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kasihyaI HAVE FINISHED. I have finished my Molly Hooper fic! Finally. It's not very long, but it's full of angst and complicated things, and it was altogether more difficult to write than a plot-based story, or a microcosm-type story.
It's even edited, more or less. The last 2K isn't, because I just need to get this out there so that I can focus on things that I actually need to write, like my homework and NaNoWriMo and the Crossover Fic of Doom.
Title: A Disordered World
Fandom: Doctor Who/Sherlock
Characters: Molly Hooper, Martha Jones, John Watson, OCs
Length: 7,645 words
Summary: Nearly a year after the invasion, Molly wakes up, not to the Toclafane shrieking, but to a rap on the front door.
Author’s Notes: I saw one of those AU gifsets on Tumblr that made the assumption that Martha and Molly went to medical school together. Note that I know absolutely nothing about the practice of any sort of medicine, except for what I have experienced on the patient end of things.
AO3 Link
Molly was never much of a science fiction fan. Her sister had devoured any version of Star Trek that she could get her hands on when they were younger, and every one of Doyle’s Challenger novels as soon as she was old enough to understand them, while Molly curled up in her room and read his crime books instead. She preferred mysteries that wrapped up at the end of the story, everything organized into explicable facts: Gregson’s monologues to his colleagues that laid out, scientifically, why all of the evidence pointed towards the shopkeeper’s assistant as the mastermind of the scheme, and why it could have been no one else. It made sense. No vast space operas, with bizarre technologies and inexplicable leaps of logic, for Molly Hooper. The one time she had joined her sister in front of the television, she had been too put off by wondering why all of the aliens looked like humans with prosthetics. ‘If they’re from another planet, why don’t they look more alien?’ she asked her sister.
Laura huffed. ‘I don’t know,’ she grumbled. ‘Stop interrupting.’
Years later, Molly could have explained to her eight-year-old self why most television aliens possessed bilateral symmetry and humanoid features (namely, budgeting) but that didn’t mean she had any further interest in the fantastic. She still liked order in her universe, which was one of the factors in her decision to go to medical school. There was a reason that everything in the body worked the way it did, even if modern medicine hadn’t discovered that reason yet. She could look at a cadaver and understand what was different about it, why it was no longer a functioning organism that walked and spoke and had feelings; human bodies could be unexpected, but never truly inexplicable. Even if she didn’t always understand what was going on, someone cleverer could pick it apart and lay everything out neatly so that she did.
And then the Toclafane arrived.
It was, Molly thought, as she hugged her knees, like something out of one of Laura’s novels. The prime minister smiled on the television (Molly felt herself relax a tiny bit) as he reassured the country. ‘We will take our place in the universe. Every man, woman, and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer.’ His expression flickered for just a moment. ‘I don't know--every medical student?’
Molly shivered. She wondered if that was a jab at someone specific — a rival? — and then laughed at herself. This was exciting news, Britain leading the world into a new age of alien contact, not a moment for pettiness. Maybe Harold Saxon had a brother in school, and it was a shout out to him. (She couldn’t remember much about his personal life; she’d voted for him because there were no other candidates as … qualified, she supposed.) She kept the news on all day after that, too nervous to leave her flat except to go to classes. As soon as her last class finished, she raced back to her room and turned on the news again in case she had missed some new development; it stayed on at a low hum all night, just to be on the safe side.
She had a class the next morning at eight, but skipped it and stayed home with a cup of tea in her hands and a copy of Grey’s Anatomy in her lap like a talisman. She liked to call it her favorite book in the world, which was not strictly true (her absolute favorite, not that she would ever admit to it, was the twenty-fifth Nancy Drew novel) but it had been her father’s copy, the one that made her decide to become a doctor when she was ten, and its weight on her legs comforted her.
Molly didn’t keep up much with politics — didn’t keep up much with anything outside of her schoolwork at the time — but she took a dislike to President Winters as soon as he appeared on her television screen. Why did the United States have to open up negotiations? It was so … Hollywood. Like those movies her last crush had liked, the string of Armageddons that wiped out America and forgot about the rest of the civilized world. Molly watched with distaste, then forgot all about movie tropes as complicated-looking metal spheres — the Toclafane — appeared out of the air and came hovering down to head level. She pressed the book into her knees with her elbows, biting her lip as she stared at the screen. Their voices came out high and peevish, and something in Molly rebelled at that: she had picked up some things from Laura, after all, and aliens didn’t sound like children the way that these ones did. It didn’t make sense.
The Toclafane whined and refused to answer President Winters, insisting on the “Mister Master”. Molly put down her tea and leaned forwards. The edge of the book dug into her stomach, and the discomfort kept her feeling grounded, reminded her that this wasn’t a television special, not a misinterpreted fiasco like the War of the Worlds broadcast. This was actually happening. And then the Prime Minister stood up.
Molly watched the exchange, confused at first, but with a deep, unaccountable conviction that this was okay. Harold Saxon would make it all right. But not even this conviction could keep her from drawing her knees to her chest, gasping sharply when blades and lasers sprang from the spheres and a man was turned to dust before her eyes.
I didn’t like him, she thought, as all hell broke loose on the ship hovering miles above her tiny student flat. Her own voice sounded small inside her head. I didn’t want him to actually die.
This isn’t a movie, she reminded herself, using her mother’s cold, precise voice instead. Pull yourself together, Molly. She refocused on the television, heart pounding, but it was so easy to let it slip out of focus and into fantasy; like coming in at the final battle of a very long, complicated film, with words like “perception filters” and “laser screwdriver” getting thrown around, because she did not just watch the President of the United States disintegrate on live television. She was not seeing the Prime Minister crouching close to the camera, face filled with badly-contained glee as he announced that this was the end of the world. The book pressed into her stomach hard enough to leave marks as she curled in around it more tightly to keep from shaking.
“Here. Come. The drums!” said Harold Saxon. Molly fumbled for her mobile, to call her sister, her father, her classmates, anyone who can tell her what is going on — oh how funny, Molly, you actually thought this was real?¬ she wanted them to say — and Harold Saxon flipped a switch, danced off the screen, and left the camera lingering on a withered old man and a handsome corpse in a greatcoat. Molly dialed Laura’s number. The phone rang twice before it got cut off without warning. No service, it read.
But that’s ridiculous, thought Molly, fear rising in her throat, there’s always service here, and then she heard a great whirring noise descending on London. She forced herself to set aside the book, wincing at the residual stinging it left as she straightened. She looked out the open window, and saw millions of small, spherical shapes descending from the sky. The prime minister’s voice boomed out over them as they filed down towards the city. “Remove one tenth of the world’s population,’ he said.
The fires started. Molly shut her eyes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She never finishes medical school. She has enough training, say the Toclafane, to be useful treating injuries in the shipyards that they are going to build. ‘But I’m — I’m not a doctor, I’m going to be a mortician,’ she stammers.
The Toclafane to whom she addresses her objection emits a tinkling laugh. ‘What need do we have of morticians? All bodies will be cremated, and we do not care how they died. We need to keep the humans alive.’
‘But I could …’ Molly trails off and looks at the remains of the school around her, at the chaotic eddies of humans and machines whirling together around the piles of ashes still left over from the decimation. She shuts her mouth. She wills herself to look at the Toclafane and face her enemy, but at the last moment, her eyes skitter to the side. ‘Where am I needed?’ she says.
They build shipyards on the beach at Normandy and in Cornwall, give her a choice between the two of those like it’s a generous offer, so to the shipyards in Normandy Molly goes. With a whirring metal ball hovering over her shoulder the entire time, she packs two sets of clothing, her textbooks, and her father’s copy of Grey’s Anatomy, and takes the train to the coast. She sits down next to a silent, grey-faced man who keeps looking out the window as if straining for a glimpse of the Valiant through the clouds. Over the course of the trip, she learns that until a week ago, he was a janitor who worked the last night shift in the Swiss Re building; he had a husband and three children from a previous marriage.
‘My boss told me I couldn’t miss work, come hell or high water. Got to keep the floors clean for the aliens, yeah?’ says her traveling companion. ‘And then I got home, and they were all gone. My family, they were just … little piles of ash on the floor.’
Molly inclines her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
The janitor shrugs and hunches his shoulders. Their train pulls into the station several hours later; outside, the air is thick with Toclafane zipping around, directing the passengers to their next destination. Molly doesn’t say goodbye to the man sitting next to her, just pats him on the arm and bows her head as she steps around debris from the fallen ceiling and makes her way to the buses.
The hospital near the beach, where they are going to build the shipyards, is a disaster. The practical, detached part of Molly’s mind tells her that it makes sense: if you are going to remove one tenth of the population of the earth (she doesn’t think that she will ever forget the moment she heard those words, echoing across the planet’s surface) you might as well remove the least useful tenth. She gets to the first floor of the hospital, looks around at the charred gurneys in the halls, and shuts her eyes to keep from throwing up.
