I can make fun of Iowa because I LIVE THERE, Y'ALL. Born and bred in the land of corn and Hawkeyes, lived here for all 26 years of my life to date. Though I lied when I said that all we have here is corn, pigs, and bars.

We also have churches and beef cattle. Oh, and hotdish.

When the wheezing of dematerialization and rematerialization faded, the Doctor frowned at the viewscreen. "Huh." He scratched a sideburn. "That's odd. The TARDIS says there's something blocking the view, but I don't pick up anything for miles. Oh, well." He strode over to the door and pulled it open.

A wave of humid heat thick enough to be almost a physical thing slapped everyone standing near the door. Outside the door, a wall of green met their eyes. Tall canelike plants, each just as tall as the TARDIS, with broad, swordlike leaves and a tassel at the top. The Time Lord blinked quizzically.

Off in the impenetrable wall of green, insects droned. A mosquito flew in the door and promptly made a beeline for Lady Jaye; she swatted at it.

Snake Eyes leaned around the Doctor and nodded. *Cornfield. About August. The silk's browning off but the ears are small yet, see?*

Several people looked at him blankly. Snake sighed audibly and shook his head.

The Doctor bounded back over to the viewscreen and stared at it intently, tapping buttons. At last, he scowled. "Iowa? I've never been to Iowa. Never wanted to be to Iowa. Nothing interesting ever happens in Iowa. The rest of this planet gets invaded by aliens twice a year, but not Iowa. Most boring piece of real estate on the planet."

*No, that's Nebraska.*

Scarlett chucked Snake on the back of the shoulder, smiling. "You can take the ninja off the farm…"

*Thank god.* Snake Eyes glared at the corn. *Detasseling sucks.*

"Close the door. I am not hiking through three miles of this stuff to get to civilization." The Doctor was flipping switches again. "Iowa." He said the word with deep disgust. "Of all the places. Corn and…more corn."

*We also have pigs.* Snake Eyes thought for a second. * And bars.*

"Iowa!"

When, in later decades, people would get nostalgic for nineteen-fifties era small-town America, it was small town Iowa that they were picturing. Even decades later, firmly in the twenty-first century, you could still find small towns in the rural Midwest that hadn't really changed that much since 1955. Oh, maybe people had cell phones and wifi, but aside from that not much else would be different.

A staple of nearly every small town of this nature is the diner. Small little family run places with names like "Bobbi's", where breakfast is served twenty-four hours a day, the coffee is always hot, the waitress knows everyone in town by first name, the pork tenderloin is twice the size of the bun, and one bite of the 'house special' omelet can clog your arteries solid and make a dedicated foodie burst into tears of joy. Such establishments were nearly holy institutions in small towns; people went there to eat, to meet, and to catch up on gossip.

At this particular diner in this particular smallish town in Iowa, a youngish couple was eating a very late lunch. The woman was blonde and pretty, and heavily pregnant. The man was also blond, and had a tolerant sort of affectionate look on his face that the waitress knew. It was the 'my wife's pregnancy cravings are ruling my life right now, but I'm finding it oddly endearing' look. She knew it well; she'd seen it on her own husband often enough.

The waitress wandered over. "You want another hash brown, Janet?"

Janet smiled. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble. Thanks, Mary."

"Already started it cooking." Mary smiled. "With mine it was always peanut butter and celery. Couldn't get enough of the stuff. You must almost be ready to go."

"Two more months, actually." Janet patted her belly.

Mary shuddered delicately. "Right, twins. Better you than me, hon."

It was at about that point that a strange grinding sort of whir started to sound. All three turned around, just in time to see a large blue box materialize in the corner. The door of the box read "Police public call box", but Mary had never heard of such a thing.

The door of the box flew open. A man strode out, all long limbs and hair and a coat that was far too heavy for the muggy Iowa summer. Behind him, Mary caught a glimpse of…something, something impossible, a room that should not be, could not be…

"Hello!" The man said cheerfully. "I'm the Doctor. I say, something smells rather good. You don't have chips here, by chance?"

Mary fainted dead away.

The Doctor lunged, to catch her, but was too late. He glanced up at the couple in the booth apologetically. "I didn't mean to frighten her." He blinked, pausing in patting the poor waitress on the cheek. "I say, you're enormous."

"Are you trying to get slapped?" Scarlett crouched next to him. She got a hold of the poor waitress under the arms, and with only a slight grunt of effort hauled the larger woman up and laid her safely on a booth seat.

"I was just saying…"

"She's pregnant, you idiot." Scarlett turned to examine the couple properly, extending a hand. "Hello. Sorry about…"

She did a double take. Looked at the woman's belly. Up at the woman again. "Twins?"

