The Clock's Dial - Chapter Thirteen
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six ,Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter Eleven , Chapter Twelve
Thirteen - Meet the Wolf
Mickey, Pete and Jackie sat in silence as the Jeep travelled along the wet roads, wincing as somehow, despite Pete’s best efforts, the vehicle managed to find every pothole in the road as if intent on ensuring no inch of their skin remained unbruised.
The morose mood provoked by the terrible events at Torchwood Eight had settled like a pall and, after a few feeble attempts to lighten the atmosphere, even Mickey had surrendered to its thrall. The situation was acerbated by Rose’s strange quiet. Ever since they’d stopped at “Carra’s Place” she’d been even more self-contained than normal, her smile and cryptic hopefulness as brief as a glimpse of sun in a cloud-filled sky. She’d munched through the chips, with vinegar, he’d ordered for her without a flicker of awareness and had permitted herself to be shown to their meagre overnight accommodation without comment. Breakfast the following morning had passed in the same disconnected manner and it was, in Mickey’s opinion, more than a bit creepy. He half expected to see a Lumic ear pod flashing in her ear. He was resolutely ignoring the flash of gold he’d caught sight of in her eyes when he’d prodded her hard enough to elicit a brief emergence from her fugue and a swift glare.
‘I reckon I’m gonna have to spend a month at Maurice’s getting the frizz out of my hair after all time spent in this rust bucket,’ Jackie grumbled, tugging at an offending lock of hair. Mickey grinned, allowing himself to be distracted.
‘I don’t know what he’s told you, but Maurice is about as French as me, Jacks,’ Pete observed, gently mocking the affection with which Jackie pronounced the hairdresser’s name.
‘He’s practically French - his mother’s brother married a French tart and his boutique’s next door to that pastry shop,’ Jackie defended.
Mickey snorted and allowed himself to be swept away in the familiar Tyler banter, all three of them ignoring the unnatural silence of the remaining occupant of the Jeep.
Rose, meanwhile, while not oblivious to the worry she was causing, could not bring herself to care - the solution to her separation from the Doctor was so close she could taste it and she needed to concentrate. Locked in her own thoughts, she poked and prodded at the problem, assaulting it from new angles and refusing to permit the possibility of failure.
When, she wondered, had she become so useless? When had she become the damsel in distress, rather than part of the legendary team that was the Doctor and Rose? Ever since she’d fallen into Pete’s world, she’d been waiting for rescue - lingering at the white expanse of wall that symbolised the void between them, malingering in her bedroom at Pete’s mansion, wallowing inside her head and then following his call thoughtlessly, passively, desperately.
All these weeks, she’d been waiting for him, twiddling her fingers and wailing like a helpless child separated from his parents. Somehow, she’d forgotten that she wasn’t just some passive bit of skirt, only good for screaming and getting into trouble. The Doctor and Rose were stuff of legends, a timeless partnership; she was not some insipid Sleeping Beauty - lost in the foggy mire of her despair, she’d forgotten that she was anything but helpless!
Unconsciously, her hand lifted to find the key that hung on a chain from her neck, closing around it tightly and letting the pain anchor her tumultuous thoughts.
Bad Wolf. Wolf.
Rose decided she was an utter idiot and was glad the Doctor wasn’t there to witness her failure; the answer was so obvious - she didn’t need rescuing, she could rescue herself.
That was the message in her dream, and with that realisation came others and, unleashed by her comprehension, they clamoured in her head, screaming for recognition. She was the Aberration, the Bad Wolf, a bringer and catalyst of destruction. She was the wife of a Time Lord - the last of the Time Lords - but, beyond all that, she was Rose Lungbarrow nee Tyler, daughter of Jackie Tyler, and the Universe, be it this one or any other, had not known stubbornness until it had known her.
The Doctor believed in absolutes - things he could examine, prove. Faith eluded him - Satan had been just another monster, because to admit anything else was to acknowledge there was something beyond the limits of his possible understanding. Hope, Rose suspected, was rather the same for him - he longed for it, but he could not find it for himself - instead, he had to borrow it from his companions. So often, he could do the impossible, because they believed in him to do it. So often, when he faltered, it had been she, like his companions before her, who set the pace, kept him on course. She gave him her belief, and with it they had conquered the impossible. Left on his own, though, wounded by a millennia of loss, he was ill equipped to find hope within himself. The logic was inescapable - he was calling to her now in an act of farewell, unable to comprehend a Universe kind enough to permit them to stay together, he would have determined their separation to be irrevocable.
She sighed - he had never really believed that he deserved happiness after his fatal act at Romana’s command. Their honeymoon had been a desperate example - a gift resisted so instinctively that it seemed sensible to perceive an act of kindness as a threat. As far as the Doctor was concerned, the Universe required balance and therefore demanded that he choose - duty or happiness; it was either/or never both, not in the long run. Save the world, lose her; save Reinette, abandon her; destroy the Daleks and Cybermen, surrender his wife.
It was so flawlessly logical, he would not look for a way out - he’d accept that this separation was the price he had to pay for being who and what he was - the last of his kind. It was, of course, utter bollocks and she was looking forward to giving him a good slap for thinking it once she’d snogged him senseless for a few weeks. The Universe was not one huge tally-sheet, a giant book to be balanced, and there was not some mammoth debt that either he or she was beholden to pay. He might not be able to see it, but she could and so she would find a way back to him. After all, she had seen everything - all that was and could ever be - and she would have seen this. And if she’d seen this there was no way in Hell she would permit the separation to prevail; she had remade Time and Space to save her Doctor and she would not have tolerated goodbye.
