Fic: The One True Free Life (22/26)
Title: The One True Free Life (22/26)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: Teen
Spoilers: Everything
Disclaimer: It would be a very different, and possibly quite upsetting, world if I owned these characters. For the sake of the world's children, I don't.
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues?
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
Donna unrolled the small black package and surveyed the mind-boggling array of instruments within. Rose and Pete Tyler had told her which of the many tools inside to try first (while the Doctor hung back, rubbing his neck and muttering about sonic something-or-others), she just had to remember which ones.
She literally jumped as the last person in her department left walked by her cubicle on their way out as she was investigating the lock pick kit, and she made a spastic move to hide it under a sheet of paper--though she wasn't sure how successful she'd been. When the coast was clear she selected the long straight pick, and the one that looked like a relaxed bolt of lighting and palmed them as she walked towards the lifts. She was pretty sure those were the two she'd been advised to use, and if not, this could quickly turn in to a rather tedious evening of riding up and down in a lift.
She had six floors to figure out how to pick the lock for the tenth floor, which was going to be difficult if her hands continued to shake as much as they were as she pressed the call button for the lift. She began to take a few deep breaths, but the ding of the bell and the doors opening caused her heart to race again. This was completely mad and totally unlike her, and she wondered if the man she met being slightly psychic had anything to do with how compelled she felt to help him. It was an unsettling thought that she attempted to push to the back of her mind now that the lift was here and she was about to go through with industrial espionage.
As soon as the doors closed, she got to work, proceeding just how Rose and Pete had shown her (after much arguing between themselves about the right way to do it) by first inserting the long straight pick in to the lock and then finessing the lightning-bolt shaped one around it. The Doctor had drawn her a diagram of what the inside of your average lock looked like and explained about pins and tumblers, but it really had all gone in one ear and out the other.
She was to the fifth floor now and still no progress. If she got to nine, she'd have to go back down and increase the risk that someone else working late might board with her.
Closing her eyes, she tried to see the diagram in her head. Pete had told her that people who were really good at picking locks "saw" with their fingers rather than their eyes. The internal mechanisms of a lock are hidden from view, and you've only got these tiny antennae to feel around with. She pulled the squiggly pick out just a hair and felt one of the pins fall. It was exhilarating; one of the first times in her adult life that she'd knowingly taken on a task that she wasn't already fully aware she could perform adequately, and actually succeeded in it. At the eighth floor, another pin fell in to place, and then another.
As the ninth floor approached, she felt another pin fall and, figuring it was now or never, she turned both picks slightly in the lock and felt it move, turning a quarter to the right. The ninth floor came and went and the lift continued to ascend. Donna blinked a few times before hastily removing both picks and stowing them in her pocket in time for the doors to open.
Stepping out in to the corridor, she tried to look as if she belonged there. That really was the key to being a temp, and the secret to her success. Always look and behave as if you've worked there all your life, like you know every single person already, and are familiar with every office and stairway. Do that, and people leave you alone to just get on with it, not even giving you a second glance. Look out of place, however, and suddenly you're fresh meat for every single petty tyrant and office bully in the building.
The corridor was lined with doors, each with a small window, and Donna felt a surge of righteous indignation. Who were all of these people to get offices with walls and doors, when most of the rest of the building had cramped cubicles and shared spaces? Even if this Doctor fellow and his mates weren't being truthful with her, she would still take pleasure in cocking things up for people who so clearly thought themselves better than everyone else.
She peered in to the first darkened office and spied a lab coat hanging off of the chair. Entering just to grab a bit of a disguise, she could not believe her luck. The coat had the name "Dr. Callahan" embroidered over the front pocket, meaning this office was in fact her hoped-for destination. She took the small digital camera she'd been given out of her pocket and opened the shutter, though she'd have to turn on a light when she finally found something worth taking pictures of.
It looked like that might take a while from the state the office was in. Someone had clearly been here and moved or removed several files already, and her heart sank even before she had a moment to ask herself why she felt so invested in this mission on behalf of people she barely knew. She pressed herself up against the wall next to the door to give herself some time and concealment to have a think.
The memo that came in to her hands that morning had been misfiled, and the notion that perhaps that had not been an accident flitted through her mind. There was a chance that someone wanted these secrets to come out, which could mean that additional documents might be hidden here, and had escaped the rather obvious ransacking. But where?
She tentatively opened a file cabinet and ran her index finger across the tops of the files. If someone had hidden the memo, where would that same person hide other items? In something innocuous-looking, something that was the polar opposite of "juicy." Something like where the memo this morning had been misfiled, among a bunch of...
