The Best of Times (3/4) - Doctor (10, 10.5), Donna, Rose, Jackie
PICTURE: schattenmond
WORDS: 3967
SPOILERS: Up to JE
CHARACTERS: (this chapter) Doctor (10), Doctor (10.5), Donna, Rose, Jackie
RATING: G
For all the people who wanted more Emotional Baggage, here it is - because the thought of carrying on post JE was irresistible (though also AU, by definition).
No infringement of the BBC's intellectual property is intended or implied.
The Doctor and Donna have returned to Bad Wolf Bay, but can anything convince the Doctor he has a right to happiness? And how can he exercise it without other people getting hurt?
Tell me, where is fancy bred?
Or in the heart, or in the head,
How begot, how nourish’d?
Reply, reply.
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Rose waits for the Doctor to make the next move. She’s nothing left to say. The switchback of hope and despair he’s forced on her since their reunion has left her too exhausted to fight him any more. Angry in his absence, she finds herself resigned to whatever fate his skewed imagination might have in store for them now he’s back before her eyes. She’s realised that his taste for self-flagellation has become the dominant force in their relationship - it’s such a bleak conclusion that she’s beginning to wonder whether his alternative version would be a better bet, after all.
He seems to have returned against his will, and she doesn’t understand why Donna chose to make an issue of it when she seemed quite supportive last time around. Whatever game he’s playing, she’s trying not to analyse it. If she did, she’d go crazy. All through the years without him she feared one thing - that they’d meet again and she’d find his love for her had cooled or, worse still, that she’d only imagined it in the first place.
Within a second of him catching sight of her again, she knew she’d nothing to worry about on that score. His face bloomed from disbelief, to bewilderment, to unaffected joy, and even the bolt from the Dalek couldn’t dim it. The casual words he’d spoken were just his way of dealing with his feelings for her. For her, that wonderful moment had cancelled out all the grief that had preceded it.
The next few hours they’d lived through minute by minute. There was no point in contemplating a future there might not be one, but two particular moments stood out from the blur of activity in her mind. First, the way she’d taken his hand when they thought they’d lost the TARDIS; he’d accepted it without a word or a look in her direction, but she’d felt through his fingertips how deeply he valued her comforting presence beside him. If she’d allowed herself to look beyond the present, she’d have assumed at that moment that only death would part them again.
But the second moment she recalled was very different. The memory of it sends a chill through her - it was the certainty that he’d taken the taunts from Davros seriously; never had she seen him more broken than that. Their first farewell at Bad Wolf Bay had been bad enough, but at least it had only closed off one possibility - that of a future with him. This time, she realised that he’d turn his back on any company. It was too horrible to believe and she’d pushed it to the back of her mind, convincing herself that they’d find time to discuss it later. She should have known him better than that. He’d made sure that such an opportunity did not arise.
So here he is in front of her again, apparently ready to talk - not that you can ever quite predict anything with the Doctor. But he seems as tongue-tied as her. What emotions are going through that mind of his, she wonders? Fear, hope, remorse, embarrassment? Can she even be bothered to ask those questions any more? His logic when he left her with the other Doctor had been so irrational, so perverted, that she knows how difficult it would be to convince him of any reality other than his own.
Finally, the other Doctor comes to her rescue. “I think Rose is trying to say that home is where the heart is,” he remarks. “And in her case, that’s probably the TARDIS.”
He is different, Rose thinks - the original Doctor could never say anything so emotionally revealing. But what’s the same? Is he a Time Lord trapped in a human body, or a human enhanced by a Time Lord’s brain? Do his attitudes come from his head or his single heart? What, if anything, makes him alien?
She turns around and sees love in his eyes, perhaps enough to last a lifetime. “What about you?” she asks.
“I’m a Time Lord,” he says. He sounds very certain. “That’s the reality. The other reality is that I love you and I want to spend my life with you. To do that without the TARDIS would be hard, but not impossible.”
“You could grow another one,” the Doctor argues.
“Bit of a long term project, that,” the second Doctor points out. “And I’ve only got one life, as far as we know. Not that anybody’s really checked.”
“What happened to Donna?” Rose asks, turning back to the original Doctor.
His eyes slide away from her. He’s bright enough to realise where this line of enquiry could go. “She had a Time Lord consciousness burning up her brain,” he says, at last. “I tried to take it out of her.”
“How?” Rose asks.
Donna speaks for the first time. “He snogged it out of me,” she explains.
The blue Doctor groans impatiently. “Oh, not that again! Don’t you ever learn?”
“It worked with Rose!” he protests.
“When did you ever snog me?” Rose asks. “Apart from that time I was Cassandra - or was it you - I can’t remember.”
“He did it after you took the Vortex into yourself,” says the blue Doctor. “He didn’t want you to remember anything.”
“I was trying to protect her!” he protests.
