In Any Other World - Chapter Fourteen : The Sound of Drums
Title: In Any Other World
Author: staci_x2
Rating: General/Teen
Warnings: None, so far
Pairings: Ten/Rose
Spoilers: The Sound of Drums.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Summary: "My name is Rose Tyler. And this is the story of how I survived." What would things have been like for the Doctor and Rose if they had never been separated into different worlds?
"Tomorrow, we take our place in the universe," said Saxon. "Every man, woman and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer and, oh, I don't know . . . shop girl?"
The Doctor looked at Rose in horror before diving forwards and wrenching the television forwards to find a bomb fixed to the back of it.
"Out!" he bellowed, and Rose and Jack ran for the door.
All Rose could feel apart from the pressure was the Doctor's cool hand, interlaced with her own. It felt exactly the same as when she had been touched by the Weeping Angel, the squeezing sensation over her whole body, not knowing which way was up until suddenly she could feel the ground beneath her feet. The Doctor's stayed in hers as the three of them groaned.
"Did I ever mention how much I hate that kind of time travel?" said Rose, and the Doctor gave his head a little shake as he stood fully upright.
"You've done that before?" said Jack.
"Weeping Angels. Long story," she said. "So, um, twenty-first century Earth is it?"
"That's right," the Doctor replied, and the three began to walk, the Doctor in between her and Jack with his hand determined not to leave hers, almost as though he felt threatened by Jack's presence.
Rose smiled. She loved it when the Doctor was possessive of her. They walked out of the alley they had landed in and down the London street, as the Doctor was certain that this, out of the whole of time and space, was where the Master was. After a minute or so of walking they came across some bollards in the street and sat down in order to decide what they wer going to do next.
"So who exactly is the Master?" Rose asked the Doctor. "Do you know him?"
"Oh yes," he replied. "Me and the Master go way back, and not in a good way."
"His voice changed," Rose remembered. "He's a Time Lord, yeah, did he regenerate?"
The Doctor, who seemed to be lost in thought, didn't respond before Jack interjected.
"But that means he's a completely new man. He could be anyone."
The Doctor, coming out of his daydream, explained that he would know him when he saw him. Apparently it was a Time Lord thing. Rose looked at the Doctor to see him staring upwards at something and slowly getting to his feet. She and Jack copied him, following his eyeline to a huge television screen in the street that was broascasting the news.
The newscaster was talking about a man named Harold Saxon, and showing a man and woman descending some stairs, surrounded by the press.
"That's him," said the Doctor. "He's Prime Minister."
As they watched, the man who the Doctor had identified as the Master kissed the lady on his arm. The Master was Prime Minister of Great Britain, and he had a wife. He stepped forwards on the screen to make a speech to the people, announcing that the country was sick, in need of medicine, and, with a smile that made Rose certain that he bwas talking straight to them, said that the country really needed a doctor.
*****
Rose looked at the Doctor and he turned to her.
"Right," he said. "Rose, we need to get to your flat."
"Ok," she said. "It's not far."
She set off, leading them in the general direction of the Powell Estate.
*****
It didn't take them long to get to Rose's flat, each of them deep in thought. As they went through the hallway, Jack took out his mobile, saying he was trying to call some friends of his but he couldn't get a reply. The Doctor asked Rose if she had a computer.
"Um, I think Mickey might have left his old one here last Christmas," she said, looking around the living room until she located it next to one of the armchairs.
She handed it over Jack, who logged on to Harold Saxon's website, telling them that he had been around for ages.
"If he's been around so long, how come we didn't know?" Rose wondered. "Have we really spent that much time away from home?"
"No, there's something I'm missing," he said, leaning over Jack's shoulder as he found Harold Saxon online. "But I can't think what."
*****
The Doctor sat down next to Jack on the sofa as he loaded Saxon's website, and Rose perched beside the Doctor on the sofa's arm. They found on the an advertisment for him that included many well-known celebritites praising him, and when Jack delved deeper he found that Saxon had first come to prominence on Christmas Eve, when he had shot down the Racnoss.
Rose looked at the Doctor. Although she had not been present in that particular adventure, he had told her all about it afterwards. Rose couldn't believe he'd been right under their noses all along. His profile told them that he had a whole life set up on Earth, a perfectly human backstory.
*****
As Jack and the Doctor reasearched Haarold Saxon further, Rose took the oppurtunity to shower and change out of her clothes. When she rejoined her friends, Jack was making tea in the kitchen and the Doctor had taken over the computer.
Jack handed Rose her tea as she came in, and voiced his idea that the Master could have gone back in time and been living on Earth for decades. The Doctor then revealed that the only thing he could do when the Master was stealing the TARDIS was fuse the coordinates so that he could only travel between the year one hundred trillion and the present day, with a leeway of no more than eighteen months.