Janet, who would, rather shortly, be Snake Eyes's mother blinked. "Yes, actually…"

Her husband cut in, bristling. "Right, what is going on here?" He pointed at the TARDIS. "What is that? And who are you? If this is some sort of experimental military thing, I've been out of the service for years, and I want no part of it. So just you leave me and my wife alone, do you hear me?"

"Frank!" His wife frowned at him. "Don't be rude! I'm sure there's a rational explanation for all this."

Scarlett sighed. "Yes, but it's really complicated."

"I know she's pregnant." The Doctor sounded slightly miffed. "I'm not an idiot. After all, I would like to point out that I landed a quite frankly rather marvelous miracle of temporal engineering within twenty feet of just the people we were looking for. Let's see you do that."

"It was an accident, wasn't it?" Tommy's voice was dry.

The Doctor rubbed an ear, slightly sheepish. "Maybe. A bit. But still."

"Thought so."

"Anyway." The Doctor pulled yet another complicated gadget out of a pocket. "Since, you know, there are murderous tech ninjas about, we should probably stop carrying on about unimportant things like my driving and focus on the task at hand." He fiddled with a knob. "Been working on this for a month…should be able to detect any energy signatures that are temporally displaced…"

From somewhere outside came the very distinct sound of an assault rifle firing several times in quick succession. There was a little crash and tinkle of window glass breaking, and the complicated gadget was shot clean out of the Doctor's hands.

Scarlett was on the floor before sound of the first gunshot had died away, physically dragging both Frank and Janet down under the table and into cover. Storm Shadow hit the Doctor about midthigh, flatting the Time Lord to the diner floor.

The diner was brick, and the walls should provide some good cover for anything short of a high-caliber sniper rifle. Frank father let out an oof as his wife landed on top of him. Scarlett winced; Janet was a slim woman, but she was seven months pregnant with twins. Still, she felt he would understand; after all, his wife was seven months pregnant with twins, and Scarlett had somewhat of a vested interest in making sure that at least one of those twins survived to dating age. They hunkered down.

"Shana, Tommy, stay here with them. At all costs, keep them alive!" Flint was barking orders. "Beach! That came from the roof of that pharmacy across the street! You, Jaye, Breaker, go! Covergirl, you're with me, we'll cover you three. Eyes open, we don't know where the rest are."

"They're shooting at us." The woman blinked. "Oh, god…" She hunkered down and wrapped both arms around her belly. Scarlett recognized the signs of oncoming shock and panic, but there were bigger things to worry about at the moment.

Gunfire crackled. People shouted. Scarlett tried to look as comforting as a woman wearing body armor and holding a gun could. Judging from the poor woman's face, she wasn't very successful. "Yes, they are. But we're here to protect you, ma'm."

Across the street, there was a muffled explosion. The little communicator at her belt crackled. "Got him. Flint, there's one in the drainage ditch ahead of you."

Snake Eyes' father pulled his wife against him. "Shh. Shhh, honey. We'll get out of this, I promise."

"I can't believe he missed." Tommy sounded incredulous. "He had a perfect line of sight on us."

"Oi." The Doctor's voice was ragged. "My suit."

Scarlett looked over, and ice suddenly formed in the pit of her stomach. The Doctor was sort of leaning against one of the benches, staring down at his chest; there was a small, neat hole in his clothing just over where a human's heart would be. Blood was rapidly soaking through both his shirt and suit jacket, staining the fabric dark.

He looked up at her, scowling. "Not this again. Why the left one? Why is it always the left one?" He sounded more aggravated than anything.

Tommy cursed inventively, and snatched a napkin dispenser from the nearest tabletop. He pressed a handful against the bullet wound; the blood that soaked the white paper almost immediately wasn't the deep red that Scarlett was accustomed to. It was paler, and there was almost a burnt orange cast to it.

"How are you not dead?" She helped Tommy ease the Time Lord to the floor.

"Two hearts." Tommy's voice was terse. "They only got one. The one on the right is still beating."

"Ten points to Gryffindor." The Doctor winced. "You'll get that reference in about fifteen years. Owwwww. It's been a long time since I got shot." He winced again. "Forgot how much it hurts."

Scarlett keyed her radio. "We need evac. The Doctor is hit; we need to get him to a hospital, yesterday."

"On our way." Flint's voice crackled back. "Breaker, you clear?"

The Doctor sat bolt upright, dislodging Tommy. Blood spurted, and the ninja cursed in Japanese. Blood was pooling in worrying quantities around the man, and his face was going even paler than normal. "No! No hospital, and no anesthetic! That doesn't end well. Oh, that smarts." He keeled gently over backwards again.

"You need medical attention." Scarlett told him gently. Tommy was on the second wad of napkins now, and the bleeding wasn't slowing.

