#sullivanwriting

Infection

They were running from something. Harry never got the chance to actually see it. The Doctor had shouted “RUN!” so, of course, he did. He watched the scarf flying behind him, catching flashes of movement through the trees. Sarah was in front, thankfully. Harry didn’t need to worry about her, not right now.

A sharp sting hit the back of his arm. He hissed, reaching for it, but when he looked down, there was nothing on his sleeve. He ignored it and kept running, just following the Doctor’s voice until they broke through the last line of trees and stumbled into an open clearing.

Harry bent over, catching his breath, lungs burning. “Well, I say…” he muttered, panting. His chest felt tight; the air wasn’t coming as easily as it should have. When he looked up, the Doctor and Sarah seemed fine, already recovering.

“Harry? Harry, what’s wrong?” the Doctor called, noticing how pale he’d gone.

Harry tried to answer, but the sound caught in his throat. His vision blurred, the edges going soft. He could hear them both shouting now, voices fading in and out.

“Harry, were you stung? Listen to me, this is important!”

He didn’t manage to reply. His knees buckled, and before he could hit the ground, the Doctor caught him. Everything around him turned fuzzy and distant. Sunlight flickering through purple leaves, Sarah’s frightened voice, the Doctor’s hand gripping his shoulder.

His breath was coming in shallow gasps now. It felt like something was spreading through his arm, cold and heavy. When the Doctor pushed up his sleeve, there it was: black veins crawling across his skin like ink.

“Doctor, look!” Sarah’s voice broke.

Harry’s head lolled to the side, words dying before they reached his mouth. He could still hear them, somewhere above him, but it was getting harder to keep his eyes open. His chest ached with every weak breath. Then it all went quiet. Just the Doctor’s voice fading into a blur and Sarah calling his name as the world went dark.

A wall of dark water and salt that seemed to rise from nowhere. Rain lashed against the steel deck, the wind howled like something alive, and the ship groaned under every heaving wave. Below deck, it was chaos. Steam lines hissing, lights flickering, men shouting orders over the din.

Harry had been in the Navy for a couple of years now and was just new to this ship and its crew. He was steady-handed but not immune to fear. When the pipes burst in the engine compartment, he was already there, having been relatively close by. Sleeves rolled up, tending to a man whose arm had been torn open by shrapnel. Another sailor screamed from the far side of the compartment as hot oil sprayed across the floor, igniting for a moment before being doused in foam and smoke.

“Hold still, man, hold still,” Harry barked, voice cracking through the noise as he tied off a strip of torn undershirt into a bandage. The deck pitched beneath them, sending the two of them sliding against the wall. He didn’t stop. Didn’t dare.

The smell of burned insulation and fuel was thick in the air. His arm ached where the edge of a pipe had caught him. A blistered patch of skin just below the elbow, but he paid it little mind. There wasn’t time for that sort of self-pity.

One of the engineers stumbled in, coughing, blood running down from his scalp. Harry caught him before he fell and guided him to a bench with that firm, instinctive gentleness only a medic could muster. “Sit. Breathe. You’re not dying today, old boy.”

He worked until the adrenaline faded and his hands began to shake. Until the ship steadied, and the storm finally began to die down. Only then did he notice the burns properly, pink, angry streaks where the heat had kissed him.

Someone else offered to take over. He waved them off with a half-smile. “I’ll live. Worse things happen at sea.”

It wasn’t bravado, not really. Just the truth spoken through gritted teeth. The sea had taken worse from better men. That night, as the quiet returned and the ship rolled under calmer skies, Harry sat in the infirmary with his arm in a basin of cool water, staring at his reflection in the porthole glass.

The van jolted over another pothole, and Sarah swore she could feel every bolt in its frame rattle in protest. A strip of fabric. Thin, coarse cloth was tied firmly across her eyes. Behind her, she heard Harry exhale through his nose, steady but worn out, that old naval sort of patience fraying at the edges.

“Comfortable?” she asked dryly, tugging faintly at the handcuffs linking them wrist to wrist. The metal was warm from their skin. Harry shifted his wrists against the cuffs, the movement earning him a quiet jingle and a soft groan from Sarah behind him. Elbows bumping with every jolt.

