Every computer on the TARDIS was interconnected to a central mainframe. From the console room, with only a matter of keystrokes, the Doctor was able to access the data from the infirmary.
Not that he was particularly happy about the convenience.
QUARANTINE UNIT: OCCUPIED, read the system report in blinking bold. OCCUPANT: HUMAN ELEMENT.
OCCUPANT COMPROMISED.
UNIDENTIFIED ELEMENT PRESENT.
The Doctor tugged off his glasses and threw them against the console, hard enough for the impact to echo to the domed ceiling and back again.
"What do you mean, unidentified?" he hissed, barely keeping his voice down.
The monitor, a bit embarrassedly under the severe castigation, continued to display the same inconclusive result.
Trying to reconfigure the interface got him nowhere. He was faced with a resounding error screen. Species Unidentified, it read in Gallifreyan, text flashing red: No Matches Found.
He rubbed a hand furiously over his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to think. "Cross reference the bio-scan you've taken of Martha with all known extant organisms stored in the Matrix," he instructed, after a moment of tense contemplation.
A loading ticker obediently appeared as his search parameters were processed. "Come on," he muttered, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Let's be having you, then."
The screen flickered and there was a sharp displeasing beep.
No Matches Found.
He let out a vicious sigh. "Right. Expand the search to include extinct organisms and theoretical beings."
A dull, stuttering little whir emanated from the walls themselves, sounding very much like a sheepish apology as the computer beeped harshly at him again. No Matches.
His open fist hit the controls, spurred by frustration. "Absolutely useless," he growled. "You've got nothing for me? Not one clue as to how to get rid of this thing?"
He hadn't known it was possible for a darkened computer to appear so pitifully hangdog, but somehow the TARDIS was managing it.
Shamed, the display retreated into screensaver mode. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, drained, staring back at himself through parted fingers in the black reflection of the monitor.
There was a smudge of lipstick still on his neck, in the smeared but recognisable silhouette of Martha's lips. He glowered at it a moment, feeling ill at the sight. His eyes were mildly bloodshot; his hair jutted up at wild angles, sticking out in distressed clumps. Breathing a rough sigh, he stuck both hands in it, raking all ten fingers through to ruffle it back into a less demented, more intentional chaos.
"Some sentient entity," he murmured to himself, pensive, dragging his fingers back through his hair to grab the back of his neck. "Likely gaseous, given the smell of vorax and ceranium. Has the capacity to possess organic hosts. Has a very specific drive for a specific kind of energy. But… does it need that energy to survive? Is it starving to death? Is that why it's deteriorating Martha's cellular integrity? Or is that just the strain it's putting on her human body, playing host to this thing?" His jaw clenched. "Or, is it just using her as a hostage, killing her slowly, to force me into letting it go before she dies?"
The TARDIS was sympathetically silent, offering a gentle stream of soothing air from a nearby vent as he talked through his uncertainty, his brimming anger – his poorly-repressed, rapidly surfacing panic.
"I don't know," he reported dully, to the empty, cavernous room. It was quiet and cold to the declaration. His eyes landed on the opposite side of the console, finding it abnormally vacant, lacking warm dark eyes and curious smile, following his every movement. "How do I get this thing out of you?" he asked it.
The scanner blinked, data trawling useless across the LCD readout.
HUMAN ELEMENT: COMPROMISED.
CELLULAR INTEGRITY DEGRADING.
FULL DEGRADATION IN: 09:13:42.
41.
40.
He didn't have time. She's dying right now, the thing had said; and it had been telling the truth.
Nine hours. That was all he had. Not even a full day. An axe hanging over her head – primed to fall unless he could work this thing out, and soon.
No information, no leads, no idea where to start. Nine hours. Normally the sort of impossible challenge he'd love to crack his knuckles and dig into – not, however, when a friend's life hung in the balance.