&
She is assigned housing with three other doctors, in a cottage that had belonged to an elderly couple. The upper part of the house was blasted in the initial invasion, and one of the other doctors nearly falls through the landing when he tries to investigate, but Molly and her fellows ransack the intact lower level to learn what they can about the former owners. It seems disrespectful, otherwise. Several Toclafane congregate to giggle as they sit around the kitchen table, flipping through the photo albums that Molly found on the bookshelves. Molly presses her lips together and refuses to give them the satisfaction of looking up.
Once construction on the shipyards is finished, the assembly lines begin. With the assembly lines, Molly’s own work begins in earnest too, nothing like what she had been prepared for while she was still in school. Of course, she was expecting normal, predictable conditions in a world that made sense, not one in which the Prime Minister spearheaded alien massacres of his own nation. She lugs her book around with her and sets it on the counter of every clinic room, every surgery that she enters. She hasn’t had any contact with her family since the invasion: the phone lines and the internet are down. Some of her fellows say that they’re almost glad they don’t know, because if they have no way of knowing, then there is hope. It seems unkind to disagree with them, so Molly bites her tongue and doesn’t tell them that, statistically, there’s a forty percent chance that someone in their immediate family died in the initial attacks; if they wanted to rank their family members in terms of usefulness to the Toclafane, they could probably figure out which ones were among the slaughtered. Her world is unstable enough without the uncertainty, and It isn’t comforting to be fairly sure that her sister is dead and her parents are alive, but at least it gives her a focus for her grief. She could share her method with the people around her, but it’s unlikely that it would be popular, so she stays quiet and tries not to think about it.
Two months after the invasion, Molly Hooper has settled into a routine that is, if horrifying, at least predictable. She wakes up at five am, when the Toclafane, as one body, emit a high-pitched shriek that pierces through her dreams and sends her shooting out of bed with her heart racing. She and her housemates (another third-year medical student from Paris, a pediatrician from St. Bart’s, and an army doctor two days away from deployment to Afghanistan) drive to the hospital under the guidance of the Toclafane who guards their street, and take over for the nurses working the night shift. The accidents that occur at the yards are horrific, would never happen in any sane world where things like sanitation laws and limits on work hours are in effect. Molly does her best to repair crushed limbs and close gashes wide enough to fit her whole hand. She avoids daydreaming about the future she had imagined: sanitary, the equipment vacuum-sealed and sterilized, her only patients coming to her wrapped in plastic and without lives to hang in the balance. She stops to eat increasingly stale, moldy food at noon and at six, and goes back to the house late at night to fall asleep, exhausted, and wake up at five o’clock again the next morning.
Day, after day, after day.
&
Nearly a year after the invasion, Molly wakes up, not to the Toclafane shrieking, but to a rap on the front door. She jumps up from the couch (One of us has done something wrong; I told John to shut up while the Toclafane were around; where is the baseball bat they’re not getting anyone without a fight) and waits. They shuttered the windows after the first week in Normandy — it doesn’t keep out aliens who can appear and disappear at will, but it makes them feel safer if no one can see in — so Molly pulls out the baseball bat from underneath the couch, creeps over to the front door and presses her eye to the peephole.
Outside, nearly invisible in the darkness, is a woman in black, standing by the door and looking around nervously. Molly doesn’t allow herself to sigh with relief, because the Toclafane have been known to use other people as bait to lure out dissidents before. Instead, she runs over to the bookshelves and tears out a page of the first book she finds. There’s no point in writing a message that the Toclafane might decipher even in the dark, but there are other, more primitive ways to communicate. Molly folds the paper into fourths and slides it under the door.
After a moment, the woman on the other side sends it back under, unfolded. She is unmonitored and comes of her own free will. Molly clenches her fists to steady herself and cracks open the door. The woman outside presses herself against the opening and slides in, easing the door shut behind her and leaning against it with her head back and eyes shut.
‘Thank you,’ she whispers.
‘Any time,’ says Molly. She fumbles around the kitchen until she finds the lighter (Claire never leaves it in the right place; she’s so absent-minded these days) and a candle, to see her visitor better. Electricity is turned off between ten and five, allegedly so that there is enough at all times to keep the reactors at the shipyards from melting down. A better engineer than Molly could calculate the reasons why that doesn’t make sense, why it’s just a ploy to keep them docile. She lights the candle and holds it up; then she nearly drops it with shock. ‘Martha Jones?’
Martha — brilliant, quick-witted Martha, dressed for war, face thinner than Molly remembers — goes blank for a moment; then, like a light going on, grins at her. ‘Molly Hooper,’ she says. ‘I remember you! You were going to be an obstetrician, right?’
‘Mortician. I’m going to — I mean, I was. They don’t need morticians anymore,’ says Molly. She puts the candle down on the table and twists her fingers together. ‘You’re the Martha Jones?’
Martha peers around at the shadowy first floor. ‘I expect so.’
‘Well, I just thought … Martha Jones is a common name, and you went missing days before the invasion … we were all worried …’ They had had a comparative anatomy class, first year, studied together and then drifted apart until Martha had dropped off her radar completely, only coming back onto it when rumors had begun to circulate regarding her disappearance.
Martha frowns, like she’s forgotten about a time before. Molly can’t blame her. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry about that — it was all a bit rushed, and I got back right as it all happened. Have you heard from anyone we knew, since then?’
Molly shakes her head. She doesn’t know who Martha had gone around with in those days, but she dredges up the names she hasn’t been able to scrub out of her mind. ‘Everyone got sent to different places. They emptied out most of London. I think Sarah Cooper was sent to Cornwall. Professor Moran was part of the one tenth.’ She swallows. She’s done her best not to think about before if she can help it. It’s not coming back, not ever, and worrying changes nothing. She has work to do here.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Martha.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Molly says, and tries to give her a smile. It doesn’t quite stay on right, and Martha just looks down at her hands. Silence stretches between them for a few seconds. ‘Do you need anything from us? Is that why you’re here?’
Martha looks up. ‘Does Claire Dubois live here?’
Molly blinks. Somehow, that wasn’t the answer she was expecting. A small, unexpected twinge of jealousy makes itself known in her chest: Martha was her classmate, not Claire’s, and for a it doesn’t make sense that she would be here for anyone else. ‘Um … She’s in the living room. She’s quite — should I wake her up?’ Claire is terrifying to wake: she sleeps with a knife under her pillow like it will protect her, and if she’s dreaming then there’s always the off chance that she’ll be up and fighting before she’s alert enough to know what’s going on. Molly has a fading scar on her forearm from the first time that happened, before she learned to dodge.
‘Thanks.’ Martha sits down. ‘I’m sorry to jump in at you like this. Things got a bit mixed up in Lourdes, and my other contact here got arrested before I could reach him.’ Her face acquires a pinched expression visible even in the unsteady light of the candle. Molly nods; she knows how it is.
‘I’ll get Claire. Wait here.’ She turns towards the living room, and her heart leaps in her throat when she sees movement there.
‘Sorry,’ says John. ‘I heard voices, is everything all right?’ His eyes slide past her, to the table, and his mouth drops open. ‘Martha Jones.’
‘That’s me,’ Martha says with a small smile.
‘Martha, this is John Watson; he’s another doctor here from London. I’ll be right back.’ Molly leaves them to make their own introductions, and tiptoes through the living room until she reaches the other side, where Claire has curled up into a ball on the love seat. She positions herself behind the arm above Claire’s head, where it will be most difficult to hit her, and taps her on the top of the head.
The response is immediate: Claire flips around and off the cushions, tripping on the way to the floor and landing on the mattress where Bill sleeps. The older man jerks awake, groaning. Claire mumbles an apology before she whips her attention around to focus on Molly, blinking.
‘What’s the matter?’
Molly fights the urge to take a step back. ‘Martha Jones, she’s … here to see you.’
Claire straightens. She rolls her shoulders. ‘Yes,’ she says, and marches into the kitchen like she was born for this moment. Molly pauses to help Bill as he rolls to his feet, knees popping in a way that makes Molly wince. By the time they make it to the kitchen, Claire and Martha are already deep in murmured conversation, while John leans against the opposite wall and watches. Bill settles into a chair across the table from them, and Molly waits by the counter.
Martha breaks off mid-sentence. ‘Is this everyone here?’ she asks Molly, who nods. ‘Good. Because I’ve got a job to do, and I need you to help me do it.’
‘It’s true?’ asks Bill, eyes bugging out of his head. He leans forwards. ‘You’ve got a plan to kill the Master?’
Molly watches Martha. She’s heard the rumors — you’d have to have lived under a rock to not hear them — but they were just that: rumors, brought in from truckers delivering materials from Russia and Saudi Arabia, no evidence. Molly has refused to let herself believe any of them. She will not set herself up for any more falls.
Martha glances at her, and then addresses the table as a whole. ‘Yeah, I do. It’s not me — I can’t do it. But I know someone who can.’ She folds her hands together.
John strides over to join them at the table. His face is a mask that would have terrified Molly a year ago; now she feels nothing but fierce pride in her housemate. ‘Tell us how,’ he says.
Martha gives him a brief nod, then turns to address Molly directly. ‘You remember when the Royal Hope Hospital vanished,’ she begins.
