Fathers and Sons (3/4) PG
Title: Fathers and Sons
Author: Gail R. Delaney
Series: The Unseen and In Between
Setting: After Fear Her
Genre: Romance, Angst
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine. If I owned Doctor Who, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant would be my own private little playmates.
Summary: “I was a dad once.” He answered her questions when she asked them, but Rose still never understood what he was really said until he was ready to open the door. The final story of the man known as The Doctor is both beautiful and tragic, but the greatest beauty is in the telling.
Follow up to Everything Rose Wanted to Know about Time Lords, and Apparently Wasn’t Afraid to Ask.
A/N: I use canon, I bend canon, I interpret canon my own way and I add just a tick of my own fanon to make it all work. When it's all posted, I'm going to do a post to my LJ explaining which is which and just where the hints were dropped
Part One
Part Two
He tipped his chin up and indicated the expanse of the library with the movement of his head. “Here. In the TARDIS. His TARDIS. I was born here.”
Rose jumped at a sudden sound behind her, and the Doctor flipped her onto the cushions, gaining his feet. He was half way across the library before she could catch her breath.
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
The Doctor reached the far corner of the library just as the bookshelves split and slid aside, Rose running up behind him to peer past his arm, watching the shifting of books and wood. In the space revealed appeared the door that Rose had seen a couple weeks before while nursing a bad cold on the library couch.
The last time she saw it, she had been much further away lying on the couch, and had only seen that it was a door that the TARDIS in the form of the blonde, blue-eyed child had disappeared into it to retrieve a storybook. Now, standing this close, she saw that it was actually a double door, the knobs meeting in the center. They were rich and dark, carved with images of suns and moons, animals and fairies, like a storybook picture carved into the wood.
"S'at room again," she said, pointing past him. "Remember?"
"Yesssss." The Doctor drew out the 's', his brow pulled down over his eyes as he studied the door. He reached into his suit for his screwdriver, waving the blue tip back and forth across the doorway. "More temporal residue. It's been put here from some other point in time." He mumbled more than spoke as he scanned the door, and looking at the tip of the screwdriver. He sucked in a deep breath before rotating on his heels to look at her. "I suppose the old girl is ready for us to see what she's hiding, hmmmm?"
Before she answered, he reached for the knobs and pushed the doors open, revealing the room beyond. Two steps into the room, the Doctor stopped and his hands dropped to his side.
Rose gasped, stepping around him to see the entire room.
There was no doubt the room belonged to a child... a somewhat messy child because the floor was scattered with toys and books and sketch pads with coloring pencils worn down to near nubs. Everything was blue in some shade or variation... the walls, the thick duvet on the bed, the carpet that covered the center of the floor, and the ceiling... the ceiling was a night sky complete with twinkling stars and a pink-yellow nebulus cloud. Rose stood in a bare spot on the floor and looked up, turning slowly. There was no end to the sky... she could have been standing in the center of a field in Chesham and the air in the room carried the scent of grass and evening.
"Doctor... this is beautiful," she whispered, suddenly feeling that the room deserved her reverence. She crouched down and picked up one of the sketch pads. The drawing was juvenile in its simplicity, but the colors were vivid and the paper indented where the artist had pushed the pencils hard into the pad.
Three people stood hand in hand. One... the father, if Rose had to guess... stood much taller than the others with wide shoulders and large hands. He was drawn to have yellow hair and a wide smile, and two hearts were drawn over his chest. Beside him was a woman wearing a green dress with long brown hair. A single heart was drawn for her, but it was large and took up just as much space as the father's two.
And between them was a little boy, his hair drawn with a white pencil. He held the hand of each adult, and his smile took up his entire face. Two hearts were drawn on his chest. Separate from the three, drawn in the corner, was a little girl with long blonde hair and dark blue eyes.
This was the Doctor's room.