"The Master was always sort of . . . hypnotic," the Doctor told them. "But this is on a massive scale."
Rose looked over at Jack, noticing his thoughtful expression.
"What is it?" she asked softly, and he looked at her.
"Nothing, it's just, I was gonna vote for him."
Rose raised her eyebrows slightly and the Doctor questioned Jack on what his policy was.
"I dunno," Jack said, his voice gentle and pensive. "He always sounded . . . good."
As Jack spoke vaguely of Harold Saxon and his policies, praising him for reasons he didn't seem to know, both Rose and the Doctor noticed that his fingers were tapping out a rhythm.
"What's that?" the Doctor demaned, and Jack seemed to come out of his trance.
Before they could get a straight answer from Jack however, the website the Doctor was on began playing a tune, announcing that Saxon was broadcasting on all channels. Rose reached for the remote and switched on the television to see Saxon sitting inside Downing Street, addressing the nation about the existence of aliens.
Video clips played along with his speech, showing the Slitheen spaceship that had destroyed Big Ben, the 'ghosts' that had turned out to be Cybermen, and finally the Christmas star that Saxon had had shot down. The most shocking part of the speech came when he announed that he had been contacted by a species called the Toclafane.
"What?!" said the Doctor in disbelief, but Harold Saxon's speech went on, saying that the Toclafane would appear to everyone tomorrow morning.
"Tomorrow, we take our place in the universe," said Saxon. "Every man, woman and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer and, oh, I don't know . . . shop girl?"
The Doctor looked at Rose in horror before diving forwards and wrenching the television forwards to find a bomb fixed to the back of it.
"Out!" he bellowed, and Rose and Jack ran for the door.
"I've got to warn the neighbours!" Rose called, but Jack pulled her along the balcony and towards the stairs. "Jack I've got to tell them!"
The Doctor came up behind them, carrying the laptop and his coat, and together he and Jack forced Rose to keep moving.
"Rose, there's no time, come on!" Jack said as they reached the staircase, and Rose finally listened to him as they broke into a run.
*****
They reached the outside just as the explosion happened. Rose watched in horror, tears filling her eyes as the home she had lived in all her life was destroyed.
"It was just the flat," the Doctor said. "Your neighbours are alright."
Rose nodded as tears welled in her eyes. That flat was the last proper link she had to her mother. The Doctor handed the laptop to Jack and pulled on his coat before standing in front of Rose.
"I'm sorry," he said, and she moved her eyes from the smoking flat to the Doctor. "I know how much the place meant to you."
"Looks like we both lost our homes today," she said, letting out a bitter laugh through her sadness and the Doctor gave her a sympathetic smile before reaching out to lace his hand through hers.
"Come on," he said. "It's not safe here. The Master knows where you live, we need to hide."
She nodded.
"Ok," she agreed. "Ok, let's go."
*****
Jack hotwired the first car they came across and got into the driver's seat. The Doctor and Rose clambered into the back and Jack zoomed off down the road.
"Where are we going?" Rose asked.
"As far away from here as possible," Jack answered. "I have these friends, in Cardiff-"
"Cardiff, Jack, seriously?" the Doctor interrupted. "No, we need to stay relatively close if we're to have any chance of stopping him."
"Do you know what we're going to do?" Rose asked.
"Not yet, but-"
The Doctor stopped talking as the sound of Rose's mobile filled the car. She froze. She couldn't even remember the last time somebody had rung her, especially not since her family now lived on a parallel world. She took her phone from her pocket and answered it.
"H-hello?"
She was hardly even surprised at the voice on the other end.
"You can run, Rose Tyler, but you can't hide. Although I do love a nice little game of hide-and-seek."
The Doctor silently held out his hand and Rose passed him the phone.
"I'm here," he said, and Rose listened as they talked.
The Doctor said that the Toclafane was just a made-up name like the Bogeyman, and as the conversation progressed onto what had become of the Time Lords, Rose reached out and covered his hand with hers. He gave her a weak smile as the car began to slow to a stop. Rose looked up to see that Jack had parked underneath a bridge, and the three of them got out to walk, the Doctor still on the phone with the Master.
They walked slowly under the nearby bridge, not even knowing where they were going to go next. Rose would have left the Doctor to continue his conversation in private, but he stayed close to her as he tried to reason with the Master, begging him to leave the Earth alone.
Their walk had taken them to a street with a few shops on it, and when the Doctor suddenly looked into a television shop window, Rose looked too to see hers, the Doctor's and Jack's faces on the news. The newscaster was calling them 'armed and extremely dangerous'.
