Places I Remember - Chapter 1 (Doctor Who - Ten x Rose & The Beatles)
Title: Places I Remember
Chapter: 1 - Yesterday
Fandoms/Pairing: Doctor Who/Ten x Rose, The Beatles,
Setting: Series 2, sometime after Fear Her, and also July 19-26, 1964
Rating: Teen
Summary: An ancient race of time-travelling aliens invades London, and that’s nothing new. It’s 1964, and Rose and the Doctor are on the case-with a little help from four lads from Liverpool, because Ringo’s now wearing the sacrificial ring! What if Help! wasn’t just a zany idea for a Beatles movie? What if the Fab Four made a film out of their own adventure with the Doctor & Rose Tyler?
Disclaimer: I don’t own Doctor Who or the Beatles and/or Help! (sadly)
Banner: by Abby/Abelina/Abelinajt. (Never mind. Photobucket keeps deleting the banner?)
Places I Remember
Chapter 1: Yesterday
*~*
Rose waved one last goodbye to her Mum and shut the TARDIS door behind her before bounding up the ramp to join the Doctor. He already had their next destination keyed in and, grinning at her, he threw the lever with his usual flourish.
“Get ready, Rose!” he said, darting around to the other side of the console to the tune of the time rotor. “You are going to love Arborous Three! The Arborans spend their entire lives living in trees! Tree houses, Rose! An entire tree city! In the spring, the trees are literally covered with blossoms in colours you can’t even imagine until you’ve seen them! Well, I think you can see them. That is, most of them should fall within the spectrum of human vis-”
The TARDIS lurched, much as it often did in flight, except something about this particular motion brought a furrow to the Doctor’s brow. Rose gripped the railing as the Doctor circled the console, shouting at the TARDIS and abusing the buttons when they didn’t seem to be cooperating.
“Hold on, Rose!”
Despite her grip on the railing, the rough landing sent Rose tumbling onto the grating. The Doctor peered at her from the floor on the other side the console before bouncing to his feet and taking a few long strides in Rose’s direction. She was already partially standing when he offered his hand, but she took it anyway and let him pull her the rest of the way up and hung on as he all but ran toward the doors.
He threw the door open, and stopped. “But-”
Rose inserted herself between the door frame and the Doctor standing motionless in the opening, and took in their surroundings-the hallway lined on both sides with glass windows that looked vaguely familiar, though the lighting was low where she thought it ought to be bright, and the area empty and quiet when it seemed destined for noisy crowds.
“Hang on,” she said, as first impressions and memory collided. “This looks like-”
“The London Zoo.”
Rose shuddered. “Right. The Reptile House. Always makes me think about giant snakes.”
The Doctor grinned at her. “I always did love that bit with the disappearing glass,” he said, voice gone higher pitched with amusement. The smile faltered quickly, however, and the corners of his lips turned down at the same time as his brow furrowed. “We’re still in London. Why haven’t we left London?”
“You’re asking me that?” Rose said, but the Doctor was already racing back toward the console.
Rose followed, eyeing the Doctor as he stared at the monitor, fingers moving in a flurry over the keyboard. She sighed and hopped up on the jump seat. This looked like it might take a while.
Indeed, the Doctor launched himself into a furious bout of TARDIS analysis and techno-babbling, interspersed here and there with the more frustrated, rambling sort of babble and quite a lot of banging. It didn’t look to be stopping any time soon, either. Rose wandered out into the Zoo, which remained dark and empty. The clock on the wall said fifteen minutes after twelve.
Middle of the night, then, which she had more or less assumed considering the state of the Zoo, but she wasn’t certain if that made sense or not. They’d left the Powell Estate at nine in the morning and if they hadn’t actually left, why the jump ahead in hours? Or was it a jump backward? Trying to sort out the intricacies of time travel was likely to give her a headache, though, so Rose wandered for a bit, glancing now and then into some of the enclosures. When she couldn’t hear the Doctor’s racket anymore, Rose headed back for the TARDIS, stopping to pick up the newspaper lying discarded on the floor beside the blue box.
The Doctor poked his head out the door just as her gaze landed on the date at the top of the paper. “Rose?”
“Look at this,” Rose said, holding the paper out for him to see.
“Eighteenth July-oh!”
Rose grinned. “Nineteen sixty four. I guess that makes London the coincidental part of the equation, then?”
