The Clock's Dial - Chapter Twelve
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six ,Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter Eleven
Twelve - Take my Hand
The world slipped by the window in grey monotony, the passing of Belgium’s border making little difference to the scenery. Curled in upon herself, Rose listened with half an ear as Pete chatted on his hands-free mobile to Caitlin. Torchwood Eight has been dismantled, its existence all but obliterated and evidence of it ever having been reduced to a vague footprint of disturbed land and a top security file in the bowels of Torchwood One.
Destroying the physical manifestation of the base had, however, been the easiest task - managing the poor souls who had had the misfortune of being assigned to its care was far harder. Hence the constant stream of communication between Pete and his acting Deputy Director. For the half of the conversation Rose was privy to, it would seem that the majority of the cyber war survivors kept at Torchwood Eight were being transported to the Scottish office where, most likely, they would be liberated from their cerebral implants. It was anticipated that this would result in death, since in most cases the conversion process damaged the brainstem irrevocably. Where a vegetative state was the consequence, the victims would be cared for as long as necessary. It seemed that recovery was not an outcome on the cards for any of Worthington’s patients, although that would not stop the doctors trying. The medical team would be closely supervised, however - Pete was not about to see a repeat of the dangerous experimentation that had produced first the Cybermen and then Worthington and Ferris’s revised version of Lumic’s warped vision.
Rose had always suspected that the Doctor and her got off easy, leaving the scene of the crime as soon as the villain was apprehended. It was exciting and fun, in a death-defying, white-knuckle way, to figure out the mystery. The clean up was dull and difficult and the bit Team TARDIS had a tendency to skip out on. They were a bit like the Scooby gang - damn meddling kids who whipped off the mask and exposed the monster just before ‘The End’ appeared and the credits rolled. Life wasn’t a cartoon, though, and Torchwood didn’t have the luxury of a quick getaway into the vortex. Now, she was seeing for herself some of what the Doctor and she had never had the time or interest to bother with - the messy clean up operation - questions and more questions, paperwork and recriminations, evidence gathering and cataloguing. Not to mention the even broader clean up - the psychiatrists and social workers to help mend the mind and the surveyors and builders to rebuild the demolished infrastructure. In short - Torchwood not only had to lance the boil, it had to oversee the recovery as well. It gave a new meaning to the Doctor’s choice of name and Rose a new pride in what her sort-of father was accomplishing. Torchwood might be human and flawed and limited, but it was also both doctor and nurse, and that took a very special sort of strength.
Rose sighed, letting her head drop against the chilled window and the steady rise and fall of Pete’s voice fade into the background. Her thumb worried at her wedding ring as her heart thudded its rhythm of loss.
She missed him so much - him, the amazing, imperfect man she’d married, not the idealised alien she’d first fallen in love with. She missed her Doctor - the impossibly brilliant scientist who needed her to help ground him, lest he become lost in the perfection of the problem and forget compassion. The perfectionist, who needed her to remind him of the honesty of imperfect solutions. The coward, who needed her understanding and forgiveness to soothe him when he ran. The hero, who needed her strength to help him stand and fight.
It wasn’t a perfect life, a life without blame or regret or mistakes, her life with the Doctor. It wasn’t necessarily the better life she’d once hurt her mother and Mickey trying to get back to, but it was the life she’d chosen the one she wanted, for better or worse, until death claimed her.
Torchwood Eight had shown her that there was a life for her on Pete’s world, one where she could make a difference, one that, if her hallucinations were anything to go by, the Doctor would approve of. Yes, she could make a life here - she just didn’t want to. She’d come back to life, just a little, dealing with Worthington and his mistaken ideals, and all it had done was to serve to remind her how much she missed her proper life - her life with him.
She wished now that she could slip back beneath the surface, into the cocooning misery of her head, because somehow the reality of functioning, of making a difference, in a world without him was worse.
And now they were travelling again, rubber on tarmac whisking her towards their final goodbye and the irrevocable dissolution of hope.
‘No, Caitlin, tell them there’s always hope. Until the last one dies, we have to believe we might save them.’
Pete’s firm voice pierced Rose’s quiet despair and she felt something fracture inside of her, because she found herself unable to believe anymore. There was not, she thought darkly, always a hope to be had.
Curling more tightly in upon herself, Rose pressed herself against the side of the jeep. Shoulder and back turned towards her family, she sought the solace of sleep.
************
Rose wraps her knuckles against the plain wooden door, her back to the sterile corridor.
The door swings open, revealing Pete, standing before a classroom full of empty desks.
‘I’m here for the exam,’ Rose mumbles, feeling the truth of her words in that moment, anxiety bubbling through her veins and releasing butterflies inside her stomach.
‘You’ve got things backwards, Rose, this is the revision class. The exam isn’t until next week, remember?’
Rose frowns. ‘Oh.’
Pete takes a step back, encouraging her inside.
‘We’ve already started, but there’s still time to join in,’ Pete says encouragingly, gesturing to the bowed heads of his studious students. Mickey and Lynda with a ‘y’ are staring intently at their textbooks in the front row, while behind them Jack flirts with Rodrigo.
‘This isn’t revision,’ Roderick shouts angrily.
‘Ignore him,’ Jackie suggests firmly, brushing past Rose and walking into the room. ‘He’s just angry because no one ever listens to him.’
‘Because he’s wrong,’ Pete confirms.
