Fic: Postcards to Gallifrey (2/5)
Title: Postcards to Gallifrey, Part Two
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Doctor, Rose, various
Summary: AU. The TARDIS is broken; no more time travel, and no off-planet travel until he can get the parts he needs. And so the Doctor and Rose live out their bohemian lifestyle in a whole new way.
Spoilers: References to Doomsday
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, nor the associated characters, and am not making any money off of this. Which makes me sad.
Acknowledgements: Thank you so much to my wonderful beta and Brit-pick, sensiblecat, with whom this chapter would only be about half of what it turned to be. I'm probably eternally indebted to you for all of your help.
Other parts:
Part One: Zakynthos, Greece
Part Three: New York City, USA
Part Four: Perth, Australia)
Part Five: Arcadia
Outside Dublin, Ireland seems to be nothing more than sheep and meadows. They end up on a small piece of land down the coast from Bray. Rose thinks that the Doctor’s going to be bored with this place within a week, and she’s sure that she will be. A week goes by, and then a month and when it’s three months and counting, Rose realizes that this place, as she puts it, isn’t so bad.
The nearest town is just fifteen minutes’ walk away from their little old cottage, and the city of Dublin is a half hour by train. In order to make some sort of money for things like food, the Doctor decides to start a small medical practice, out there in the country. From somewhere in the infinite depths of the TARDIS’ interior, he digs up one of the many diplomas that he’s collected through his travels. Not much happens out here though; the worst is a bad case or two of the flu, and a few children’s bones to reset.
He's just wandering, when he finds the place. He and Rose had only arrived a few days prior, and Rose was doing the domestic thing and setting up house, which the Doctor didn't care to have any part of. He only lives in the house for her sake, really. He's almost rather live in the TARDIS. But the damage is more than physical; her link to the Time Vortex has somehow been weakened; not cut off, but a trickle of power is all that’s getting through. And he just doesn’t have the parts. With so many of her non-essential systems shut down to keep from doing further damage, Rose argues that if they're going to have to do the coking and the cleaning and the shopping, and if there is a house that they can use for just a little while, why not move in? It’s only for a few months, at the least, before the TARDIS has enough power to jump again.
Just down the road, is the local blacksmith. Walking down the road, he decides to investigate the sound. He finds, in the forge, a small, tough woman with close-cropped black hair and a love for horses and metal, nailing the last shoe onto the hoof of a lovely chestnut mare while the horse’s owner waits by the fence, chatting with the farrier’s husband. With a few deft taps, the last shoe is on, and she puts down the leg, looking up from her work to see the Doctor, standing in the doorway. She takes in his appearance with a raised eyebrow and says, in a brogue so thick he almost needs the translation software to understand, “You’re going to get your pretty suit all dirty if you stay ‘round here much longer.”
Her next customer arrives, and she turns her attention back to her work. The Doctor stays and watches her work this time, taking in the rest of the workshop, with the various pieces of metalwork, some half-finished, tucked into out-of-the-way corners. It’s all a bit fascinating to him. When she’s finished shoeing this next horse, last of the day, she invites him in for a cup of tea, if he’s going to hang around. He starts asking questions about her work and not just the practical things either. The bits and pieces she’s got tucked away look far more decorative in nature than the horseshoes she just finished with.
She pulls one of them out from the shadows, showing him the working of it, how delicate it looks, when it’s really quite strong. When her husband pulls them away from this, she finally introduces herself as Bridget and her husband as Connor. After a cup of tea, he goes back to Rose, keeping his thoughts to himself.
The Doctor goes back again, many times. Bridget finally gets fed up with him just standing around and offers to teach him a few things. He’s excited at the chance to learn something new. So, for a few hours nearly every day, he vanishes. Rose notices, but he doesn't say anything and she, even though she's desperately curious, doesn't ask. She decides that, if it's important, he'll tell her when he's ready.
He needs his own workspace though, out of the way of Bridget’s paying work. So, down at the end of the garden, where a little stream runs, he turns the old, run-down potting shed into a makeshift forge. For hours each day, he disappears in there.