Accounting.
Accounting paperwork probably gives even accountants migraines, she thought, thumbing through the hanging files until she came to rest on a thick folder bursting with carbons and complex strings of line-item numbers.
She flipped through the papers quickly, wishing she had brought her rubber thumb along, and beginning to wonder if she'd hit a dead end, when she found them: Photocopies of about ten pages that didn't match the colour-coded sheets of numbers around them. She looked at her watch and felt a hot wave of panic crawl across her skin. There was no time to read through the papers in detail, the Tyler clan (and extraterrestrial allies) would be arriving any minute, depending on traffic.
She took as many pictures as she could, stuffed the originals in to a pocket and replaced the folder. Slipping back out of the office, she found the door to the stairwell and groped her way upwards when the door shut again and she was plunged in to darkness.
~o0o~
Curled up like apostrophes in the trunk of the Minor, the Doctor quite colourfully cursed Ianto Jones's eclectic taste in automobiles. Rose tried to put a better spin on the situation, coyly pointing out how very little space there was, and how they had to snuggle up so close, even with the little bit they'd punched out of the back seat, but the Doctor was having none of it.
"I can be close to you any time I want," he moaned. "I certainly don't need to be shut away in the boot of a car to get my jollies." At that moment, the car drove over a particularly jarring bump (one among many) and he hit his head with a sharp clunk.
"Do you think Donna's doing all right?" Rose asked, mainly just to keep the Doctor talking, as he looked like he was on the verge of either weeping or having a panic attack.
"Of course she is. Donna Noble can do anything she sets her mind to."
"She's not Donna Noble, but you're right. I was a bit surprised that you went to find the version of her here so quickly. After all that business about the alternate versions of people not being the same and all the grief you gave me over Pete. Ouch, budge over a bit!" Rose tried to remove one of the Doctor's extremely pointy elbows from her spine and wondered how anyone could have so many sharp bits on them.
"Was just curious," he said in a small voice. "Nothing strange about that."
Rose pursed her lips and shifted so she could see his face in the very dim light that filtered through various cracks and fissures. "What are you hiding?" she asked playfully. "You look extremely guilty." She looked again, in to the depths of his eyes. "Hang on, you do look guilty." She was not playing any longer and scrutinised his features for further reaction.
"No I'm not. No I don't. And even if I did, this isn't really the time, is it?"
Rose narrowed her eyes and gave him a probing stare. "Why not? Have you got some important place to be somewhere else in the boot of this car?"
He spluttered and fussed, as much as he could given the cramped conditions. "We've important things to attend to anyway. It could be dangerous and I don't want us to lose focus."
"If someone can't focus on a dangerous situation while simultaneously dealing with your considerable personal issues, they wouldn't last a day travelling with you. I think I've already passed that test, don't you?"
He remained obstinately silent, pursing his lips as if to forcibly keep any information inside where it belonged.
"Fine," said Rose finally. "Fine, don't tell me. Just thought you looked like you had something you wanted to get off your chest."
"I promised I wouldn't tell you," he said after a rather pregnant pause in which the rattling of the car and the noise of the road became almost deafening.
"Promised who? Wouldn't tell me what?"
The Doctor raised his eyes up, to the roof of the boot, but also beyond that. Far beyond. "Him," he said. "I promised him."
Rose screwed up her face with a confused pout. "But you're him. He's you. Can't you just, I dunno, unpromise? I mean, if there's something you want to tell me."
If there was one thing Rose could not stand, it was being made to play twenty questions over a confession. Guys tended to do this to her, and she had no idea if it was just a bloke-thing, or if it was something about her in particular that made men want to confess their darkest secrets, without actually having to say them. She'd humoured the first couple, but thereafter, she generally refused to play. However, this was the Doctor, her Doctor, and all of her other rules had already been rewritten for him.
The road noise changed tone markedly, cutting off her train of thought and spreading a relieved look across the Doctor's features. They could both feel the car slow to a stop, and soon a hand was reaching back in to the boot from the hole they'd put in the back seat, clutching a mobile phone with a large touch-screen.
"I think you'll want to look at this," came Pete's muffled voice. "We're in the city now, traffic is relatively light, I wouldn't say any more than twenty minutes. How are you two holding up?"
The Doctor had already taken the phone and they both mumbled that they were fine as he scrolled through the images on the screen and zooming in, placing their heads together so they could both read.
