Fic: Kalendae. (2/4, Doctor/Rose, AU, PG)
Kalendae. Doctor/Rose, Susan, TARDIS, Sarah Jane, everyone, PG-ish, AU.
"You could ask her again," says Rose. She is sitting across from him in a chair, with her feet on the coffee table. It doesn't matter, it's not as if she's ever tracked dirt in. It's impossible. He wonders, though, how she manages not to slide directly through the chair, being an insubstantial projection and all. "Doctor, are you listening?" He wasn't. It seems he is a rambling sort of man this go-round.
"My apologies," he says, and tilts his teacup at her. "Go on."
VIII.
He has his tongue partway into Grace Holloway's mouth when the Eye of Harmony opens and everything starts to make a fatal sort of sense.
"Er," he says. She raises one sculpted eyebrow at him.
"Er?"
"There's a madman in my ship," he says. "He wants to steal my body and my remaining lives. And he'll probably destroy the planet in the process." She is backing away from him very slowly and carefully. Well, in for a penny, he thinks. "Grace. You must help me. I need to find a very particular kind of clock." This date is going to get much, much worse before it gets better. He feels a throbbing in his head, and realizes only too late what it means. Remote retinal imaging! The absolute bastard! They've probably got an eyeful already.
A lot of things happen awfully quickly. And then:
"Lee, this is your last chance," he says. He's begging. He can beg, he doesn't mind. He's only been in this body for a handful of hours, and he hasn't built up the usual amount of indignant pride just yet. Who knows, this one might never. He does enjoy this floppy cravat. Humility would be novel. Lee gives him the faintest, oddest little half-smile.
"This is my only chance," says Lee. The Master gloats and says something pretentious and totally false. And then the Doctor hears the barest whisper, like a sigh, coming from the empty space just to Lee's left.
Now, it says. And in one swift turn, Lee gives the Master an enormous shove that sends him toppling over the staircase, head over heels. He lands with a crash and a broken scream, but Lee's already jumped the railing and is busy yanking at the Doctor's cuffs. He manages to get one hand loose before Grace- possessed green eyes flashing with rage- comes up behind him and wraps her arms around his neck. Lee goes flailing off backwards and the Doctor struggles to get the other shackle off his wrist. "Let me," says that same invisible voice, and suddenly it's Rose, Rose here with the sonic, breaking the lock and setting him free. Well, that explains how Lee got in to start with: moments ago, he'd been concerned with the TARDIS's grossly lax security, but now he's beginning to see the big picture. His autopilot is forever turning people's hearts to compassionate goo once they've had five minutes alone with her. There was that miner's rebellion on Celsus Nine, when they held him hostage and used the ship to- hello, focus, he thinks fiercely to himself. They both turn for the stairs but there's the Master at the bottom, right over the Eye, holding Lee with one arm pinned behind his back.
"Don't!" Rose cries out, and the Master cracks Lee's neck in a fluid swipe. "NO!" The Doctor grips the railing so hard, either he or it might snap. His teeth grit.
"I heard you," the Master tells Rose, conversationally. Grace draws closer, and the Master holds her by the hair. The strange light begins to drain from her eyes. "Talking to him. The first time. Thought you were so subtle. I remembered you, of course. The Doctor's little caged bird. All song and no dance."
"I remember you, too," says Rose. "All your failures." The Master's eyes narrow with rage. "Your rubbish plots."
"She's right," the Doctor cuts in. "You've killed your one chance. You're finished."
"Not exactly," the Master sneers. He thrusts Grace forward, into the beam. "Always bring a spare!" he screams, and the Eye opens, flooding the room with light. There's a great quaking in the TARDIS and an incredible surge of energy pulses across the walls. The Doctor's pinned by a powerful relay beam, and the Master throws Grace aside. Rose is with her in an instant, helping her to stand, even though her hands probably go right through Grace's sleeves. The Doctor finds he can barely speak, barely summon the will to communicate- there's a force like a raging wind being drawn out of him, pulled with incredible ferocity. A strange thing, to die twice in so many days. He looks across the room at them, both looking back at him.
"Go!" he cries. They nod, and run off down the corridor. He shuts his eyes, while the Master rambles on and on about the incredible things he's going to do with all those extra opportunities. "Yes, of course," says the Doctor. "Since you were so careful with your last dozen."
There's a fistfight and a dramatic reversal, and naturally the women save the day. He can hear Grace and Rose coming from down the hall, joy in their voices, but he stays put. He listens to the hum of his ship around him, now settled back into the time stream, purring contentedly like a great fifth-dimensional cat. He lies on the floor of the cloister room for a long moment, feeling totally at peace with the universe.
After all that, she won't come with him.
"You could ask her again," says Rose. She is sitting across from him in a chair, with her feet on the coffee table. It doesn't matter, it's not as if she's ever tracked dirt in. It's impossible. He wonders, though, how she manages not to slide directly through the chair, being an insubstantial projection and all. "Doctor, are you listening?" He wasn't. It seems he is a rambling sort of man this go-round.
"My apologies," he says, and tilts his teacup at her. "Go on."
"I said, you could ask her again." Rose looks thoughtful. "You never know. Some girls like to be asked twice."
He says he'll file it away.
"Somebody else," she says. "Anybody else. Not you." She's on the opposite side of the console, staring straight down at the controls. She won't look at him. She hasn't looked at him since he told her what he was planning to do. It's like she can't. She faced down the Nightmare Child at his side, and now she won't look at him. "We can contact another ship-"
"Rose," he says. "There are no other ships."
