A/N: FEAR = forget everything and run.

Part 2 of 10 of the episode "Living Nightmare."

Chapter 25: Forget Everything and Run

I don't even think. I just act.

"Leave her alone!" I scream on instinct as I rush at the man at the speed of lightning.

"Nova, don't!" Dad yells after me. "You'll get yourself killed! Nova!"

His voice falls on deaf ears as I launch myself at the man, football-tackling him to the wet ground. The force knocks the knife out of the man's hand. After a swift punch to the jaw, which knocks him senseless but not unconscious, I immediately snatch the knife from the ground and jump back up on my feet.

"Back off, jack, or I'll use this!" I yell, pointing the sharp end of the knife at the man's chest, which are both covered in fresh, as well as old, blood. "It'd be very unfortunate for you to get killed with your own weapon!" I then yell toward my father without turning my back on the dirty man, "Dad, run!"

But he doesn't run. Instead, he just stands there, stunned. "Nova, what the hell are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" I yell back at him. "I'm saving your ass—properly, this time!" I failed to protect him last time, but this time I will not fail. "Go! Find your friends! I'll catch up with you! I have to take care of this first!" I'm not going to let this jackass kill anybody else. I'll kill him before he even has a chance; after all, I am now the one holding the knife.

However, Dad still refuses to leave. "Nova, have you lost your mind?" he says, totally appalled that I—his daughter—am willing to kill someone in front of him. This sicko just killed an innocent woman in front of us, so yes, Dad, I would kill this man without question!

"Nobody else is gonna die in front of me!" I say seriously. "Certainly not you! Now go!"

To my great annoyance, Dad is not giving up. "Nova, you don't realize who this man is you're fighting!"

"I know exactly who he is!" I scream back at him. "He's a murderer! There's no telling how many innocent people he's killed before her! I'm not gonna let you be next! Stay down, scum!" I yell this last bit once I see the man attempt to get up, his shaggy beard dripping with blood and dirt. I then attempt to yell for Dad to find the police before the man gets away with another murder, that 'murder' being us.

Clearly, Dad doesn't even know how to give up. "He has no interest in killing me! He's only interested in killing women! Such as yourself! Surely, just from that fact, you should know who he is!"

I sigh. Dear God, why doesn't he get it? Why doesn't he get that I'm trying to save him—something I failed to do last time?

"I don't care who he is!" I groan. "I only care about all the lives I'd be saving once his ass is thrown in ja—!"

I am suddenly interrupted as the man lunges at me and tackles me to the ground, exactly like how I tackled him before. I am unable to catch myself as I fall backwards and abruptly lose my grip on the knife. Before I have a chance to grab the knife again, the man grabs it first and immediately pounces on me, like a cat to a mouse, pinning me to the ground by sitting on my hips, and attempts to stab at me. Before he plunges the knife in my throat, I manage to block him with my arm, but I end up getting stabbed in the right shoulder to the hilt. I instinctively scream in pain.

"Get off of her!" I hear Dad yell from a distance, and half a second later I feel the man being pulled off of me. Through the blurry haze in my vision due to the pain, I see Dad pull the man backwards, but he ends up pulling him back way too hard, and they both end up falling to the ground. Dad attempts to hold the man down, but, without warning, he swings his head back into Dad's chin hard, cutting his lip on one side. Dad yelps in pain and releases the man as he jumps back up and goes after me again.

But this time I am ready for him. Somehow, I manage to pull the knife from my shoulder at just the right time for the man to jump on me again, holding the knife between us as he falls on top of me, this time in an attempt to strangle me. However, he only goes as far as to wrap his fingers around my throat and squeeze slightly but not tightly. The moment his stomach collides with mine, I feel the knife press between us, followed by the warmth of something sticky and liquid-y quickly spread around my waist to the ground below me. There is a look of complete and utter shock on the man's face before I see a light fade in his eyes, and he falls silent and deadweight against me, the knife stuck between us and the sticky substance continuing to spread around my body.

