New Earth

[just_the_doctor]

The TARDIS doors open on a windy landscape. A grassy plain on the shore of a lake, with all manner of short-range atmospheric crafts buzzing about their tasks.

"It's the year five billion and twenty-three," the Doctor explains. "We're in the galaxy M-87, and this? This is New Earth."

Comments

[whats-bad-wolf.livejournal.com]

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.

[just_the_doctor]

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.

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

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.

[just_the_doctor]

"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."

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

"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.

[just_the_doctor]

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.

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

"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.

[just_the_doctor]

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."

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

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.

[just_the_doctor]

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."

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

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.

[just_the_doctor]

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.

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

The cats aren't having any of it, so it's lucky for both Cassandra and, by sheer accident, the Doctor, that she has a Plan B.

Her lackey Chip pulls a lever and every cell door on the row springs open, including the Doctor's, who of course immediately proceeds to yell at her about what she's done, which is to give the whole system a shot of adrenaline, waking up an army of plague-carriers who'd like nothing better than to infect every last one of them.

No way in hell is Cassandra sticking around to watch this. She flees, leaving the Doctor shouting something about not touching them in her wake.

[just_the_doctor]

The Doctor tries to warn the nurses, but can't lose sight of Cassandra/Rose, so he takes off after her.

A moment later, there's the sound of an electrical explosion, and every cell opens up, disgorging thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of disease-carriers into the narrow passageways.

Cassandra swears she didn't do it, and right now, the Doctor doesn't have time to argue the point. His first priority is to keep Rose safe, and that means, as it usually does, that they have to run.

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

And run, they do, down the stairs, while alarms go off and the PA system announces a quarantine as doors slam shut on every floor. The Doctor's still shouting at her to keep going down, as though there were anywhere else to go. As if she were in any hurry to stick around.

They descend the last flight of stairs and burst through a door into the cellar, and Cassandra starts pushing the lift button frantically until the Doctor reminds her it won't work because of the quarantine.

"This way!"

She runs the other way, the Doctor on her heel, as well as a bunch of those plague people. She hears Chip whimpering somewhere behind her, but she can't stop, she needs this body safe, too. As long as she's in it, anyway.

[just_the_doctor]

They burst through into another room, this one full of equipment, and the Doctor begins to put things together.

Cassandra wails that they're trapped -- and they are, a bit -- and asks him what they should do.

"Well, for starters, you're going to leave that body," he says, pointing toward the machine in the corner. "That psychograft is banned on every civilized planet! You're compressing Rose to death."

She, in turn, gestures to another machine, this one containing the remains of a brain in a jar and some bits of skin. "But I've got nowhere to go. My original skin's dead."

"Not my problem. You can float as atoms in the air. Now, get out." He holds the sonic screwdriver in front of him like a weapon, pointing it at her menacingly. "Give her back to me."

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

"You asked for it."

She breathes herself out in a cloud of light, and suddenly Rose can think again, though just barely.

"Blimey, my head..."

The room's still spinning a bit as she looks around, confused.

"Where'd she go?"

[just_the_doctor]

There's an instant of vertigo, and then the Doctor's shrinking, melting, being drawn and pulled down, like being stuffed into a box.

"Oh, my. This is... different," says Cassandra with the Time Lord's voice. "Goodness me, I'm a man. Yum. So many parts! And hardly used... Ah.. ah! Two hearts! Oh, baby, I'm beating out a samba!"

Rose, predictably and tiresomely, commands her out of him, but Cassandra is too taken with the new form to notice.

"Ooh, he's slim. And a little bit foxy. You've thought so too. I've been inside your head... You've been looking... you like it."

And that's about the time that the plague carriers break through the doors. Cassandra looks around the room frantically, realizing with a start that she's currently compressing the only mind who would get them out of this fix.

"What do we do? What would he do?? The Doctor-- what the hell would he do?!"

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

Run, Rose thinks. He'd tell her to run, but there's nowhere to go but...

"Ladder... we've gotta get up."

Of course Cassandra shoves her out of the way to get to the ladder first, and Rose tries not to see the Doctor in that action because the Doctor'd never do that. But if the Doctor's gone then she's alone again and she just got him back and what if Cassandra won't leave? She hadn't been able to fight back, but the Doctor's stronger than that, but there's no time to consider it because there are plague-carriers behind them and all she can do is follow and keep trying to make Cassandra listen before they both get pulled down to their inevitably slow and agonizing deaths.

"If you get out of the Doctor's body, he can think of something. We're gonna die if--"

And then something grabs her ankle -- one of the cat-nuns -- and she screams and tries to kick the cat off as it rants on about how this is all somehow her fault.

Then the plague-carriers catch up and one of them grabs onto the cat woman like she'd been grabbing onto Rose, and her face breaks out into horrible boils before she falls down the latter, shrieking in agony. There's no time to feel sorry for her (though Rose does a bit anyway), because they've got to keep climbing.

