Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [9]
‘Going to pinpoint the source of the distress call,’ the Doctor had said. That was the first she’d heard of any distress call.
‘You have a nice bath,’ Fitz had added.
‘We’ll be back before it’s cold,’ the Doctor had finished.
And they were gone, some sort of device in the Doctor’s hand bleeping and burbling.
‘Fine,’ she’d said airily to the closing door. ‘You boys go and play with your toys. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine here. Got any washing you want doing? Socks need darning? Shall I have dinner on the table when you get back? Phft!’
Not that she really fancied a dreary plod round some backwater of a planet looking for a crashed spaceship or stranded alien astronaut. If it turned out to be more than a fifteen-minute job to fix it, no doubt Fitz would be back to tell her. But since she’d been an official TARDIS occupant, she’d had hardly a moment to herself, and the thought of a half-hour soak, all on her own, was too enticing.
Trix stood up, foamy, and reached for a pink-and-white candy-striped towel, wondering if they’d come back yet and were already in the console room, congratulating themselves. They could be so annoying at times. She felt a bit bad for begrudging the Doctor his happiness – particularly after what had happened to Miranda – but his current outburst of boyish enthusiasm seemed to have ignited Fitz’s immaturity, and the two of them were just getting each other going. She wondered if Anji had felt like this around them, and whether the Doctor was doing it on purpose, trying to make her feel like a gooseberry so that she’d be more than willing to jump ship when she got the opportunity.
Huh! she thought. Fat chance, Doctor.
She checked the Mickey Mouse alarm clock on her bedside table – one of the knick-knacks that Anji had left behind – and realised that she’d been soaking for over an hour.
A few minutes later, she strolled into the console room, running her fingers through the tangles in her hair, shaking it out. There was no sign of them – just a big, empty Fitz-and-the-Doctor-shaped hole where, somehow, they ought to have been. Well, as long as they weren’t having An Exciting Adventure With Some Space Hunks, that was fine by her.
It was only as the second hour began to roll around that Trix began to get worried.
Trix saw instantly that Fitz was lying in what looked to be an awfully uncomfortable position, his left leg bent at an implausible angle, face down on the grass just fifty yards from the TARDIS.
15
‘Fitz!’ she called as she ran to him. He lay in a patch of dappled sunlight, unmoving, his black leather jacket crumpled up around his torso.
‘What happened?’ She knelt beside him and tried to remember the intensive first-aid course she’d once taken in preparation for the role of ‘nurse’ to a rather wealthy elderly gentleman. But that seemed like a lifetime ago, and she realised that she wasn’t quite sure what to check. His pulse. Yes, that would do. She didn’t want to move him or roll him over or anything like that: that, she knew, was The Wrong Thing To Do. She felt around his neck until she found his pulse. She didn’t know whether it was a good pulse or a bad pulse, but at least he had one.
Something rustled and she sat up sharply, glancing around: the TARDIS had landed at the edge of a patch of rather pretty woodland. The ground sloped gently downwards towards a little copse of trees and bushes in a hollow. The air smelled rich and aromatic, herby. She could quite easily have been on Earth – a summer’s evening, somewhere in the Mediterranean, thought Trix as she glanced around, wondering if the Doctor had made the noise.
‘Doctor?’ she called, and then realised that if Fitz and the Doctor had been attacked, the noise could just as easily have been their attacker.
‘Fitz!’ she hissed, leaning in close to him as she realised that there was a limit to the resuscitative powers of pulse-checking. ‘Wake up, Fitz!’
There was a disgruntled groan from him and he turned his head experimentally.
‘Don’t move,’ Trix said. ‘ Can you