Fic: Life on Mars/Doctor Who Crossover.

[mellaithwen]

Title: This Is How We Walk On The Moon

Rating: Blue Cortina. PG-13. Gen.

Word Count: 7, 092

Warning: Spoilers for Doctor Who; Smith and Jones and general Life on Mars spoilers (nothing past the 6^th episode). Swearing within.

Summary: AU. Life on Mars/Doctor Who crossover. Sam wakes up in the hospital...only, he’s definitely not in Manchester anymore.

Thank you to mad_lemming_89 for answering my little nervous questions and WINKING, hehe. Saying that, mistakes are still my own--but I hope I caught the majority of them!
 

*-*-*

The rainfall is swift and the wind outside—as the storm intensifies—makes the windows of the Royal Hope Hospital rattle and shake. People by the waterside and those on boats across the Thames stop and stare. The cloud hovers ominously above the high-rise-hospital, and only the hospital. Its lightning crackles as thunder booms.

In one place.

And the rain? Falling swiftly? About that...

It falls for a few minutes just as every other drop would, it’s calm despite its fervour. But soon after, the droplets, they change. Vertigo and gravity and maybe some kind of magnetic pull, but whatever it is, it’s pulling the rain back. It’s going up, and up, and up as though in rewind, or as if watching a storm while hanging upside down.

It’s wrong and there’s a buzzing before the lightning strikes and the building shakes and quivers and rumbles along, up and up, just like the rain. The bright white light envelopes it all as lightning strikes again and again and the shaking never stops like an earthquake beneath their feet, before darkness.

Only it isn’t night, its space.

And this isn’t London, it’s the bloody moon.

It takes a few seconds for the shock to settle in but soon after that, hysteria takes over and that’s when the screaming starts.

*-*-*

The gunfire starts at noon. Like every good 70’s cop show, Sam thinks to himself, feeling more and more like The Sweeney ever day.

The case had begun with one murder. Body found in a back-alley, miles from where they are now, but the more they delved into it, the more they found, and even more suspects came to light. Drugs, revenge, exploitation, the lot.

Even now, Sam can’t explain it back to anyone who asks. It doesn’t matter. Whoever survives this is getting sent to jail for pulling this crap in the first place.

Sam’s doing a lot more aiming than shooting; he’s never felt comfortable with running blind; letting off rounds as though every hit doesn’t mean he’s a killer. Every bullet that makes impact isn’t leaving a wife behind or a child left alone.

But then there’s another part of him that’s enraged by the guns being pointed at him. They’ve done nothing, the police didn’t even open fire before it all began; and that took a lot of persuasion on Sam’s part.

And it’s all for nothing.

Because there are men down in the streets of Manchester and every shot he dodges, Sam’s desperately trying to think back and remember something like this happening.

But it’s not his area, he didn’t live here, and he was a child, there’s no way he’d have remembered something like this.

As far as Sam can tell, perception altered ever so slightly by the impending danger of the gunshots in the air, their current situation, as dire as it would seem, doesn’t garner remembrance in the future. It’s just an escalated situation, it doesn’t spawn from a long buried hatred (aside of that between cops and robbers), it’s nothing that will change the world, or change the area.

It’s no revolution, it’s just...gunfire.

He feels it then, just as he aims once more. It’s as if there are sudden blinkers on his eyes that weren’t there before. They make it harder for him to see. It’s a wind tunnel in his ears that limits sounds to muffled garbage in the distance of the swirling mass. He can hear his pulse, thumping; his blood pounding in his head. In his ears.

It’s a tugging that shouldn’t be there. And it has nothing to do with guns or dodging bullets. It’s something he’s been searching for ever since he arrived in 1973, only now? He doesn’t want it.

It’s this voice that says it’s time to go, Sam as though he’s a child and it’s past his bed time. It’s this feeling that’s whispering to him, as though he has no authority, no say. But he’s not a child, at least, not as he is from the future, and he’s needed here. If he wakes up, he does so in a different era when he’s only just gotten used to this one. He won’t be a good cop in a bad place; he’ll be just another good cop, no doubt influenced by said bad place.

A place that isn’t all that bad, come to think of it.

Though at this very moment, it’s at its worst.

“No, no.” He whispers, begs to no one who can hear him, no one who’ll listen. He isn’t ready, he isn’t ready. He can’t leave them now, he has to finish, he has to help. All he can hear is the screams in his ears, the panic as gunshots resound and ricochet; some from the police, some...not, some into police, some not. It’s a crowded street corner and it’s a bad situation they weren’t prepared for. It’s hell.

