A/N: WARNING: This chapter contains detailed descriptions of gory medical procedures. Not for the squeamish!

Chapter 11: Dire Straits

"Oh my God! Doctor!" Clara cried. She dove to her knees and cradled his head in her lap.

"Missy!" Clara screamed back into the restaurant. "Missy, get out here!"

There the Doctor laid on her front porch. Miraculously alive, but barely. Blood and pus caked the bandages which clung stickily to his swollen arms. His hair was wild and his face was scruffy with the shadowed beginnings of a beard. His feet were bound with rotten leaves, full of blisters and bruises. The black embroidered robe he wore was in tatters, hardly covering his torso down to his knees.

Dirt encrusted the front of his body. Sunburn and jaundice discolored his usually pasty white skin. His lips were dry and cracked. He looked like death. He mumbled incoherently, babbling nonsense. Clara felt his forehead. He was boiling hot to the touch.

How the hell did he survive the execution? Where the hell had he been? How did he find them? Nevermind that, she would have time for all her questions later. She brushed the wild hair from his forehead and felt tears welling up in her eyes. Now that the initial shock had worn off, she could start to process what was going on. The Doctor was back. Her Doctor. He had come back to her.

"Doctor, I've got you." She cradled his head and rocked gently. "I've got you."

Missy's heels stomped against the tile angrily. "Clara, this better be good!" She approached the door and looked over Clara's shoulder. Her jaw dropped.

"What the fu–"

"Missy!" Clara ordered. "Help me get him inside! He needs help!"

The man was on the brink of death. Missy had just gotten him back and she was not about to lose him again. Despite the grim situation, her heart somersaulted in her chest. The Doctor was alive. Swallowing her surprise, she dove into action, grabbing his legs while Clara gripped him under the shoulders. Grunting, they dragged him inside and locked the door. Obviously, they were closed for the day.

The Tardis warbled in what could only be described as shock. Her rotors spun wildly. The Cloister Bells tolled. She rearranged the rooms so that the first door in the hallway was the sickbay.

They gently set him down on the cool waxed floors of the diner. "Wait here," Missy commanded, running off to the sickbay to retrieve a gurney.

Clara held the Doctor's clammy hand in her own. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. She shouted his name but no response came. His pulse was thready and erratic. What kind of hell had he been through? Tears slipped down her face at the thought. She carded her fingers through his sweaty hair and promised him that she would never let him go again.

Missy returned with a clattering gurney. She lowered it as far as it would go and locked the brakes. She gripped his legs again, shock barely concealed in her eyes. "Clara, help me!"

Clara snapped out of her trance and gripped him tightly by the armpits. She heaved him up with her chest, grunting with exertion. He was heavier than he looked. Missy swung his legs around. Together, they managed to get him up onto the gurney. Clara raised the rails and they ran to the sickbay as fast as their legs could carry them.

Inside the ward, the Tardis laid out a vast array of medications and antibiotics. She had scanned him upon entry. She whirred with desperate worry. Sepsis, congestive heart failure, renal failure, liver failure. Her thief was dying and she could not take off to bring him to a real hospital. His life was in Clara's and Missy's hands.

Bursting into the sickbay, they positioned the gurney in the middle of the room and threw on the brakes. Panting, the two looked at each other through wide eyes.

"W-What do we do? What do we do?" Missy stammered, panic lacing her voice.

"How should I know?!" Clara cried. "I only know basic first aid! I'm a teacher!"

Her face lit up. She had an idea. "The Tardis telepathic circuits!"

Without taking the time to explain, she bolted back to the console room. She flew up the stairs and pounced on the console. With no gentleness or care, she shoved her fingers deep into the telepathic matrix. "Tell me what to do!" she demanded.

The Tardis groaned at the psychic intrusion but was eager to help in any way she could. She pulled up her vast archives. Clara opened her mind and closed her eyes. Pink lightning danced around her fingers. The folds of the matrix sucked around her knuckles, drawing her in.

The Tardis opened up the connection roughly. Medical knowledge streamed directly into her head. It burned like fire. She screamed but did not let go. The information forced its way into her brain, rewriting her neural pathways in the blink of an eye. Sweat beaded on her forehead. Her legs trembled, threatening to buckle beneath her. Within moments, she knew how to treat the Doctor.

Abruptly, the matrix released her. She stumbled backwards with the sudden detachment. Her rear impacted the hard steel floors with a thud. Her head pounded in her skull, feeling raw like something had just been shoved into it. Her vision swam.

Wincing, she rose back to her feet with a wobble. She braced herself against the console until she found her footing. The room stopped spinning. With a hurried thank you to the ship, she ran back to the sickbay with her newfound knowledge.

While Clara was gone, Missy had unwrapped the slimy makeshift bandages from one of his arms. She grabbed a bag of saline and squeezed it as hard as she could into the wounds. Blood clots and pus dripped from his arms and swirled down into the drain the Tardis had molded into the floor.

Clara rushed back into the room, hyper like a wild animal. "Missy, I know what to do."

The first step was to get fluids and antibiotics into his system. She snapped on some gloves and snatched a bottle of iodine from a nearby surgical tray. She squirted it onto his chest liberally. She had to place a central line catheter into his subclavian vein in order to deliver the fluids fast enough. His blood pressure was in the toilet. One slight mistake and she could puncture the neighboring artery or even his lung. She could kill him. She had no choice but to try.