“Oh, not much changed there, then,” Donna remarks. “I suppose that’s what this carry-on was all about? Keeping Rose safe? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but quite how she’s meant to be safe with a genocidal clone of yours and no TARDIS is an interesting question.”
“He’s not a clone,” says the Doctor, with a frown.
“Can we stop arguing about terminology?” asks the blue Doctor. “And, if it’s all right with you, I’m not very keen on being referred to as the cost of saving the Universe, born in fire and anger and blood, thank you.”
Rose would rather like to cheer for him at this point.
“This must be one of the conversations I don’t remember,” Donna says. “See, the thing is, when I came round, my last memory was you two running down the street towards each other. All this stuff about there being two of you, I’ve heard from him.”
“It’s a bit nippy out here,” Jackie complains, reminding everyone she’s still present. “Couldn’t we talk about it in the TARDIS?”
The Doctor’s obviously reluctant to let them in. He probably fears, quite rightly, that he’ll Whave a job getting rid of them. Once again, his duplicate sets the tone.
“If I go back in there,” he says, “it’s on the understanding that she’s as much my ship as yours. I might have the body of a human, but I’ve got a Time Lord’s mind. I lost Gallifrey too. The TARDIS is where I belong. And I want to be there with Rose, because she’s the person I want to spend my life with.”
The Doctor cringes as if he’s just bitten on an ice cube with a rotten tooth. He opens his mouth to argue but Donna gets in first.
“Fair enough. What about you, Rose? Nobody seems to have asked you for your opinion.”
“I stand by what I said before,” Rose replies. “I didn’t come all that way to let you leave me behind again, Doctor. I belong with you both.”
“It wouldn’t work,” the Doctor says, almost before she’s finished speaking. “Can’t have two versions of me running around the place.”
“Why not?” Jackie asks. “If she can get used to your body exploding and changing into someone else, she can handle anything. And it’s obvious you’re never going to do the proper thing and commit yourself to her.”
“That’s because it would be selfish!” he protests. “I can’t be a partner to her. She’ll want things I can’t give her.” He stumbles over his words and pulled at his fingers - Rose has no intention of rescuing him from the hole he was digging himself into.
“When will you stop deciding what I want, and try asking me?” Rose sighs. “This isn’t about what I want, it’s all about you! You’re terrified of anything happening to me. But plenty could if you leave us here, it’s just you won’t be around to see it! Do you think people aren’t going to notice him? He’s the Doctor! How long will it be before someone carts him off and starts experimenting on him?”
“You don’t have much faith in Torchwood, do you?” Jackie says, indignantly, and at that the original Doctor throws back his head and lets out a harsh, mirthless laugh.
“Oh, Pete has his heavies, and his tricks up his sleeve,” Rose agrees. “But who wants to live that way? Always on edge, wondering who’s tapping your phone or following you? You’ve got to admit, Mum, I’m pretty high profile. And who’d want to go through his life pretending to be dumber than he really is, just to fit in?”
“She’s right,” says Donna. “The TARDIS is safer than anywhere else. So you have to get along and not screw up each other’s timelines? Well, welcome to the real world, Martian Boy!”
“You tell him, Earth Girl!” the second Doctor says with a smile. “I love it when you get angry, Donna Noble.”
“You don’t know the half of it!” the Doctor grumbles. “Know what she did to get over here? After she’d thrown a drink in my face? Locked me in a blinking force field! On my own ship!”
“Stop going on about your own ship,” says Donna. “You’re gonna have to share it now. Not very good at that, are we, Mr High-and-Mighty?”
Jackie shivers and pulled her jacket round her with an exaggerated sigh.
“Time we got you home, Mrs Tyler,” Donna declares, herding them all into the TARDIS. “Don’t you have a little boy waiting for you?”
“Yeah, Tony,” Jackie replies.
“Ooh, I bet he’s a little terror, just like his big sis,” says Donna, cosying up to Jackie. “How old is he, then?
“Just turned four. He’s the image of Rose. You’d like him, Doctor. You’re not rushing off anywhere, are you? At least stay for tea. Or even for a week or two. After all, I might never see Rose again. Oh, don’t worry. I let her go a long time ago. When she’s made her mind up, that’s it, and she’ll never be happy without you…and all right, it’s a bit different having two of you, but think of all those times you’ll be having an adventure and you’ll be able to run rings around the monsters…”
The Doctor looks at Rose. His eyebrows lift in his typical outmanoeuvred gesture. They’re not home and dry yet, by a long chalk, but it looks like Jackie’s getting a lift home, at least.
And after that…well, they’ll just have to wait and see. But he’ll not get her off the TARDIS without a fight - and she’s a feeling he’ll have to take on Blue Doctor and Donna.
Hope is still a long way down the line, but it’s a start.
*****
So here they are again. Him and Rose.
