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There is a big, limp, oddly shaped thing leaning against the side of the blue box, and a burning sensation in her middle, which is odd. How can she be burning, when everything is so wet? Isn’t it raining?
Sweaty, shaky fingers claw haphazardly at her neck. They grab hold of a bit of metal. There is the sound of metal against metal, and her arms hurt again, and there is the noise of fabric rubbing against the ground, and then fabric ripping against metal, and the sight of something red against her skin, and for a long moment all she sees is stars.
Big, blue stars.
Two of them.
Then wood slamming against wood, hard and loud, knocking her back into her body.
The fingers at her neck were her fingers, grabbing her key, and the metal noise was her unlocking the TARDIS, and her middle was burning because her lungs hurt from running, and her arms hurt because she’d been carrying and dragging that big, oddly shaped thing while she was running. How long was she running?
And the fabric that ripped was fabric that had been covering the big limp thing she was dragging into the TARDIS.
And the two, big blue stars were on the limp thing, too…because the stars were on the thing’s shoes…
Because the thing was a person, and he was wearing Chuck Taylors.
The big lump she’d been dragging through the rain was the Doctor, and he was lying on the grating, bleeding.
*
Assembled hordes of Genghis Khan, he’d said, and Rose hopes he wasn’t being hyperbolic as she drags him carefully through the halls and into the medbay.
An arrow. He’d been shot by an arrow.
Well, first they’d been imprisoned for four days.
Actually, first they’d been arrested for—it wasn’t important. But whatever civilization they’d bumped into, it was an understatement to say they didn’t take kindly to offworlders. Manhandled, beaten, four days of borderline starvation, and they were running out of bananas from the Doctor’s coat pockets. All because the sonic didn’t work on wood.
His worry for her wellbeing got the best of him, and even though she insisted on sticking with their initial plan, which involved waiting another night to use the upcoming local holiday as a distraction, he decided to break out at midnight, when the guards were changing shifts.
All was well and they were half a mile deep in the woods until they heard the sound of horses. Alien horses, Rose had thought with food-and-sleep-deprived, torture-induced giddiness until an arrow hissed past her ear half a second later. And then the horror of witnessing the Doctor get pierced in the leg… Well, all of that combined explained the dissociation she’d experienced while carrying him the four miles back to the TARDIS.
In the downpour and slippery mud, the Doctor assured her that he’d be able to make it back to the ship at least, because he hadn’t been hit that badly, and it was really quite a small arrow, but only a few yards further he went pale and collapsed. He’d gone in and out of consciousness after that, mostly enough to slur her name and then go out again.
Now, she uses the remains of adrenaline in her system to lift him onto the exam table, careful to not knock the arrow still protruding from just above his knee.
She feels faint just looking at it. The sense of calm she’d had after safely getting his body into the TARDIS is replaced with rapidly rising panic.
Her eyes dart around the sterile room. He’s hurt—badly, probably, even though he said he’d be alright before he passed out. God, how do you even remove an arrow? Tears well up before she can stop them. She wipes harshly at her face, and looks down to see where the tears have cleaned the dirt from the pads of her fingers.
Handwashing first. Then arrow-removing and nursing-back-to-health.
A few deep breaths. It’s okay, she tells herself as she quickly washes her hands. The TARDIS will walk her through what to do. At least, that’s what the Doctor had told her when she asked him one day, out of pure curiosity, if he were to have a medical emergency with nobody around but her.
Well. First he’d said that Time Lords don’t have medical emergencies. She had swatted him. Then he’d said he would regenerate, if it came down to it and she really couldn’t do the Heimlich quick enough. She had swatted him harder.
(Back at Christmas, after he’d first changed, Rose asked him if he was immortal, since he could just change his body whenever he was about to die. He explained that he had used one of his last three regenerations to save her, and Rose felt so guilty that she almost asked him to leave her at the Powell Estate. The thought was quickly forgotten after the Doctor’s assurance that he would have died for good if it wasn’t for her. Still, she was too uneasy to joke about him regenerating again.)
She almost asks the TARDIS for help out loud, when suddenly her attention is drawn to a white button, flush against the countertop, that has started flashing with white light. Instructions. Okay. She remembers the Doctor using this countertop as a screen somehow, to view the results of her bloodwork when she was bitten by that lugierfly in Melfant.
She takes a steadying look at her patient, lying still and breathing shallow on the bed.
“I hope you’ll forgive me for ripping your suit on the way here,” she mumbles, turning her back again to look at the countertop interface as she reaches to press the button the TARDIS indicated. A subtle noise hits her ears, like the static of turning a TV on, but the screen remains blank.
“I’m sure I will,” the Doctor speaks cheerfully.
She turns in an instant. He’s awake?
“No, he’s not,” he says. Only it’s not him, because he’s still lying unconscious on the bed. But there’s another Doctor standing beside the bed, a—
“This is Emergency Program Three,” the hologram says, looking stoically ahead. Then he tugs his ear, looking a bit sheepishly at her. “Sorry, I should have started with that.”