‘It was in the papers, everywhere,’ says Molly. She hadn’t been sure what to make of it; hadn’t even heard about it until after it was over, she had been so busy that day reading an enormously dense chapter on the prefrontal cortex. Laura had been hysterical.
‘Right. Well. We really did go to the moon. And there was this — this man, there. A time traveler, from another planet. He saved us; he figured out how to get the people responsible to put the hospital back without killing anyone; and when it was all over, he offered to take me with him.’
She continues, telling them about this time traveler, this Doctor, as if he is her own personal deity. It makes no sense — why Martha? What was an alien doing on earth? — but in the past year Molly has seen more inexplicable things than she had ever imagined, and for that, she is willing to listen to this story that Martha tells of daring rescues and impossibilities she would have laughed at before. It even comes as something of a relief to her: if so many terrible, chaotic things can exist on such a large scale, then she has to believe that there is an equal capacity for good in the universe to exist as well.
‘He has saved your lives, so many times, and you never even knew about it,’ Martha says. ‘I’ve only been with him for a year, but he’s been doing this for centuries. And right now, he needs our help. He’s on board the Valiant, right this very moment, trapped by the Master. I’ve studied the network that the Master uses — not just me, there was a whole bunch of other scientists — and I realized — it’s all mental. He’s got this control over our minds with it, to keep people from revolting all at once, but what if we turned that against him?’ Her face glows with excitement as she explains. ‘I can’t take down the system from outside the Valiant, not like we’d need to get everyone fighting at once, but you don’t need to fight. You just need to think a little.’
Molly thinks. She thinks about the precipitous political rise of a sadistic alien to the highest seat in the British government, and the way that she had rearranged her worldview to include genocidal machines tearing holes in the sky. It had all seemed so inevitable. Questioning why, when it would do her no practical good, hadn’t mattered very much. If what Martha says about the Archangel network is true, then perhaps it hadn’t been her fault that she had acquiesced so easily.
Molly would prefer to think that, but comforting beliefs stopped helping her the day that she left London.
‘When do we do it?’ she asks, when Martha has finished talking.
‘Four days from now, the fleet is going to launch,’ Martha says at once. ‘The second that the countdown reaches zero.’
‘That’s your plan? That’s it?’ John sounds skeptical. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
‘I’ve been walking the earth for three hundred and sixty three days now, with six billion Toclafane out looking for me. I’ve been to all six continents, on my own, and I haven’t been caught. I know what I’m doing,’ says Martha, and Molly may fall a little bit in love with the way she addresses him, every inch a commanding officer.
John gives her an abrupt nod, and purses his lips.
‘Where will you go next?’ Molly asks.
Claire and Martha share a look. ‘I’ve got friends,’ says Claire, ‘and it’s better if you don’t know anything more than that. Not that I don’t trust you,’ she adds quickly, correctly reading Molly’s cool expression, ‘but for the Toclafane, you see. They have ways of finding things out.’
‘I’ll be gone before the sun goes down tomorrow,’ promises Martha. ‘You won’t be in any more danger.’
Molly nearly blurts out that she should stay longer, tell them more about what she’s been doing, give them news of the outside world, but she knows better. Martha Jones has become a legend by giving the right information to the right people and moving on, not by staying put to chat. Instead, she says, ‘You can have the couch. I’ll sleep with Bill — no, I mean — I’ll share the mattress with Bill. I don’t mind.’
‘As long as we’re clear that that weren’t a euphemism for any fancy business,’ he grouses. Molly smiles fondly at him.
Martha looks as though she is about to protest; Molly reaches down to help Bill out of his chair and avoids eye contact to cut off any further conversation. She figures that she has another hour or two of sleep before the wake-up call; and although she isn’t in danger of being crushed to death by heavy machinery if she nods off at her job, she still has care of other people and a responsibility to make sure that she doesn’t accidentally hand them methamphetamines instead of methylphenidate. All the same, she lies awake for what feels like an hour after they have settled down. Martha sleeps curled up at one end of the couch, hands clenched under her chin; Molly’s eyes, having adjusted to the dark, can pick out a frown on her face even at rest. She exhales slowly and stares up at the ceiling, hands folded flat and empty across her stomach.
&
When the Toclafane begin their synchronized wailing two hours later, it takes Molly a moment to remember why she feels more than usually exhausted, and why she is sleeping against Bill’s back. She flips around, and her eyes flicker up to the couch. Martha Jones lies in exactly the same pose as she had when she fell asleep last night, but her muscles are clenched, and her eyes, wide open.
‘They don’t come into houses usually,’ Claire says. ‘Not unless someone doesn’t show up for work.’
Martha nods, and shuts her eyes. By the time that Molly has rolled, joints crackling, to her feet, and helped Bill upright, she is asleep once more. They all congregate in the kitchen to eat cold cereal, silent in deference to the defender of the earth sleeping in the next room. Molly can’t keep herself from glancing over every minute or so while she prepares herself for work. Martha Jones, the only known survivor of the invasion of Japan and the classmate who helped Molly memorize the functions of the vertebrae, here in Normandy on the eve of the fleet launch. Seeing isn’t enough; she wants to talk to her, receive acknowledgement back, additional confirmation that she is alive and planning and going to save them all. But however much Molly has had to sacrifice, she still maintains a sense of decency, and weaves her morning routine around the couch at a respectful distance. She suspects that her companions feel much the same as she does: Bill keeps shushing Claire although she is probably the quietest of them all, and John gives Martha’s sleeping form a military salute before he locks the front door behind them.
Molly buzzes through work that day, distracted and clumsy. The weight that had been eased off of her shoulders falls back on as soon as she arrives at the hospital and is confronted by her current round of patients and wheelchairs carrying in new patients and an endless stream of Toclafane making sure that she won’t sabotage their workforce. The sheer number of injuries and infection in her workload is enough to put out the spark of joy that she had felt when Martha arrived: even if John is wrong, and it does work, what are they gaining back? What will be left? London is gone; New York is gone; Australia and New Zealand and Japan and huge swathes of central Africa are razed flat and dead; there are nuclear factories stretching along most seaboards and oil-slicked craters in the Middle East. Rebuilding will take decades. Lifetimes. If there is even enough left of humanity to make it possible.
She shakes the thought out of her head and focuses on the task in front of her. It’s easier to simply purse her lips as she stitches up a deep gash in the heel of a man’s hand, and not think about it. He grunts in pain despite the anesthetic, and the Toclafane hovering in the room above them makes a small, interested noise as though observing animals in a zoo.
‘Sorry,’ she murmurs to him, ignoring the ever-present whirring.
‘Me too,’ he grits out through his teeth.
It takes ten stitches to sew his skin back together; when it’s done, she covers the wound and leaves him in the care of a nurse while she goes back to the woman with crushed fingers in room eight. And then she will go round to assess more damages, tend to more wounds, save as many people as she possibly can until it’s time to go home, fall onto the couch, and wake up tomorrow to do it all again. Even if the Master gets deposed in two days’ time, there will still be injuries and sick people by the dozens who need attending to; she could not in good conscience flee to the dead while there is still so much to be done for the living. Mortuaries and a quiet, clean environment with every instrument in its place will have to wait for a time when bodies can be cared for individually, instead of burned on mass funeral pyres in the quarry.
‘Doctor! Doctor, may I have a word?’ she hears someone call out to Dr. Silva as she goes by. The word, yesterday so innocuous, drags Molly away from the edge of the dark, hopeless precipice towards which her thoughts had been turning yet again. She remembers Martha’s words from yesterday, and the fierce pride in her voice when she spoke about the Doctor. And, as silly as Molly tells herself that it is, the parallels in Martha’s story with her own please her: Molly the for-all-intents-and-purposes-doctor, aiding and abetting Martha the almost-doctor, to release the man who calls himself a doctor for all of humanity.
Molly rolls back her shoulders and lifts her chin. Of course, she thinks. It doesn’t matter that it will be ruined, and need rebuilding. That’s what doctors are for. She walks around the corner with more confidence, and promptly comes face to face with a trio of Toclafane, hovering in the doorway of her next patient and chattering to each other. She averts her eyes and lets her shoulders fall forwards again, cloaking her resolve behind a habitually weary posture. The Toclafane can’t read minds, but alien as they are, they are remarkably good at reading human body language. It is one more thing that doesn’t make sense to Molly, and one more thing that she has shoved to the back of her mind because she can’t waste the brain space trying to figure it out. The practical upshot is all that matters, and the practical upshot is that she must stay mild-mannered and cowed so that she doesn’t risk letting the Toclafane know that something is out of place.
She is on her way to hide in the disused morgue for her lunch break when John catches up to her, walking fast and clutching paperwork to his chest. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he asks, panting.
Molly blinks. ‘Don’t you usually — I mean, not that you can’t, I just — oh.’ She sees his gaze flicker up and over his shoulder, indicating without turning his head: Toclafane. ‘Of course. Come on.’ She opens the door to the stairwell for him, ushering him before her and dragging the door shut against the ponderous weight of its hinges. He hurries down the stairs to the lower level; she follows him without speaking until they are locked safely in the empty, echoing basement hallway.
