The Family Man, Chapter 5
Author's Note: So, I totally stole the last scene straight out of the movie because I love it so much and because I can. Mwa ha. Hope you enjoy. I am so completely in love with this chapter, and got a little teary there at the end. More to come soon :)
The Doctor was unusually quiet on their ride home. It didn’t help that Rose continued to sigh heavily every few minutes, as she was deeply contemplating the Torchwood dilemma. With each deep breath, her thin sundress rode higher up on her thigh, leaving the Doctor frantic with distraction. He continually turned his eyes resolutely to the road ahead, only to find they had snuck back to Rose’s leg, which only served to bring graphic flashbacks of her naked backside. Not to mention the insistent, seemingly urgent message that kept flashing through his superior Time Lord brain: Rose Tyler isn’t wearing knickers…
“I’m going to ring Donna to let her know we’re coming home early,” Rose said suddenly, accosting his eyes with her own.
He snapped to attention as a small smile formed on her lips.
“I’m sure they would throw a fit if we picked them up now. We could let them stay the day while we figure out this…whatever it is that’s coming toward us,” she continued.
The Doctor nodded as Rose flipped through the numbers on her phone, and absently reached out her hand to find his. She played with his fingers resting gently on the gearshift before drawing it into hers to rest casually on her leg. She started speaking suddenly, having apparently gotten through to Donna.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she said as she trailed her fingertips over the Doctor’s. “Oh, it was great! They had so much fun. We did too. Yeah, we’re coming back early. Oh, I know. I wouldn’t dream of dragging the kids away yet. You don’t mind? Great…”
Rose continued to chat with her friend as the Doctor flexed his hand uncertainly on her leg. Rose didn’t seem to mind, and even pulled at his wrist to bring it higher. She burst out laughing as if Donna had said something funny, and then hung up after a brief goodbye.
“She’s hilarious,” Rose snorted, hardly noticing how tense the Doctor had become. He was barely breathing, and could focus on nothing other than the feel of her warm skin under his fingers.
Rose sighed and stretched, pulling her arms over her head in the cramped car, while the Doctor suffered through the excruciating decision of whether to pull his hand back or not. He finally manufactured the excuse of adjusting the rear-view mirror, grateful he’d escaped the high-pressure situation.
“Oh, I just realized,” Rose exclaimed happily. “No kids at home for the next several hours…”
The Doctor blinked, uncertain as to what she meant until he felt her hot breath on his ear.
“Whatever shall we do to fill the time?” Rose whispered, tugging at his earlobe with her teeth.
“Rose!” the Doctor squeaked as the steering wheel jerked. “I’m driving! I’m the driver!”
She relented with a naughty look on her face, unwilling to give up completely.
“And we’ve got some serious business to attend to when we get home!” he added, getting better control of his voice. “Torchwood emergency! It could be a cataclysmic astronomical event sweeping through our galaxy!”
Rose looked unconvinced, but conceded the point grumpily.
“You’re no fun,” she pouted before allowing a spark to enter her eyes. “But all the more incentive to figure it out quickly!”
The Doctor gritted his teeth, already considering ways to drag out their procedures and experiments.
--
Back in the safety of their garage, the Doctor touched the TARDIS’ blue doors reverently.
“Hello, old girl!” he cooed as he went inside, lighting up in a way that nearly made Rose jealous, except for the fact that she loved the ship almost as much as him.
“Did you miss us?” Rose asked as she skipped up to the console and began to tap at the various buttons, already calculating the last several weeks worth of subatomic data from proximate galaxies.
The Doctor leaned over her shoulder, his eyebrows pushed into his hairline.
“Where’d you learn that?” he asked.
Rose smacked his shoulder and flipped around him, imitating his mechanical choreography when driving the ship as he watched entranced. She stopped by the output monitor and tapped her fingers at the electronic figures, humming to herself.
“See that?” she asked importantly. “There’s a definite shift from Andromeda to M82. You can just barely make out the quantum-dynamic alternation, but it’s there.”
The Doctor followed her explanation, looking at how the galaxies had expanded and reset in reaction to the passing phenomena.
“Like a shock wave,” the Doctor observed, already formulating a new schematic in his head. He bustled to the other side of the console and flipped the large switch under the chameleon circuit before tapping on the keyboard. The readout on the screen changed into a series of Gallifreyan figures, and Rose frowned in annoyance. She’d been trying to learn the language for a number of years, but still hadn’t figured out the more complex syntax structures.