They sit side by side on the grating in silence, out here in the darkness, the TARDIS spiraling around and around in the space of one second. Eternity is found in a second, he thinks, except this time it's not in the poetic sense. He has put them out of sync with the rest of the universe, so that the shockwaves will not disintegrate them the instant he begins the time-lock. The shockwaves might very well disintegrate them the instant afterwards, but that is the risk he is going to take. One of the risks he is going to take, out of many. He is holding the control pad in his hands almost idly, pretending it's a box of tea or a toaster oven or an inconsequential toy. He has finished the wiring and entered the phase coordinates with Rose's help, and now there are only two things left to do. The first is to go back to the war. The second is to end it.
"It'll be an enormous drain on the power," he tells her, distantly. Retreating into the facts. "Secondary systems will go down first. It'll be your job to keep the resistance levels-"
"I'm a secondary system," she says. He stares at her.
"No," he says. "You aren't."
She doesn't mention it again.
They stand up, or rather, he does. Rose just disappears and reappears standing, the show-off. He thinks, absurdly, of Pinocchio. Perhaps things become most real in the moments you're not looking at them. He wobbles a bit, without meaning to, as he straightens up, and Rose takes his hands in hers to steady him, cradles them in her cool palms before the illusion dissolves and she's passed through him. She keeps them there for a second anyway, her transparent fingers melded with his. It's as if they're holding hands.
"You know what I wish most?" she asks. He doesn't. "To go out of those doors with you. Just once would have been enough. To walk out with you, and come back with you." She leans up and presses a cool, soft kiss to his cheek. "It would have been wonderful." He feels heat behind his eyes, an abrupt swell of tears, which he refuses to allow. He can't. He won't. He doesn't know why, but her words fill him with a nameless bitterness. A great well of sadness, a crushing ache in a place he thought deadened by war. It's been hundreds of years, and countless terrors, and he didn't know this. Didn't know her one, most cherished dream.
"I would have taken you anywhere," he says. It's a promise. A vow. "Everywhere."
"You did," she says.
They push the buttons together.
IX.
At first, he's sure he's dead.
He hopes so.
It's the worst regeneration sickness of his life. He thought the others were bad: amnesia, multiple personality shifts, almost throttling Peri. The first gasp of consciousness is a blur of agony. He can still remember the console shattering around him, shrapnel from the walls piercing his skin- he aches and stings in all the same places, his head is splitting and his eyes register only splashes of color and brightness, like explosions still firing randomly. Worse, he can barely cling to his own memories, can barely remember anything but the shattering sound of time exploding and remaking itself around them, the great howl of the void, the pull of the dark. He's supposed to be healing. It feels instead like a very long death.
After a few days- or weeks, he doesn't know, his sense of time is crackling wildly as a broken radio- of lying on his side or his back, curling up when the pain hits and passing out for long stretches, he finds he can control his arms and legs a bit better than yesterday. He drags himself along the grates and props his back up against the console. His jacket's in tatters, and it no longer fits him across the shoulders. He tugs at it, and tries to sit up straighter. He thinks he's seeing things, but slowly his eyes register the glimmering distortions as bio-cells running along the walls. He looks up. The support beams have twisted, he thinks. It takes him a while to realize that they've grown that way, like tree trunks forming in resistance to a stubborn wind. Or coral, swaying in the ocean depths. He closes his eyes from the effort of conscious sight, and pats the bottom of the console with one hand.
"Hello," he says. It's the first thing his parched, swollen throat can manage. "I like it," he says. "Looks good." The lights flicker warmly, appreciatively. Speech is exhausting, but he feels he ought to tell her something positive. He remembers the burned-out shell he died in, flames still licking the walls, the hull breached and the Eye cracked through the middle. She's been working as hard as he has, to rebuild herself, patch her skin, grow a new support structure. His beautiful, brilliant ship. Living is exhausting work. He can try it if she's willing. "Rose," he says. Perhaps she can tell him where they've landed, if they've landed. He hopes they've landed. He doesn't want to think about the possibilities, just yet. That they failed, and the war rages on. That they failed, and the war was lost. That they are inside the void. That there is nothing left in the universe but him and his TARDIS and a computer program with an exceptionally beautiful smile. "Rose," he says again.
He opens his eyes.
And he remembers. He remembers all of it, in a great wash, like being thrown into the sea. He remembers their resistance, how their weapons turned on him at the end. He battled two armies at once while the walls of time fell, and his ship rebuilt them in a new image from the dimensional singularity at her core. He remembers shouting commands, and Rose's fingers moving in a holographic blur over the controls. He remembers the great shock that threw them out of the universe briefly, and the wrenching suction of the time seal that dragged them back in. He remembers the darkness, and the fire in the TARDIS, and he remembers her face- he remembers her eyes in the second before she vanished. His hearts thud wildly. With a great effort, he heaves himself up onto the console, feeling his legs quake and then hold. "Autopilot," he says. "Initiate sequence." He summons up the memory banks, activity logs, enters command prompts. There's nothing, except a kind of distressed psychic undercurrent that seems to be coming from the TARDIS itself. He scours the damaged cortex, runs every diagnostic, digs into the archives and examines every file, searches, probes, calls and recalls. There are so many gaps, so many healing scars, in his ship's mind. At last he finds it, the node where autopilot functions are joined to the system. There is nothing there. There's no trace of her. Of anything. The secondary systems have been burnt up, burnt out. Erased at the root. "Rose," he says. The ship has no memory of her. He lets go of the monitor and slumps to the floor. His eyes burn, but nothing comes. He's too empty to make tears. He holds his face and sobs without sound. He's not sure what he's crying for, or what he isn't crying for. He feels ashamed. There are death rites he could perform for his people, his family, ways he could mark their passing. He ought to get up. But he doesn't know how. He just needs to hear a voice, one voice, telling him- he doesn't know. Anything would do. But there's nothing. There's nobody left, nobody at all, nobody will ever know or remember, not even- he sobs harder and harder like a child, uncontrollably, until he's wrung out. He curls up in his ruined jacket and falls into a formless, dreamless sleep.
