Chapter Two
It had taken a while for Martha to get used to how the TARDIS translated languages in her head. As far as AI translations go, the TARDIS was really good (probably because she wasn't actually artificial, but she was on that gray line between technology and organism and though Martha would never dare to call the TARDIS anything like "artificial" in front of the Doctor, in her mind it was hard to tell the difference). Often, Martha couldn't even tell that there was any translation going on. She understood Old English just as easily as Judoon, both of which were just as easy as the regular everyday English she spoke at home.
But every now and then, try as the TARDIS might, there were just certain translations that didn't quite make it to a realm of understanding for Martha.
Calder's stream of Irish Gaelic profanities was one of those instances.
She understood the translated English words and the tone to guess well enough, but between his accent and the slang references, the actual meaning was (thankfully) lost on Martha.
"Quite the mouth you've got," Martha commented as she knelt on the pavement next to the bodies of the Doctor and Angel to check the Doctor's vitals.
Calder replied something else that didn't quite translate but sounded rude. In the next moment, though, he looked abashed and added, "Sorry."
"No worries," Martha replied, "I'm not actually sure what you said. Besides," she sat back on her heels, satisfied that at least the Doctor was alive and that blood wasn't gushing out of him. Still, he was completely out. "I'm inclined to agree."
"Is he okay?"
Martha nodded. "He's alive," she confirmed. "I'm worried about broken bones, especially vertebrae; not to mention concussions. I'm a doctor - I'm in residency - but I can't exactly check for any of those things in an alley with a vampire on top of him."
"We'll take the win that he's alive for now," Calder replied. "First we've got to get Angel tied up." Calder put his hands on his hips as he considered the problem. He had the sort of face that was initially boyish in a handsome kind of way, but with the grimness of the situation, Martha could see a hardness that lingered under the surface and sharp lines of stress that hadn't etched themselves in yet, but would in not-too-many years.
"Do we?" Martha asked.
Calder nodded. "Fast. If Angel's really soulless… You don't have rope or ties of some sort on you, do you?"
Martha shook her head. "But I'm sure the Doctor does somewhere in his coat. Reaching in there blind is a dangerous activity, though. Based on experience I don't recommend it."
This was a perfect lead-in to a line about how a piranha could even survive in the Doctor's pockets, but Calder didn't take the bait. He merely accepted this response, the corners of his eyes crinkling with thought. A moment later he swallowed and said, "Okay, we're going back to my place; I have stuff there. I'm calling a cab."
"Won't the driver ask awkward questions about why we have two unconscious men with us?"
"Cabs are self-driving," Calder replied. He held his palm in front of him face-up and his thumb tapped a black ring on his middle finger. A hologram appeared in the palm of his hand and he started interacting with it, presumably calling a cab. "And I live too far away for us to drag them. Besides, what'll the neighbors think?"
It was a grim attempt at a joke and Martha replied with an equally grim "Ha."
Moments later the hologram was gone and Calder was bending down next to Martha. "Help me get Angel close to the street. You get his legs. If he wakes up, just drop him and run."
The seriousness with which he said it made Martha's heart race, but she hurried to help him carry Angel's body down the alley. They watched closely for signs of Angel waking up, but he remained a very dead (and cumbersome) weight to move.
When Angel had been propped against the wall, Calder volunteered to watch for the cab (and over Angel) and to call for her if and when something changed while she went back to tend to the Doctor. Grateful for the space and the lookout, Martha hurried back.
Kneeling down next to the Doctor again, Martha re-checked his vitals and gently palpated his chest and neck for signs of breaks and swelling. As she was leaning over his body, she noticed a strange crinkling in her pocket.
The note! Martha quickly pulled out the mysterious note that Angel had given her in her own handwriting and looked at it again.
Read alone, the envelope said.
Glancing back down the alley where Calder was pacing and focused on Angel, Martha decided this was as alone as she was likely to get. Maybe the note inside was really from the Doctor, telling her exactly what needed to be done to fix the problem (which problem? All of them, hopefully).
Tearing open the envelope, Martha pulled a single torn bit of paper out.
The note read: Bring a mirror to the Tower.
Martha read it twice, checked the back of the paper, and checked the envelope in case she missed something.
There was nothing else. Just, Bring a mirror to the Tower.
"What the hell?" she murmured.
Also, it wasn't the Doctor's handwriting, it was hers. Definitely hers. It was her hasty doctor's scrawl, so really, she probably shouldn't have worried about anyone potentially reading it over her shoulder. Why would she have told herself to bring a mirror, of all things to… "the Tower"? What tower?