‘Yeah,’ Jack turns away from Rodrigo and winks, ‘everyone believes in Father Christmas.’
‘Father Christmas is a myth!’ Roderick screams.
‘No he’s not,’ Rose asserts, ‘I’ve met him. He gave me a beach.’ She steps forward, frowning as her feet feel suddenly wet.
She looks down and finds only water.
‘Pete? Mum?’
The waves whoosh towards her, through her, dragging her along with them, towards the white shore. She laughs are the exhilaration of the ride, only to cry out as she stops abruptly, colliding with a nothingness that rings like glass.
‘You’re meant to be on the other side,’ Father Christmas says, patting her hand. ‘It seems you’ve forgotten, my dear. I tried to warn you.’
Sadly, he shakes his head.
‘Santa?’
‘I tried to spare you this. You scraped your hands when you fell, child. Does it sting?’
Rose gasps, her palms smarting, and she brings them up towards her face, realising she is holding something.
‘It’s my snow globe. Pretty, isn’t it?’ Father Christmas chuckles, taking the toy from her hands and shaking it. Bright stars burst and sparkle inside the glass ball. Turning it right side up, Santa places the globe in her waiting hands. Twinkling, the dust settles on the small pinstriped figure standing in the sand.
‘Doctor?
‘Flow dab, flow dab!’
Rose screams, relinquishing the glass globe, as the waves rush back towards her, hurtling her away from the shore, until she stands before a wasteland, the sea held back behind her, the ocean floor exposed before her. Brightly coloured blue fish gasp and writhe, drowning in the air.
‘Flow!’ a voice at her ear demands. His voice.
Rose sobs, grasping at the water, only for it to slip through her figures.
‘Flow,’ the voice demands again.
‘I can’t, I can’t make it flow. Help me, Doctor!’ she cries.
‘FLOW!’
‘I can’t! I don’t know how! I’m not strong enough.’
The water erupts, leaving Rose alone on the beach.
‘You’re stronger than you think,’ chuckles Santa, reclining in his deck chair. ‘Stronger than I expected.’
He reaches down beside him and lifts and plonks a bucket upside down on the sand. When he lifts it again, a perfectly formed sandcastle remains behind.
‘Would you look at that! All I needed was a bucket and the sand took care of itself. Now, be a good girl, Rose, and make my list this year! Naughty children don’t get nice presents,’ Father Christmas warns.
‘But there’s not time to be good!’ she protests, feeling near tears. Why didn’t he understand?
‘Oh, Rose,’ said the Doctor, scuffing his boots through the sand, ‘time is relative, remember? There’s always time, time is eternal. It’s space that’s short. Hop, skip and a jump, that’s all there is to space.’
He turns and grabs her hand. ‘Jump, Rose!’ he commands.
Rose closes her eyes and jumps.
‘One, two, buckle my shoe…’
Rose snaps her eyes open. She is in her old playground, back at the estate. The climbing frame is freshly painted and there are games painted on the tarmac.
‘They’re playing hopscotch,’ says the Controller. ‘You’d do better watching the clock.’
‘The clock?’
‘What’s the time?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t see…’
‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf? One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four…’
‘Can’t you hear, Rose? What’s the time?’
‘Dinner time!’
‘No…’
‘Rose, come on, wake up, it’s dinner time.’
Rose blinked, finding Mickey’s face too close.
‘Come on, sleepy head, time for dinner.’
Rose rubbed her hands up her face, kneading her forehead.
‘Sorry, Mickey, I fell asleep.’
‘No kidding! I have Rose drool all over my top!’
‘Do not!’
‘Do too, look!’ he insisted, pulling his head back out of the jeep door and stepping into the light, gesturing at his unblemished t-shirt. ‘Huh, must have dried already. Still, trust me - the drool’s there, you just can’t see it anymore.’
Rose sighed and forced herself to move, feeling her neck and back protest.
‘Come on, before there’s a run on dodgy road side sandwiches,’ Mickey badgered, thrusting his hand into the jeep to help her.
Rose froze, staring at Mickey’s hand.
‘Rose? Come on, take my hand, I’ll give you a pull up.’ He waggled his hand at her for emphasis.
Rose blinked, shaking her head slightly before reaching for Mickey’s hand.
‘You hungry?’ He asked, as he pulled her into the dwindling light of the early evening.
Rose shrugged noncommittally.
Mickey smirked. ‘You might not be once you’ve checked the place out,’ he chuckled, gesturing towards the small café they’d stopped at.
“Carra’s Place” the road sign announced.
Rose looked at Mickey in confusion and, with a laugh, he pointed to the sign over the café itself, which was missing most of its letters.
Rose stared at the sign off a few moments, before grimacing.
‘You are such a bloke!’ she grumbled despairingly.
‘It’s even better if you rearrange it a bit,’ Mickey continued, ‘then it’s Ace Crap!’
Rose stilled. ‘What did you say?’
‘It’s Ace Crap,’ he repeated with a chortle.
‘No,’ Rose flapped a hand at him impatiently. ‘You rearranged it,’ Rose muttered to herself, eyes widening as something clicked into place. ‘Oh my god! You rearranged it!’
‘You alright, babe?’ Mickey asked, confused by her irrelevant mumblings.
‘Yes!’ she said, a grin forming slowly as she lifted her eyes to his. ‘Yes, I really think I might be.’
Chapter Thirteen