The readout has already told him that he is orbiting a fading star in the Selluca system, not far from the edge of the Gamma district, in the year one million. There is an ion storm passing about five hundred thousand miles away. Environmental conditions within and without the ship are stable. It is the Sellucan equivalent of a Thursday. Everything he's ever known and everyone he's ever loved is gone.
At first he thinks he will just stay here, in this spot, letting the TARDIS turn and turn until her lights fade and her hull ices and he turns into a skeleton underneath the grating. But it's such a disgustingly maudlin fantasy that he berates himself for having it. Next he thinks he should chameleon arch himself, bury the memories, live an ordinary life and die an ordinary death and be buried in somebody else's soil. But that's cheating. Whatever he does, he refuses to forget. Forgetting is what the rest of the universe does. He's not allowed. That's the punishment for living.
So instead of all that he goes down to the wardrobe and picks himself out a jumper and a jacket and pair of jeans, and puts his tattered old costume into a box. He does it without looking in the mirror, because vanity is also not allowed anymore. He's got no interest in what this body looks like. It's only a body. He goes back up to the console and sets the receiver on a wider range, sits back, and listens.
The first distress call is the one he answers.
He saves a group of colonists from an exploding reactor. They're a blue-skinned people with fetching ridges on their cheeks. He doesn't stay long enough for them to hold a party in his honor. Because he's off to find the missing cargo ship that drifted into a stasis minefield with a plucky crew still aboard. He rescues them, very narrowly, from being turned into floating debris. And then there's Chatfield, Minnesota, in 2059, something about stolen fusion cells. Death is so close on that one he can taste it on the wind, in the air, as it whistles past him. It feels like a summer breeze. He inhales a little deeper and moves on. He'll catch it if he's quick enough next time. He picks up a rumor that the Nestene Consciousness is looking to reassert itself, set down roots somewhere nice and cozy and heavily populated. That sounds promising. Easy enough to spot their first wave of clunky automatons being brought in en masse to retailers. Plastic, in whatever form, is never all that smart. He's right in the midst of one of their hubs, heading up from the loading dock to the elevator, when he hears the voice calling down the hall. A girl's voice, young and frightened. No civilians, that's another rule. No more collateral damage. Not allowed. He rolls his eyes and heads off to find her, scoop her up, deposit her outdoors, and then back to the plan. A massive explosion and a perfectly-timed escape. Down to the second. He finds her in the back room of the basement, a pink and yellow girl flat against the wall with her arms up in terror, half a dozen autons lined up in front of her. He grabs her hand.
"Run," he says, and they do. Breathless down the hall, into the elevator, where the doors shut with a slam, taking off a plastic arm in the process. "So," he says, "best if you forget you ever-" and the girl turns around. His entire body quakes once, like he's been pushed back with enormous force, and he hits the wall of the elevator hard. His arms scramble against the wall at strange angles. His mouth opens and shuts and opens again. "Rose," he says, stupidly. "Rose." Her eyes narrow.
"How d'you know my name?" Everything about her is perfect, perfectly duplicated, or perfectly imitated, down to the dark eyebrows and the cant of her hips and the way she tilts her head, wonderingly, warily. It's his autopilot, here, alive and- breathing? Is his autopilot breathing? He comes forward and she moves back. She brandishes the arm at him. "I don't think so," she says, threateningly. He's still staring at her, thinking about rubbing his eyes to make sure he's not hallucinating, in shock, dead and in an extended final sequence. Is it really important to know which one? Probably not. "What's the matter with you?" she asks him. "Are you hurt?"
"No," he says. "How-" he puts his hand over one heart anyway, to stop the pounding there. "How are you here? Tell me how you did it. No. Don't tell me. I'll guess. Hard light relay sequencing?" She stares at him in total confusion. "No." Something clicks. "Do you not- recognize me?"
"Mate," she says, "You've got me mixed up with somebody else." The elevator dings and the doors open. Wordlessly, mechanically, he steps out, and gestures for her to do the same. She holds onto the arm but follows him anyway, eyes still searching him. He takes her out by the back doors, holds the gate for her, and watches her go down the steps. She turns around, and he just stands there, stuck. Processing. His mind moves a million miles a minute, but it's still not quite fast enough to catch up to this new and impossible bit of information. "What are you doing?" she asks. "Come on. I'll call the police." She waves the arm at him. "Is this your plan? Standing around?"
"Working so far, isn't it?" he returns, reflexively. He must have had a thousand arguments with her, just like this, with her beautiful eyes flashing at him. This has to be a dream, a trick, a trance, but he doesn't care. He just wants to stand here on these steps and make her mad, make her yell at him and correct him and speak to him, look at him, know him. It's exhilarating. "But I was thinking something more drastic," he says, and pulls out the relay. "You'll want to be a bit further away when this goes off."
"Is that a bomb?" Her voice rises in pitch. "You'll blow yourself up!"
"Maybe," he says. "Maybe not, eh?" He smiles at her and she stares back at him as if he's mad. Well, that's hardly a new experience. It's so familiar it hurts like a bruise. He doesn't want it to stop. "Go on," he says. "Run for your life." He shuts the door behind him and practically sprints to the rooftop, hearts taking the pennant in his chest. When the bomb goes off, all he can think about is the feeling of her hand in his, the warm press of it, how solid and real and human it felt, the slight pulse in her wrist and the pull of her arm. He makes it out to the street and stares up at the secondary explosions, the raging plume of fire that goes up into the night. He feels inexplicably like dancing in front of it. Reality has officially taken a holiday. "Rose!" he calls out, into the darkness. He's running now. He'll catch up to her and they'll watch it together, the sparks and the smoke, holding hands. People are coming out of bars and buses, turning to look, wondering at the chaos. "Rose!" he cries.
But nobody answers.