Martha glanced back at Calder, who was still standing guard over Angel near the street.
She shoved the note back in her pocket. One thing at a time. Lord knew there were plenty of other things to worry about in that moment than a mirror and a tower…
"Shitshitshit," Calder muttered as he rummaged frantically through his weapons chest. Angel had warned him to keep it neat and orderly in case of emergencies, but he'd taken it like a parent tells you to keep your room clean in case of company. He winced and swore again as his finger hit something sharp. "This is so incredibly bad."
Martha bent over the Doctor, who had been laid (not dumped) on top of the pile of laundry on Calder's couch. At least it was clean laundry.
They'd dragged the soulless corpse that was Angel into Calder's bedroom. Which was not where Calder wanted a soulless vampire. But handcuffs would make the situation marginally better.
If he could find them.
"I think the Doctor's waking up," Martha reported. "Are you sure your friend is going to be okay? I mean, I get that he's not human, but that was a pretty big fall."
"I've seen Angel survive worse," Calder replied. "The question isn't whether he's going to be okay. The question is, are we? Ah!" He found the handcuffs and dashed back across his small living room to his even smaller bedroom.
Angel was still out, it seemed, but at this point he could be faking it. Angel had warned Calder about his soulless self, but not extensively. It had mostly been, "If I lose my soul, you'll have to kill me." Aside from that, he'd heard stories. Frightening stories.
But Calder had been fighting vampires for almost twenty years, and had been a Champion for the Powers That Be almost as long. He wasn't going to kill one of his best friends, his mentor, and his Seer if he could help it.
Calder sucked in a breath and went up to Angel. He was still as stone and Calder tried to remember seeing him that unmoving before. Had he ever seen Angel sleep? Had he paid attention? The longer he dallied the more likely Angel would come to. Calder reached out, picked up Angel's nearest hand, and slapped one of the cuffs on.
Calder hardly dared to breathe (like that would rouse the knocked-out vampire back to consciousness). He reached for the other hand. Picked it up. Slapped the other cuff on. Angel didn't stir.
Calder let out a breath of relief and hurriedly backed away to find some rope for Angel's feet.
"Oh, my head!" he heard the Doctor's voice in the other room.
Calder heard Martha ask the Doctor to follow her finger with his eyes.
"No, no, I'm fine, what happened?" the Doctor said as Calder came back into the room and headed back over to his weapons chest.
"Just do it, Doctor. Really, we should be checking for neck injuries, but Calder's busy handcuffing your other friend, who is apparently a vampire. So those exist now. Thanks for the warning."
"I wasn't expecting them," the Doctor replied. He was sitting up and holding the towel of ice that Martha had scavenged from the kitchen against the side of his head. "What'd I miss?"
"That fae woman disappeared, for one thing. Calder said it's a teleportation spell," Martha said. "And for another thing, after the witches, I thought your spaceship would be more...sciency, and a lot less Grimm's fairy tales, you know?"
Calder bent over his weapons chest again, grabbed the much-easier-to-find bundle of rope, and hurried back into the bedroom.
"Stories have to be based on something, right?" the Doctor's voice said dismissively from the living room. Calder could still hear everything through the open door. "Oh! But I was thinking, that gun, it's not really a gun. It's a receptacle. Probably from Red Four, but I didn't get a good look at it. It's for meditation, you know. Just pull yourself out of yourself, but they had a trick for keeping the body from shutting down in its absence. But like you said, Martha, Angel's a vampire. He's technically dead so we should be able to reverse it!"
"That's wonderful!" Martha agreed. She raised her voice and added, "Did you hear that, Calder? We might be able to wake him up!"
Calder was halfway under his bed, threading the rope to wrap around the whole damn thing. Angelus couldn't walk if he had a bed strapped to him, right?
"No!" Calder shouted back at Martha and the Doctor. "We are not waking him up until his soul is back in his body!"
He heard footsteps and Martha stuck her head through the doorway, looking incredulous that Calder was currently tying up a corpse. "Isn't it the same?" she asked.
"God no," Calder replied, popping up to throw the rope over Angel's legs before diving back down under the bed to get it. "Without his soul, Angel was one of the most legendary vampires there ever was. And that's not for saving puppies."
"Oh," Martha said.
The Doctor appeared behind her, looking appraisingly over Calder's handiwork. "Angel did always say he had been bad in the past. I thought it was more of a general regret-the-decisions-of-your-youth thing."
"There are books written about his bad decisions," Calder replied, pulling the rope tight. He started tying knots anywhere and everywhere he could think to tie knots to secure the whole thing. "They read kind of like horror-holos." He looked up briefly and added, "All Angel himself has really told me about what he was like is that if he ever loses his soul I'll have to kill him as fast as I can."