"I will be a monkey's uncle," said the Doctor after they'd finished with the first couple.
"You'll what?"
"A monkey's uncle?" He looked at her searchingly. "No?"
She just squinted one eye at him and smirked indulgently. "So, if I read this right, this means that Phoenix is only going to start in the schools, but it'll spread to more and more places, yeah?"
The Doctor nodded. "Brilliant strategy, that. You start something out with kids, and if they act a little different or think a little differently, everyone puts it up to a generation gap. They get some fancy name like GenerationXYZ -stroke-PDQ and no one really thinks much about it. But then, everyone else begins to adopt that same way of thinking, but again no one thinks twice about it because you lot love young people, and everyone wants to be like them."
"Again with the 'you lot.' But what is it that they're trying to do? I didn't really understand that bit. Is it mind control, like we said?"
"No. No, I recognise this technology, and it's a lot subtler than mind control. Really controlling people's thoughts is hard to conceal. People begin to act like zombies, everyone notices. This is something much more refined." He tried to bring a hand up to run it through his hair, but wound up hitting it on the roof of the boot with a groan. "This is a genius plan. Oh, I'd love to meet the man who came up with this...well, I suppose I probably will before all's said and done."
"Doctor?"
He looked over at her, turning his head uncomfortably.
"So, what is it, exactly?"
A smile crept across his face so achingly slowly, she felt an irrational urge to smack him.
"It's words. Words that when recited tap in to...sort of a psionic mainframe. Different combinations of words do different things but I think I've got a very good idea now what it is they are trying to accomplish and why they needed me. And how we can stop it from happening."
The car lurched suddenly to a halt and with a squeal Rose tumbled sideways and nearly steamrollered the Doctor, who didn't actually look terribly displeased with the course of events.
"This is something we never really got to do before saving the world before," he said cheekily.
"Yeah, what's that?"
His answer was to unwedge his arm from under him and capture the back of Rose's neck, bringing her in for a quick, but deep, kiss.
"More's the pity," she sighed as he let her go and the boot opened to reveal Pete Tyler looking rather dis-chuffed over the sight of his step-daughter and the Doctor engaged in activities that looked very much unlike saving any worlds that he was aware of.
"Are you quite done?" he enquired, offering a hand to help Rose out.
His only answer was two infuriating giggles.
(To Chapter 23)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: Teen
Spoilers: Everything
Disclaimer: It would be a very different, and possibly quite upsetting, world if I owned these characters. For the sake of the world's children, I don't.
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues?
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
Donna unrolled the small black package and surveyed the mind-boggling array of instruments within. Rose and Pete Tyler had told her which of the many tools inside to try first (while the Doctor hung back, rubbing his neck and muttering about sonic something-or-others), she just had to remember which ones.
She literally jumped as the last person in her department left walked by her cubicle on their way out as she was investigating the lock pick kit, and she made a spastic move to hide it under a sheet of paper--though she wasn't sure how successful she'd been. When the coast was clear she selected the long straight pick, and the one that looked like a relaxed bolt of lighting and palmed them as she walked towards the lifts. She was pretty sure those were the two she'd been advised to use, and if not, this could quickly turn in to a rather tedious evening of riding up and down in a lift.
She had six floors to figure out how to pick the lock for the tenth floor, which was going to be difficult if her hands continued to shake as much as they were as she pressed the call button for the lift. She began to take a few deep breaths, but the ding of the bell and the doors opening caused her heart to race again. This was completely mad and totally unlike her, and she wondered if the man she met being slightly psychic had anything to do with how compelled she felt to help him. It was an unsettling thought that she attempted to push to the back of her mind now that the lift was here and she was about to go through with industrial espionage.
As soon as the doors closed, she got to work, proceeding just how Rose and Pete had shown her (after much arguing between themselves about the right way to do it) by first inserting the long straight pick in to the lock and then finessing the lightning-bolt shaped one around it. The Doctor had drawn her a diagram of what the inside of your average lock looked like and explained about pins and tumblers, but it really had all gone in one ear and out the other.
She was to the fifth floor now and still no progress. If she got to nine, she'd have to go back down and increase the risk that someone else working late might board with her.
Closing her eyes, she tried to see the diagram in her head. Pete had told her that people who were really good at picking locks "saw" with their fingers rather than their eyes. The internal mechanisms of a lock are hidden from view, and you've only got these tiny antennae to feel around with. She pulled the squiggly pick out just a hair and felt one of the pins fall. It was exhilarating; one of the first times in her adult life that she'd knowingly taken on a task that she wasn't already fully aware she could perform adequately, and actually succeeded in it. At the eighth floor, another pin fell in to place, and then another.