Rose Tyler has a mother. And a boyfriend, and a flat on an upper floor, and Rose Tyler makes tea for them both, and Rose Tyler is nearly suffocated by a plastic arm in her own living room. Rose Tyler has never seen him before in her exceedingly short human life. But Rose Tyler is nineteen, and brave as a lion, and willing to kick dangerous plastic automatons over the side of a railing whilst dangling from an enormous chain. She does this for a stranger, a man she's never met, and for the sake of the world, and then she puts her arms around Mickey and says, sadly, that she'd better not go. In a daze, he nods and goes back to the TARDIS and puts the ship into orbit and stands around staring at nothing for a long, long time. It could be the Trickster, he thinks. A little pocket parallel universe. He runs some diagnostics and dematerializes and takes the ship out to the next quadrant and back. Could be a memory fracture in his own cortex. He gives himself a full work-up in the medbay and comes up with nothing. It could be a hiccup in the universe, some sort of massive re-set from when he hit the switch, a remnant or a left-over. He tells himself it doesn't matter, regardless. She's not his Rose. She stared and said, it's bigger on the inside, for goodness' sake. She's human. Fragile, mortal, foolish. She won't know how to steer, she doesn't remember him. Them. Anything. It's not a second chance. It doesn't change things. It could be a trap. It could be a gaffe, a coincidence, a portent, a mistake.
It could be a gift.
He thinks about her transparent feet up on the coffee table, her thoughtful smile and the secret in her eyes. She said something important. Some girls, he remembers. Some girls like to be asked twice. He spins the dials in a hurry, and the ship moves even faster than he does, humming with eagerness. He flies to the doors and flings them open and there she is, still standing in the same spot, trash and newspapers scuttling in the wind, Mickey clinging to her knees, an incandescent smile just beginning to dawn on her face. The sun in springtime isn't warmer, or more dazzling, or more welcome after the snows. He holds out his hand, and she comes running to take it.
"Right then, Rose Tyler," he says. "What's it going to be?"
"Everywhere," she says.
It feels very much like a promise.
The first time he sees her eating- an apple, the very first thing is an apple, he files that away in the new mental jumble of things marked Rose???Tyler- his eyes bulge out of his head. From the suspicious look she gives him afterwards, there was something like naked surprise plastered across his face. It's shaming. He's always thought himself capable of at least playing it cool.
"Did they not have apples, where you're from?" she asks. He grimaces and evades the question by taking her to the great orchards of Gebulalala, where they grow apples that produce starbursts behind your eyelids and sweet songs in your ears as you eat them. He eats two and Rose eats three. He laughs so hard at her reactions that she pounds on his back to keep him from choking.
"Respiratory bypass," he says, waving her off. But he doesn't mind, not really. He is not trying to keep a catalogue of every touch and every touch's sensation, and still it's happening. He has held her hand and helped her upright and pulled her away by the sleeve and she has rested her hand on his arm and slapped him on the back and now she is tugging him down the row of trees, pointing at things eagerly, asking him to give names to everything in sight, and to explain their functions, and to introduce her to all the workers and tell her how best to introduce herself. "Just smile at them," he says, only half-jokingly, and she does. A young man startles and flushes and drops a basket of apples and they roll around at his feet. "It always seems to work fine for you."
He takes her to the market on Tel Telaxis and watches her hands wander over fine silks, fabrics of incredible softness and luxurious touch. Her fingers rest lightly on things and stroke them and turn them over and she marvels at the feel of everything, the richness. Her hands don't go through anything. They never get translucent or begin to disappear. She's entirely corporeal and solid and her senses are always working overtime, taking things in, processing them, producing new observations and reactions. He enjoys watching that more than anything. He tries to buy her a bolt of sky-blue cloth that feels airy and feathery as dove's wings, and she shrugs him off, kindly.
"I'm not that fancy," she says. But she's wrong, she's so utterly wrong. He starts to insist and her eyes get cloudy, sad. "Don't need presents," she tells him, misunderstanding. "I didn't come with you for presents." He doesn't know how to explain it. He wants to give her a million beautiful things that she can touch and hold and keep. He wants to watch her holding them. He needs to know she's real. She gets tired and falls asleep on the jumpseat sometimes, snoring a little with her mouth open and her hair matted and her face pressed so hard on her sleeve it makes little patterns in her flesh. This is new, too. Everything goes in the file. He stays awake and putters with the console and when he is sure that she's dreaming, fully gone and not going to laugh at him, he stares at her for a while. He thinks about stroking her hair in her sleep, tucking strands of it behind her ears, pulling a blanket over her. He never knew where Rose went when she vanished- away- but Rose Tyler stays Rose Tyler at every moment. She is more than he ever imagined. When she wakes up, he asks her if she'd like to see Christmas in Italy or on the other moon of Poosh, not the missing one. She says Poosh, but her eyes are distant. She's been dreaming something unpleasant. She looks up at him, her hair still undone and wild about her temples. Like a ragged halo. Or a daisy crown, pure innocence. "When you met me," she asks, and his blood goes especially cold, "who did you mistake me for?"
"An old friend."
"An old friend," she repeats, and smiles slyly. "Or an old friend?"
"Italy it is!" he says, and gives the accelerator a jerk. She laughs and tumbles around on the jump seat and then she's off downstairs, picking out a costume. He doesn't think about it much as they run for their lives and face down death in a dingy Cardiff basement- hand in hand, for the file- but it's all he can think about afterwards. He has no idea what he'd tell her, what she'd say. How she'd look at him. If she'd leave.
"Do you think we could stop for a minute," she asks, later, "and see my mum?" In any other body, he'd have said no. In fact, he frequently has.
"Fine," he says. He tries to look tough and mean and put-upon as he says it. He rolls his eyes and spins the dials and sighs with exaggerated saintliness. But inside he is whispering the same word over and over: stay. Stay, stay stay stay stay stay.