She wakes, one morning in the false dawn of the early morning, to find herself alone. He does this occasionally, going out walking while the ground is still covered in its blanket of mists; his restlessness needing an outlet. But she hears a strange noise, rhythmic and sharp in the cool air. So she wraps her dressing gown around her, puts the kettle on, and goes off, over the field that is their back garden. The TARDIS, against the back wall of the house, is silent and empty, so she goes on. Finally, down on the stream on the far edge of the garden, she identifies the source of the sound, from the little shed that she never paid much attention to, before now.
He’s just taken something out of the little fire that’s hot enough to warm the entire space. Rose comes in cautiously, watching the sparks fly up from the hammer blows. As she watches, he makes some mistake, apparent by his incomprehensible swearing. He looks up, noticing her and stopping dead. “Oh, um,” he looks away, at the scene she’s walked into, “hi.”
Rose enters properly, and he goes into action, turning down the gas of the forge and taking the cherry-red metal with the tongs into the trough of water, where it lays, hissing. Soon, the forge is quiet, the heat slowly escaping into the cool air. “What are you making?”
“Oh, nothing really. Just messing around a bit,” he replies, not really answering.
She steps forward, asking again. He doesn’t look at her when he speaks. “Nothing important. Just something pretty perhaps, I was thinking it could be, I dunno, trinket or something.”
She doesn’t ask again, but the question hangs in the air between them. His expression, his mask, slips just a little. He shakes his head, turns away, because Rose knows what’s going on. “We didn’t have the parts,” she says quietly, an echo from the past.
He nods, and she gets it. He’s trying to make the parts they need; parts that won’t be invented for a couple of hundred years, at the least on this planet, if at all. There’s something else that she realizes, something that needs to be said. “It isn’t going to work, is it?”
The Doctor doesn’t have to answer, because they both know she’s right. She’s staring at his back, because he won’t face her and she won’t force him to. She asks the question that’s been chasing her, for a while now. “Is this my fault?”
Puzzlement finally gets him to glance at her. “What do you mean?”
She realizes that the question is confusing, and rephrases. “Why are you doing this? Not the metal,” she waves a hand, encompassing the little workshop, “but the house. The living a life, day after day. Are you doing this because of me?”
He turns the question back around on her. “Why do you leave when I do? Why don’t you stay?”
She blinks, thinking about it. “I told you, when,” she stops, “when they left; that I wasn’t going to leave you.”
That’s not good enough for him. “But that was when I could show you the universe, every planet in the cosmos. Anywhere in the whole of time and space. When the TARDIS worked properly,” he adds quietly.
“You think I stayed for the stars?” She asks.
And there it is; the thing that’s been there all along. He turns to face her, full on. “Are you ever going to leave me?” His tone is neutral, as if he has no opinion on the matter; still trying to keep that mask.
She tilts her head, watching him, waiting for the facade to crack again, wanting to get under there. “Do you want me to?”
The Doctor can’t answer that, he just can’t. It’d be against the rules, to tell her the truth, to tell her that, other than a crippled TARDIS, she’s all he has left. That, if she left, he’d go on, of course, but there would always be a part of him with her. And even that’s against the rules, he realizes. He’s loved every companion that he’s had, all of them the same. But Rose, Rose has wormed her way into his very being, become so much a part of him, more than any other.
“Do you want me to leave?” She asks again. “Because, if you do,” she hesitates, weighing the truth of her statement, “I would. If that’s what you wanted.”
He doesn’t give her a straight answer, not that she’s exactly expecting one. “Do they matter anymore? All those rules and codes that I scorned for so many years.” She realizes he’s talking about Gallifrey, and keeps silent. “Does it really matter now?”
She doesn’t have an answer for him, and he keeps talking. “There were rules I followed, you know,” he tells her, gazing at something so far beyond this place she can barely comprehend. “I was a renegade, a rule breaker,” he says, without the pride that once would have been there, “in everything but this.” He looks back down at her.