He hears man down, too many times to count, as he sees people—comrades and colleagues, women he’s passed without a second glance on the streets of Manchester, men he’s nodded too, some strangers, others known by name and rank and their children’s birthdays being such a busy time for them.

They all fall like rag-dolls.

Like clowns drooping, dangling in the arms of a blonde haired child, always smiling, always cruel, too happy, too smart, too smug and it’s all too messy too fussy, too jumbled and god! The sun’s in his eyes, glaring in the way and there’s too much against him, odds and enemies and loose ends dangling from the cliff-face of his bad luck.

Thoughts ring in his ears like whirring sirens and he can’t focus, god, he can barely breathe!

A shout, then, sudden, loud and running footsteps right up behind him.

“Sam, get down!”

He complies, listens, and does as he’s told, because he doesn’t have much choice.

Because he’s been hit.

Because it’s too late.

He falls to his knees, crumples in a heap. He gets down, but only after the bullet rips through his body. Too late for Gene Hunt to push him down and out of harms way.

The blood drips through his fingers as he tries to press down on the wound that’s making crimson spread across his abdomen like a broken tin of paint spilt all over his shirt.

Only it’s warm, and it smells like copper, tastes like copper.

And that’s when he knows he’s buggered, because he shouldn’t be able to taste it at all.

It hurts and the pinpricks spread through his limbs and his body aches and he’s mumbling something under his breath while he bleeds and bleeds, and, and, and...

And he feels the panic lessen when Gene reaches his side, reaches out to him, mouthing insults or condolences—Sam can’t tell, because Sam can’t hear over the loud shots, over the blood pumping...he can’t hear.

Some time later, maybe even in another world, he’ll realise his superior wasn’t actually making a sound. Mouth opening and closing like a fish on the beach, desperate for water, desperate for help and answers. Flopping around on the sandy shore as though it’ll do any good, like Sam’s fingers trying to encompass the great hole in his stomach leaking life fluid all over the road.

He feels his superior grab his shoulders tightly but...gently.

“Sam,” his voice is tinged with fear and urgency as he ushers the man carefully into his arms.

He cradles his young DI; pushing the injured man’s hand back down onto the wound. He ignores the mild whimper and tiny trail of blood that spills down Sam’s chin. He does so with a stern expression to keep his own emotions under control lest the mask slip and slide like fingers slick with the blood that shouldn’t be there.

But Sam’s still hurting, and he doesn’t want to hurt anymore. Gene knows this. Hell, it’s obvious, it’s common sense, but it’s also the tell tale grimace on Tyler’s face, the quivering lip, shaking skin. He doesn’t want Sam to hurt but he doesn’t want Sam to die either.

Gene keeps the man’s knuckles warm with his own palm. Praying to a god he doesn’t believe in that it’s enough to save them all.

But even the Gene Genie can’t ignore the eyes glazed with pain and confusion, the clammy skin in the baking sunlight, the rapid breathing and the blue-tinged lips. All clear symptoms of the onset of shock.

“Sam, Sammy-boy, listen to me, keep calm, stay here, alright?” His voice fades in and out with the hiss and rushing air of a ventilator unseen. The sirens in the distance sound more like beeping machines and soon enough Sam can’t hear anything at all save for his own memories replaying in his fading mind.

“Sam, get down!”

He doesn’t get up.

*-*-*

“But it was that woman!” Martha Jones exclaims, recalling her consultant’s body on the floor and the blood sucking...alien. “Miss. Finnegan! It was working for her,” she looks down at the leather drone lying dead on the floor. “Just like a servant.”

The adrenaline is pumping through her body, she’s following a madman around the hospital—her workplace—while they’re on the moon. While they’re encompassed in a bubble that stops any air from getting out.

Only no air can get in either, since, they’re on the moon and all.

She’s doing all of this and more, as extra terrestrial police thump around each floor in search of a fugitive. The double act from the Planet Zovirax—and if she’s honest with herself, she’s actually pretty damn proud of that joke—are protecting their fair Plasmavore and making it harder to give her up to the Judoon.

Considering all of this, rent to pay and impending exams, she’s actually holding up extraordinarily well.

“My sonic screwdriver,” The Doctor mumbles sadly, as he releases the object from the X-Ray machine; inspecting the damage and the burnt ends dejectedly.

“She was one of the patients but—”

“My sonic screwdriver.” He repeats, as Martha continues to speak, explaining what she had seen if only to justify it to the logical side of her brain.

