Held in Trust: Chapter 23
Title: Held in Trust (23/?)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Beta: ladychi
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure! Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut, Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | 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
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Rose had hoped that being without the Doctor would be like riding a bike-she'd drift back out of focus and become the woman she'd been just a few months before. She had hoped that, this time around, every thought would not make her capillaries constrict at the realisation that she'd not be able to share it with him. Family gatherings would not be solely remembered as a montage of pitying looks cast her direction. She wouldn't feel like she had betrayed him every time she found herself laughing.
But it wasn't like riding a bicycle. Not at all. It felt wholly new, and that drove the nagging suspicion that she perhaps had different feelings for her new Doctor than the original version. A whole new betrayal for the new world she found herself dwelling in.
Donna often visited her, and Rose knew she was hurting as well, but she was always ready with a suggestion of a day at the cinema, or a special trip to the shops just to purchase the perfect flavour of ice cream to accompany an evening of romantic comedies. Rose appreciated these outings as a way to make Donna feel as if she were successfully fulfilling the role of the Doctor's best mate, seeing to the needs of his loved ones. But they never restored her to a feeling of normalcy.
It had been five weeks since the night of his disappearance. The singularity generator still existed in stasis-along with its new best friend the wristwatch-with the time lock humming around them. Around that liquid blue barrier hummed Torchwood . A rather permanent-looking temporary structure had been erected to house the broken-down old shed and its potentially deadly contents. Security guards, all but one now recovered from Hurricane Donna, patrolled night and day around the perimeter. Several bored science officers spent shifts monitoring for signs that the time lock might be failing. At Rose's continual and loud insistence, monitors for detecting Hawking radiation were also brought online, though they had never once registered so much as a blip.
By dint of her former relationship with Torchwood, and her quick thinking (complete with as-yet-unexplained-but-miraculous Yale lock key), Rose Tyler was grudgingly granted a low level security clearance, and she moved to a nearby rental cottage, there to keep a sort of vigil. Every day she ate a sparse breakfast, put on her wellies and walked the mile to what Torchwood now referred to as Site Sierra Fifty-eight. She'd chat with the guards at the gate for a few minutes, listening to stories of drunken nights at the pub, or the misbehaviour of someone's dog-smiling and tutting when appropriate.
She would all but sleep-walk through the various security and safety protocols, don a white lab coat, affix her temporary ID badge to it, and enter the airlock seals in to the central monitoring room.
At first, all of the scientists uprooted from their London homes in order to do time at this purgatorially boring rural outpost saw her as somehow responsible for their lot, and were very sour towards her indeed. All of them except Laxmi Chaudhrey and her young assistant, who had both first-hand witnessed how Rose's quick thinking and air of unchallengeable authority had saved them all.
They had both approached Rose several times with data concerning the circumstances surrounding the Doctor's disappearance that they thought she might find interesting. Rose, in reply, was polite, interested, but always wound up setting their print-outs aside in favour of simply blowing in to a hot cup of tea and staring off in to space. To see her there-foot propped up on a console, hair tied messily back with a rubber-band-it struck them both as very much at odds with the woman who'd come crashing in to the scene of the incident, demanding respect and solving problems. It was something they could not find a solution to in their calculations and read-outs.
***
In London, Donna frequently found herself physically sickened by the swirl of colours and cacophony of sound awaiting her every day outside her front door. She felt that she had slowed, yet the rest of the world had sped up considerably. She couldn't come to a complete stop, though. Bills needed paying, life went on-she didn't have the luxury of just calling a halt to her entire life to enter a never-ending limbo, nor did she really want to.
Still, nothing's ever really quite the same after one (single-handedly and with no language in common) negotiates a peace treaty between two warring species, both of whom claimed mining rights to Sol Three. Taking minutes and planning corporate holiday parties was sadly lacking in the endorphins department when compared to sending a lost alien child back home through a rift in time and space.
She would often come over rather irritable, and her family was at a loss to explain her behaviour and mood swings. Friends come and go, after all, and she'd only known the Doctor for a few months. To her family, he was just the dilettante boyfriend of a shallow heiress-too old for Rose Tyler by half, and barely employed himself. Now that'd he'd quite predictably gone missing, doubtless to run after some even younger and posher girl, there wasn't any reason why Donna should be so affected by it.
There had been times in the last several months when Donna had been unable to avoid her family meeting him. Wilf seemed to take a bit of a shine, but her mum appeared to be one of the few creatures in the galaxy that was utterly immune to his charm-and his gob. But to both of them he was still just a mate, known only for whisking her off to parts unknown at the weekend and returning her dirty and exhausted, invariably late for Sunday tea.