Somehow, without either of them noticing the exact moment, he isn’t hiding anymore, not from her. “I don’t want you to leave. But someday, you’re going to want to. When that day comes- I don’t want to keep you where you don’t want to be.”
She scoffs a little. “Yeah, but what have I got to go back to?”
Because she doesn’t have a family to go home to anymore. The Doctor flinches, because he feels that her decision is his fault. “And that’s what I chose,” she says, just a little sadly.
He wants to ask her if she thinks she made the right choice, but he’s afraid. He can face down demons and Daleks and anything the universe can throw at him. But he’s not brave enough to ask her that question. He doesn’t take this chance, though the dialogue is one that never really goes away between the two of them. Rose turns. “I put the kettle on for tea,” she says simply.
The Doctor nods, letting go of the previous thread of conversation. They have tea, at four in the morning, and watch the sun rise in a slow creep of light across the land. It’s too early for Rose still, so she goes back to bed.
The second time she wakes up that day, later on, she’s still alone, but his voice is drifting up from the bottom floor. He’s on the phone, with a patient, she decides, as she lays there and listens. And so it goes. Some mornings she finds him in the forge, others he is elsewhere, puttering around the kitchen, or out in the fields. Only occasionally does she wake to find him beside her, where he was when she fell asleep.
Ireland, in addition to the sheep and grass, is also a land of dreams and legends. The land remembers the history better than most lands, more viscerally. Other lands forget because they must, but this one doesn’t. Leprechauns, gods, saints; all of them are echoes of other things, other truths; all of which the land remembers. They run into so many strange things here in Ireland, almost as many as they did while traveling more widely. All things accepted as just a normal part of life by the locals.
But for the most part, out here in the pastoral lands that roll away before the eye to the crashing seas and rocks of the Wicklow area, they live an almost quiet life for a year or so. People, when they are spread so thinly over such a wide area, become naturally neighbourly. They spend New Year’s Eve that year at the pub in town, toasting in the year surrounded by people who call themselves friends, as the snow falls faintly over the countryside.
*
She’s said the goodbyes, and given what explanations she can (though they’re mostly excuses, since she doesn’t really understand either why they’re moving), while he’s got the TARDIS ready to go again. Not far, still, he still can’t fix it. But they’re off again, the Doctor’s wanderlust getting to him too much again. The house, which they were only borrowing for a little while anyway from one of the many someones who owed him a favour or two, is locked and silent again, as Rose steps from the gravel of the garden walk in through the doors of the TARDIS once more.
*
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Doctor, Rose, various
Summary: AU. The TARDIS is broken; no more time travel, and no off-planet travel until he can get the parts he needs. And so the Doctor and Rose live out their bohemian lifestyle in a whole new way.
Spoilers: References to Doomsday
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, nor the associated characters, and am not making any money off of this. Which makes me sad.
Acknowledgements: Thank you so much to my wonderful beta and Brit-pick, sensiblecat, with whom this chapter would only be about half of what it turned to be. I'm probably eternally indebted to you for all of your help.
Other parts:
Part One: Zakynthos, Greece
Part Three: New York City, USA
Part Four: Perth, Australia)
Part Five: Arcadia
Outside Dublin, Ireland seems to be nothing more than sheep and meadows. They end up on a small piece of land down the coast from Bray. Rose thinks that the Doctor’s going to be bored with this place within a week, and she’s sure that she will be. A week goes by, and then a month and when it’s three months and counting, Rose realizes that this place, as she puts it, isn’t so bad.
The nearest town is just fifteen minutes’ walk away from their little old cottage, and the city of Dublin is a half hour by train. In order to make some sort of money for things like food, the Doctor decides to start a small medical practice, out there in the country. From somewhere in the infinite depths of the TARDIS’ interior, he digs up one of the many diplomas that he’s collected through his travels. Not much happens out here though; the worst is a bad case or two of the flu, and a few children’s bones to reset.
