The Doctor's Diary - Part 12
AUTHOR -
sensiblecat
CHARACTERS - Ten/Rose, Jack, Jackie/Pete, Susan
SHOW - Post Doomsday, with some Classic DW refs.
RATING - FRT
PICTURE -
swankkat
Dear Doctor,
I don’t know what to say….I can’t even say that, you’ll probably remember the last time I said it. Why did it seem so easy to write everything until you told the truth? What did we used to talk about all day?
I can’t believe we used so many words and said so little.
Burble, burble, burble.
Okay, this is staying in the Drafts file. Start again. Oh, there’s such a lot to tell you. I’m fine. Never better. Fan-bloody-tastic. Tickety-boo. And d’you know what? I’m officially a big sister!
I was there when it happened watching my mother in a birthing pool (I’m gonna need therapy to get over that) and Dad was standing there gibbering like an idiot. “It’s a baby! It’s a baby!”
“What did you think it bleeding well would be,” Mum yelled back, “An elephant?” And then she had a go at me for laughing!
Dad says he was trying to say, “It’s a boy,” but he got muddled up. I think he’d had a few too many by then. Then he started running around with his camcorder, and all Mum could say was, “Never mind that bloody thing, get me a cup of tea and some toast,” and he’s like, “Jacks, we’ve got staff for all that,” and she’s saying, “They’re not bloody seeing me looking like this, I haven’t got my make up on.”
So I had to go downstairs and get her a tea tray, because you can’t be seen without your mascara on even if you did give birth twenty minutes ago. Twelve days late and it felt more like twelve months, the way my mother was going on. Anyway, in the end the baby came out the right way up and she got to keep her bikini line. I know, you really don’t want to think about my mum in a bikini, but she’s already started with a personal trainer because she wants her figure back by the time they go to the Canaries for Christmas.
It’s your fault this baby hasn’t got a name yet. They’ve agreed on Russell but the middle name is up for grabs (I think Russell Tyler sounds like something off “Stars in Your Eyes”, but anyway). To quote my mother on the subject of you, “If he’d known he was going to get a baby named after him, he’d have had a proper name.” So, if this poor kid isn’t going to be called Russell Tardis Doctor Tyler, you’d better come up with a good name, less than 39 syllables long, and fast. And screw Time Lord protocol. Otherwise, this kid is going to go through life as RT-DT, and everybody will drive him mad asking where See-Threepio is.
The health visitor came round and assumed the kid was mine - that didn’t go down too well, especially with me. I was left with a bunch of leaflets about groups with names like Snugglebums and Mr Storks, and where to buy biodegradable nappies. At least I got a compliment on how well I’d got my figure back.
I NEVER, EVER want kids. You can cross that one right off the Problem List. I know you’ve got one, probably on a big yellow Post It Note, and somewhere between “Nasty Piece of Coral Rot” and “Bananas Dying Out in Two Hundred Years Time”, it says “Does Rose ever want to have kids?” You can cross it out, okay? Feel better?
I’ve a house-share organised with Tosh and Ianto. Mickey reckons Ianto is gay, and anyway he isn’t interested, for whatever reason. He’s a total neatnick, which will probably drive me nuts. He will have washing-up rotas plastered on the kitchen wall and little colour coded labels for the tops of tins, and he will probably keep in a stock of sterile wipes for us to clean the tops of the tins before we open them. But he’s very sweet. We’ll muddle through. It’s time to leave home. Could be worse. Could be an impossible planet under a black hole……..
All this has happened to me and I still don’t know what to say. Every time I read that last message I want to cry. Like that’s gonna help. This is so weird. I thought you were the one who had the problem saying it.
I want life to go on and be fantastic, and I want it to stop. Just stop until we can be….oh, I can’t write it. Mum and Dad are so happy. They have everything they ever wanted, and it’s because of you. You wanted that to happen, didn’t you? It’s not just stupid planets with millions of people that you save.
That day, when Mickey was saying, “There’s people dying outside,” and you said, “I know” - the way you smiled. I’d give anything for a picture of that. I’ve only just started remembering it. You must have so many memories - how do you keep them all in your head and remember which body you were in, and all that? Do you make yourself forget things just because you were happy and it hurts to remember?