Part Three.
...
"You could ask her again," says Rose. She is sitting across from him in a chair, with her feet on the coffee table. It doesn't matter, it's not as if she's ever tracked dirt in. It's impossible. He wonders, though, how she manages not to slide directly through the chair, being an insubstantial projection and all. "Doctor, are you listening?" He wasn't. It seems he is a rambling sort of man this go-round.
"My apologies," he says, and tilts his teacup at her. "Go on."
VIII.
He has his tongue partway into Grace Holloway's mouth when the Eye of Harmony opens and everything starts to make a fatal sort of sense.
"Er," he says. She raises one sculpted eyebrow at him.
"Er?"
"There's a madman in my ship," he says. "He wants to steal my body and my remaining lives. And he'll probably destroy the planet in the process." She is backing away from him very slowly and carefully. Well, in for a penny, he thinks. "Grace. You must help me. I need to find a very particular kind of clock." This date is going to get much, much worse before it gets better. He feels a throbbing in his head, and realizes only too late what it means. Remote retinal imaging! The absolute bastard! They've probably got an eyeful already.
A lot of things happen awfully quickly. And then:
"Lee, this is your last chance," he says. He's begging. He can beg, he doesn't mind. He's only been in this body for a handful of hours, and he hasn't built up the usual amount of indignant pride just yet. Who knows, this one might never. He does enjoy this floppy cravat. Humility would be novel. Lee gives him the faintest, oddest little half-smile.
"This is my only chance," says Lee. The Master gloats and says something pretentious and totally false. And then the Doctor hears the barest whisper, like a sigh, coming from the empty space just to Lee's left.
Now, it says. And in one swift turn, Lee gives the Master an enormous shove that sends him toppling over the staircase, head over heels. He lands with a crash and a broken scream, but Lee's already jumped the railing and is busy yanking at the Doctor's cuffs. He manages to get one hand loose before Grace- possessed green eyes flashing with rage- comes up behind him and wraps her arms around his neck. Lee goes flailing off backwards and the Doctor struggles to get the other shackle off his wrist. "Let me," says that same invisible voice, and suddenly it's Rose, Rose here with the sonic, breaking the lock and setting him free. Well, that explains how Lee got in to start with: moments ago, he'd been concerned with the TARDIS's grossly lax security, but now he's beginning to see the big picture. His autopilot is forever turning people's hearts to compassionate goo once they've had five minutes alone with her. There was that miner's rebellion on Celsus Nine, when they held him hostage and used the ship to- hello, focus, he thinks fiercely to himself. They both turn for the stairs but there's the Master at the bottom, right over the Eye, holding Lee with one arm pinned behind his back.
"Don't!" Rose cries out, and the Master cracks Lee's neck in a fluid swipe. "NO!" The Doctor grips the railing so hard, either he or it might snap. His teeth grit.
"I heard you," the Master tells Rose, conversationally. Grace draws closer, and the Master holds her by the hair. The strange light begins to drain from her eyes. "Talking to him. The first time. Thought you were so subtle. I remembered you, of course. The Doctor's little caged bird. All song and no dance."
"I remember you, too," says Rose. "All your failures." The Master's eyes narrow with rage. "Your rubbish plots."
"She's right," the Doctor cuts in. "You've killed your one chance. You're finished."
"Not exactly," the Master sneers. He thrusts Grace forward, into the beam. "Always bring a spare!" he screams, and the Eye opens, flooding the room with light. There's a great quaking in the TARDIS and an incredible surge of energy pulses across the walls. The Doctor's pinned by a powerful relay beam, and the Master throws Grace aside. Rose is with her in an instant, helping her to stand, even though her hands probably go right through Grace's sleeves. The Doctor finds he can barely speak, barely summon the will to communicate- there's a force like a raging wind being drawn out of him, pulled with incredible ferocity. A strange thing, to die twice in so many days. He looks across the room at them, both looking back at him.
"Go!" he cries. They nod, and run off down the corridor. He shuts his eyes, while the Master rambles on and on about the incredible things he's going to do with all those extra opportunities. "Yes, of course," says the Doctor. "Since you were so careful with your last dozen."
There's a fistfight and a dramatic reversal, and naturally the women save the day. He can hear Grace and Rose coming from down the hall, joy in their voices, but he stays put. He listens to the hum of his ship around him, now settled back into the time stream, purring contentedly like a great fifth-dimensional cat. He lies on the floor of the cloister room for a long moment, feeling totally at peace with the universe.
After all that, she won't come with him.
"You could ask her again," says Rose. She is sitting across from him in a chair, with her feet on the coffee table. It doesn't matter, it's not as if she's ever tracked dirt in. It's impossible. He wonders, though, how she manages not to slide directly through the chair, being an insubstantial projection and all. "Doctor, are you listening?" He wasn't. It seems he is a rambling sort of man this go-round.
"My apologies," he says, and tilts his teacup at her. "Go on."
"I said, you could ask her again." Rose looks thoughtful. "You never know. Some girls like to be asked twice."
He says he'll file it away.
"Somebody else," she says. "Anybody else. Not you." She's on the opposite side of the console, staring straight down at the controls. She won't look at him. She hasn't looked at him since he told her what he was planning to do. It's like she can't. She faced down the Nightmare Child at his side, and now she won't look at him. "We can contact another ship-"
"Rose," he says. "There are no other ships."
They sit side by side on the grating in silence, out here in the darkness, the TARDIS spiraling around and around in the space of one second. Eternity is found in a second, he thinks, except this time it's not in the poetic sense. He has put them out of sync with the rest of the universe, so that the shockwaves will not disintegrate them the instant he begins the time-lock. The shockwaves might very well disintegrate them the instant afterwards, but that is the risk he is going to take. One of the risks he is going to take, out of many. He is holding the control pad in his hands almost idly, pretending it's a box of tea or a toaster oven or an inconsequential toy. He has finished the wiring and entered the phase coordinates with Rose's help, and now there are only two things left to do. The first is to go back to the war. The second is to end it.
