Meaning and Memory (4/4)
TITLE: Meaning and Memory
PAIRING: Alt!Ten/Rose, I swear! Just trust me on this.
RATING: This chapter PG
SPOILERS: Does it need saying?
SUMMARY: Alt!Ten hits a rough patch. What's it like to have someone else's memories?
A/N: This is one of those fics where Alt!Ten and Rose get all dysfunctional.
When the Doctor awoke early the next morning, after a night of little actual sleep but an intense longing for it, Rose was nowhere to be found. The various personal effects of hers that had slowly sprouted around the house like mushrooms over the course of the past couple of months also seemed to have vanished. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror while exiting the bathroom didn't help matters at all and he spent a bleary few minutes in the kitchen staring at the coffee maker, willing it to speed up and perhaps to deliver the caffeine directly in to his bloodstream. He poked at his stomach and pulled at the skin around his hips, thinking about the financial feasibility of a gym membership. Being in a human body and having to do a lot less running for his life than the other Doctor was doing nothing at all for his physique. If he was going to be single again.... Again? No, for the first time ever in his life. At the apparent age of thirty-five he was going to be single for the first time, and the thought was both thrilling and mortifying. A parade of what-ifs marched through his head. What if he never met another person who was interested in him? What if he was rubbish in bed? What if he was a sloppy kisser? What if women didn't really dig the sideburns as much as he thought they did? What if he got his heart broken? What if everyone actually just thought that he was a weird, funny-looking geek?
The Time Lord part of his mind began to kick in to full list-making, probability-testing gear: Join gym, shave sideburns, get cooler glasses, watch more American television. The notion of prescription sunglasses crossed his mind, and then the even better notion of contact lenses, though he wasn't sure he could actually go through with sticking something to his eyeballs. He looked down at his bare torso. Chest waxing? Sounded painful and not really worth it. Off the list.
He finished his coffee standing right there in his pajama bottoms in the kitchen and shuffled back upstairs to check his email. The usual bunch of meaningless claptrap from colleagues and students who apparently had no lives outside of work, based on the timestamps of the messages. Who sends an email about K+ Lambda photoproduction and recoil polarization* at two o'clock in the morning? One of his post-docs, apparently. He shuddered at the thought of having to stay up that late in to the night just to finally understand such an elementary concept. Another what-if struck him suddenly: What if he was just a right old miserable bastard?
~o0o~
Across town, Rose Tyler sat at her desk high above Canary Wharf. She'd come in late, pleading a morning appointment with an important contact in the government, but really it was just because of how poorly she slept and the residual puffiness that would alert everyone in the office to her newly-Doctorless status. She cleared out as much of her stuff as she could find from the Doctor's house and gone back to her flat in the pre-dawn hours. That is, after she placed a tiny remote tracking device inside the fabric of his billfold, which he'd foolishly left sitting on the mantle-piece. She had come prepared for her spying mission the night before with the best of what Torchwood had to offer. She might not be his lover any more, but she still had her promise to the other Doctor, and her responsibility as a Torchwood operative to keep tabs on such a potentially dangerous personage.
She stroked the button of her computer's mouse, hovering the pointer over the window that would show his whereabouts. To click or not to click? "I am not stalking him, I am not stalking him, I am not..." she muttered again, and clicked. Watching the progress of the little black dot, it appeared he was on his way to his office, on the bus. She watched the slow movement of the dot-that-was-the-Doctor down the road but then noticed that it stopped at least twelve blocks from where he normally got off. Biting the tip of her pen, she clicked through a few windows to get to the CCTV menu and selected the camera closest to where he appeared to be. She hoped he hadn't dropped his wallet somewhere, that would make this whole project a lot more problematic.
Gaining remote control of the camera she spun it around to just catch the back of his head as he entered a hair salon. She never would have believed it if someone else had told her that people actually do this, but at that moment she literally smacked her own forehead with the palm of her hand. A hair salon? He wasn't due for a trim, so that could only mean one thing. Oh Doctor, she thought, wasting no time, are you? She repeated her new mantra to herself: set him free, set him free, set him free. He doesn't love you. Though that didn't stop her from keeping an eye on the time as she completed some paperwork, and after a half an hour bringing the CCTV feed back up. He wound up walking right past the camera a few minutes later, and she almost didn't recognize him. The sideburns were now gone, and he was sporting a new, less spiky cut, with a fringe that almost fell over his eyes. She thought he looked five years younger, and a lot more conservative. She wasn't sure if she liked it and she caught herself planning what she would say when she saw him next, then realizing that she might not see him next. At least not for a long while.