“Mmm, quite,” the Doctor said, taking the paper from Rose without looking away, eyes flicking rapidly across the text. He flipped to a page near the back, still reading, then bolted into the TARDIS. Rose followed, watching him lay the paper out over the console and slip on his brainy specs.
“Look here,” he said, after a moment, pointing to an article written by a junior reporter titled Aliens in London? “‘Mr. William Howell, senior resident of St John’s Wood, claims to have seen a UFO landing in the Regent’s Park boating lake two nights ago whilst out walking his dog, Gertrude-’”
The Doctor paused, nose scrunching up as though he’d tasted something unpleasant. “Gertrude? What sort of name is that for a dog? Gertrude!”
“Never mind about Gertrude,” Rose said, nudging him to the side with her hip so she could see the paper, too. “Regent’s Park? Doctor, the Zoo is in Regent’s Park.”
The Doctor grinned widely. “Rose Tyler, you are absolutely correct!”
“So do you figure that’s why we’re here, then?” Rose said, skimming the article. “I mean, it’s not the Slitheen, because they landed in the Thames, didn’t they? And we can’t exactly do anything about them now, not without risking a paradox, yeah? So the TARDIS wouldn’t’ve bothered.”
The grin widened and the Doctor bounced a little on his toes. Then, as he was prone to doing, his expression sobered and he turned his attention back to the newspaper. “Says here that our Mr. Howell had a good look at the aliens as they were climbing out of their ship.”
Rose started reading from the point where the Doctor’s thumb rested on the article.
‘There were five of them, all males, and they bore a striking resemblance to one of those cults,’ says Howell. ‘Those Thuggee scoundrels from the East, you know? Except in the middle of their foreheads was a third eye! I daresay they were no mere tattoos, either. Why, one of them looked right at us and blinked! Nearly frightened poor Gertrude to death. The old girl’s not been the same since it happened.’
Scotland Yard declined to comment in regards to Howell’s claims. No evidence of a “space ship” has been spotted in the boating lake, though Mr. Howell reports the likelihood of some sort of alien concealment at work and promises to keep the Daily Herald apprised of his ongoing investigations.
“Three eyes?” Rose said, looking up at the Doctor, whose own two eyes moved back and forth as he reread the article. “Sound familiar?”
He didn’t answer right away, just clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth and rushed over to the TARDIS monitor. Rose followed, and by the time she reached his side he had an image pulled up. Two images, really, side by side in comparison. The Doctor pointed to the image on the left, a grainy, sepia toned photograph of a group of men who looked like characters out of that Indiana Jones movie, the one with that mine car roller coaster. They were a little less theatrically costumed than what she remembered from the film, but close enough that she could see the similarities.
“The Thuggee cult,” the Doctor explained, tossing his head in the direction of the newspaper. “Basically an ancient gang of criminals who ran amuck through India for oh, six hundred years or so, thieving, murdering, and being generally nasty, until the British succeeded in suppressing them at the end of the nineteenth century. Recently reintroduced into the general awareness of the mid-twentieth century pop-culture thanks to a rather charming-and when I say charming, I mean dubious-horror film from nineteen fifty-nine. The Stranglers of Bombay!”
This last he said in a wavering, ghostlike voice, complete with wriggling fingers quite close to her nose. Rose suppressed the urge to giggle by biting her lip, though she couldn’t stop the grin.
“The Thuggees worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali, sometimes known as the Goddess of death, darkness-and time,” the Doctor added, before gesturing to the second image. “Now look here.”
The image on the right was the super-sharp, almost three dimensional sort of picture Rose had grown to associate with the TARDIS and its wealth of advanced tech, and in that photo stood a humanoid wearing similar clothing to the Thuggees. His tunic covered him from wrists to ankles in black fabric that pooled and shimmered in an undeniably alien sort of way. The wide red sash at his waist held a long, unsheathed sword in it, its ornately carved handle made of something similar to ivory and its blade tinted deep red. In his hand he gripped a staff, the shaft of which matched the sword’s handle in design, topped with what looked to be the face of an idol done in gold, or something very like it. Atop his head he wore a turban, black and red in the same shimmery material as the tunic and adorned with round golden pieces in varying sizes. If all that wasn’t enough to convince Rose of his alienness, the third eye in the centre of his forehead was.
“The Kah Lai Lar,” the Doctor said, enunciating every syllable carefully. “Roughly translated, the Devout Children of the Great Kalai.”
