amberfocus | You're What?: Chapter Four (Reply)

Chapter 3: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/69273.html

Thinking

The Doctor strode to Rose and collapsed on his knees in the sand beside her. “Rose?” he asked softly, touching her. A tiny whimper emerged from her throat and he saw her eyes glimmering in the moonlight. “Rose, how badly are you hurt?”

She took in a labored breath, trying to answer him, but the raspy sound on her exhalation filled him with dread. “Bad,” she just barely managed to say. Hastily he gathered her into his arms despite her moan of pain and rushed her into the infirmary. A few moments later an anxious Jack joined him, looking much the worse for wear in ripped jeans and a torn t-shirt.

“What’d you do, scramble down the cliff?” the Doctor asked as he ran Rose through the diagnostic machine.

“I did,” said Jack wiping the blood from a scratch on his face with a clean length of bandage. “I knew you wouldn’t have time to come back up for me and I needed to know if she was okay. Is she?” His earnest sapphire eyes met the Doctor’s cold, steel blue gaze.

“She was conscious when I found her, but carrying her inside made her pass out. She’s hurt,” he said trying to keep the fear out of his voice until he knew just how badly.

Jack didn’t say anything else, but the look he gave the Doctor made his gut tighten. Jack moved around to the far side of the table and sat down in the chair, his hands clasping Rose’s left one between them as he studied the girl’s face. The Doctor turned his eyes away from the scene, his fists clenching as he refocused his gaze onto the computer screen.

He let out a sigh of relief as the machine scanned her lungs. “What?” asked Jack.

“She was having trouble breathing. I thought maybe she’d punctured a lung or collapsed it or something. But she hasn’t. A few of the alveolar sacs in some of the terminal bronchioles have ruptured, but I can mend that fairly quickly.” He programmed a small, handheld device and quickly lifted Rose’s blouse, laying the machine against the skin over the ruptured sacs. It let out a soothing hum and began to glow with a soft green light.

The larger machine continued to run its scan over the rest of her body. As it made its diagnosis the Doctor read out the items to Jack. “Broken collarbone, torn cartilage in the elbow joint, cracked coccyx, and a dislocated knee cap.”

“And the baby?” Jack asked anxiously.

The Doctor had been avoiding looking at that particular part of the readout. With a deep breath he allowed his gaze to wander to the image of Rose’s pelvis. “Baby’s fine,” he said on a loud exhale. He moved to Rose’s head and put his fingers to her temples.

“What are you doing?” Jack asked suspiciously.

“I’m using telepathy to make sure she stays unconscious while I fix her. She’s going to be in a lot of pain if she wakes up mid-process and I can’t give her any medication right now without harming the babe. Not until I’ve had a chance to run some tests. Human painkillers aren’t safe for my kind and I don’t know if the medications I have for my own emergency use are safe for Rose until I do some blood work. Now hush. I need to concentrate.”

The Doctor closed his eyes and shut out the outside world, focusing only on finding Rose’s mind and pushing it into further unconsciousness. He was able to do so, but not before running into her feelings of hurt and betrayal at his earlier treatment of her. He was slammed up against the wall of her emotions, buffeted by how strongly she felt about him, how much she loved him, how much she wanted him to love her and how she thought now he never would.

He also found that she’d given up on him, resigned herself to going home and doing everything on her own because why on Earth would he ever want to tie himself to a stupid ape? Not even finished her A-levels, hardly a worthy prospect for him to love, just an idiot girl who couldn’t do anything right, including keep a man like the Doctor around for more than a few tumbles into bed.

What had he ever seen in her, because it couldn’t have been love? It must have just been sex. Pretty much all she’d ever been good for to any man, but she’d thought maybe the Doctor was different, that this time it would be different, that maybe he would care about the person she was inside. In truth, he was just as bad as Captain Jack and all his conquests, taking what he wanted and moving on when the going got rough--.

With a gasp he hauled himself out of her turbulent thoughts and stared at her face bleakly. He pulled himself together and relocated her knee cap and set her collarbone. He wheeled her gurney into a small machine that encompassed her completely and set it to mending the breaks in her bones and the damage to the connective tissues.

