bakerstreet | minor injury meme.

It's times like these that the Doctor wishes that he keeps more in touch with his companions. A fruit basket! A card! A souvenir from his travels! A phone call! Anything to make it seem a little less like he only shows up when the planet's in danger or he needs help.

But, that's how things are.

He supposes he could have actually called first. Checked to make sure Martha was even in, find out when she'd be back if she wasn't, show up at that time. He doesn't call though, and when the TARDIS arrives outside her place, there's an underlying high-pitched whine mixed in.

The Doctor throws open the door, having difficulty with breathing, and braces himself in the threshold of his ship, silently hoping if Martha's around, she'll have heard the TARDIS and come out. Otherwise, this is going to get ugly for him very fast.

He stares down at his right leg, still hidden inside, and cringes. There's a lovely creature, somewhere like a squid crossed with a beetle, fixed onto his leg from his ankle to his knee.

He's had better days.

Luckily for the Doctor, Martha's at home, relaxing with a nice glass of wine and a book after a long day of work. Said long day of work might have involved copious amounts of blue slime, and even after a lot of showering, there's still a faint bluish tinge to Martha's hair and skin.

She's still in her bathrobe when she hears the sound of the TARDIS outside, and she sighs and finishes off her glass of wine in one long gulp. It's not that she doesn't like the Doctor. Of course she does. But she knows that if he's turning up, things are probably going to head downhill very quickly. He never just pops by to say hello, to have a nice cup of tea and a chat. It's always "oh, lovely to see you Martha, have I mentioned the world's going to end in five minutes?"

Hopefully this is the sort of catastrophe that doesn't require actual clothes, she thinks, eyeing the rest of the bottle of wine wistfully as she gets up to open the door. Or going out at all. Or-

"Are you all right?" She frowns at the Doctor, fairly certain the answer to that question is no, but maybe he'll elaborate as to just what is wrong with him. More than the usual, at any rate.

His relief at seeing her doesn't show because he's too busy focusing on not falling over. He doesn't tell her that the world's going to end in five minutes though, so he feels like this entire thing could be a whole lot worse.

The Doctor holds off on replying, straightening awkwardly so that he can pull his right leg into view. "Tragically, I find I need a doctor," he tells her. "Hello, Martha," he sighs. He probably should have said that first, but his priorities are a little skewed by the thing attached to him.

"Most people usually start with 'hello'," she informs him. "It's considered polite, especially if you don't want to sound like you're using your friend for their medical skills." Look, she might be a little annoyed that she only sees him when he needs something. She knows that's how the post-Doctor life works, she's talked to Sarah Jane about it, but she still doesn't like it much. On the bright side, she wasn't dumped off in Aberdeen, so she probably doesn't have anything to complain about.

(Plus he hasn't said anything about her blueness.)

"And what do you need a doctor for?" There's a lump under the fabric of his trousers, but it could be just about anything. Although the wriggling does rather tend to narrow it down, she reckons.

He deserves that, he knows. He even has it in him to look properly chagrined. It isn't like he plans things this way. "There's no one else I can go to, Martha." Maybe he'll try harder after this. Maybe he won't cut himself off from his companions that are still alive, still in this universe.

If he hasn't ever done it by now though, he doubts he'll change.

He winces and pulls at his pant leg, though it catches and sticks in several places, it eventually reveals enough of the bug-cephalopod creature that's made a mess of his leg, blood surrounding everywhere it touches.

"I can't remove it." He'd like to say that's the worst of the problem.

"That is really gross." Martha stares at it, wrinkling her nose. Of course she'll help him; she might gripe, but she'd never turn him away. She knows what he's like, knows he's never going to change his ways. He doesn't look back on the past - can't afford to spend all his time dwelling on it. She doesn't entirely blame him, but as the person on the human side of everything, it hurts, even if she knows why.

"You need to sit down and keep your leg above the level of your heart -hearts, that is." She doesn't bother ducking back into her flat to retrieve any of her equipment; the TARDIS has more advanced medical supplies than she does. "Tell me what you know about it and what it does." It needs to come off now, but she has to know something to know how best to treat it.

Try having it attached to you.

