the area. Worse, causality is tangled. Probably at least one or two stable time loops set up thanks to this mess, which means getting another time machine involved, even if it's the TARDIS, risks turning the whole ball of yarn into… well, let's leave that outcome at somewhere between 'less than good' and 'big ol' hole in the universe'. Oh, we'll be able to leave once all the windows are turned off, but anything other than that is just asking for disaster."

"Stable time loop?"

The Doctor brushed off the question. "I'll explain the finer points of temporal mechanics later! We've got to find that time window!"

"Right here."

Delaine was looking up at a wall mounted window, on the other side of which was a ballroom full of the highest members of French society, all screaming for their lives as the droids herded them into the corners.

"I think it's been fucked," she added, rapping on the glass with the handcuffs still attached to her right wrist. Whatever the window was made of, the metal didn't even scratch it.

The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver out and took a reading that made him want to swear himself. "Hyperplex this side, plate glass on the other. I'd need a truck to smash through it."

"Would a horse work?" Mickey asked.

The Doctor turned to see Arthur standing just down the hall a bit, looking a bit underwhelmed for the situation.

"Suppose it would," he replied.

We waited.

There wasn't much other option. While I might have been able to pilot the TARDIS with Zeke's help, the fact that the limiter was still locked around my wrist put a quick stop to that back-up plan and somehow, Rose didn't know where the fast return switch was. There was more than a small chance that she was lying, buying time for the Doctor to return on his own, but honestly I couldn't disagree with the decision. Even if I didn't have the advantage of foreknowledge, the chances of us unintentionally marooning him on this dead ship were too high.

Still, I was getting antsy. What if my presence somehow changed things enough that the fireplace time window wouldn't –

Before I could get to the 'work' part of the brainwave, the Doctor walked in.

"Miss me?"

Rose looked like she was torn between hugging and hitting him. "You were gone for five and a half hours!"

"I left the horse back in France," he said.

And for some reason there was the tipping point towards hug. "Thank god."

"Suppose someone's going to have to figure out how to get him out of the ballroom at Versailles, but I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually," the Doctor said before turning his attention to me. "You, infirmary, now. Bad enough you messed up your hand, leaving it like that for over five hours isn't helping."

"What, you wanted me to screw it back into place on my own?" I asked. "With one good hand, no anesthetic, and no equipment?"

"No. I'll be in to handle it," he replied with a slight roll of his eyes. "After I go get Reinette."

Ah. Well. This could only end in tears. History said that Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson had died from tuberculosis at age forty-two. There was no getting around that fact because if it hadn't happened, this ship might have never existed.

I walked through the hallways of the TARDIS, relying on her vague definition of 'directions' pressing on my brain to guide me to the infirmary.

Considering I ended up there fairly quickly, I didn't really have anything negative to say about it save feeling ridiculous for doing the whole Inigo Montoya 'guide my sword' bit without the impressiveness of a fine sword or a dead relative attached.

The Doctor arrived not too long after, his mood and hair much lower than it had been before he'd rushed off through that fireplace for the last time. He didn't say anything and I didn't press it; I knew what it was like to fail at saving someone, to have time slipping through your fingers despite your best efforts.

"See you found the infirmary without any difficulty," he noted.

I looked up at the ceiling. "Had some help."

The Doctor hmmed, but didn't comment on it as he brought over a screen on a swivel arm. "Readings say you've got some light blood loss, a number of minor lacerations, bruising, and the… well, obvious problem with your hand."

That matched with what I had been keeping track of. "So what do you want to fix first?"

He gave me a look. "What do you think?"

"Going by your face, probably the attitude."

"I may be good, but I'm not that kind of miracle worker; I'll settle for the hand," he said, pulling over a machine that had more than a passing resemblance to a dentist's overhead light.

"What's that?"

"Psychic anesthetic. Good for working around allergies and dosage issues."

Clever and not too different from the medical bay in my cosmic warehouse. I didn't entirely appreciate the haze slipping over my mind, but considering that I'd spent six and a half hours running on nothing but adrenaline and pure determination, the level of exhaustion crawling over me made sense. That the 'anesthetic' took that exhaustion to a point that teetered on the edge of passing out was only logical, at least to my tired mind.

That the Doctor was still talking to me was less sense. "What were you thinking, dislocating your wrist like that? I could have –"

"Pain is a transient sensation," I murmured. Stop talking to me and let me sleep.

"Hah. Tell that to the permanent damage you would have ended up with if not for the wonders of Gallifreyan medicine," he replied as the bones just pushed themselves back into the right place without any surgery or pain. Huh. Usually healing hurt more than that. "Just… in the future, don't be so reckless. With your hands or your life."

"So if I'm reckless in the eighteenth century, everything's alright."

The Doctor made a face. "Not what I meant."

"I figured," I said right before I finally fell asleep.

The Doctor shook his head as he put the skeletal realignment machine back into its place along the wall and grabbed a small jar of blue healing paste. Humans were ridiculous, this one was more so than usual.