"Nova!" Dad rushes to my aide, his bottom lip bloodied and bruised on one side.

"Dad…" I say weakly as I struggle under the man's weight. "Help…" He grabs the man's shoulders as I push from below, and we both manage to move the man's body off of me. I am able to breathe easier once his body is pulled aside. We both gasp once we reveal the sharp end of the knife imbedded in the man's chest and my dress covered in blood.

"Nova…" Dad gasps when he sees my shoulder after he pulls me to my feet. "Your shoulder…"

"Don't worry about me," I say, shaking my head, as I cover my shoulder with my hand, trying to stop the heavy bleeding. "What about the woman?" Surely, we saved her, right; now that that scumbag is dead?

"Blimey, the woman!" Dad gasps in horror. "How could I forget?" He then rushes to the thirty-something-year-old woman and kneels next to her, examining her injuries. I follow close behind.

It's not good. The woman's abdomen is completely torn open, blood pooling everywhere around her. I hate to be pessimistic, but there is absolutely no way anyone could survive an injury like that.

However, Dad is determined to save this woman; or at least try to keep her calm during her last moments. I can sense it through our link. "It's alright, ma'am," he says soothingly to her, keeping her calm. "Don't be afraid. I'm a doctor. I'm here to help you. Focus on me, yeah; right at me." Surprisingly, he doesn't attempt to stop the woman bleeding out all over the ground beneath her. Does this mean he also knows she is not going to make it? He must; otherwise he would be attempting to stop the bleeding, right?

"Doctor…" the woman whimpers weakly as the light slowly fades from her eyes.

Dad nods sincerely. "That's right; that's who I am. I'm the Doctor." The poor woman's eyes then begin to slowly close, and Dad immediately says, "Don't try to sleep. Keep your eyes open; focus on me. Help is coming. You'll be alright soon."

"Doc…tor…" she repeats Dad's name before her eyes close completely, and her chest settles with a final breath…and then nothing. I sigh as I struggle to fight back a tear that threatens to spill from my eye.

"Ma'am, I need you to focus on me," Dad says, unbeknownst to her death; either that, or he already knows she is dead but just doesn't want to believe it. "Right at me. Can you do that? Ma'am?" He gives her shoulder a gentle shake. "Ma'am, I need you to open your eyes. I need you to focus on me, okay? Can you open your eyes for me?"

"Dad…" I say as I lay a hand on his shoulder. "She's gone."

Dad is still and silent for a few moments before he slowly rises from the ground, not taking his eyes off the dead woman. "We were too late," he says softly as he reaches for my hand in comfort, his eyes misty with tears.

"I'm sorry," I say as I squeeze his hand tightly. "There's nothing you could've done. Not after what he'd done." I say this with contempt in my hearts as I turn to the man's corpse, only to find it missing from the place where we left him. "What the…?" I say, totally shocked. "Where did he go?" I glance around the alley, but his body is nowhere to be found. I even walk up and down the alley, but there isn't any sign of him anywhere—no blood, no knife…nothing. "But…he was dead!" I say, completely astounded. "How could he just disappear?" It's completely impossible…right?

"Because that's exactly what he did," Dad murmurs under his breath, which confuses me more.

"How?" I say incredulously. "There's no way he could've gotten up and walked off. He was dead; stabbed right in the chest!" I glance to my father and see his serious look, and I frown. "What, you're saying he literally disappeared?" He nods slowly. "How is that possible?"

"Perhaps because he wasn't real," he says, but the way he says it is strange, like he knows something; though what, I don't know.

"What do you mean, he wasn't real?" I say with a puzzled frown. "Of course he was real! He almost killed me! Look at my dress; it's covered in his blood! And how do you think you got that bruised lip? You didn't get it from nothing, and I didn't just randomly decide to squirt ketchup all over my dress, if ketchup even exists in this time-period." Absolutely nothing about this situation makes any sense…at least not to me.