And nine hours – that was only the time he had until she died. The pain would find her much, much sooner. Death by cellular degradation; the Doctor had seen it up-close, and it was nasty. A slow, agonising, outright torturous way to go. It would be far less than nine hours before every system of hers began shutting down, every part of her body malfunctioning and deteriorating, organs and flesh and tissues oozing apart and bleeding to sludge… while, the entire time, she remained conscious. Suffering.
His stomach performed a positively flawless Olympic dive at the thought of it.
"There's got to be something," he breathed, head shaking, grasping at his jaw and staring at the screen. "Show me her scan again."
A window popped open. It was, to his puzzlement, not the one he had requested.
The Doctor leant closer and squinted quizzically. It took him a moment to figure out what exactly it was he was staring at.
When he did, he heaved a hard sigh.
"I know you're only trying to help," he acknowledged, putting a hand on the console. "But that won't work, old girl. I can't let it into me."
The analysis of his brain onscreen blinked insistently, to the contrary.
"Yes," he sighed heavily, "you're right. I would survive it. And yes, I'd be able to sustain it for a hell of a lot longer than Martha can. But I can't give that thing access to my memories or knowledge. I can't give it access to you."
The TARDIS very helpfully provided an image of a standard neural blocker on the screen.
"It won't work," the Doctor repeated stubbornly. "If I let it into me, sure, it'd save her life momentarily. But who's to say it wouldn't make things worse in the long run? Some volatile, merciless, intangible entity, obsessed with sex, with the entirety of time and space suddenly at its fingertips? At that point, everyone's in trouble." He winced. "Especially Martha. God knows what it'd make me do to her."
The time machine rumbled subtly, seeming to grouse. He could sense a very 'We'll cross that bridge when we get there' attitude coming from the ship, as well as a healthy dose of 'Either you want to save the human, or not.' But he wasn't surprised. This was a quandary, even in all her infinite knowledge, that she simply was incapable of understanding the nuance of as a machine.
"Thanks for trying to help," he exhaled heavily, giving the edge of the console a gentle pat. He let his eyes fall closed, channelling his appreciation. "And sorry for shouting."
The TARDIS gave a warm, diffident hum; forgiving without hesitation. It was enough to make him smile a little.
When his eyes opened, it was to new information on the monitor.
His hearts both fell precipitously. It was the full-body scan he'd ordered of Martha as soon as he'd made it back to the console room.
He felt a horrible weight in his throat. "Turn it off." The order was ignored, and he felt his temper flare. "I said turn it off," he demanded, looking up to the ceiling.
Instead, the scan remained – prompting him to glare at it.
And then, he stared, mouth opening.
Her cellular integrity was listed as 100%. The last time he'd checked, it'd been down to a harrowing forty-eight.
"What?" he breathed, straightening up. "What happened?"
That was when his eyes found the timestamp of the scan, and the wind was knocked from his sails.
"This was half an hour ago," he grunted. "Of course she was healthy then. What are you on about?"
Patiently, tolerating his slowness with grace in light of his emotional turmoil, the readout expanded, zooming in on one specific metric. He squinted.
"What's her brain chemistry got to do with anything?" he muttered. "It looks perfectly normal. Activity levels stable. Cortisol, adrenaline…oh." He blinked. "Whoa. Ohh-kay, that's a lot of dopamine. You aren't suggesting I give her drugs, are you?" His attention turned suspiciously to the ceiling. "You haven't been giving her drugs, have you?"
The stats on the screen persisted, blinking irritably. He sighed and returned to analysing the chart. "Yes. A lot of these are unusually elevated. Dopamine, vasopressin, oxytocin, norepinephri…"
Mid-list, he actually heard himself, and paused. He took another look at her brain activity levels, eyes widening. The line remained even for some time, but towards its end, it steadily began to climb; and then, shockingly, almost impossibly, it spiked. Double what should have been possible, for a young, female homo sapien.
After the spike, it made a slow descent, declining again – returning to its baseline fluctuation after roughly, from what he could glean, a four-minute period of elevation. Further investigation of the timestamp revealed this snapshot of her anatomy had been taken, based on the in-flight clock, precisely thirty-three minutes prior.