‘What’s going on?’ Molly asks. ‘What happened?’
John leans against the wall and shuts his eyes. ‘Doctor Fang, you know her, right? Surgeon, usually down in the ER.’
Molly ushers him inside the morgue. There’s a long-empty gurney in the middle, on which she lays out her lunch. ‘Yes?’
He sits down on the gurney. It creaks under his weight, and Molly wishes he wouldn’t sit so close to her food, but she won’t complain. She needs to look at the bigger picture.
‘I told her that we’d had a visitor last night,’ he says. ‘I thought, ‘well, if telepathy is our best shot, we’re going to need all the brain power we’ve got. Might as well spread the word around’.’
It’s a good idea, and she wishes she’d thought of it. She’d been so afraid of being discovered that she had barely had room to think for most of the morning; and here is John Watson, doing all he could to spread an idea he wasn’t even sure would work. She sits down on the other side of the gurney, gripping the edges of the table while he gathers his words together.
‘I think one of the Toclafane might have heard part of it,’ he says, bringing her away from her own knotted stomach and back to the present.
Molly stares at him, ducks her head and lowers her voice. ‘How do you know?’
John sighs and purses his lips before he answers. ‘Because when I came back to ask her to lunch, I found a pile of dust on the floor of her office.’ He rubs his face with one hand. ‘I’ve pulled in a couple of people from other wings to cover her shifts, and I keep looking over my shoulder now, thinking I’m next.’
Molly tries to think of something comforting to say. The only thing that comes to mind is ‘You probably are,’ which, while true, is not what he needs to hear. It isn’t what she wants to tell him, either. Despite having virtually nothing in common besides a university education in the many ways that the human body can be broken and put back together, she likes John. He goes about his rounds like he’s going to war for his patients, fighting for their lives against an impossible foe. She doesn’t want him to die.
‘There ought to be at least one office on this floor,’ she says finally. ‘I don’t have the keys, but none of these doors were locked the first time I came down here. You could hide here. I could cover for you.’
John shakes his head. ‘I can’t do that. I can’t put you in danger, too. I just — wanted someone to know. When they do get me, that that’s why.’ He licks his lips.
Molly finds herself reaching over to grip his hand, although her fingers don’t quite cover his own. ‘I don’t mind. Really, I don’t. Come with me.’
John looks at their hands like they are foreign bodies. He lifts his head, eyes meeting hers. ‘Molly, no.’
She opens her mouth to tell him that he can’t die, not right before they win, that it doesn’t make sense — and stops as a low, familiar hum cuts her off. In front of them, light crackles through the air, splitting to reveal a dark metal sphere with geometric grooves covering its surface.
‘Hello, doctors,’ sings the Toclafane in its little-girl voice.
Molly holds on tighter to his hand. ‘John,’ she says. No, that’s not enough. She tries again. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll make it right.’
John pulls away from her and stands, ramrod-stiff, as the Toclafane moves closer. Molly slides backwards, heart in her throat. ‘Hello,’ says John.
&
On the morning of the fleet launch, they are all excused from work to gather around the televisions at home and watch the event. The Toclafane are in a fervor because the Master will be making a speech before they depart for the skies; they let their humans sleep until nearly seven o’clock today. Molly wakes up to their shrill, gleeful singing with a three-day-old ache in her chest and a stiff neck. In the armchair by her head, Claire thrashes herself into consciousness and runs to the kitchen to check the time on the wind-up clock on the wall.
‘Fifty-seven minutes to zero,’ she shouts, turning on the tap to wash her hair.
Molly swings herself upright, rubbing her eyes. Today is the day, she tells herself. It may feel like every other day, but today is when it ends. ‘Shall we turn on the telly?’ she asks Claire as she gets up so that Bill will have room to stretch. ‘Or — no, I suppose that there will be a countdown on the screen, too. It doesn’t matter.’ She ought to feel excited, or angry, or even fearful, she supposes, but there isn’t room in her for any feeling besides tired, in the end.
When she has eaten what passes for breakfast these days, Molly turns the knob on the television and curls up on the couch between Bill and Claire. She hugs her shins and rests her chin on her knees, eyes fixed on the proceedings being filmed aboard the Valiant.
The time is 7:59am. The Master’s grin stretches wide across the screen, intercut with footage of the coasts: thousands and thousands of slim silver needles perched between land and sea, piercing the cloud cover and surrounded by swarms of metal spheres. Inside the ships, hundreds of people in white space suits sit at their controls and crawl among the decks, checking engines and weapons while the Toclafane dart about like children, giggling. Molly swallows the bile that rises in her throat, thinking of those people leaving the planet forever, drifting through the void to fight aliens, other people — for what? For the amusement of the Master. It is singularly pointless, and Molly curls in tighter on herself to keep from screaming. Two more minutes.
The Master is speaking, and then he stops. His maniac grin gains a new shade of sadism. The camera pans away from him, down to the woman kneeling at his feet, and Molly’s breath catches in her throat. No, she thinks. No, that’s not right. She had a plan. She stayed alive for a year, with every Toclafane looking out for her; she can’t have gotten captured now. It doesn’t make sense. On her right, Claire curses up a blue streak in French, and on her left, Bill bows his head. Molly stares at the screen, mouth pressed shut.
And, for the first time in a year, Molly is right: it doesn’t make sense, but it isn’t supposed to. Martha Jones lifts her chin and laughs to the Master’s face; Claire jumps up, shrieking with joy; and Molly shuts her eyes.
Doctor, she thinks, remembering Martha’s stories about a man who traveled through time.
Doctor, she thinks, and pictures that man as he had writhed and aged under the power of the Master’s weapons.
Doctor, she thinks, and sees the janitor on the train whose family had been killed; sees the old couple in whose house she has been living; sees the hundreds and hundreds of injures she has tended to and the lives they have ruined; sees John, her housemate and comrade; sees her apartment a year and a day ago, when Harold Saxon died and took her future with him.
Doctor, she thinks, hearing Bill and Claire murmuring the words beside her.
Doctor.
And the world goes silent.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Molly Hooper opens her eyes. The camera field on the television in her flat is empty and silent, showing only the light wood paneling of the Valiant where the President’s square-jawed face had occupied the bulk of the screen a moment previously. She stares, heart pounding and textbook digging into her stomach, waiting for something to happen. After a few eerie seconds, the camera cuts back to the ground. A tense-faced reporter with sleek black hair presses her fingers to her earpiece, eyes half-shut in concentration before they fly open with shock. She addresses the camera, voice controlled.
‘We have lost direct visual contact with the ship, but reports are coming in that the President of the United States has just been assassinated. I repeat, the American President has just been assassinated.’ Molly stares at the screen, the bottom dropping out of her stomach. ‘The Toclafane have not made an appearance, and it is unclear whether or not the alien life forms were directly involved,’ the reporter continues, ‘However, the Prime Minister …’ and here she breaks off to exchange a wide-eyed look with someone off-camera.
Molly seizes her phone, and hits the number of the first friend she comes across in her contacts list. Sarah picks up almost immediately.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Molly asks.
&
At five o’clock in the afternoon, two weeks later, Molly is sitting in the library basement among the old periodicals. There’s an article that one of the doctors was telling her about — a case of fibrodysplasia documented in the eighteen fifties — that she wants to finish reading before she goes home to watch the new Prime Minister’s speech. She opens a huge bound volume whose spine comes close to cracking, showering her with dust and paper particles that make her sneeze violently.
‘Bless you,’ someone says.
Molly jumps, slamming the book shut. A young woman pauses at the gap between stacks into which she has wedged herself. It takes Molly a moment to recognize her. ‘Oh, thank you — Martha!’ She lays the periodical across the tops of its shelf mates and gives Martha her full attention, heart still pounding with surprise. It makes her movements quick and jittery; she folds her arms against her body self-consciously. ‘How are you — everyone was so worried — they thought you’d died at the Royal Hope Hospital, there were witnesses, but they couldn’t find your body, so I thought …’ She bites her lip and trails off before she can find a way to put her foot in her mouth somehow.
Martha stares at her for a moment — well, not at her precisely, more like she looks through Molly, which is nothing new. Then she shakes her head and her eyes refocus, a sad smile appearing on her face. ‘No. I got out in time, thank god. My mum was freaking out the whole time.’ She makes as if to go on her way, but then turns back. ‘How are you doing, by the way? I haven’t seen you in, what is it, a year and a half? Two years?’
‘Two years,’ Molly says, too quickly. ‘I’m fine. Doing fine. I’ve got a residency lined up at St. Bart’s, actually.’
For some reason, this makes Martha’s smile widen. ‘Fantastic! I’m sure you’ll be a brilliant mortician.’ Warmth fills in Molly’s chest, but before she can say anything along the lines of you remembered, thank you for remembering, Martha has ducked back out of the stack and into the wider corridor. ‘It was good to see you again,’ she says, waving. ‘Thanks.’