As the ninth floor approached, she felt another pin fall and, figuring it was now or never, she turned both picks slightly in the lock and felt it move, turning a quarter to the right. The ninth floor came and went and the lift continued to ascend. Donna blinked a few times before hastily removing both picks and stowing them in her pocket in time for the doors to open.
Stepping out in to the corridor, she tried to look as if she belonged there. That really was the key to being a temp, and the secret to her success. Always look and behave as if you've worked there all your life, like you know every single person already, and are familiar with every office and stairway. Do that, and people leave you alone to just get on with it, not even giving you a second glance. Look out of place, however, and suddenly you're fresh meat for every single petty tyrant and office bully in the building.
The corridor was lined with doors, each with a small window, and Donna felt a surge of righteous indignation. Who were all of these people to get offices with walls and doors, when most of the rest of the building had cramped cubicles and shared spaces? Even if this Doctor fellow and his mates weren't being truthful with her, she would still take pleasure in cocking things up for people who so clearly thought themselves better than everyone else.
She peered in to the first darkened office and spied a lab coat hanging off of the chair. Entering just to grab a bit of a disguise, she could not believe her luck. The coat had the name "Dr. Callahan" embroidered over the front pocket, meaning this office was in fact her hoped-for destination. She took the small digital camera she'd been given out of her pocket and opened the shutter, though she'd have to turn on a light when she finally found something worth taking pictures of.
It looked like that might take a while from the state the office was in. Someone had clearly been here and moved or removed several files already, and her heart sank even before she had a moment to ask herself why she felt so invested in this mission on behalf of people she barely knew. She pressed herself up against the wall next to the door to give herself some time and concealment to have a think.
The memo that came in to her hands that morning had been misfiled, and the notion that perhaps that had not been an accident flitted through her mind. There was a chance that someone wanted these secrets to come out, which could mean that additional documents might be hidden here, and had escaped the rather obvious ransacking. But where?
She tentatively opened a file cabinet and ran her index finger across the tops of the files. If someone had hidden the memo, where would that same person hide other items? In something innocuous-looking, something that was the polar opposite of "juicy." Something like where the memo this morning had been misfiled, among a bunch of...
Accounting.
Accounting paperwork probably gives even accountants migraines, she thought, thumbing through the hanging files until she came to rest on a thick folder bursting with carbons and complex strings of line-item numbers.
She flipped through the papers quickly, wishing she had brought her rubber thumb along, and beginning to wonder if she'd hit a dead end, when she found them: Photocopies of about ten pages that didn't match the colour-coded sheets of numbers around them. She looked at her watch and felt a hot wave of panic crawl across her skin. There was no time to read through the papers in detail, the Tyler clan (and extraterrestrial allies) would be arriving any minute, depending on traffic.
She took as many pictures as she could, stuffed the originals in to a pocket and replaced the folder. Slipping back out of the office, she found the door to the stairwell and groped her way upwards when the door shut again and she was plunged in to darkness.
~o0o~
Curled up like apostrophes in the trunk of the Minor, the Doctor quite colourfully cursed Ianto Jones's eclectic taste in automobiles. Rose tried to put a better spin on the situation, coyly pointing out how very little space there was, and how they had to snuggle up so close, even with the little bit they'd punched out of the back seat, but the Doctor was having none of it.
"I can be close to you any time I want," he moaned. "I certainly don't need to be shut away in the boot of a car to get my jollies." At that moment, the car drove over a particularly jarring bump (one among many) and he hit his head with a sharp clunk.
"Do you think Donna's doing all right?" Rose asked, mainly just to keep the Doctor talking, as he looked like he was on the verge of either weeping or having a panic attack.
"Of course she is. Donna Noble can do anything she sets her mind to."
"She's not Donna Noble, but you're right. I was a bit surprised that you went to find the version of her here so quickly. After all that business about the alternate versions of people not being the same and all the grief you gave me over Pete. Ouch, budge over a bit!" Rose tried to remove one of the Doctor's extremely pointy elbows from her spine and wondered how anyone could have so many sharp bits on them.
"Was just curious," he said in a small voice. "Nothing strange about that."
Rose pursed her lips and shifted so she could see his face in the very dim light that filtered through various cracks and fissures. "What are you hiding?" she asked playfully. "You look extremely guilty." She looked again, in to the depths of his eyes. "Hang on, you do look guilty." She was not playing any longer and scrutinised his features for further reaction.