“You better clean that up,” the Doctor said tossing Jack the first aid kit and indicating his cut. “And Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Stay here with Rose, will you? I need to…” He paused, looked towards Rose then back to Jack and away again. “I need to think.”

“Doctor, what if she wakes up, wants you?”

“She won’t. She won’t wake up until I remove the block I put in her mind. And she’ll be in that machine for four hours. Someone needs to stay with her. Just…do it, Jack,” the Doctor ordered and then strode from the room.

He wasn’t sure where he was going as he paced the corridors. For the first little while it was mindless walking and so he was rather surprised to find himself in the room that had once allowed him access to the power source of the Eye of Harmony. The room was useless now, had been since the Time War, and so much of its beauty had been buried by dust and grime. The Eye had died in the destruction of Gallifrey, any connection to it severed as his world came to an end. He really ought to talk to the TARDIS about jettisoning the room. It was nothing but a painful reminder that he was the last of his kind.

An angry negative infringed on his thoughts. His ship put a very clear image of Rose, her stomach swollen in a much more advanced state of pregnancy than she currently was in at the moment, directly into his mind. “Very funny,” he snapped. Again, the ship pushed against his mind.

“I know what you’re trying to say,” he said bitterly. “You’re trying to say I’m not the last of my kind; that with that babe there’s two of us now. But there’s not. He won’t be a Time Lord. He’ll be…I don’t know what he’ll be, some hybridization, but not a Time Lord. They’re all dead.”

An image of triple-stranded DNA flared into his thoughts, clearly overwriting an image of double-stranded DNA. The Doctor furrowed his brow. “You’re saying my genes will dominate?” The image of the double-stranded DNA disappeared entirely. “Will there be anything of Rose left in the child at all?” he asked a little wistfully.

The ship gave him a mild affirmative wave of emotion. “I’m not cut out to be a father. I’m no good at it.” The TARDIS flashed an image of his son in his mind. “That’s not the same. I didn’t raise him. The only good thing I ever did for him was take Susan when he begged me to. This one…Rose will expect me to be able to be a good parent to him if I let her stay with me and I’m not one.” The image of Susan was inserted into his head.

“That’s different, too. I didn’t raise her from infancy. She was almost fifteen when I took her and we fled Gallifrey. I made so many mistakes with her. The only reason I took her from there was to save her life.” The TARDIS stubbornly flashed image after image of Susan hugging him and kissing him good-night each night and good-morning each morning.

“Yes, I know Susan loved me. That’s not the point. The point is I’m not sure I’m capable of loving a child. I could barely unbend enough to tolerate Susan’s affections. I don’t…love.” She pulled up an image of the Doctor from the night he’d abandoned Susan on Earth with the man she’d fallen in love with. He was sitting in a dark room, alone, and there were tears falling down his face.

Then the TARDIS flashed images of him in bed with Rose, making love to her and gazing at her afterwards, as she slept in his arms. The look on his face was ineffably tender. The TARDIS was clearly telling him that he did, indeed, love. “You really need to stop spying on me,” he growled. He deliberately blanked his mind.

The TARDIS played dirty. She inserted an image of an exhausted and sweaty Rose holding a tiny bundle in her arms and gazing upwards with a look of love and hope in her eyes as her gaze found the Doctor’s. He watched his own face soften and he fell to his knees by her side, resting one hand on the infant and the other on Rose’s cheek.

“Stop it,” he ground out. “Stop it. I have to think and I can’t do that with you in my head.” With an angry grinding of gears the ship withdrew from his head.

He sank down to sit on the side of the well. He wasn’t ready for this. Was it even possible he could do this without making a right mess of things? He and Rose were so new. They’d barely had a chance to start their relationship and now…and now she thought that he didn’t think she was worthy of him. He buried his face in his hands. How could Rose have gotten it so wrong? He was the one that wasn’t worthy of her.

Chapter 5: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/72863.html