‘See you,’ Molly says, bemused. She chews her lip as she slots the periodical back into its proper place, willing it to make sense of that particular interaction for her, but try as she might, she can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s just missed something important.
END
It's even edited, more or less. The last 2K isn't, because I just need to get this out there so that I can focus on things that I actually need to write, like my homework and NaNoWriMo and the Crossover Fic of Doom.
Title: A Disordered World
Fandom: Doctor Who/Sherlock
Characters: Molly Hooper, Martha Jones, John Watson, OCs
Length: 7,645 words
Summary: Nearly a year after the invasion, Molly wakes up, not to the Toclafane shrieking, but to a rap on the front door.
Author’s Notes: I saw one of those AU gifsets on Tumblr that made the assumption that Martha and Molly went to medical school together. Note that I know absolutely nothing about the practice of any sort of medicine, except for what I have experienced on the patient end of things.
AO3 Link
Molly was never much of a science fiction fan. Her sister had devoured any version of Star Trek that she could get her hands on when they were younger, and every one of Doyle’s Challenger novels as soon as she was old enough to understand them, while Molly curled up in her room and read his crime books instead. She preferred mysteries that wrapped up at the end of the story, everything organized into explicable facts: Gregson’s monologues to his colleagues that laid out, scientifically, why all of the evidence pointed towards the shopkeeper’s assistant as the mastermind of the scheme, and why it could have been no one else. It made sense. No vast space operas, with bizarre technologies and inexplicable leaps of logic, for Molly Hooper. The one time she had joined her sister in front of the television, she had been too put off by wondering why all of the aliens looked like humans with prosthetics. ‘If they’re from another planet, why don’t they look more alien?’ she asked her sister.
Laura huffed. ‘I don’t know,’ she grumbled. ‘Stop interrupting.’
Years later, Molly could have explained to her eight-year-old self why most television aliens possessed bilateral symmetry and humanoid features (namely, budgeting) but that didn’t mean she had any further interest in the fantastic. She still liked order in her universe, which was one of the factors in her decision to go to medical school. There was a reason that everything in the body worked the way it did, even if modern medicine hadn’t discovered that reason yet. She could look at a cadaver and understand what was different about it, why it was no longer a functioning organism that walked and spoke and had feelings; human bodies could be unexpected, but never truly inexplicable. Even if she didn’t always understand what was going on, someone cleverer could pick it apart and lay everything out neatly so that she did.
And then the Toclafane arrived.
It was, Molly thought, as she hugged her knees, like something out of one of Laura’s novels. The prime minister smiled on the television (Molly felt herself relax a tiny bit) as he reassured the country. ‘We will take our place in the universe. Every man, woman, and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer.’ His expression flickered for just a moment. ‘I don't know--every medical student?’
Molly shivered. She wondered if that was a jab at someone specific — a rival? — and then laughed at herself. This was exciting news, Britain leading the world into a new age of alien contact, not a moment for pettiness. Maybe Harold Saxon had a brother in school, and it was a shout out to him. (She couldn’t remember much about his personal life; she’d voted for him because there were no other candidates as … qualified, she supposed.) She kept the news on all day after that, too nervous to leave her flat except to go to classes. As soon as her last class finished, she raced back to her room and turned on the news again in case she had missed some new development; it stayed on at a low hum all night, just to be on the safe side.
She had a class the next morning at eight, but skipped it and stayed home with a cup of tea in her hands and a copy of Grey’s Anatomy in her lap like a talisman. She liked to call it her favorite book in the world, which was not strictly true (her absolute favorite, not that she would ever admit to it, was the twenty-fifth Nancy Drew novel) but it had been her father’s copy, the one that made her decide to become a doctor when she was ten, and its weight on her legs comforted her.
Molly didn’t keep up much with politics — didn’t keep up much with anything outside of her schoolwork at the time — but she took a dislike to President Winters as soon as he appeared on her television screen. Why did the United States have to open up negotiations? It was so … Hollywood. Like those movies her last crush had liked, the string of Armageddons that wiped out America and forgot about the rest of the civilized world. Molly watched with distaste, then forgot all about movie tropes as complicated-looking metal spheres — the Toclafane — appeared out of the air and came hovering down to head level. She pressed the book into her knees with her elbows, biting her lip as she stared at the screen. Their voices came out high and peevish, and something in Molly rebelled at that: she had picked up some things from Laura, after all, and aliens didn’t sound like children the way that these ones did. It didn’t make sense.
The Toclafane whined and refused to answer President Winters, insisting on the “Mister Master”. Molly put down her tea and leaned forwards. The edge of the book dug into her stomach, and the discomfort kept her feeling grounded, reminded her that this wasn’t a television special, not a misinterpreted fiasco like the War of the Worlds broadcast. This was actually happening. And then the Prime Minister stood up.
Molly watched the exchange, confused at first, but with a deep, unaccountable conviction that this was okay. Harold Saxon would make it all right. But not even this conviction could keep her from drawing her knees to her chest, gasping sharply when blades and lasers sprang from the spheres and a man was turned to dust before her eyes.
I didn’t like him, she thought, as all hell broke loose on the ship hovering miles above her tiny student flat. Her own voice sounded small inside her head. I didn’t want him to actually die.
This isn’t a movie, she reminded herself, using her mother’s cold, precise voice instead. Pull yourself together, Molly. She refocused on the television, heart pounding, but it was so easy to let it slip out of focus and into fantasy; like coming in at the final battle of a very long, complicated film, with words like “perception filters” and “laser screwdriver” getting thrown around, because she did not just watch the President of the United States disintegrate on live television. She was not seeing the Prime Minister crouching close to the camera, face filled with badly-contained glee as he announced that this was the end of the world. The book pressed into her stomach hard enough to leave marks as she curled in around it more tightly to keep from shaking.
“Here. Come. The drums!” said Harold Saxon. Molly fumbled for her mobile, to call her sister, her father, her classmates, anyone who can tell her what is going on — oh how funny, Molly, you actually thought this was real?¬ she wanted them to say — and Harold Saxon flipped a switch, danced off the screen, and left the camera lingering on a withered old man and a handsome corpse in a greatcoat. Molly dialed Laura’s number. The phone rang twice before it got cut off without warning. No service, it read.
But that’s ridiculous, thought Molly, fear rising in her throat, there’s always service here, and then she heard a great whirring noise descending on London. She forced herself to set aside the book, wincing at the residual stinging it left as she straightened. She looked out the open window, and saw millions of small, spherical shapes descending from the sky. The prime minister’s voice boomed out over them as they filed down towards the city. “Remove one tenth of the world’s population,’ he said.
The fires started. Molly shut her eyes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She never finishes medical school. She has enough training, say the Toclafane, to be useful treating injuries in the shipyards that they are going to build. ‘But I’m — I’m not a doctor, I’m going to be a mortician,’ she stammers.
The Toclafane to whom she addresses her objection emits a tinkling laugh. ‘What need do we have of morticians? All bodies will be cremated, and we do not care how they died. We need to keep the humans alive.’
‘But I could …’ Molly trails off and looks at the remains of the school around her, at the chaotic eddies of humans and machines whirling together around the piles of ashes still left over from the decimation. She shuts her mouth. She wills herself to look at the Toclafane and face her enemy, but at the last moment, her eyes skitter to the side. ‘Where am I needed?’ she says.
They build shipyards on the beach at Normandy and in Cornwall, give her a choice between the two of those like it’s a generous offer, so to the shipyards in Normandy Molly goes. With a whirring metal ball hovering over her shoulder the entire time, she packs two sets of clothing, her textbooks, and her father’s copy of Grey’s Anatomy, and takes the train to the coast. She sits down next to a silent, grey-faced man who keeps looking out the window as if straining for a glimpse of the Valiant through the clouds. Over the course of the trip, she learns that until a week ago, he was a janitor who worked the last night shift in the Swiss Re building; he had a husband and three children from a previous marriage.
‘My boss told me I couldn’t miss work, come hell or high water. Got to keep the floors clean for the aliens, yeah?’ says her traveling companion. ‘And then I got home, and they were all gone. My family, they were just … little piles of ash on the floor.’
Molly inclines her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
The janitor shrugs and hunches his shoulders. Their train pulls into the station several hours later; outside, the air is thick with Toclafane zipping around, directing the passengers to their next destination. Molly doesn’t say goodbye to the man sitting next to her, just pats him on the arm and bows her head as she steps around debris from the fallen ceiling and makes her way to the buses.
The hospital near the beach, where they are going to build the shipyards, is a disaster. The practical, detached part of Molly’s mind tells her that it makes sense: if you are going to remove one tenth of the population of the earth (she doesn’t think that she will ever forget the moment she heard those words, echoing across the planet’s surface) you might as well remove the least useful tenth. She gets to the first floor of the hospital, looks around at the charred gurneys in the halls, and shuts her eyes to keep from throwing up.
&
She is assigned housing with three other doctors, in a cottage that had belonged to an elderly couple. The upper part of the house was blasted in the initial invasion, and one of the other doctors nearly falls through the landing when he tries to investigate, but Molly and her fellows ransack the intact lower level to learn what they can about the former owners. It seems disrespectful, otherwise. Several Toclafane congregate to giggle as they sit around the kitchen table, flipping through the photo albums that Molly found on the bookshelves. Molly presses her lips together and refuses to give them the satisfaction of looking up.
