Sick River - (11th Doctor, River, Amy, Rory)
Title: Sick River
Author: betawho
Rating: PG
Characters: 11th Doctor, River Song, Amy Pond, Rory Williams
Words: 2410
Part 1 of 2
Summary: River was always the strong one, but what would the others do if she got sick?
River took aim, wavered, her eyes rolled up and she passed out, falling over backward.
“River!” Rory just managed to catch her. He held her up, his hand went to her neck. “She’s burning up!”
The aliens didn’t stop firing at them, but with River no longer giving them covering fire, the bad guys were getting bold, advancing out from behind the barrels and bales that littered the smuggler’s ship cluttered hallways.
They all ducked back behind the gold statue of “Freedom” which they had traced to this ship from the planet Kantaro, where it had been stolen. The smugglers were unwilling to risk melting the precious metal, which was the only thing keeping them safe at the moment.
“River?” Amy patted her cheeks with concern, giving her a harder smack when she didn’t respond. Rory frowned at her, she frowned back. River wouldn’t want to be unconscious if there was any alternative.
“Quick!” the Doctor said. “Take River, run that way, keep your eyes closed!” He pointed down the tall corridor toward the crammed hold where they’d materialized the Tardis.
“Run with our eyes closed?” Rory protested, River dragging heavy against his side. His daughter was a substantial woman.
“Come on,” Amy grabbed River’s other arm and slung it over her shoulder, they took off, River hot and limp between them. They squinted their eyes almost closed.
Amy looked back to see what the Doctor was doing, just in time to see him smash open a safety hatch and pull a lever. Fire suppression foam instantly filled the hallway, jetting from in visible ports in the walls. They slammed their eyes closed against the spray and felt the foam expanding all around them, starting to solidify.
They ran, pushing their way through, like running under water.
The Doctor passed them, creating a wake. From the sound of it, he soniced open the emergency bulkhead at the end of the hall, causing a “Whoosh,” and a sucking draw on the foam, that slurped them out the last few feet.
They emerged in the hold, standing in a pile of half-solidified foam, and dripping chunks of bubbles. River’s hair looked like a huge wad of cotton candy.
The Doctor, trailing bubbles, ran and slid to a stop in front of the Tardis, slamming against the doors. He tried to snap them open but his fingers were too slippery. He fumbled for the key he wore on a chain around his neck.
An energy bolt streaked out of the wall of foam behind them, setting fire to the dry scarecrow figure of some primitive god. Foam shot from the overhead jets. Muffled alien shouts sounded behind them.
Rory and Amy ran to the Tardis. Rory slipped and cracked his knee against the floor, almost pulling Amy and River down on top of him. The Doctor fumbled the key into the lock and pushed the doors open.
Showing an unusual strength, he whirled, scooped River up in both arms and carrying her, ran into the Tardis.
Amy yanked Rory up and shoved him after them.
They stumbled into the Tardis and slammed the door on the rain of growing foam outside. The Doctor was already halfway up the inner staircase. “Medbay!” he yelled at them, a frantic note in his voice.
Amy saw the panicked look he was giving River and felt her heart jolt. She looked at Rory, he looked back and they pelted up the stairs.
They skidded to a halt in the sickbay door to see a foamy Doctor laying a foamy River on the medbay diagnostic bed. His hands were moving in a blur, calling up equipment and programs faster than their eyes could follow.
River’s skin was beet red.
Rory’s eyes went large, but he knew his way around in here. He’d made a point of it. He ran over, swept his hands under the sterilizer, leaving a razor precise line where the foam stopped and his clean hands began, and ran to wrestle River out of her foamy clothes.
The minute Amy pulled on her gunbelt, trying to remove it, River reacted.
Silent as death she fought them. Chops, kicks, a hand-wringing armwrestling grip that Rory would remember for a long time as she practically threw him over the bed.
Amy yelled. “River! River, it’s us! You’re sick! We’re trying to help!” She managed to toss River’s gun away before River could grab it, but received a sharp shove in the solarplexus that left her stunned and gasping to breathe.