When she looked up from the drawing, she sought the Doctor out and saw that he'd moved from the doorway to the bed. Draped across the foot of the bed was the same soft afghan Rose remembered the TARDIS giving her when she was sick. The Doctor picked it up and held it to his face, his eyes closed as he inhaled. With the blanket still held to his nose he sank down onto the small bed.
"You were a messy little boy," Rose said softly, walking over him, stepping carefully over the books and toys. She sat down beside him, close enough that she could lean her cheek against his arm and lay her hand on his leg.
He lowered the blanket, holding it bundled in his hands. "My mother was forever telling me to clean up, but I always thought there were more important things to do. And why put all my toys away if I'm just going to take them out again?" His voice was distant and rough, his eyes on the blanket. "She made this before I was born and I slept with it until the day we left the TARDIS."
A shuddered breath shook his body and he looked up, his gaze on the other side of the room. "We landed on Gallifrey and I remember being very cross because they wouldn't let me take some toy with me..." He shook his head. "I don't even remember what it was now. My mother told me I could play with it when we came home." Rose's eyes prickled with hot tears when she saw the moisture pooling in his dark brown eyes. "They never let us come back."
Rose wrapped her arm behind him, curling her other hand into the bend of his arm to hold him. She rested her cheek on his shoulder but tipped her head back to see his face. The smiles and bright gleam in his eyes from just minutes before were now replaced with a sadness that pulled at his features. "How old were you?"
He shook his head again. "Perhaps five? Six?"
"Why did your father decide to bring you back? He looked down at her, and she offered a smile, hoping he knew it was okay to keep talking. "He must have had some idea..."
The Doctor swallowed, closing his eyes slowly. He laid his hand on hers. "He wanted me to go to the Academy. He knew that the Council would be angry, but really didn't know what they would do to him. But, they couldn't deny my right to be trained as a Time Lord. I was a child of Gallifrey. It was my right, just like any child."
Rose set the sketch in his lap and his gaze shifted down. "I think we should hang this up, too. Or, at least, put it somewhere special. Who's this?" she asked, pointing out the girl in the corner. "Did you have a sister?"
"No," he answered, taking his specs from his pocket so he could examine the picture. "I had a brother, but not while we lived here. No, that is my imaginary friend. My father used to say it was a touch of the human in me to create an imaginary playmate when there was so much to do within the TARDIS to occupy my mind."
She smiled at the thought that the Doctor - A Time Lord who traveled the stars in a blue box - had an imaginary friend when he was a little boy. "Yeah? Cuz... she looks a lot like the TARDIS. You know, when she visits with me. Blonde hair, dark blue eyes... could be her."
"I never made the connection..." He said softly, studying the picture. "You told me, and I don't think I even remembered. I just thought..." He let the handing holding the sketchpad drop into his lap. The Doctor looked at Rose. "Why would she show herself to you now and not me?"
Rose shrugged. "Probably got her reasons."
He seemed to slip back into thought, staring at the drawing, but some of the strain had left his face, the lines around his eyes relaxing. Rose pulled back, but stayed beside him, picking up a small stuffed toy on the bed. It looked like a cross between a rhinoceros and a pelican, and was a deep purple color. A book sat on the bed behind the Doctor and she picked it up, smiling when she saw the title embossed in the leather.
"Look. Here's the book she read me. Rumplestiltskin ."
"It was my favorite story. She used to read..." His voice trailed off again and he looked at the book. "I should have known then. Imaginary friends don't read books at the foot of your bed, do they?"
"How would you have known? Sounds like you didn't exactly have a bunch of other children hangin' 'round tellin' you how to act and how things were supposed to be. Maybe that's why she was a little girl. So you had a friend?"
"Maybe."
The Doctor stood and Rose scooted back further onto the bed, crossing her legs with the sketch pad and book in her lap. She watched him traverse the room slowly, stopping here and there to pick up a toy or a book, running his fingers along the edge of a shelf. The room was really huge, probably bigger than her mum's entire flat.