He smeared some of the paste over the cut on her cheek, moving onto the other cuts as the nanites within it started knitting the wound shut. The cut along her side, he would save for last since there was no telling how much of the paste it would take to heal it and it wasn't actively life threatening.

He was fairly certain that she wasn't a spy. A spy might have attempted the handcuff trick, but the casual disregard for her own safety in the defense of others didn't fit with the profession.

So that left his 'Time Sensitive Human' and 'Hidden Time Lord' theories standing, and without some evidence – either some irrefutable proof of a human history or the appearance of a Chameleon Arch watch somewhere in Delaine's possession – that's what he was stuck with. Two theories that were mutually exclusive yet relied on the same evidence.

Whatever the truth was, the Doctor decided, the girl at the middle of the mystery was something that he was going to protect.

Author's Notes

Yeah… well, I wasn't happy with the way the 'blow up' scenario had progressed even before I got to the 'death threat bit', mostly because I didn't think I captured how confusing and rushed Delaine's attempt at 'mental defense' was for the Doctor, but also because I realized that revealing her history through that was rushing things forward too much and, while it would be fun for the Doctor to get a taste of the nightmare fuel that is Kilgrave, I decided to save him for a future chapter (that already had his 'reveal' scene mostly finished already, though I'll probably rewrite it for some reason or another).

Also I figured, the Doctor making a peace offering (the watch) instead of violating Delaine's mind when we've already set up that Kilgrave is a pretty big stress trigger for her was just smarter from a storytelling perspective. He's decided to give her a small amount of trust (seemingly on a whim) and the events of this chapter prove that trust wasn't misplaced, what with her undergoing a great deal of physical injury to maintain Rose and Mickey's safety.

From there, it makes sense for the Doctor to stop keeping her in the Zero Room and for Delaine to start disassociating the Doctor from her trauma, thus taking the first steps down the road to being actual friends rather than continue the 'I don't know what to make of this person and don't know anything about her, but what I have so far is pretty interesting and I like a good mystery' / 'I don't like this person because they have the face and voice of a man who did something horrible to me and a whole host of issues that will probably make my life hell' thing they had going on at first.

In comparison, a standoff that inadvertently put two people through a break-neck series of traumatic memories – of which only one of them knows the context and full emotional resonance – that ends with the words 'touch me again and I'll kill you' in a completely serious manner would result in a situation where Delaine's emotionally fragile and jumpy, the Doctor feels guilty (and possibly still suspicious), and both of them avoiding communication for admittedly understandable reasons.

Sure, the relationship needs work between Delaine's cageyness and preexisting bias against both the Tenth Doctor and Rose (as you may have noticed, compared to the 'ugh' way she reacts to them, she treats Mickey 200% better and with more enthusiasm and was the same way with Sarah Jane) and the Doctor's assumption that he's the resident moral and intellectual authority on everything, his arrogance (Time Lord superiority and all that), his occasional forays into hypocrisy (you know the whole 'time can be rewritten' thing, despite there are a number of episodes dedicated to fixing someone else's meddling in time?), and his 0-to-60 approach on murder (which is really messed up when paired with the 'moral authority' thing), but they're starting to ease past that.

Can't say if things will improve all that much between Delaine and Rose, since their problem is more of a personality issue rather than communication problems, but I think they can at least get to the point where they're at least genuinely neutral to each other rather than quietly annoyed.

The trick with a character not knowing some vital information about someone or something is that they'll make theories and assumptions based on what they know and, usually, those theories and assumptions will bite them in the ass somehow. If not, well, it'll still be fun for the reader who knows what's really going on.

Ex: The Doctor knows Delaine is unnaturally well informed about his history + she's also capable of working with robotics originating from 3000 years after her assumed era of origin + the TARDIS's medical scans say she's a normal human female from the early 21st century.

This eliminates a lot of theories like 'Zygon' (TARDIS's medical scan would have picked up on venom sacks in the tongue – which is the method the Tenth Doctor tries to use in The Day Of The Doctor), 'Time Agent' (TARDIS would have def. picked up on 3,000 years of evolutionary difference between a 21st century and a 51st century human), and probably more I couldn't be bothered to list here. From there, the Doctor goes with what he knows to be true about his universe and the person he is studying;

1. Time travel leaves a recognizable trace, which Delaine doesn't have one beyond what she should have for the time she's spent in the TARDIS. So that rules out Time Agent (besides the genetic thing).

2. Humans have a certain proclivity for developing psychic powers, including time sensitivity. This may account for her knowledge of his history and knowing how to handle robotics he knows how to handle; she's picking up on how the Doctor did it at some earlier point in his history.

3. A human agency active in this time period is interested in aliens, which possibly includes him, as he was present for a possible genesis of said organization. Delaine may be a Torchwood Agent, which accounts for 'human' and does not wholly exclude the 'Time Sensitive' angle.

4. Time Lords, who usually have some form of time sensitivity and high intellect compared to baseline humans, have the means of completely rewriting their DNA and sealing away their memories to hide among another species (though these are known to leak through). This fits with what the Doctor knows, even though he hasn't found a Chameleon Arch Fob Watch that would corroborate the 'Hidden Time Lord' theory.