Donna’s cleared off and left them to it. She’s in Tyler Towers bonding with Jackie and the other him. He gets the feeling that Jackie’s the mother Donna wishes she’d had, which makes him feel sorry for her, to be honest. Not that he’s any sort of expert on these things. He was seven years old before he even knew who his mother was - then this woman showed up from nowhere one day and started telling him human stories. If anyone had had the slightest idea what that would lead to, she’d have been banished from Gallifrey before he’d learned her name.
Everyone leaves in the end. All his people, all his companions. When they fight it and keep returning it just prolongs the agony.
Only the TARDIS is eternal. One day, she too will die, but probably long after him.
He can’t imagine life without the TARDIS, even with Rose as a consolation prize. Of course, it’s different for the other him - he’s human. Must be - he’s got human DNA. Presumably. Anyway, when he realised the way things were going on the beach, he didn’t complain. He had that resignation in his eyes that’s all too familiar - when you know it’s no use fighting something.
Ironic, really. He was the one getting the happy ending.
Or the consolation prize.
Depending on your point of view.
Rose is just sitting there watching him, perched on the jump seat like old times. He can’t bear to look at her like that, so he aimlessly circles the console, making adjustments here and there. There’s a sound from the TARDIS - half click and half clang as a bit of supporting metal relaxes and expands somewhere below decks. The old girl’s taking a well-deserved breather. There’ll be lots of maintenance checks to do when he’s back on his own. That’s good. He likes to keep busy.
He still doesn’t look at Rose. He starts to hum something under his breath, then stops. It’s not really a humming sort of situation. To be honest, he wishes she’d just go away and get it over with. How many goodbyes do they have to go through before she gets the message?
It’s not as if he won’t be all right. He’s got Donna. Best of friends. She’s exactly the right person to keep an eye on him, which presumably is what Rose was bothered about in the first place. Of course, she’ll leave him in the end; they all do. But it’s still a great life. No mortgage, no ties, free to blow wherever the Time Winds take you.
He sighs, without quite knowing why. Probably he’s just overtired.
“How long are you going to keep this up?” she asks.
“Keep what up?” he asks back. “I think the anomalizer’s playing up again. These readings are way off. Unless it’s just calibrating differently over here.”
“If you say you’re always all right, I shall probably kill you,” she threatens.
“Well.” He grinds to a halt after the meaningless syllable, rubbing the back of his neck. It’s supposed to punctuate a conversation, not to stop it. “Better me than him,” he adds, laughing with shallow heartiness. “He’s only got one life.”
“And you’ve already decided what he’s doing with it,” she pointed out.
“If he’s me - and of course he is - he’ll want to spend it with you.”
It’s the last thing he ought to have said, and if he’d been concentrating on that rather than the finer points of the data scrolling across the screen, he’d have realised that.
“For a genius, you’re incredibly stupid,” she informs him.
He looks up, frowning. “Rose, you’ve got a home to go to. Everything you ever wanted is out there, so why don’t you stop fussing over me and just go?”
It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said to her.
“You’re doing it again,” she says. “Telling me what I want. There’s only one person in your life that you haven’t worked out an answer for, and that’s yourself.”
“Thanks for the analysis,” he snaps. “I could have gone to Vienna in 1903, but you seem to know me so much better.” Yes, it’s sarcastic. Cruel, even. That’s what he does. He isn’t your cuddly Time Lord, the one you get to take home. If she doesn’t understand that by now, it’s just too bad.
“Davros would have a field day if he could see you now,” she says quietly. “Driving us all away. How long do you think you’ll last on your own?”
“I don’t know,” he mutters, after a long and awkward pause.
“Don’t you get it?” she persists. “He hates you. He wants to destroy you completely. And he’s almost succeeded.”
“You saw the whole Dalek race destroyed before your eyes,” he reminds her, looking at her at last. “I don’t think there’s much doubt that I won that round.”
“He’ll be back. All your enemies come back. Even the Master.” She hears his sharp intake of breath; he feels as if someone just reached into his body and squeezed his heart like the stone in a juicy mango. Bleeding him and sucking up the spoils. “Yes, I know about him,” she continues. “And Jack. You tried to keep us apart but I’d already done my homework. And your other self filled in the rest. He doesn’t seem to have your hang-ups.”
He’s standing at the controls, holding on to the edge of the surround and concentrating on the comforting sensation of the familiar, slightly chilly crazed porcelain that makes up the texture of his life. Suddenly he’s remembering what the Master did to the TARDIS - raped her, in effect - and he’s struggling not to lose control.
“We don’t need to talk about that,” he says. “Over and done with.”
“Nothing with you is ever over and done with,” she says. “And I’m supposed to deal with that. I’m the Virgin Mary Rose, the miracle worker who can take all the bad bits of you and make you all right again. You can go back to your own world and imagine me doing it. If anything goes wrong, you don’t have to watch.”