The Doctor fought her silently, trying to pin her shoulders down, keep her from leaping off the bed, he turned a hip and grunted as she kicked him hard enough to send him spinning.
Rory threw himself across her, using his weight to hold her down. “River! It’s us!” he yelled. He managed to duck his head just before she could get a grip on it. The twisting motion her hands made would have been fatal. He jerked back, stumbling away.
River jackknifed up and got one knee under her on the bed, ready to spring away. Amy stepped forward and threw a punch, putting her whole body behind it. It connected with River’s jaw with a sound like a concrete sack hitting wet cement.
River toppled over backward, half sliding off the bed. The Doctor caught her, her hair spilling over his arm. He slid her back up onto the bed. “Good job, Pond,” he said.
Amy sucked in a breath, she cradled her reddened hand. “Yeah,” she said painfully. “She’s got a head like a rock!”
“Runs in the family,” the Doctor gave her a weak smile, his eyes flicking back to River. “See to that hand, Rory.”
While Rory pulled Amy over to the other bed and ran to get the bone scanner, the Doctor carefully positioned River and attached electrodes to the sides of her throat and upper chest.
River had been unconscious the entire time.
“Why didn’t you try to wake her up?” Amy asked, then hissed as Rory applied a device to her hand.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
The Doctor kept one hand on the side of River’s throat, more for the contact, Amy thought, than to check her pulse.
“She had reverted to her self-defense programming. I didn’t dare let her hear my voice,” he said.
Rory’s head snapped up. “Does that happen often?”
The Doctor shook his head impatiently, his quiff whipping, as he glared at the readouts on the screen beside him. “She has conscious control over it. But whatever this is has ripped that from her.”
He growled at whatever was showing on the screens and flung the sensors away. He leaned over and placed a hand on either side of her throat, he palpated the red, swollen flesh there with long, sensitive fingers, looking more like a doctor at that moment than Amy had ever seen him.
Rory looked on in concern, still mending Amy’s broken knuckle. “What is it?” he said. He realized what the Doctor was doing.
The Doctor shook his head, then leaned forward and laid his forehead on River’s. He held very still for a moment, and Amy shivered as a ghostly feeling rippled through the air.
The Doctor pulled back. “She’s too far in,” he muttered, not quite under his breath.
“Doctor?” Amy said with that pleading but stern voice that said mayhem would ensue if he didn’t start unpacking a little.
He looked back, his fingers still working on River’s throat and under her jaw. “Her lymph nodes are swollen. Her temperature is elevated, even more than usual. And her skin is dry and papery.
“What does that say to you, Rory?”
“Poison,” Rory said flatly.
The Doctor whirled and grabbed a small device from the tray of instruments behind him. It had a flat, square tongue of glass on the end and he quickly lifted one of River's hands, pricked the end of her finger with the small pick on the end of the device.
He pulled out the glass tongue and Amy realized it was a slide. He tapped it into a device and shoved his eyes down over the covered viewfinder.
River started spazming. Rory and Amy yelled and jumped forward to grab her. They tried to hold her shoulders down. She was flopping like a landed fish, yet still somehow rigid. Rory tried to make sure she didn't swallow her tongue. Amy tried to keep her on the table.
The Doctor flailed to grab her feet, earning a kick in the jaw for his efforts.
Abruptly she stopped and fell still. Everyone panted, watching to see if it would happen again.
But she remained still as death, the flushed redness of her skin paled and drained away, leaving her looking white and waxy. She was unnaturally stiff.
"River?" Amy said in a quiet voice that sounded very much like it was edging toward scream.
"Oh, no. No, no, no," the Doctor said, pushing his way to her head, knocking Rory out of his way, he grabbed her head and lifted it up, looking as if he was trying to force his very thoughts into her mind. "You promised not to do this, you made me promise, so that means you promised too!"
She started to pant. He breathed out a sigh of relief, wilting. She started breathing harder, harder, deeper, faster, gasping, obviously not getting any air.