And then he can pare those down from there as he gathers more evidence and understanding of Delaine's character (thus why he took 'spy' off the list at the end of the chapter, though how close he'd actually get to the truth without seeing Delaine use an ability he can't account for – say, some manner of shapeshifting or physical strength far outside of the human norm). Deductive reasoning is fun!

Arashi – On the subject of the Seventh Doctor(s), call it… exploiting the gnome-field advantage.

Milkymou – Attitude in the 'mildly combative but still ultimately good/helpful' sense or 'I've know bullshit, Doctor, and what you are doing right now is t' sense? The former we've seen in companions before, mostly with the Fifth Doctor, between Adric, Teagan, and Turlough (who was a spy sent by an enemy of the Doctor to kill him, but as you can see by the fact we still have a show, didn't) but I don't think that anyone consistently calls the Doctor out on his bullshit on the show… well, Five's companions dump on him a lot, but like half of it is kind of undeserved, Six's companions have a tendency to call him out on his bitchiness, and I'm pretty sure that Clara might qualify for both Eleven and Twelve, but it's been a while since I've watched any of her episodes so eh.

Writing it, I think that the biggest thing about their dynamic is that Delaine is able to meet the Doctor on equal footing and that's not a relationship dynamic that he's ever really had with any companion. Even Romana, who's a Time Lady who actually did way better than him in the Academy, still ended up following the Doctor's lead because of her lack of practical experience.

Yeah, giving a character in the actual show superpowers like that wouldn't just be hell on the budget; it would just open the door to sloppy writing and potentially undermine the whole theme of 'brains over brawn, peace over violence'. I mean, I wouldn't say no to an alien or cyborg companion – make Kroton canon! –, but there's a limit to an audience's suspension of disbelief and putting a superpowered character out of a comic book – sorry to the 2016 Christmas special – into the Doctor's universe doesn't quite work.

I know coming in that I was going to reference fandoms that other people never heard of – I mean, Animorphs will eventually become semi-relevant to the plot, but hell if I know my audience is familiar with that series – so I try to keep everything fairly inclusive and explain things in the Author's Notes if it gets more specific than 'obscene healing factor' or 'general shapeshifting'. I'm pretty sure that some people just gloss over them, but at least it's there.

Oh, and I doubt she would eat the Doctor. Probably not that much nutritional value to a Time Lord and Ten's so skinny he's probably get stuck in her teeth.

Well, there's a few things going on with Delaine's dislike of the Zero Room, one of which will be covered in a future chapter. The other is a thing called 'white torture', which has a Wikipedia page that describes its effects quite well. The short version is it's a kind of sensory deprivation that, instead of using a dark room, uses a solid white room with no windows and a bright light that never turns off.

While I hadn't really had her first experience with her 'patron' in mind when describing it, it wouldn't be out of place to say that past experience doesn't make it better.

Slush hydrogen is a mix of liquid and solid hydrogen, which is close to negative 260 degrees Fahrenheit. It's mostly been proposed as a replacement for straight liquid hydrogen rocket fuel because you can get more of it into less space (good for rocket design which has to take weight into consideration), but I was using it here as the contents of the fire extinguisher guns because the spray of liquid hydrogen mixing with oxygen creates water vapor, which the aforementioned cold-as-hellness turns into ice (which fits in well with what the extinguisher guns do in the episode, though it isn't a substance used in real life fire extinguishers, probably because careless use would be really, really bad).

The fact that the repair droids are built to survive the coldness of space, which goes down to about negative 270 degrees Celsius (translation; negative 455 degrees Fahrenheit), means it just slows them down for a minute before they adjust to that (the Doctor does point out in the episode itself that the robot is melting the ice, which means there's some sort of heater built in, but Delaine's able to damage them somewhat despite being at human-normal because frozen metal tends to be more brittle) and proceed on with their murder-business.

Also I found out while researching this that low-frequency sounds can also put out fire. Perhaps it's a potential function of the sonic screwdriver? It's probably not going to come up in this story (at least not in anything I have planned), but it was interesting to find out.

Research is fuuuun (even if the math attached to some of the things means nothing to me).

The Doctor doesn't really explain why he can't just use the TARDIS in the actual episode, so I used a bit of explanation from the Eleventh Doctor episodes The Lodger and The Angels Take Manhattan; time distortions make it difficult for the TARDIS to lock onto a position / signal and brute forcing it isn't an option.

The main thing that I'm not really satisfied with concerning this and the last chapter is that I wasn't really able to work in more of Reinette / Madame De Pompadour's actual history? Like the fact that when she was nine, a fortune teller told her and her mom that she'd someday reign over the heart of a king and so everyone was like 'okay, gotta start grooming this kid to become Louis XV's future mistress'.

Like the Doctor said – France, it's another planet.

Anyway, for more information on Madame De Pompadour, check out the Wikipedia page, because this Author's Notes is getting kind of long.