"He can see us," the Doctor said after a moment, pointing the sonic screwdriver upwards to a camera and destroying it. "He's got control of everything."
*****
All that was left to do was run. Run and hide because there was nowhere left to go. It was getting dark by the time they found somwhere they could camp out, an old abandoned warehouse near a fish and chip shop. Rose offered to go out and get them some food while Jack and the Doctor set up a fire and loaded the laptop.
When she returned with their meal of chips, Jack had managed to tune his vortex manipulator into the government wavelength so they could follow what Saxon was doing. The three of them sat round a table the Doctor had managed to find as they ate their chips, and the Doctor finally talked to them about the Master.
He told them of what his home planet was like, the beautiful Gallifrey and the Citadel of the Time Lords. He said how children of Gallifrey were taken from their families at the age of eight and made to stare at the time vortex, the raw power of time and space.
"Some would be inspired," he told them. "Some would runaway . . . and some would go mad."
Rose smiled.
"You ran," she said softly, and he smiled back at her.
"Never stopped."
It was after the Doctor's story that Jack felt he should tell a story of his own. His manipulator beeped, and he patched it through to the laptop to show the Torchwood logo on the screen. Both the Doctor and Rose were shocked at this revelation.
"You're part of Torchwood?" said Rose in disbelief. "Jack, do you not know-"
"It's different now, I swear to you. It's changed."
He told them how the old Torchwood regime had been destroyed at Canary Wharf and that his team consisted of only half a dozen people, and that he had rebuilt it in the Doctor's honour.
*****
They stopped talking when the file that Jack had received on the manipulator loaded, showing a video of a woman. She had attached some Saxon files with the video, and said that itall started when Saxon became Minister in charge of the Archangel Network.
"What's that?" Rose asked Jack.
"It's a mobile phone network," he explained. "You'll have it. All phones have it worldwide, even the other networks are carried by it."
As he spoke, Rose took out her phone and handed it over to the Doctor, who ran the sonic screwdriver over it. He tapped the phone on the table and a beeping sounded in the same rhythm that Jack had tapped out earlier when he had been talking about Saxon.
"You said the Master was sort of hypnotic," Rose remembered. "Is that how he's got all his power? Through hypnosis?"
"It's subtle," said the Doctor. "It's very subtle, just ticking away in the subconscious. Contained in that rhythm, in layers of code "Vote Saxon. Believe in me." Whispering to the world. That's why I didn't sense him. I should have sensed another Time Lord on Earth but the signal cancelled him out."
Once they knew how he had managed to gain contol of the population, they had way to fight back.
*****
The Doctor set to work immediately, first taking apart the mobile phone and laptop.
"TARDIS keys?" said the Doctor, and Rose smiled as she saw that Jack still carried his around with him.
When the Doctor was finished, he had created a perception filter. He asked Jack forward to try it out.
"You know, Doctor, I kinda know how it works," he said, and Rose giggled as his eyes kept getting drawn away from the Doctor.
From where she was standing, it looked rather humourous.
"Alright, alright," said Jack, looking over at Rose and chuckling. "It's strange to be on the other side of the perception filter for once."
"Not invisible, just unnoticed," he told them both, thinking up a metaphor. "Oh! I know what it's like! It's like . . . it's like when you fancy someone and they don't even know you exist. That's what it's like."
He reached out and took Rose's hand as he set off away from the warehouse.
"Come on!" he called out to Jack, and Rose turned to give him an apologetic smile.
She knew that what the Doctor had just described was exactly the way Jack felt about him.
*****
They left the warehouse and went onto the streets, the Doctor still holding Rose's hand as he instructed them on how to behave. They couldn't run, or shout, or draw attention to themselves in any way. They had to just keep to the shadows, like ghosts.
It felt surreal to walk through the streets without being noticed. Rose felt as though she were in some sort of strange dream as they made their way to where the American President was flying in to meet with Harold Saxon.
They stood in the background as the President and Saxon conversed. The President told Mr Saxon that UNIT had taken control of the operation, and that the Toclafane would appear on a ship called the Valiant instead of in everybody's homes.
Jack used his manipulator to find the coordinates of the Valiant, and the threee of them used it as a teleport to get on board.
*****
Once again, the Doctor held Rose's hand through the teleportation, and they arrived on the Valiant to discover that it was already dawn. They were making their way through a maintenance corridor when the Doctor stopped and listened to the air, chaning their direction and leading them straight to the TARDIS.
Rose's face broke into a wide grin when she saw it and she followed the Doctor as he ran towards it. The doors were unlocked, but as the three of them entered the console room they saw that something was very wrong.