“The Great Kalai,” Rose said, letting the words percolate for a moment. “Is it just me, Doctor, or does that sound a lot like ‘Kali’?”
“Precisely, Rose!” said the Doctor. “There’s some suggestion that the Kah Lai Lar may have visited the Earth near the time of the first references to Kali, but not a lot is known about them. In fact-” he paused to adjust his specs “-this is the first time they’ve been seen since around, oh, twelve-thousand BC, give or take a few millennia. Earth timeline, of course.”
Rose wasn’t sure if the sensation was something new, or if she simply hadn’t been aware of such things until she began travelling with the Doctor. The moment he finished speaking, a little tingle rose up her neck and over her scalp like a cool, prickly wave, the way it did these days whenever the Doctor said something which pieced two seemingly isolated facts into one fact connected by the impossibilities of time travel.
“So what you’re saying is,” said Rose, gaze drifting away from the photograph to settle on the Doctor, “that if their first trip to Earth inspired an entire religion, then whatever they’ve come back for, it can’t be good.”
He didn’t smile, but the crinkles at the corners of his eyes squished a bit, and she could see, glinting there in his eyes, that spark of pride in her he couldn’t hide anymore, or didn’t try to, even though he never said and she never asked. Beneath that though…
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” the Doctor said, turning away, though it didn’t matter, because she’d already seen it.
Rose slipped in beside him in front of the now blank monitor, felt his sturdy frame relax just a fraction against her side. They stood like that for an extended moment, shorter maybe than Rose would’ve liked, but ages from the Doctor’s perspective.
“So how do we stop them from-from whatever it is they’re up to?”
The Doctor sprang into motion then, bouncing away like the tightly-coiled spring he so often resembled. He was already tossing random items out from beneath the floor by the time Rose made it to the opening.
“We can’t stop them until we know what it is they’re doing,” he said, passing up a large coil of thick wire, which Rose set onto the grating beside her in preparation for the next item. “And we won’t know what they’re doing until we find them! So! The plan, Rose?”
Rose plucked the next object from the Doctor’s now grease-smudged hand. A bicycle bell, dinted on one side, and slightly rusty. But-
A push of her finger, and bell pinged loudly, the sound echoing around the room. Rose grinned. “We find them!”
*~*
>>to be continued in Chapter Two
Chapter: 1 - Yesterday
Fandoms/Pairing: Doctor Who/Ten x Rose, The Beatles,
Setting: Series 2, sometime after Fear Her, and also July 19-26, 1964
Rating: Teen
Summary: An ancient race of time-travelling aliens invades London, and that’s nothing new. It’s 1964, and Rose and the Doctor are on the case-with a little help from four lads from Liverpool, because Ringo’s now wearing the sacrificial ring! What if Help! wasn’t just a zany idea for a Beatles movie? What if the Fab Four made a film out of their own adventure with the Doctor & Rose Tyler?
Disclaimer: I don’t own Doctor Who or the Beatles and/or Help! (sadly)
Banner: by Abby/Abelina/Abelinajt. (Never mind. Photobucket keeps deleting the banner?)
Places I Remember
Chapter 1: Yesterday
*~*
Rose waved one last goodbye to her Mum and shut the TARDIS door behind her before bounding up the ramp to join the Doctor. He already had their next destination keyed in and, grinning at her, he threw the lever with his usual flourish.
“Get ready, Rose!” he said, darting around to the other side of the console to the tune of the time rotor. “You are going to love Arborous Three! The Arborans spend their entire lives living in trees! Tree houses, Rose! An entire tree city! In the spring, the trees are literally covered with blossoms in colours you can’t even imagine until you’ve seen them! Well, I think you can see them. That is, most of them should fall within the spectrum of human vis-”
The TARDIS lurched, much as it often did in flight, except something about this particular motion brought a furrow to the Doctor’s brow. Rose gripped the railing as the Doctor circled the console, shouting at the TARDIS and abusing the buttons when they didn’t seem to be cooperating.
“Hold on, Rose!”
Despite her grip on the railing, the rough landing sent Rose tumbling onto the grating. The Doctor peered at her from the floor on the other side the console before bouncing to his feet and taking a few long strides in Rose’s direction. She was already partially standing when he offered his hand, but she took it anyway and let him pull her the rest of the way up and hung on as he all but ran toward the doors.