The Doctor's usually an awful patient, but he did ask for the help (sort of asked, anyway), and he really does want it off as soon as possible, so he slips back into the TARDIS, using Martha's shoulder to help him along the way. He only barely remembers to close up the TARDIS behind them and then they're moving through corridors to those advanced medical supplies.

"I can't remove it, literally. I've tried. It's... something in it's saliva's wormed its way through me, messing with my head. Anytime I try to touch it I get a very-not-me thought of 'how about not,'" he explains on the way. "Came across it on a planet that'd been mostly ruined remnants from the Time War."

The Doctor didn't want to go, but the TARDIS seemed very sure that he had to be there.

He wonders if she wanted him to get this thing latched to him, but he doubts that was the point.

He eases down into a medical chair, tensing and biting back a hiss of pain when he tries to elevate his leg like she wanted.

"It's--" Hell. "It's not feeding of meat or blood, Martha." He leans his head back and screws his eyes shut. "It's feeding on me. My essence."

"At least it's not poisonous," she points out in a disarmingly cheerful voice. That's what she'd been most worried about, keeping the venom from travelling through the Doctor's system. But if it's feeding on him, it probably wants to keep its host alive - for the moment, anyway. Till it gets its fill and finds another host to latch onto.

"If it gets onto me," Martha adds as she bustles around the infirmary, collecting an assortment of supplies, "you're going to have to find yourself another doctor the next time you land yourself in trouble." Okay, that's a lie, but she'll be really annoyed with him for awhile.

"Any allergies to local anaesthetics?" She rummages through a drawer that seems to have odds and ends of medical supplies she's never seen before, and holds something up. "Is this a scanner? I'd like to get a look at your leg before I start cutting." Her tone is perfectly normal, like she's not doing anything more complicated than pulling a splinter out of his thumb. "I need to know how deep that thing goes."

His thoughts wander more than is probably healthy. He tries to remember where he picked up the gadgets Martha is holding. Who gave it to him, or did he actually get it, himself? No, that seems unlikely. He wouldn't have that much foresight. Probably?

He wonders what he would do if he had to get Martha a doctor. Suck it up and take her to Jack, if Jack's still on this planet. He might not be. That's another person that the Doctor doesn't see on a regular basis, and really, he should. It isn't like Jack is going to die anytime soon. Does he take her to her mum? Ask Francine if she has a doctor she trusts that isn't her daughter?

God, he can't keep bringing dying/broken/agonized companions back to their mothers. This. This is why he's traveling alone! ~~Among other things~~.

"Martha," his voice is alarmed when he finally speaks, and it isn't to answer any of her medical questions. "Martha. You're blue?" Look who's finally noticed, except there's panic in his voice because he doesn't know if he's seeing things.

Sorry, did you want to know something important?

Martha hits what appears to be a power button on the maybe-scanner and waves it over her hand. It's nice, she notes absent-mindedly; she can adjust the knob and see different layers - veins and capillaries, muscles, bones - she might just have to steal it when she's done. She'll call it payment.

"It's temporary. I think." Probably. And she's not a Smurf or anything, it's just a light tint. "Work being...you know, work. Not sure what it was, but it spewed this blue gunk everywhere." She holds up a large jar. "This look like it's about the right size?" She's got to shove the...thing into something once she's pulled it off.

She grabs a pair of shears and expertly slices the Doctor's trousers up to the knee, pulling the separated cloth up to reveal a mess of blood and cephalopod and a skinny hairy leg. She's pretty sure she can see something writhing under his skin. "This," she informs him, "is not going to be fun."

"Yeah, right size, I think," he answers, distractedly.

It isn't until he sees the shears that his mind catches back up with the situation and he's jerking away from her, not entirely by choice. "Oh god." Breathe. Relax. He tries to center himself, compartmentalize his thoughts. "Sorry. It's... I'm not trying to be difficult," he promises. Still doesn't mean he's not worming out of the way.

He grips the armrests tightly. "Animalia. Mollusca. Cephalopoda. Decapodiformes. Teuthida." He keeps thinking Earth terminology to stray his mind from the very alien thing sucking at him. Laughs, hysterical. "It's okay, Martha, you're just human." Sorry. That came out wrong. "I think it only has a taste for Time Lords."