“That’s just morbid,” he says with a shudder.
“How would you like to be called the cost of saving the universe?” she asks. “Have someone standing there and dumping you, going on about fire and blood and revenge and war, or whatever? He’s you. You said it yourself. If he needs saving, you do it.”
“I can’t,” he stammered. He wishes this would stop.
“How many impossible things have you done in your life?” she asks. “You’re not the person who says ‘can’t.’ You don’t wimp out, you don’t give up. Stop running away. You need us.”
“What are you suggesting?” he asks. “I think we already came up with the most obvious solution.”
“I’m suggesting we travel together. The four of us.”
“It wouldn’t work.” He snaps the judgement back before he can weaken and start to think about it.
“Why?” she asks. “Because you couldn’t bear to watch me care about someone else?”
“Oh, don’t be silly!”
“Is it silly?” she asks. “If Jack had ever laid a finger on me that way, you’d have shoved him out of the airlock. Be honest.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he argues. “It’s because you need things I can’t give you that I’m giving him to you.”
“What, so I get a Doctor sex toy?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t want it!” he almost snarls at her.
“Makes two of us, Doctor! And maybe you’re right. Maybe be we can’t do it, or we shouldn’t or we won’t…and here you are again, telling me what humans want. And what you think you don’t deserve.”
He’s had enough. “Rose, I’ve had those things. Family. All that kind of stuff.” He can’t go on for a minute - this is more, far more, than he’s ever said to her before, and he can only do it on the understanding that they’ll never see each other again.
He gulps hard and ploughs on. “And I lost them. Every one. When I look at someone that way, I can’t help it - I see their faces, all the people I lost. I can’t do it again. It…it…”
Now he really can’t go on. He’s just standing there, trying to hold himself together, and it isn’t working, and it shows, and she can see it. Her face is half shocked and half compassionate. She knows how much he’d hate her to pity him and so she’s trying not to. He needs his pride. There’s only him between the universe and everybody who needs saving and…everything else. If he falls apart, that’s it. Finito.
He hears Donna’s voice. She must have come back in - unusually silently for her. He wonders how much she’s heard.
“I’m going to say what I said before,” she tells him. “I know how all that ended. I saw you let someone in, and then lose her, and you hid it all away but it’s gone on hurting. I still think I was right, though.”
He sees Rose’s eyebrows rise questioningly. She probably thinks he had a fling with someone else and he can’t think why he feels the need to set her straight on that score. Talk about illogical, Captain.
“Don’t go into all that now,” he orders Donna, without turning around.
She doesn’t come any closer. She’s always understood how to protect him, how to keep the right distance.
And he knows exactly what she’s going to say, so he pre-empts it. “You think I’m wrong.”
“I know you’re wrong,” she answers. “I’ve wondered…I encouraged you to open up and let Jenny in, and you did and then she died, and I’ve gone back and forth and wondered if I made it worse for you.” She stops. “Look at me.”
What was that about distance, he wonders? Slowly, he does as he’s told.
And he’s glad he did. Because there’s something about the way Donna’s looking at him that takes him out of his martyr’s bubble, just for a moment, and makes his senses tingle with the sense of beginning an adventure of the heart. For all her bluster, Donna’s a very straight, no bullshit kind of person. What you see is what you get.
“And you know what?” she says. “Seeing you warm up, start smiling again, looking at her with all that pride and love, was just incredible. You are such an amazing bloke when you let it show. It’s worth it. Worth all the pain. You cut yourself off from feeling those things and you might as well be a Dalek, trapped inside your metal shell.”
“No wonder they scream,” Rose murmurs, and he knows she’s remembering Canary Wharf.
“You’ve not lost anyone,” he protests.
“Course I have!” she retorts. “What about my Dad - he had a heart attack six months after that wedding. D’you think I didn’t feel guilty? D’you think Mum never happened to mention it? And what about Lance? I watched him die right in front of me.”
And he treated her like dirt. She was there in the TARDIS, in her wedding dress, crying, and he hadn’t a clue what to do with her.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“I should bloody well think so,” she says, with no obvious rancour. “Look, spaceman. Me an’ Rose here, we’ve seen the mess the world gets into when you give up. We’re not gonna let it happen. You’re a right complicated bastard and that’s before there were two of you. Nobody can promise it’ll be easy, the four of us together, but it’s a lot better than you going emo and emptying the Thames.”
Rose hasn’t caught up yet - he can tell by her expression.
“Go on,” he tells her. “You’re dying to ask.”
“Ask what?” she says, trying to sound innocent.
“Jenny,” he says. “You want to know who she was, don’t you?”
She could shove it all back where it came from. Back in the bottle - file away under, “I was a dad once.” But she’s not that nice little girl any more. All that niceness was - well - very nice. But not always very good for him.
“Well,” she admits. “Since you ask.”