"No." The Time Lord was already fair-skinned to begin with, but there was an almost grayish cast to his face now. "Time Lord. I can…fix it." He blinked several times. "Look, I'm going to appear to be dead. But I won't be. The frost will be normal. Just…don't do anything. No hospital. No anesthetic. Just wait until I wake up on my own." He blinked again, more slowly. "Get me back to the TARDIS. She...helps."

With that, his head dropped back. Almost immediately, the bleeding stopped.

Just…stopped.

Storm Shadow snatched his hands away as if burned. He swore again, rather inventively.

"What?" Scarlett reached to feel for a pulse. "Is he…"

The Doctor's skin felt like ice. Literally, like ice. The man was so cold that her fingers went numb within seconds. Even as Scarlett watched, frost began to form on his eyelashes.

"His heart is still beating." Tommy was staring. "Very, very slowly, but he's not dead."

"He really wasn't kidding." Scarlett whistled quietly. "Not human."

The door crashed open. Beach sprinted in. As soon as he saw the Doctor, he stopped dead. "Aw, fuck."

"He's not dead." Scarlett shook her head. "He's…well, damned if I know, but he said he's fixing himself somehow."

"You sure? Because that's an awful damned lot of blood."

"His heart is still beating. The one that didn't get shot." Tommy sat back on his heels, rubbing that strange, pale, orange-tinted blood off of his hands onto yet another napkin. "One or two beats a minute, but it's still beating. And feel him."

Beach's eyebrows rose under the balaclava. "Whut?"

"Feel him." Storm Shadow stood up.

Beach did. Cursed. Snatched his hand back. "That ain't natural."

"Not human, at least." Scarlett shook her head again.

Covergirl, Jaye, Flint and Breaker came sprinting in at just about that point. All four stopped short when they saw the scene inside the resturant.

"Not dead." Scarlett said again, without looking up. "Just looks that way."

"No shit." Covergirl whistled. "I've seen a few corpses in my day, but I've never seen frost form on a corpse when it was a hundred and ten in the shade outside."

"This is some sort of weird alien thing, isn't it?" Flint holstered his sidearm.

Storm Shadow nodded. "Said he was fixing himself." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "Not unlike the Trance of the Sleeping Phoenix, really. Aside from the frost, that is. He said we should take him back to the TARDIS. I take it we won, then?"

Beach grunted in an affirmative sort of way. He carefully hefted the Doctor and rose to his feet. "Oof. Skinny sumbitch is heavier'n he looks. Someone get the door."

Scarlett eyed the TARDIS, then the Doctor. Very carefully, she felt along the front of the Time Lord's shirt for a moment, and just as carefully drew that oddly hard to look at key over the Doctor's head.

The lock turned over easily. The door swung open. Beach brushed past her, Breaker and Covergirl close on his heels. Scarlett blinked. For just a moment, she'd thought that the lights in the console room had dimmed, and the hum of machinery pitched lower. For just a moment, she caught a faint thread of worry.

Sentient ship. Right.

"You got them all?" She raised her eyebrows at the rest of the team.

Flint nodded fractionally. "Six man team, all accounted for. It's safe for them to clear out." A tilt of his head at the increasingly confused couple still sitting on the floor

"We can go home?" Frank blinked.

"Yessir."

"Just like that?"

"Yessir."

Those ice-blue eyes narrowed slightly, and Scarlett was suddenly reminded forcefully of Snake Eyes. "Just like that? One moment and boxes are appearing from thin air and people are trying to kill us, the next a man who claims to have two hearts is bleeding all over the floor and bleeding the wrong color, and the next you tell us to just head home?"

Flint considered that for a moment. "Yessir."

"And we don't get so much as a word of explanation?"

Flint eyed the other man for a second. "We're from the future. Part of an elite antiterrorism team. In…oh, thirty or so years, your son will be a member of that team, and one of the most dangerous men on the planet. One terrorist sect will be so terrified of him, in fact, that they will send mercenaries back through time to try to kill him before he's even born." He pointed at Janet's belly. "We came back to make sure that didn't happen, and we did. The assassins are dead, and you two are safe. The blue police box is a time machine. The man who got shot is the pilot. He isn't human, and so far as we can tell he'll pull through, though I can't claim to be any sort of an expert on alien biology. As soon as he comes around, we'll be on our way and you can pretend that this never happened. Any other questions?"

A long pause.

"I'd call you crazy and a liar." Frank's voice was even. "If I hadn't seen that box appear out of thin air. And even so, I'm still thinking it."

"Call me whatever you like." Flint shrugged. "You're alive to do it, and that's what matters."

"Son?" Janet frowned. "The doctor said it was going to be twin girls. We were going to name them Terri and Jessica. We don't have any boy names picked out."

A slow, worrying smirk spread over Tommy's face. "Jessica?"

"I'm sure you'll think of something." Flint didn't so much as blink. "Like I said. Best to pretend this whole day never happened."