"Rory!" the Doctor scrambled under the bed and slammed a pressure cuff in Rory's hand, he waved at River's other arm, even as he wrapped a second cuff around her bicep nearest to him. "Oxygen cuff!" he yelled when he saw Rory's confused gaze. Rory nodded and wrapped it around River's other arm, the straps ripping with the sound of velcro.
The Doctor's fingers danced over his cuff then darted over and danced over Rory's. Both cuffs inflated like miniature water wings, and started pulsating in time, like artificial lungs.
The Doctor swiped a finger over the ebony headboard and it lit up with colorful signs and symbols and monitoring statistics, the round Gallifreyan writing flowing down it in a scrolling cascade.
"Rory, set up a saline drip," the Doctor ordered as he did incomprehensible things with the controls. "Us the osmotic cuff."
Rory nodded and darted to the other side of the sickbay.
"What can I do?" Amy asked, staring at her daughter's still, waxy face.
"Just stand ready, Amy." The Doctor gave her a quick and not very encouraging smile.
Rory came back and brushed by her. Amy stepped back and picked up River's clothes, her battledress and boots had been scattered in the earlier attack. She quickly folded them and set them on the end of the other bed.
Her heart beat like a lead balloon in her chest, each beat hard and bruising. She stared at her daughter, still clad in a racy lace bra and short slip. But what she saw was the tiny swaddled baby who’d cried as she was taken from her. She refused to let the tears that threatened flow. She gritted her teeth and charged up her mad. Anger had always helped her whenever things wheeled out of her control.
She would not lose her baby again.
The Doctor went back to his blood slide while Rory set up the saline drip.
The Doctor looked for a long time, longer than it seemed for him to make up his mind. He pulled back and wiped a hand down his face, pulling the skin tight. He turned and stared at River in the bed. She was still breathing hard, gasping, but no longer as pale.
It was the Doctor who was pale now.
"What?" Amy demanded. Totally refusing to accept that look on his face. "What is it?"
The Doctor got and walked to the side of River's bed. She looked like a doll laying there. A lifesize figurine. He picked up one fist, he smiled a watery smile, even unconscious his wife would bunch her fists and fight.
He raised her arm. Her whole arm came up, stiff, like rigor mortis. Not bending at the elbow, almost creaking. He kissed her fist and set her arm back down.
"What is it, Doctor?" Rory said in his intense, worried voice.
The Doctor pulled up a screen on the headboard, eclipsing the icons already there. He zeroed in on an image of River's lungs. Then focused in, and in, and in, until the screen showed what looked like a field of gray grass, then zoomed in further, until the waving grass looked the size of cables. Like a closeup of hair follicles.
"What is that?" Amy asked.
"Cilia," Rory answered distractedly. He stared at the image and frowned. Tiny, thread thin filaments were growing up the outside of the cables, branching out like mold spores, connecting in a web, tangling around the cilia, smothering it, stopping the natural waving motion.
"Doctor?" Rory asked, a scared look on his face.
"It's Pliascene poisoning," the Doctor said, rubbing a hand over his mouth, his face pale.
"And that is?" Rory prompted.
"Celluloid fibers that bond with muscle fibers and the cilia of the lungs, like plastic. The lymphatic system can filter them out, but they attack too quickly, overwhelming the systems, until..."
"Until?" Amy demanded. "Until what?"
"Until they completely encase and supplant the normal tissues. Until she becomes a fiberglass cast of herself," he finished.
Rory stared, mouth open. He shut it. "Isn't there something we can do? Give her a transfusion, filter them out of the blood."
"They're not just in her blood. We keep her blood stockpiled here just in case, but even that wouldn't be enough, we..."
He got a blank look on his face.
Amy knew that look. Her heart beat faster.
"We..? We what?!" she demanded.
He looked at her. "Oh, she's not going to like this..."
They stuffed her back into the spacesuit she'd worn as a child. Amy tenderly pulled her curly hair back in a ponytail, securing it with a scrunchie, and tucked it back into the helmet of the suit.
The Doctor and Rory hooked up all the biological connections. Amy deliberately didn't look, just the thought made her wince.
They all worked in grim silence. Each doing their part.
They sealed up the suit. The Doctor activated the controls.