“Wha’?”
The Holo-Doctor smiles kindly at her before launching into his explanation. “If the TARDIS has activated Emergency Program Three, it means I’ve been injured, and I’m unable to either treat myself or pilot us to medical professionals for treatment. I,” he says, gesturing to his holo-self, “am here to provide instructions to you to provide adequate medical care. Or, at least enough care until I’m able to treat myself or pilot us–”
“Right,” Rose nods sharply. Instructions. Okay. Anything to put her frenetic energy towards instead of breaking down. “Where do I start?”
“Let’s see,” the Holo-Doctor hums, and it comes across a bit like a buzz. “What are we working with,” he mutters, standing up straight and taking a look at the Time Lord on the bed.
“Ah,” he exclaims at the arrow in his leg.
*
She managed to remove the arrow from his leg—delicately, with care and precision and a lot of pretending not to feel the static electricity of the hologram leaning over her shoulder guiding her movements. Her childhood years of playing Operation with Mickey sitting across from her doing anything he could to distract her were finally paying off.
She washed the wound carefully before the Holo-Doctor taught her how to use the Stitch-O-Matic, which looked about forty years old and halfway between a stapler and a vintage sewing machine, but really required very little skill on her end once she got it to start glowing.
Poison on the arrow, they’d discovered through blood tests, was the cause of the Doctor’s unconsciousness. A simple substance, however, which required only an injection of one of the hundreds of 64th-century cure-alls that lined the cabinets of the medbay. Now she sits in a chair next to the bed and waits for him to wake up.
“Shouldn’t be more than two hours, I think,” the Holo-Doctor says, leaning against the cabinet. Well, pretending to. He looks at her softly then. “Thank you, Rose. You did wonderful.”
He smiles, and her mind flashes back to last year, another hologram, another smile. Have a good life. Do that for me, Rose.
She pushes the memory aside before it chokes her, and focuses on something that she hadn’t had the opportunity to ask in the previous chaos.
“How comes you can have a conversation with me? Last time, I mean, when it-–,” Rose shakes her head. “When he sent me home on Satellite 5. The hologram. It was like he was reading from a script. I thought he recorded it.” She thinks back. “‘Cept for when he turned and looked at me at the end,” she remembers with a laugh. “Blimey, that scared me.”
“Well,” the Doctor draws out, “there are hundreds of emergency programs that TARDISes are installed with.” He pauses. “I say installed, but really I mean when they’re grown. Like, when they’re embryos—if you will…They sort of—Oh, how to explain this to a human…”
“When a mommy TARDIS and daddy TARDIS love each other very much?”
“Ha ha. The short answer is that a TARDIS and her pilot are bonded, telepathically. Which is good news for emergency programs like this. You needed my help to save me. The TARDIS can pull on her bond with me to create an interface that thinks and speaks like me. So I can make sure you don’t just yank an arrow out of my leg and slather me in ointment.”
Rose rolls her eyes. “I wouldn’t have just yanked–”
“Now, on Satellite 5, the message you heard was recorded. It wasn’t the TARDIS predicting what I’d want to say at that moment. It was me.”
“Why?”
“Why record something?” The Holo-Doctor clarifies. “Why not just rely on the TARDIS?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Emergency Programs One and Two… Those are only activated if I believe I’m never going to see you again.” He looks seriously at her with his flickering eyes. “I’ve been saying me and I this whole time for simplicity’s sake, Rose, but you understand I’m not really the Doctor. Sure, I’ve got a part of his consciousness through the TARDIS, and in my limited capacity as an interface I feel Doctor-ish, but I’m still just a prediction of how the real him would behave.
“And in circumstances where he,” he says, gesturing to the Time Lord on the bed, “won’t ever see you again… Well. I assume he wants his last words to you to be the genuine article. No leaving it up to chance with a hologram. So he records it instead.”
She thinks about her last Doctor standing alone in the console room, after she’d gone to bed or off to visit her mum, thinking about what he’d want his last words to be to her. How soon after she’d started traveling with him did he record that? Did he have a message for Jack, that Jack never got to see because Jack never—
“And yes,” he continues obliviously. “I knew you’d move closer to me, so I turned my head when I recorded the message. I’m just that good,” he grins.
“You mean you’re just that smug,” she counters. “Too smug for someone I can just wave my arm through if I want him to go away. Mister Not-Doctor.”
“Oi!”
*
He begins to wake up, and that’s already a clue that something’s gone terribly wrong, because he doesn’t remember falling asleep. Where had he been, before he fell asleep? Where was he now? Oh, his leg hurts. Why was he…?
Giggling. He’s hearing giggling. Rose’s. The second best sound in the universe, after the song of the TARDIS. The Doctor smiles.
“...and he said, ‘The pig’s already in the elevator!’”