He walked out of frame and Rose closed the window, going back to the GPS map and the Doctor-Dot. Over the next few weeks, this routine got to be a habit for her. She would arrive at her office, get her morning coffee, chat with her colleagues and then open the map of the Doctor's comings and goings and keep it active throughout the day as she went about her usual business of research, governmental liaising, and conference calls with other branches. Every hour or so, she'd take a peep just to make sure he wasn't showing up anywhere that might signal genocide or fraternizing with malevolent aliens. She discovered he'd indeed joined a gym, but hardly ever went, he spent a good deal of time at the pub, and a lot more in his office but no apocalypses seemed to be in the offing.
Spying on him in this way made Rose feel sneaky and dirty, but she also knew that if she didn't do it, someone else at Torchwood would. She hadn't yet told Pete or her mother about their breakup, but her family was beginning to put two and two together regarding the up-tick in the amount of time she spent either in her office or at her own flat and the scarcity of any Doctor sightings at family gatherings and events. She wouldn't be able to keep it a secret for much longer, and when the truth came out, Pete would insist the Doctor be trailed and monitored anyway. Better the task be done by someone with at least a passing concern for his privacy.
~o0o~
It was pissing it down outside when he boarded, though had now stopped, and the bus was crowded. The Doctor was running late for a departmental meeting and was glad to at least get a seat in the back. He wasn't going to the gym enough to be fit, just to be sore from overdoing it, and his calves hurt. He'd been running too late to pick up a paper at the news agent and couldn't bear to look at the dry and frankly simplistic papers he had in his brief case, so he just stared out the window at the world going by. The same world, every day, time always moving forward and never back, his mind atrophying by degrees.
A ripple of some sort began to percolate among the other passengers, and there seemed to be a great deal of shifting about and craning of necks all of a sudden. A few of the female passengers squealed, and the Doctor looked up to see what the fuss was about. A large, hairy, dun coloured moth was trapped on the bus, alighting here and there on passengers, searching desperately for a tree to blend in with. As it did so, the riders either froze and stared at it in horror until it moved on, or swiped at it with books and magazines. Some young louts near him began to really go for it with a rolled up newspaper, whooping and egging each other on, jostling the other passengers, as the thing danced around erratically up near the handrails.
It came to rest two seats in front of him, on the shoulder of an older woman, and the Doctor sincerely hoped the blokes with the newspaper wouldn't knock her block off while simultaneously smearing dead moth on her prim white jumper. But rather than a newspaper, a hand came down on the woman's shoulder and caught the moth in a loose fist. The Doctor tried to discreetly shift in his seat to see who it was who'd finally done the sensible thing here. It was a young woman, dressed professionally, carrying a messenger bag, wearing trainers instead of pumps. He just saw the back of her as she fought her way to the front, and he followed her with his eyes. She clutched the hand holding the moth close to her and as she passed the other riders all looked at her as if she had three heads, as did the driver when at the next stop light she asked him to open the doors. He did so, however, and she stuck her hand out the door and released the moth with no fanfare. Just opened her hand and off it flew.
The moth fluttered next to the bus, and came to land on the outside of the Doctor's window. It sat there and moved its wings back and forth lazily, taking its bearings. All it had wanted was a tree to sit on, some nectar to drink, a full moon to worship, and what did it get? A bus load of primates who wanted to kill it just for being alive. These humans, he thought, then corrected himself: Us humans. We really are a pretty horrid lot, most of us. But not all. Not all.
He felt someone slide on to the seat next to his and broke out of his reverie with a start, turned, and saw that it was the woman who'd saved the moth. She smiled at him sweetly and said, "Hello."
"Hello," the Doctor replied, the edges of his mouth quirking up seemingly without his control. "John Smith," he said, and stuck his hand out.
"Rose Tyler." She took his hand and shook it firmly. "Nice to meet you."
"Are you, ah, are you heading to the University?" he asked, not wanting to meet her eyes but feeling drawn there anyway.
"Could do."
He looked over at the window again, looked at the moth still resting there, perhaps having a drink from a water droplet left by the rain storm earlier, counting its little moth blessings that someone saw its little moth life as important enough to spare just a minute or two for. Beware of us humans, he wanted to tell it. You should steer well clear. He looked back at Rose, then again at the moth. Well, of most of us. Better be safe though, better...
"Run," he whispered, and took Rose's hand.
END.
* I work at a university very well known for the hard sciences and this was actually something that was on a flier for a talk being given on campus. I took a picture of the flier because when I saw it the first time, my first thought was "WTF? That sounds like something the Doctor would want to talk about!"