“Hardly,” Harry muttered. “Though I’ve had worse. Once spent six hours upside down in a wetsuit off Gibraltar.”

“Sounds about right,” she said. “Always knew you were a man of peculiar hobbies.”

He smiled, she could hear it in his voice. “I’ll have you know, Sarah, I didn’t plan it. Intelligence work isn’t all martinis and tuxedos.”

“Shame. Would’ve suited you.”

Another lurch, another bump. Sarah tilted her head slightly in his direction, her voice lowering. “Any idea where they’re taking us?”

“Secure location, apparently,” he murmured, trying for levity but not quite finding it. “I’d wager underground. Probably some charming little bunker with no heating and an abundance of mildew.”

“Ah, nostalgia,” she sighed, almost fondly.

For a moment, the van fell silent save the hum of the engine and the rattle of chains. Their shoulders brushed with each turn, hands brushing once, twice, accidentally, but neither drew away.

“I should’ve listened to you,” Harry said finally, quiet now. “When you said the contact felt off.”

“Too late for that now,” Sarah replied softly. “Besides, it’s not like either of us was going to stay home and knit, was it?”

He laughed, but it was short-lived. She could feel the shift in him. A faint tightening of the arm, that instinctive readiness she remembered all too well.

“Brace yourself,” he whispered.

The van slowed. Gravel. Doors opening. Voices outside.

Time travel was one thing in stories, quite another when it left you behind. Everyone he knew, everyone who remembered... him.

The graveyard was quiet in that way only old places could be, where the wind had long ago run out of new things to say. Gravel shifted underfoot as Harry walked, coat pulled close against the chill, Naomi trailing just behind him, uncertain if she should speak. She didn’t. She didn’t have to. He’d already said enough for both of them.

The records hadn’t lied. Kate seldom did. One by one, the names had lined up before him in neat, polished stone. His parents, long gone before he’d ever thought to call. His brother Will, younger by a few years, had a smile in the photos he could still half remember. Sarah Jane… that one had hurt the worst. He’d stared at her headstone until the words blurred, the carved letters cutting through him sharper than any scalpel.

He’d whispered her name once, his old girl (though he shouldn't call her old because that just undid him), as if she might answer from the quiet. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. Taking Naomi's hand, letting her know she would've liked her. Not sure who he was talking to, maybe them both.

Harry stood before one in particular, mud spattered on his shoes, coat collar turned up against the drizzle. His name. Harold J. Sullivan. Carved into the stone in careful, official lettering. 1986. It shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did. Staring at words that meant nothing, he was standing right there.

Harry’s breath hitched in his throat. Letting go of Naomi's hand. He knelt, tracing the letters with the edge of a trembling glove. “I didn’t know your name was Harold,” Naomi said softly behind him, her voice carrying across the wind.

He huffed a laugh, thin and brittle. “Neither did anyone else, thankfully.” But the words cracked somewhere deep. Harold. A name that belonged to someone young and stupid and brave, who hadn’t yet seen too much. Someone who’d promised to come back and never did.

He stayed there for a long while, the cold seeping through his knees, the weight of decades pressing down on him. Everyone he’d ever known was a ghost now, and somehow he was the only one left walking.

Naomi said something soft about paradoxes, about timelines that didn’t forgive interference, but Harry barely heard. He crouched, brushing dirt from his own name. The earth beneath his fingers was cold and real.

“Guess I didn’t make it home after all,” he said quietly. “Funny thing, isn’t it? The world moves on, and I’m still trying to catch up.”

The room smelled faintly of rust and antiseptic. A strange kind of irony. A place built to cleanse and cut now reeking of decay. Harry sat slumped against the back of a metal chair, wrists bound so tightly the rope had carved twin welts into his skin, keeping his wrists flat to the chair arms. His shirt clung to him, damp and cold, a dark smear of blood creeping through the sleeve. The lamp above hummed, flickering every few seconds, washing the concrete walls in stuttering light. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. Hours, maybe. Days.

Time didn’t behave properly in rooms like this.

The first time they’d asked, he’d told the truth.

