Fic: The Doctor and His Time Ladies (Chapter 10)
Title: The Doctor and His Time Ladies
Author: country_who
Rating: PG
Word Count (This chapter): 5200
Genre: AU, Action/Adventure
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, Tenth Doctor, Human Doctor, Rose, Jenny, Jack
Summary: AU Journey's End. Rose gets trapped in the TARDIS instead of Donna and now holds the mind of a Time Lord protected by the Bad Wolf, but what happens when the human Doctor dies, and the Time Lord tries to take her to a planet to get her mind off of him, and fulfill a promise? Does the Doctor have more to lose than gain?
Author's Note: Thanks to othermewriter who solidified the main ideas swimming in the soup I call my brain.
Prologue| Chapter 1| Chapter 2| Chapter 3| Chapter 4| Chapter 5| Chapter 6| Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9
Jack watched helplessly as Rose tossed and turned on the ground, whimpering incoherently. Every now and then he would hear Rose say what he thought was a word, but he couldn’t be sure. Whatever it was she was really saying it sounded a lot like, ‘Doctor.” He was trying his best to calm her, in an attempt to try to make her get some real rest, but he couldn’t. Every time he reached out to touch her, she gave a strangled scream and flung herself away from him erratically.
She was terrified of him, and it was eating him up inside. They were best friends, and so much more than that. They were like a brother and sister- a twin brother and sister. He would fight until the end of the universe to make sure she was safe, and Jack knew deep down that Rose would do the same thing for him. She had saved his life countless times in more ways than just making him immortal. She made him better, just like she did to the Doctor. Just like she did to everyone she had ever touched.
Sure, she would have denied it; she didn’t think she was anything special. She thought that she was just an ordinary girl from the shops, from a time period and a planet that was so tiny and insignificant that the wonders of the universe that were out there.
Once again, he tried to touch her shoulder, and this time she didn’t pull away, she just trembled under his touch.
It was the fever, and Jack knew it. Even without anything to measure it with, Jack knew it had gone far beyond what was even deemed safe for a human hours ago. Yet, she still shivered like she was freezing to death, while the color in her cheeks left her and she turned ghastly gray. Her body refused to sweat and help alleviate the fever, while she craved more warmth and tried to weakly wrap her arms around herself. Jack didn’t want to admit it, but she looked like death.
His chest ached to make her well, while he reached down and placed a hand on her shoulder, while she tried to roll over onto her side.
“Easy now, Rose,” Jack said gently, pressing both his hands down on her shoulders, while she weakly tried to resist him.
“Et ee oh,” Rose mumbled incoherently and shivered harder.
Jack raised an eyebrow at her and gently stroked her face with his fingers, trying to coax her back awake, so that she might tell him some way of helping her. Her hair was soft under his touch while he brushed it out of her face caringly.
“Wanna run that past me again?” Jack asked, forcing levity into his voice and listening intently for Rose’s reply.
He thought he knew what she had asked of him, but he didn’t want it to be true. He didn’t want her to reject him. The desire to make all of her pain go away was running rampant through his veins.
Suddenly anger washed over him, as he looked at Rose anew. She looked just as weak as before, but now when he saw it, he didn’t just see a friend in need. He saw the men who had drugged him and dragged him in here. Rage over whelmed him as he bit tongue hard enough to draw blood and tried not to show his rage to her, who was already afraid enough. No one had the right to make Rose afraid. They wouldn’t have been able to accomplish it had it not been for them taking the easy way out and using chemicals. It was the way of cowards.
Jack shook his head at himself. He couldn’t think about that now. He had to focus on Rose. He knelt down a bit farther and tightened his grip a bit around her arms again.
“Let me go,” Rose said, pausing between each word to catch a breath.
Jack eased up and let Rose go. As soon as he let go of her shoulders, she visibly relaxed and almost subconsciously moved herself as far away from him as possible. She kept moving until she met the wall and slumped against it, breathing deeply. She drew herself up with the palms of her hand and forced her eyes open.
“W-who are you,” Rose asked, breathlessly, while she pulled her hair back with her hands and got a good look at her cellmate. “What have you done to me?”
Jack looked taken aback and tried to reach out to her, but pulled back when she pulled away with fear in her eyes. Rose Tyler didn’t remember him. It felt like getting slapped in the face or punched or both at the same time. There wasn’t a glimmer of trust in her eyes, while she stared back at him clearly trying to fight it. She didn’t want to trust him, she wanted to hate him. If she hated him for doing this to her then everything would make sense. It was like putting a face to a crime.
Jack had never seen that in Rose before. Even when they first met she was suspicious, but there was still that little something about the way she looked at him that said that she believed in him. Granted, it might have been because he saved her life and healed her hands. How was he going to do that again with nothing?
She kept creeping closer to the locked door, inch by inch, but she never took her eyes off of him. One of her hands went to the door and she reached up and tried to move the door knob. When she found it locked, she became more frantic screaming to herself while she tried desperately to get it open.
“Come on,” she shouted, through gritted teeth. “Please.” Every word became a desperate plea and lost its strength and power with each passing second. “Open, please.”
“It’s locked, Rose,” Jack told her, stopping himself from trying to hold her as she slumped down the door and covered her hands with her face.
He had to look away for a minute, the pain of seeing Rose sob was too much for even him to bear. Over the endless years that he had been immortal, he thought he would become hardened to it. He should be able to handle himself better in these situations by now. It shouldn’t break him to pieces like this.
He should have been able to help her. He should be there to comfort her.
It seemed like hours before she actually stopped sobbing. Jack had actually moved to the other side of the cell and turned his head so that it was facing the other side of the wall. He didn’t notice that she was staring at him through red rimmed and swollen eyes.
“You called me, Rose. Why?” Rose asked out of the blue, startling at Jack and causing him to look at her in a bemused expression.
“What?”
“Why’d you call me ‘Rose’?” Rose repeated, while she gave him a hard stare, trying to look tougher than she was, but failing miserably.