Sometimes I deliberately try to remember the annoying stuff, like the way you used to witter on in fifteen different languages, and buy me choccies and then eat them all, and sing along to Frank Sinatra. But even that makes me sad, now. All I can think is that I should have stopped moaning and enjoyed it all while we had the chance.
They want their baby to be like you. They want to see you again……and they never will, will they? You just can’t bring yourself to tell me. You don’t know. You can’t do the impossible.
Except, you can. You have. I’ve seen it. And I’ll hang on to that. No matter how many things look like they aren’t going to work out, things like me being ill……
It’s just, they’re so happy. I can’t bear to see it. That’s why I’m moving out.
Take care,
Rose
********
Dear Rose,
Sometimes words just aren’t enough are they? I know hundreds of different languages - languages with hundreds of words for love and affection and friendship and sexual attraction, and languages that barely acknowledge it exists at all. I know poetry and music and I’ve seen the greatest pictures in the universe, but you can’t beat a good hug. That’s the hardest thing. No hugging. No being close. Humans taught me how to do that, my own people hadn’t a clue. They didn’t realise when they put me in the Looms and took my human mother out of me that she’d already taught me things they couldn’t even start to understand.
I remember the hugs best of all. Just the feeling of belonging together. The feeling that, even if we knew we’d lose it all tomorrow, it was worth it for those times in each other’s arms. Like you, I try not to think about them too often. It hurts too much.
I know you worry terribly about me being on my own. I’m not, never have been in a way, because I always have the TARDIS and she’s so very much more than just a ship, or even just a home. And now, as it turns out, I have a family. I’m not quite sure how to define that - it isn’t just about DNA, although that comes into it. I think it’s something you don’t even know you’re searching for until you find it. I have so much to tell you. I’ve found one of my own people, but he’s so much more than that, because he’s also one of us.
I have a son, a son I never knew I had. I need to explain that a little. For my people, things were not linear. All times were equal. We held most assets in common, our children included. Exact parentage was rarely known, though the most determined of us could find ways to identify it, as my daughter Susan did. The Houses were our families: the word we used translates, more or less, into your language as “cousins” but it was more like a family web than a family line. Remember, a few hundred years ago I looked, in human terms, three times the age that I look now. It blurs the distinctions between the generations. How to describe it? Extended family, yes, but not quite in the human, maybe Chinese or Asian sense, because that warmth was lacking. Partly that, partly a school, because there was always so much complicated learning to be done.
So when I say I have a son, what I mean is that I have found someone linked to me by ties of blood and heritage, even though he knew nothing of it for the first hundred and forty years of his life, and nor did I. He was born many centuries after his mother, who may be either my grand-daughter or my daughter; to a Time Lord, that’s surprisingly insignificant, since she could easily have ended up having a child centuries before I was born myself. Do you begin to understand the complications?
Yet some of it seems very simple. I must have changed, because when Susan made herself known to me I felt very little connection to her - that grew from our living together and learning things from one another, things that seemed all the more significant because we were in voluntary exile. But when I found out that I had a son, and his name was Jack Harkness, it’s hard for me to explain how that felt. A feeling that, somehow, I’d known all along, or that the TARDIS had. Pride. Excitement. Happiness. Belonging. The sheer pleasure of having someone to teach about the ways of my people. And someone to teach me the ways of his.
I’m not the last of the Time Lords. I can hardly bring myself to write that. There is something left for us both to belong to, and you are a part of it too. After all, you found him before I did - or should that be, he found you?
(Anyway, what’s wrong with Frank Sinatra? You think that’s bad? Jack plays “The Trolley Song” by Judy Garland every time he starts the TARDIS up).
*******
Hey Rose,
My turn to e-mail tonight. Good news about the kid brother. It’s kinda weird to hear you planning to move in with Ianto and Tosh, I thought they worked for me. But then, I thought you didn’t make it out of Canary Wharf until a couple weeks ago. Saw your name and your mom’s on the lists, and thought the worst. Looks like we’re both harder to kill than we thought. Useful qualification when you’re travelling with him.
I’ve been in Cardiff for a while now. About a hundred years in fact. Couple of things you need to know, might come as a bit of a shock. This not-dying thing seems to be permanent. Always thought it was something to do with the Doctor, but turns out I have you to thank for it. Been a mixed blessing at times. Very lonely.