"Actually, ketchup does exist in this time-period," Dad says. "It was invented in 1812 by a brilliant scientist named—"

"Cut the history lesson!" I say, not having a care in the slightest about that. "My point is that this—" I gesture to my bloody dress. "—happened! And that bloody lip of yours, it happened too, and we weren't the ones responsible! How could we have been? Like I said, you didn't punch yourself in the face, and I didn't involve myself in a one-woman food fight. And we certainly didn't kill that woman! All of this was done by someone else—ow!" I growl in pain from my injured shoulder, holding my hand against it more tightly. "Whoever that sick son of a gun was!"

"Jack the Ripper," he confirms before he lays a hand on my other shoulder. "And you need to calm down, Nova. You're losing a lot of blood. We need to stop your shoulder from bleeding any more than it already has."

"To Hell with my shoulder!" I growl back at him, believing this situation to be much more important than my own health. "I'm telling you, we—!"

I then pause. Did he just say 'Jack the Ripper?' As in 'the Jack the Ripper?' The notorious serial killer of Victorian London?

"Wait, you're serious?" I say in genuine shock. "That's who I fought? I fought Jack the Ripper? He was really famous, wasn't he?"

Dad shushes me (Dude, seriously? Is there really a need for that?) and says with a nod, "Yes, Jack the Ripper was famous, but obviously not for the right reasons. Don't talk anymore, Nova. Preserve your energy. Madame Vastra should be meeting us shortly."

I am about to respond when we suddenly hear a man's voice from the opposite side of the alley call in a worried tone, "Mary? Mary, my beloved, where are you? Please answer me!"

We turn to see a man in his mid-to-late forties emerge from around the corner. He abruptly pauses at the sight of the woman's mangled body lying in a large pool of blood.

"Mary!" the man cries, grief-stricken. "My love! No!" He drops down and cradles the woman's dead body—whom I assume is his wife—in his arms and sobs uncontrollably, burying his face in her hair. "What monster did this?" He then looks up at Dad and I and frowns. "You! Did you…?" He is suddenly at a loss for words, like he is indecisive as to believe whether or not we were responsible for his wife's murder (we're obviously not).

Dad glances at me in disbelief and then back at the man. "Um…no," he sputters. "This is…no. Sir, this isn't what it looks like." He then steps away from me, revealing my bloody dress to the man. The man immediately gasps in horror at the sight of me.

"You!" he growls, glaring accusingly at me. "You did this! You killed my beloved!"

What the actual freak?! Is he serious?!

"What?" I exclaim, in total disbelief that he—that anyone—would think I had done such a terrible thing. "No! No! I didn't do this! He didn't either! Neither of us did this! It was Jack the Ripper! He did this, not us!"

"Liar!" the man screams at me, still cradling his dead wife. "Jack the Ripper is gone; has been for years! Don't you dare tell me he killed my wife when you are the one covered in her blood!"

This can't seriously be happening!

"No!" I say seriously. "This isn't her blood; it's Jack's! He tried to kill me, but I ended up killing him instead!" How can I possibly prove that? I honestly don't think I can, especially since his body had mysteriously disappeared.

"Sir, you've got it wrong!" Dad says, taking my side. "She didn't kill your wife! She tried to save her! We both did…but we ended up arriving too late. I'm deeply sorry." If only we had arrived sooner…

"Save it for the rope!" the man growls angrily at him as he lays his wife's body gently back on the ground. "You'll be tried and hanged for this treachery!" He then runs off, presumably to fetch the cops.

"Wait, stop!" Dad yells after the man. "You've got it wrong!" But, of course, it is fruitless.

I can't believe this! I was just falsely accused of murder! Seriously, is there anything good that ever happens when it comes to travelling with Dad? So far, in my personal experience, nothing good has happened while travelling with Dad (no offense to him). Something tells me this might be a normal thing to get used to, but I'm not sure I want it to be normal, at least not for me. How does Dad even live like this?