She felt for the landmarks the Tardis had inscribed in her mind and readied a needle. She took a deep breath, steeling herself. Slowly, she inserted it just above his right collarbone. Dark red blood welled up in the syringe and she knew she had hit the vein and not the artery. She gasped in relief. Thank God.

She unscrewed the syringe, leaving the needle in place and reached for a wire. Her hands began to shake with nervousness. She'd had no practice in this and had only just learned it. 'Get a grip, Clara,' she ordered herself.

She took a deep breath and fed the wire through the hollow needle and into the vein. She withdrew the needle and slipped the small catheter over the wire. Once placed in the vein, she carefully withdrew the wire. She capped the line and taped the catheter to his chest so it would not pull out.

"Damn, that was impressive." Missy congratulated.

Clara breathed a sigh of relief. The hardest part was over. "Thank you."

Clara yanked the wheeled IV pole over to the bedside and hung up several bags of fluids, medications, electrolytes, and strong broad-spectrum antibiotics. She could only hope that the Tardis was right about what he needed. She plugged the the lines to an IV pump and screwed the single catheter to the central line. She pressed a button on the pump, setting it to maximum flow. He needed immediate help. Within seconds, the concoctions flowed directly into his vein.

"Missy, we need to clean out these wounds." Clara tossed a box of blue nitrile gloves at her. "Glove up," she ordered.

Missy caught the box clumsily. This was way out of her depth. She hastily slid on the gloves with a snap. She grabbed his left arm which she had already started on and wiped out the lacerations with a piece of gauze. Luckily, the tissue was so swollen that it did not bleed much. She threw the spent gauze into the ground. Selecting another piece, she continued to wipe until most of the sticky pus was gone. Retrieving the bag of saline, she flushed the wounds again.

Clara took his right arm and unwrapped the bandages. She retched at the sight of the gory wounds. How the hell had he done this? They almost appeared to be claw marks as if he had been attacked by a bear. She rinsed out the gunk with saline until the water ran clear. She squirted iodine into the wound to sterilize it. She used gauze the same way Missy was doing to remove what the water could not. Soon, the wound was pink and glistening.

"Missy, hand me that staple gun." She reached out her hand expectantly.

"What the hell is that?" Missy questioned with frustration, unable to tell which tool was which on the large tray.

Clara gestured to it. "It's that white thing with the trigger."

"This?" Missy held up the gun.

"Yes, pass it to me, quick."

Missy gave it to her and resumed her work cleaning out his wounds. Clara pinched the torn skin together as best she could and held the staple gun over it. She pulled the trigger. With a click a little metal clip shot out and gripped the two ends together. It looked like one of those little clips that hold a bag of chips closed.

Clara continued to pinch and click for each wound until all three gashes had been closed. It was ugly, but it was doing the job. She wrapped them in sterile gauze and walked around to the other side of the gurney. She examined his lacerations. Missy had done an admittedly good job. The wounds looked clean and sterilized. Clara stapled to his left arm and stepped back.

Clara and Missy looked at each other in disbelief. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, they had a chance to properly think. Their Doctor was alive and safe in the Tardis. Where had he been? How had he found them? How was he still alive? They had so many questions but none of them mattered right now.

Clara hooked him up to some monitors. His blood pressure climbed steadily with the fluids they were giving him. His hearts had settled into a more regular rhythm, thumping quickly. The rate was higher than she would like, but it was progress.

All they could do now was wait and hope that the Tardis's medicines would work.

"Now that he's safe, he should enter a healing coma," Missy stated breathlessly. "There's nothing else we can do for him but pray."

Clara nodded, fighting against the tears threatening to spill over. She had never seen him in such dire straits. Watching him on that gurney brought back the horrible memory of his execution. His failed execution. She had seen his hearts stop. His face was the same so he had not regenerated. How was this possible?

"I'm gonna go and take another look at the evidence," Missy announced. She couldn't stand to see him like this any longer. She pulled off her gloves into the trash and left the room.

Clara dipped a clean rag into a bowl of cold water. She wrung it out and folded it neatly. She placed it on his forehead. Hopefully it would help bring his temperature down. The monitors beeped steadily, echoing through the silent halls of the Tardis.

Clara took another rag and added soap to the bowl. Carefully, she peeled the filthy robe off of his body and discarded it in the corner. The Tardis blipped it out of existence, along with the rest of the mess on the floor. God, he was so skinny. His body was covered in bug bites and small cuts. Gingerly, she dabbed the soapy cloth over his skin. What felt like centuries worth of grime and soot quickly blackened the rag. She threw it to the ground for the Tardis to take care of and reached for another cloth that the Tardis had spawned on the tray. She gently cleaned all the remaining dirt, pus, and blood from his body. In all, she went through eight rags.

In the corner appeared a fresh white hospital gown hanging from a peg on the wall. Clara thanked the Tardis and retrieved it. Carefully, she slipped it over and underneath him. She tied it off at the back and laid him back down.

Satisfied, she sunk down into a cushy chair by his bedside. She watched him intently, looking for any signs of change. He snored softly. She wondered if he was dreaming.

Clara yawned with exhaustion. She had stayed up the whole night and deep into the morning. Her head still ached with the volume of new information thrust into it. She scooted up the chair closer to the bed and rested her crossed arms on the mattress. She put her head down just for a moment. Before she knew it, she had passed out too.

A/N: You made it past the gory chapter! None of the rest will be like this. Don't forget to review!