“—She had this straw like some sort of vampire...”

Do vampires even use straws? She wonders.

“I love my sonic screwdriver—”

“Doctor!”

“Sorry!” He apologises, tossing the broken device behind him, making a mental note to get another as soon as possible. He then realises how she has just addressed him, despite earlier mentions that he might not have yet earned such a title.

“You called me Doctor.” He grins.

“Anyway, Miss. Finnegan is the alien, she was drinking Mr. Stoker’s blood.

“Funny time to take a snack, you’d think she’d be hiding.” And then it hits him. “Unless...no, yes that’s it, wait a minute, yes! Shape changer!” He announces as though his current audience—medical student from Earth, Martha Jones—understands him. “Eternal shape changer! She wasn’t drinking blood she was assimilating it. If she can assimilate Mr. Stoker’s blood, mimic the Biology, she’ll register as human.” He thinks of what could happen, he thinks of terror and situations none too great and he has to stop it all. “We’ve got to find her and show the Judoon. Come on!”

They get as far as the door when they hear steady footsteps outside. The silhouette of a man in a motorbike helmet is walking up the stairs, towards them and there’s nowhere for them to but back where they came.

“Back, back, back, turn, go, back, now!” The Doctor rambles, pushing Martha into a run as they reach the closest private room and hide within.

*-*-*

When Sam wakes up, there’s no one by his side and the screaming hasn’t changed one bit. But he can’t hear gunshots anymore, and his fingers are dry instead of being slick with his own blood. The sun isn’t glaring in his eyes and there are sheets beneath his head instead of a hot, rough road.

Gene’s gone but...but there’s a tube down his throat and there’s a man and a woman hiding inside of the doorway and he can breathe but he shouldn’t be able to, not like this, not like this. Alarm bells ring in his head as he tries weakly to raise his unresponsive limbs.

 “Sorry about your screwdriver.” Martha whispers, smiling at the Doctor as they both look carefully out of the small window, waiting for a clear path to race out and find the alien culprit.

But as soon as they hear the—until now—very quiet patient’s splintered choking as reaches for his respirator, they rush towards him instead. Sam’s desperate to remove the foreign object from within his trachea, even though he’s too weak and confused to do any damage.

“Steady,” the woman in the white coat soothes, as she unclips the breathing machine and holds the tube, bracing both herself and Sam. “On the count of three, deep breath.” She has no doubt that it’s the right thing to do, as she tells him what to do, though secretly concerned that she has yet to extract a ventilator unaided before now.

She turns to her companion.

“Hold him down.”

And the words spark a panic in Sam’s muddled brain. His eyes are blurry, closed for too long, stuck in the seventies for too long. Suddenly the light seems brighter and harsher than he ever remembered it and he’s afraid when a soft grip attends to his lax muscles.

“Ready? One, two, three!” She pulls it out skilfully with deft hand movements that lessen the pain for the patient. Even so, it takes many long minutes for Sam to nod his thanks let alone speak.

“A...are you m-my doctor?” He whispers finally to the both of them, voice scratchy and raw from the extraction of the tube and the months of keeping quiet as he roamed around the past.

The woman, clad in her white coat—hands surprisingly steady though Sam can make out a slight quiver in her frame that he recognises from past adrenaline rushes of his own—is about to speak when her companion interjects without warning.

“I’m a doctor, but I’m not your doctor.”

Sam frowns, head spinning. He feels slender fingers push him back down against the covers as he’s told to lie down, rest. Those same fingers clasp his chart, scanning quickly.

“Dr. Marcum’s been your attending.” She explains. “My name’s Dr. Jones, Martha, we’ll try and find Dr. Marcum for you, in the mean time you need to rest.”

“...screams.” Sam whispers, burning eyes staring off at the window in the door’s frame.

“It’s nothing to worry about.” Martha tries to console, clearly lying.

“You couldn’t have picked a worse time to have woken up, Mr...” The Doctor starts, having caught a quick enough glimpse at the chart, though leaving the admission open for an introduction.

“Tyler, Sam Tyler.”

The man—the Doctor—stops and stares for so long that Sam squirms under his gaze as much as he can under such close proximity.

Saved from any awkward conversation that may have followed, as clamping footsteps make themselves known. Heard in the distance; they are too hard, too loud. Not...right. All demeanours in the room change though it’s fair to say Sam’s has been confused since waking, with phantom hands shaking him and voices that aren’t there begging for him to stay even though he’s all but left 1973.