Rose unclenched and lowered her hand, fingering unconsciously the indents the TARDIS key had left on her palm. She hardly felt Mickey’s forceful nudge, barely registered her angry glare at him in response - instead, her focus was on the new resolve blossoming within her as, with a sigh, some deadened part of herself awakened and lifted its golden head.
**************
‘What’s she doing now?’
Jackie’s stage whisper would have prompted laughter in other circumstances. Instead, Mickey sighed, before responding wearily,
‘The same thing she was doing last time you asked!’
‘Any change in direction?’ Pete inquired from the driving seat.
‘Nah, reckon we’re gonna end up in Norway,’ Mickey replied momentarily, having turned on the weak interior light for long enough to illuminate the map Rose was sightlessly drawing on.
Their somewhat sedate meander towards Almelo had come to an abrupt halt when, without warning, Rose had sprung to life, grabbing map and pen and beginning to draw a new route. The activity would have been greeted with delight if she had not, to all intents and purposes, given the appearance of unconsciousness. Instead of alert, her eyes had been closed and she had remained entirely unresponsive to all attempts to wake her.
‘Yep, Norway, look,’ Mickey commented as Rose’s pen drew a line into the country.
As if Rose had heard him, she stopped as suddenly as she had begun, her now static pen halting as it drove a hole in the paper map. Cautiously, Mickey eased the map from Rose’s lap.
‘Dårlig Ulv-Stranden,’ Mickey announced.
Finally, they had a destination.
******
The playground was quiet. The swing, where once upon a time she and Mickey had shared their first kiss, moved gently back and forward, the momentum of its last passenger not yet altogether lost. Its hinges sweaked, the only sound to penetrate the silence.
Rose tilted her head, listening to her senses. Behind her, Bucknall House loomed. It was familiar. Home. Until a big-eared fool had swept her off her feet. It was home, but it wasn’t real.
‘I know you’re here,’ she said.
The swing stilled. The silence was total.
‘Bad wolf,’ Rose spoke clearly.
‘At last,’ the air whispered, as the playground shimmered into nothingness.
White. Everywhere white. Then a speck, that became a form, that became… HER.
‘I have waited for you,’ SHE said.
‘Yeah, well, you were a bit cryptic, so I’m a bit late,’ Rose retorted.
‘I showed you. Repeatedly. You were unacceptably slow!’ SHE was displeased.
Rose crooked an eyebrow.
‘Like I said, cryptic.’
‘I was compelled to become him and walk before you and still you failed to see!’
Rose rolled her eyes. ‘The Doctor appears, impossibly, in this Universe? I think - uh oh, nuts, not, ooo, message!’
‘Sarcasm is not an indication of wit or intelligence, child.’
‘Bite me!’
The two regarded each other.
‘I missed you,’ Rose breathed, as a sense of need enveloped her senses.
For an infinite moment both were still, within each other.
‘It was you, not him, all along?’
SHE chuckled. ‘Not always. The call, that is him alone. He cannot comprehend more than that, for hope is not a concept he can permit himself. He calls, so it is left to me to beckon.’
‘He is saying goodbye,’ Rose stated.
‘We will not permit such a thing.’ Rose felt the denial deep inside of her, even as it reached her ears.
‘We became one, Rose Marion Tyler. You looked into our heart and a new self was formed. We are one and We are each other. There cannot be a Time when We are not. We saw this and We reshaped it. Only he, denying, failed to perceive. It is for Us to mend, for He sees only loss.’
Rose looked away. ‘How… how is he?’
The form before her frowned.
‘He still is he.’ Rose waited. ‘He is within us. He prevails.’
Rose almost laughed. She loved the TARDIS and she loved the small spark of its power that dwelt within her, but she could not help but lament its limitations.
SHE felt the rebuke and considered the speck of human that was now part of HER.
‘He grieves.’
Rose nodded.
‘We would not have him hurt.’
‘No,’ Rose concurred, ‘we would not.’
In the silent white, the two women regarded each other, acknowledging each within the other, and agreed.
‘For him,’ they spoke.
The Universes, and all that fell between them, trembled.
***************
Each moment stood, before her, a fragment of Time.
‘Run,’ and she took his hand.
‘I wouldn’t change it.’
‘I don’t think I could take you home now. Please don’t make me try.’
‘I think you need a Doctor.’
‘Dance with me?’
‘The Universe’s not gonna explode if we go back and order you a dress.’
‘I do? Ah, I mean, I do. Yes. I really really really do. A lot.’
‘Rose!’
Each moment stood before her. She saw them all. They saw them all, and they were as nothing. And yet, they were everything.
‘This cannot be,’ They agreed, and the path was set.
A wolf cub grew. A black hole swallowed a nebula whole. An ancient servant of an arrogant race let her soul fracture in a past, so that a future could be rewritten, even as a Time Lord prepared to say goodbye.
‘This will not be.’
A child surrendered her soul as a wolf screamed to a dying star.
Somewhere, a chess piece was conceded, a game surrendered.
Rose opened her eyes.
‘It is time.’
Chapter Fourteen