The Bizarre Adventures of Doctor Who

Headache

It's another day for Theodore, it would've been a peaceful one for him, but of course, it wasn't the case, he received a call from Conan Ashfield, someone he and Lila helped in the past, who sounded disturbed, and immediately Theodore went to visit the man somewhere in a different part of the city they were in when they initially went to help him.

Time passed, at least a few months after the incident prior, and Conan waited for Theodore's arrival near an abandoned theatre.

When the TARDIS materialized nearby, Theodore stepped out, wearing a dark navy long coat with fitting trousers and a frilly white puffy shirt to go along with the assemble, topped with a black bow loosely tied around the collar.

His icy blue eyes locking with him, Theodore went over to Conan, waiting for him nearby, hardly changed since he saw him last, inquiring what caused the man to call him once more, and Conan looked horrified as he led Theodore around the building towards a newspaper stand.

"It just happened," Conan tells him as he grabbed a folded newspaper from the stack, flipping the pages, until he found a news article, showing Theodore.

In his large hands, Theodore reads the newspaper, describing the sudden death of Professor Stanford, found dead in his cell, the details of his death absent in the article, but Conan managed to find out the details from having contacts inside the prison where Prison Stanford resided since he'd been imprisoned following his conviction for the abuses committed against his students.

"His head... his head was gone..." Conan described what happened to Professor Stanford from what he gotten from his contacts, colour missing from his face.

His contacts' reliable, they don't have a reason to lie to him, they themselves despised Professor Stanford for what he done to his students, but they wouldn't make up details like this, nor would they risk it all just to kill him.

It started with Professor Stanford repeatedly complaining of headaches weeks before the incident, enough that the nurses had to give him over-the-counter migraine medicine to dull the pain.

Whatever migraines he had, they were intense enough to send the man to the ground, curled up in a fetal position.

He was supposed to have a doctor come by and check on him, but that didn't come to pass, because the following morning before the doctor would've visited his cell, the prison guards found Professor Stanford slumped in a corner of his cell.

They described the grisly sight as someone popping a balloon filled with red paint.

All that remained was his neck, everything else above, disintegrated into red paste.

Took the guards hours to stop vomiting from the sight and the prison went under lockdown while they tried figuring out how Professor Stanford died, but found no probable cause. He was in solitary confinement due to the threats received by his fellow inmates, but they weren't responsible for his death, they'd been transferred elsewhere prior to it.

Checking on the cameras, they didn't see anything out of the ordinary, Professor Stanford near the corner of his cell, his migraine causing him pain, and the next minute, he was lying dead, his head gone.

No weapon was found in his cell, no one gone in, everything checked out, leaving only more questions than answers.

Seeing the date, the death happened just shy six months after the previous incident, long after Professor Stanford started his sentence.

"Did he have visitors?" Theodore asks Conan as he lit a cigarette, deep in thought.

He asked Theodore if he wanted one, but he declined, before Conan said that outside his lawyer, nobody visited the disavowed professor.