He stopped to pick up a small round toy on the shelf, and she smiled when his face lit up. With a slight touch, the entire toy exploded in color, taking on a brand new form in the palm of his hands. It was like a kaliedescope without the tube. "I used to love this!” he declared, bounding on the balls of his feet. “I think it was the toy I wanted to take with me."
The Doctor played for several minutes, and Rose just watched. He was like a kid all over again, not that he wasn't often like a kid. It was engrained in his personality now.
"So," she said after a bit. "You didn't have a sister. Did you have any brothers?"
His head popped up and he slipped the magical changing ball into his pocket. Rose smiled, wondering how long it would be before she found him playing with the toy when he thought she wasn't looking. "Yes. He was born several years after me. After I'd gone on to Academy. Roderick. My father was hesitant to allow my mother to have another child."
"Why?"
"Having me was difficult for her." He ticked his head to the side before diverting his eyes away. "Probably one of the reasons Time Lords were discouraged from procreating, especially outside of Gallifrey. My mother conceived - quite unexpectedly, as you might imagine - but, the genetic coding for a Time Lord is pre-set for a very strictly monitored and guided growth pattern."
"Which means what, exactly?"
He came back across the room and dropped onto the bed with a hop, making the mattress bounce and Rose squeak as she tried to keep from toppling onto the floor. The Doctor leaned back, extending his legs with his ankles crossed, supporting his weight on his bent elbows. "In any species that procreates naturally, it's all done automatically. Zygotes divide into blastomeres. The blastocyst attaches to the endometrium.” Rose pulled a face, grimacing. “But, when a Time Lord is Loomed, every stage of development is initiated by the nursery guardians. Nothing happens naturally."
"But, it did... obviously."
"Well, yeah... but not like anything you'd call normal. A human pregnancy is approximately nine months. In comparison, a loomed child remains in the Loom for--" He tipped his head back and forth, his lower lip protruding as he ran calculations in his head. "--the equivalent of three and a half years. Course, we also come out of the Loom with full cognitive, linguistic and motor skills developed."
Rose gasped. "Good God, please tell me your mother wasn't pregnant for over three years."
"Nah. Just two."
"What?"
He shifted his weight onto one elbow and wagging a finger at her with the other hand. "No elephant jokes."
"You're telling me your mother was pregnant for two years."
He hummed an affirmative, nodding his head. "Mind you, even then, not like a human pregnancy. I was on slow cook." Rose groaned, and he grinned. "My father told me years later that he thought it was because the Time Lord DNA was dominant. Takes longer for a Time Lord to develop because of the Regenerative DNA coding and whatnot. Her human body didn't quite know how to handle it. Not that it was a particularly hard pregnancy, by what I hear. My father said you couldn't even tell for a good ten or twelve months."
Rose stretched out on her side beside him. "Wasn't she worried? I mean, come 'round the tenth or eleventh month, I would've been wonderin'."
"By then, she'd gotten used to things being different with my dad. And he took care of her, him and the TARDIS. Still wasn't easy, and my father didn't want to put her at risk. But, she had Roderick without much fuss. He wasn't born with the Regenerative gene, so it was more a Gallifreyan/Human cross and didn't go along quite the same."
Rose shook her head, staring down at a star embroidered on the duvet they laid across. "Confusin', that's what it is. Human DNA, Gallifreyan DNA, Gallifreyan but Time Lord DNA..." She looked up, and found the Doctor watching her. “What?"
He didn't answer right away, his gaze shifting over her face as one corner of his mouth ticked up in a small smile. "It's just... I never even considered telling anyone all the things I've just..." His smile widened.
She leaned over and kissed his cheek. "Thank you for telling me."
With a huff, the Doctor rolled forward off the bed and stood, offering his hand to her. "What do you say we go have some tea and biscuits?"
Rose took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. "Sure. One more question, though."
"Still?" She nodded. "Okay, one more question."
"How is it that your father had a name, your brother had a name... even your wife and children had names... but you are just The Doctor?"