And the spacesuit sat up. Stood up. And started walking.
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Author: betawho
Rating: PG
Characters: 11th Doctor, River Song, Amy Pond, Rory Williams
Words: 2410
Part 1 of 2
Summary: River was always the strong one, but what would the others do if she got sick?
River took aim, wavered, her eyes rolled up and she passed out, falling over backward.
“River!” Rory just managed to catch her. He held her up, his hand went to her neck. “She’s burning up!”
The aliens didn’t stop firing at them, but with River no longer giving them covering fire, the bad guys were getting bold, advancing out from behind the barrels and bales that littered the smuggler’s ship cluttered hallways.
They all ducked back behind the gold statue of “Freedom” which they had traced to this ship from the planet Kantaro, where it had been stolen. The smugglers were unwilling to risk melting the precious metal, which was the only thing keeping them safe at the moment.
“River?” Amy patted her cheeks with concern, giving her a harder smack when she didn’t respond. Rory frowned at her, she frowned back. River wouldn’t want to be unconscious if there was any alternative.
“Quick!” the Doctor said. “Take River, run that way, keep your eyes closed!” He pointed down the tall corridor toward the crammed hold where they’d materialized the Tardis.
“Run with our eyes closed?” Rory protested, River dragging heavy against his side. His daughter was a substantial woman.
“Come on,” Amy grabbed River’s other arm and slung it over her shoulder, they took off, River hot and limp between them. They squinted their eyes almost closed.
Amy looked back to see what the Doctor was doing, just in time to see him smash open a safety hatch and pull a lever. Fire suppression foam instantly filled the hallway, jetting from in visible ports in the walls. They slammed their eyes closed against the spray and felt the foam expanding all around them, starting to solidify.
They ran, pushing their way through, like running under water.
The Doctor passed them, creating a wake. From the sound of it, he soniced open the emergency bulkhead at the end of the hall, causing a “Whoosh,” and a sucking draw on the foam, that slurped them out the last few feet.
They emerged in the hold, standing in a pile of half-solidified foam, and dripping chunks of bubbles. River’s hair looked like a huge wad of cotton candy.
The Doctor, trailing bubbles, ran and slid to a stop in front of the Tardis, slamming against the doors. He tried to snap them open but his fingers were too slippery. He fumbled for the key he wore on a chain around his neck.
An energy bolt streaked out of the wall of foam behind them, setting fire to the dry scarecrow figure of some primitive god. Foam shot from the overhead jets. Muffled alien shouts sounded behind them.
Rory and Amy ran to the Tardis. Rory slipped and cracked his knee against the floor, almost pulling Amy and River down on top of him. The Doctor fumbled the key into the lock and pushed the doors open.
Showing an unusual strength, he whirled, scooped River up in both arms and carrying her, ran into the Tardis.
Amy yanked Rory up and shoved him after them.
They stumbled into the Tardis and slammed the door on the rain of growing foam outside. The Doctor was already halfway up the inner staircase. “Medbay!” he yelled at them, a frantic note in his voice.
Amy saw the panicked look he was giving River and felt her heart jolt. She looked at Rory, he looked back and they pelted up the stairs.
They skidded to a halt in the sickbay door to see a foamy Doctor laying a foamy River on the medbay diagnostic bed. His hands were moving in a blur, calling up equipment and programs faster than their eyes could follow.
River’s skin was beet red.
Rory’s eyes went large, but he knew his way around in here. He’d made a point of it. He ran over, swept his hands under the sterilizer, leaving a razor precise line where the foam stopped and his clean hands began, and ran to wrestle River out of her foamy clothes.
The minute Amy pulled on her gunbelt, trying to remove it, River reacted.
Silent as death she fought them. Chops, kicks, a hand-wringing armwrestling grip that Rory would remember for a long time as she practically threw him over the bed.
Amy yelled. “River! River, it’s us! You’re sick! We’re trying to help!” She managed to toss River’s gun away before River could grab it, but received a sharp shove in the solarplexus that left her stunned and gasping to breathe.