His brow furrowed. She hadn't been in the TARDIS, then. She'd been in proximity to it, clearly close enough for it to manage a remote scan of her physiology; but exactly thirty minutes ago, Martha had been…
…oh.
Oh.
He felt himself colour, vividly.
"Why are you showing me this?" he demanded, hands balling into fists as heat slid up the back of his neck. "You're only meant to monitor for medical emergencies. This is a… breach of privacy."
The TARDIS made a vague and huffing groan, which he interpreted to mean that he was still being monumentally thick and it was growing fatigued with explanations. Without prompting – to his great surprise – it began to run a simulation.
"Oh!" he said, brows flying up, the minute it did.
From the moment Martha had been taken over, her body had been labouring, struggling – and slowly failing – to accommodate the extraterrestrial entity within. But approximately thirty minutes ago, in a dingy bathroom stall in a nightclub: all of a sudden, she'd been healthy as a horse again.
All of a sudden, her neurochemistry was twice as potent as it ought've been.
That nameless, faceless bloke.
"It didn't just atomise him," he breathed, grasping either side of the screen as he leant into it, mouth ajar in a kind of morbid, bewildered fascination. "It absorbed him!"
It was vampiric, almost. Sickening and perverse and brilliant.
"It consumed him," the Doctor mused softly, almost whispering, head cocked sideways as he ran his tongue over his teeth in thought. "And it completely restored her."
If he could replicate that energy influx somehow – he could save her. Buy himself time to figure it out.
"You," he said, looking up to the ceiling with a grin, "are fantastic. Fantastic!"
The TARDIS gave a prim, modest little huff that seemed to amount to a flustered, oh, stop it, you.
But in a second, the Doctor's megawatt delight was gone, and he was back to frowning hard, rubbing his brow.
To replicate the energy… that was the challenge now.
I don't need this body. I don't need her; I need the energy.
It had told him as much, point-blank. Put the ball in his court from the start.
In the whole of the universe, there's no hit like it.
"Oh, blimey," he exhaled, dragging a hand down his face. Backing away from the console, staring at the solution it offered in wide-eyed dread. The backs of his thighs hit the Captain's chair, and he slowly sank down to sit on its edge, fingers pressed over his mouth as his brow crumpled in hard contemplation.
Orgasmic energy.
Bloody hell. Now where in creation was he going to source that from? Could hardly order it in bulk, could he?
It was the sort of primal, lifeblood, purely organic force that there was no imitating. He couldn't work his way out of it with a chemical replica or hologrammatic simulation; there had to be real, visceral euphoria for the entity inside her to feed on.
But Martha didn't exactly have a boyfriend, did she? She had no Mickey, no human man that the Doctor could simply scoop up and deposit in the quarantine chamber. There was no leaving the happy couple there for a couple of minutes as he piped in a bit of Marvin Gaye over the intercom and went to entertain himself with some Venusian sudoku.
And the idea was icky all over. Because to use a human man to save Martha would mean to kill the poor chap; and the Doctor wasn't in the business of allowing human sacrifices. It was, in fact, the sort of thing he historically got uptight over. The energy collection was so vicious it left nothing. Not bones, not skin, not hair: just dust. Even if Martha happened to have some blokes in her phone she was particularly friendly with, who wouldn't mind lending their – er – services, to the cause – he highly doubted any of them would go along with the ruse. Not knowing it ended with them being brutally, instantaneously incinerated at end.
To get a willing human man in proximity to Martha Jones, to give her the infusion she needed; it was totally unviable.
Unless…
Oh, there was a perilous thought, but…
Does it have to be human?
The creature had said nothing about human energy specifically. And it had gone on, and on, ad nauseam, about its needs, wants and desires.
The Doctor's gaze flicked away from the monitor then, eyes darting about uncomfortably – as though it had proposed something tremendously indelicate at top volume, and someone else might've overheard.
"I can't," he stated aloud.
