just_the_doctor

Rose laughs again at that, agreeably. Different, but still the Doctor. Still her Doctor.

She looks out at the city again thoughtfully, then back at him, grinning.

"Can we go an' visit New New York," she asks, starting to get up from the grass, "so good they named it twice?"

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"Well," he says, getting up as well. "I thought we might go there first."

The Doctor points toward the building just across the lake, while Rose helps him with his coat.

"It's some sort of hospital," he explains when she asks about it. "Green moon on the side - that's the universal symbol for hospitals. I got this. A message on the psychic paper."

He pulls out the little wallet and shows her. The words 'Ward 26' and 'Please Come' alternate across the paper in a handwritten scrawl.

"Someone wants to see me."

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"Hmm! An' I thought we were just sight-seeing."

Rose looks out at the hospital, then back at the Doctor, taking his arm again. A hospital visit doesn't exactly seem the most exciting new new trip, but for someone who can send a message on the psychic paper-- well, that's pretty Spock, after all.

"Come on, then. Let's go an' buy some grapes."

She grins at him and they set off, heading to the hospital.

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He pauses outside the door. "Hopsital. Why did it have to be a hospital?" he mutters. "Hate these places."

Rose gives him a funny look as they walk through the door, letting him know that sounds "a bit rich".

He protests, "I can't help it! I don't like hospitals - they give me the creeps!"

The lobby looks like hospital lobbies always look, white and sterile and too bright. Apart from the little shop, which is sadly missing here.

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"Very smart," Rose notes, peering round at the lobby and how perfect it all looks. "Not exactly NHS."

A lack of shop doesn't bother her too much, though; not as much as wondering why they even need hospitals now when they can do things like hold back the destruction of Earth.

"Thought this far in the future, they'd've cured everything."

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The Doctor shrugs.

"The Human Race moves on, but so do the viruses. It's an ongoing war."

He looks around. Lift, lift... gotta be a lift around here somewhere.

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One of the nurses walks by her as the Doctor's talking, which really isn't anything out of the ordinary -- it's a hospital after all -- until Rose sees her properly, and then she can't help staring.

She points as she looks back at the Doctor.

"They're cats."

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"Now, don't stare," he says softly. "Think what you look like to them, all... Pink and yellow."

He grins and points to a spot over her shoulder. "That's where I'd put the shop! Right there!"

Looking around again, he finally spots the lift and heads inside.

"Ward 26, thanks!"

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Rose glances back at the nurses, then blinks and rushes to follow the Doctor--

"Hold on! Hold on!"

--but the lift closes just as she skids and reaches it. Too late -- it's already going up, with the Doctor inside it.

She looks round and finds the other lift, calling this fact up through the closed doors as she pushes the button for it.

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"Ward 26," he yells down to her. "And watch out for the disinfectant."

She doesn't hear that last part, so he tries again. Still no luck.

"Oh, you'll find out," he finally says, stepping back into the center of the lift to be ready.

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The lift arrives and opens just then and Rose steps in; she looks round but there doesn't appear to be any buttons.

A little nervously, she says to thin air, "Um, Ward 26." Beat. "Thanks."

Something beeps and the lift starts moving.

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It's all old hat to him, really. Quick rinse-down, splash of powder, and a thorough drying.

The Doctor has far more fun that a sentient being has any right to during this process, but that's okay, because someone wants to see him, and that's an adventure.

The doors open on Ward 26, and the Doctor heads out to find it.

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Rose does not enjoy the disinfection process. Something pours water on her head while she is in a lift. It's no wonder she shrieks and flails to try and turn it off.

Finally, though, she's dry, her hair isn't too much of a mess, and the lift doors are opening again. She steps out, avoiding the cables on the floor and glancing round at the rather dilapidated corridor.

There's a man a little way down the corridor, dressed in what seem to be regular hospital scrubs; Rose looks up at him when he speaks. "The human child is clean."

"Um ... I'm lookin' for Ward 26?"

"This way, Rose Tyler," and he scurries off back down the corridor.

Somehow Rose suspects this might not be the way to Ward 26, and though she does follow the odd little man, she grabs an abandoned metal rod from the floor. A makeshift weapon. Just in case.

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The Doctor is escorted into the ward by Sister Jatt. She seems surprised and confused by his suggestion of a shop. He considers pushing the issue until he sees a man in one of the ward bays, grey as ash... or as a stone.

"That's Petrifold Regression, right?"

"I'm dying, sir," says the man, identified as the Duke of Manhattan by his assistant. "A lifetime of charity and abstinence. And it ends like this."