He stops moving. "Ahhh... I think I... Have a hold of it now. In my head. Okay? Okay. Ready."

"Well, that's reassuring," she deadpans as she injects the contents of a syringe into him. She rolls up the sleeves of her robe, pulls on a pair of gloves.

"Too soon," Martha mutters under her breath. The skin isn't numb yet - although he probably ought to be put under, she thinks, if she has to cut too deep. She hasn't had a chance to look at the thing yet and-

"Oh. Bollocks." She twiddles a knob on the scanner till the right layer comes into focus. It's grown roots into his leg, it looks like, except the roots are moving constantly and are really probably tentacles. This calls for a few more swear words, more severe this time, because she doesn't know what the hell to do or where to start.

Even worse, there's a suspicious-looking bulge on his calf - ordinarily, she would assume that it's an abscess, but she's got a nasty feeling that the Doctor's squiddy friend is trying to reproduce. Also, she's run out of curses.

He blacks out for a few seconds, not from pain, but from the thing taking a merry walk through his mind and slamming all the doors closed. He reaches out and grabs her arm tightly when he blinks back, groaning, "This shouldn't be so hard for me."

There's an accidental moment on his part when the touch contact sends an image into her head of the thing in under his skin. He doesn't even realize he's done it, too disoriented and mentally bogged down.

"Yeah, I know," she mutters at the image flashing into her mind, too busy concentrating on the situation at hand to really register what he's just done. If it were a squid, she could just stab the bloody thing with her scalpel. The carapace is too tough to cut through, though, and she's not sure she's got anything that will work.

(She does have a bone saw as a last resort, but she's definitely keeping that out of the Doctor's sight.)

Martha grabs the squid-bug with one hand, trying to lift it as far away from the skin as she can - which isn't very far. The tentacles are covered with some sort of chitin before they pierce the skin, which rules out her first plan, and the shell covers the entire thing - there are no weak spots (plan number two). She makes a face and slices decisively through his skin around the place where all the tentacles seem to meet. The branching tentacles make it difficult, but she slowly wrestles the thing - and a flap of the Doctor's skin and muscles - back. She drives the blade of the scalpel into the middle of the mess, and recoils at a scream that isn't audible. It resounds in her head, not just a scream, but pain unlike anything she's ever known, an intense fear that paralyses her where she stands.

"...Martha?" he asks, hesitant, unaware of her troubles, but as far as he can tell, nothing weird happened. Well. Weirder than things already are. He frowns, worried. Maybe he shouldn't have brought this to her. He could've gone to any number of planets with fantastic hospitals and good shops. He just--he hates them. He hates them poking around at his Gallifreyan blood, and it never seems to end well.

So, he came to Martha. He trusts her.

"Martha, what's wrong?" he continues. "How can I help?"

"The screaming," she whispers, her eyes wide and unseeing. It reminds her of the mass executions - and as she thinks about it, the memories flash to the forefront of her mind, as vivid as the day they happened. The Toclafane whirling, blades slicing. The sounds of their manic giggling mixing with the screams of their victims. Martha hiding wherever she could, hoping her perception filter wouldn't fail, that she would escape this, hating herself for surviving, for not trying to stop it, for being powerless.

She can't think about what she's doing, not when every fiber of her being is telling her to curl up on the floor, not when she wants to retch and sob all at once.

The screaming--? What is she...? His skin is numb and his head is dizzy and his best friend is falling apart. He reaches out with both hands and takes her wrists as though he can steady her, bring her back to the present, out of her mind.

"Martha, listen to my voice. There's no screaming, it's all--" he trails off, frowning, his next words more of a question to himself, "in your head?"

"It won't stop," she whimpers. The blood-slick fingers of her gloves tighten around his wrists, clinging to him like a lifeline. The forgotten scalpel is still stuck in the middle of the beetle-squid - or, rather, the layer of flesh it's clinging to, then the beetle-squid - and the amount of blood pooling on the floor is starting to look a little alarming.

"Whatever you were doing, Martha? It had to be working. It won't stop because the bug needs to stop you, so it can hang onto me."

Or is this his fault? Has he lost control of his own mind, bleeding to her, complete with the beetle-squid piggybacking? He wants to believe he has better control than that, but he honestly can't tell right now. In the end it doesn't really matter, it still must be the alien, trying to push her away.