She was tired and in pain, all she wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep, but she couldn’t-not yet anyway. What would happen when she fell victim to it? She wasn’t going to trust her cellmate yet. She looked to the side where most of the pain was stemming from and she bit her lip. Her entire sleeve was covered in dark red blood with rivulets running down her arm and tracing paths all the way down her fingers and dripping onto the floor. The flesh was being eaten away slowly and painfully, while the burning intensified. She forced herself to look away and focus on her cell mate.
He was hansom with cool blue eyes filled with concern. His jaw-line was firm and wide with a small dimple in the middle of it. He seemed to have knowledge beyond his years as he stared at her. She imagined that he would fit better in the body of an ancient man than the one he currently resided in. His hair was short cut and somehow perfect despite it being obvious that he hadn’t done much to it.
Had she just been judging by his eyes, she might have trusted him straight off, but the rest of him confused her. He wasn’t right and she couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.
“That’s your name,” Jack said, in a gentle voice, knowing this was hard on her.
Jack’s words broke her out of her reverie, and she listened intently.
“H-how d’you know that?” Rose asked softly, backing against the wall more a wincing as she gripped her arm in pain.
“I’m your friend, Jack, from a long time ago. We were talking, laughing about two hours ago, before you fell asleep. D’you remember?”
Rose shook her head.
“I don’t… don’t remember anything,” Rose muttered, looking around her and swallowing hard. “How can I trust you? You might’ve done this to me. I… you might have done more to me.”
Jack shook his head. “You know better than that Rose. Look deep. Look at me. I’m not dangerous and you know it. I’m locked in a cell same as you.”
Rose didn’t look convinced. She stared at him while he motioned to with his hands up and down his upper torso. He was in fact trapped in the same cell as her, but he wasn’t freezing to death, he wasn’t in pain and he wasn’t suffering from memory loss. This had to be a trick. It couldn’t be real. She needed to get out. She needed to be safe.
“You’re not ill,” Rose said finally.
“Drugs didn’t work on me,” Jack said honestly, risking an inch forward. This time Rose didn’t pull back. “You’re here with the Doctor. D’you remember him?”
Rose shook her head from side to side, but winced after two times and squeezed her eyes shut to stop the room from tilting. She held her hands on the side of her head and thought back. ‘The Doctor,’ that was a strange name, but something about it made her feel warm from the inside out. The phrase alone made her want to pick up and run to where ever this man was. If only she could remember.
“He’s your best friend in the whole universe,” Jack told her. He’s the man you love more than any other he added silently in his mind. “You travel with him.”
“Travel?” Rose asked disbelievingly.
“Into time and space,” Jack confirmed with a feigned gusto. He took another step forward and this time Rose actually leaned forward. She was looking at him harder, like he had told her to. Her eyes scanned him for something that wasn’t visible. She didn’t know what it was, but something was familiar about him. That intangible thing that she had thought was beyond wrong before felt so right now.
Some where, she saw him and two other men. One was wearing a leather jacket and beaming as the Jack in the vision shouted ‘into time,’ gleefully. The second was standing around like he didn’t know what to say or do. Her vision spun as she felt herself turning and her own hand reach up and touch Jack’s as well as the man in leather’s while they all said the last part of the phrase together. They seemed excited about the time travel, like it was the most magical thing in the world to the, but something so every day at the time.
“I think,” Rose muttered, reaching out her hand so that Jack could take it in his while he sat down next to her. “Possibly. I…”
Rose closed her eyes, thinking hard while she tried to see the image of the man in her mind’s eye again. She liked him. He was very right. His bright blue eyes were icy, but yielded to some kind of warmth that she couldn’t quite name. His smile was bright and kind, but there was still an edge to him from far too many losses in life. She traced his outline, giggling at his ears to herself and smiling.
“He’s… he’s got big ears,” Rose said dimly, while she looked over at Jack who was beaming at her.
“That he did, right before his regeneration.”
Jack used this moment of trust to reach over to Rose’s arm and peer under her shirt sleeve, where blood was continuing running freely down her arm. A wince came over her as he pressed her fingers into the flesh, trying to avoid the blisters beginning to form on the edge of the growing wound.
Stripping his shirt so that he was only wearing a thin white vest, Jack began to tear it into bandage strips, wonder why he hadn’t thought of it earlier. Rose watched him closely while he made short work of the fabric. Her eyes were curious as he reached over and pressed the largest section of the wound and motioned for Rose to hold it in place while he tied off the other strips.
“Regeneration,” Rose muttered to herself, while she watched Jack continue his work as gingerly as he could.
She closed her eyes and tried to see again. The word was cold, clinical and petrifying, so why did she think it was so beautiful?
In her mind’s eye, she saw the man in leather again. He was smiling, but she knew he was in more pain than he would let on. Everything is silent in this memory. A moment of silence, maybe, or maybe it was because at the time the last thing that Rose was focused on was what the man was saying. Her attention had been drawn to the crippling thought of losing him. The expression on his face spoke far much more than the frivolous words that slipped from his lips.
It wasn’t until he said his last sentence that she could finally hear the words that he was saying. “…absolutely fantastic and you know what? So was I.” With that the man burst into flames as the energy flowing from his hands and face shook the room they were standing in. She was forced to look away from the sight and looked back when a new man was standing in the other man’s place.
He was younger than the other man; with wild hair and doe brown eyes that seemed to glow brighter the more he smiled. He took her hand and said worlds that made her heart melt.
“My Doctor,” Rose whispered to herself, before she turned her head to look at Jack, already beginning to tie off the last of the makeshift bandages.
“All done,” Jack said with a hint of triumph, while he ran his hand over the bandage. “How’s it feel? Not too tight or painful?”
Rose shook her head and noticed how in fact the bandage seemed to be helping somewhat with the throbbing. She flexed her arm experimentally, and noticed that the flesh was still sore and the muscle was beginning to become affected as she noticed the limited control over her own appendage as it hung partially lip at her side.
“Fine thanks,” Rose told him with a smile to hide her worry, while she leaned on his shoulder and closed her eyes. “Tell me about him. What sort of a doctor is he?”