Once construction on the shipyards is finished, the assembly lines begin. With the assembly lines, Molly’s own work begins in earnest too, nothing like what she had been prepared for while she was still in school. Of course, she was expecting normal, predictable conditions in a world that made sense, not one in which the Prime Minister spearheaded alien massacres of his own nation. She lugs her book around with her and sets it on the counter of every clinic room, every surgery that she enters. She hasn’t had any contact with her family since the invasion: the phone lines and the internet are down. Some of her fellows say that they’re almost glad they don’t know, because if they have no way of knowing, then there is hope. It seems unkind to disagree with them, so Molly bites her tongue and doesn’t tell them that, statistically, there’s a forty percent chance that someone in their immediate family died in the initial attacks; if they wanted to rank their family members in terms of usefulness to the Toclafane, they could probably figure out which ones were among the slaughtered. Her world is unstable enough without the uncertainty, and It isn’t comforting to be fairly sure that her sister is dead and her parents are alive, but at least it gives her a focus for her grief. She could share her method with the people around her, but it’s unlikely that it would be popular, so she stays quiet and tries not to think about it.
Two months after the invasion, Molly Hooper has settled into a routine that is, if horrifying, at least predictable. She wakes up at five am, when the Toclafane, as one body, emit a high-pitched shriek that pierces through her dreams and sends her shooting out of bed with her heart racing. She and her housemates (another third-year medical student from Paris, a pediatrician from St. Bart’s, and an army doctor two days away from deployment to Afghanistan) drive to the hospital under the guidance of the Toclafane who guards their street, and take over for the nurses working the night shift. The accidents that occur at the yards are horrific, would never happen in any sane world where things like sanitation laws and limits on work hours are in effect. Molly does her best to repair crushed limbs and close gashes wide enough to fit her whole hand. She avoids daydreaming about the future she had imagined: sanitary, the equipment vacuum-sealed and sterilized, her only patients coming to her wrapped in plastic and without lives to hang in the balance. She stops to eat increasingly stale, moldy food at noon and at six, and goes back to the house late at night to fall asleep, exhausted, and wake up at five o’clock again the next morning.
Day, after day, after day.
&
Nearly a year after the invasion, Molly wakes up, not to the Toclafane shrieking, but to a rap on the front door. She jumps up from the couch (One of us has done something wrong; I told John to shut up while the Toclafane were around; where is the baseball bat they’re not getting anyone without a fight) and waits. They shuttered the windows after the first week in Normandy — it doesn’t keep out aliens who can appear and disappear at will, but it makes them feel safer if no one can see in — so Molly pulls out the baseball bat from underneath the couch, creeps over to the front door and presses her eye to the peephole.
Outside, nearly invisible in the darkness, is a woman in black, standing by the door and looking around nervously. Molly doesn’t allow herself to sigh with relief, because the Toclafane have been known to use other people as bait to lure out dissidents before. Instead, she runs over to the bookshelves and tears out a page of the first book she finds. There’s no point in writing a message that the Toclafane might decipher even in the dark, but there are other, more primitive ways to communicate. Molly folds the paper into fourths and slides it under the door.
After a moment, the woman on the other side sends it back under, unfolded. She is unmonitored and comes of her own free will. Molly clenches her fists to steady herself and cracks open the door. The woman outside presses herself against the opening and slides in, easing the door shut behind her and leaning against it with her head back and eyes shut.
‘Thank you,’ she whispers.
‘Any time,’ says Molly. She fumbles around the kitchen until she finds the lighter (Claire never leaves it in the right place; she’s so absent-minded these days) and a candle, to see her visitor better. Electricity is turned off between ten and five, allegedly so that there is enough at all times to keep the reactors at the shipyards from melting down. A better engineer than Molly could calculate the reasons why that doesn’t make sense, why it’s just a ploy to keep them docile. She lights the candle and holds it up; then she nearly drops it with shock. ‘Martha Jones?’
Martha — brilliant, quick-witted Martha, dressed for war, face thinner than Molly remembers — goes blank for a moment; then, like a light going on, grins at her. ‘Molly Hooper,’ she says. ‘I remember you! You were going to be an obstetrician, right?’
‘Mortician. I’m going to — I mean, I was. They don’t need morticians anymore,’ says Molly. She puts the candle down on the table and twists her fingers together. ‘You’re the Martha Jones?’
Martha peers around at the shadowy first floor. ‘I expect so.’
‘Well, I just thought … Martha Jones is a common name, and you went missing days before the invasion … we were all worried …’ They had had a comparative anatomy class, first year, studied together and then drifted apart until Martha had dropped off her radar completely, only coming back onto it when rumors had begun to circulate regarding her disappearance.
Martha frowns, like she’s forgotten about a time before. Molly can’t blame her. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry about that — it was all a bit rushed, and I got back right as it all happened. Have you heard from anyone we knew, since then?’
Molly shakes her head. She doesn’t know who Martha had gone around with in those days, but she dredges up the names she hasn’t been able to scrub out of her mind. ‘Everyone got sent to different places. They emptied out most of London. I think Sarah Cooper was sent to Cornwall. Professor Moran was part of the one tenth.’ She swallows. She’s done her best not to think about before if she can help it. It’s not coming back, not ever, and worrying changes nothing. She has work to do here.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Martha.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Molly says, and tries to give her a smile. It doesn’t quite stay on right, and Martha just looks down at her hands. Silence stretches between them for a few seconds. ‘Do you need anything from us? Is that why you’re here?’
Martha looks up. ‘Does Claire Dubois live here?’
Molly blinks. Somehow, that wasn’t the answer she was expecting. A small, unexpected twinge of jealousy makes itself known in her chest: Martha was her classmate, not Claire’s, and for a it doesn’t make sense that she would be here for anyone else. ‘Um … She’s in the living room. She’s quite — should I wake her up?’ Claire is terrifying to wake: she sleeps with a knife under her pillow like it will protect her, and if she’s dreaming then there’s always the off chance that she’ll be up and fighting before she’s alert enough to know what’s going on. Molly has a fading scar on her forearm from the first time that happened, before she learned to dodge.
‘Thanks.’ Martha sits down. ‘I’m sorry to jump in at you like this. Things got a bit mixed up in Lourdes, and my other contact here got arrested before I could reach him.’ Her face acquires a pinched expression visible even in the unsteady light of the candle. Molly nods; she knows how it is.
‘I’ll get Claire. Wait here.’ She turns towards the living room, and her heart leaps in her throat when she sees movement there.
‘Sorry,’ says John. ‘I heard voices, is everything all right?’ His eyes slide past her, to the table, and his mouth drops open. ‘Martha Jones.’
‘That’s me,’ Martha says with a small smile.
‘Martha, this is John Watson; he’s another doctor here from London. I’ll be right back.’ Molly leaves them to make their own introductions, and tiptoes through the living room until she reaches the other side, where Claire has curled up into a ball on the love seat. She positions herself behind the arm above Claire’s head, where it will be most difficult to hit her, and taps her on the top of the head.
The response is immediate: Claire flips around and off the cushions, tripping on the way to the floor and landing on the mattress where Bill sleeps. The older man jerks awake, groaning. Claire mumbles an apology before she whips her attention around to focus on Molly, blinking.
‘What’s the matter?’
Molly fights the urge to take a step back. ‘Martha Jones, she’s … here to see you.’
Claire straightens. She rolls her shoulders. ‘Yes,’ she says, and marches into the kitchen like she was born for this moment. Molly pauses to help Bill as he rolls to his feet, knees popping in a way that makes Molly wince. By the time they make it to the kitchen, Claire and Martha are already deep in murmured conversation, while John leans against the opposite wall and watches. Bill settles into a chair across the table from them, and Molly waits by the counter.
Martha breaks off mid-sentence. ‘Is this everyone here?’ she asks Molly, who nods. ‘Good. Because I’ve got a job to do, and I need you to help me do it.’
‘It’s true?’ asks Bill, eyes bugging out of his head. He leans forwards. ‘You’ve got a plan to kill the Master?’
Molly watches Martha. She’s heard the rumors — you’d have to have lived under a rock to not hear them — but they were just that: rumors, brought in from truckers delivering materials from Russia and Saudi Arabia, no evidence. Molly has refused to let herself believe any of them. She will not set herself up for any more falls.
Martha glances at her, and then addresses the table as a whole. ‘Yeah, I do. It’s not me — I can’t do it. But I know someone who can.’ She folds her hands together.
John strides over to join them at the table. His face is a mask that would have terrified Molly a year ago; now she feels nothing but fierce pride in her housemate. ‘Tell us how,’ he says.
Martha gives him a brief nod, then turns to address Molly directly. ‘You remember when the Royal Hope Hospital vanished,’ she begins.