He's just wandering, when he finds the place. He and Rose had only arrived a few days prior, and Rose was doing the domestic thing and setting up house, which the Doctor didn't care to have any part of. He only lives in the house for her sake, really. He's almost rather live in the TARDIS. But the damage is more than physical; her link to the Time Vortex has somehow been weakened; not cut off, but a trickle of power is all that’s getting through. And he just doesn’t have the parts. With so many of her non-essential systems shut down to keep from doing further damage, Rose argues that if they're going to have to do the coking and the cleaning and the shopping, and if there is a house that they can use for just a little while, why not move in? It’s only for a few months, at the least, before the TARDIS has enough power to jump again.
Just down the road, is the local blacksmith. Walking down the road, he decides to investigate the sound. He finds, in the forge, a small, tough woman with close-cropped black hair and a love for horses and metal, nailing the last shoe onto the hoof of a lovely chestnut mare while the horse’s owner waits by the fence, chatting with the farrier’s husband. With a few deft taps, the last shoe is on, and she puts down the leg, looking up from her work to see the Doctor, standing in the doorway. She takes in his appearance with a raised eyebrow and says, in a brogue so thick he almost needs the translation software to understand, “You’re going to get your pretty suit all dirty if you stay ‘round here much longer.”
Her next customer arrives, and she turns her attention back to her work. The Doctor stays and watches her work this time, taking in the rest of the workshop, with the various pieces of metalwork, some half-finished, tucked into out-of-the-way corners. It’s all a bit fascinating to him. When she’s finished shoeing this next horse, last of the day, she invites him in for a cup of tea, if he’s going to hang around. He starts asking questions about her work and not just the practical things either. The bits and pieces she’s got tucked away look far more decorative in nature than the horseshoes she just finished with.
She pulls one of them out from the shadows, showing him the working of it, how delicate it looks, when it’s really quite strong. When her husband pulls them away from this, she finally introduces herself as Bridget and her husband as Connor. After a cup of tea, he goes back to Rose, keeping his thoughts to himself.
The Doctor goes back again, many times. Bridget finally gets fed up with him just standing around and offers to teach him a few things. He’s excited at the chance to learn something new. So, for a few hours nearly every day, he vanishes. Rose notices, but he doesn't say anything and she, even though she's desperately curious, doesn't ask. She decides that, if it's important, he'll tell her when he's ready.
He needs his own workspace though, out of the way of Bridget’s paying work. So, down at the end of the garden, where a little stream runs, he turns the old, run-down potting shed into a makeshift forge. For hours each day, he disappears in there.
She wakes, one morning in the false dawn of the early morning, to find herself alone. He does this occasionally, going out walking while the ground is still covered in its blanket of mists; his restlessness needing an outlet. But she hears a strange noise, rhythmic and sharp in the cool air. So she wraps her dressing gown around her, puts the kettle on, and goes off, over the field that is their back garden. The TARDIS, against the back wall of the house, is silent and empty, so she goes on. Finally, down on the stream on the far edge of the garden, she identifies the source of the sound, from the little shed that she never paid much attention to, before now.
He’s just taken something out of the little fire that’s hot enough to warm the entire space. Rose comes in cautiously, watching the sparks fly up from the hammer blows. As she watches, he makes some mistake, apparent by his incomprehensible swearing. He looks up, noticing her and stopping dead. “Oh, um,” he looks away, at the scene she’s walked into, “hi.”
Rose enters properly, and he goes into action, turning down the gas of the forge and taking the cherry-red metal with the tongs into the trough of water, where it lays, hissing. Soon, the forge is quiet, the heat slowly escaping into the cool air. “What are you making?”
“Oh, nothing really. Just messing around a bit,” he replies, not really answering.
She steps forward, asking again. He doesn’t look at her when he speaks. “Nothing important. Just something pretty perhaps, I was thinking it could be, I dunno, trinket or something.”
She doesn’t ask again, but the question hangs in the air between them. His expression, his mask, slips just a little. He shakes his head, turns away, because Rose knows what’s going on. “We didn’t have the parts,” she says quietly, an echo from the past.