I lead a team at Torchwood Three. All of Torchwood isn’t the same. The 21st century is when everything changes on Earth, and our job is to get ready. Ripping open holes in space time and going into denial about the results isn’t the way I’d choose do things, and I did what I could to warn them, but some disasters aren’t preventable. Had rather better luck in Cardiff, on the whole. There’s the Rift, of course, and a lot of stuff happens. More than anyone could cover up, although we try. It’s classified of course. I can e-mail openly from here in the TARDIS, but not from just anywhere.
The Doctor tells me you had a dream about me. Well, I guess if it gets the two of us in bed together, I can handle that. The woman with dark hair is Gwen; she came to us from the police a couple of years back and she sets us straight on what you could call the people side. Our Ianto handles reception, admin and general coffee magic, Tosh is the IT brains, Owen’s the medic. We’re close, it’s not the kind of work you can talk to just anyone about. Oh, and you were right about the hand on my desk. It came down over London that Christmas Day and I figured it would be safer here than with that bunch at Torchwood One.
After I ran into the Doctor again we spent quite a while running tests on the hand and trying to figure out why I couldn’t die. Okay, this is where it starts getting freaky. Time Lord DNA is complicated. There are genes which stay recessive until exposed to the energy of the Time Vortex. That, plus rather secretive parents, was the reason why I spent the first 140 years of my life believing I was human. Wrong.
My mom was called Susan Campbell. You may know of her as Susan Foreman, though that was no more her given name than Jack Harkness is mine. She was the Doctor’s first travelling companion. He talks about her as his daughter, or sometimes grand-daughter, but I don’t believe he fathered her, or anyone, in any sense we’d recognise. I know he tried to tell you about it once, and he screwed up bad; that bothers him a lot. I think it was a mistake to assume it meant he’d been intimate with anyone. Family, as we’d know it, is a difficult concept for him to get. When he said he’d been a dad once, I think it was his way of telling you he was working out what it means to be human. That, given time, he’d get there, and love you the way you deserved to be loved. Too bad that, as we know now, time was the one thing you didn’t have.
This I know, Mom travelled with him - left Gallifrey with him, in fact, and he cared deeply for her. They stayed together until she met Dad, and even then she didn’t want to leave him - he had to lock her out of the TARDIS to make her do it.
You and I both know travelling with the Doctor changes you. RL can be a problem after. Right or wrong, my parents dealt by acting like it never happened. Mom never said where she came from, leastways not to me. They moved way into the future, long after Gallifrey had ceased to exist, and because they found out how all that ended, they cut themselves off from the Doctor. I grew up believing I was human, but blood will out, I guess, and I wound up time travelling anyway. They didn’t approve; we lost contact. It happens. Maybe I’d never have known the truth if things on the Gamestation hadn’t turned out how they did.
It’s a tough thing to handle, not being human. Not being a complete Time Lord either, since my dad wasn’t, the reverse of the Doctor’s situation. Course, he had the Looms to bring him up to scratch, so he gets the whole new body thing. I just get to die and come back to life. I’m growing a TARDIS from a piece of coral on my desk, but he says it’ll need another 500 years or so on the clock to come to anything. Maybe if I make nice I’ll get to drive his sometime. It always did feel like home, right from the moment I walked in. It’s good to be back. He tells me Susan picked the TARDIS out for him all those years ago on Gallifrey. Knew it was the one. Nice story.
I’d been looking for him for a while. I went to Cardiff because I figured sooner or later he’d be back to refuel, but in the end we met up in London at the Canary Wharf Memorial Ceremony. There wasn’t going to be one, you know, but when the anniversary came round people started leaving flowers and soon it was like Diana’s funeral and 9/11 rolled into one. When Sir Bob showed up with Bono and Chris Martin the powers that be decided it would be safer to throw together something official. I was there as the Torchwood rep - not the easiest occasion for me, and I was kinda distracted even before I spotted the TARDIS. Was surprised to see him there, but I think Martha wanted to go.