Sister Jatt leads him away, reassuring the Doctor that "he'll be up and about in no time."

"I doubt it," the Doctor says skeptically. "Petrifold Regression? He's turning to stone. There won't be a cure for... oh... a thousand years? He might be up and about, but only as a statue."

"Have faith in the sisterhood," Jatt says, then swiftly changes the subject. "But is there no one here you recognize? It's rather unusual to visit without knowing the patient."

He looks down the ward and he sees him. He knows who's called him here.

"No. I think I've found him," he says numbly, walking toward the tank at the end of the ward.

Sister Jatt leaves him with Novice Hame, another of the feline nurses. The Doctor asks Jatt to inquire after Rose, as she appears to have gotten lost. It's hard to worry too much about it right now, though, not with him here.

"I'm afraid the Face of Boe's asleep," Novice Hame says apologetically. "That's all he tends to do these days. Are you a friend, or...?"

The Doctor shakes his head. "We met just the once on Platform One. What's wrong with him?"

Hame explains that the Face of Boe is dying. Of old age. "The one thing we can't cure." She goes on to point out that he's thousands of years old. "Some people say millions," she adds with the smile of a gossip. "Although, that's impossible."

"Oh, no... I like impossible," he says, kneeling before the tank. He's barely registering anything the nurse has said to him. He puts a hand to the tank sadly. "I'm here. I look a bit different, but it's me... it's the Doctor."

And it seems the Face of Boe sighs in his sleep. Comforted somehow by his presence.

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Rose follows the strange little man down the corridor, the sounds of a vaguely familiar voice reaching her ears just before they emerge into the room where the images of a party are being projected onto a screen.

Anyway-- oh, hello darling! Now, don't! Stop it!

That voice...that woman, that glamorous-looking woman. She wasn't a woman at all: Rose knew that voice anywhere.

"Wait a minute, that's..."

Rose gapes. The bitchy trampoline.

"Peekaboo!" and it's Cassandra herself, that horrid old inhuman thing that fancied herself the last of her kind.

"Don't you come anywhere near me, Cassandra."

She wields her metal rod, willing to beat the talking flap of skin to death if she tries anything funny. (Though she does wonder, briefly, how you can beat something to death that doesn't have organs.)

Cassandra must think of the same thing at the same time, given her reply.

"Why? What do you think I'm going to do? Flap you to death?"

"Yeah, but... what about Gollum?"

Rose eyes what must be Cassandra's man-servant-thing warily, ready to give him a good whack over the head with the rod if she needs to.

"Oh... that's just Chip. He's my pet."

Rose doesn't even have time to express her distaste for the idea before said pet chimes in.

"I worship the mistress!"
"Moisturize me, moisturize me..."

Great. Just beautiful. Rose thinks, looking at the two of them in disgust and disbelief.

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"You said 'the one thing you can't cure," the Doctor says to Novice Hame. "The one thing. Surely that's an exaggeration, though. You can never hope to cure everything, can you?"

"Have faith in the Sisterhood," the novice replies.

"Faith's all well and good, but there are people in these beds who should have died just in the time since I've arrived."

"And yet, they live," comes the voice of Sister Jatt once again.

The Doctor approaches her. Hell, it's worth a shot. "Sister Jatt, have you ever heard of a chemical called selyn?"

The felinoid considers briefly. "No, I don't believe I have. Is it a medication of some sort?"

"I have a friend who is dependent on it," he replies. "But she is separated from her supply and will die if it's not replenished. I had hoped that you had possibly learned of it, and that you might know how to obtain it or synthesize it."

"I'm afraid not. The research of the Sisterhood is more focused on the treatment and cure of degenerative diseases than withdrawal symptoms from illicit substances."

He shakes his head. "Selyn isn't... never mind. Thank you, Sister."

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"How come you're still alive?"

Rose continues to eye Cassandra with all the distrust she deserves.

"After you murdered me?"

"That was your own fault," Rose insists, feeling strangely compelled to remind her that she'd been the one to plead for the Doctor to save Cassandra's life at the end.

"The brain of my mistress survived," Chip explains, "and her pretty blue eyes were salvaged from the bin."

Rose wrinkles her nose a bit in disbelief, and laughs, incredulous.

"What about the skin? I saw it, you-- you got ripped apart."

"That piece of skin was taken from the front of my body. This piece is the back."

This only makes Rose laugh harder.
"Right! So you're talking out of your ar--"

"Ask not." Cassandra cut her off, sharply.