Dirty and exhausted, but exhilarated. Not just by the things she'd witnessed with him, but what she herself was able to do. She felt that given enough time-time to mourn, time to think and plan-she'd get back into that saddle. That's what the Doctor would have wanted for her, she was sure of it. And it's what he would have wanted for Rose as well. There was something about the sort of half-life that Rose was now living that struck Donna as profoundly wrong and contrary to everything the Doctor had taught her.
But Donna had never felt brave enough to broach the subject with Rose until they'd both had perhaps one glass of wine too many, with nothing on the telly to distract them on a Saturday night in rural Somerset.
"Is he still calling you then?" Rose enquired, referring to the Torchwood security officer who had never quite recovered from his initial encounter with the exceedingly distracting Donna Mott.
Donna rolled her eyes and made a face. "Only every, like, three hours. If this keeps up I'm going to have to get a new phone number."
"He can't be that bad, can he?" Rose laughed.
"I dunno. There's just something about him. I reckon he's fine-looking and all but I just feel like even though he's the one ringing me up, it's still all about him. He can get back to me after he gets over himself. I've no time for some bloke who just wants to prove his manhood."
Rose answered by silently raising her eyebrows and taking a pointed sip from her wine glass.
"Still though," Donna mused, "I could just use him for sex. If I get desperate."
Rose hooted at that and raised her glass. "A woman's got needs and more power to you, I suppose. I'm rubbish with men, so whatever I tell you to do, please do the opposite."
"You seem to have done all right so far," Donna said softly.
Rose gave a shadowy, fleeting little smile. "Yeah, well, I am getting a bit tired of this scenario, to be quite honest."
There was a momentary, and not altogether comfortable silence, as Donna sussed out whether or not Rose wanted her to press further. She kicked herself for not having the conviction to just come right out and say what she thought, while at the same time hating herself for feeling like she was even able to pass judgement on the way someone else chose to live their life.
"What scenario is that?" Donna finally asked.
"Being left by him," Rose answered simply, quietly.
"He didn't do it on purpose. It was a terrible accident, I'm sure of it." Donna thought hard before saying what she had to say next. "In the end though, everyone leaves. Sooner or later."
"You don't understand."
"No? You know, after my dad died-after everyone's dads and brothers and sisters and uncles and cousins died-I thought nothing in the world meant anything any more. And I know you know what that feels like because I can see it in you now. But no amount of waiting or hoping would bring them back."
Rose slammed her glass back down on to the table and looked out a nearby window in to the black night rather than meet Donna's gaze. "The Doctor isn't dead. He isn't."
"I know," Donna lied.
"He's just somewhere where he can't get back. He can't come back or...he doesn't want to come back."
This was nearly too much for Donna, who fought back the impulse to smack some sense in to her friend.
"Now look, missy," Donna said firmly, gritting her teeth in an attempt to remain calm. "I get that you're upset, and not knowing what's happened to him is terrible, but listen to yourself. If he were to walk in right now, how would he feel if he heard you say that about him?"
Rose stared at her hands and said nothing.
"Either way, this isn't a life. It's not right. It's not what he'd want," Donna continued, her lips drawn thin, struggling to excuse Rose's unjust words as the artefacts of grief.
"But it's what I want."
As if on cue, a fox cried out in the distance.
***
"You're out of your own time," Elpis said to the Doctor as the three of them picked their way towards the fissures, over some rocky and unstable ground. They tried not to make too much sound, but the nature of the terrain was such that their steps were frequently sending loud rains of shale down steep slopes. Crede's long legs were making the going harder for him, and he remained several yards behind them.
"Nicely spotted," the Doctor replied flatly.
"But one thing I can't figure out is your timeline. It's more like a timetangle."
He took his eyes off of the shifting stones beneath them long enough to give her a cagey look. "It's a very long story."
"Give me the abridged version," Elpis pressed.
"I don't even think there's time for that, to be honest. We'd be here until next week."
"But you're displaced." She reached out and touched his arm with a dainty feathered hand. "Where were you before you were here?"
He tensed his shoulders and fought the urge to throw up another pointless roadblock. Old habits die hard, after all. "I was home. 21st Century, Earth, Great Britain, London, Hammersmith, Carthew Road, number 70." It all came out in rather a jumble and he didn't expect Elpis to understand any of it, but it felt good to say the words.
"You're expected," Elpis replied.
The Doctor had prepared a speech about how those locations were so far away they didn't really matter and they should perhaps focus on the here and now, so was thrown off-balance by her words.
"I'm... I'm what?"
"What?" Elpis looked at him quizzically.
"You said something."
"Did I?" She ran a hand over her head, ruffling her feathers and then smoothing them down again. "Things bleed through sometimes. We call them the Echoes, though humans of course like to be profane and call them prophesy. Or demonic possession, depending on how well pleased they are with what we say." She gave a wry smirk. "So what am I, a prophet or a demon?"
(To Chapter 24)