So, Rose, all we need to do now is work out how to get you home. Because we will. We’ve batted around a few ideas and the straight dope is - we need another Time Lord, over your side, better still two. Or any well-disposed Time Aware species would do, at a pinch. There needs to be someone either side to hold the paths open through the Void and you’d need transport, and an escort who knows what they’re doing. I’m having a tough time persuading the Doctor not to fire up and head out regardless, but it’s really not a good idea - too risky. And I think he has a lot of issues with his people that make it hard for him to ask for help, even if we knew where they were. But it helps that you shouldn’t be where you are; it’s causing a wound in time, and that alone should be drawing the right kind of attention to you.
There’s a good chance a few of his people made it over to your side. Romana used to nip across from E-space to N-space like she was going out to get milk. I know from the Doctor that she was around for the endgame, and a few others besides. Finally I got him to open up a little about the way the Time War ended. Best avoid that subject for a while now, I think. He was called on to do what nobody, of any species, should be asked to do. I’ve had to assassinate people. Even one at a time, I always try to arrange for a firing squad of at least three. It’s too much to have on your conscience. Go easy on him, Rose.
Can you IM? I’m gonna bring Tosh on board and try setting up a chat with with your dad (or stepdad?) sometime - maybe we could bring the two Owens into the frame and agree a strategy to keep you medically stable whilst we work something out. Talking of medics, Martha’s asked me for an internship after she graduates. I’d be happy to have her; she’s proved her worth on the TARDIS. She’s been good for him. He needs the company.
Okay, guess that wraps it up for now. The Doc’s fine, sends his love. He’s a little freaked out by your outbreak of baby burbling, I think, or maybe the thought of your mom in a birthing pool. Sorry, but there was a lot of laughter in the control room when we read that part out.
SWALK
Jack.
Dear Doctor (and Jack)
Now I really don’t know what to say. Yay for the Face of Boe, maybe? Or the TARDIS? If we’d thought of asking the TARDIS about all this, we’d’ve got it sorted years ago.
Who was Romana?
I’m having a few days in hospital under obs whilst the Owens work out my treatment plan. Gives me chance to catch up on some of that reading. Did I tell you I’ve an interview date for Peterborough?
Mum and Dad went for Russell John Harkness Tyler in the end.
I love you (both). I’m very available ;-)
Rose
sensiblecat
CHARACTERS - Ten/Rose, Jack, Jackie/Pete, Susan
SHOW - Post Doomsday, with some Classic DW refs.
RATING - FRT
PICTURE -
swankkat
Dear Doctor,
I don’t know what to say….I can’t even say that, you’ll probably remember the last time I said it. Why did it seem so easy to write everything until you told the truth? What did we used to talk about all day?
I can’t believe we used so many words and said so little.
Burble, burble, burble.
Okay, this is staying in the Drafts file. Start again. Oh, there’s such a lot to tell you. I’m fine. Never better. Fan-bloody-tastic. Tickety-boo. And d’you know what? I’m officially a big sister!
I was there when it happened watching my mother in a birthing pool (I’m gonna need therapy to get over that) and Dad was standing there gibbering like an idiot. “It’s a baby! It’s a baby!”
“What did you think it bleeding well would be,” Mum yelled back, “An elephant?” And then she had a go at me for laughing!
Dad says he was trying to say, “It’s a boy,” but he got muddled up. I think he’d had a few too many by then. Then he started running around with his camcorder, and all Mum could say was, “Never mind that bloody thing, get me a cup of tea and some toast,” and he’s like, “Jacks, we’ve got staff for all that,” and she’s saying, “They’re not bloody seeing me looking like this, I haven’t got my make up on.”
So I had to go downstairs and get her a tea tray, because you can’t be seen without your mascara on even if you did give birth twenty minutes ago. Twelve days late and it felt more like twelve months, the way my mother was going on. Anyway, in the end the baby came out the right way up and she got to keep her bikini line. I know, you really don’t want to think about my mum in a bikini, but she’s already started with a personal trainer because she wants her figure back by the time they go to the Canaries for Christmas.
It’s your fault this baby hasn’t got a name yet. They’ve agreed on Russell but the middle name is up for grabs (I think Russell Tyler sounds like something off “Stars in Your Eyes”, but anyway). To quote my mother on the subject of you, “If he’d known he was going to get a baby named after him, he’d have had a proper name.” So, if this poor kid isn’t going to be called Russell Tardis Doctor Tyler, you’d better come up with a good name, less than 39 syllables long, and fast. And screw Time Lord protocol. Otherwise, this kid is going to go through life as RT-DT, and everybody will drive him mad asking where See-Threepio is.