“And that,” the Doctor said with a flourish, “is even more interesting. The core of the storm is picking up little pieces of everything it touches. I can see bits of the Sklaren Galaxy toward the outer rim, which means this puppy’s been churning since…five point six million years ago.”
“It’s not like any storm I’ve ever seen before,” Rose added glumly. “How is that possible in the vacuum of space?”
“It’s rotating around a supermassive black hole,” the Doctor said as he switched their view screen to a long-distance scanner, allowing them to glimpse the outermost reaches of it’s influence. The fuzzy readout showed a bright purple lightning bolt frozen across a band of stars.
“So it’s not unlike most of the galaxies in our universe,” Rose posited, staring at the screen in fascination.
“No…and…” the Doctor stopped speaking, cut off by a soft green light blinking persistently on the console.
“Oh my god,” Rose breathed. “Those are life signals…”
The Doctor stepped back to lean against the railing, dragging a hand through his hair as he did so.
“Is it picking them up?” Rose wondered aloud. “Or are they indigenous? It could be dropping life forms all over space!”
“Not just space,” the Doctor said dryly. “It’s trapping temporal energy. And look here at the phase matrix, rotating out from the core,” he indicated as he approached the console. “It’s chewing up time and space and spitting it out in all directions.”
“What happens when it reaches us, Doctor?” Rose asked, her face going pale at the thought.
The Doctor shook his head, knowing the outcome having experienced it firsthand.
“We end up anywhere, anytime,” he answered.
“And now for my next question,” Rose announced, her eyes growing dark and determined. “How do we stop it?”
The Doctor shifted his chin into his open palm while hugging his body tightly. He stared intensely at the screen, all of his higher-functioning Time Lord faculties working at full capacity.
“We don’t,” he replied evenly.
--
Rose had given up after two more hours of number crunching, predictive software manipulation and semi-schematic diagramming. She refused to see what the Doctor saw, which was an unavoidable collision with the superstorm, but there was no practical solution immediately available. So with a weary heart, Rose resigned for the evening, leaving the Doctor to puzzle it out on his own.
“I’m going to pick up the kids,” she reported. “Maybe something will come to me later if I stop trying to force it.”
“Alright,” the Doctor said soothingly. “See you soon.”
He watched her leave the TARDIS and then turned his attention back to the screen. The truth was, he had no intention of trying to avoid the storm. Part of him knew it was his ticket home, if only he could figure out its properties. Secondly, he reasoned, that if he had already encountered it twice in the span of a few days, it must hold some significance, and finding out the answer to that question wasn’t something he intended to miss. He had to figure it out, one way or another.
The Doctor sighed loudly, realizing he should take a break too. He wasn’t going to solve the mystery in one night, and certainly not without further data necessitated by the storm’s steady encroachment. He would have to wait at least another two days before it was close enough to evaluate. In the meantime, he supposed, he might as well play the part of the family man.
He walked into the house and was immediately buried in dachshunds, who for all their squat stature, were incredibly powerful little dogs. The Doctor tripped over K9 and nearly fell on top of Arthur, but was rewarded with Butterscotch’s happy kisses all over his cheek.
“Oh hello!” the Doctor said cheerfully. “Why yes I missed you too!”
He untangled himself from the floor and picked up his favorite pooch, heading to the living room to sit on the sofa. He figured that’s what married human men did after a long day at work, in addition to watching hours of flavorless cop dramas and college sports. He picked up the remote control and grinned as he started to flip mindlessly through the channels on their smallish telly.
Not surprisingly, there was little on to amuse him, so he started browsing through the video collection instead. He was arrested by the numerous tapes sitting on the mantle, especially the ones with handwritten notes along the edges.
“Wil’s first dentist visit,” he read aloud as he scanned the tapes. “Wedding Memories. Little Ood and Rose’s 30th.”
He pulled out the last tape, excited to watch the much-hyped event of his daughter eating spaghetti, although he could hardly wait to watch all the videos on the shelf. This was the life he was supposed to have lead, after all, and he’d missed all of it.
The tape was cued to show the exterior of a cheesy Italian retaurant, where Rose and Sammy were posing dramatically. The Doctor could hear his own voice booming loudly, since he was apparently manipulating the camera.
“Wave!” he cried cheerfully. “And say Molto Bene! That’s Italian!”
“Molto Bene, that’s Italian!” Rose echoed impishly as she spun Sammy around in her arms.
“Oi, cheeky!” the Doctor objected.
The video cut out and came back inside the restaurant, where Rose was helping Wil tie a napkin around his neck.
