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."

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[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.

[just_the_doctor]

They come to him, into the stream of chemicals, and walk away changed. Cassandra asks if the Doctor's killed them all, but he reminds her that's her way of things, not his.

"I'm the Doctor and I cured them."

He helps her down into the elevator and walks out into the lobby. The plague-carriers are now cure-carriers. Just a touch and the diseases are cured. It doesn't take long for it to spread throughout the whole lobby. A woman comes up to the Doctor, looks up with childlike eyes, and hugs him. He murmurs to her soothingly, then ushers her off to go sit with a man on his own.

"It's a new sub-species, Cassandra! A brand new form of life! New Humans! Look at them, look! Grown by cats... kept in the dark, fed by tubes... but completely, completely alive!"

The euphoria of the moment sweeps him up. It's not a total win, but it so rarely ever is. The majority, though, have survived. Life will out, he tells her. It finds a way. That's its nature.

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

A voice comes over the loudspeaker: it's the NNYPD, demanding that all staff submit themselves to immediate arrest. The hospital is full of police officers, taking the cats away, helping to herd the new humans into managable groups so that they could be catalogued.

One of the nuns, that Novice the Doctor had spoken to, is lead away by a police officer. The look shared between her in the Doctor is something Cassandra's glad she's not on the receiving end of.
The crisis is over, and she's hoping she can make some sort of escape before the Doctor remembers that he's supposed to be stopping her, too. But she still feels oddly compelled to follow him when he exclaims something about the Face of Boe and dashes off to speak to the supposedly dying creature. Perhaps it's curiosity, perhaps just a desire to hear what the last of Boekind had to say for itself, so that by the time she reached that age she could avoid being similarly dull.

[just_the_doctor]

Despite his fears, the Doctor finds the Face of Boe alive and well, floating in his tank, eyes open and alert.

"You were supposed to be dying," he says with a smile.

The Face of Boe seems to smile, though his expression doesn't change. "There are better things to do today," he replies telepathically. "Dying can wait."

Cassandra rolls her eyes and complains about "a head full of big face". The Doctor shushes her and listens as the Face of Boe continues.

"I have grown tired with the universe, Doctor, but you have taught me to look at it anew."

The Doctor teases him with the same old legend of him being millions of years old, and -- there's no mistaking it this time -- the Face of Boe chuckles.

Sobering, the Doctor adds, in a hushed tone, "I got the impression... there was something you wanted to tell me..."

"A great secret," the Face of Boe answers, similarly reverent.

"So the legend says."

"It can wait."

The Doctor breaks the somber mood then by pulling a sour face and almost pouting, "Oh, does it have to?"

"We shall meet again, Doctor, for the third time... for the last time... and the truth shall be told. Until that day..." The Face of Boe teleports away.

"That is enigmatic," the Doctor notes, impressed. "That-- that is - that is textbook enigmatic." He turns, then, to Cassandra, who has been completely disinterested in the whole conversation and is picking at her -- Rose's -- nails.

"And now for you."

[ibringlife.livejournal.com]

"But... everything's happy," Cassandra protested. "Everything's fine... can't you just leave me?"

She's not really all that hopeful. Meddling seemed to be his job, which he proves by ordering her to leave Rose's body, claiming that she's lived long enough. Long enough? Who's he to judge. She starts to cry, protesting that she's not ready, that she doesn't want to die. She begs for his help, but even as she catches something like sympathy in his eyes, he's adamant that he can't.

Then a familiar voice brings hope back.

"Mistress!"

It's her Chip. Still alive. He'll help. He has to.

[just_the_doctor]

"I kept myself safe," Chip says adoringly. "For you, mistress."

The Doctor can almost see the wheels turning in Cassandra's mind as she says, "A body... and not just that, a volunteer..."

"Don't you dare," he snaps. "He's got a life of his own."

Chip protests. He worships Cassandra. He would willingly welcome her into his body. The Doctor tries vainly again to stop her, but Cassandra doesn't listen. She ejects herself from Rose and enters Chip without a flinch.

Rose gasps, and her knees buckle. All the words he might have spoken to Cassandra in that moment flee the Doctor's mind as he lunges forward to catch Rose, checking if she's all right.