He tries not to think how much of that blood is his mixed in.

"I know it's not easy. Think happy thoughts?" He doesn't mean to sound cliche, alright. Different people have different mental defenses, and he doesn't want to get any nearer to her mind than he might already be. "Push beyond it."

Martha is normally strong and capable. She doesn't panic in a crisis. She kept her head when she found herself on the moon, she watched over the Doctor when he'd had to hide away, she'd stared down the Master in the last moments of his reign. She doesn't flinch at anything she has to do, no matter how gruesome or dangerous - she'd agreed to cut into her best friend without batting an eyelash, after all.

Which makes this sudden change all the more jarring. It's utterly uncharacteristic of her. If she was capable of fighting back, she would be, because Martha isn't the sort to give up without a fight.

But right now, she's locked in an unending loop of her own memories. The streets running with blood on the first day of the Master's reign, the skies black with Toclafane. The bodies everywhere, some killed with a simple slash, some rendered into a fine mince - all of them decaying because there's no one to dispose of them, not even to burn them. The labour camps where all the humans had been forced to work building the Master's rockets, from the youngest to the very oldest, Martha hiding in a corner of the barracks and subsiding on whatever they would give her - never much, and always more than they could really spare. It all tumbles through her mind in a torrent, unceasing. Like her nightmares, only worse.

She's gone. Completely lost to the sea of her own mind. His eyes rapidly move, praying to find any signs of his Martha there, but she's gone.

"Martha..."

He doesn't want to do this, but the only way to pull someone up from drowning is to be there, with them. Besides, it isn't like she's stuck in the Time War, right? There's "screaming" in her mind but it's not that place, so he'll be fine?

(Sometimes--usually--he forgets about the Year That Never Was. Purposely pushes it out of his mind because life of the Valiant was completely different than life on the ground. And anytime he thinks of it, he remembers the lead weight of the Master willfully dying in his arms as his strongest memory. How do you tell someone that, someone who remembers the Year? Someone, all of them, who likely wanted to take that gun and make it happen? How do you tell them that through all the atrocities, your worst memory is their enemy dying?)

So, he doesn't think what screaming in her mind entails.

He puts blocks in his own mind as though it will help. Stares down at his bleeding leg and the leeching bug. If he gets lost in Martha's mind, he's probably done for. Better to make this quick.

Can't be too hard, right?

He rotates his wrists and presses his thumbs to her pulse points. "Martha, I'm going to help you, okay? You're going to be alright. Listen for me, in your head. I'm going to... try and find you." He forces a smile, even though he doubts she'll see it, and then closes his eyes, focusing, and slides his mind into hers.

"Who aided the renegade?" An entire barracks of the labour camp is standing out in the cold, their clothes ragged, their cheeks hollow from too much work on too little food. All of them, from the oldest to the youngest, are forced to work - building the rockets, mining the uranium, anything and everything. Martha huddles behind a corner of a building, clutching her perception filter and praying. The warning hadn't come soon enough, she hadn't been able to move on - she'd barely made it out of the barracks before everyone had been hustled outside.

"You know what the punishment is." Martha doesn't want to believe that there are people who would work for the Master willingly, but there are. They subjugate their neighbours, their friends, for simple human comforts - new clothing, enough food to eat, relative safety for their family. Or maybe, as in the case of this particular overseer (or so she's heard), they just have a taste for cruelty.

"If the guilty parties submit themselves for judgment, I won't have to kill all of you," he continues. A pair of Toclafane hover to one side, flanking a little girl.

"Can we play?" one of the spheres asks in its childish voice. "We want to play with the nice people."

Martha bites down on a knuckle. The blades flash, and the girl collapses in a spray of blood, her parents somewhere in the crowd crying out. Her name was Yelena, she thinks. She'd told her about her puppy the night before, left somewhere outside Moscow. Her older sister Katya had been at university, one of the victims of that first day of the Master's reign. Her crumpled grey dress turns scarlet with blood, and the Toclafane giggle as they mutilate her beyond recognition. It's all Martha can do to keep from stepping forward, offering herself up.

The silence continues as the Toclafane slaughter the crowd one by one, methodically, starting with the children first. They like the children the best, their voices rising in sing-song rhymes. After the first ten, they stop.