Author: Gail R. Delaney
Series: The Unseen and In Between
Setting: After Fear Her
Genre: Romance, Angst
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine. If I owned Doctor Who, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant would be my own private little playmates.
Summary: “I was a dad once.” He answered her questions when she asked them, but Rose still never understood what he was really said until he was ready to open the door. The final story of the man known as The Doctor is both beautiful and tragic, but the greatest beauty is in the telling.
Follow up to Everything Rose Wanted to Know about Time Lords, and Apparently Wasn’t Afraid to Ask.
A/N: I use canon, I bend canon, I interpret canon my own way and I add just a tick of my own fanon to make it all work. When it's all posted, I'm going to do a post to my LJ explaining which is which and just where the hints were dropped
Part One
Part Two
He tipped his chin up and indicated the expanse of the library with the movement of his head. “Here. In the TARDIS. His TARDIS. I was born here.”
Rose jumped at a sudden sound behind her, and the Doctor flipped her onto the cushions, gaining his feet. He was half way across the library before she could catch her breath.
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
The Doctor reached the far corner of the library just as the bookshelves split and slid aside, Rose running up behind him to peer past his arm, watching the shifting of books and wood. In the space revealed appeared the door that Rose had seen a couple weeks before while nursing a bad cold on the library couch.
The last time she saw it, she had been much further away lying on the couch, and had only seen that it was a door that the TARDIS in the form of the blonde, blue-eyed child had disappeared into it to retrieve a storybook. Now, standing this close, she saw that it was actually a double door, the knobs meeting in the center. They were rich and dark, carved with images of suns and moons, animals and fairies, like a storybook picture carved into the wood.
"S'at room again," she said, pointing past him. "Remember?"
"Yesssss." The Doctor drew out the 's', his brow pulled down over his eyes as he studied the door. He reached into his suit for his screwdriver, waving the blue tip back and forth across the doorway. "More temporal residue. It's been put here from some other point in time." He mumbled more than spoke as he scanned the door, and looking at the tip of the screwdriver. He sucked in a deep breath before rotating on his heels to look at her. "I suppose the old girl is ready for us to see what she's hiding, hmmmm?"
Before she answered, he reached for the knobs and pushed the doors open, revealing the room beyond. Two steps into the room, the Doctor stopped and his hands dropped to his side.
Rose gasped, stepping around him to see the entire room.
There was no doubt the room belonged to a child... a somewhat messy child because the floor was scattered with toys and books and sketch pads with coloring pencils worn down to near nubs. Everything was blue in some shade or variation... the walls, the thick duvet on the bed, the carpet that covered the center of the floor, and the ceiling... the ceiling was a night sky complete with twinkling stars and a pink-yellow nebulus cloud. Rose stood in a bare spot on the floor and looked up, turning slowly. There was no end to the sky... she could have been standing in the center of a field in Chesham and the air in the room carried the scent of grass and evening.
"Doctor... this is beautiful," she whispered, suddenly feeling that the room deserved her reverence. She crouched down and picked up one of the sketch pads. The drawing was juvenile in its simplicity, but the colors were vivid and the paper indented where the artist had pushed the pencils hard into the pad.
Three people stood hand in hand. One... the father, if Rose had to guess... stood much taller than the others with wide shoulders and large hands. He was drawn to have yellow hair and a wide smile, and two hearts were drawn over his chest. Beside him was a woman wearing a green dress with long brown hair. A single heart was drawn for her, but it was large and took up just as much space as the father's two.
And between them was a little boy, his hair drawn with a white pencil. He held the hand of each adult, and his smile took up his entire face. Two hearts were drawn on his chest. Separate from the three, drawn in the corner, was a little girl with long blonde hair and dark blue eyes.
This was the Doctor's room.