"It'll be an enormous drain on the power," he tells her, distantly. Retreating into the facts. "Secondary systems will go down first. It'll be your job to keep the resistance levels-"
"I'm a secondary system," she says. He stares at her.
"No," he says. "You aren't."
She doesn't mention it again.
They stand up, or rather, he does. Rose just disappears and reappears standing, the show-off. He thinks, absurdly, of Pinocchio. Perhaps things become most real in the moments you're not looking at them. He wobbles a bit, without meaning to, as he straightens up, and Rose takes his hands in hers to steady him, cradles them in her cool palms before the illusion dissolves and she's passed through him. She keeps them there for a second anyway, her transparent fingers melded with his. It's as if they're holding hands.
"You know what I wish most?" she asks. He doesn't. "To go out of those doors with you. Just once would have been enough. To walk out with you, and come back with you." She leans up and presses a cool, soft kiss to his cheek. "It would have been wonderful." He feels heat behind his eyes, an abrupt swell of tears, which he refuses to allow. He can't. He won't. He doesn't know why, but her words fill him with a nameless bitterness. A great well of sadness, a crushing ache in a place he thought deadened by war. It's been hundreds of years, and countless terrors, and he didn't know this. Didn't know her one, most cherished dream.
"I would have taken you anywhere," he says. It's a promise. A vow. "Everywhere."
"You did," she says.
They push the buttons together.
IX.
At first, he's sure he's dead.
He hopes so.
It's the worst regeneration sickness of his life. He thought the others were bad: amnesia, multiple personality shifts, almost throttling Peri. The first gasp of consciousness is a blur of agony. He can still remember the console shattering around him, shrapnel from the walls piercing his skin- he aches and stings in all the same places, his head is splitting and his eyes register only splashes of color and brightness, like explosions still firing randomly. Worse, he can barely cling to his own memories, can barely remember anything but the shattering sound of time exploding and remaking itself around them, the great howl of the void, the pull of the dark. He's supposed to be healing. It feels instead like a very long death.
After a few days- or weeks, he doesn't know, his sense of time is crackling wildly as a broken radio- of lying on his side or his back, curling up when the pain hits and passing out for long stretches, he finds he can control his arms and legs a bit better than yesterday. He drags himself along the grates and props his back up against the console. His jacket's in tatters, and it no longer fits him across the shoulders. He tugs at it, and tries to sit up straighter. He thinks he's seeing things, but slowly his eyes register the glimmering distortions as bio-cells running along the walls. He looks up. The support beams have twisted, he thinks. It takes him a while to realize that they've grown that way, like tree trunks forming in resistance to a stubborn wind. Or coral, swaying in the ocean depths. He closes his eyes from the effort of conscious sight, and pats the bottom of the console with one hand.
"Hello," he says. It's the first thing his parched, swollen throat can manage. "I like it," he says. "Looks good." The lights flicker warmly, appreciatively. Speech is exhausting, but he feels he ought to tell her something positive. He remembers the burned-out shell he died in, flames still licking the walls, the hull breached and the Eye cracked through the middle. She's been working as hard as he has, to rebuild herself, patch her skin, grow a new support structure. His beautiful, brilliant ship. Living is exhausting work. He can try it if she's willing. "Rose," he says. Perhaps she can tell him where they've landed, if they've landed. He hopes they've landed. He doesn't want to think about the possibilities, just yet. That they failed, and the war rages on. That they failed, and the war was lost. That they are inside the void. That there is nothing left in the universe but him and his TARDIS and a computer program with an exceptionally beautiful smile. "Rose," he says again.
He opens his eyes.
And he remembers. He remembers all of it, in a great wash, like being thrown into the sea. He remembers their resistance, how their weapons turned on him at the end. He battled two armies at once while the walls of time fell, and his ship rebuilt them in a new image from the dimensional singularity at her core. He remembers shouting commands, and Rose's fingers moving in a holographic blur over the controls. He remembers the great shock that threw them out of the universe briefly, and the wrenching suction of the time seal that dragged them back in. He remembers the darkness, and the fire in the TARDIS, and he remembers her face- he remembers her eyes in the second before she vanished. His hearts thud wildly. With a great effort, he heaves himself up onto the console, feeling his legs quake and then hold. "Autopilot," he says. "Initiate sequence." He summons up the memory banks, activity logs, enters command prompts. There's nothing, except a kind of distressed psychic undercurrent that seems to be coming from the TARDIS itself. He scours the damaged cortex, runs every diagnostic, digs into the archives and examines every file, searches, probes, calls and recalls. There are so many gaps, so many healing scars, in his ship's mind. At last he finds it, the node where autopilot functions are joined to the system. There is nothing there. There's no trace of her. Of anything. The secondary systems have been burnt up, burnt out. Erased at the root. "Rose," he says. The ship has no memory of her. He lets go of the monitor and slumps to the floor. His eyes burn, but nothing comes. He's too empty to make tears. He holds his face and sobs without sound. He's not sure what he's crying for, or what he isn't crying for. He feels ashamed. There are death rites he could perform for his people, his family, ways he could mark their passing. He ought to get up. But he doesn't know how. He just needs to hear a voice, one voice, telling him- he doesn't know. Anything would do. But there's nothing. There's nobody left, nobody at all, nobody will ever know or remember, not even- he sobs harder and harder like a child, uncontrollably, until he's wrung out. He curls up in his ruined jacket and falls into a formless, dreamless sleep.