Nobody has betrayed her yet.

As more of the Toclafane come down and the overseer gestures for them to begin their work, nobody else has a chance to. Martha isn't sure if the copper taste in her mouth is from her knuckle or the blood spraying everywhere. She's too far away for any of it to hit her, but it feels like she can taste and smell it anyway.

There's a two second break where the Doctor's mind physically jolts away from Martha's before it's engulfed entirely and wedged unpleasantly together. Two seconds where the Doctor chokes on bile, where his body says run, but he can't.

Human nature is the spit of a thought, disgusted and hidden in the static of the Doctor's mind, obfuscated. The Master is a force of destructive chaos, but he couldn't have done everything alone, not without help. He manipulated thousands, sure. Made them bend to his will, as he always does. But that excuse could only be used for so many people. Some, he didn't even need to push. Some just wanted to be powerful. Push over the weak, finally finding the opportunity to do so.

Maybe the Master doesn't always like going after Earth because it's the Doctor's favorite.

Maybe he goes after it because he knows the darkness in these human hearts best.

Finding a stable joint connection in Martha's mind is more difficult than he thought it'd be after he's overtaken. The horror that she no doubt keeps stuffed down is all around him now--the screaming. When he finally grapples a hold of something solid, he almost wishes he hadn't, but he knows she's here, and he needs her out.

As he paces on the outskirts of the scene, he watches the Toclafane in their slaughter, the names of people sliding through a filter to him because Martha knows them. He did this. He sent her here, with a mission. He made her deal with this.

Had there been another option? the question tumbles between their minds, buffered by the Toclafane glee.

He falls out of the memory before he makes it around to Martha, into another one. Not hers, not his, but relevant. Darkest skies and a dying universe and everything so cold. The Master and Yana staring up as one, children and Toclafane around them. The Doctor's watching with them, unwillingly, because the Master put Malcassairo into his head as a stain.

When he locks his mind back up tight, he's standing two feet behind Martha and puts a hand to her shoulder and a finger to his lips. He doesn't speak, but his thoughts are there, with her: Calm, Martha. Stay calm. Please. He's terrified of the memory shifting into something more like a nightmare if they draw attention to themselves. I promise it's really me.

The nightmares are worse - the ones where she's the one the Toclafane are playing with, or worse, where she's forced to watch her family and friends be shredded to pieces.

(After everything went back to normal, she couldn't eat meat for months. She still can't eat beef if it's too raw.)

Doctor? Her mental presence clings to him like a lifeline. Deep down, she knows it's just a memory, that it's not real, but the terror of the moment overrides her rationality. (The shred of normal Martha knows that the squid-thing is probably amplifying that emotion, too, making it worse so that she's too crippled to act.)

The scene shifts. Japan, she knows in an instant. She'd been caught here, briefly, spent weeks she hadn't had to spare working on the navigation chips for the rockets. She'd managed to remain anonymous up till the very end. It's the end that they're in, the streets on fire as she runs through them, trying to find a way out. There's got to be an escape route. She can't pay attention to the people around her, the ones trying to find whatever shelter they can from the flames, the ones on fire, the charred husks at her feet. She has to stay alive.

It's me. I'm here to help you. Do you remember what's going on? He tries to only focus on her when they're in Japan. Don't get taken in. Don't get lost. Steady, steady (but the thing's still in his head, too). For too long, he isn't even the Doctor. He's just some other no-name, running with her, kept at her side, probably even unseen by her. He's in-sync with her fear, her adrenaline, her breath. Nowhere is safe, no corner, no path. Who do you trust?

"Do you know? She's dead, Doctor," the Master's voice lulls. "Torn to shreds. She screamed through the night."
"No," the Doctor snaps, "no, you'd make me see it, if she was. Lord it over me. You have nothing. No."

"No!" He shakes himself, stepping in front of Martha and grabbing her by the shoulders, panting hard, his own panic feeding into her mind. "Martha, this isn't real. You can't fight the past, you can't fight in your memories. It's leading you down a labyrinth that you won't be able to climb out of. You have to fortify against it, Martha, build yourself a mental fortress, or we're both going to sink!"

6-1/3-5

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