nine

When they arrived at the med-center, a man and a woman were trying to hold a man down so they could put him in what Nina immediately recognized as a stasis chamber.

"Argh! Stop it!" The man yelled. He had his eyes closed shut, and was squeezing them tightly.

"Korwin, it's Abi," the woman spoke. "Open your eyes, I need to take a look at you." Nina tried to organize her thoughts as she watched the scene unfold. This was Abi, probably the doctor on board, Korwin was the engineer, McDonnell was the Captain.

"Korwin!" The Captain yelled out as soon as she spotted him. Nina immediately noticed how worried she was. They were probably family, most likely husband and wife. "What's happened? Is he okay?"

"Help me! It's burning me!" Korwin yelled. Nina froze. This sentence was weirdly familiar. For some reason, it terrified her. And by the look on the Doctor's face, he had noticed it.

"How long's he been like this?" The Doctor asked, keeping his eyes on Nina for a second. He was clearly going to question her about it later.

"Ashton just brought him in," Abi, the ship's doctor told him. The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver and scanned Korwin, earning a frown from pretty much everyone else in the room.

"What are you doing?" McDonnell asked him, taking a step closer from Korwin, just behind the Doctor.

"You shouldn't get too close," Nina finally spoke up. The Doctor turned around to look at her and saw the pleading look on her face.

"She's right, step back," he said, trying to pull the woman back with his arm.

"Don't be so stupid," McDonnell exclaimed. "That's my husband."

"And he's just sabotaged our ship," Ashton said.

"What?" McDonnell asked in disbelief. She couldn't accept that the person she trusted the most would sabotage their ship, betray her.

"He went mad," Ashton explained. "He put the ship onto secure closure, then he set the heat pulse to melt the controls."

"No way. He wouldn't do that," McDonnell denied.

"I saw it happen, Captain," Ashton insisted.

"Korwin? Korwin, open your eyes for me a second," the Doctor called out to him once he had finished scanning him.

"I can't!" He yelled through the pain.

"Yeah, course you can. Go on," the Doctor called out for him. He granted a look to Nina, who was in the corner of the room all alone and hadn't said anything yet. He was clearly concerned.

"Don't make me look at you, please," he pleaded. The doctor sighed and made his way back down towards his feet, where he picked a hypo-gun up from a medical tray.

"All right, all right, all right," he gave in. "Just relax. Sedative?"

"Yes," Abi confirmed. The Doctor nodded and shot the poor man with the sedative, making him immediately relax on the bed and go to sleep.

"What's wrong with him?" The Captain asked, obviously very worried. The Doctor perched on the bed and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Rising body temperature, unusual energy readings. Stasis chamber. I do love a good stasis chamber," he smiled at the Captain, pointing at the chamber. "Keep him sedated in there. Regulate his body temperature. And, just for fun, run a bio-scan and tissue profile on a metabolic detail."

"Just doing them now," Abi told him, looking around to see the monitors and the computers already doing the scans.

"Oh, you're good," he laughed, earning a smile from the young girl. "Anyone else presenting these symptoms?"

"Not so far."

"Well, that's something," the Doctor granted.

"Will someone tell me what is the matter with him?" McDonnell suddenly exclaimed. She was obviously very worried about her husband.

"Some sort of infection. We'll know more after the test results," the Doctor explained. "Now, allons-y, back downstairs." Ashton leaves the room, but the Captain hesitates. She doesn't want to leave her husband alone. "Hey, go. See about those engines. I'll be right behind you." McDonnell nods gravely and follows Ashton out.

Nina was about to follow them back to the engine room, but a hand on her arm stopped her. The Doctor grabbed her arm and pulled her to a corner of the room.

"What did you see?" He asked her. Nina immediately knew what he was referring to. Nina looked down at the memory. She had seen the Doctor in an orange space suit, his face scrunched up in pain as he screamed in agony. Burn with me, he had said. Nina shook her head.

"I can't tell you that," she said, keeping her gaze on the floor.

"On a scale from one to ten?" He asked her, placing a hand on her shoulder, seeing the memory was clearly bringing her discomfort.

"No, that's not--" she sighed. For once in her life, she found herself lost for words and sighed in frustration. "I only saw a fragment of time. I don't know all that's going to happen. I know about a few seconds and nothing beyond that. I have no idea if it ends well, but the stuff I saw I--"

"It's bad," he guessed, pulling her into a tight hug. Nina couldn't help but feel safe in his embrace. She felt like that's where she needed to be.

As soon as they separated, Nina stepped back just enough for her to look up and look him in the eyes.

"You know what's going on, don't you?" She asked quietly.

Of course, he knew. This was who they were. Who they were meant to be. The last two Time Lords, and the universe pulling them towards each other, drawing them together, playing with their feelings. Both Nina and the Doctor knew that they were probably only having these feelings towards each other because they were the last two living beings of their species. Yet, it felt so real.

The Doctor nodded shortly, cupping her face with his hands. This felt so right, Nina knew of it. But she couldn't do this. Not now. She needed time. Her last relationship didn't end well, and it ended quite recently from her point of view. She had just been ripped away from her universe, from her friends, from the people she had gotten to love, to call her family. Nina placed her hands on his and gently pulled them away from her face. She held onto them for a few seconds, before letting them go.

"I can't do this," she told him. She could feel the tears starting to sting the back of her eyes, and it drove her mad. She hated crying, she hated letting people know how vulnerable she actually was. "I'm sorry. I just -- I can't. Not now," she made clear to him that this was temporary, her voice barely being able to come out of her throat. Nina didn't want to get into another relationship so fast, but she didn't know exactly how long she was going to be able to keep away from the Doctor.