Around the console was what looked to be a cage with several thick wires running through it, and the room was bathed in an ominous red light. In addition to that, the sound of the TARDIS was completely wrong. The usually contented-sounding hum was gone, replaced with a noise that made her sound quite ill.
"It's a paradox machine," said the Doctor in disgust.
At two minutes past eight, the paradox machine would trigger, and even the Doctor didn't know what it was going to do. All they knew was that first contact with the Toclafane was happening two minutes before the machine was due to go off. The only thing they could do was get to the Master, and to both Rose's and Jack's delight, the Doctor finally had a plan.
*****
They made their way out of the TARDIS and headed for the conference room. They entered as the President was making a speech, awaiting the arrival of the Toclafane. The Doctor told Jack and Rose the plan in whispers, which was to get one of the TARDIS keys around the Master's neck. This would cancel out his perception and make the world see him for what he reallt was.
"If they stop me," said the Doctor. "You've got a key."
"Be careful," Rose said, and he gave her a reassuring smile.
"I always am."
The Doctor set off against the corners of the room, keeping to the shadows as the three Toclafane spheres appeared around President Winters' head. The spheres began to ask for the Master, and after a few moments, the Master stood up and ordered one of them to kill the President. Before the eyes of the entire nation, President Winters disintegrated, and as the Doctor rushed forward the Master had him captured by the guards.
Jack held Rose back from going to his aid, but the preception filter did not work on the Master, and he ould see them anyway. Jack pushed Rose away and lunged forward towards the Master, who fired what he called a laser screwdriver at him, killing him. Although she now knew that Jack would always come back to life, it still stung to see someone she cared about so much falling lifelessly to the floor.
*****
She rushed to Jack's side as the Doctor pleaded with the Master to stop. When the Master ordered the guards to let the Doctor go, Rose dared to hope jut for a second that perhaps the Doctor had got through to him. But then the Master began to talk of Lazarus and his genetic manipulation device, how he had concentrated the technology into his screwdriver and reversed it so that it made people older instead of younger.
Rose watched in horror as he pointed the screwdriver at the Doctor, who beganto scream in pain and convulse as the Master added one hundred years to his age.
"Teleport."
Rose realised that Jack had come back to life, and reluctantly tore her eyes away from the Doctor as he handed her the time vortex manipulator.
"No," Rose whispered. "I'm not leaving him. I'm not leaving either of you."
Jack tried to convince her that there was nothing she could do, that the Master couldn't be stopped, but she couldn't leave. Rose let out a silent cry as she looked back over at the Doctor, whose head was now balding and grey and whose skin sagged from his once-young face. She crawled towards him across the floor and supported him with her arms.
"Doctor," she murmured.
"Ah," the Master cooed. "How sweet. The shop girl and the Doctor. But tell me, Rose Tyler, did you ever really believe the two of you would last?"
Rose's eyes burned with hatred for him as the Doctor demanded to know, in his wheezing voice, who the Toclafane were. The Master just told him that if he knew, his hearts would break, and then the Toclafane invasion began.
The Master addressed the nation, announcing the end of the world as six billion Toclafane began to descend to the Earth. The Master ordered them to remove one tenth of the population, and tears filled Rose's eyes as messages from Earth sounded in the room, dying humans begging for help.
And through all the detruction, as the Master took control of the entire world, Rose listened to the Doctor's voice and gripped his hand tightly. He whispered instructions to into her ear as tears rolled down her cheeks. How could she possibly do what he was asking? He finished talking and she turned to look into his eyes, the only thing that still looked like the Doctor she knew and loved. It was enough to convince her.
She stood, her heart tearing in two as she left the Doctor's side, and stood with the teleport in her hands. With a last, teary look at first Jack and then the Doctor, Rose activated the teleport, and for once welcomed the pressure that came with that sort of teleportation. It forced everything out of her head, just for a few short seconds, and brought her some clarity.
She scrambled to her feet on the grass she had landed and looked up at the sky, at the Toclafane destoying one tenth of her people, 600,000,000 human beings. How could she fight aginst that? The world was over, it was as simple as that.
How could the Doctor believe that it could be saved? That she could save it? How could he believe in her, the twenty-one year-old from the Powell Estate. No matter how much she'd seen and done in her travelling with him, did he honestly think she was capable of taking on a task like this? On her own?
His final words to her rang in her ears as she stared upwards.
"If I believe in one thing . . . just one thing . . . I believe in you, Rose Tyler."
The Doctor believed in her. Yes, that had to mean something. She could do it. She could save the world and her Doctor and everything could go back to the way it should be.
"I'll see you soon, Doctor," she murmured at the sky, before turning and running away, running forwards on her year-long mission to save the world from the Master.