[just_the_doctor]

At a locked door, Cassandra looks back down at Rose to see what to do next. Rose suggests the sonic screwdriver, which, naturally, Cassandra has no idea how to use. So, at Rose's suggestion, she crosses the gap back into the "chavtastic" one.

Back in control of his faculties, the Doctor is able to hold his knowledge hostage. As long as Cassandra is in Rose, the Doctor won't help, and as long as Cassandra is in him, he can't help.

After going back and forth a couple of times, Cassandra relents and passes Rose by in favor of one of the plague carriers climbing toward them.

"Oh, sweet Lord... I look disgusting!" comes a voice from below them, just as the Doctor sonics open the door and pulls Rose through behind him.

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

"Oh no you don't!"

Rose just has time to catch the words before she's being shoved back down into the recesses of her own mind, and Cassandra's back in there, taking up all the room.

And the Doctor's shouting something about it being her last warning, but she's on the floor, shell-shocked, distant.

"Inside her head... they're so alone... they keep reaching out, just to hold us... all their lives and they've never been touched."

All those people. It's even more horrific than the diseases they carry. The sympathy isn't like Cassandra, and maybe that's a bit of Rose bleeding through or maybe she's just got a conscience after all. She takes the hand the Doctor offers, pulls herself to her feet.

The diseased people bang on the lift doors, but don't break through. They walk back onto Ward 26, where some woman menaces them with a chair as the Doctor insists that they're fine, clean, not diseased.

[just_the_doctor]

The Doctor asks the status of everyone in the ward, and (instead of being helpful) the Duke's assistant explains how she's trying to get a signal over to New New York to send a "private executive squad" to break in. No amount of pointing out how breaking quarantine would mean putting ten million people at risk makes a difference to this sniveling woman trying to save her own skin.

Which, of course, means, "I have to stop you lot as well. Suits me."

He barks orders for everyone to bring him the intravenous solutions for all the diseases. Everything that anyone is using, everything that's in cold storage on the ward. There are fewer than he'd expected, but then again, many disparate diseases share root causes. With enough (and the bile rises in his throat to think the word) research, those links could be discovered, the remedies distilled.

All of this rushes through his mind as the IV bags are strapped to him like bandoliers. He uses the sonic screwdriver to open the lift doors, reminding Cassandra that just because they aren't moving doesn't mean they aren't still working. He pops a winch free, sticks the sonic screwdriver in his mouth and takes a running leap into the shaft, grabbing hold of the cable and reattaching the winch.

"Going down!" he calls over his shoulder. "Come on!"

"Not in a million years," Cassandra replies, aghast.

The Doctor insists. "I need another pair of hands. What do you think?" Then, with a little smirk, he adds, "If you're so desperate to stay alive... why don't you live a little?"

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

As it turns out, she may have no choice, as more plague-carriers emerge from the quarantine and the Duke of Manhattan's assistant starts shouting at someone to seal the doors, which then close, leaving her trapped with no way to go except down.

Again.

She jumps into the lift shaft and onto the Doctor's back with the sinking sensation that she's really going to regret this.

"You're completely mad. I can see why she likes you."

"Going down!" is the Doctor's completely mad reply, and then they're falling and she has no choice but to cling to the Doctor and hope he's got enough self-preservation instinct to avoid getting them both killed.

[just_the_doctor]

The winch works as a brake to slow their descent right near the bottom of the shaft, on top of the parked elevator car.

"Now, listen - when I say so, take hold of that lever," he says, pointing to the disinfection system on top of the elevator. Cassandra protests, but he stays firm. "I'm cooking up a cocktail. I know a bit about medicine myself."

One by one, the Doctor rips open the IV bags with his teeth and pours them into the disinfectant tank.

"Now, that lever's going to resist. But keep it in position. Hold onto it with everything you've got."

"What about you?"

He opens the door atop the lift and drops down, sonicing open the doors. The plague bearers are clustered in the main lobby, huddled together in small groups. The Doctor looks back up at Cassandra/Rose and can't resist the pun. "I've got an appointment. The Doctor is in."

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

She watches him drop down into the lift, disappearing from her direct line of sight. She can't hear anything except the lift doors opening, and if she cranes her head far enough she can sort of see, but not enough, not really.

"I'm in here, come on!" That's the Doctor, from below, presumably to the plague-bearers.

"Don't tell them!" Cassandra hisses, having had enough running for one day, but she stays where she is and pulls the lever at the Doctor's command as he continues to encourage them to come closer. There's no way back up, no way out but through all those people. Nothing to do but trust in the man who'd already gotten her killed once. And maybe it was just Rose in there pushing a bit, but she very nearly did trust him.