Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [91]
Anji stopped her rhythmic presses and moved back to the Doctor’s mouth.
‘No time to argue,’ she said, bending over him.
She breathed into the Doctor’s mouth. Suddenly his eyes flew open, and he coughed. Anji sat back quickly. Not quickly enough. The Doctor grabbed her, and planted a huge kiss on her lips.
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EarthWorld
‘Thank you!’ he cried. ‘You saved my life!’
No, she didn’t, thought an inner mean bit of Fitz. You just turned your body off for a bit. You can do that. You just probably don’t know it.
Anji was detaching the Doctor’s arms and standing up. Fitz noticed her surreptitiously wiping her mouth, and was quietly pleased.
The Doctor jumped up, too. ‘Where am I?’ he said. ‘No no, don’t tell me. . .
yes! I remember!’
Fitz’s stomach did a leap. Surely. . . surely there hadn’t been time for the triplets to sort everything out.
‘We’re on New Jupiter!’ concluded the Doctor. Fitz breathed easily again. The rest of the room suddenly came back into focus. Antarctica and Africa were still weeping over their sister’s body; they’d not looked away once throughout the drama. The President was staring forward with glazed eyes. The Doctor was looking at all this too. ‘Oh no no no no!’ he cried, bounding over to where Asia lay, Fitz and Anji following. The Doctor examined the slender corpse, lying peacefully and looking for all the world like a sleeping angel. ‘I’m sorry,’ Fitz heard him whisper under his breath, but the other two triplets ignored him.
Then the Doctor went over to Hoover. Fitz and Anji hung awkwardly back.
The Doctor sat down beside the haunted man. ‘She loved you, you know,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t true, what Hanstrum said. She knew how desperately you wanted children, how important it was to you. And you see. . . she knew you could never have them.’
That caught the man’s attention. He turned a puzzled face to the Doctor.
‘She was a geneticist. She carried out tests. . . Oh, I know you didn’t know about that. She didn’t want to worry you. She didn’t want you to know. She loved you so much.’ The Doctor turned away then, and Fitz saw a strange look in his eyes. Not like the Doctor. Was he still feeling what Elizabethan had felt?
Then the look passed, and the Doctor continued: ‘Her course of action was. . .
possibly not the most sensible or rational. But perhaps being locked up for so many years didn’t help her to think straight.’ The Doctor looked more like himself, with that. The judgemental Doctor. Condescending to the forces of oppression. ‘She knew that Hanstrum wanted her – the only man allowed to see her.’
‘My wife. . . my best friend. . . ’ muttered the President.
‘No!’ Fitz jumped slightly at the force in the Doctor’s voice. ‘He wanted her, but she remained faithful! That’s how much she loved you, and you insult her by believing her to have betrayed you. He was all over her – it would have been so easy. But she wouldn’t do it. Have you heard of in vitro fertilisation? Well, Dear TARDIS...
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that’s what she did, and it hurt her. Hurt her a lot. And because she didn’t really know what she was doing, she managed to split her one child into three, and goodness knows how she damaged them. She was stupid and irresponsible, but she was doing it all for you. Do you think she deserved that?’
‘And then she died,’ said Anji, stepping forward.
‘I remember that bit.
Hanstrum had power over her, and he didn’t want to give that up. Oh, and he wanted his children on the throne, as well. But she was going to throw it all away, and he would have been ruined. So he killed her.’
‘And you locked up those three children for the rest of their lives,’ said the Doctor. ‘And now one of them is dead. Lots of people are dead.’
Fitz winced slightly. Hoover was crying now, and whatever the man had done, Fitz wanted the Doctor to stop this. Stop kicking him while he was down. Stop rubbing it in. It wasn’t as if the guy had done any of it on purpose.
Suddenly Hoover looked