He was a doctor. He did work with NATO. Nothing more, nothing less. He didn’t have the clearance they thought he did, no secret files, no weapons. Just a man who’d spent too long stitching up other men.

The second time, they’d broken his index finger.

He’d heard the crack before he’d felt it. A clean, wet snap, like a wishbone giving way. Pain bloomed fast and hot, rising up his arm, hitting his chest like a hammer. He’d made a sound, half gasp, half sob, and hated himself for it. But he didn’t speak. Didn’t look at them. He just kept his jaw clenched and his breathing even.

They broke another.

It was slower this time. The man had smiled, almost gently, as though testing the limits of human anatomy fascinated him. The pressure built until Harry thought his bones might scream before he did. They didn’t. He did. And when he did, the man nodded as if satisfied.

“Next time, perhaps, you tell truth.”

“I’ve told you,” Harry rasped, throat raw. “I’m just a doctor.”

The man tilted his head. “Then you fix yourself, da?”

They’d left him then, for what felt like forever. His hand was swelling grotesquely, fingers bent at wrong angles, skin split where bone pressed against it. He could barely flex them. He tried once; a mistake, and the pain ripped through him like lightning, forcing a strangled groan from his throat. He might have passed out after that. When he came to, his hand was cold. Numb. He almost welcomed it.

When the door opened again, the air shifted. Metal scraped against the floor. They’d brought a tray. He saw what was on it and felt the nausea rise sharp and immediate. Surgical pins. A needle driver. Pliers. Clean gauze.

“Oh, I say...” he muttered hoarsely, forcing out a laugh that sounded like gravel. “That’s a bit excessive, isn’t it?” No answer. The man rolled up his sleeves, humming under his breath. No anaesthetic. Not even alcohol to sterilize the skin. Harry bit down on his tongue to keep from saying something that might earn him another broken joint. He’d done this sort of work before, but never on himself. Never while half-delirious and trembling with shock.

The first pin slid through the splintered bone with a quiet, wet click.

Harry screamed. He couldn’t help it. It tore its way out of him raw and animal, echoing off the walls until it sounded like someone else entirely. His body convulsed, sweat pouring down his face, eyes squeezed shut against the dizzying wash of light and sound.

The man didn’t stop. He worked methodically, like he was tuning an instrument. Harry blacked out twice. The second time was a mercy. One moment there was pain; the next there was only silence, a deep and merciful dark. When he woke, his right hand was bandaged and braced against a splint, two of his fingers broken and held together by pins. His throat was dry. He could taste iron. His heart hammered weakly, his breathing ragged but steady. He could feel the broken finger, the pins inside bone. It made him queasy, a feeling he couldn't escape.

Harry stared down at his hand, the one that had stitched wounds, held scalpels, and steadied lives. Now wrapped in bloodied gauze and trembling violently. He wondered, in a moment of delirium, if they’d taken something permanent. Not just bone or flesh, but the part of him that could heal.

And still, when the man came back, Harry met his eyes. “I told you,” he whispered, voice low and cracked. “I’m just a doctor.”

The man smiled faintly, as if amused by his persistence. “Not anymore.”

The door shut again. The light flickered. And Harry sat there, hand throbbing with every heartbeat, trying not to look at the tray still glinting red in the corner of the room. He still had eight other fingers and a whole lot of time.

The woods were wrong tonight. Still. Watching. Listening.

Harry adjusted the strap of his tranquiliser rifle, breath misting in the cold air. “Remind me again,” he muttered, “why we’re the ones chasing the twenty-first century’s answer to Bigfoot?”

Naomi, a few paces ahead, didn’t look back. “Because everyone else at UNIT prefers coffee and paperwork. And you can’t stand either.”

He gave a faint huff. “Paperwork, perhaps. Coffee’s growing on me.”

“Since when?”

“Since they stopped serving it in tin mugs.”

For a moment, her laugh warmed the air between them. It almost felt normal, the two of them stumbling through mud and mist, chasing after something that shouldn’t exist. But then she stopped short, hand rising for silence.

“Harry,” she whispered.

He followed her beam. Blood. A thick trail cutting through the leaves, dark and tacky in the torchlight.

“Deer?” he asked.