The readout has already told him that he is orbiting a fading star in the Selluca system, not far from the edge of the Gamma district, in the year one million. There is an ion storm passing about five hundred thousand miles away. Environmental conditions within and without the ship are stable. It is the Sellucan equivalent of a Thursday. Everything he's ever known and everyone he's ever loved is gone.
At first he thinks he will just stay here, in this spot, letting the TARDIS turn and turn until her lights fade and her hull ices and he turns into a skeleton underneath the grating. But it's such a disgustingly maudlin fantasy that he berates himself for having it. Next he thinks he should chameleon arch himself, bury the memories, live an ordinary life and die an ordinary death and be buried in somebody else's soil. But that's cheating. Whatever he does, he refuses to forget. Forgetting is what the rest of the universe does. He's not allowed. That's the punishment for living.
So instead of all that he goes down to the wardrobe and picks himself out a jumper and a jacket and pair of jeans, and puts his tattered old costume into a box. He does it without looking in the mirror, because vanity is also not allowed anymore. He's got no interest in what this body looks like. It's only a body. He goes back up to the console and sets the receiver on a wider range, sits back, and listens.
The first distress call is the one he answers.
He saves a group of colonists from an exploding reactor. They're a blue-skinned people with fetching ridges on their cheeks. He doesn't stay long enough for them to hold a party in his honor. Because he's off to find the missing cargo ship that drifted into a stasis minefield with a plucky crew still aboard. He rescues them, very narrowly, from being turned into floating debris. And then there's Chatfield, Minnesota, in 2059, something about stolen fusion cells. Death is so close on that one he can taste it on the wind, in the air, as it whistles past him. It feels like a summer breeze. He inhales a little deeper and moves on. He'll catch it if he's quick enough next time. He picks up a rumor that the Nestene Consciousness is looking to reassert itself, set down roots somewhere nice and cozy and heavily populated. That sounds promising. Easy enough to spot their first wave of clunky automatons being brought in en masse to retailers. Plastic, in whatever form, is never all that smart. He's right in the midst of one of their hubs, heading up from the loading dock to the elevator, when he hears the voice calling down the hall. A girl's voice, young and frightened. No civilians, that's another rule. No more collateral damage. Not allowed. He rolls his eyes and heads off to find her, scoop her up, deposit her outdoors, and then back to the plan. A massive explosion and a perfectly-timed escape. Down to the second. He finds her in the back room of the basement, a pink and yellow girl flat against the wall with her arms up in terror, half a dozen autons lined up in front of her. He grabs her hand.
"Run," he says, and they do. Breathless down the hall, into the elevator, where the doors shut with a slam, taking off a plastic arm in the process. "So," he says, "best if you forget you ever-" and the girl turns around. His entire body quakes once, like he's been pushed back with enormous force, and he hits the wall of the elevator hard. His arms scramble against the wall at strange angles. His mouth opens and shuts and opens again. "Rose," he says, stupidly. "Rose." Her eyes narrow.
"How d'you know my name?" Everything about her is perfect, perfectly duplicated, or perfectly imitated, down to the dark eyebrows and the cant of her hips and the way she tilts her head, wonderingly, warily. It's his autopilot, here, alive and- breathing? Is his autopilot breathing? He comes forward and she moves back. She brandishes the arm at him. "I don't think so," she says, threateningly. He's still staring at her, thinking about rubbing his eyes to make sure he's not hallucinating, in shock, dead and in an extended final sequence. Is it really important to know which one? Probably not. "What's the matter with you?" she asks him. "Are you hurt?"
"No," he says. "How-" he puts his hand over one heart anyway, to stop the pounding there. "How are you here? Tell me how you did it. No. Don't tell me. I'll guess. Hard light relay sequencing?" She stares at him in total confusion. "No." Something clicks. "Do you not- recognize me?"
"Mate," she says, "You've got me mixed up with somebody else." The elevator dings and the doors open. Wordlessly, mechanically, he steps out, and gestures for her to do the same. She holds onto the arm but follows him anyway, eyes still searching him. He takes her out by the back doors, holds the gate for her, and watches her go down the steps. She turns around, and he just stands there, stuck. Processing. His mind moves a million miles a minute, but it's still not quite fast enough to catch up to this new and impossible bit of information. "What are you doing?" she asks. "Come on. I'll call the police." She waves the arm at him. "Is this your plan? Standing around?"
"Working so far, isn't it?" he returns, reflexively. He must have had a thousand arguments with her, just like this, with her beautiful eyes flashing at him. This has to be a dream, a trick, a trance, but he doesn't care. He just wants to stand here on these steps and make her mad, make her yell at him and correct him and speak to him, look at him, know him. It's exhilarating. "But I was thinking something more drastic," he says, and pulls out the relay. "You'll want to be a bit further away when this goes off."
"Is that a bomb?" Her voice rises in pitch. "You'll blow yourself up!"
"Maybe," he says. "Maybe not, eh?" He smiles at her and she stares back at him as if he's mad. Well, that's hardly a new experience. It's so familiar it hurts like a bruise. He doesn't want it to stop. "Go on," he says. "Run for your life." He shuts the door behind him and practically sprints to the rooftop, hearts taking the pennant in his chest. When the bomb goes off, all he can think about is the feeling of her hand in his, the warm press of it, how solid and real and human it felt, the slight pulse in her wrist and the pull of her arm. He makes it out to the street and stares up at the secondary explosions, the raging plume of fire that goes up into the night. He feels inexplicably like dancing in front of it. Reality has officially taken a holiday. "Rose!" he calls out, into the darkness. He's running now. He'll catch up to her and they'll watch it together, the sparks and the smoke, holding hands. People are coming out of bars and buses, turning to look, wondering at the chaos. "Rose!" he cries.
But nobody answers.