When she looked up from the drawing, she sought the Doctor out and saw that he'd moved from the doorway to the bed. Draped across the foot of the bed was the same soft afghan Rose remembered the TARDIS giving her when she was sick. The Doctor picked it up and held it to his face, his eyes closed as he inhaled. With the blanket still held to his nose he sank down onto the small bed.
"You were a messy little boy," Rose said softly, walking over him, stepping carefully over the books and toys. She sat down beside him, close enough that she could lean her cheek against his arm and lay her hand on his leg.
He lowered the blanket, holding it bundled in his hands. "My mother was forever telling me to clean up, but I always thought there were more important things to do. And why put all my toys away if I'm just going to take them out again?" His voice was distant and rough, his eyes on the blanket. "She made this before I was born and I slept with it until the day we left the TARDIS."
A shuddered breath shook his body and he looked up, his gaze on the other side of the room. "We landed on Gallifrey and I remember being very cross because they wouldn't let me take some toy with me..." He shook his head. "I don't even remember what it was now. My mother told me I could play with it when we came home." Rose's eyes prickled with hot tears when she saw the moisture pooling in his dark brown eyes. "They never let us come back."
Rose wrapped her arm behind him, curling her other hand into the bend of his arm to hold him. She rested her cheek on his shoulder but tipped her head back to see his face. The smiles and bright gleam in his eyes from just minutes before were now replaced with a sadness that pulled at his features. "How old were you?"
He shook his head again. "Perhaps five? Six?"
"Why did your father decide to bring you back? He looked down at her, and she offered a smile, hoping he knew it was okay to keep talking. "He must have had some idea..."
The Doctor swallowed, closing his eyes slowly. He laid his hand on hers. "He wanted me to go to the Academy. He knew that the Council would be angry, but really didn't know what they would do to him. But, they couldn't deny my right to be trained as a Time Lord. I was a child of Gallifrey. It was my right, just like any child."
Rose set the sketch in his lap and his gaze shifted down. "I think we should hang this up, too. Or, at least, put it somewhere special. Who's this?" she asked, pointing out the girl in the corner. "Did you have a sister?"
"No," he answered, taking his specs from his pocket so he could examine the picture. "I had a brother, but not while we lived here. No, that is my imaginary friend. My father used to say it was a touch of the human in me to create an imaginary playmate when there was so much to do within the TARDIS to occupy my mind."
She smiled at the thought that the Doctor - A Time Lord who traveled the stars in a blue box - had an imaginary friend when he was a little boy. "Yeah? Cuz... she looks a lot like the TARDIS. You know, when she visits with me. Blonde hair, dark blue eyes... could be her."
"I never made the connection..." He said softly, studying the picture. "You told me, and I don't think I even remembered. I just thought..." He let the handing holding the sketchpad drop into his lap. The Doctor looked at Rose. "Why would she show herself to you now and not me?"
Rose shrugged. "Probably got her reasons."
He seemed to slip back into thought, staring at the drawing, but some of the strain had left his face, the lines around his eyes relaxing. Rose pulled back, but stayed beside him, picking up a small stuffed toy on the bed. It looked like a cross between a rhinoceros and a pelican, and was a deep purple color. A book sat on the bed behind the Doctor and she picked it up, smiling when she saw the title embossed in the leather.
"Look. Here's the book she read me. Rumplestiltskin ."
"It was my favorite story. She used to read..." His voice trailed off again and he looked at the book. "I should have known then. Imaginary friends don't read books at the foot of your bed, do they?"
"How would you have known? Sounds like you didn't exactly have a bunch of other children hangin' 'round tellin' you how to act and how things were supposed to be. Maybe that's why she was a little girl. So you had a friend?"
"Maybe."
The Doctor stood and Rose scooted back further onto the bed, crossing her legs with the sketch pad and book in her lap. She watched him traverse the room slowly, stopping here and there to pick up a toy or a book, running his fingers along the edge of a shelf. The room was really huge, probably bigger than her mum's entire flat.