“He’s your Doctor,” Jack said teasingly, but hurried to explain when he caught Rose’s confused expression. “His name’s the Doctor. He’s a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He travels and picks up passengers basically.”
“Like strays?” Rose asked.
“I suppose,” Jack said with a shrug. “He’s lonely. His planet was destroyed.”
Rose nodded, thinking back hard and remembering a little chippie where the man in leather sat her down and told her the truth. She couldn’t recall the exact moment that he lied to her or if he ever truly did instead of simply omitting some of the details in his life, but she still felt relief. He was opening up to her, after every other human or alien companion that he could have opened up to he had opened up to her.
“I don’t know much about the Time Lords myself,” Jack explained and gave Rose an apologetic look, “just the legends and tales from centuries ago. The observers of the universe. They were from Gallifrey, ‘the Shining World of the Seventh System’.”
“He’s the last?” Rose asked.
“Yes,” Jack said, watching Rose carefully for her reaction, but there wasn’t one.
“We are friends?” Rose questioned in a soft voice, looking down at her finger and noticing the ring there. “We’re not married or anything?”
Jack looked at the ring with a surprised expression and gently lifted her hand in his and looked at the band. Rose wasn’t married-he knew that. She said it was just a few days for them since they had been together when the stars were going out. The Doctor certainly didn’t work that fast, especially after everything Rose had told him before her mind went in the safe direction that her body had gone in.
“May I?” Jack asked, while he put his fingers around the golden band and looked at Rose expectantly.
She nodded, watching Jack slide the item from her finger. Part of her wanted to tell Jack no. This was something she had been waiting for to happen since she had met that man, but she couldn’t, because she couldn’t remember why she wanted it. Instead, she found herself holding her breath, while the ring, warmed by her body heat was slid from her finger by Jack’s careful touch.
He held the item flat on his hands for a moment and just stared at it, before he turned it over and rolled it over on his palm with his finger. He couldn’t find a tracking device on it, or anything that seemed suspicious. Briefly, he flirted with the idea that maybe this was a wedding ring, but when he searched the inside the ring for an inscription, there wasn’t on. It was just a cold metallic thing with no love behind it. He turned it over in his hand again and traced the outside of it with his index finger before drawing a deep breath of defeat.
“I don’t know,” Jack said, handing her the ring back, while she slid it back into place. “Maybe it’s just a ring?”
“Maybe,” Rose said softly, while she moved her fingers and watched as the ring glinted in the harsh artificial light of the room. She bit her lip and moved so that her hands were shoved in the pockets of her jeans out of sight.
Rose closed her eyes tightly and forced her tears away. She was strong, that something she knew for certain. She was a survivor and a ring wasn’t going to change that. She was a woman, she wore jewelry, and surely she had just slid the item on arbitrarily without giving it a second thought in the world.
“Rose,” Jack said softly.
“I’m fine,” she said in a partially broken voice wiping her hand across her nose and sniffing. “H-how long have we been in here?”
“Me? A few days,” Jack replied thankful for the change in subject. “You’ve been here for ‘bout four hours. The Doctor’ll come though. You can believe in him.”
“Do you, though?” Rose asked softly.
“More than anyone else,” Jack replied, and laid a soft hand on her knee. “And, so do you.” He caught a glint in his eyes and smiled surely at Rose, while he winked at her. “He’s probably tearing the whole planet apart just to find you. His Rose.”
“He seems like more than a friend,” Rose said, with a note of challenge to her voice. She had seen the fleeting memories of him; every one of them had the same fleeting tone, love. She loved that man even if he didn’t love her back. She would follow him to the end of the universe and back and not think twice. She would hold him forever if he would just let her.
Jack gave her a sage nod and gave her a lazy smirk. Of course she would figure it out. She was clever, cleverer than the Doctor and certainly cleverer than him. Her eyes absolutely burned with the knowledge of knowing that he was keeping something from her.
“Yeah, with you two it is more than a friendship, but it’s complicated,” Jack explained, rubbing his eyes and looking at Rose. There were gaps from what the Doctor hadn’t told him, what he had withheld. He had only truly spoken about Rose fleetingly when he had run into that room filled with stet radiation and during the few moments they had spent together during the year that never was. They had found themselves regressing to the past where they were both happy to keep their minds off of the present. Somehow, they both seemed to default back to Rose, despite the pain it brought them both to know she was gone.
“You were separated, the Doctor won’t tell me how exactly but there was a battle at Canary Warf. Does that sound familiar?” Jack asked.
Rose thought back, scrunching up her nose and closed her eyes. After a moment she shook her head.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Jack said with a sober laugh.
Rose’s face fell and she looked down at her shoes. “Maybe.”
Finally, Jack decided she needed to know.
“He does love you, Rose,” Jack told her, looking deeply into her eyes and peering into her hazel eyes. “He’s afraid to tell you, but he does.”
Rose looked stunned for a moment. She blinked a few times before she shook her head. “H-how d’you know?”
Jack gave her a wise grin. “He told me. When you were separated from him, he was caught up in the Year the Never Was. Terrible things happened, you don’t even want to know about them, but me and him were trapped together for a while before they put me in chains, for being a ‘danger’.” Jake gave her a laugh and Rose giggled with him.
“You seem like a softie,” Rose teased, thankful for a something slightly less tense.
“Only for some,” Jack said with a grin. “Any way, he does love you, more than you could ever realize, Rose.”
Rose’s face fell. “But, not enough to tell me.”
A small tear managed to get past her defenses and Rose wiped it away hurriedly.
Jack reached out and put a hand on her shoulder encouragingly. “Hey, that’s not the Rose Tyler I know, memory or no memory. You’re strong Rose. I told you that, ‘you worth fighting for,’ before.” He took her shoulders and gave her a firm shake. “You didn’t need me then, but me and the Doctor need you now.”