“She was my daughter,” he begins. “But not in the way you think.”
Chapter Two
Chapter One
WORDS: 3967
SPOILERS: Up to JE
CHARACTERS: (this chapter) Doctor (10), Doctor (10.5), Donna, Rose, Jackie
RATING: G
For all the people who wanted more Emotional Baggage, here it is - because the thought of carrying on post JE was irresistible (though also AU, by definition).
No infringement of the BBC's intellectual property is intended or implied.
The Doctor and Donna have returned to Bad Wolf Bay, but can anything convince the Doctor he has a right to happiness? And how can he exercise it without other people getting hurt?
Tell me, where is fancy bred?
Or in the heart, or in the head,
How begot, how nourish’d?
Reply, reply.
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Rose waits for the Doctor to make the next move. She’s nothing left to say. The switchback of hope and despair he’s forced on her since their reunion has left her too exhausted to fight him any more. Angry in his absence, she finds herself resigned to whatever fate his skewed imagination might have in store for them now he’s back before her eyes. She’s realised that his taste for self-flagellation has become the dominant force in their relationship - it’s such a bleak conclusion that she’s beginning to wonder whether his alternative version would be a better bet, after all.
He seems to have returned against his will, and she doesn’t understand why Donna chose to make an issue of it when she seemed quite supportive last time around. Whatever game he’s playing, she’s trying not to analyse it. If she did, she’d go crazy. All through the years without him she feared one thing - that they’d meet again and she’d find his love for her had cooled or, worse still, that she’d only imagined it in the first place.
Within a second of him catching sight of her again, she knew she’d nothing to worry about on that score. His face bloomed from disbelief, to bewilderment, to unaffected joy, and even the bolt from the Dalek couldn’t dim it. The casual words he’d spoken were just his way of dealing with his feelings for her. For her, that wonderful moment had cancelled out all the grief that had preceded it.
The next few hours they’d lived through minute by minute. There was no point in contemplating a future there might not be one, but two particular moments stood out from the blur of activity in her mind. First, the way she’d taken his hand when they thought they’d lost the TARDIS; he’d accepted it without a word or a look in her direction, but she’d felt through his fingertips how deeply he valued her comforting presence beside him. If she’d allowed herself to look beyond the present, she’d have assumed at that moment that only death would part them again.
But the second moment she recalled was very different. The memory of it sends a chill through her - it was the certainty that he’d taken the taunts from Davros seriously; never had she seen him more broken than that. Their first farewell at Bad Wolf Bay had been bad enough, but at least it had only closed off one possibility - that of a future with him. This time, she realised that he’d turn his back on any company. It was too horrible to believe and she’d pushed it to the back of her mind, convincing herself that they’d find time to discuss it later. She should have known him better than that. He’d made sure that such an opportunity did not arise.
So here he is in front of her again, apparently ready to talk - not that you can ever quite predict anything with the Doctor. But he seems as tongue-tied as her. What emotions are going through that mind of his, she wonders? Fear, hope, remorse, embarrassment? Can she even be bothered to ask those questions any more? His logic when he left her with the other Doctor had been so irrational, so perverted, that she knows how difficult it would be to convince him of any reality other than his own.
Finally, the other Doctor comes to her rescue. “I think Rose is trying to say that home is where the heart is,” he remarks. “And in her case, that’s probably the TARDIS.”
He is different, Rose thinks - the original Doctor could never say anything so emotionally revealing. But what’s the same? Is he a Time Lord trapped in a human body, or a human enhanced by a Time Lord’s brain? Do his attitudes come from his head or his single heart? What, if anything, makes him alien?
She turns around and sees love in his eyes, perhaps enough to last a lifetime. “What about you?” she asks.
“I’m a Time Lord,” he says. He sounds very certain. “That’s the reality. The other reality is that I love you and I want to spend my life with you. To do that without the TARDIS would be hard, but not impossible.”
“You could grow another one,” the Doctor argues.
“Bit of a long term project, that,” the second Doctor points out. “And I’ve only got one life, as far as we know. Not that anybody’s really checked.”
“What happened to Donna?” Rose asks, turning back to the original Doctor.
His eyes slide away from her. He’s bright enough to realise where this line of enquiry could go. “She had a Time Lord consciousness burning up her brain,” he says, at last. “I tried to take it out of her.”
“How?” Rose asks.
Donna speaks for the first time. “He snogged it out of me,” she explains.
The blue Doctor groans impatiently. “Oh, not that again! Don’t you ever learn?”
“It worked with Rose!” he protests.
“When did you ever snog me?” Rose asks. “Apart from that time I was Cassandra - or was it you - I can’t remember.”
“He did it after you took the Vortex into yourself,” says the blue Doctor. “He didn’t want you to remember anything.”
“I was trying to protect her!” he protests.