The health visitor came round and assumed the kid was mine - that didn’t go down too well, especially with me. I was left with a bunch of leaflets about groups with names like Snugglebums and Mr Storks, and where to buy biodegradable nappies. At least I got a compliment on how well I’d got my figure back.
I NEVER, EVER want kids. You can cross that one right off the Problem List. I know you’ve got one, probably on a big yellow Post It Note, and somewhere between “Nasty Piece of Coral Rot” and “Bananas Dying Out in Two Hundred Years Time”, it says “Does Rose ever want to have kids?” You can cross it out, okay? Feel better?
I’ve a house-share organised with Tosh and Ianto. Mickey reckons Ianto is gay, and anyway he isn’t interested, for whatever reason. He’s a total neatnick, which will probably drive me nuts. He will have washing-up rotas plastered on the kitchen wall and little colour coded labels for the tops of tins, and he will probably keep in a stock of sterile wipes for us to clean the tops of the tins before we open them. But he’s very sweet. We’ll muddle through. It’s time to leave home. Could be worse. Could be an impossible planet under a black hole……..
All this has happened to me and I still don’t know what to say. Every time I read that last message I want to cry. Like that’s gonna help. This is so weird. I thought you were the one who had the problem saying it.
I want life to go on and be fantastic, and I want it to stop. Just stop until we can be….oh, I can’t write it. Mum and Dad are so happy. They have everything they ever wanted, and it’s because of you. You wanted that to happen, didn’t you? It’s not just stupid planets with millions of people that you save.
That day, when Mickey was saying, “There’s people dying outside,” and you said, “I know” - the way you smiled. I’d give anything for a picture of that. I’ve only just started remembering it. You must have so many memories - how do you keep them all in your head and remember which body you were in, and all that? Do you make yourself forget things just because you were happy and it hurts to remember?
Sometimes I deliberately try to remember the annoying stuff, like the way you used to witter on in fifteen different languages, and buy me choccies and then eat them all, and sing along to Frank Sinatra. But even that makes me sad, now. All I can think is that I should have stopped moaning and enjoyed it all while we had the chance.
They want their baby to be like you. They want to see you again……and they never will, will they? You just can’t bring yourself to tell me. You don’t know. You can’t do the impossible.
Except, you can. You have. I’ve seen it. And I’ll hang on to that. No matter how many things look like they aren’t going to work out, things like me being ill……
It’s just, they’re so happy. I can’t bear to see it. That’s why I’m moving out.
Take care,
Rose
********
Dear Rose,
Sometimes words just aren’t enough are they? I know hundreds of different languages - languages with hundreds of words for love and affection and friendship and sexual attraction, and languages that barely acknowledge it exists at all. I know poetry and music and I’ve seen the greatest pictures in the universe, but you can’t beat a good hug. That’s the hardest thing. No hugging. No being close. Humans taught me how to do that, my own people hadn’t a clue. They didn’t realise when they put me in the Looms and took my human mother out of me that she’d already taught me things they couldn’t even start to understand.
I remember the hugs best of all. Just the feeling of belonging together. The feeling that, even if we knew we’d lose it all tomorrow, it was worth it for those times in each other’s arms. Like you, I try not to think about them too often. It hurts too much.
I know you worry terribly about me being on my own. I’m not, never have been in a way, because I always have the TARDIS and she’s so very much more than just a ship, or even just a home. And now, as it turns out, I have a family. I’m not quite sure how to define that - it isn’t just about DNA, although that comes into it. I think it’s something you don’t even know you’re searching for until you find it. I have so much to tell you. I’ve found one of my own people, but he’s so much more than that, because he’s also one of us.
I have a son, a son I never knew I had. I need to explain that a little. For my people, things were not linear. All times were equal. We held most assets in common, our children included. Exact parentage was rarely known, though the most determined of us could find ways to identify it, as my daughter Susan did. The Houses were our families: the word we used translates, more or less, into your language as “cousins” but it was more like a family web than a family line. Remember, a few hundred years ago I looked, in human terms, three times the age that I look now. It blurs the distinctions between the generations. How to describe it? Extended family, yes, but not quite in the human, maybe Chinese or Asian sense, because that warmth was lacking. Partly that, partly a school, because there was always so much complicated learning to be done.