‘It was in the papers, everywhere,’ says Molly. She hadn’t been sure what to make of it; hadn’t even heard about it until after it was over, she had been so busy that day reading an enormously dense chapter on the prefrontal cortex. Laura had been hysterical.
‘Right. Well. We really did go to the moon. And there was this — this man, there. A time traveler, from another planet. He saved us; he figured out how to get the people responsible to put the hospital back without killing anyone; and when it was all over, he offered to take me with him.’
She continues, telling them about this time traveler, this Doctor, as if he is her own personal deity. It makes no sense — why Martha? What was an alien doing on earth? — but in the past year Molly has seen more inexplicable things than she had ever imagined, and for that, she is willing to listen to this story that Martha tells of daring rescues and impossibilities she would have laughed at before. It even comes as something of a relief to her: if so many terrible, chaotic things can exist on such a large scale, then she has to believe that there is an equal capacity for good in the universe to exist as well.
‘He has saved your lives, so many times, and you never even knew about it,’ Martha says. ‘I’ve only been with him for a year, but he’s been doing this for centuries. And right now, he needs our help. He’s on board the Valiant, right this very moment, trapped by the Master. I’ve studied the network that the Master uses — not just me, there was a whole bunch of other scientists — and I realized — it’s all mental. He’s got this control over our minds with it, to keep people from revolting all at once, but what if we turned that against him?’ Her face glows with excitement as she explains. ‘I can’t take down the system from outside the Valiant, not like we’d need to get everyone fighting at once, but you don’t need to fight. You just need to think a little.’
Molly thinks. She thinks about the precipitous political rise of a sadistic alien to the highest seat in the British government, and the way that she had rearranged her worldview to include genocidal machines tearing holes in the sky. It had all seemed so inevitable. Questioning why, when it would do her no practical good, hadn’t mattered very much. If what Martha says about the Archangel network is true, then perhaps it hadn’t been her fault that she had acquiesced so easily.
Molly would prefer to think that, but comforting beliefs stopped helping her the day that she left London.
‘When do we do it?’ she asks, when Martha has finished talking.
‘Four days from now, the fleet is going to launch,’ Martha says at once. ‘The second that the countdown reaches zero.’
‘That’s your plan? That’s it?’ John sounds skeptical. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
‘I’ve been walking the earth for three hundred and sixty three days now, with six billion Toclafane out looking for me. I’ve been to all six continents, on my own, and I haven’t been caught. I know what I’m doing,’ says Martha, and Molly may fall a little bit in love with the way she addresses him, every inch a commanding officer.
John gives her an abrupt nod, and purses his lips.
‘Where will you go next?’ Molly asks.
Claire and Martha share a look. ‘I’ve got friends,’ says Claire, ‘and it’s better if you don’t know anything more than that. Not that I don’t trust you,’ she adds quickly, correctly reading Molly’s cool expression, ‘but for the Toclafane, you see. They have ways of finding things out.’
‘I’ll be gone before the sun goes down tomorrow,’ promises Martha. ‘You won’t be in any more danger.’
Molly nearly blurts out that she should stay longer, tell them more about what she’s been doing, give them news of the outside world, but she knows better. Martha Jones has become a legend by giving the right information to the right people and moving on, not by staying put to chat. Instead, she says, ‘You can have the couch. I’ll sleep with Bill — no, I mean — I’ll share the mattress with Bill. I don’t mind.’
‘As long as we’re clear that that weren’t a euphemism for any fancy business,’ he grouses. Molly smiles fondly at him.
Martha looks as though she is about to protest; Molly reaches down to help Bill out of his chair and avoids eye contact to cut off any further conversation. She figures that she has another hour or two of sleep before the wake-up call; and although she isn’t in danger of being crushed to death by heavy machinery if she nods off at her job, she still has care of other people and a responsibility to make sure that she doesn’t accidentally hand them methamphetamines instead of methylphenidate. All the same, she lies awake for what feels like an hour after they have settled down. Martha sleeps curled up at one end of the couch, hands clenched under her chin; Molly’s eyes, having adjusted to the dark, can pick out a frown on her face even at rest. She exhales slowly and stares up at the ceiling, hands folded flat and empty across her stomach.
&
When the Toclafane begin their synchronized wailing two hours later, it takes Molly a moment to remember why she feels more than usually exhausted, and why she is sleeping against Bill’s back. She flips around, and her eyes flicker up to the couch. Martha Jones lies in exactly the same pose as she had when she fell asleep last night, but her muscles are clenched, and her eyes, wide open.
‘They don’t come into houses usually,’ Claire says. ‘Not unless someone doesn’t show up for work.’
Martha nods, and shuts her eyes. By the time that Molly has rolled, joints crackling, to her feet, and helped Bill upright, she is asleep once more. They all congregate in the kitchen to eat cold cereal, silent in deference to the defender of the earth sleeping in the next room. Molly can’t keep herself from glancing over every minute or so while she prepares herself for work. Martha Jones, the only known survivor of the invasion of Japan and the classmate who helped Molly memorize the functions of the vertebrae, here in Normandy on the eve of the fleet launch. Seeing isn’t enough; she wants to talk to her, receive acknowledgement back, additional confirmation that she is alive and planning and going to save them all. But however much Molly has had to sacrifice, she still maintains a sense of decency, and weaves her morning routine around the couch at a respectful distance. She suspects that her companions feel much the same as she does: Bill keeps shushing Claire although she is probably the quietest of them all, and John gives Martha’s sleeping form a military salute before he locks the front door behind them.
Molly buzzes through work that day, distracted and clumsy. The weight that had been eased off of her shoulders falls back on as soon as she arrives at the hospital and is confronted by her current round of patients and wheelchairs carrying in new patients and an endless stream of Toclafane making sure that she won’t sabotage their workforce. The sheer number of injuries and infection in her workload is enough to put out the spark of joy that she had felt when Martha arrived: even if John is wrong, and it does work, what are they gaining back? What will be left? London is gone; New York is gone; Australia and New Zealand and Japan and huge swathes of central Africa are razed flat and dead; there are nuclear factories stretching along most seaboards and oil-slicked craters in the Middle East. Rebuilding will take decades. Lifetimes. If there is even enough left of humanity to make it possible.
She shakes the thought out of her head and focuses on the task in front of her. It’s easier to simply purse her lips as she stitches up a deep gash in the heel of a man’s hand, and not think about it. He grunts in pain despite the anesthetic, and the Toclafane hovering in the room above them makes a small, interested noise as though observing animals in a zoo.
‘Sorry,’ she murmurs to him, ignoring the ever-present whirring.
‘Me too,’ he grits out through his teeth.
It takes ten stitches to sew his skin back together; when it’s done, she covers the wound and leaves him in the care of a nurse while she goes back to the woman with crushed fingers in room eight. And then she will go round to assess more damages, tend to more wounds, save as many people as she possibly can until it’s time to go home, fall onto the couch, and wake up tomorrow to do it all again. Even if the Master gets deposed in two days’ time, there will still be injuries and sick people by the dozens who need attending to; she could not in good conscience flee to the dead while there is still so much to be done for the living. Mortuaries and a quiet, clean environment with every instrument in its place will have to wait for a time when bodies can be cared for individually, instead of burned on mass funeral pyres in the quarry.
‘Doctor! Doctor, may I have a word?’ she hears someone call out to Dr. Silva as she goes by. The word, yesterday so innocuous, drags Molly away from the edge of the dark, hopeless precipice towards which her thoughts had been turning yet again. She remembers Martha’s words from yesterday, and the fierce pride in her voice when she spoke about the Doctor. And, as silly as Molly tells herself that it is, the parallels in Martha’s story with her own please her: Molly the for-all-intents-and-purposes-doctor, aiding and abetting Martha the almost-doctor, to release the man who calls himself a doctor for all of humanity.
Molly rolls back her shoulders and lifts her chin. Of course, she thinks. It doesn’t matter that it will be ruined, and need rebuilding. That’s what doctors are for. She walks around the corner with more confidence, and promptly comes face to face with a trio of Toclafane, hovering in the doorway of her next patient and chattering to each other. She averts her eyes and lets her shoulders fall forwards again, cloaking her resolve behind a habitually weary posture. The Toclafane can’t read minds, but alien as they are, they are remarkably good at reading human body language. It is one more thing that doesn’t make sense to Molly, and one more thing that she has shoved to the back of her mind because she can’t waste the brain space trying to figure it out. The practical upshot is all that matters, and the practical upshot is that she must stay mild-mannered and cowed so that she doesn’t risk letting the Toclafane know that something is out of place.
She is on her way to hide in the disused morgue for her lunch break when John catches up to her, walking fast and clutching paperwork to his chest. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he asks, panting.
Molly blinks. ‘Don’t you usually — I mean, not that you can’t, I just — oh.’ She sees his gaze flicker up and over his shoulder, indicating without turning his head: Toclafane. ‘Of course. Come on.’ She opens the door to the stairwell for him, ushering him before her and dragging the door shut against the ponderous weight of its hinges. He hurries down the stairs to the lower level; she follows him without speaking until they are locked safely in the empty, echoing basement hallway.