“Oh, not much changed there, then,” Donna remarks. “I suppose that’s what this carry-on was all about? Keeping Rose safe? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but quite how she’s meant to be safe with a genocidal clone of yours and no TARDIS is an interesting question.”
“He’s not a clone,” says the Doctor, with a frown.
“Can we stop arguing about terminology?” asks the blue Doctor. “And, if it’s all right with you, I’m not very keen on being referred to as the cost of saving the Universe, born in fire and anger and blood, thank you.”
Rose would rather like to cheer for him at this point.
“This must be one of the conversations I don’t remember,” Donna says. “See, the thing is, when I came round, my last memory was you two running down the street towards each other. All this stuff about there being two of you, I’ve heard from him.”
“It’s a bit nippy out here,” Jackie complains, reminding everyone she’s still present. “Couldn’t we talk about it in the TARDIS?”
The Doctor’s obviously reluctant to let them in. He probably fears, quite rightly, that he’ll Whave a job getting rid of them. Once again, his duplicate sets the tone.
“If I go back in there,” he says, “it’s on the understanding that she’s as much my ship as yours. I might have the body of a human, but I’ve got a Time Lord’s mind. I lost Gallifrey too. The TARDIS is where I belong. And I want to be there with Rose, because she’s the person I want to spend my life with.”
The Doctor cringes as if he’s just bitten on an ice cube with a rotten tooth. He opens his mouth to argue but Donna gets in first.
“Fair enough. What about you, Rose? Nobody seems to have asked you for your opinion.”
“I stand by what I said before,” Rose replies. “I didn’t come all that way to let you leave me behind again, Doctor. I belong with you both.”
“It wouldn’t work,” the Doctor says, almost before she’s finished speaking. “Can’t have two versions of me running around the place.”
“Why not?” Jackie asks. “If she can get used to your body exploding and changing into someone else, she can handle anything. And it’s obvious you’re never going to do the proper thing and commit yourself to her.”
“That’s because it would be selfish!” he protests. “I can’t be a partner to her. She’ll want things I can’t give her.” He stumbles over his words and pulled at his fingers - Rose has no intention of rescuing him from the hole he was digging himself into.
“When will you stop deciding what I want, and try asking me?” Rose sighs. “This isn’t about what I want, it’s all about you! You’re terrified of anything happening to me. But plenty could if you leave us here, it’s just you won’t be around to see it! Do you think people aren’t going to notice him? He’s the Doctor! How long will it be before someone carts him off and starts experimenting on him?”
“You don’t have much faith in Torchwood, do you?” Jackie says, indignantly, and at that the original Doctor throws back his head and lets out a harsh, mirthless laugh.
“Oh, Pete has his heavies, and his tricks up his sleeve,” Rose agrees. “But who wants to live that way? Always on edge, wondering who’s tapping your phone or following you? You’ve got to admit, Mum, I’m pretty high profile. And who’d want to go through his life pretending to be dumber than he really is, just to fit in?”
“She’s right,” says Donna. “The TARDIS is safer than anywhere else. So you have to get along and not screw up each other’s timelines? Well, welcome to the real world, Martian Boy!”
“You tell him, Earth Girl!” the second Doctor says with a smile. “I love it when you get angry, Donna Noble.”
“You don’t know the half of it!” the Doctor grumbles. “Know what she did to get over here? After she’d thrown a drink in my face? Locked me in a blinking force field! On my own ship!”
“Stop going on about your own ship,” says Donna. “You’re gonna have to share it now. Not very good at that, are we, Mr High-and-Mighty?”
Jackie shivers and pulled her jacket round her with an exaggerated sigh.
“Time we got you home, Mrs Tyler,” Donna declares, herding them all into the TARDIS. “Don’t you have a little boy waiting for you?”
“Yeah, Tony,” Jackie replies.
“Ooh, I bet he’s a little terror, just like his big sis,” says Donna, cosying up to Jackie. “How old is he, then?
“Just turned four. He’s the image of Rose. You’d like him, Doctor. You’re not rushing off anywhere, are you? At least stay for tea. Or even for a week or two. After all, I might never see Rose again. Oh, don’t worry. I let her go a long time ago. When she’s made her mind up, that’s it, and she’ll never be happy without you…and all right, it’s a bit different having two of you, but think of all those times you’ll be having an adventure and you’ll be able to run rings around the monsters…”
The Doctor looks at Rose. His eyebrows lift in his typical outmanoeuvred gesture. They’re not home and dry yet, by a long chalk, but it looks like Jackie’s getting a lift home, at least.
And after that…well, they’ll just have to wait and see. But he’ll not get her off the TARDIS without a fight - and she’s a feeling he’ll have to take on Blue Doctor and Donna.
Hope is still a long way down the line, but it’s a start.
*****
So here they are again. Him and Rose.