"I understand," he said. Nina could hear the hurt in his voice, but she also knew he completely understood what she was feeling. For some reason, Nina got the impression that he, too, had lost someone quite recently.

"Call us if there's news," the Doctor called out to Abi, who was looking over at the scans. Nina flinched at the volume of his voice, and the contrast it had with the volume of their previous conversation. "Any questions?"

"Yeah," Abi told him. "Who are you? "

"I'm the Doctor."

"We should get back there," Nina pulled the Doctor outside of the med center. "Thirty-two minutes and fifty seconds left."

As soon as they walked back into the Engines room, the Doctor made sure to go back to the intercom to speak to Abi, who had been left behind at the infirmary.

"Abi, how's Korwin doing? Any results from the bio-scan?" He asked, throwing a glance at Nina, who seemed extremely tense.

"He's under heavy sedation. I'm just trying to make sense of this data. Give me a couple of minutes and I'll let you know."

"Martha, Riley. How are you doing?" He said, now calling the two youngsters from the intercom.

"We're at door twenty-eight," Martha told him.

"You've got to move faster!" The Doctor exclaimed. He then pulled his glasses out and put them on. Nina smiled at the sight.

"We're doing the best we can!" Martha yelled back. The Doctor walked away from the intercom, going back to work in the engines. Nina was trying to help him the best she could if she didn't have a sonic screwdriver, meaning she had to do everything by hand.

"Find the next number in the sequence," Riley's voice said over the intercom. They had left it on to always hear Martha and Riley if ever they needed help. "313, 331, 367... What?"

"You said the crew knew all the answers," Martha's scared voice said. Nina thought about the sequence, and something switched on her brain as she understood it. It was a prime number sequence.

"The crew's changed since we set the answers," Riley told her.

"You're joking," Martha complained. Nina let go of the wires she had been working on and ran to the intercom. She pressed the button.

"379!" She yelled out at them.

"What??" Martha yelled back, absolutely confused.

"It's a sequence of happy primes," she explained, scratching the back of her head. "379."

"Happy what?" Riley shot back. Nina sighed in frustration.

"Just enter it," she said.

"Are you sure??" Riley asked again. It frustrated Nina that he didn't trust her knowledge about recreational mathematics. "We only get one chance!" Nina sighed, slightly annoyed.

"For goodness sake," she sighed. "Any number which reduces to one when you take the sum of the square of its digits and you continue iterating until it yields one is a happy number," she started to speak at her trademark 100mph. "Any number that doesn't, isn't. A happy prime is a number which is both happy and prime, now type it in!" She yelled out. She hadn't noticed it, but the Doctor was standing right behind her, nodding in agreement at everything she was saying.

"I dunno," the Doctor said, a smile on his face. "Talk about dumbing down! Don't they teach recreational mathematics anymore?" The Captian frowned at them. The subject was obviously never brought up at schools.

"We're through!" Martha said, a surprised tone to her voice.

"No need to act surprised," Nina mumbled to herself, but the Doctor heard. Nina walked back to the control panel and kept on working on it.

"Keep moving, fast as you can," the Doctor told them, taking his glasses off. "And, Martha, be careful. There may be something else on board this ship." He said the last part slightly quieter as if he didn't want to alarm everyone else in the ship.

"Anytime you want to unnerve me, feel free," Martha said, sarcasm dripping from her voice.

"Will do, thanks," he sing-songed as he walked back to the control panel.

"How much time have we got left?" The Captain asked Mr. Bad Attitude, whose name she found out was Scannell. Before he could have gone check it in the main computer, Nina called it out loud.

"Thirty minutes and fifty-two seconds," she told her.

"How-" Scannell was about to ask, but decided against it, closing his mouth and going back to working on the panel.

"We need a backup in case they don't reach the auxiliary engines in time," The Doctor said, holding a big cable in his hand. "Come on! Think! Resources, what have we got?!" He asked, looking around. As Nina was about to suggest the generators, since the power was still working and the intercom was still up, but Martha's voice interrupted her.

"Doctor, Nina, who had the most number ones, Elvis or the Beatles?" Martha's voice asked through an intercom, sending a shiver down Nina's spine. That was what she had seen in the vision she'd had in the TARDIS. "That's pre-download."

"Elvis," the Doctor said.

"I'm pretty sure it's the Beatles," Nina countered, her voice slightly faltering. She hated it, but what she had seen was coming true, which meant that the other vision she had was probably also going to. The Doctor looked at her.

"Could be. Could be the Beatles."

"Could also be Elvis," Nina pointed out.

"I don't know!" The Doctor yelled out through the intercom. "We're a bit busy."

"Fine, I'll ask someone else," Martha said, slightly annoyed at his tone. The Doctor, obviously, didn't catch that.

"Now, where was I? Here comes the sun," he mumbled to himself. Nina slapped herself mentally since she was the only one who understood the reference he accidentally made.

"Oh shut up," she told him. "Weve got resources. The powers still working, the generator's going. If we can harness that.." she trailed off.

"Yes!" He yelled out, grabbing Nina's head and kissing her forehead. "We use the generator to jumpstart the ship!"

"May not work, but will definetly buy us some time," she agreed, a wide smile on her face.

"That... is brilliant," McDonnell said when she understood what they wanted to do.

"I know!" The Doctor yelled out. "See, tiny glimmer of hope!" He said, smiling smugly at everyone, even Mr. Bad Attitude.

"If it works," the pessimist mumbled. Nina scoffed and rolled her eyes at him.

"Oh believe me, you're gonna make it work," the Captian snapped at him, earning a smirk from Nina and the Doctor. He walked away with his eyes on the ground.

"That told him," the Doctor said.