PAIRING: Alt!Ten/Rose, I swear! Just trust me on this.
RATING: This chapter PG
SPOILERS: Does it need saying?
SUMMARY: Alt!Ten hits a rough patch. What's it like to have someone else's memories?
A/N: This is one of those fics where Alt!Ten and Rose get all dysfunctional.
When the Doctor awoke early the next morning, after a night of little actual sleep but an intense longing for it, Rose was nowhere to be found. The various personal effects of hers that had slowly sprouted around the house like mushrooms over the course of the past couple of months also seemed to have vanished. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror while exiting the bathroom didn't help matters at all and he spent a bleary few minutes in the kitchen staring at the coffee maker, willing it to speed up and perhaps to deliver the caffeine directly in to his bloodstream. He poked at his stomach and pulled at the skin around his hips, thinking about the financial feasibility of a gym membership. Being in a human body and having to do a lot less running for his life than the other Doctor was doing nothing at all for his physique. If he was going to be single again.... Again? No, for the first time ever in his life. At the apparent age of thirty-five he was going to be single for the first time, and the thought was both thrilling and mortifying. A parade of what-ifs marched through his head. What if he never met another person who was interested in him? What if he was rubbish in bed? What if he was a sloppy kisser? What if women didn't really dig the sideburns as much as he thought they did? What if he got his heart broken? What if everyone actually just thought that he was a weird, funny-looking geek?
The Time Lord part of his mind began to kick in to full list-making, probability-testing gear: Join gym, shave sideburns, get cooler glasses, watch more American television. The notion of prescription sunglasses crossed his mind, and then the even better notion of contact lenses, though he wasn't sure he could actually go through with sticking something to his eyeballs. He looked down at his bare torso. Chest waxing? Sounded painful and not really worth it. Off the list.
He finished his coffee standing right there in his pajama bottoms in the kitchen and shuffled back upstairs to check his email. The usual bunch of meaningless claptrap from colleagues and students who apparently had no lives outside of work, based on the timestamps of the messages. Who sends an email about K+ Lambda photoproduction and recoil polarization* at two o'clock in the morning? One of his post-docs, apparently. He shuddered at the thought of having to stay up that late in to the night just to finally understand such an elementary concept. Another what-if struck him suddenly: What if he was just a right old miserable bastard?
~o0o~
Across town, Rose Tyler sat at her desk high above Canary Wharf. She'd come in late, pleading a morning appointment with an important contact in the government, but really it was just because of how poorly she slept and the residual puffiness that would alert everyone in the office to her newly-Doctorless status. She cleared out as much of her stuff as she could find from the Doctor's house and gone back to her flat in the pre-dawn hours. That is, after she placed a tiny remote tracking device inside the fabric of his billfold, which he'd foolishly left sitting on the mantle-piece. She had come prepared for her spying mission the night before with the best of what Torchwood had to offer. She might not be his lover any more, but she still had her promise to the other Doctor, and her responsibility as a Torchwood operative to keep tabs on such a potentially dangerous personage.
She stroked the button of her computer's mouse, hovering the pointer over the window that would show his whereabouts. To click or not to click? "I am not stalking him, I am not stalking him, I am not..." she muttered again, and clicked. Watching the progress of the little black dot, it appeared he was on his way to his office, on the bus. She watched the slow movement of the dot-that-was-the-Doctor down the road but then noticed that it stopped at least twelve blocks from where he normally got off. Biting the tip of her pen, she clicked through a few windows to get to the CCTV menu and selected the camera closest to where he appeared to be. She hoped he hadn't dropped his wallet somewhere, that would make this whole project a lot more problematic.
Gaining remote control of the camera she spun it around to just catch the back of his head as he entered a hair salon. She never would have believed it if someone else had told her that people actually do this, but at that moment she literally smacked her own forehead with the palm of her hand. A hair salon? He wasn't due for a trim, so that could only mean one thing. Oh Doctor, she thought, wasting no time, are you? She repeated her new mantra to herself: set him free, set him free, set him free. He doesn't love you. Though that didn't stop her from keeping an eye on the time as she completed some paperwork, and after a half an hour bringing the CCTV feed back up. He wound up walking right past the camera a few minutes later, and she almost didn't recognize him. The sideburns were now gone, and he was sporting a new, less spiky cut, with a fringe that almost fell over his eyes. She thought he looked five years younger, and a lot more conservative. She wasn't sure if she liked it and she caught herself planning what she would say when she saw him next, then realizing that she might not see him next. At least not for a long while.