Donna’s cleared off and left them to it. She’s in Tyler Towers bonding with Jackie and the other him. He gets the feeling that Jackie’s the mother Donna wishes she’d had, which makes him feel sorry for her, to be honest. Not that he’s any sort of expert on these things. He was seven years old before he even knew who his mother was - then this woman showed up from nowhere one day and started telling him human stories. If anyone had had the slightest idea what that would lead to, she’d have been banished from Gallifrey before he’d learned her name.
Everyone leaves in the end. All his people, all his companions. When they fight it and keep returning it just prolongs the agony.
Only the TARDIS is eternal. One day, she too will die, but probably long after him.
He can’t imagine life without the TARDIS, even with Rose as a consolation prize. Of course, it’s different for the other him - he’s human. Must be - he’s got human DNA. Presumably. Anyway, when he realised the way things were going on the beach, he didn’t complain. He had that resignation in his eyes that’s all too familiar - when you know it’s no use fighting something.
Ironic, really. He was the one getting the happy ending.
Or the consolation prize.
Depending on your point of view.
Rose is just sitting there watching him, perched on the jump seat like old times. He can’t bear to look at her like that, so he aimlessly circles the console, making adjustments here and there. There’s a sound from the TARDIS - half click and half clang as a bit of supporting metal relaxes and expands somewhere below decks. The old girl’s taking a well-deserved breather. There’ll be lots of maintenance checks to do when he’s back on his own. That’s good. He likes to keep busy.
He still doesn’t look at Rose. He starts to hum something under his breath, then stops. It’s not really a humming sort of situation. To be honest, he wishes she’d just go away and get it over with. How many goodbyes do they have to go through before she gets the message?
It’s not as if he won’t be all right. He’s got Donna. Best of friends. She’s exactly the right person to keep an eye on him, which presumably is what Rose was bothered about in the first place. Of course, she’ll leave him in the end; they all do. But it’s still a great life. No mortgage, no ties, free to blow wherever the Time Winds take you.
He sighs, without quite knowing why. Probably he’s just overtired.
“How long are you going to keep this up?” she asks.
“Keep what up?” he asks back. “I think the anomalizer’s playing up again. These readings are way off. Unless it’s just calibrating differently over here.”
“If you say you’re always all right, I shall probably kill you,” she threatens.
“Well.” He grinds to a halt after the meaningless syllable, rubbing the back of his neck. It’s supposed to punctuate a conversation, not to stop it. “Better me than him,” he adds, laughing with shallow heartiness. “He’s only got one life.”
“And you’ve already decided what he’s doing with it,” she pointed out.
“If he’s me - and of course he is - he’ll want to spend it with you.”
It’s the last thing he ought to have said, and if he’d been concentrating on that rather than the finer points of the data scrolling across the screen, he’d have realised that.
“For a genius, you’re incredibly stupid,” she informs him.
He looks up, frowning. “Rose, you’ve got a home to go to. Everything you ever wanted is out there, so why don’t you stop fussing over me and just go?”
It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said to her.
“You’re doing it again,” she says. “Telling me what I want. There’s only one person in your life that you haven’t worked out an answer for, and that’s yourself.”
“Thanks for the analysis,” he snaps. “I could have gone to Vienna in 1903, but you seem to know me so much better.” Yes, it’s sarcastic. Cruel, even. That’s what he does. He isn’t your cuddly Time Lord, the one you get to take home. If she doesn’t understand that by now, it’s just too bad.
“Davros would have a field day if he could see you now,” she says quietly. “Driving us all away. How long do you think you’ll last on your own?”
“I don’t know,” he mutters, after a long and awkward pause.
“Don’t you get it?” she persists. “He hates you. He wants to destroy you completely. And he’s almost succeeded.”
“You saw the whole Dalek race destroyed before your eyes,” he reminds her, looking at her at last. “I don’t think there’s much doubt that I won that round.”
“He’ll be back. All your enemies come back. Even the Master.” She hears his sharp intake of breath; he feels as if someone just reached into his body and squeezed his heart like the stone in a juicy mango. Bleeding him and sucking up the spoils. “Yes, I know about him,” she continues. “And Jack. You tried to keep us apart but I’d already done my homework. And your other self filled in the rest. He doesn’t seem to have your hang-ups.”
He’s standing at the controls, holding on to the edge of the surround and concentrating on the comforting sensation of the familiar, slightly chilly crazed porcelain that makes up the texture of his life. Suddenly he’s remembering what the Master did to the TARDIS - raped her, in effect - and he’s struggling not to lose control.
“We don’t need to talk about that,” he says. “Over and done with.”
“Nothing with you is ever over and done with,” she says. “And I’m supposed to deal with that. I’m the Virgin Mary Rose, the miracle worker who can take all the bad bits of you and make you all right again. You can go back to your own world and imagine me doing it. If anything goes wrong, you don’t have to watch.”
“That’s just morbid,” he says with a shudder.