Rose Tyler has a mother. And a boyfriend, and a flat on an upper floor, and Rose Tyler makes tea for them both, and Rose Tyler is nearly suffocated by a plastic arm in her own living room. Rose Tyler has never seen him before in her exceedingly short human life. But Rose Tyler is nineteen, and brave as a lion, and willing to kick dangerous plastic automatons over the side of a railing whilst dangling from an enormous chain. She does this for a stranger, a man she's never met, and for the sake of the world, and then she puts her arms around Mickey and says, sadly, that she'd better not go. In a daze, he nods and goes back to the TARDIS and puts the ship into orbit and stands around staring at nothing for a long, long time. It could be the Trickster, he thinks. A little pocket parallel universe. He runs some diagnostics and dematerializes and takes the ship out to the next quadrant and back. Could be a memory fracture in his own cortex. He gives himself a full work-up in the medbay and comes up with nothing. It could be a hiccup in the universe, some sort of massive re-set from when he hit the switch, a remnant or a left-over. He tells himself it doesn't matter, regardless. She's not his Rose. She stared and said, it's bigger on the inside, for goodness' sake. She's human. Fragile, mortal, foolish. She won't know how to steer, she doesn't remember him. Them. Anything. It's not a second chance. It doesn't change things. It could be a trap. It could be a gaffe, a coincidence, a portent, a mistake.
It could be a gift.
He thinks about her transparent feet up on the coffee table, her thoughtful smile and the secret in her eyes. She said something important. Some girls, he remembers. Some girls like to be asked twice. He spins the dials in a hurry, and the ship moves even faster than he does, humming with eagerness. He flies to the doors and flings them open and there she is, still standing in the same spot, trash and newspapers scuttling in the wind, Mickey clinging to her knees, an incandescent smile just beginning to dawn on her face. The sun in springtime isn't warmer, or more dazzling, or more welcome after the snows. He holds out his hand, and she comes running to take it.
"Right then, Rose Tyler," he says. "What's it going to be?"
"Everywhere," she says.
It feels very much like a promise.
The first time he sees her eating- an apple, the very first thing is an apple, he files that away in the new mental jumble of things marked Rose???Tyler- his eyes bulge out of his head. From the suspicious look she gives him afterwards, there was something like naked surprise plastered across his face. It's shaming. He's always thought himself capable of at least playing it cool.
"Did they not have apples, where you're from?" she asks. He grimaces and evades the question by taking her to the great orchards of Gebulalala, where they grow apples that produce starbursts behind your eyelids and sweet songs in your ears as you eat them. He eats two and Rose eats three. He laughs so hard at her reactions that she pounds on his back to keep him from choking.
"Respiratory bypass," he says, waving her off. But he doesn't mind, not really. He is not trying to keep a catalogue of every touch and every touch's sensation, and still it's happening. He has held her hand and helped her upright and pulled her away by the sleeve and she has rested her hand on his arm and slapped him on the back and now she is tugging him down the row of trees, pointing at things eagerly, asking him to give names to everything in sight, and to explain their functions, and to introduce her to all the workers and tell her how best to introduce herself. "Just smile at them," he says, only half-jokingly, and she does. A young man startles and flushes and drops a basket of apples and they roll around at his feet. "It always seems to work fine for you."
He takes her to the market on Tel Telaxis and watches her hands wander over fine silks, fabrics of incredible softness and luxurious touch. Her fingers rest lightly on things and stroke them and turn them over and she marvels at the feel of everything, the richness. Her hands don't go through anything. They never get translucent or begin to disappear. She's entirely corporeal and solid and her senses are always working overtime, taking things in, processing them, producing new observations and reactions. He enjoys watching that more than anything. He tries to buy her a bolt of sky-blue cloth that feels airy and feathery as dove's wings, and she shrugs him off, kindly.
"I'm not that fancy," she says. But she's wrong, she's so utterly wrong. He starts to insist and her eyes get cloudy, sad. "Don't need presents," she tells him, misunderstanding. "I didn't come with you for presents." He doesn't know how to explain it. He wants to give her a million beautiful things that she can touch and hold and keep. He wants to watch her holding them. He needs to know she's real. She gets tired and falls asleep on the jumpseat sometimes, snoring a little with her mouth open and her hair matted and her face pressed so hard on her sleeve it makes little patterns in her flesh. This is new, too. Everything goes in the file. He stays awake and putters with the console and when he is sure that she's dreaming, fully gone and not going to laugh at him, he stares at her for a while. He thinks about stroking her hair in her sleep, tucking strands of it behind her ears, pulling a blanket over her. He never knew where Rose went when she vanished- away- but Rose Tyler stays Rose Tyler at every moment. She is more than he ever imagined. When she wakes up, he asks her if she'd like to see Christmas in Italy or on the other moon of Poosh, not the missing one. She says Poosh, but her eyes are distant. She's been dreaming something unpleasant. She looks up at him, her hair still undone and wild about her temples. Like a ragged halo. Or a daisy crown, pure innocence. "When you met me," she asks, and his blood goes especially cold, "who did you mistake me for?"
"An old friend."
"An old friend," she repeats, and smiles slyly. "Or an old friend?"
"Italy it is!" he says, and gives the accelerator a jerk. She laughs and tumbles around on the jump seat and then she's off downstairs, picking out a costume. He doesn't think about it much as they run for their lives and face down death in a dingy Cardiff basement- hand in hand, for the file- but it's all he can think about afterwards. He has no idea what he'd tell her, what she'd say. How she'd look at him. If she'd leave.
"Do you think we could stop for a minute," she asks, later, "and see my mum?" In any other body, he'd have said no. In fact, he frequently has.
"Fine," he says. He tries to look tough and mean and put-upon as he says it. He rolls his eyes and spins the dials and sighs with exaggerated saintliness. But inside he is whispering the same word over and over: stay. Stay, stay stay stay stay stay.
Part Three.
...