So when I say I have a son, what I mean is that I have found someone linked to me by ties of blood and heritage, even though he knew nothing of it for the first hundred and forty years of his life, and nor did I. He was born many centuries after his mother, who may be either my grand-daughter or my daughter; to a Time Lord, that’s surprisingly insignificant, since she could easily have ended up having a child centuries before I was born myself. Do you begin to understand the complications?
Yet some of it seems very simple. I must have changed, because when Susan made herself known to me I felt very little connection to her - that grew from our living together and learning things from one another, things that seemed all the more significant because we were in voluntary exile. But when I found out that I had a son, and his name was Jack Harkness, it’s hard for me to explain how that felt. A feeling that, somehow, I’d known all along, or that the TARDIS had. Pride. Excitement. Happiness. Belonging. The sheer pleasure of having someone to teach about the ways of my people. And someone to teach me the ways of his.
I’m not the last of the Time Lords. I can hardly bring myself to write that. There is something left for us both to belong to, and you are a part of it too. After all, you found him before I did - or should that be, he found you?
(Anyway, what’s wrong with Frank Sinatra? You think that’s bad? Jack plays “The Trolley Song” by Judy Garland every time he starts the TARDIS up).
*******
Hey Rose,
My turn to e-mail tonight. Good news about the kid brother. It’s kinda weird to hear you planning to move in with Ianto and Tosh, I thought they worked for me. But then, I thought you didn’t make it out of Canary Wharf until a couple weeks ago. Saw your name and your mom’s on the lists, and thought the worst. Looks like we’re both harder to kill than we thought. Useful qualification when you’re travelling with him.
I’ve been in Cardiff for a while now. About a hundred years in fact. Couple of things you need to know, might come as a bit of a shock. This not-dying thing seems to be permanent. Always thought it was something to do with the Doctor, but turns out I have you to thank for it. Been a mixed blessing at times. Very lonely.
I lead a team at Torchwood Three. All of Torchwood isn’t the same. The 21st century is when everything changes on Earth, and our job is to get ready. Ripping open holes in space time and going into denial about the results isn’t the way I’d choose do things, and I did what I could to warn them, but some disasters aren’t preventable. Had rather better luck in Cardiff, on the whole. There’s the Rift, of course, and a lot of stuff happens. More than anyone could cover up, although we try. It’s classified of course. I can e-mail openly from here in the TARDIS, but not from just anywhere.
The Doctor tells me you had a dream about me. Well, I guess if it gets the two of us in bed together, I can handle that. The woman with dark hair is Gwen; she came to us from the police a couple of years back and she sets us straight on what you could call the people side. Our Ianto handles reception, admin and general coffee magic, Tosh is the IT brains, Owen’s the medic. We’re close, it’s not the kind of work you can talk to just anyone about. Oh, and you were right about the hand on my desk. It came down over London that Christmas Day and I figured it would be safer here than with that bunch at Torchwood One.
After I ran into the Doctor again we spent quite a while running tests on the hand and trying to figure out why I couldn’t die. Okay, this is where it starts getting freaky. Time Lord DNA is complicated. There are genes which stay recessive until exposed to the energy of the Time Vortex. That, plus rather secretive parents, was the reason why I spent the first 140 years of my life believing I was human. Wrong.
My mom was called Susan Campbell. You may know of her as Susan Foreman, though that was no more her given name than Jack Harkness is mine. She was the Doctor’s first travelling companion. He talks about her as his daughter, or sometimes grand-daughter, but I don’t believe he fathered her, or anyone, in any sense we’d recognise. I know he tried to tell you about it once, and he screwed up bad; that bothers him a lot. I think it was a mistake to assume it meant he’d been intimate with anyone. Family, as we’d know it, is a difficult concept for him to get. When he said he’d been a dad once, I think it was his way of telling you he was working out what it means to be human. That, given time, he’d get there, and love you the way you deserved to be loved. Too bad that, as we know now, time was the one thing you didn’t have.