“How would you like to be called the cost of saving the universe?” she asks. “Have someone standing there and dumping you, going on about fire and blood and revenge and war, or whatever? He’s you. You said it yourself. If he needs saving, you do it.”
“I can’t,” he stammered. He wishes this would stop.
“How many impossible things have you done in your life?” she asks. “You’re not the person who says ‘can’t.’ You don’t wimp out, you don’t give up. Stop running away. You need us.”
“What are you suggesting?” he asks. “I think we already came up with the most obvious solution.”
“I’m suggesting we travel together. The four of us.”
“It wouldn’t work.” He snaps the judgement back before he can weaken and start to think about it.
“Why?” she asks. “Because you couldn’t bear to watch me care about someone else?”
“Oh, don’t be silly!”
“Is it silly?” she asks. “If Jack had ever laid a finger on me that way, you’d have shoved him out of the airlock. Be honest.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he argues. “It’s because you need things I can’t give you that I’m giving him to you.”
“What, so I get a Doctor sex toy?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t want it!” he almost snarls at her.
“Makes two of us, Doctor! And maybe you’re right. Maybe be we can’t do it, or we shouldn’t or we won’t…and here you are again, telling me what humans want. And what you think you don’t deserve.”
He’s had enough. “Rose, I’ve had those things. Family. All that kind of stuff.” He can’t go on for a minute - this is more, far more, than he’s ever said to her before, and he can only do it on the understanding that they’ll never see each other again.
He gulps hard and ploughs on. “And I lost them. Every one. When I look at someone that way, I can’t help it - I see their faces, all the people I lost. I can’t do it again. It…it…”
Now he really can’t go on. He’s just standing there, trying to hold himself together, and it isn’t working, and it shows, and she can see it. Her face is half shocked and half compassionate. She knows how much he’d hate her to pity him and so she’s trying not to. He needs his pride. There’s only him between the universe and everybody who needs saving and…everything else. If he falls apart, that’s it. Finito.
He hears Donna’s voice. She must have come back in - unusually silently for her. He wonders how much she’s heard.
“I’m going to say what I said before,” she tells him. “I know how all that ended. I saw you let someone in, and then lose her, and you hid it all away but it’s gone on hurting. I still think I was right, though.”
He sees Rose’s eyebrows rise questioningly. She probably thinks he had a fling with someone else and he can’t think why he feels the need to set her straight on that score. Talk about illogical, Captain.
“Don’t go into all that now,” he orders Donna, without turning around.
She doesn’t come any closer. She’s always understood how to protect him, how to keep the right distance.
And he knows exactly what she’s going to say, so he pre-empts it. “You think I’m wrong.”
“I know you’re wrong,” she answers. “I’ve wondered…I encouraged you to open up and let Jenny in, and you did and then she died, and I’ve gone back and forth and wondered if I made it worse for you.” She stops. “Look at me.”
What was that about distance, he wonders? Slowly, he does as he’s told.
And he’s glad he did. Because there’s something about the way Donna’s looking at him that takes him out of his martyr’s bubble, just for a moment, and makes his senses tingle with the sense of beginning an adventure of the heart. For all her bluster, Donna’s a very straight, no bullshit kind of person. What you see is what you get.
“And you know what?” she says. “Seeing you warm up, start smiling again, looking at her with all that pride and love, was just incredible. You are such an amazing bloke when you let it show. It’s worth it. Worth all the pain. You cut yourself off from feeling those things and you might as well be a Dalek, trapped inside your metal shell.”
“No wonder they scream,” Rose murmurs, and he knows she’s remembering Canary Wharf.
“You’ve not lost anyone,” he protests.
“Course I have!” she retorts. “What about my Dad - he had a heart attack six months after that wedding. D’you think I didn’t feel guilty? D’you think Mum never happened to mention it? And what about Lance? I watched him die right in front of me.”
And he treated her like dirt. She was there in the TARDIS, in her wedding dress, crying, and he hadn’t a clue what to do with her.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“I should bloody well think so,” she says, with no obvious rancour. “Look, spaceman. Me an’ Rose here, we’ve seen the mess the world gets into when you give up. We’re not gonna let it happen. You’re a right complicated bastard and that’s before there were two of you. Nobody can promise it’ll be easy, the four of us together, but it’s a lot better than you going emo and emptying the Thames.”
Rose hasn’t caught up yet - he can tell by her expression.
“Go on,” he tells her. “You’re dying to ask.”
“Ask what?” she says, trying to sound innocent.
“Jenny,” he says. “You want to know who she was, don’t you?”
She could shove it all back where it came from. Back in the bottle - file away under, “I was a dad once.” But she’s not that nice little girl any more. All that niceness was - well - very nice. But not always very good for him.
“Well,” she admits. “Since you ask.”
“She was my daughter,” he begins. “But not in the way you think.”
Chapter Two
Chapter One