If you liked it, please leave a comment :) Comments make my day :)
Author: staci_x2
Rating: General/Teen
Warnings: None, so far
Pairings: Ten/Rose
Spoilers: The Sound of Drums.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Summary: "My name is Rose Tyler. And this is the story of how I survived." What would things have been like for the Doctor and Rose if they had never been separated into different worlds?
"Tomorrow, we take our place in the universe," said Saxon. "Every man, woman and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer and, oh, I don't know . . . shop girl?"
The Doctor looked at Rose in horror before diving forwards and wrenching the television forwards to find a bomb fixed to the back of it.
"Out!" he bellowed, and Rose and Jack ran for the door.
All Rose could feel apart from the pressure was the Doctor's cool hand, interlaced with her own. It felt exactly the same as when she had been touched by the Weeping Angel, the squeezing sensation over her whole body, not knowing which way was up until suddenly she could feel the ground beneath her feet. The Doctor's stayed in hers as the three of them groaned.
"Did I ever mention how much I hate that kind of time travel?" said Rose, and the Doctor gave his head a little shake as he stood fully upright.
"You've done that before?" said Jack.
"Weeping Angels. Long story," she said. "So, um, twenty-first century Earth is it?"
"That's right," the Doctor replied, and the three began to walk, the Doctor in between her and Jack with his hand determined not to leave hers, almost as though he felt threatened by Jack's presence.
Rose smiled. She loved it when the Doctor was possessive of her. They walked out of the alley they had landed in and down the London street, as the Doctor was certain that this, out of the whole of time and space, was where the Master was. After a minute or so of walking they came across some bollards in the street and sat down in order to decide what they wer going to do next.
"So who exactly is the Master?" Rose asked the Doctor. "Do you know him?"
"Oh yes," he replied. "Me and the Master go way back, and not in a good way."
"His voice changed," Rose remembered. "He's a Time Lord, yeah, did he regenerate?"
The Doctor, who seemed to be lost in thought, didn't respond before Jack interjected.
"But that means he's a completely new man. He could be anyone."
The Doctor, coming out of his daydream, explained that he would know him when he saw him. Apparently it was a Time Lord thing. Rose looked at the Doctor to see him staring upwards at something and slowly getting to his feet. She and Jack copied him, following his eyeline to a huge television screen in the street that was broascasting the news.
The newscaster was talking about a man named Harold Saxon, and showing a man and woman descending some stairs, surrounded by the press.
"That's him," said the Doctor. "He's Prime Minister."
As they watched, the man who the Doctor had identified as the Master kissed the lady on his arm. The Master was Prime Minister of Great Britain, and he had a wife. He stepped forwards on the screen to make a speech to the people, announcing that the country was sick, in need of medicine, and, with a smile that made Rose certain that he bwas talking straight to them, said that the country really needed a doctor.
*****
Rose looked at the Doctor and he turned to her.
"Right," he said. "Rose, we need to get to your flat."
"Ok," she said. "It's not far."
She set off, leading them in the general direction of the Powell Estate.
*****
It didn't take them long to get to Rose's flat, each of them deep in thought. As they went through the hallway, Jack took out his mobile, saying he was trying to call some friends of his but he couldn't get a reply. The Doctor asked Rose if she had a computer.
"Um, I think Mickey might have left his old one here last Christmas," she said, looking around the living room until she located it next to one of the armchairs.
She handed it over Jack, who logged on to Harold Saxon's website, telling them that he had been around for ages.
"If he's been around so long, how come we didn't know?" Rose wondered. "Have we really spent that much time away from home?"
"No, there's something I'm missing," he said, leaning over Jack's shoulder as he found Harold Saxon online. "But I can't think what."
*****
The Doctor sat down next to Jack on the sofa as he loaded Saxon's website, and Rose perched beside the Doctor on the sofa's arm. They found on the an advertisment for him that included many well-known celebritites praising him, and when Jack delved deeper he found that Saxon had first come to prominence on Christmas Eve, when he had shot down the Racnoss.
Rose looked at the Doctor. Although she had not been present in that particular adventure, he had told her all about it afterwards. Rose couldn't believe he'd been right under their noses all along. His profile told them that he had a whole life set up on Earth, a perfectly human backstory.
*****
As Jack and the Doctor reasearched Haarold Saxon further, Rose took the oppurtunity to shower and change out of her clothes. When she rejoined her friends, Jack was making tea in the kitchen and the Doctor had taken over the computer.
Jack handed Rose her tea as she came in, and voiced his idea that the Master could have gone back in time and been living on Earth for decades. The Doctor then revealed that the only thing he could do when the Master was stealing the TARDIS was fuse the coordinates so that he could only travel between the year one hundred trillion and the present day, with a leeway of no more than eighteen months.