This I know, Mom travelled with him - left Gallifrey with him, in fact, and he cared deeply for her. They stayed together until she met Dad, and even then she didn’t want to leave him - he had to lock her out of the TARDIS to make her do it.
You and I both know travelling with the Doctor changes you. RL can be a problem after. Right or wrong, my parents dealt by acting like it never happened. Mom never said where she came from, leastways not to me. They moved way into the future, long after Gallifrey had ceased to exist, and because they found out how all that ended, they cut themselves off from the Doctor. I grew up believing I was human, but blood will out, I guess, and I wound up time travelling anyway. They didn’t approve; we lost contact. It happens. Maybe I’d never have known the truth if things on the Gamestation hadn’t turned out how they did.
It’s a tough thing to handle, not being human. Not being a complete Time Lord either, since my dad wasn’t, the reverse of the Doctor’s situation. Course, he had the Looms to bring him up to scratch, so he gets the whole new body thing. I just get to die and come back to life. I’m growing a TARDIS from a piece of coral on my desk, but he says it’ll need another 500 years or so on the clock to come to anything. Maybe if I make nice I’ll get to drive his sometime. It always did feel like home, right from the moment I walked in. It’s good to be back. He tells me Susan picked the TARDIS out for him all those years ago on Gallifrey. Knew it was the one. Nice story.
I’d been looking for him for a while. I went to Cardiff because I figured sooner or later he’d be back to refuel, but in the end we met up in London at the Canary Wharf Memorial Ceremony. There wasn’t going to be one, you know, but when the anniversary came round people started leaving flowers and soon it was like Diana’s funeral and 9/11 rolled into one. When Sir Bob showed up with Bono and Chris Martin the powers that be decided it would be safer to throw together something official. I was there as the Torchwood rep - not the easiest occasion for me, and I was kinda distracted even before I spotted the TARDIS. Was surprised to see him there, but I think Martha wanted to go.
So, Rose, all we need to do now is work out how to get you home. Because we will. We’ve batted around a few ideas and the straight dope is - we need another Time Lord, over your side, better still two. Or any well-disposed Time Aware species would do, at a pinch. There needs to be someone either side to hold the paths open through the Void and you’d need transport, and an escort who knows what they’re doing. I’m having a tough time persuading the Doctor not to fire up and head out regardless, but it’s really not a good idea - too risky. And I think he has a lot of issues with his people that make it hard for him to ask for help, even if we knew where they were. But it helps that you shouldn’t be where you are; it’s causing a wound in time, and that alone should be drawing the right kind of attention to you.
There’s a good chance a few of his people made it over to your side. Romana used to nip across from E-space to N-space like she was going out to get milk. I know from the Doctor that she was around for the endgame, and a few others besides. Finally I got him to open up a little about the way the Time War ended. Best avoid that subject for a while now, I think. He was called on to do what nobody, of any species, should be asked to do. I’ve had to assassinate people. Even one at a time, I always try to arrange for a firing squad of at least three. It’s too much to have on your conscience. Go easy on him, Rose.
Can you IM? I’m gonna bring Tosh on board and try setting up a chat with with your dad (or stepdad?) sometime - maybe we could bring the two Owens into the frame and agree a strategy to keep you medically stable whilst we work something out. Talking of medics, Martha’s asked me for an internship after she graduates. I’d be happy to have her; she’s proved her worth on the TARDIS. She’s been good for him. He needs the company.
Okay, guess that wraps it up for now. The Doc’s fine, sends his love. He’s a little freaked out by your outbreak of baby burbling, I think, or maybe the thought of your mom in a birthing pool. Sorry, but there was a lot of laughter in the control room when we read that part out.
SWALK
Jack.
Dear Doctor (and Jack)
Now I really don’t know what to say. Yay for the Face of Boe, maybe? Or the TARDIS? If we’d thought of asking the TARDIS about all this, we’d’ve got it sorted years ago.
Who was Romana?
I’m having a few days in hospital under obs whilst the Owens work out my treatment plan. Gives me chance to catch up on some of that reading. Did I tell you I’ve an interview date for Peterborough?
Mum and Dad went for Russell John Harkness Tyler in the end.
I love you (both). I’m very available ;-)
Rose