The image of Jack filled her mind, as she closed her eyes as the memory asserted itself in her mind. She looked from the man in leather to her and smiled softly at them both. He said something about their times together being fun. But, then he sobered as he turned towards her and stared at her intently. He was saying goodbye, Rose realized and she found herself telling him that it wasn’t going to turn out like that. The Doctor was going to fix it. She really did trust the man. Jack’s eyes softened and he looked at Rose his words were garbled, but she got the point as her placed a chaste kiss on her lips and moved to do the same after saying something to the Doctor.
“Okay,” Rose said slowly. “I remember. You… You kissed me.”
“Just between friends,” Jack replied with a wink, as he hugged her and helped her to lie back down, but she fought him.
“Don’t wanna go to sleep,” Rose protested. “Last time I lost my memories. I don’t wanna… I can’t…”
Jack shushed her and nodded his head. “Then you don’t have to. We can talk. You wanna go through more memories?”
Rose shrugged.
“Just anything,” she muttered, leaning against Jack and listening intently as he started spinning a tale about a barrage balloon, an invisible spaceship and a blonde with a nice bottom.
~o~
Jenny felt something cool pressed against her forehead, as she slowly came through again. She moved in its direction and caused the sensation to leave her. She reached up to touch the area where the item had been, but someone caught her hand instead. They squeezed and she squeezed in reply.
“Jenny,” a voice said to her.
Scrunching her face in confusion, Jenny tried to remember who the voice belonged to. It was someone important. The way they said her name was comforting enough, she had heard it said that way before, when she was dying. The image of her father suddenly poured itself into her mind and she smiled. He was there. She wasn’t going to leave him this time, she promised herself silently just as much as him.
“Wha…” Jenny muttered, but her voice croaked at the dryness in her throat.
“Here, drink this,” her father’s voice said softly, while something cool pressed under
her lips and a hand went behind her head and lifted her head up to drink.
She took several deep sips, before the hands drew the container away and helped her to sit up. Finally she felt the heaviness in her eyelids leave her and she looked up to see her father staring at her. His brown eyes were filled with worry, while he continued to hold her shoulders as she steadied herself in the chair of the seat.
“What happened?” Jenny asked, rubbing her temples to try to relieve the pain stemming from the area.
“I was hoping you might be able to answer that one,” the Doctor teased, but he soon turned serious. “Are you okay? You were mumbling something about not knowing who you were.”
Jenny scrunched her face up and nodded. “I’m Jenny Anderson, daughter of the Time Lord the Doctor, born by progenation on Messaline, died, regenerated, travelled, met and fell in love with Jack Harkness, lost him, found Mr. Anderson, and then met my father on a planet in the forty-second century after briefly being able to construct of vortex manipulator and install it into my ship. Right?”
The Doctor beamed, “Right.”
“Okay, then,” Jenny said, rubbing her temples again and trying to gather her thoughts as to what had just happened. “I was Rose, again. Not literally, but I felt her. She’s hurt and she’s with… with Jack.” There was clear relief in Jenny’s voice as she allowed herself a brief smile before continuing on. “He’s taking good care of her, but she can’t remember-which would explain why I thought I couldn’t remember.”
The Doctor’s eyes turned frantic.
“What is it, Jenny? What’s done this to her?” the Doctor demanded, fiercely.
Jenny scrunched up her brow as she stared at her father and concentrated on trying to remember what she had seen.
“It was that stuff that they shot you with, Dad,” Jenny said finally. “But it’s worse, way worse with her. It’s progressed so far in only four hours.”
The image of Rose’s deteriorating arm made its way to the front of her consciousness and she swallowed hard. She made the silent decision to withhold that bit of information from the Doctor.
“Well,” the Doctor said, tugging at his hair and starting the engine again. “We’re fifteen minutes away, and it’s not going to progress any farther.”
He picked up Jenny’s bag, and pulled out the communication device and handed it to Jenny. “Call Atali, tell her we need a miracle cure, now.”
“Consider it done,” Jenny muttered as she pressed the button. “This is Jenny, requesting to contact Atali in the med-center.”
“Atali here, what’s wrong, Jenny?” Atali’s voice crackled over the speaker, while Jenny adjusted the settings to make the audio clearer.
“We’ve gotten new intelligence which says that Rose has been infected with the same chemical as the Doctor, do you have any form of cure or research on it. We know that she’s in bad shape.”
There was a pause on the other end of the communication device, some shuffling and a slamming door.
“No, but I’ll figure it out,” Atali’s voice said. “I’ve been running tests, but I’ll pick up the pace. If it comes down to it, common sense medicine is the best I can do, but it helped the Doctor. Rose will make it too.”
“Thanks,” Jenny replied, thinking hard while she wracked her brain. “Dad’s DNA has regenerative properties; you must have taken blood tests. Why don’t you take that, and see if you can get it to mutate into something that resists the chemicals and formulate a cure from there? Regeneration is pretty fast it shouldn’t take too long.”
Jenny rushed out the explanation and took a deep breath once she was done and looked over to her father and mouthed ‘will it work,’ to him.
“It should,” the Doctor whispered hopefully, while Jenny nodded.
“I’ll try,” Atali said, before she signed off and Jenny let her get back to her work.
The jeep was filled with silence until the Doctor pulled the vehicle to a stop just under fifteen minutes later and started to get out. Jenny mirrored his actions, taking Mr. Anderson in her hands and placing him on her shoulder, while she matched her father’s fevered pace.
“Dad?” Jenny asked in a hushed whisper. “What’s the plan?’
“Get Rose,” the Doctor replied, shortly, while he stopped in front of the compound and looked around at the buildings and pointed at one of the other end of the compound. “That’s where they’re keeping Rose. You see how there are guards all around here, but not there and it’s out in the open? That means that they want us to get in, and find her, so they can get to me.”
The Doctor shifted to the side and looked at Jenny while she began to walk around the perimeter of the compound, trying to stay out of sight.
“Jenny, if anything happens, take Rose and go, alright? I’m expendable, no jumping in front of bullets. They want me, and they can have me if it means you and Rose and Jack are safe, okay?”
“Dad, I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” he assured her. “Trust me, I’ll find a way out.”