The Doctor fought her silently, trying to pin her shoulders down, keep her from leaping off the bed, he turned a hip and grunted as she kicked him hard enough to send him spinning.
Rory threw himself across her, using his weight to hold her down. “River! It’s us!” he yelled. He managed to duck his head just before she could get a grip on it. The twisting motion her hands made would have been fatal. He jerked back, stumbling away.
River jackknifed up and got one knee under her on the bed, ready to spring away. Amy stepped forward and threw a punch, putting her whole body behind it. It connected with River’s jaw with a sound like a concrete sack hitting wet cement.
River toppled over backward, half sliding off the bed. The Doctor caught her, her hair spilling over his arm. He slid her back up onto the bed. “Good job, Pond,” he said.
Amy sucked in a breath, she cradled her reddened hand. “Yeah,” she said painfully. “She’s got a head like a rock!”
“Runs in the family,” the Doctor gave her a weak smile, his eyes flicking back to River. “See to that hand, Rory.”
While Rory pulled Amy over to the other bed and ran to get the bone scanner, the Doctor carefully positioned River and attached electrodes to the sides of her throat and upper chest.
River had been unconscious the entire time.
“Why didn’t you try to wake her up?” Amy asked, then hissed as Rory applied a device to her hand.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
The Doctor kept one hand on the side of River’s throat, more for the contact, Amy thought, than to check her pulse.
“She had reverted to her self-defense programming. I didn’t dare let her hear my voice,” he said.
Rory’s head snapped up. “Does that happen often?”
The Doctor shook his head impatiently, his quiff whipping, as he glared at the readouts on the screen beside him. “She has conscious control over it. But whatever this is has ripped that from her.”
He growled at whatever was showing on the screens and flung the sensors away. He leaned over and placed a hand on either side of her throat, he palpated the red, swollen flesh there with long, sensitive fingers, looking more like a doctor at that moment than Amy had ever seen him.
Rory looked on in concern, still mending Amy’s broken knuckle. “What is it?” he said. He realized what the Doctor was doing.
The Doctor shook his head, then leaned forward and laid his forehead on River’s. He held very still for a moment, and Amy shivered as a ghostly feeling rippled through the air.
The Doctor pulled back. “She’s too far in,” he muttered, not quite under his breath.
“Doctor?” Amy said with that pleading but stern voice that said mayhem would ensue if he didn’t start unpacking a little.
He looked back, his fingers still working on River’s throat and under her jaw. “Her lymph nodes are swollen. Her temperature is elevated, even more than usual. And her skin is dry and papery.
“What does that say to you, Rory?”
“Poison,” Rory said flatly.
The Doctor whirled and grabbed a small device from the tray of instruments behind him. It had a flat, square tongue of glass on the end and he quickly lifted one of River's hands, pricked the end of her finger with the small pick on the end of the device.
He pulled out the glass tongue and Amy realized it was a slide. He tapped it into a device and shoved his eyes down over the covered viewfinder.
River started spazming. Rory and Amy yelled and jumped forward to grab her. They tried to hold her shoulders down. She was flopping like a landed fish, yet still somehow rigid. Rory tried to make sure she didn't swallow her tongue. Amy tried to keep her on the table.
The Doctor flailed to grab her feet, earning a kick in the jaw for his efforts.
Abruptly she stopped and fell still. Everyone panted, watching to see if it would happen again.
But she remained still as death, the flushed redness of her skin paled and drained away, leaving her looking white and waxy. She was unnaturally stiff.
"River?" Amy said in a quiet voice that sounded very much like it was edging toward scream.
"Oh, no. No, no, no," the Doctor said, pushing his way to her head, knocking Rory out of his way, he grabbed her head and lifted it up, looking as if he was trying to force his very thoughts into her mind. "You promised not to do this, you made me promise, so that means you promised too!"
She started to pant. He breathed out a sigh of relief, wilting. She started breathing harder, harder, deeper, faster, gasping, obviously not getting any air.
"Rory!" the Doctor scrambled under the bed and slammed a pressure cuff in Rory's hand, he waved at River's other arm, even as he wrapped a second cuff around her bicep nearest to him. "Oxygen cuff!" he yelled when he saw Rory's confused gaze. Rory nodded and wrapped it around River's other arm, the straps ripping with the sound of velcro.