Well – no. That was disingenuous. He very much could. Time Lords weren't necessarily meant to, but the Doctor had never much troubled himself with the dos and don'ts of Time Lord conduct. He wasn't a saint, in spite of the rumours. He'd been knocking about a frightfully long time, and during that rebellious and unsupervised time, he had gleefully meddled, interfered, fraternised… and, yes, acquainted himself with the depths of orgasmic energy. It had been a preferred endeavour, actually, of his eighth regeneration (a randy little thing, under the cravat and frills). The War had gone a long way in calming him down.
And so it wasn't a matter of ability. It was a matter of… well. Martha.
Sweet, clever, gentle Martha. Martha, who took care of him when he needed it.
Martha, who happened, rather inconveniently, to love him within an inch of her life.
"Ohhh," he groaned softly, and flattened both palms over his eyes, cradling his head in his hands.
This was unfathomably messy.
Martha could never quite seem to exhale in his presence. Always so wound-up he could almost hear her tick. For a while he had presumed it was a crush – which was fine, and hadn't been so problematic. Humans were always doing that, getting crushes, fancying people they oughtn't. The Doctor was used to being fancied, and had grown to find it rather amusing. Jane Austen, Cleopatra, that week and a half with Stephen Fry…
If she'd only fancied him, it wouldn't have been a consideration.
But Martha – she loved him. He knew it. He could feel it. He could hear her pulse when he walked in a room; could feel her fibrillating like a scared rabbit when they so much as brushed elbows; could smell her, exuding enough pheromones to fill the Thames, upon a perfectly innocent hug. Martha was all too happy to sacrifice life and limb, if it meant there was even a chance he'd be better off for it. To fling herself into the line of fire for his benefit.
It had long since gone beyond the realm of fancying with Martha. And therein lied the danger.
He could do irreversible damage, if he did not tread carefully.
Messy, messy, messy.
It meant her life. No part of him had any reservation, in theory, about saving her. He was a by any means necessary sort of man this time round, and he was hardly going to get squeamish about rescuing his friend – rules and regulations be damned. Shagging a travelling partner was against the rules, yes, for a rather long list of complex interpersonal reasons he had long ago decided upon. Letting his friend die when he had the power to stop it – not even on the map. He'd break a million arbitrary rules before he let something so heinous happen on his watch.
But in practise, it was a nightmare. Indulging in something so, well, intimate, as a matter of utility? With someone who loved him?
Forewarning, it-means-nothings and all, she'd gone to pieces over a kiss – the very first day they'd met. What the hell was a shag going to do to the poor woman, six months in?
"It's her life," he reiterated aloud, voice hardening.
Worse case scenario: she left him. The thought, as it had earlier, vaguely made him want to sick up. But was it truly worse, being alone, than her dying?
Of course it wasn't.
He couldn't lose anyone else.
The Doctor set his jaw and stood from the chair – mind thoroughly made up. With purpose, he returned to the console.
"I need to talk to her," he said. "She is still in there, isn't she?"
The analysis was conclusive. BRAINWAVE PATTERNS CONSISTENT WITH SUBJECT Martha Jones PREVALENT.
He gave a curt nod. And then he squared his shoulders and turned, striding down the ramp: heading back for the infirmary.
The doors whispered open when he came barrelling at them, hands in pockets as he swept into the room. "Oi, you! No lazing about."
The young woman curled on the coral slab in the quarantine chamber started. She sat up suddenly, turning to regard him – looking as frizzy as she was annoyed. She inspected him with narrowed eyes, and then said, quite harshly, "Where's my sandwich?"
"Oh, now we've got an attitude, have we?"
"You've been gone for ages!"
"Yes, I have," he said, marching up to the Perspex. "All your fault, of course. Wouldn't be in this mess at all, if you'd just get your own body and stop pinching other people's."
"So I don't get to eat, then. While you keep me prisoner." She glared at him, lips thinning. "There are galactic laws against this."