He walked out of frame and Rose closed the window, going back to the GPS map and the Doctor-Dot. Over the next few weeks, this routine got to be a habit for her. She would arrive at her office, get her morning coffee, chat with her colleagues and then open the map of the Doctor's comings and goings and keep it active throughout the day as she went about her usual business of research, governmental liaising, and conference calls with other branches. Every hour or so, she'd take a peep just to make sure he wasn't showing up anywhere that might signal genocide or fraternizing with malevolent aliens. She discovered he'd indeed joined a gym, but hardly ever went, he spent a good deal of time at the pub, and a lot more in his office but no apocalypses seemed to be in the offing.
Spying on him in this way made Rose feel sneaky and dirty, but she also knew that if she didn't do it, someone else at Torchwood would. She hadn't yet told Pete or her mother about their breakup, but her family was beginning to put two and two together regarding the up-tick in the amount of time she spent either in her office or at her own flat and the scarcity of any Doctor sightings at family gatherings and events. She wouldn't be able to keep it a secret for much longer, and when the truth came out, Pete would insist the Doctor be trailed and monitored anyway. Better the task be done by someone with at least a passing concern for his privacy.
~o0o~
It was pissing it down outside when he boarded, though had now stopped, and the bus was crowded. The Doctor was running late for a departmental meeting and was glad to at least get a seat in the back. He wasn't going to the gym enough to be fit, just to be sore from overdoing it, and his calves hurt. He'd been running too late to pick up a paper at the news agent and couldn't bear to look at the dry and frankly simplistic papers he had in his brief case, so he just stared out the window at the world going by. The same world, every day, time always moving forward and never back, his mind atrophying by degrees.
A ripple of some sort began to percolate among the other passengers, and there seemed to be a great deal of shifting about and craning of necks all of a sudden. A few of the female passengers squealed, and the Doctor looked up to see what the fuss was about. A large, hairy, dun coloured moth was trapped on the bus, alighting here and there on passengers, searching desperately for a tree to blend in with. As it did so, the riders either froze and stared at it in horror until it moved on, or swiped at it with books and magazines. Some young louts near him began to really go for it with a rolled up newspaper, whooping and egging each other on, jostling the other passengers, as the thing danced around erratically up near the handrails.
It came to rest two seats in front of him, on the shoulder of an older woman, and the Doctor sincerely hoped the blokes with the newspaper wouldn't knock her block off while simultaneously smearing dead moth on her prim white jumper. But rather than a newspaper, a hand came down on the woman's shoulder and caught the moth in a loose fist. The Doctor tried to discreetly shift in his seat to see who it was who'd finally done the sensible thing here. It was a young woman, dressed professionally, carrying a messenger bag, wearing trainers instead of pumps. He just saw the back of her as she fought her way to the front, and he followed her with his eyes. She clutched the hand holding the moth close to her and as she passed the other riders all looked at her as if she had three heads, as did the driver when at the next stop light she asked him to open the doors. He did so, however, and she stuck her hand out the door and released the moth with no fanfare. Just opened her hand and off it flew.
The moth fluttered next to the bus, and came to land on the outside of the Doctor's window. It sat there and moved its wings back and forth lazily, taking its bearings. All it had wanted was a tree to sit on, some nectar to drink, a full moon to worship, and what did it get? A bus load of primates who wanted to kill it just for being alive. These humans, he thought, then corrected himself: Us humans. We really are a pretty horrid lot, most of us. But not all. Not all.
He felt someone slide on to the seat next to his and broke out of his reverie with a start, turned, and saw that it was the woman who'd saved the moth. She smiled at him sweetly and said, "Hello."
"Hello," the Doctor replied, the edges of his mouth quirking up seemingly without his control. "John Smith," he said, and stuck his hand out.
"Rose Tyler." She took his hand and shook it firmly. "Nice to meet you."
"Are you, ah, are you heading to the University?" he asked, not wanting to meet her eyes but feeling drawn there anyway.
"Could do."
He looked over at the window again, looked at the moth still resting there, perhaps having a drink from a water droplet left by the rain storm earlier, counting its little moth blessings that someone saw its little moth life as important enough to spare just a minute or two for. Beware of us humans, he wanted to tell it. You should steer well clear. He looked back at Rose, then again at the moth. Well, of most of us. Better be safe though, better...
"Run," he whispered, and took Rose's hand.
END.
* I work at a university very well known for the hard sciences and this was actually something that was on a flier for a talk being given on campus. I took a picture of the flier because when I saw it the first time, my first thought was "WTF? That sounds like something the Doctor would want to talk about!"