"Okay, so before we continue shooting and stabbing everyone we meet," the Doctor said, clearly annoyed, but Calder had no idea why, "can we maybe consider just putting the soul back?"
"About that," Martha said, "the gun's broken."
"It's not actually a gu-what?" The Doctor turned to look at Martha.
"It fell under you. And him," Martha nodded at Angel. "I gathered the pieces in case you know how to fix it. Well, that and it seemed a bit too dangerous to just leave laying around on the street."
"Which is why we're kind of fucked," Calder said, testing the strength of his knot. "I need more rope for his arms…"
The Doctor patted at his pockets, plunged a hand into his jacket and pulled out a length of rope. An unreasonably long length of rope. He tossed it at Calder. "Are ropes really going to hold him?" he asked.
"I don't know, honestly," Calder replied, starting to tie the end of the rope around the bedframe. "But we don't need the gun to re-soul him. We just need a spell and a few ingredients. I think Angel has everything at his place. The ropes just need to hold him long enough to do the spell."
"Ah," the Doctor said. "A spell. Even so, how about you show me the-the gun, Martha? Keep our options open?"
"Yeah, okay," Martha agreed. "So that girl wasn't a Carrionite?" she asked as she and the Doctor headed back down the short hall back to the open living room/kitchen area. "She certainly didn't look like one."
"Nah," the Doctor said, "they're locked up tight."
Calder finished tying Angel to the bed as securely as he could, and then did a sweep of his room to clear away anything that could be used as a weapon (and quickly toss some dirty clothes in the hamper). Maybe it was Angel's hesitancy to really talk about his evil days, but Calder felt more nervous than usual about this whole thing. He'd faced plenty of soulless vampires before; was Angel really all that different?
The books said so. The guys down at the Dragon's Crown said so. Angel said so by insisting that Calder would have to kill him. (But then, Angel was prone to melodrama.)
Maybe part of it was that Angel was gone. Calder couldn't ask him any of these questions. He couldn't clarify anything. Calder was going to have to make difficult decisions about one of his best friends alone. Well, and maybe with these Martha-and-Doctor people. Calder had met the Doctor once, about five…no, six years ago. He'd looked much older, with graying hair and a stern but kind demeanor. He'd instructed Calder not to tell Angel they'd met - something about being from too far ahead in the timeline - and Calder hadn't. Aside from that, he'd heard Angel reference the Doctor before, but mostly in the form of a complaint. Usually concerning the mess he'd left in Angel's apartment.
Calder headed out to his living room where Martha and the Doctor both sat on the couch, bent over his chipped oval coffee table in the process of sorting through broken soul-gun parts. Or the Doctor was sorting and Martha was watching while holding an ice pack against the Doctor's head. Making his way over, Calder picked up a metal cylinder with a transparent window through which he could see something wispy blue-white and ethereal.
"Wow…" Calder whispered, fascinated. It was wild that you could see a soul like that.
"I've seen worse," the Doctor said, moving the other pieces around with quick movements. "I've seen better too. A lot better. And this-" he squinted at the wiring hanging from one piece, "is going to take more tools than just my sonic screwdriver. You don't happen to have any jeweler's tools do you?"
"No," Calder replied, "but I could probably get you some. You can order anything online these days for same-day delivery."
"Best do that, then," the Doctor said. "Never hurts to have a backup plan. You say you know a way to pop his soul back in?" The Doctor leaned over, peering down Calder's hallway toward his bedroom. "I'm not particularly keen to meet a soulless corpse that can walk about."
Calder dug out his Palm to order the jeweler's tools, wondering if it would be weird to ask each of them to pitch in a 20 to get the job done. "Me neither," he said. "I don't know how else to restrain him, though. I don't exactly have access to a cage."
"Yeah..." the Doctor said, setting the piece of the gun that he was holding down on the table, "how long do we have before he wakes up?"
"If he's a vampire," Martha said, "can we use, you know," she waved her hand, "vampire things? Garlic? Crosses? I saw a movie once where if you put a stake in their heart, they were paralyzed."
Calder shook his head vigorously. "No, it doesn't paralyze them, it kills them. We're not doing that except as a last resort. Crosses work, but more as a deterrent, and garlic just kinda smells bad unless they eat it."
"But he's tied up," Martha said, Calder's concern finally lighting a spark of worry in her voice.
"Still," the Doctor said, taking a few steps down the hall, "I did see him survive being thrown off of a skyscraper once." He paused, pushing a hand back through his hair. "Some additional precautions might be in order. Calder! How about electric shocks? How does he respond to those?"