"The Master was always sort of . . . hypnotic," the Doctor told them. "But this is on a massive scale."
Rose looked over at Jack, noticing his thoughtful expression.
"What is it?" she asked softly, and he looked at her.
"Nothing, it's just, I was gonna vote for him."
Rose raised her eyebrows slightly and the Doctor questioned Jack on what his policy was.
"I dunno," Jack said, his voice gentle and pensive. "He always sounded . . . good."
As Jack spoke vaguely of Harold Saxon and his policies, praising him for reasons he didn't seem to know, both Rose and the Doctor noticed that his fingers were tapping out a rhythm.
"What's that?" the Doctor demaned, and Jack seemed to come out of his trance.
Before they could get a straight answer from Jack however, the website the Doctor was on began playing a tune, announcing that Saxon was broadcasting on all channels. Rose reached for the remote and switched on the television to see Saxon sitting inside Downing Street, addressing the nation about the existence of aliens.
Video clips played along with his speech, showing the Slitheen spaceship that had destroyed Big Ben, the 'ghosts' that had turned out to be Cybermen, and finally the Christmas star that Saxon had had shot down. The most shocking part of the speech came when he announed that he had been contacted by a species called the Toclafane.
"What?!" said the Doctor in disbelief, but Harold Saxon's speech went on, saying that the Toclafane would appear to everyone tomorrow morning.
"Tomorrow, we take our place in the universe," said Saxon. "Every man, woman and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer and, oh, I don't know . . . shop girl?"
The Doctor looked at Rose in horror before diving forwards and wrenching the television forwards to find a bomb fixed to the back of it.
"Out!" he bellowed, and Rose and Jack ran for the door.
"I've got to warn the neighbours!" Rose called, but Jack pulled her along the balcony and towards the stairs. "Jack I've got to tell them!"
The Doctor came up behind them, carrying the laptop and his coat, and together he and Jack forced Rose to keep moving.
"Rose, there's no time, come on!" Jack said as they reached the staircase, and Rose finally listened to him as they broke into a run.
*****
They reached the outside just as the explosion happened. Rose watched in horror, tears filling her eyes as the home she had lived in all her life was destroyed.
"It was just the flat," the Doctor said. "Your neighbours are alright."
Rose nodded as tears welled in her eyes. That flat was the last proper link she had to her mother. The Doctor handed the laptop to Jack and pulled on his coat before standing in front of Rose.
"I'm sorry," he said, and she moved her eyes from the smoking flat to the Doctor. "I know how much the place meant to you."
"Looks like we both lost our homes today," she said, letting out a bitter laugh through her sadness and the Doctor gave her a sympathetic smile before reaching out to lace his hand through hers.
"Come on," he said. "It's not safe here. The Master knows where you live, we need to hide."
She nodded.
"Ok," she agreed. "Ok, let's go."
*****
Jack hotwired the first car they came across and got into the driver's seat. The Doctor and Rose clambered into the back and Jack zoomed off down the road.
"Where are we going?" Rose asked.
"As far away from here as possible," Jack answered. "I have these friends, in Cardiff-"
"Cardiff, Jack, seriously?" the Doctor interrupted. "No, we need to stay relatively close if we're to have any chance of stopping him."
"Do you know what we're going to do?" Rose asked.
"Not yet, but-"
The Doctor stopped talking as the sound of Rose's mobile filled the car. She froze. She couldn't even remember the last time somebody had rung her, especially not since her family now lived on a parallel world. She took her phone from her pocket and answered it.
"H-hello?"
She was hardly even surprised at the voice on the other end.
"You can run, Rose Tyler, but you can't hide. Although I do love a nice little game of hide-and-seek."
The Doctor silently held out his hand and Rose passed him the phone.
"I'm here," he said, and Rose listened as they talked.
The Doctor said that the Toclafane was just a made-up name like the Bogeyman, and as the conversation progressed onto what had become of the Time Lords, Rose reached out and covered his hand with hers. He gave her a weak smile as the car began to slow to a stop. Rose looked up to see that Jack had parked underneath a bridge, and the three of them got out to walk, the Doctor still on the phone with the Master.
They walked slowly under the nearby bridge, not even knowing where they were going to go next. Rose would have left the Doctor to continue his conversation in private, but he stayed close to her as he tried to reason with the Master, begging him to leave the Earth alone.
Their walk had taken them to a street with a few shops on it, and when the Doctor suddenly looked into a television shop window, Rose looked too to see hers, the Doctor's and Jack's faces on the news. The newscaster was calling them 'armed and extremely dangerous'.