The Doctor's fingers danced over his cuff then darted over and danced over Rory's. Both cuffs inflated like miniature water wings, and started pulsating in time, like artificial lungs.
The Doctor swiped a finger over the ebony headboard and it lit up with colorful signs and symbols and monitoring statistics, the round Gallifreyan writing flowing down it in a scrolling cascade.
"Rory, set up a saline drip," the Doctor ordered as he did incomprehensible things with the controls. "Us the osmotic cuff."
Rory nodded and darted to the other side of the sickbay.
"What can I do?" Amy asked, staring at her daughter's still, waxy face.
"Just stand ready, Amy." The Doctor gave her a quick and not very encouraging smile.
Rory came back and brushed by her. Amy stepped back and picked up River's clothes, her battledress and boots had been scattered in the earlier attack. She quickly folded them and set them on the end of the other bed.
Her heart beat like a lead balloon in her chest, each beat hard and bruising. She stared at her daughter, still clad in a racy lace bra and short slip. But what she saw was the tiny swaddled baby who’d cried as she was taken from her. She refused to let the tears that threatened flow. She gritted her teeth and charged up her mad. Anger had always helped her whenever things wheeled out of her control.
She would not lose her baby again.
The Doctor went back to his blood slide while Rory set up the saline drip.
The Doctor looked for a long time, longer than it seemed for him to make up his mind. He pulled back and wiped a hand down his face, pulling the skin tight. He turned and stared at River in the bed. She was still breathing hard, gasping, but no longer as pale.
It was the Doctor who was pale now.
"What?" Amy demanded. Totally refusing to accept that look on his face. "What is it?"
The Doctor got and walked to the side of River's bed. She looked like a doll laying there. A lifesize figurine. He picked up one fist, he smiled a watery smile, even unconscious his wife would bunch her fists and fight.
He raised her arm. Her whole arm came up, stiff, like rigor mortis. Not bending at the elbow, almost creaking. He kissed her fist and set her arm back down.
"What is it, Doctor?" Rory said in his intense, worried voice.
The Doctor pulled up a screen on the headboard, eclipsing the icons already there. He zeroed in on an image of River's lungs. Then focused in, and in, and in, until the screen showed what looked like a field of gray grass, then zoomed in further, until the waving grass looked the size of cables. Like a closeup of hair follicles.
"What is that?" Amy asked.
"Cilia," Rory answered distractedly. He stared at the image and frowned. Tiny, thread thin filaments were growing up the outside of the cables, branching out like mold spores, connecting in a web, tangling around the cilia, smothering it, stopping the natural waving motion.
"Doctor?" Rory asked, a scared look on his face.
"It's Pliascene poisoning," the Doctor said, rubbing a hand over his mouth, his face pale.
"And that is?" Rory prompted.
"Celluloid fibers that bond with muscle fibers and the cilia of the lungs, like plastic. The lymphatic system can filter them out, but they attack too quickly, overwhelming the systems, until..."
"Until?" Amy demanded. "Until what?"
"Until they completely encase and supplant the normal tissues. Until she becomes a fiberglass cast of herself," he finished.
Rory stared, mouth open. He shut it. "Isn't there something we can do? Give her a transfusion, filter them out of the blood."
"They're not just in her blood. We keep her blood stockpiled here just in case, but even that wouldn't be enough, we..."
He got a blank look on his face.
Amy knew that look. Her heart beat faster.
"We..? We what?!" she demanded.
He looked at her. "Oh, she's not going to like this..."
They stuffed her back into the spacesuit she'd worn as a child. Amy tenderly pulled her curly hair back in a ponytail, securing it with a scrunchie, and tucked it back into the helmet of the suit.
The Doctor and Rory hooked up all the biological connections. Amy deliberately didn't look, just the thought made her wince.
They all worked in grim silence. Each doing their part.
They sealed up the suit. The Doctor activated the controls.
And the spacesuit sat up. Stood up. And started walking.
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