Calder shrugged and then nodded. "Yeah, that should work. I mean, theoretically he could still walk through an electric bolt. He told me about this time once where he was electrocuted and his heart beat for a second and he made out with this really hot-" Calder stopped at the looks he was getting. "But if the electric shock is strong enough to seize up his muscles, that would be okay, I think. Just don't set him on fire with all the electricity: that kills him fast."
"Right!" the Doctor said, taking Calder's cue to move on from the make-out story. "I'll need a bit of wire and maybe we can work something out..." The Doctor started opening Calder's kitchen drawers more or less at random.
Calder snorted lightly. "Yeah, like I just have wire laying about. In my walls, maybe. Or that lamp." He pointed to the singular lamp in the room.
The Doctor eyed the lamp with such a raw, calculating look that Calder sent an apology to the lamp in his head. It was a secondhand lamp, but he didn't want it to be cannibalized.
Unless it was necessary for keeping a barrier between him and having to stake his friend/mentor. At that point, the lamp lost.
"Okay," Calder said, trying to take stock of their situation (the Doctor had picked up his lamp and was already in the process of dismantling it). "I'm going to run over to Angel's place. He has all the stuff we need for the re-ensouling spell. You two just focus on keeping him contained. Do you have what you need for the electric-whatever-you're-making or do I need to order something else? The jeweler's tools should be on their way."
The Doctor pulled the wires from the inside of Calder's lamp and it reminded Calder of the time he'd seen a witch pull the intestines out of a rabbit. "I'll make do with what I have here," the Doctor said, wrapping the wires around his hand. "We'll get the tools for the soul extractor. We fix that, we fix Angel. Once that's done, we're down to our original problem, but we have all the weapons!" He flashed a ferocious grin at Calder.
Calder nodded a little grimly. He could only focus on one crisis at a time, and that was the problem of Angel's soul not being in his body. "Let me give you my number so we can call if we have to," he said, pulling out his Palm.
Martha pulled out a Palm that looked ancient to Calder. He has to resist the urge to ask to see it. How old was that thing? Could it possibly still work? He waved his Palm at it to transfer his number to her contacts.
"I'm ready," Martha said, looking up at him expectantly.
Calder waved his Palm again.
"What's the number?"
"It didn't transfer?" Calder said. "How old is that thing?"
"Early 2000's," Martha said. "I've got to type the number in."
Calder looked down at his Palm, wondering what his number was. He hadn't had to actually tell it to anyone since he'd gotten his first Palm. "Uhhhh..."
"As fun as this is," the Doctor said over his shoulder as he walked down the hall toward Calder's bedroom, "I think it might be helpful if you went with Calder. Do a bit of magic. Broaden your horizons!"
"Doctor," Martha protested.
"Actually," Calder said, "I think the spell is easier with a second person. I'm not great at magic, so a second pair of hands would be really helpful."
Martha looked flummoxed. "I've never done magic- Well, I shouted Expelliarmus at Shakespeare once, but I'm not sure that counts."
"You just need to walk in a circle with some herbs," Calder said, deeply understanding the feeling of being way out of his depth. He was already doing his best to appear confident about his own ability to cast the spell. Was it too late to hire a local wizard? He couldn't think of someone trustworthy on such short notice. "Also," he added, even though this wasn't the point, "shouting Expelliarmus at Shakespeare sounds awesome."
"It kind of was," Martha admitted with a grin. Then she sobered and glanced around for the Doctor. He was down the short hall, off of which was the tiny bathroom and at the end, the tiny bedroom. The Doctor had removed the panel where the light controls were and was pulling wires out from the wall.
Calder cringed and kissed his security deposit goodbye. Like he hadn't accidentally axed his kitchen wall two weeks after he moved into this apartment.
"Will you be okay?" Martha asked.
"Just fine," the Doctor said cheerfully. "I'll have this place strung up and ready to deliver a shock strong enough to stop an elephant. Well, maybe a bison. I've never shocked a bison to be honest. What have bison ever done to me? Or elephants for that matter?"
"Doctor," Martha interrupted.
"Right!" the Doctor said, accepting the interruption without seeming to need to take a breath. "We'll just have to worry about getting him out again once he's better."
"Great," Calder said, hoping that the Doctor could deliver on that promise. "Aim for elephant, okay?"
The Doctor gave him a thumbs up and returned to ruining the wiring in Calder's apartment.
Calder winced. "Great," he said again. "Well, Martha, let's go do this spell before my landlord kicks me out for destroying his property."