She crouched, shaking her head. “Not unless deer have this much metal in them.” Her light caught the glint of torn mesh. The remains of a hiker’s pack.

“Wonderful,” Harry muttered. “Local wildlife’s moved up the food chain.”

The carcass was only a few metres off, or what was left of it. The ribs were shattered outward, the chest cavity hollowed. It looked almost cauterised. No teeth marks, no tracks leading away.

Naomi’s breath trembled. “Harry—”

“I see it.”

Something was moving. Slow, deliberate. To their right. Then gone. The sound shifted, now behind them. A scrape. A snarl.

“Stay behind me,” he murmured, raising the rifle.

“Not a chance.”

“Naomi—”

The forest exploded. A shape slammed out of the dark, all muscle and slick hide, eyes like molten gold. Harry barely had time to shout before it was on them. He shoved Naomi out of the way hard (in the nick of time too), the impact of the creature’s lunge knocking him sideways into the mud. The tranquiliser went off with a hiss. Too close, too fast. Leaving his ears ringing from the misfire.

Claws tore across his sleeve, catching skin. Pain flared sharp and white. He kicked back, tried to roll, but the weight pinned him. Hot, fetid breath washed over his face. The thing’s jaw opening to reveal rows of curved, glassy teeth.

“Naomi—!” Voice squeaking.

Her shot cracked through the air. The dart hit high, near its throat. The beast roared. A sound that didn’t belong in nature reared back. Harry scrambled upright, dragging her with him as the creature thrashed against a tree, howling, the tranquiliser finally taking hold. It stumbled once, twice, and then somehow dipped out of sight back into the woods.

The silence that followed was worse.

Harry’s chest heaved. Mud streaked his face, his coat torn and glistening with blood. Naomi’s hands were shaking when she caught his arm. “You— you’re bleeding—”

He glanced down, winced, and forced a lopsided grin. “I'll live.”

She didn’t laugh this time. Her eyes lingered on the dark streaks along his skin, the faint shimmer where the creature’s claws had met flesh. Harry set to reloading his rifle with trembling hands.

"Should we—"

“Let’s get out of here." Naomi stopped him, not letting him finish that thought inside that hollow head of his.

"Er... Uh... Right you are, old thing."

"Harry."

"Sorry."

(this turned out more body horror so beware)

The smell was the first thing that struck him. Not blood, not quite. Something metallic, like a surgery gone wrong. Harry lifted a hand to his mouth, swallowing the bile that burned at the back of his throat. The lights flickered overhead, cold and sterile one moment, dripping red the next. A medical bay, or what had once been one. Now it was a graveyard.

Bodies. No, remnants; were strewn across the floor. Human limbs grafted to silver plating, half-fused faces frozen in silent agony. The whir of half-dead machinery hummed in the walls like a dying heartbeat. Cyber components, crudely integrated, wires sprouting from flesh where veins once ran. Some twitched.

Sarah pressed closer to the Doctor’s side, eyes wide, hand over her mouth. “Oh— oh my God.:

"There is no God here, Sarah Jane" The Doctor told her rather coldly. He was staring down the corridor, where the lights had gone completely dark. His jaw was tight, lips pressed thin, that rare chill he wore when anger simmered too deep for words.

Harry swallowed hard. “They’ve— they’ve used human parts in replacement for what they didn’t have, Doctor. Cyber-tech spliced with flesh. Organs… limbs… it’s—” He didn’t finish.

One of the corpses moved.

Sarah screamed.

Harry flinched backward, heart hammering as the half-made thing convulsed on the floor, its voice a wet, gurgling mockery of life. “P—please—” it rasped, or something like it, voice distorted through a speaker fused to its throat. “H-help… us—”

The Doctor was beside it in an instant, eyes wide, voice low. “I’m so sorry.” He reached for the creature’s chest, adjusted a dial, and the flickering light in its eyes dimmed to nothing. The silence that followed was suffocating.

Harry stared, breathing hard. “You— you killed it.”

“No,” the Doctor said, his tone so cold it cut through the static hum of the room. “I released it.”

Sarah’s hand found Harry’s arm, her grip iron-tight. “We shouldn’t be here.”