Jenny didn’t say anything and began to walk along the perimeter again, while he father fell into place beside her.
Author: country_who
Rating: PG
Word Count (This chapter): 5200
Genre: AU, Action/Adventure
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, Tenth Doctor, Human Doctor, Rose, Jenny, Jack
Summary: AU Journey's End. Rose gets trapped in the TARDIS instead of Donna and now holds the mind of a Time Lord protected by the Bad Wolf, but what happens when the human Doctor dies, and the Time Lord tries to take her to a planet to get her mind off of him, and fulfill a promise? Does the Doctor have more to lose than gain?
Author's Note: Thanks to othermewriter who solidified the main ideas swimming in the soup I call my brain.
Prologue| Chapter 1| Chapter 2| Chapter 3| Chapter 4| Chapter 5| Chapter 6| Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9
Jack watched helplessly as Rose tossed and turned on the ground, whimpering incoherently. Every now and then he would hear Rose say what he thought was a word, but he couldn’t be sure. Whatever it was she was really saying it sounded a lot like, ‘Doctor.” He was trying his best to calm her, in an attempt to try to make her get some real rest, but he couldn’t. Every time he reached out to touch her, she gave a strangled scream and flung herself away from him erratically.
She was terrified of him, and it was eating him up inside. They were best friends, and so much more than that. They were like a brother and sister- a twin brother and sister. He would fight until the end of the universe to make sure she was safe, and Jack knew deep down that Rose would do the same thing for him. She had saved his life countless times in more ways than just making him immortal. She made him better, just like she did to the Doctor. Just like she did to everyone she had ever touched.
Sure, she would have denied it; she didn’t think she was anything special. She thought that she was just an ordinary girl from the shops, from a time period and a planet that was so tiny and insignificant that the wonders of the universe that were out there.
Once again, he tried to touch her shoulder, and this time she didn’t pull away, she just trembled under his touch.
It was the fever, and Jack knew it. Even without anything to measure it with, Jack knew it had gone far beyond what was even deemed safe for a human hours ago. Yet, she still shivered like she was freezing to death, while the color in her cheeks left her and she turned ghastly gray. Her body refused to sweat and help alleviate the fever, while she craved more warmth and tried to weakly wrap her arms around herself. Jack didn’t want to admit it, but she looked like death.
His chest ached to make her well, while he reached down and placed a hand on her shoulder, while she tried to roll over onto her side.
“Easy now, Rose,” Jack said gently, pressing both his hands down on her shoulders, while she weakly tried to resist him.
“Et ee oh,” Rose mumbled incoherently and shivered harder.
Jack raised an eyebrow at her and gently stroked her face with his fingers, trying to coax her back awake, so that she might tell him some way of helping her. Her hair was soft under his touch while he brushed it out of her face caringly.
“Wanna run that past me again?” Jack asked, forcing levity into his voice and listening intently for Rose’s reply.
He thought he knew what she had asked of him, but he didn’t want it to be true. He didn’t want her to reject him. The desire to make all of her pain go away was running rampant through his veins.
Suddenly anger washed over him, as he looked at Rose anew. She looked just as weak as before, but now when he saw it, he didn’t just see a friend in need. He saw the men who had drugged him and dragged him in here. Rage over whelmed him as he bit tongue hard enough to draw blood and tried not to show his rage to her, who was already afraid enough. No one had the right to make Rose afraid. They wouldn’t have been able to accomplish it had it not been for them taking the easy way out and using chemicals. It was the way of cowards.
Jack shook his head at himself. He couldn’t think about that now. He had to focus on Rose. He knelt down a bit farther and tightened his grip a bit around her arms again.
“Let me go,” Rose said, pausing between each word to catch a breath.
Jack eased up and let Rose go. As soon as he let go of her shoulders, she visibly relaxed and almost subconsciously moved herself as far away from him as possible. She kept moving until she met the wall and slumped against it, breathing deeply. She drew herself up with the palms of her hand and forced her eyes open.
“W-who are you,” Rose asked, breathlessly, while she pulled her hair back with her hands and got a good look at her cellmate. “What have you done to me?”
Jack looked taken aback and tried to reach out to her, but pulled back when she pulled away with fear in her eyes. Rose Tyler didn’t remember him. It felt like getting slapped in the face or punched or both at the same time. There wasn’t a glimmer of trust in her eyes, while she stared back at him clearly trying to fight it. She didn’t want to trust him, she wanted to hate him. If she hated him for doing this to her then everything would make sense. It was like putting a face to a crime.
Jack had never seen that in Rose before. Even when they first met she was suspicious, but there was still that little something about the way she looked at him that said that she believed in him. Granted, it might have been because he saved her life and healed her hands. How was he going to do that again with nothing?
She kept creeping closer to the locked door, inch by inch, but she never took her eyes off of him. One of her hands went to the door and she reached up and tried to move the door knob. When she found it locked, she became more frantic screaming to herself while she tried desperately to get it open.
“Come on,” she shouted, through gritted teeth. “Please.” Every word became a desperate plea and lost its strength and power with each passing second. “Open, please.”
“It’s locked, Rose,” Jack told her, stopping himself from trying to hold her as she slumped down the door and covered her hands with her face.
He had to look away for a minute, the pain of seeing Rose sob was too much for even him to bear. Over the endless years that he had been immortal, he thought he would become hardened to it. He should be able to handle himself better in these situations by now. It shouldn’t break him to pieces like this.
He should have been able to help her. He should be there to comfort her.
It seemed like hours before she actually stopped sobbing. Jack had actually moved to the other side of the cell and turned his head so that it was facing the other side of the wall. He didn’t notice that she was staring at him through red rimmed and swollen eyes.
“You called me, Rose. Why?” Rose asked out of the blue, startling at Jack and causing him to look at her in a bemused expression.
“What?”
“Why’d you call me ‘Rose’?” Rose repeated, while she gave him a hard stare, trying to look tougher than she was, but failing miserably.