"There are galactic laws against possession and murder as well," he snapped. "So you really don't want to get into legality with me."
Quite deliberately, she turned around and laid down again on the cot: turning her back on him.
"Let me die in peace," she said.
The Doctor gave a massive sigh. "Don't be so dramatic," he scolded. "You'll be delighted to know, I've got something better for you than food."
She laid in hostile, hunched silence.
"Right," he said. "Well, I s'pose I'll just leave you here to languish, then. And take all my nice, tasty, harvestable energy with me."
Her head snapped up. She turned back around in bewilderment, scowling suspiciously.
"What energy?" she demanded, rising from the cot.
"Yeah, bet that got your attention," he scoffed.
Quickly, she crossed the cell, going to the Perspex in four strides. "What are you talking about?"
The Doctor gazed down at his companion's face and let out a flat sigh.
"I've got a deal for you," he said. "You give me back Martha Jones – you get what you want. Simple as that."
"You don't even know if she's still alive in this body."
"Don't play games with me," he growled. "Or I might just rethink my fair trade."
Her brow crept up, and her eyes flicked over him in a way he did not like at all.
"You're going to give me what I want?" she said, squinting. "You? Really?"
"Yeah, that's clever. Insult the person who holds your survival in their hands, that'll win me right over."
"I'm not insulting you," she said, frowning. "You're a Time Lord."
He bristled slightly at the statement; reminded, unpleasantly, that everything he had ever told Martha, this thing was now privy to.
"Problem?" he said, rather stiffly.
"I know of the Time Lords."
"Yeah, well, you don't know of this one."
"So, you're…" She seemed to regard him rather clinically, then. He felt himself go a bit warm under the collar, fists clenching in irritation when her gaze meandered below his waist. "You're capable, then."
"Would it be my bargaining chip, if I weren't?"
"I don't know. Time Lords are masters of deceit."
"Cheers," he drawled. "Unfortunately, no deceit today. Martha Jones dies without another dose of energy to reverse her cellular degradation. It's my only shot at saving her." His eyes fixed on hers. "So count yourself lucky."
Her head tilted thoughtfully, considering.
"You know what'll happen to you," she said slowly. "You saw it first-hand."
"Yes."
"It'll kill you."
Fat chance, he thought.
"Like I said," he told her. "Happens to the best of us."
Her eyes roamed him, untrusting. "You're willing to die for her?"
"I'm willing to do whatever it takes to save her."
"But you're hardly saving her. You're just extending her life by a few days." Her eyebrow lifted. "Maybe a week, depending on how… enthusiastic you are. I'll still be trapped in this bloody ship, when it's all said and done. Burning to death. Without energy."
"That doesn't sound like my problem," the Doctor replied, quite easily.
"Nothing will change. The degradation will continue in your absence, and both of us will die. You're not fixing anything by doing this. Only prolonging her torture."
"If I don't do this, she'll be dead in a matter of hours," he retorted. "Dead in a week versus dead in a day – I know which one would give me greater peace of mind, were I in her shoes. Thanks to you, there's nothing else for me to do. I don't have time for planning and scheming. This is the only way I can help her." He glared. "And are you really going to refuse a hit of your favourite drug in the universe?"
It shook her head, eyeing him suspiciously.
"That's what I thought," he said. "Now. Do we have a deal?"
Slowly, slightly, it nodded.
"Give me back Martha," he ordered. "And believe me, try to pull a fast one, and it will not end well for you."
The entity harumphed a bit, and rolled its eyes. Then it took a deep breath and seemed to concentrate hard on something.
Martha's eyes fixed just past his face, gazing into nothingness. There was no perceptible shift in her expression, no perceivable energy transfer. She just drew a rather deep and sudden breath, blinking as though waking from a dream.
Her eyes snapped left, pupils dilating, locking onto his.
"Doctor!" she exclaimed, starting to step forward; freezing in alarm, when she registered the Perspex an inch before her nose. "Er, wha…" Her head whipped around, nose wrinkling. "Um. Where am I?"