They’re male and female now though. Gene isn’t alone in his shouting and Sam lets out a soft sigh, oh Annie. Before realising that there are far more pressing matters at hand.

The man and woman—who are actually in the room with him, in 2007—are tense and both of them are at the door with a large amount of trepidation. The man’s hand is twitching and he appears to be bracing himself for something.

“Wh-what’s going on?” Sam asks, straining his voice to even be heard as anything more than a whisper.

“We’re about to be attacked by aliens...” The man says, grinning strangely. He reaches his hand back to Sam’s, ensuring eye contact is made. “I’m the Doctor by the way.”

“The Doctor?”

“Yes, but not your doctor, remember, the Doctor—”

“W...wait, aliens?” Sam asks, sounding as incredulous as he can with his speech mimicking that of a teenage boy going through puberty...only more painful no doubt.

“—And we have to go.” The Doctor says, gesturing to Martha, who nods hurriedly.

“Haven’t you got back-up?” Sam hears Martha whisper as the Doctor unlocks the doors. “You must have a partner or something.”

“Humans,” the Doctor complains exasperated, sharing a quick glance with Sam, before staring back at Martha and lowering his voice pausing slightly. “We’re stuck on the moon, running out of air, with Judoon and a blood-sucking criminal and you’re asking personal questions?”

They dodge out through the doors, but the footsteps are too close. “I like that.” Martha’s voice can still be heard. “Humans. Still not convinced you’re an alien.”

Sam hears a whirring sound and sees a faint blue light pointed towards their silhouette, the Doctor’s silhouette in particular.

“Non-human.” A booming voice—a stranger to Sam’s ears—declares outside the wooden doors.

“Oh my god you really aren’t!”

“And again!” The Doctor says just as Sam sees them break into a run just as the footsteps increase in their loud consistency, spiking tendrils of fear through Sam’s veins.

The stars are too bright outside of the window and there’s something that’s too close and too blue to be the moon, hanging in the sky. The floor vibrates with each footfall outside, like riot police walking in unison against a rally of protestors and pickets. Like the military, like...

The door slams open and a looming force enters and Sam can’t help but think of them as Vogon’s pushing their way into his room. 

“You will be catalogued.” The bleak disastrous voice commands as Sam mutters obscenities under his breath that would make even Gene Hunt proud.

He doesn’t have a chance to try and sit up before a devise is gestured at his forehead and a light shines on his forehead, reminding him of little brats with laser pens at the cinema rather than Vogon’s from the planet Vogsphere.

“Category, Human.”

Sam makes no move to protest as his hand is marked with a cross and dropped unceremoniously. He watches as, what he can only describe as biped-rhino-aliens walk out of the room, and promptly passes out.

*-*-*

Sound returns first.

Woosh, pop, and stones scratching beneath feet on the pavement. Gravel under his back now, no warmth, constant cold, and...blood.

“What the...we’ve got a pulse!” The fingers pressed into his neck disappear and he hears, if not sees, an urgent ambulance man racing back to his vehicle.

When he opens his eyes, he sees a broad figure move out of his eye line, and when his sight clears completely, the first thing he sees is Annie step in front of him and lean down. He can’t hear the shots anymore, or the footsteps. There’s no suit wearing doctor, but there is a doctor sorting out a gurney ready to hoist him into the back of the waiting ambulance. Leaving Annie to distract him with her bouncing curls, glistening eyes and worried smile. Her hands are shaking as they rub Sam’s shoulders trying to keep him warm.

She knows he’s cold.

Well, maybe numb is a better term to describe how he feels. It’s as though he’s disconnected somehow. He’s there, he knows he’s there, he doesn’t dare question it, not anymore. But he feels separate. Super-imposed. It isn’t that he doesn’t belong, it isn’t that he’s out of place, it’s just that he can’t really feel the pain anymore. When he knows he should be in a lot of it.

“You had us worried there.” She tells him, and Sam barely hears the snort in the distance as Gene paces at Sam’s head. Out of eye line—covered in blood that isn’t his, with eyes too red-rimmed and puffy for the DCI’s own liking.

“Worried, worried,” He mutters. “If you pull shit like that again, Tyler...” He trails off, unable to finish. Unable to think of an adequate punishment for the dying. Sam’s still too pale, deathly pale when he should be grinning because the shooting’s bloody stopped. Or whining about how the Hyde way was different, or hell, blaming himself instead of the idiots who opened fire first.