He threw the door open, and stopped. “But-”
Rose inserted herself between the door frame and the Doctor standing motionless in the opening, and took in their surroundings-the hallway lined on both sides with glass windows that looked vaguely familiar, though the lighting was low where she thought it ought to be bright, and the area empty and quiet when it seemed destined for noisy crowds.
“Hang on,” she said, as first impressions and memory collided. “This looks like-”
“The London Zoo.”
Rose shuddered. “Right. The Reptile House. Always makes me think about giant snakes.”
The Doctor grinned at her. “I always did love that bit with the disappearing glass,” he said, voice gone higher pitched with amusement. The smile faltered quickly, however, and the corners of his lips turned down at the same time as his brow furrowed. “We’re still in London. Why haven’t we left London?”
“You’re asking me that?” Rose said, but the Doctor was already racing back toward the console.
Rose followed, eyeing the Doctor as he stared at the monitor, fingers moving in a flurry over the keyboard. She sighed and hopped up on the jump seat. This looked like it might take a while.
Indeed, the Doctor launched himself into a furious bout of TARDIS analysis and techno-babbling, interspersed here and there with the more frustrated, rambling sort of babble and quite a lot of banging. It didn’t look to be stopping any time soon, either. Rose wandered out into the Zoo, which remained dark and empty. The clock on the wall said fifteen minutes after twelve.
Middle of the night, then, which she had more or less assumed considering the state of the Zoo, but she wasn’t certain if that made sense or not. They’d left the Powell Estate at nine in the morning and if they hadn’t actually left, why the jump ahead in hours? Or was it a jump backward? Trying to sort out the intricacies of time travel was likely to give her a headache, though, so Rose wandered for a bit, glancing now and then into some of the enclosures. When she couldn’t hear the Doctor’s racket anymore, Rose headed back for the TARDIS, stopping to pick up the newspaper lying discarded on the floor beside the blue box.
The Doctor poked his head out the door just as her gaze landed on the date at the top of the paper. “Rose?”
“Look at this,” Rose said, holding the paper out for him to see.
“Eighteenth July-oh!”
Rose grinned. “Nineteen sixty four. I guess that makes London the coincidental part of the equation, then?”
“Mmm, quite,” the Doctor said, taking the paper from Rose without looking away, eyes flicking rapidly across the text. He flipped to a page near the back, still reading, then bolted into the TARDIS. Rose followed, watching him lay the paper out over the console and slip on his brainy specs.
“Look here,” he said, after a moment, pointing to an article written by a junior reporter titled Aliens in London? “‘Mr. William Howell, senior resident of St John’s Wood, claims to have seen a UFO landing in the Regent’s Park boating lake two nights ago whilst out walking his dog, Gertrude-’”
The Doctor paused, nose scrunching up as though he’d tasted something unpleasant. “Gertrude? What sort of name is that for a dog? Gertrude!”
“Never mind about Gertrude,” Rose said, nudging him to the side with her hip so she could see the paper, too. “Regent’s Park? Doctor, the Zoo is in Regent’s Park.”
The Doctor grinned widely. “Rose Tyler, you are absolutely correct!”
“So do you figure that’s why we’re here, then?” Rose said, skimming the article. “I mean, it’s not the Slitheen, because they landed in the Thames, didn’t they? And we can’t exactly do anything about them now, not without risking a paradox, yeah? So the TARDIS wouldn’t’ve bothered.”
The grin widened and the Doctor bounced a little on his toes. Then, as he was prone to doing, his expression sobered and he turned his attention back to the newspaper. “Says here that our Mr. Howell had a good look at the aliens as they were climbing out of their ship.”
Rose started reading from the point where the Doctor’s thumb rested on the article.
‘There were five of them, all males, and they bore a striking resemblance to one of those cults,’ says Howell. ‘Those Thuggee scoundrels from the East, you know? Except in the middle of their foreheads was a third eye! I daresay they were no mere tattoos, either. Why, one of them looked right at us and blinked! Nearly frightened poor Gertrude to death. The old girl’s not been the same since it happened.’
Scotland Yard declined to comment in regards to Howell’s claims. No evidence of a “space ship” has been spotted in the boating lake, though Mr. Howell reports the likelihood of some sort of alien concealment at work and promises to keep the Daily Herald apprised of his ongoing investigations.
“Three eyes?” Rose said, looking up at the Doctor, whose own two eyes moved back and forth as he reread the article. “Sound familiar?”