She was tired and in pain, all she wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep, but she couldn’t-not yet anyway. What would happen when she fell victim to it? She wasn’t going to trust her cellmate yet. She looked to the side where most of the pain was stemming from and she bit her lip. Her entire sleeve was covered in dark red blood with rivulets running down her arm and tracing paths all the way down her fingers and dripping onto the floor. The flesh was being eaten away slowly and painfully, while the burning intensified. She forced herself to look away and focus on her cell mate.
He was hansom with cool blue eyes filled with concern. His jaw-line was firm and wide with a small dimple in the middle of it. He seemed to have knowledge beyond his years as he stared at her. She imagined that he would fit better in the body of an ancient man than the one he currently resided in. His hair was short cut and somehow perfect despite it being obvious that he hadn’t done much to it.
Had she just been judging by his eyes, she might have trusted him straight off, but the rest of him confused her. He wasn’t right and she couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.
“That’s your name,” Jack said, in a gentle voice, knowing this was hard on her.
Jack’s words broke her out of her reverie, and she listened intently.
“H-how d’you know that?” Rose asked softly, backing against the wall more a wincing as she gripped her arm in pain.
“I’m your friend, Jack, from a long time ago. We were talking, laughing about two hours ago, before you fell asleep. D’you remember?”
Rose shook her head.
“I don’t… don’t remember anything,” Rose muttered, looking around her and swallowing hard. “How can I trust you? You might’ve done this to me. I… you might have done more to me.”
Jack shook his head. “You know better than that Rose. Look deep. Look at me. I’m not dangerous and you know it. I’m locked in a cell same as you.”
Rose didn’t look convinced. She stared at him while he motioned to with his hands up and down his upper torso. He was in fact trapped in the same cell as her, but he wasn’t freezing to death, he wasn’t in pain and he wasn’t suffering from memory loss. This had to be a trick. It couldn’t be real. She needed to get out. She needed to be safe.
“You’re not ill,” Rose said finally.
“Drugs didn’t work on me,” Jack said honestly, risking an inch forward. This time Rose didn’t pull back. “You’re here with the Doctor. D’you remember him?”
Rose shook her head from side to side, but winced after two times and squeezed her eyes shut to stop the room from tilting. She held her hands on the side of her head and thought back. ‘The Doctor,’ that was a strange name, but something about it made her feel warm from the inside out. The phrase alone made her want to pick up and run to where ever this man was. If only she could remember.
“He’s your best friend in the whole universe,” Jack told her. He’s the man you love more than any other he added silently in his mind. “You travel with him.”
“Travel?” Rose asked disbelievingly.
“Into time and space,” Jack confirmed with a feigned gusto. He took another step forward and this time Rose actually leaned forward. She was looking at him harder, like he had told her to. Her eyes scanned him for something that wasn’t visible. She didn’t know what it was, but something was familiar about him. That intangible thing that she had thought was beyond wrong before felt so right now.
Some where, she saw him and two other men. One was wearing a leather jacket and beaming as the Jack in the vision shouted ‘into time,’ gleefully. The second was standing around like he didn’t know what to say or do. Her vision spun as she felt herself turning and her own hand reach up and touch Jack’s as well as the man in leather’s while they all said the last part of the phrase together. They seemed excited about the time travel, like it was the most magical thing in the world to the, but something so every day at the time.
“I think,” Rose muttered, reaching out her hand so that Jack could take it in his while he sat down next to her. “Possibly. I…”
Rose closed her eyes, thinking hard while she tried to see the image of the man in her mind’s eye again. She liked him. He was very right. His bright blue eyes were icy, but yielded to some kind of warmth that she couldn’t quite name. His smile was bright and kind, but there was still an edge to him from far too many losses in life. She traced his outline, giggling at his ears to herself and smiling.
“He’s… he’s got big ears,” Rose said dimly, while she looked over at Jack who was beaming at her.
“That he did, right before his regeneration.”
Jack used this moment of trust to reach over to Rose’s arm and peer under her shirt sleeve, where blood was continuing running freely down her arm. A wince came over her as he pressed her fingers into the flesh, trying to avoid the blisters beginning to form on the edge of the growing wound.
Stripping his shirt so that he was only wearing a thin white vest, Jack began to tear it into bandage strips, wonder why he hadn’t thought of it earlier. Rose watched him closely while he made short work of the fabric. Her eyes were curious as he reached over and pressed the largest section of the wound and motioned for Rose to hold it in place while he tied off the other strips.
“Regeneration,” Rose muttered to herself, while she watched Jack continue his work as gingerly as he could.
She closed her eyes and tried to see again. The word was cold, clinical and petrifying, so why did she think it was so beautiful?
In her mind’s eye, she saw the man in leather again. He was smiling, but she knew he was in more pain than he would let on. Everything is silent in this memory. A moment of silence, maybe, or maybe it was because at the time the last thing that Rose was focused on was what the man was saying. Her attention had been drawn to the crippling thought of losing him. The expression on his face spoke far much more than the frivolous words that slipped from his lips.
It wasn’t until he said his last sentence that she could finally hear the words that he was saying. “…absolutely fantastic and you know what? So was I.” With that the man burst into flames as the energy flowing from his hands and face shook the room they were standing in. She was forced to look away from the sight and looked back when a new man was standing in the other man’s place.
He was younger than the other man; with wild hair and doe brown eyes that seemed to glow brighter the more he smiled. He took her hand and said worlds that made her heart melt.
“My Doctor,” Rose whispered to herself, before she turned her head to look at Jack, already beginning to tie off the last of the makeshift bandages.
“All done,” Jack said with a hint of triumph, while he ran his hand over the bandage. “How’s it feel? Not too tight or painful?”
Rose shook her head and noticed how in fact the bandage seemed to be helping somewhat with the throbbing. She flexed her arm experimentally, and noticed that the flesh was still sore and the muscle was beginning to become affected as she noticed the limited control over her own appendage as it hung partially lip at her side.
“Fine thanks,” Rose told him with a smile to hide her worry, while she leaned on his shoulder and closed her eyes. “Tell me about him. What sort of a doctor is he?”