"He can see us," the Doctor said after a moment, pointing the sonic screwdriver upwards to a camera and destroying it. "He's got control of everything."
*****
All that was left to do was run. Run and hide because there was nowhere left to go. It was getting dark by the time they found somwhere they could camp out, an old abandoned warehouse near a fish and chip shop. Rose offered to go out and get them some food while Jack and the Doctor set up a fire and loaded the laptop.
When she returned with their meal of chips, Jack had managed to tune his vortex manipulator into the government wavelength so they could follow what Saxon was doing. The three of them sat round a table the Doctor had managed to find as they ate their chips, and the Doctor finally talked to them about the Master.
He told them of what his home planet was like, the beautiful Gallifrey and the Citadel of the Time Lords. He said how children of Gallifrey were taken from their families at the age of eight and made to stare at the time vortex, the raw power of time and space.
"Some would be inspired," he told them. "Some would runaway . . . and some would go mad."
Rose smiled.
"You ran," she said softly, and he smiled back at her.
"Never stopped."
It was after the Doctor's story that Jack felt he should tell a story of his own. His manipulator beeped, and he patched it through to the laptop to show the Torchwood logo on the screen. Both the Doctor and Rose were shocked at this revelation.
"You're part of Torchwood?" said Rose in disbelief. "Jack, do you not know-"
"It's different now, I swear to you. It's changed."
He told them how the old Torchwood regime had been destroyed at Canary Wharf and that his team consisted of only half a dozen people, and that he had rebuilt it in the Doctor's honour.
*****
They stopped talking when the file that Jack had received on the manipulator loaded, showing a video of a woman. She had attached some Saxon files with the video, and said that itall started when Saxon became Minister in charge of the Archangel Network.
"What's that?" Rose asked Jack.
"It's a mobile phone network," he explained. "You'll have it. All phones have it worldwide, even the other networks are carried by it."
As he spoke, Rose took out her phone and handed it over to the Doctor, who ran the sonic screwdriver over it. He tapped the phone on the table and a beeping sounded in the same rhythm that Jack had tapped out earlier when he had been talking about Saxon.
"You said the Master was sort of hypnotic," Rose remembered. "Is that how he's got all his power? Through hypnosis?"
"It's subtle," said the Doctor. "It's very subtle, just ticking away in the subconscious. Contained in that rhythm, in layers of code "Vote Saxon. Believe in me." Whispering to the world. That's why I didn't sense him. I should have sensed another Time Lord on Earth but the signal cancelled him out."
Once they knew how he had managed to gain contol of the population, they had way to fight back.
*****
The Doctor set to work immediately, first taking apart the mobile phone and laptop.
"TARDIS keys?" said the Doctor, and Rose smiled as she saw that Jack still carried his around with him.
When the Doctor was finished, he had created a perception filter. He asked Jack forward to try it out.
"You know, Doctor, I kinda know how it works," he said, and Rose giggled as his eyes kept getting drawn away from the Doctor.
From where she was standing, it looked rather humourous.
"Alright, alright," said Jack, looking over at Rose and chuckling. "It's strange to be on the other side of the perception filter for once."
"Not invisible, just unnoticed," he told them both, thinking up a metaphor. "Oh! I know what it's like! It's like . . . it's like when you fancy someone and they don't even know you exist. That's what it's like."
He reached out and took Rose's hand as he set off away from the warehouse.
"Come on!" he called out to Jack, and Rose turned to give him an apologetic smile.
She knew that what the Doctor had just described was exactly the way Jack felt about him.
*****
They left the warehouse and went onto the streets, the Doctor still holding Rose's hand as he instructed them on how to behave. They couldn't run, or shout, or draw attention to themselves in any way. They had to just keep to the shadows, like ghosts.
It felt surreal to walk through the streets without being noticed. Rose felt as though she were in some sort of strange dream as they made their way to where the American President was flying in to meet with Harold Saxon.
They stood in the background as the President and Saxon conversed. The President told Mr Saxon that UNIT had taken control of the operation, and that the Toclafane would appear on a ship called the Valiant instead of in everybody's homes.
Jack used his manipulator to find the coordinates of the Valiant, and the threee of them used it as a teleport to get on board.
*****
Once again, the Doctor held Rose's hand through the teleportation, and they arrived on the Valiant to discover that it was already dawn. They were making their way through a maintenance corridor when the Doctor stopped and listened to the air, chaning their direction and leading them straight to the TARDIS.
Rose's face broke into a wide grin when she saw it and she followed the Doctor as he ran towards it. The doors were unlocked, but as the three of them entered the console room they saw that something was very wrong.