Sam’s too young to be lying on the asphalt soaked in his own blood. Gene’s too old to be the one watching from afar, already covered in a fair share of the precious red stuff and none of it’s his own. He’s the superior, he’s the commanding officer, it’s his team and he’s the one who’s supposed to take the responsibility, the bullet, not Sam. He’s done it before. Taken a shot intended for his strange DI, he should have been able to do it again.

“Why don’t you drink scotch, Sammy-boy?”

It might have saved you.

Maybe even make it stick.

Annie smoothes down Sam’s hair and pretends not to see how glazed his eyes look, how dim they seem in the mid afternoon sunlight in the middle of the street. She pretends not see how much they don’t even register anything he’s being told. How they seem permanently fixed on her.

“H-how many?” Sam asks for the fallen before he asks for himself, before he smiles, or rests. Before he...

He needs to know.

“We don’t know yet, but, it’s over.” She says, hesitant even though it’s true.

Sam’s eyes start to roll but he stops, blinks and swallows blood and saliva lingering on his tongue. Annie sees it all and feels her own blood run cold. She can’t forget what she’d seen just minutes ago. In the middle of the fray, though kept back somewhat for safety, a woman after all, she’d taken her eyes away from the blood of others, of guns and bodies, and seen them.

Gene’s head bowed, hands still atop Sam’s, cradling the younger officer in his arms.

She blinks and tries to make it go away but all it does is drop tears onto Sam’s neck. He doesn’t notice them either and he’s looking away, at something Annie can’t see.

“’m not crazy.” He whispers brokenly, voice cracking under the strain of breathing.

“Sam, please don’t do this.”

“I was there, Annie, I saw it. I was back.”

“No, you’re back now, Sam, with us.”

Gene’s stopped pacing, he’s still. When Sam looks up, he sees his DCI’s head blocking the immediate sunlight from his face, he squints and blinks but the image is fading, blurred and dark around the edges.

“Sam.” Annie calls.

“Sam.” Gene orders.

He leans down with Annie, grasping the man’s shoulders as finally the gurney gets there, but Sam’s eyes are already closing and the fingers in Annie’s palm are limp—no longer gripping.

She bows her head and clutches them tighter.

*-*-*

“We shouldn’t have left him.” Martha mutters to the Doctor on their return to the room, now designated their official safe haven for the time being.

“He’s human, he was perfectly safe.”

“Only now he’s unconscious and we still haven’t found that...that alien. Maybe I shouldn’t have unhooked him so soon.” Martha whispers, referring to the ventilator, while the Doctor keeps an eye out for any unwanted visitors. He turns to her with a compassionate smile.

“You did the right thing.”

“Yeah but now he’s in the same boat as the rest of us. Suffocating.”

“We have time.”

“How much time? Hours? Minutes?” Her voice trails away in a dangerous list.

“Just time. There’s always time, it’s everywhere, it’s everything. We have it.”

I have it.

Sam’s awake now and he’s forcing the wet droplets resting on his eyelashes to defy gravity rather than fall down the side of his face. To his annoyance, they fall anyway. They leave a glistening wet trail down into his hair but the liquid’s cold on his warm skin.

If he concentrates he can still hear Annie in the distance. Feel Gene grab his bloody coat in his hands before being pushed back by the emergency staff at the scene. They don’t realise it’s all DCI Hunt can do. And he has to bloody do something.

Now that he isn’t bleeding, now that he’s relatively safe medically speaking, he can feel Annie’s tears on his neck even though he knows they’re not there. He can hear her voice more clearly, despite the fact she stopped speaking to him over 30 years ago.

If he breathes deep enough, careful enough; just right then the dizziness increases and in the din haze he sees a mesh of colours that almost form a bright silhouette of the past. But it’s too bright, too distorted, too messed up and splattered with blood and tears to make anything out.

He hopes that he can see Gene reach an arm around Annie. He hopes he can see them cope.

“Is he from London?” Sam hears the Doctor ask the...other doctor.

“No,” she replies. “His chart says he was transferred from St. James’ in Manchester a few days ago. Better facilities.”

“For a comatose patient with no real treatment to be had?” The cynicism is spawned from sympathy, considering no hospitals in Manchester were being hijacked to the moon.

“I think the family were probably desperate, according to his chart he’s been like this for a while.”

The Doctor nods.

Sam can see them through the opened slit between his eyelids that still gives the illusion of sleep without succumbing to the much needed down time that the REM cycle might provide.

“I knew a Tyler once, knew a few of them to be honest.”