‘What’s going on?’ Molly asks. ‘What happened?’
John leans against the wall and shuts his eyes. ‘Doctor Fang, you know her, right? Surgeon, usually down in the ER.’
Molly ushers him inside the morgue. There’s a long-empty gurney in the middle, on which she lays out her lunch. ‘Yes?’
He sits down on the gurney. It creaks under his weight, and Molly wishes he wouldn’t sit so close to her food, but she won’t complain. She needs to look at the bigger picture.
‘I told her that we’d had a visitor last night,’ he says. ‘I thought, ‘well, if telepathy is our best shot, we’re going to need all the brain power we’ve got. Might as well spread the word around’.’
It’s a good idea, and she wishes she’d thought of it. She’d been so afraid of being discovered that she had barely had room to think for most of the morning; and here is John Watson, doing all he could to spread an idea he wasn’t even sure would work. She sits down on the other side of the gurney, gripping the edges of the table while he gathers his words together.
‘I think one of the Toclafane might have heard part of it,’ he says, bringing her away from her own knotted stomach and back to the present.
Molly stares at him, ducks her head and lowers her voice. ‘How do you know?’
John sighs and purses his lips before he answers. ‘Because when I came back to ask her to lunch, I found a pile of dust on the floor of her office.’ He rubs his face with one hand. ‘I’ve pulled in a couple of people from other wings to cover her shifts, and I keep looking over my shoulder now, thinking I’m next.’
Molly tries to think of something comforting to say. The only thing that comes to mind is ‘You probably are,’ which, while true, is not what he needs to hear. It isn’t what she wants to tell him, either. Despite having virtually nothing in common besides a university education in the many ways that the human body can be broken and put back together, she likes John. He goes about his rounds like he’s going to war for his patients, fighting for their lives against an impossible foe. She doesn’t want him to die.
‘There ought to be at least one office on this floor,’ she says finally. ‘I don’t have the keys, but none of these doors were locked the first time I came down here. You could hide here. I could cover for you.’
John shakes his head. ‘I can’t do that. I can’t put you in danger, too. I just — wanted someone to know. When they do get me, that that’s why.’ He licks his lips.
Molly finds herself reaching over to grip his hand, although her fingers don’t quite cover his own. ‘I don’t mind. Really, I don’t. Come with me.’
John looks at their hands like they are foreign bodies. He lifts his head, eyes meeting hers. ‘Molly, no.’
She opens her mouth to tell him that he can’t die, not right before they win, that it doesn’t make sense — and stops as a low, familiar hum cuts her off. In front of them, light crackles through the air, splitting to reveal a dark metal sphere with geometric grooves covering its surface.
‘Hello, doctors,’ sings the Toclafane in its little-girl voice.
Molly holds on tighter to his hand. ‘John,’ she says. No, that’s not enough. She tries again. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll make it right.’
John pulls away from her and stands, ramrod-stiff, as the Toclafane moves closer. Molly slides backwards, heart in her throat. ‘Hello,’ says John.
&
On the morning of the fleet launch, they are all excused from work to gather around the televisions at home and watch the event. The Toclafane are in a fervor because the Master will be making a speech before they depart for the skies; they let their humans sleep until nearly seven o’clock today. Molly wakes up to their shrill, gleeful singing with a three-day-old ache in her chest and a stiff neck. In the armchair by her head, Claire thrashes herself into consciousness and runs to the kitchen to check the time on the wind-up clock on the wall.
‘Fifty-seven minutes to zero,’ she shouts, turning on the tap to wash her hair.
Molly swings herself upright, rubbing her eyes. Today is the day, she tells herself. It may feel like every other day, but today is when it ends. ‘Shall we turn on the telly?’ she asks Claire as she gets up so that Bill will have room to stretch. ‘Or — no, I suppose that there will be a countdown on the screen, too. It doesn’t matter.’ She ought to feel excited, or angry, or even fearful, she supposes, but there isn’t room in her for any feeling besides tired, in the end.
When she has eaten what passes for breakfast these days, Molly turns the knob on the television and curls up on the couch between Bill and Claire. She hugs her shins and rests her chin on her knees, eyes fixed on the proceedings being filmed aboard the Valiant.
The time is 7:59am. The Master’s grin stretches wide across the screen, intercut with footage of the coasts: thousands and thousands of slim silver needles perched between land and sea, piercing the cloud cover and surrounded by swarms of metal spheres. Inside the ships, hundreds of people in white space suits sit at their controls and crawl among the decks, checking engines and weapons while the Toclafane dart about like children, giggling. Molly swallows the bile that rises in her throat, thinking of those people leaving the planet forever, drifting through the void to fight aliens, other people — for what? For the amusement of the Master. It is singularly pointless, and Molly curls in tighter on herself to keep from screaming. Two more minutes.
The Master is speaking, and then he stops. His maniac grin gains a new shade of sadism. The camera pans away from him, down to the woman kneeling at his feet, and Molly’s breath catches in her throat. No, she thinks. No, that’s not right. She had a plan. She stayed alive for a year, with every Toclafane looking out for her; she can’t have gotten captured now. It doesn’t make sense. On her right, Claire curses up a blue streak in French, and on her left, Bill bows his head. Molly stares at the screen, mouth pressed shut.
And, for the first time in a year, Molly is right: it doesn’t make sense, but it isn’t supposed to. Martha Jones lifts her chin and laughs to the Master’s face; Claire jumps up, shrieking with joy; and Molly shuts her eyes.
Doctor, she thinks, remembering Martha’s stories about a man who traveled through time.
Doctor, she thinks, and pictures that man as he had writhed and aged under the power of the Master’s weapons.
Doctor, she thinks, and sees the janitor on the train whose family had been killed; sees the old couple in whose house she has been living; sees the hundreds and hundreds of injures she has tended to and the lives they have ruined; sees John, her housemate and comrade; sees her apartment a year and a day ago, when Harold Saxon died and took her future with him.
Doctor, she thinks, hearing Bill and Claire murmuring the words beside her.
Doctor.
And the world goes silent.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Molly Hooper opens her eyes. The camera field on the television in her flat is empty and silent, showing only the light wood paneling of the Valiant where the President’s square-jawed face had occupied the bulk of the screen a moment previously. She stares, heart pounding and textbook digging into her stomach, waiting for something to happen. After a few eerie seconds, the camera cuts back to the ground. A tense-faced reporter with sleek black hair presses her fingers to her earpiece, eyes half-shut in concentration before they fly open with shock. She addresses the camera, voice controlled.
‘We have lost direct visual contact with the ship, but reports are coming in that the President of the United States has just been assassinated. I repeat, the American President has just been assassinated.’ Molly stares at the screen, the bottom dropping out of her stomach. ‘The Toclafane have not made an appearance, and it is unclear whether or not the alien life forms were directly involved,’ the reporter continues, ‘However, the Prime Minister …’ and here she breaks off to exchange a wide-eyed look with someone off-camera.
Molly seizes her phone, and hits the number of the first friend she comes across in her contacts list. Sarah picks up almost immediately.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Molly asks.
&
At five o’clock in the afternoon, two weeks later, Molly is sitting in the library basement among the old periodicals. There’s an article that one of the doctors was telling her about — a case of fibrodysplasia documented in the eighteen fifties — that she wants to finish reading before she goes home to watch the new Prime Minister’s speech. She opens a huge bound volume whose spine comes close to cracking, showering her with dust and paper particles that make her sneeze violently.
‘Bless you,’ someone says.
Molly jumps, slamming the book shut. A young woman pauses at the gap between stacks into which she has wedged herself. It takes Molly a moment to recognize her. ‘Oh, thank you — Martha!’ She lays the periodical across the tops of its shelf mates and gives Martha her full attention, heart still pounding with surprise. It makes her movements quick and jittery; she folds her arms against her body self-consciously. ‘How are you — everyone was so worried — they thought you’d died at the Royal Hope Hospital, there were witnesses, but they couldn’t find your body, so I thought …’ She bites her lip and trails off before she can find a way to put her foot in her mouth somehow.
Martha stares at her for a moment — well, not at her precisely, more like she looks through Molly, which is nothing new. Then she shakes her head and her eyes refocus, a sad smile appearing on her face. ‘No. I got out in time, thank god. My mum was freaking out the whole time.’ She makes as if to go on her way, but then turns back. ‘How are you doing, by the way? I haven’t seen you in, what is it, a year and a half? Two years?’
‘Two years,’ Molly says, too quickly. ‘I’m fine. Doing fine. I’ve got a residency lined up at St. Bart’s, actually.’
For some reason, this makes Martha’s smile widen. ‘Fantastic! I’m sure you’ll be a brilliant mortician.’ Warmth fills in Molly’s chest, but before she can say anything along the lines of you remembered, thank you for remembering, Martha has ducked back out of the stack and into the wider corridor. ‘It was good to see you again,’ she says, waving. ‘Thanks.’
‘See you,’ Molly says, bemused. She chews her lip as she slots the periodical back into its proper place, willing it to make sense of that particular interaction for her, but try as she might, she can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s just missed something important.
END