Around the console was what looked to be a cage with several thick wires running through it, and the room was bathed in an ominous red light. In addition to that, the sound of the TARDIS was completely wrong. The usually contented-sounding hum was gone, replaced with a noise that made her sound quite ill.
"It's a paradox machine," said the Doctor in disgust.
At two minutes past eight, the paradox machine would trigger, and even the Doctor didn't know what it was going to do. All they knew was that first contact with the Toclafane was happening two minutes before the machine was due to go off. The only thing they could do was get to the Master, and to both Rose's and Jack's delight, the Doctor finally had a plan.
*****
They made their way out of the TARDIS and headed for the conference room. They entered as the President was making a speech, awaiting the arrival of the Toclafane. The Doctor told Jack and Rose the plan in whispers, which was to get one of the TARDIS keys around the Master's neck. This would cancel out his perception and make the world see him for what he reallt was.
"If they stop me," said the Doctor. "You've got a key."
"Be careful," Rose said, and he gave her a reassuring smile.
"I always am."
The Doctor set off against the corners of the room, keeping to the shadows as the three Toclafane spheres appeared around President Winters' head. The spheres began to ask for the Master, and after a few moments, the Master stood up and ordered one of them to kill the President. Before the eyes of the entire nation, President Winters disintegrated, and as the Doctor rushed forward the Master had him captured by the guards.
Jack held Rose back from going to his aid, but the preception filter did not work on the Master, and he ould see them anyway. Jack pushed Rose away and lunged forward towards the Master, who fired what he called a laser screwdriver at him, killing him. Although she now knew that Jack would always come back to life, it still stung to see someone she cared about so much falling lifelessly to the floor.
*****
She rushed to Jack's side as the Doctor pleaded with the Master to stop. When the Master ordered the guards to let the Doctor go, Rose dared to hope jut for a second that perhaps the Doctor had got through to him. But then the Master began to talk of Lazarus and his genetic manipulation device, how he had concentrated the technology into his screwdriver and reversed it so that it made people older instead of younger.
Rose watched in horror as he pointed the screwdriver at the Doctor, who beganto scream in pain and convulse as the Master added one hundred years to his age.
"Teleport."
Rose realised that Jack had come back to life, and reluctantly tore her eyes away from the Doctor as he handed her the time vortex manipulator.
"No," Rose whispered. "I'm not leaving him. I'm not leaving either of you."
Jack tried to convince her that there was nothing she could do, that the Master couldn't be stopped, but she couldn't leave. Rose let out a silent cry as she looked back over at the Doctor, whose head was now balding and grey and whose skin sagged from his once-young face. She crawled towards him across the floor and supported him with her arms.
"Doctor," she murmured.
"Ah," the Master cooed. "How sweet. The shop girl and the Doctor. But tell me, Rose Tyler, did you ever really believe the two of you would last?"
Rose's eyes burned with hatred for him as the Doctor demanded to know, in his wheezing voice, who the Toclafane were. The Master just told him that if he knew, his hearts would break, and then the Toclafane invasion began.
The Master addressed the nation, announcing the end of the world as six billion Toclafane began to descend to the Earth. The Master ordered them to remove one tenth of the population, and tears filled Rose's eyes as messages from Earth sounded in the room, dying humans begging for help.
And through all the detruction, as the Master took control of the entire world, Rose listened to the Doctor's voice and gripped his hand tightly. He whispered instructions to into her ear as tears rolled down her cheeks. How could she possibly do what he was asking? He finished talking and she turned to look into his eyes, the only thing that still looked like the Doctor she knew and loved. It was enough to convince her.
She stood, her heart tearing in two as she left the Doctor's side, and stood with the teleport in her hands. With a last, teary look at first Jack and then the Doctor, Rose activated the teleport, and for once welcomed the pressure that came with that sort of teleportation. It forced everything out of her head, just for a few short seconds, and brought her some clarity.
She scrambled to her feet on the grass she had landed and looked up at the sky, at the Toclafane destoying one tenth of her people, 600,000,000 human beings. How could she fight aginst that? The world was over, it was as simple as that.
How could the Doctor believe that it could be saved? That she could save it? How could he believe in her, the twenty-one year-old from the Powell Estate. No matter how much she'd seen and done in her travelling with him, did he honestly think she was capable of taking on a task like this? On her own?
His final words to her rang in her ears as she stared upwards.
"If I believe in one thing . . . just one thing . . . I believe in you, Rose Tyler."
The Doctor believed in her. Yes, that had to mean something. She could do it. She could save the world and her Doctor and everything could go back to the way it should be.
"I'll see you soon, Doctor," she murmured at the sky, before turning and running away, running forwards on her year-long mission to save the world from the Master.
If you liked it, please leave a comment :) Comments make my day :)