He almost agreed— until he saw the tracks.

Scrape marks, deep gouges in the metal floor, leading away from the bodies and into the dark. A trail of oil and blood alike. Something had dragged them. And recently.

Harry’s stomach twisted. “Doctor…”

“Yes, Harry. I see it.”

There was a sound from down the corridor then. Mechanical. Wet. Like gears grinding through muscle, and it was moving fast.

The Doctor turned to them, coat tails brushing the floor. “Run.” A shriek tore through the air, metallic, animalistic, wrong. As something hit the lights, shattering glass and plunging them into chaos. Sparks lit silver glints of movement. Sarah stumbled, clutching Harry’s sleeve. He held her upright, flashlight trembling in his grip. It wasn’t just killing. It was collecting. They seemed to be on the metaphorical menu.

It happened fast. Faster than he could process. One moment, Harry was chasing the ball down the muddied stretch of Dartmouth’s field, boots thudding against wet grass, breath hot in the chill air and then something slammed into him square in the face. A shoulder, an elbow, he wasn’t sure which. Just a flash of white pain and the sharp, metallic taste of shock blooming in his mouth.

He hit the ground hard, back first, the world briefly a smear of grey and green. The whistle blew somewhere distant. Voices called out, half concern, half laughter. Harry blinked up at the sky, dazed, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Everything rang, his ears, his teeth, his very bones. He tried to breathe through his nose and felt resistance. Then warmth.

He reached up, fingers brushing his face; and froze. Blood. Thick, hot, slick between his fingers. For a moment, his mind refused to connect the dots. Then the pain struck properly — deep and throbbing, as if someone had buried fire beneath his skin.

“Oh… bloody hell,” he managed, voice cracking as he sat up too fast. The world tilted. He blinked hard, trying to steady his focus, but the smear of red on his hand just kept spreading. His stomach turned. He pressed his palm to his face on instinct, only making it worse, and when he pulled it away, the sight was enough to drain what little colour remained in him.

The pitch swam. Someone was saying his name. Far away, muffled. He tried to get to his knees, stubborn as ever, but the ground didn’t seem to cooperate. His head pounded with his heartbeat. The air went thick. Then nothing.

When Harry came round, it was to the antiseptic sting of the infirmary, cotton stuffed in his nose and his head tilted back over a pillow. A dull ache thudded between his eyes.

“Future doctor, hm?” she said, tightening the dressing. “Can’t stand the sight of your own blood?”

He groaned. “I’ll… work on that.”

The air was thick with smoke and the metallic scent of blood, an alien kind, sharp and acrid. Harry had stopped trying to tell the sides apart hours ago. Green skin, blue, grey, it didn’t matter. A wound was a wound, and as long as the patient was still breathing, he could help.

The makeshift medical station had been set up under what passed for a ceiling, a jagged slab of metal shielding them from the burning sky above. He had stripped off his jacket hours ago, sleeves rolled up, forearms streaked with crimson and something darker. His hands moved on instinct now, stitching flesh that didn’t quite behave the way it should. One soldier gritted rows of diamond-like teeth while Harry worked. Another’s pulse fluttered beneath translucent skin. Every second counted, and he was running out of those too.

He had long since stopped asking what planet this was, or how he had ended up separated from the Doctor and Sarah. None of it mattered anymore. There were too many bodies on the floor, too many groans in the dark, and he, just one man, had to hold the line. His throat burned when he barked orders, but they listened. Alien soldiers twice his height followed his command because he sounded like he knew what he was doing.

“Clamp here, hold pressure, no— there!” he snapped, and the soldier obeyed, four-fingered hands trembling as they pressed against a leaking artery.

Hours bled together. The explosions outside grew distant, then returned, then distant again. Time was only measured by the next casualty dragged in. Friend or foe, it made no difference to Harry anymore. He had patched up creatures that would have killed him if they were conscious. When a gun discharged nearby, he didn’t even flinch, just asked if the injured were still breathing.

When at last the noise faded, the shouting, the gunfire, the screams, he stood in the silence, swaying slightly. His eyes moved over the makeshift ward, rows of wounded, some sleeping, some gone. A soldier, one of the reptilian ones, pressed a ration bar into his palm and guided him into a chair. Harry didn’t protest. His hands were trembling too much to unwrap it anyway.