He didn’t answer right away, just clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth and rushed over to the TARDIS monitor. Rose followed, and by the time she reached his side he had an image pulled up. Two images, really, side by side in comparison. The Doctor pointed to the image on the left, a grainy, sepia toned photograph of a group of men who looked like characters out of that Indiana Jones movie, the one with that mine car roller coaster. They were a little less theatrically costumed than what she remembered from the film, but close enough that she could see the similarities.
“The Thuggee cult,” the Doctor explained, tossing his head in the direction of the newspaper. “Basically an ancient gang of criminals who ran amuck through India for oh, six hundred years or so, thieving, murdering, and being generally nasty, until the British succeeded in suppressing them at the end of the nineteenth century. Recently reintroduced into the general awareness of the mid-twentieth century pop-culture thanks to a rather charming-and when I say charming, I mean dubious-horror film from nineteen fifty-nine. The Stranglers of Bombay!”
This last he said in a wavering, ghostlike voice, complete with wriggling fingers quite close to her nose. Rose suppressed the urge to giggle by biting her lip, though she couldn’t stop the grin.
“The Thuggees worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali, sometimes known as the Goddess of death, darkness-and time,” the Doctor added, before gesturing to the second image. “Now look here.”
The image on the right was the super-sharp, almost three dimensional sort of picture Rose had grown to associate with the TARDIS and its wealth of advanced tech, and in that photo stood a humanoid wearing similar clothing to the Thuggees. His tunic covered him from wrists to ankles in black fabric that pooled and shimmered in an undeniably alien sort of way. The wide red sash at his waist held a long, unsheathed sword in it, its ornately carved handle made of something similar to ivory and its blade tinted deep red. In his hand he gripped a staff, the shaft of which matched the sword’s handle in design, topped with what looked to be the face of an idol done in gold, or something very like it. Atop his head he wore a turban, black and red in the same shimmery material as the tunic and adorned with round golden pieces in varying sizes. If all that wasn’t enough to convince Rose of his alienness, the third eye in the centre of his forehead was.
“The Kah Lai Lar,” the Doctor said, enunciating every syllable carefully. “Roughly translated, the Devout Children of the Great Kalai.”
“The Great Kalai,” Rose said, letting the words percolate for a moment. “Is it just me, Doctor, or does that sound a lot like ‘Kali’?”
“Precisely, Rose!” said the Doctor. “There’s some suggestion that the Kah Lai Lar may have visited the Earth near the time of the first references to Kali, but not a lot is known about them. In fact-” he paused to adjust his specs “-this is the first time they’ve been seen since around, oh, twelve-thousand BC, give or take a few millennia. Earth timeline, of course.”
Rose wasn’t sure if the sensation was something new, or if she simply hadn’t been aware of such things until she began travelling with the Doctor. The moment he finished speaking, a little tingle rose up her neck and over her scalp like a cool, prickly wave, the way it did these days whenever the Doctor said something which pieced two seemingly isolated facts into one fact connected by the impossibilities of time travel.
“So what you’re saying is,” said Rose, gaze drifting away from the photograph to settle on the Doctor, “that if their first trip to Earth inspired an entire religion, then whatever they’ve come back for, it can’t be good.”
He didn’t smile, but the crinkles at the corners of his eyes squished a bit, and she could see, glinting there in his eyes, that spark of pride in her he couldn’t hide anymore, or didn’t try to, even though he never said and she never asked. Beneath that though…
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” the Doctor said, turning away, though it didn’t matter, because she’d already seen it.
Rose slipped in beside him in front of the now blank monitor, felt his sturdy frame relax just a fraction against her side. They stood like that for an extended moment, shorter maybe than Rose would’ve liked, but ages from the Doctor’s perspective.
“So how do we stop them from-from whatever it is they’re up to?”
The Doctor sprang into motion then, bouncing away like the tightly-coiled spring he so often resembled. He was already tossing random items out from beneath the floor by the time Rose made it to the opening.
“We can’t stop them until we know what it is they’re doing,” he said, passing up a large coil of thick wire, which Rose set onto the grating beside her in preparation for the next item. “And we won’t know what they’re doing until we find them! So! The plan, Rose?”
Rose plucked the next object from the Doctor’s now grease-smudged hand. A bicycle bell, dinted on one side, and slightly rusty. But-
A push of her finger, and bell pinged loudly, the sound echoing around the room. Rose grinned. “We find them!”
*~*
>>to be continued in Chapter Two