Further explanations commenced, with Chip grovelling on at his mistress's nonexistent feet, going on about how he'd helped her, how she'd been hiding here in secret with Chip giving her access to the drugs and technology needed to sustain her.

It was creepy. Cassandra was just as creepy as ever, and this Chip person's obsession with her was just... Rose shuddered to consider it too carefully as she listened to Cassandra whine on some more about being the last human.

"Well, you've got a knack for survival - I'll give you that."

It's all she'll give her. Rose starts to think she'd best find the Doctor, let him know about this, and let him figure out what to do about Cassandra.

Unfortunately, Cassandra appears to have other ideas.

"I've not been idle, Rose... tucked away, underneath this hospital - I've been listening. The Sisters are hiding something."

Warily: "What do you mean?"

"Oh... these cats have secrets. Hush, let me whisper. Come close."

That makes Rose crack up again. As if she were that stupid? Please. Cassandra had to have lost a few brain cells somewhere along the way.

"You must be joking if you think I'm coming anywhere near you!"

To prove her point, she backs up, and finds herself apparently just where Cassandra wanted her. Caught in some device, some thing that sends beams of light out to capture and hold her.

"Chip! Activate the psychograft!"

"I can't move! Cassandra, let me go! What are you doing?" Rose's voice rose in panic as she struggled futiley against whatever force held her.

"The lady's moving on. It's goodbye trampoline, and hello Blondie!"

Cassandra's voice was all Rose could hear, and suddenly it was as though her head was full of it, full of Cassandra, full of that familiar voice, and then full of nothing but darkness.

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The Doctor gets himself a small cup of water while he continues to wait for Rose, as well as one for Novice Hame.

"That's very kind. But there's no need," she tells him. She tells him how she can hear the Face of Boe singing in her head -- ancient songs. The Doctor can imagine them. Songs that were old long before Rassilon and Omega, before the Time Lords were known by that name.

"Am I the only visitor?" he asks.

Novice Hame nods sadly. "The rest of Boe-kind became extinct. Long ago. He's the only one left. Legend says that the Face of Boe has watched the universe grow old. There's all sorts of superstitions around him. One story says that just before his death, the Face of Boe will impart his great secret. That he will speak those words only to one like himself."

"What does that mean?"

The novice ducks her head shyly as she answers, "It's just a story."

"Tell me the rest," he prompts.

After a moment's internal conflict, she relents. "It's said he'll talk to a wanderer. To the man without a home. The lonely God."

To the Doctor, it's like a punch to the chest. The man without a home. The wanderer. And he called me. He called me.

It's too much of a shock. He turns his back on the Face of Boe and Novice Hame and finds a commlink he can contact Rose with.

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"It's like living inside a bouncy castle."

Cassandra's voice sounds like it's somehow a mile away , and then she's jumping up and down, she, Rose, but she's not the one doing it at all.

She's got to find the Doctor, and for a minute she and Cassandra are in agreement.

"...the same Doctor with a new face! That hypocrite! I must get the name of his surgeon."

She wants to defend him but she's the one speaking, and when the phone rings she's relieved that Cassandra answers, and even more relieved when what comes out isn't anything like her voice at all. The Doctor will know. He'll have to know, there's no way he'd ever mistake her for that.

Chavtastic, indeed. Rose manages indignance before Cassandra's fake cockney accent drowns out her own thoughts before she can try to give the Doctor some hint that she's not running the show here in her head any more.

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The Doctor gets off the phone with Rose at the sound of a man's laughter. It's the Duke of New York -- not ten minutes ago at Death's doorstep, and now laughing and drinking champagne.

This is, of course, impossible. And he says as much to Matron Casp, the head nurse. She refuses to tell him how they've cured a supposedly incurable condition, and is whisked away to attend to another problem.

The Doctor is taking a look at some of the other patients when Rose finally shows up. He grabs her by the arm and shows her around. All through the ward, incurable diseases are being cured with complete banality.

He walks out of the ward, looking for a terminal. "Because if they've got the best medicine in the world... then why's it such a secret?"

"I can't Adam and Eve it," Rose replies cryptically, which gives the Doctor pause.

"What's-- what's with the voice?"

"Oh, I don't know... just larking about New Earth... New me..."

He tilts his head and looks at her... really looks at her. And when he realizes that most of the buttons on her shirt are undone, he really looks at her. But just for a moment. Then he shrugs and grins.

"Well, I can talk. New New Doctor."