Someone spoke to him, a voice deep and resonant, probably a leader. “Many who would have died still breathe because of you.”

Harry blinked at the creature before him and tried to smile. His lips were dry, his voice hoarse. “Just doing my duty.”

The leader nodded in respect.

Harry didn’t see him leave. His head had fallen forward, chin against his chest, his body finally giving in to exhaustion. Around him, the wounded slept. The smoke drifted higher. Somewhere beyond the ruins, the sun, or whatever this world called its sun, was rising again.

(my wonderful wife @sjsmithfiles wrote this for meeee, I love her)

Oh, this endless day.

Harry knew days like this in the Navy: Days that wouldn’t end. He would run from stern to bow, observing silent tensions, giving and receiving orders, watching the quiet cannons of other boats in the waters. Never did they fire, and never were they aimed solely at him - never were the lips of a great machine of artillery and death held against his flesh, primed and hungry for the warm blood beneath his sailor’s skin. Never did he know direct threat, just tension.

That is where this day differs from those other endless days at sea.

This day has no tension: No build-up, and subsequent release. Since he woke in the morning and came to work and found himself bound inside a cupboard by a newly-regenerated Doctor, it has been all release - all go. First, Nerva, and then the desolate sands of the Earth its people had abandoned, and now, Skaro.

Harry is used to clear, open waters. He is used to the anticipation of fire, not the constant licking of its angry tongue against his nape, and the subsequent searing. He is used to stopping wars, not dealing with their consequences.

Rest from the constant panic comes in a form uglier than he’d have liked. Separated from Sarah, Harry finds himself in the Kaled bunker - in a detention room, all by himself, hands and feet held by iron to a table similarly cold and hard. He is propped up at an angle - just off-kilter enough to be uncomfortable, and do a degree that he can’t see the door. He feels rather exposed, though he still wears his coat and everything else. He and the Doctor were taken apart from one another for “questioning,” and Harry hopes at least that he hasn’t heard from neither his time-travelling companion, nor any Kaleds because the former is off on a daring escape attempt, and he’ll soon find his brave smile in his face as he releases him from his shackles.

Finally, the door to his chamber slides open. Harry strains his neck to see who’s come in. Unfortunately, his luck betrays him - the snivelling face of Davros’ right (rather, left) hand strides in, a look of calm superiority hidden behind his small spectacles. Nyder: Was that his name?

“Your compatriot refuses to be cooperative. Davros himself took to his interrogation.”

“The Doctor being non-cooperative? I’d never have thought.”

“Doctor,” Nyder repeats. He slowly crosses the room, taking the time to size Sullivan up. He is like a shark; a shark in twig’s clothing; regardless, it smells blood, “I was unaware you mutos had terms for doctors.”

“Oh, that’s just the old boy’s name. I doubt he’s really a-”

“Not that I believe you are mutos.”

“Oh. How kind of you.”

“Mutos don’t wear such a sporting sense of humour.”

Nyder finally stops to the side of Harry’s table. A pad on the side commands the rotors that keep the shape at its angle, and Nyder reaches to use it to turn Harry all the way up. Harry opens his mouth to say something else snarky, but Nyder’s leather glove shoots for his chin. The cold material of his handwear rubs uncomfortably against Harry’s chin.

“It is clear your friend - this… Doctor - is the leader of your group. I doubt you’d have anything to tell me, even if I tore answers from your skin. Still, you aren’t without worth.”

Nyder’s other hand lands on Harry’s chest. His leather-clad fingers trace the line of his shirt buttons down to the joined lapels of his Navy jacket. And his fingers hook around the jacket’s first button. Nyder seems to relish in the taste of undoing it: The hand around Harry’s jaw holds on tighter. The Kaled commander continues, undoing Harry’s jacket buttons until his gut spills free. That’s when it happens:

The cold steel of a gun pressed against his abdomen. Even though his shirt, Harry feels the cold iron as if he wasn’t wearing anything at all: Nyder presses it deep into his skin - enough to bruise.