"Great!" I huff. "First proper adventure through Time and Space, and I'm about to be hanged after being falsely accused of murder. All thanks to a dead guy, I might add." I then frown. "Speaking of which, if it's true what that dillweed just said about Jack the Ripper being dead for years, how come he was still around today? I mean, I couldn't have fought a ghost, could I? I mean, I couldn't have! Ghosts can't bleed; they don't leave behind anything, except maybe ectoplasm. But this isn't ectoplasm; this is real blood!" He had to have been real; otherwise the blood on my dress would have disappeared along with him.

"That is a very good question that will, unfortunately, have to wait to be answered later," Dad says with a sigh of disappointment. "Right now, we need to leave the premises before that man comes back with the authorities." He gently wraps his arm around me and guides me toward the opposite end of the alley from where the man had gone.

Unfortunately, we are not fast enough to escape. "The only place you'll be going is the Gallows!" the man growls at us again, this time with a large group of police bobbies in tow. He then turns to one of the bobbies—one with a more professional looking uniform with extra badges, including one that says 'Chief of Police' on the front—and says, again pointing accusingly at us, "Officer, arrest these villains! They killed my wife, my beloved Mary! I saw it with my own eyes! They stabbed and killed her right in front of me!"

Ugh, seriously? I want to friggin' punch this guy!

"What?" I say, feeling greatly offended. "That's a lie! That's complete and utter bullshit! We didn't kill her!"

"Says the murderer literally covered in blood!" the bastard glares at me as four bobbies approach and surround us, one of them with his weapon—a large club of some sort—gripped tightly in hand.

I've had enough of this jackass. "I told you, asshole," I continue screaming as the bobbies restrain us and clap us in handcuffs, "this isn't her blood! It's Jack the Ripper's! He tried to kill me after he killed your wife! We tried to save her! Why are you too dumb to not see tha—?"

"Nova!" Dad yells at me in a warning tone. "Be quiet!" But I'm not finished yet.

I am about to say something more when the Chief of Police yells over us, "Enough! You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you."

"That will not be necessary, Chief," an unfamiliar female voice speaks over the crowd of bobbies. "An attorney has already been appointed. In fact, I am appointing myself as their attorney." A few bobbies back away to let a veiled woman through, dressed in all black; though there is something strange about her face under the veil, which takes on a green tinge.

Dad sighs in relief, apparently recognizing the woman. "Madame Vastra! Blimey, am I glad to see you! Your timing couldn't have been better!"

"And your timing couldn't have been worse, old friend!" she snaps back in an accusing tone, like she's angry with him for something he had (or hadn't) done in the past.

Ooh! Burn! I can't help thinking in my head as a response to their tense interaction. I then realize that Dad had named the woman 'Madame Vastra,' and I wonder if this is the woman—the Silurian—that he told me about earlier.

'Yes, Nova,' Dad confirms telepathically to me, 'this is the friend I told you about. The Veiled Detective of Paternoster Row, Madame Vastra.'

"It's alright, Chief Halloway," the veiled woman, Madame Vastra, says calmly. "I shall be taking it from here."

The Chief immediately shakes his head. "Madame, I'm afraid I can't let you take them. They've been accused of murder, and I have to see to it that they are properly interrogated."

"And that they receive proper medical attention," the bobby holding me adds, who had been holding me much too tightly by my injured shoulder. "The girl is injured badly, sir. She is bleeding profusely from her right shoulder." He then holds out his hand, which is covered in my blood from having touched my shoulder this whole time. He stares at the rusty-orange color curiously, commenting, "With a very unusual blood color."

His comment makes me cringe in fear, worrying that they'll discover Dad's and my secret to not being human solely based on the color of my blood on his hands.