Guffaws of her laughter now. Hmm, lovely.
Hang on a minute, that’s his punchline!
That’s his voice!
“Rose,” he breathes as he pushes himself up with his arms, blinking his eyes open to the medbay.
She’s sitting in a chair a few feet from his bed. She must have not heard him, though, because she continues laughing and remains fully engrossed in her conversation with the man across from her, and that man is…
Oh, for God’s sake.
His hologram is giddy as a puppy, his pleasure at making her laugh obvious. His mouth is open in a stupidly wide grin, and his eyes are devoted to Rose’s face.
Does he really have to look at her like that? His eyes don’t even function, they’re just diffracted light waves—diffracted light waves meant to emulate his eyes! He can’t help but groan.
Rose reacts instantly to the noise, moving quickly to stand at his bedside.
“Doctor!” Her eyes meet his, brow furrowed, mirth replaced with a mix of relief and concern. “You’re awake! How are you feeling?”
He thinks, hard, about what the last thing he remembers is. Why does his leg hurt?
“One of those guards got me with an arrow,” he says, more to himself. “Oh, that’s rude!” He pulls the sheet away to look at his leg before he notices his lack of trousers. Ehm.
Ah, there it is. On the outside of his thigh, a few inches above his knee, is a neat row of stitches. He looks back up at Rose, and she’s admiring the stitches just as much as him.
“You stitched me up!” He smiles at her. She meets his eyes, chewing on her lip.
“Well, the TARDIS gave me a machine to do it,” she says, then winces. “I had to cut up your trousers,” she confesses like a child caught cheating on an exam. “I’m really sorry!”
“I’ve got other trousers.”
“Yeah, but it won’t match your jacket, and I know how much you love your suit…”
“Rose, you’ve seen me in a brown pinstriped suit every single day since I’ve regenerated. That was months ago. Eight months. You think I’ve been wearing the same exact suit every day for eight months? That I’ve only got the one? You think I'm that unhygienic?”
“Oh.”
“I’ve got two. I switch every four months.”
“Oh…oh, shove off!”
He giggles at her, and the noise seems to pull the remaining worry out of her face.
“I’m so glad you’re alright,” she tells him seriously. “When I saw the TARDIS activated an emergency program, I got kinda worried. But he was a lot of help…”
He? Oh, right. The Doctor reluctantly tears his gaze from Rose's sympathetic eyes and looks behind her.
His hologram is leaning on the counter, and raises a hand to give him a little wave. The Doctor remembers the giggling he woke up to and feels a just, warranted, perfectly reasonable scowl grow on his face.
“Right, ta,” he offers, and he really almost tries to sound sincere. “You can turn off now,” he tells the hologram.
Rose spins around at his words, but it’s too late, and his holo-self obediently disappears. Her mouth drops open. “Rude!”
“What?”
She shakes her head in disbelief. “All that help and you don’t even thank him!”
“I don’t need to thank him, he’s not real!”
“Yes he is,” Rose mutters. “Or, sort of. He was telling me—” She falters when the Doctor won’t stop looking at her chest. Well. More likely the blood stain on her shirt over her chest.
“He was telling you stories while you were clearly in need of medical care," he grumbles. Well, he tries for a grumble, but it comes out more like a whine since he's still just woken up.
“We got carried away, after you’d been taken care of,” she defends.
“Carried away,” the Doctor snorts as he shifts himself, trying to get off the bed so he can help her. His leg throbs and he can’t hide his wince of pain.
“Doctor, you need to stay still,” Rose complains.
“Rose, if I’m correct, the guards had posion on their weapons. There’s no telling what might have gotten into your cuts and scrapes. You have wounds that need to be cleaned, and I'm the only one who knows where everything is in here—”
She’s already moving away from him and over to the counter, looking for the flashing button again. The Doctor begs the TARDIS not to let it reappear. “You stay still. We can just ring up the other Doctor again—”
“Please don’t call him the other Doctor.”
“—and he can show me how to do it properly.” She frowns. “There was a button here somewhere. ‘S gone.”
Thank you, he tells the TARDIS.
“It’s gone,” he huffs, “because I’m here, and I’m all you need.”
“But you can’t even move!”
The Doctor considers this.
*
“Six steps forward. Great. Raise your left arm. Open the cupboard. No, the other one. Yes, now grab the jar labeled Excemidephin and then—Rose, you’re not supposed to do it until I tell you to! That’s the point of the game!”
“Oh, so we can play games now, but the other Doctor—”
“Please don’t call him the other Doctor.”
“He’s not allowed to tell me stories and play games with me while I’m injured? But you are?”
A cough. “Six steps backwards.”
“Right.”
“Rose, I’m testing your mind and your body’s reflexes. We were tortured and starved, it’s important that we make sure there are no lasting effects. Did you ever think of that?”
“You thought of that just now, as an excuse, am I right?”
A cough.
“Right.”