“He’s your Doctor,” Jack said teasingly, but hurried to explain when he caught Rose’s confused expression. “His name’s the Doctor. He’s a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He travels and picks up passengers basically.”
“Like strays?” Rose asked.
“I suppose,” Jack said with a shrug. “He’s lonely. His planet was destroyed.”
Rose nodded, thinking back hard and remembering a little chippie where the man in leather sat her down and told her the truth. She couldn’t recall the exact moment that he lied to her or if he ever truly did instead of simply omitting some of the details in his life, but she still felt relief. He was opening up to her, after every other human or alien companion that he could have opened up to he had opened up to her.
“I don’t know much about the Time Lords myself,” Jack explained and gave Rose an apologetic look, “just the legends and tales from centuries ago. The observers of the universe. They were from Gallifrey, ‘the Shining World of the Seventh System’.”
“He’s the last?” Rose asked.
“Yes,” Jack said, watching Rose carefully for her reaction, but there wasn’t one.
“We are friends?” Rose questioned in a soft voice, looking down at her finger and noticing the ring there. “We’re not married or anything?”
Jack looked at the ring with a surprised expression and gently lifted her hand in his and looked at the band. Rose wasn’t married-he knew that. She said it was just a few days for them since they had been together when the stars were going out. The Doctor certainly didn’t work that fast, especially after everything Rose had told him before her mind went in the safe direction that her body had gone in.
“May I?” Jack asked, while he put his fingers around the golden band and looked at Rose expectantly.
She nodded, watching Jack slide the item from her finger. Part of her wanted to tell Jack no. This was something she had been waiting for to happen since she had met that man, but she couldn’t, because she couldn’t remember why she wanted it. Instead, she found herself holding her breath, while the ring, warmed by her body heat was slid from her finger by Jack’s careful touch.
He held the item flat on his hands for a moment and just stared at it, before he turned it over and rolled it over on his palm with his finger. He couldn’t find a tracking device on it, or anything that seemed suspicious. Briefly, he flirted with the idea that maybe this was a wedding ring, but when he searched the inside the ring for an inscription, there wasn’t on. It was just a cold metallic thing with no love behind it. He turned it over in his hand again and traced the outside of it with his index finger before drawing a deep breath of defeat.
“I don’t know,” Jack said, handing her the ring back, while she slid it back into place. “Maybe it’s just a ring?”
“Maybe,” Rose said softly, while she moved her fingers and watched as the ring glinted in the harsh artificial light of the room. She bit her lip and moved so that her hands were shoved in the pockets of her jeans out of sight.
Rose closed her eyes tightly and forced her tears away. She was strong, that something she knew for certain. She was a survivor and a ring wasn’t going to change that. She was a woman, she wore jewelry, and surely she had just slid the item on arbitrarily without giving it a second thought in the world.
“Rose,” Jack said softly.
“I’m fine,” she said in a partially broken voice wiping her hand across her nose and sniffing. “H-how long have we been in here?”
“Me? A few days,” Jack replied thankful for the change in subject. “You’ve been here for ‘bout four hours. The Doctor’ll come though. You can believe in him.”
“Do you, though?” Rose asked softly.
“More than anyone else,” Jack replied, and laid a soft hand on her knee. “And, so do you.” He caught a glint in his eyes and smiled surely at Rose, while he winked at her. “He’s probably tearing the whole planet apart just to find you. His Rose.”
“He seems like more than a friend,” Rose said, with a note of challenge to her voice. She had seen the fleeting memories of him; every one of them had the same fleeting tone, love. She loved that man even if he didn’t love her back. She would follow him to the end of the universe and back and not think twice. She would hold him forever if he would just let her.
Jack gave her a sage nod and gave her a lazy smirk. Of course she would figure it out. She was clever, cleverer than the Doctor and certainly cleverer than him. Her eyes absolutely burned with the knowledge of knowing that he was keeping something from her.
“Yeah, with you two it is more than a friendship, but it’s complicated,” Jack explained, rubbing his eyes and looking at Rose. There were gaps from what the Doctor hadn’t told him, what he had withheld. He had only truly spoken about Rose fleetingly when he had run into that room filled with stet radiation and during the few moments they had spent together during the year that never was. They had found themselves regressing to the past where they were both happy to keep their minds off of the present. Somehow, they both seemed to default back to Rose, despite the pain it brought them both to know she was gone.
“You were separated, the Doctor won’t tell me how exactly but there was a battle at Canary Warf. Does that sound familiar?” Jack asked.
Rose thought back, scrunching up her nose and closed her eyes. After a moment she shook her head.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Jack said with a sober laugh.
Rose’s face fell and she looked down at her shoes. “Maybe.”
Finally, Jack decided she needed to know.
“He does love you, Rose,” Jack told her, looking deeply into her eyes and peering into her hazel eyes. “He’s afraid to tell you, but he does.”
Rose looked stunned for a moment. She blinked a few times before she shook her head. “H-how d’you know?”
Jack gave her a wise grin. “He told me. When you were separated from him, he was caught up in the Year the Never Was. Terrible things happened, you don’t even want to know about them, but me and him were trapped together for a while before they put me in chains, for being a ‘danger’.” Jake gave her a laugh and Rose giggled with him.
“You seem like a softie,” Rose teased, thankful for a something slightly less tense.
“Only for some,” Jack said with a grin. “Any way, he does love you, more than you could ever realize, Rose.”
Rose’s face fell. “But, not enough to tell me.”
A small tear managed to get past her defenses and Rose wiped it away hurriedly.
Jack reached out and put a hand on her shoulder encouragingly. “Hey, that’s not the Rose Tyler I know, memory or no memory. You’re strong Rose. I told you that, ‘you worth fighting for,’ before.” He took her shoulders and gave her a firm shake. “You didn’t need me then, but me and the Doctor need you now.”
