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Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 |
Chapter 16: Winter
The Doctor was so lost in his own private hell that he did not hear Nicholas until the man placed a hand on his shoulder.
‘Doctor? Let her go. Let us cure her!’
‘Nicholas?’ His voice was disbelieving, as if his mind was playing tricks, giving him what he longed to hear rather than what was truly there. ‘You weren’t here!’
‘It’s me. Alex was look out, he fetched us. Here, let me.’
He felt drops of liquid against his eyes and blinked instinctively. Almost at once the thick web coating his eyes softened and fell away. He winced at the sudden harsh invasion of light, before seeking out Rose with furious intensity. Lying in his lap, Adelphos crouched beside her, she looked like a fallen angel. Alabaster white, the cuts and grazes on her hands, face and knees stood out as violent red aberrations. Her slightly parted lips were tinged with blue and her chest barely rose with rapid little breaths. Her once beautiful white gown was torn and bloodied and her fragile form was swamped within his jacket, the black leather drawing painful attention to her deathly pallor.
Adelphos was dripping a pale liquid between her lips but he looked nervous and the Doctor knew then that even now they might be too late. Certainly, the man could not treat Rose’s pneumothorax. As Adelphos sat back, the Doctor pinned him with a cold stare.
‘Are you done?’
‘N-n-no. Twelve drops of this cordial must be administered every three hours for the next twenty-four hours. Only then will death release his hold on her. I fear, however, that Hades will not willingly relinquish her. This breathlessness is not of the pomegranate’s doing.’
‘No,’ the Doctor acknowledged. ‘Let me be clear. That cordial. Once every three hours?’
‘Yes.’
‘Give it to me!’
‘What?’
‘Give. It. To. Me. I will treat her. She is my responsibility.’
‘You are right. She is. You have bested Orpheus. Here, take it. May the goddess be with you.’ Adelphos got up, backing away from the angry man before him as he thrust the bottle of elixir into the Doctor’s waiting hand. Wordlessly Nicholas joined him, both men fleeing before the palpable air of danger and barely restrained violence emanating from the man at their feet.
Dismissing the Phosians from his mind, the Doctor lay Rose gently on the floor and pulled his key and sonic screwdriver from the pocket of his jacket. Pressing the screwdriver to the key, he called for his ship, sighing with relieved welcome as it materialised before him. Gathering Rose into his arms, he strode towards his ship, the doors opening for him automatically as the TARDIS registered the situation, shifting the infirmary so it was mere paces away from the console room. The Doctor hurried to the infirmary and the medical equipment he hoped would ensure that Hades was denied his prize.
The Doctor hunched over Rose’s pallid hand, his thumb worrying it as it lay limply within his own. The arms of his jumper were pushed up above his elbows, giving him an air of worried industry. The monitors above Rose flashed and reported silently, their capacity for sound curtailed; after hours without sight his hearing still seemed hyper sensitive and the only noise he could endure was the gentle rhythm of Rose’s living form. He had treated her collapsed lung and mended her broken rib. Her tattered feet, cuts and grazes were all dealt with. She might have been sleeping, except she would not wake and the monitors indicated a war within her; the poison remained. For the last twelve hours he had dutifully dispensed Adelphos’s cordial, twelve drops every three hours. Her temperature had dropped a little after six hours but that was the only sign that it was having any impact. Her heart still beat too fast and irregular, she was still fevered and her mind was still locked in a coma.
It had taken them thirty-eight hours to reach Adelphos, no doubt the reason why he had not been waiting for them when they’d arrived. As he’d feared, his act of forcing Rose to awaken, coupled with her subsequent exertion, had allowed the poison to make rapid progress through her dangerously compromised defences. The scales were evenly weighted, the antidote and the poison battling for supremacy within her and all he could do was watch. He had been unable to properly identify the poison, although it contained similarities to both atropine and wolfsbane, causing tachycardia, dizziness, nausea, blurred vision, fatigue, numbness and ultimately either cardiac or respiratory arrest as it depressed the functioning of heart and lungs. He had found no more effective treatment than Adelphos’s potion. There was nothing he could do but hope. And wait.
He wondered if she even knew he was here, waiting for her. He knew her limbs had become numb, perhaps she could not feel him. The idea that she might think she was alone horrified him. If she felt abandoned she might chose not to return to him. His eyes shimmered with tears, one breaking free to fall onto her still hand. He rubbed it into her skin mindlessly, imaging that same hand wiping the tears from his cheeks, promising he would be all right. Asking him to find someone, to not be alone. But he would be, without her. She was all he wanted. She couldn’t leave him.
He had to let her know that he was here, he was waiting. Bedtime stories. She’d wanted bedtime stories before. Tales from his planet. He started talking before the thought had fully developed, hoping his voice would be a stronger lure than the siren call of death.
‘I wasn’t born, you know, not like you were. I was loomed. Neat little trick my people had for dealing with growing infertility and a shortage of women. I’m half human, though. My father broke all the rules of our planet and fell in love, with an ape-descendant no less. Maybe that’s why I’m so fond of your planet; inferior genes coming to the fore.’ He reached out of sweep a strand of hair from her face, his fingertips lingering on her cheek. Was it a little pinker than before?
‘Never really understood my father. Very human of me, that.’ He stroked her hair. ‘You’re so transient. It’s like loving a mayfly.’ He let his hand drift down her arm before capturing her hand once more. ‘Still, I think maybe I understand him a little better now …’
The timer by Rose’s bed rang. Time for another dose of the antidote. Releasing Rose’s hand, he moved to the table by her bed, picking up the small bottle before sitting beside Rose and easing her up into his arms. Very gently, he parted her lips with a careful finger before dripping twelve drops of the cordial into her mouth. Putting the bottle down he massaged her throat, encouraging her to swallow, before subsiding back, resting his back against the bank of medical machinery, Rose still cradled against him. He savoured the weight of her against his body, the living warmth of her skin, the sensation of her breath against the bare skin of his forearm. Sitting like this he could pretend she had fallen asleep against him watching a movie, one of those pointless romantic comedies she liked to watch and he watched with her just to keep her company. He could pretend that any moment now she would wake up and demand to know who’d eaten the last of the popcorn. Any moment now.
He settled her more securely against him. ‘Now, where was I?’ He pressed his lips together, his expression tense. Mayflies. No. No more of that. Perhaps a fairy story?
‘Once upon a time there was a poor princess called Rose, trapped in a run down castle by her evil mother, Jackie the Terrible. One day, as Rose tended to her duties in a dank and nasty basement, a dashing knight swept in and saved her from a sudden marauding hoard of plastic men…’
Chapter 17
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