And that's about the moment that Rose lunges at him. His hand is halfway to the sonic screwdriver in blind panic when the girl grabs him around the face and kisses him. Not a simple little kiss, either. Not even a first date sort of kiss. This... was exploratory surgery.

She breaks it off and breathlessly points toward a terminal.

The Doctor stares after her for a moment. Then, smoothing back his hair, he simply observes, "Yep... still got it."

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Rose herself is reduced to a twinge of indignance in the back of Cassandra's mind, a twinge that twinges a bit harder at that kiss, at Cassandra kissing her Doctor with her lips, there's something just not right about that, not fair, even.

It's not helped by the fact that Cassandra's barely listening to the Doctor's explanation.

"Nope... nothing odd... surgery... post-op... nano-dentistry... no sign of a shop... they should have a shop."

"No, it's missing something else."

Or maybe she's just pretending not to listen. Rose can't tell, it's all so muddled in here that she can't tell what she wants and what Cassandra wants and where that ends.

"When I was downstairs, those Nurse/Cat/Nuns were talking about Intensive Care. Where is it...?"

The Doctor congratulates her on a job well done, and that's all Rose can tell for a while, as Cassandra helps the Doctor search for the root of this mystery.

As long as someone's helping, that's the main point. She knows they're talking about Intensive Care, about finding it, and that's probably the right track.

There's a faint sense of triumph when they find where it's hidden, and she really should be angry about Cassandra feeling that, but it's so hard to feel anything, like one of those dreams where you're someone else and just swept along for the ride. That's all she is now, swept along for the ride as Cassandra and the Doctor head for the mysterious corridor that's apparently what passes for Intensive Care.

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Row upon row upon endless row of little green chambers greet them in the "Intensive Care Unit".

The Doctor opens one of the units and stares, horrified, at the boil- and sore-covered man looking pathetically back at him. Rose calls it "disgusting", and the Doctor finds it hard to disagree.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he says softly to the man as he closes the door. He moves down the line a bit and opens another. This one is a woman, just as infected as the man.

Every disease in the world, he explains to Rose. Safe enough, so long as they aren't touched, but plague carriers, every one of them. Thousands of them. Born sick. Created sick. Meant to be sick. "No wonder the Sisters have got a cure for everything," he says. "They've built the ultimate research laboratory."

Novice Hame appears then, trying to justify this horror. Greater cause... Mankind needed us... They're only flesh... Think of those saved... All of the standard excuses that have been used before on a thousand worlds before this one where the slaughter of innocents has been used to save other innocents.

"If they live because of this, then life is worthless," he insists.

"But who are you to decide that?"

"I'm the Doctor," he says menacingly. "And if you don't like it... if you want to take it to a higher authority, then there isn't one. It stops with me." The last of the Time Lords. The Lonely God. The Oncoming Storm.

Rose breaks in to ask if the city knows what they do, and suddenly, things click into place. He holds up a hand to cut Hame off and asks her, quite calmly, what they have done to Rose.

When the Novice protests, he steps forward, teeth clenched in the effort to keep his voice soft and even. "I'm being very, very calm. You wanna beware of that - very, very calm. And the only reason I'm being so very, very calm is that the brain is a delicate thing. Whatever you've done to Rose's head, I want it reversed. These people are dying, and Rose would care."

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Rose would care, and Rose would certainly be very glad the Doctor finally noticed something, but Rose has left the building, and Cassandra's silently rolling her eyes and wondering how it took the Doctor this long.

"Oh, all right, clever clogs. Smarty pants. Lady killer."

She spins him around to face her, plays with his tie flirtatiously as she explains.

"I knew something was going on in this hospital, but I needed this body and your mind to find it out."

He asks who she is, and she leans in close to whisper. The Last Human. And she thinks he's not going to do anything about it, because the perfume she'd tucked into her shirt earlier isn't perfume at all, and a spray of it's all it takes to knock the Doctor unconscious and leave her to deal with the cats on her own.

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He comes to inside one of the empty "Intensive Care" cells and immediately screams to be let out.

Cassandra taunts him from inside Rose's body, telling him of how she's longed for this moment, how she's dreamed of killing him, how in just under seven minutes, The Doctor will be sprayed, smeared, injected, and otherwise exposed to every disease imaginable. She gloats and sneers, but none of that matters because she's taken Rose's body and intends to "junk her with the waste" as soon as she find someone "less common".

The Doctor gets ready to rail at her again through the frosted green door, to spend more of his little time remaining not caring about himself, but fighting to get Rose free. The nurses return, though, and Cassandra hushes him and proceeds to try and make a deal.

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