Madame Vastra must have somehow sensed my nervousness, because she suddenly speaks up and says, "I insist, gentlemen. I will see to it that this man and his companion are treated well under my care. I will even interrogate them myself once they're back to full health. If anything goes south, I shall alert you and your men. You have my word."

The Chief is silent for a minute, staring suspiciously at us, before he reluctantly agrees with a wave of his hand, "Very well. Release them!" The bobbies hesitantly begin un-cuffing us.

"And be sure to give Mr. Langley my sympathies," Vastra adds, nodding to the man, who continues to stare accusingly at us.

After hearing that the bobbies are releasing us, Mr. Langley scowls at us, saying incredulously, "You're just going to release these scumbags? After all the evil they've done? Unbelievable!" He then says after making eye contact with me, "You won't get away with this! I'll make sure you rot in Hell! There will be justice for my beloved! One day!" His words immediately make me think of the school intruder's words: 'She will be ours! One day!'

"That will be all, Mr. Langley," the Chief speaks up again before he orders the other bobbies to attend to the poor woman's dead body. He has a brief interaction with Vastra—Vastra murmuring something about whether or not they've found 'her' yet, to which the Chief shakes his head and assures her that they will keep looking—before he sends Vastra away to take care of us.

"Thank you, Madame Vastra," Dad says to her after the bobbies are out of earshot. "Truly, from the bottoms of my hearts. I don't know where we'd be if you hadn't shown up when you did."

"On your way to the Gallows, I should think," she replies with a shrug. "And 'thank yous' are not necessary. You asked me to meet you here, and I answered your call." She then lowers her voice to a pointed whisper. "Unlike you, who decided to answer my calls late. An entire week late, I might add. Point taken, I hope." Her statement makes Dad go silent, feeling immensely guilty.

"Awkward," I can't help murmuring under my breath to myself.

"Shall we?" Vastra says, gesturing toward the end of the alley.

Dad and I begin following the Veiled Detective. However, I am stopped by a strange sense—a sense of being watched from behind. I turn back around to see a transparent, brunette woman, dressed in a hospital gown, staring at me pleadingly. I am momentarily startled to see the woman.

"Doctor!" the woman calls out to me, her voice sounding like an echo, like she is near and far at the same time.

"Who are you?" I frown at her, feeling slightly creeped out by her presence.

"Doctor!" she repeats in a more desperate tone, and it seems like she's speaking toward me, like she thinks I'm her personal doctor, but I'm obviously not. I've never even met this woman.

I shake my head at her. "I'm not—!" I start to say before I'm suddenly interrupted.

"Nova!" Dad calls from behind me. "What are you doing? Who are you talking to?"

I turn back to him for a second, startled by his sudden presence. I then turn back to the ghostly woman only to find her gone. I frown, looking around in confusion. "There was…" I start to say, but I can't seem to get any other words out.

What exactly do I say? 'There was a ghost of a hospital patient that called to me from beyond the grave, mistaking me for her personal doctor?' Yeah, like anyone would believe that.

Or, perhaps she wasn't calling out to her personal doctor, but rather the Doctor—my father. Her face did look somewhat familiar. She looked strikingly similar to the woman in the 'missing persons' poster with the name 'Jenny Flint.' Could that have been her—the 'Paternoster Gang' member?

"Come on," Dad says in an insistent tone, clearly oblivious to my confusion, "we need to go with Vastra. We can't wander off anymore, you understand? We need to find out what's really going on here. Something tells me you didn't just fight a ghost back there." He then turns back to head toward the end of the alley where Vastra is waiting patiently for us.

I turn back around to see if there is any evidence of the ghostly woman, but there is none; not even the bobbies seemed aware of her presence. Only I was.

But why? Whoever this woman is, why would she only appear to me? How could I possibly help her—someone who may now be dead?

"Nova!" Dad calls to me in a more urgent tone, forcing me to forget everything about the woman and follow.

"Coming!" I call back as I reluctantly do just that.

A/N: TO BE CONTINUED!