The image of Jack filled her mind, as she closed her eyes as the memory asserted itself in her mind. She looked from the man in leather to her and smiled softly at them both. He said something about their times together being fun. But, then he sobered as he turned towards her and stared at her intently. He was saying goodbye, Rose realized and she found herself telling him that it wasn’t going to turn out like that. The Doctor was going to fix it. She really did trust the man. Jack’s eyes softened and he looked at Rose his words were garbled, but she got the point as her placed a chaste kiss on her lips and moved to do the same after saying something to the Doctor.
“Okay,” Rose said slowly. “I remember. You… You kissed me.”
“Just between friends,” Jack replied with a wink, as he hugged her and helped her to lie back down, but she fought him.
“Don’t wanna go to sleep,” Rose protested. “Last time I lost my memories. I don’t wanna… I can’t…”
Jack shushed her and nodded his head. “Then you don’t have to. We can talk. You wanna go through more memories?”
Rose shrugged.
“Just anything,” she muttered, leaning against Jack and listening intently as he started spinning a tale about a barrage balloon, an invisible spaceship and a blonde with a nice bottom.
~o~
Jenny felt something cool pressed against her forehead, as she slowly came through again. She moved in its direction and caused the sensation to leave her. She reached up to touch the area where the item had been, but someone caught her hand instead. They squeezed and she squeezed in reply.
“Jenny,” a voice said to her.
Scrunching her face in confusion, Jenny tried to remember who the voice belonged to. It was someone important. The way they said her name was comforting enough, she had heard it said that way before, when she was dying. The image of her father suddenly poured itself into her mind and she smiled. He was there. She wasn’t going to leave him this time, she promised herself silently just as much as him.
“Wha…” Jenny muttered, but her voice croaked at the dryness in her throat.
“Here, drink this,” her father’s voice said softly, while something cool pressed under
her lips and a hand went behind her head and lifted her head up to drink.
She took several deep sips, before the hands drew the container away and helped her to sit up. Finally she felt the heaviness in her eyelids leave her and she looked up to see her father staring at her. His brown eyes were filled with worry, while he continued to hold her shoulders as she steadied herself in the chair of the seat.
“What happened?” Jenny asked, rubbing her temples to try to relieve the pain stemming from the area.
“I was hoping you might be able to answer that one,” the Doctor teased, but he soon turned serious. “Are you okay? You were mumbling something about not knowing who you were.”
Jenny scrunched her face up and nodded. “I’m Jenny Anderson, daughter of the Time Lord the Doctor, born by progenation on Messaline, died, regenerated, travelled, met and fell in love with Jack Harkness, lost him, found Mr. Anderson, and then met my father on a planet in the forty-second century after briefly being able to construct of vortex manipulator and install it into my ship. Right?”
The Doctor beamed, “Right.”
“Okay, then,” Jenny said, rubbing her temples again and trying to gather her thoughts as to what had just happened. “I was Rose, again. Not literally, but I felt her. She’s hurt and she’s with… with Jack.” There was clear relief in Jenny’s voice as she allowed herself a brief smile before continuing on. “He’s taking good care of her, but she can’t remember-which would explain why I thought I couldn’t remember.”
The Doctor’s eyes turned frantic.
“What is it, Jenny? What’s done this to her?” the Doctor demanded, fiercely.
Jenny scrunched up her brow as she stared at her father and concentrated on trying to remember what she had seen.
“It was that stuff that they shot you with, Dad,” Jenny said finally. “But it’s worse, way worse with her. It’s progressed so far in only four hours.”
The image of Rose’s deteriorating arm made its way to the front of her consciousness and she swallowed hard. She made the silent decision to withhold that bit of information from the Doctor.
“Well,” the Doctor said, tugging at his hair and starting the engine again. “We’re fifteen minutes away, and it’s not going to progress any farther.”
He picked up Jenny’s bag, and pulled out the communication device and handed it to Jenny. “Call Atali, tell her we need a miracle cure, now.”
“Consider it done,” Jenny muttered as she pressed the button. “This is Jenny, requesting to contact Atali in the med-center.”
“Atali here, what’s wrong, Jenny?” Atali’s voice crackled over the speaker, while Jenny adjusted the settings to make the audio clearer.
“We’ve gotten new intelligence which says that Rose has been infected with the same chemical as the Doctor, do you have any form of cure or research on it. We know that she’s in bad shape.”
There was a pause on the other end of the communication device, some shuffling and a slamming door.
“No, but I’ll figure it out,” Atali’s voice said. “I’ve been running tests, but I’ll pick up the pace. If it comes down to it, common sense medicine is the best I can do, but it helped the Doctor. Rose will make it too.”
“Thanks,” Jenny replied, thinking hard while she wracked her brain. “Dad’s DNA has regenerative properties; you must have taken blood tests. Why don’t you take that, and see if you can get it to mutate into something that resists the chemicals and formulate a cure from there? Regeneration is pretty fast it shouldn’t take too long.”
Jenny rushed out the explanation and took a deep breath once she was done and looked over to her father and mouthed ‘will it work,’ to him.
“It should,” the Doctor whispered hopefully, while Jenny nodded.
“I’ll try,” Atali said, before she signed off and Jenny let her get back to her work.
The jeep was filled with silence until the Doctor pulled the vehicle to a stop just under fifteen minutes later and started to get out. Jenny mirrored his actions, taking Mr. Anderson in her hands and placing him on her shoulder, while she matched her father’s fevered pace.
“Dad?” Jenny asked in a hushed whisper. “What’s the plan?’
“Get Rose,” the Doctor replied, shortly, while he stopped in front of the compound and looked around at the buildings and pointed at one of the other end of the compound. “That’s where they’re keeping Rose. You see how there are guards all around here, but not there and it’s out in the open? That means that they want us to get in, and find her, so they can get to me.”
The Doctor shifted to the side and looked at Jenny while she began to walk around the perimeter of the compound, trying to stay out of sight.
“Jenny, if anything happens, take Rose and go, alright? I’m expendable, no jumping in front of bullets. They want me, and they can have me if it means you and Rose and Jack are safe, okay?”
“Dad, I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” he assured her. “Trust me, I’ll find a way out.”
Jenny didn’t say anything and began to walk along the perimeter again, while he father fell into place beside her.