"Yeah." Frank nodded slowly. "Yeah. I'm thinking so."

Back on the TARDIS, Beach glanced around the console room. "Uhm. Where am I supposed to put him? He's annoying, but ah wouldn't feel right just dumping him on the floor." He shifted; the Doctor was thin, but once a man got tall enough even a thin man had enough mass to him that you wouldn't want to stand around holding him for long. To add to that, the cold from whatever sort of freaky alien ninja trance thing the Doctor was doing was making his hands go numb.

There was a creak of hinges. The Ranger turned.

Where he was certain there had once been a hallway winding off towards the unknown reaches of the TARDIS, there was now a wooden door. It swung outwards, as if pushed by a gentle breeze.

"I think that was a hint." Scarlett said.

"Ah hate this creepy-ass ship." Beach strode over and nudged the door the rest of the way open with the toe of a boot, Scarlett just a step behind him.

It was a bedroom. A big one, lined with bookshelves stuffed to capacity. A battered old armchair sat next to a small table; there was a book turned upside-down to keep a page, an empty but unwashed teacup, and a plate covered in cookie crumbs. A massive and ancient four-poster bed dominated one wall; the sheets were deep blue, crisp and neat and obviously not slept in recently.

A workbench was wedged in between a couple of dangerously overloaded bookshelves. It was so covered with bits and pieces of electronics and devices that Beach couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of in various states of assembly that the bench itself was hardly visible. There was a toy car balanced precariously on top of a box carefully labelled 'Fuses', which was filled with disassembled circuit boards. A second box was labeled 'light bulbs', and was filled with wire of varying lengths and types. A third was labelled 'trans-dimensional couplings' and was filled with jelly beans. The red beans looked to have been ruthlessly weeded out; there was a pile of them shoved to one side, apparently discarded.

Beach shook his head and laid the Doctor on the bed. The man still wasn't moving and apparently wasn't breathing. Frost iced his hair and eyelashes, and traced intricate patterns on his skin.

"Weird." The Ranger muttered to himself. "Just damned weird."

Scarlett carefully looped the TARDIS key back around the Doctor's neck. "Should we…I don't know…keep an eye on him or something?"

Beach shrugged. "An' do what? We all know some field medicine, but ain't none of us here a doctor. And besides, even if Doc or Lifeline was here…ain't like he's human. Two hearts, weird blood, and gawd only knows what else he's got mixed up on the inside. What could any of us do for him?"

"Yeah." Scarlett sighed. "I dunno. It just seems…wrong to just tuck him up in bed and leave him on his own after he just got shot. A shot that would have killed any of us. You know?"

"Yeah." Beach frowned. "Wish I knew how long this…whatever the hell he's doing…lasts."

Scarlett sighed again and settled herself in the armchair. "I'll stay with him for a little while." She glanced around at the groaning bookshelves. "I think I should probably be able to find something to read."

Beach glanced at the nearest book. "If'n you like Great Tragedy Writers of the Kuulandi System, anyway."

Scarlett glanced at the book on the end table. "Or Calvin and Hobbes comics."

Beach shook his head and stumped out. "I've met some weirdoes in my day, but this guy really takes the cake."

Ten minutes later, she lowered the Calvin and Hobbes book. "Snake Eyes, I know you're right behind me."

Snake Eyes padded around into view. Scarlett eyed him. Tension through the shoulders, a little change in his stride…she knew those tells, as well as she knew the back of her own hand. She set the book aside. "What's wrong?"

A sigh and a headshake. *He okay?* A thumb pointed in the direction of the Doctor.

"So far as we can tell." She folded her arms. "Snake Eyes, I know you. What's wrong?"

Another headshake. *Nothing.*

Scarlett narrowed her eyes at him. "Which means, in Snake Eyes-ese, that yes, something is absolutely wrong and I want to talk about it, but I'm going to make Scarlett drag it out of me because then I can pretend I'm still the scary stoic ninja who doesn't need to talk to his girlfriend about feelings, but she insists and I just go along with it because I don't like sleeping on the floor. Am I right?"

A beat. *Maybe.*

"I know. What's wrong, Snake?"

*I saw them.* His movements were short and jerky. *Just out the door, but…*

Scarlett understood immediately. "Oh, Snake." She stood up and wrapped her arms around his waist, tucking her head under his chin. "When did you last see them? Before you deployed to Vietnam?"

She felt him swallow and nod.

She didn't say anything else. She just held him for a few minutes, and let him hold her. At last, he pulled away, stole the chair from the work bench, and dragged it over. *Might as well keep you company.*

"You'll do a better job of it than him." Scarlett nodded at the comatose-frost-covered Time Lord. "I wish I knew how to help him more."

Snake Eyes just shrugged.

"Yeah, I know." She sighed. "Nothing to do but wait."