“Locals? Or...you know.” She gestures towards him, and then to the window, clearly meaning alien. He grins.

“Local.” He grins. “Definitely local. Had Christmas dinner on the Powell Estate after dealing with the Sycorax a year or so ago. And for your information, I’m not from the moon either.”

“Right.” She mutters, keeping an eye on the patient’s vitals. “You think he’s a relative, maybe?”

“Probably not if he’s from Manchester. Tyler’s I knew weren’t much of a big-widespread-family.”

“You still keep in touch?” Martha asks softly in an attempt to keep the small talk going on a topic that’s simple enough.

“No.” The Doctor answers with a sudden finality, but a groan from the former comatose man leaves her with no time to ponder on it.

“Sam? Can you hear me, Sam?”

“Mum?” He mumbles as he tries to push himself up, it’s the pen light in his eyes that confuses him all of a sudden. Her voice is soft but loud, and the words have been repeated again and again over the months since the accident. He would have still said it, still called her that by mistake even if he’d been completely coherent, up and about.

Martha smiles apologetically.

“Just me again, you remember? From earlier? You must have passed out after we left.”

“Sorry about that.” The Doctor pipes up by her side. “Was a bit rude to run out on you after saying aliens were invading the hospital, but we’ll probably be doing it again soon, now I come to mention of it.”

Sam falls back against the covers.

“I...I d...don’t know what’s worse, time travel, g-getting hit by a car, or this.” His speech is improving, slightly louder than before and the more he swallows away the fuzzy taste the drugs leave behind, the easier it is to get his unresponsive voice box to work despite the raw pain in his throat.

“Time travel?” Martha and the Doctor chorus, the former in confusion, the latter in wonder.

Sam nods, too damn confused to even bother hiding the exact words that may well get him committed. Martha puts her hand on Sam’s forehead, closing the distance between them in a single gesture.

“You’ve got a slight fever,” she says calmly, as though that would explain his mutterings. Sam leans into the blissfully cold touch without a second thought. In one era he’s too cold, in another he’s too hot. He can’t win.

He savours the moment though he can’t help hating that he’s alone. His thoughts drift to Annie, left in the past—if any of it was real. If she was real. But she has to be. Had to be. He wouldn’t invent grains of sand in her palm on his first day in the seventies, just like he wouldn’t give the characters of his insanity histories and depth and sense of humours so different to his own.

He wonders why his mother isn’t there, having heard her voice so many times, but he remembers hearing the young woman—Martha—say transfer, and god only knows how long it’s been. God only knows.

“What was that?” The Doctor pipes up suddenly, confusing the others in the room with his abruptness.

“What was what?”

“That!” The Doctor insists.

“What?” Martha repeats.

“That noise. Cover the door.” The Doctor says as Martha complies instantly. He turns to Sam, grinning.

“I’m 925 years old.” He whispers, quite happily, having manipulated the situation to tell Sam so. And Sam can’t help it; he laughs. It sounds more like a grimace of pain, granted, but somehow the Doctor know that wasn’t the direct intention and he certainly knows when he’s being laughed at.

“You said you’d been time travelling.”

Sam sobers up instantly.

“Reverse psychology?” Sam asks, keeping his sentences as simple as he can, finding it hard to stay awake let alone make conversation. “Act crazy to get me to...admit ‘m insane? Nice...try.”

“Not at all, crazy people never admit they’re crazy.”

When Sam doesn’t answer, the Doctor continues down another route, taking advantage of the distance between the two of them and Martha to question the former-comatose patient further.

“Where’d you go?” His voice sounds wistful enough to convince Sam that he’s not patronising him. He genuinely wants to know.

“1973.”

Now it’s the Doctor’s turn to laugh.

*-*-*

“Coma, my arse. He just doesn’t want to go to work in the morning the lazy—”

“Sir, I assure you this is quite serious. Sam’s not responding to stimuli, by every definition he is in a coma. One that he may not wake up from, demeaning my professional opinion won’t—”

“I’ll demean your opinion however I bloody like. This man’s a damn good copper and he isn’t that bad a person come to think of it. He deserves the best treatment whether he’s responding to stimuli or not! He has people here who don’t want him dead and gone—”

“Sometimes it’s down to a choice.” Suddenly, the doctor sounds so much wiser than he did before. “Sam can choose to stay, or he can leave and return to what he left behind.”

“What the bloody hell are you on about? Return. He came from Hyde not Heaven.”

The doctor quirks his eyebrow at Gene, as though to say, you believe in Heaven? But he replaces it by flashing a knowing smile that Gene mistakes for being condescending.