"No I'm not. No I don't. And even if I did, this isn't really the time, is it?"
Rose narrowed her eyes and gave him a probing stare. "Why not? Have you got some important place to be somewhere else in the boot of this car?"
He spluttered and fussed, as much as he could given the cramped conditions. "We've important things to attend to anyway. It could be dangerous and I don't want us to lose focus."
"If someone can't focus on a dangerous situation while simultaneously dealing with your considerable personal issues, they wouldn't last a day travelling with you. I think I've already passed that test, don't you?"
He remained obstinately silent, pursing his lips as if to forcibly keep any information inside where it belonged.
"Fine," said Rose finally. "Fine, don't tell me. Just thought you looked like you had something you wanted to get off your chest."
"I promised I wouldn't tell you," he said after a rather pregnant pause in which the rattling of the car and the noise of the road became almost deafening.
"Promised who? Wouldn't tell me what?"
The Doctor raised his eyes up, to the roof of the boot, but also beyond that. Far beyond. "Him," he said. "I promised him."
Rose screwed up her face with a confused pout. "But you're him. He's you. Can't you just, I dunno, unpromise? I mean, if there's something you want to tell me."
If there was one thing Rose could not stand, it was being made to play twenty questions over a confession. Guys tended to do this to her, and she had no idea if it was just a bloke-thing, or if it was something about her in particular that made men want to confess their darkest secrets, without actually having to say them. She'd humoured the first couple, but thereafter, she generally refused to play. However, this was the Doctor, her Doctor, and all of her other rules had already been rewritten for him.
The road noise changed tone markedly, cutting off her train of thought and spreading a relieved look across the Doctor's features. They could both feel the car slow to a stop, and soon a hand was reaching back in to the boot from the hole they'd put in the back seat, clutching a mobile phone with a large touch-screen.
"I think you'll want to look at this," came Pete's muffled voice. "We're in the city now, traffic is relatively light, I wouldn't say any more than twenty minutes. How are you two holding up?"
The Doctor had already taken the phone and they both mumbled that they were fine as he scrolled through the images on the screen and zooming in, placing their heads together so they could both read.
"I will be a monkey's uncle," said the Doctor after they'd finished with the first couple.
"You'll what?"
"A monkey's uncle?" He looked at her searchingly. "No?"
She just squinted one eye at him and smirked indulgently. "So, if I read this right, this means that Phoenix is only going to start in the schools, but it'll spread to more and more places, yeah?"
The Doctor nodded. "Brilliant strategy, that. You start something out with kids, and if they act a little different or think a little differently, everyone puts it up to a generation gap. They get some fancy name like GenerationXYZ -stroke-PDQ and no one really thinks much about it. But then, everyone else begins to adopt that same way of thinking, but again no one thinks twice about it because you lot love young people, and everyone wants to be like them."
"Again with the 'you lot.' But what is it that they're trying to do? I didn't really understand that bit. Is it mind control, like we said?"
"No. No, I recognise this technology, and it's a lot subtler than mind control. Really controlling people's thoughts is hard to conceal. People begin to act like zombies, everyone notices. This is something much more refined." He tried to bring a hand up to run it through his hair, but wound up hitting it on the roof of the boot with a groan. "This is a genius plan. Oh, I'd love to meet the man who came up with this...well, I suppose I probably will before all's said and done."
"Doctor?"
He looked over at her, turning his head uncomfortably.
"So, what is it, exactly?"
A smile crept across his face so achingly slowly, she felt an irrational urge to smack him.
"It's words. Words that when recited tap in to...sort of a psionic mainframe. Different combinations of words do different things but I think I've got a very good idea now what it is they are trying to accomplish and why they needed me. And how we can stop it from happening."
The car lurched suddenly to a halt and with a squeal Rose tumbled sideways and nearly steamrollered the Doctor, who didn't actually look terribly displeased with the course of events.
"This is something we never really got to do before saving the world before," he said cheekily.
"Yeah, what's that?"
His answer was to unwedge his arm from under him and capture the back of Rose's neck, bringing her in for a quick, but deep, kiss.
"More's the pity," she sighed as he let her go and the boot opened to reveal Pete Tyler looking rather dis-chuffed over the sight of his step-daughter and the Doctor engaged in activities that looked very much unlike saving any worlds that he was aware of.
"Are you quite done?" he enquired, offering a hand to help Rose out.
His only answer was two infuriating giggles.
(To Chapter 23)