He stopped to pick up a small round toy on the shelf, and she smiled when his face lit up. With a slight touch, the entire toy exploded in color, taking on a brand new form in the palm of his hands. It was like a kaliedescope without the tube. "I used to love this!” he declared, bounding on the balls of his feet. “I think it was the toy I wanted to take with me."
The Doctor played for several minutes, and Rose just watched. He was like a kid all over again, not that he wasn't often like a kid. It was engrained in his personality now.
"So," she said after a bit. "You didn't have a sister. Did you have any brothers?"
His head popped up and he slipped the magical changing ball into his pocket. Rose smiled, wondering how long it would be before she found him playing with the toy when he thought she wasn't looking. "Yes. He was born several years after me. After I'd gone on to Academy. Roderick. My father was hesitant to allow my mother to have another child."
"Why?"
"Having me was difficult for her." He ticked his head to the side before diverting his eyes away. "Probably one of the reasons Time Lords were discouraged from procreating, especially outside of Gallifrey. My mother conceived - quite unexpectedly, as you might imagine - but, the genetic coding for a Time Lord is pre-set for a very strictly monitored and guided growth pattern."
"Which means what, exactly?"
He came back across the room and dropped onto the bed with a hop, making the mattress bounce and Rose squeak as she tried to keep from toppling onto the floor. The Doctor leaned back, extending his legs with his ankles crossed, supporting his weight on his bent elbows. "In any species that procreates naturally, it's all done automatically. Zygotes divide into blastomeres. The blastocyst attaches to the endometrium.” Rose pulled a face, grimacing. “But, when a Time Lord is Loomed, every stage of development is initiated by the nursery guardians. Nothing happens naturally."
"But, it did... obviously."
"Well, yeah... but not like anything you'd call normal. A human pregnancy is approximately nine months. In comparison, a loomed child remains in the Loom for--" He tipped his head back and forth, his lower lip protruding as he ran calculations in his head. "--the equivalent of three and a half years. Course, we also come out of the Loom with full cognitive, linguistic and motor skills developed."
Rose gasped. "Good God, please tell me your mother wasn't pregnant for over three years."
"Nah. Just two."
"What?"
He shifted his weight onto one elbow and wagging a finger at her with the other hand. "No elephant jokes."
"You're telling me your mother was pregnant for two years."
He hummed an affirmative, nodding his head. "Mind you, even then, not like a human pregnancy. I was on slow cook." Rose groaned, and he grinned. "My father told me years later that he thought it was because the Time Lord DNA was dominant. Takes longer for a Time Lord to develop because of the Regenerative DNA coding and whatnot. Her human body didn't quite know how to handle it. Not that it was a particularly hard pregnancy, by what I hear. My father said you couldn't even tell for a good ten or twelve months."
Rose stretched out on her side beside him. "Wasn't she worried? I mean, come 'round the tenth or eleventh month, I would've been wonderin'."
"By then, she'd gotten used to things being different with my dad. And he took care of her, him and the TARDIS. Still wasn't easy, and my father didn't want to put her at risk. But, she had Roderick without much fuss. He wasn't born with the Regenerative gene, so it was more a Gallifreyan/Human cross and didn't go along quite the same."
Rose shook her head, staring down at a star embroidered on the duvet they laid across. "Confusin', that's what it is. Human DNA, Gallifreyan DNA, Gallifreyan but Time Lord DNA..." She looked up, and found the Doctor watching her. “What?"
He didn't answer right away, his gaze shifting over her face as one corner of his mouth ticked up in a small smile. "It's just... I never even considered telling anyone all the things I've just..." His smile widened.
She leaned over and kissed his cheek. "Thank you for telling me."
With a huff, the Doctor rolled forward off the bed and stood, offering his hand to her. "What do you say we go have some tea and biscuits?"
Rose took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. "Sure. One more question, though."
"Still?" She nodded. "Okay, one more question."
"How is it that your father had a name, your brother had a name... even your wife and children had names... but you are just The Doctor?"