“Now you listen to me...” He jabs his finger into the doctor’s shoulder, taking great pleasure in towering over the young M.D. bringing a quiver from the man’s form. Gene’s about to spout off his threat, poised on his tongue, lengthy and filled with political incorrectness when Sam laughs.

“What’d I tell you?” Gene smiles at the doctor, revelling in sound of victory. “Coma. My. Arse.”

But the doctor doesn’t share the DCI’s happiness. Instead he uses his penlight to shine in Sam’s eyes, and sighs as he clips it back onto his white coat. Gene can tell from the doctor’s body language that it’s not over.

Sadly enough, Sam’s laughing is and the silence that follows is the most hopeless thing Gene’s ever heard.

“No,” He won’t give up yet. “He laughed, I heard him, you heard him.”

“It’s common in coma patients. Often they make a sound, cry, and sometimes laugh. Sometimes it can be an indication that the patient is close to waking...or—

“Or what?” Say it, Gene thinks, I dare you.

“Or a more permanent vegetative state.”

Gene shakes his head as he stands at the bottom of Sam’s bed, gripping the frame tightly until his knuckles turn white.

He much prefers the first one.

*-*-*

To say that air was fleeting would be a great understatement, even though it’s true.

And all Sam really wants to do is close his eyes and hope to wake up somewhere else.

The other half of him wants to be up and around helping any way he can. He’s a police officer for god sake, he shouldn’t be bedridden; he should be helping in any way possible. A spokesman for the people, a fellow citizen of Great Britain.

He doesn’t want to feel useless. Like an invalid. He’s used to have people depend on him, have a burden on his shoulders propelling him into every case, determined to seek justice and tell right from wrong. Point out the shades of grey to a superior officer who can only see Black and White and the clear glass bottom of the scotch at night.

Sam doesn’t want to lie back while everything else explodes around him. He doesn’t want to lie here when he promised to take Annie out the following Saturday.

Though really, that seems bleak no matter what hospital in whatever era he ends up in.

His eyes begin to droop as the air thins and his thoughts are a jumble of friends and family of past and present.

There’s barely any oxygen left, nearly none at all, and he’s sinking further into the scratchy bed sheets, thinking, it won’t be long now.

His body aches, and he couldn’t be sorer, but he feels almost as though he’s floating.

Maybe it’s the drugs. Maybe it’s the suffocation, maybe he’s on some high, maybe he’s actually a college student experimenting and mixing drugs and none of this is real. He’s not a police officer at all, future or past, none of its real. No one is. It’s a drug-induced-haze that’s supremely fucked up.

He can’t breathe, but it doesn’t hurt and he doesn’t struggle, he just stops.

*-*-*

“Come on, come on, please, come on Judoon, reverse it.”

Change it, change it back, take us back; put us back.

The Doctor never lets go of the burden he carries as he waits by the window and prays for...

And there it is.

Wet and glorious, falling fast.

“It’s raining, Martha, it’s raining on the moon.”

*-*-*

“I don’t bloody well care if he’s been clinically dead twice, you bloody well help him or I’ll twist your knackers and shove them where the sun don’t shine, are we clear?”

“Mr. Hunt—”

“DCI Hunt.”

“DCI Hunt, I won’t be spoken to like—”

“And I won’t watch my officer die a third time in one day!”

Sam coughs and they both turn instantly to see the young man twitching somewhat. Shaking almost. It’s too mild to be a seizure and it stops nearly as soon as it had began, leaving them with an awake DI in their midst, no longer on death’s door, it would seem.

“’Bout time you joined us.” Gene mutters, downplaying his fear considerably and turning to the young doctor. “Well? Shouldn’t you go get your boss or something?” Judging by the uncertainty in the doctor’s eyes, it’s clear he was thinking the same thing.

He checks Sam’s vitals carefully and as quickly as possible. The patient however licks his dry lips and tries tentatively to ready his eyes against the harsh glare of the lights above, despite his slight blurred vision shielding the worse.

“You’re a right attention seeker, you.”

Sam’s head lolls on the pillow, away from the booming voice that’s too loud for his ears to cope with.

“Hey, you better be listening to me you great big div, I told you not to pull that dying shit and you went and did it anyway. Talk about packing it in early, lose a little blood and off you trot. Where are your ‘nads Tyler?”

Sam smiles despite himself, grin widening as he catches Gene’s glare.