“I’m not a little kid!” her son complained. “I can use the fork and spoon as well as any adult...perhaps better."
Rose rolled her eyes at the camera, indicating some inner maternal struggle. Just then, the food arrived and the Doctor zoomed in on Sammy. Her eyes were huge as the plate of spaghetti descended, and she giggled as the Doctor laughed out loud.
“That’s as big as you!” he teased. “Where are you going to put all that food, Sammy?”
The little girl dug in her fork and picked up a heaping pile before Rose could intervene, shoveling it into her mouth, still giggling.
“Sammy!” the Doctor cried, nearly dropping the camera. “Oh, Rassilon. Rose look at this!”
Rose turned to look at their daughter, horrified and then elated at her daughter's crass eating habits. She burst out laughing, tears brimming over her eyes and Sammy looked from left to right, still unsure if she was in trouble.
It was then that the Doctor broke down, his hiccupping laughter coming in waves through the camera’s microphone.
“You look like…oh…Sammy you look like an Ood! You’re my little Ood!” he was nearly crying.
The camera jerked over to Wil, who was shaking his head in disgust.
“And you make me wear the napkin?” he asked sullenly, causing his parents to break into hysterics again.
The Doctor was laughing along with the tape, not realizing how much his face had begun to hurt until Butterscotch barked at one of the other dogs and distracted him. He leaned back into the couch with a deep sigh, still holding his sides as the tape played on.
After a few more minutes, the tape cut out and became static, only to be replaced with a digital placard reading: Rose’s 30th Birthday!!! He smiled faintly, finding it hard to think of her growing older, though it was easier to imagine her wiser. She’d waltzed circles around him in the TARDIS earlier, and he had no doubt she did the same thing in every aspect of their life together.
The tape was being recorded by somebody else, since the Doctor caught sight of himself in a far away frame, at the fringes of a big outdoor party in their backyard. Several people were crowded around the pool, while others stood at the grill or monitored children playing on the swings. Eventually, he saw Rose coming out from the house holding a big margarita in her hand.
“Happy birthday!” the unfamiliar cameraman cheered.
“Thanks, Lee! Where’s Donna?” Rose asked, peering around her.
“She was just grabbing something from the car,” Lee informed her. “And here she is!”
Donna approached surreptitiously, holding a keyboard in her hands. She set it down on one of the tables and started to play an opening chord. Rose groaned in response, and stared at the Doctor as he came near with a knowing look in his eyes.
As Donna stretched out the introduction to the song, the gathered friends and family started to cheer. The Doctor bowed slightly before coming to stand before his wife and holding her left hand as she pretended to chug her drink in embarrassment.
The Doctor was shocked to watch himself on the video as he actually began to sing, and if he wasn’t being too cocky, in a rather pleasing timber and tone.
“Many guys have come to you with a line that wasn’t true and you passed them by…” he began.
“Passed them by!” Donna added with a riotous grin on her face as Lee chuckled.
“Now you’re in the center ring, and their lines don’t mean a thing. Why don’t you let me try?” the Doctor crooned as Rose set down her glass and grasped his free hand.
“Let me try!” Donna bellowed dramatically.
“Now I don’t wear a diamond ring,” the Doctor said as he pulled Rose closer. “I don’t even have a song to sing! All I know is lalalalalalala means…I love you!”
The camera moved around them until it froze on Rose’s face, and the Doctor could feel his hearts stop at the sight of her. She was crying. The Doctor's hand on the video came up to cradle her cheek, gently wiping one of her tears away.
“Lalalalalalala means…I love you!” the Doctor sang heartfully before leaning in to kiss her.
Rose kissed him back passionately, completely ignoring the cat calls and cheers that followed from all of their friends.
“Oi, where’s my kiss? I was the accompanist!” Donna's voice could be heard from off-camera.
“Thirty years old today,” Lee’s voice narrated. “And more madly in love than ever.”
Rose and the Doctor were locked in a tight embrace, as if nothing else existed in the world.
The Doctor stopped watching the tape and looked down at his arms, which were squeezing tightly around his body and imitating the hug he could see on the video. He relaxed and let them fall, barely realizing Sammy had come into the room and was staring at him expectantly. He looked back at her, mapping the small hazel eyes so much like her mother’s, but hidden behind thick brainy specs that only hinted at her unparallel intellect. He smiled warmly.
"Daddy?" she whispered hopefully before breaking out into a delighted smile bordering on tears. "It's you! You're back!"
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