The doctor excuses himself with squeaking shoes racing across linoleum and Sam isn’t sure he’s alright with the exit. The only witness who could testify that DCI Hunt had indeed strangled DI Sam Tyler for daring to try and die on the Gene Genie’s watch.

“And just what the hell are you smiling about, Tyler?” Despite his grumbling anger, his voice like a rough growl. After all, Gene can’t help but notice the ashen white skin and the next to no movements on Sam’s part.

“Whatever you mouthed off about earlier, you managed to scare Cartwright into tears.”

His voice is more imploring than anything else, he may pretend not to care, but he wouldn’t mind having it explained to him. “Got her knickers in a right twist.”

“I don’t care if he belongs there, he needs to stay here, here with this and us and he can’t just up and leave!”

Sam thinks for a moment.

He sees two doctors, one male one female. He sees big bulging creatures from his worst nightmares in his doorway. He sees the earth in orbit, and knows it’s time when he hears and feels that last intake of air. Rushing between his ribs through lungs too deprived to continue as fragile a state as they are...

He remembers what Maya told him and hopes it’s easier for them to stop having to visit him, hope, and wait for the day when everything goes back to the way it was.

Then he thinks about what he has here.

“Nothing.” Sam whispers, voice hoarse and weak. “Just...just a bad dream, that’s all.”

“Are you sure?”

Sam looks up slowly to see Annie in the doorway, her voice is timid but her eyes are glistening and he can’t bear to say anything but stare. He nods instead and tries not to imagine his mother’s wails in the back of his head on her next visit to the hospital.

“Well, as long as you don’t go flat lining again.” Gene thankfully steals the silence of the impending moment. “It seems you’re still a permanent pain in my arse then, Tyler.”

Sam grins and never brings up the fact that Gene’s hands are shaking, or that they’ve been scrubbed clean so hard that even though the red blood stains are gone, the skin beneath is more like a pink rash betraying what was done.

He just smiles weakly in the presence of friends while Gene claps his hands against his knees.

“Well, maybe you can afford to lie here surrounded by voluptuous nurses,” Gene says, especially for the matron who has just walked in. She scowls, in his direction, hands on her hips, glaring. “But some of us have work to do.” Gene says, getting up—excusing himself from the room as Annie takes up the spot on Sam’s other side.

“Guv,” Sam grabs his superior’s attention with as loud a call as he can.

“What is it now, Sammy-boy?”

“Thanks.”

And he more than means it. DCI Gene Hunt, never one for pulling a Dorothy lets his eyes roam around the room for a second, nodding to himself, and nodding to Sam.

“Yeah well, couldn’t just leave you there, could I?”

*-*-*

When the rumbling lightning and rain has stopped and the worst is over, with the doors opening to security personnel and medical men and women attending to the fallen. When all that’s fading slightly, the Doctor goes off in search of Martha. In the hustle of arriving back on earth, and of course, regaining consciousness, she and the Doctor had lost each other along the way.

But he knows exactly where to find her, and leans in the doorway, watching as she tidies the body of Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler.

Deceased.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know.” He tells her aware of the guilt of many gnawing at his own insides, never wishing it upon another. His hands are in his pockets, fingernails catching on a stray thread within. His eyes are still bloodshot but his pallor is no longer pale and they’re both breathing despite it all.

“I know.” She whispers. “When the air went...it must have been too much for his body to handle.” She knows that too.

The Doctor agrees and replies with a nod. He leads her out through the room’s doors and stops as Martha carries on walking until she’s outside and ushered to an ambulance to be checked on.

The Doctor turns back to Sam. To the still man who lay atop the bed and speaks completely unperturbed by the fact that he won’t receive an answer now, here, today.

“It was nice to meet you, Mr. Tyler.” The Doctor nods appreciatively. Knowingly. “And I highly doubt you’re insane, by the way. Just a little eccentric...Like me, I suppose. Only...only human.”

*-*-*

Sam blinks awake to see that not only has Gene has returned—even if it is only to pass out drunk; flask empty in hand, on the chair in the corner—but Annie’s there too. The young woman having sat herself on the other side of the bed nestled right next to Sam’s hand. He can’t help but smile at the sight, her soft skin on his, and the fading voice telling him he wasn’t crazy. Isn’t. Not really. No.

Gene snorts in his alcohol induced sleep as Sam settles back into the sheets, believing the Doctor’s words whole heartedly. He’s not insane; he’s just a time-traveller from 2007 who just happened to go to the moon. That’s all.

He’s back now, that’s what matters.

-Fin.

Please Review.

,