He nods, and she gets it. He’s trying to make the parts they need; parts that won’t be invented for a couple of hundred years, at the least on this planet, if at all. There’s something else that she realizes, something that needs to be said. “It isn’t going to work, is it?”
The Doctor doesn’t have to answer, because they both know she’s right. She’s staring at his back, because he won’t face her and she won’t force him to. She asks the question that’s been chasing her, for a while now. “Is this my fault?”
Puzzlement finally gets him to glance at her. “What do you mean?”
She realizes that the question is confusing, and rephrases. “Why are you doing this? Not the metal,” she waves a hand, encompassing the little workshop, “but the house. The living a life, day after day. Are you doing this because of me?”
He turns the question back around on her. “Why do you leave when I do? Why don’t you stay?”
She blinks, thinking about it. “I told you, when,” she stops, “when they left; that I wasn’t going to leave you.”
That’s not good enough for him. “But that was when I could show you the universe, every planet in the cosmos. Anywhere in the whole of time and space. When the TARDIS worked properly,” he adds quietly.
“You think I stayed for the stars?” She asks.
And there it is; the thing that’s been there all along. He turns to face her, full on. “Are you ever going to leave me?” His tone is neutral, as if he has no opinion on the matter; still trying to keep that mask.
She tilts her head, watching him, waiting for the facade to crack again, wanting to get under there. “Do you want me to?”
The Doctor can’t answer that, he just can’t. It’d be against the rules, to tell her the truth, to tell her that, other than a crippled TARDIS, she’s all he has left. That, if she left, he’d go on, of course, but there would always be a part of him with her. And even that’s against the rules, he realizes. He’s loved every companion that he’s had, all of them the same. But Rose, Rose has wormed her way into his very being, become so much a part of him, more than any other.
“Do you want me to leave?” She asks again. “Because, if you do,” she hesitates, weighing the truth of her statement, “I would. If that’s what you wanted.”
He doesn’t give her a straight answer, not that she’s exactly expecting one. “Do they matter anymore? All those rules and codes that I scorned for so many years.” She realizes he’s talking about Gallifrey, and keeps silent. “Does it really matter now?”
She doesn’t have an answer for him, and he keeps talking. “There were rules I followed, you know,” he tells her, gazing at something so far beyond this place she can barely comprehend. “I was a renegade, a rule breaker,” he says, without the pride that once would have been there, “in everything but this.” He looks back down at her.
Somehow, without either of them noticing the exact moment, he isn’t hiding anymore, not from her. “I don’t want you to leave. But someday, you’re going to want to. When that day comes- I don’t want to keep you where you don’t want to be.”
She scoffs a little. “Yeah, but what have I got to go back to?”
Because she doesn’t have a family to go home to anymore. The Doctor flinches, because he feels that her decision is his fault. “And that’s what I chose,” she says, just a little sadly.
He wants to ask her if she thinks she made the right choice, but he’s afraid. He can face down demons and Daleks and anything the universe can throw at him. But he’s not brave enough to ask her that question. He doesn’t take this chance, though the dialogue is one that never really goes away between the two of them. Rose turns. “I put the kettle on for tea,” she says simply.
The Doctor nods, letting go of the previous thread of conversation. They have tea, at four in the morning, and watch the sun rise in a slow creep of light across the land. It’s too early for Rose still, so she goes back to bed.
The second time she wakes up that day, later on, she’s still alone, but his voice is drifting up from the bottom floor. He’s on the phone, with a patient, she decides, as she lays there and listens. And so it goes. Some mornings she finds him in the forge, others he is elsewhere, puttering around the kitchen, or out in the fields. Only occasionally does she wake to find him beside her, where he was when she fell asleep.
Ireland, in addition to the sheep and grass, is also a land of dreams and legends. The land remembers the history better than most lands, more viscerally. Other lands forget because they must, but this one doesn’t. Leprechauns, gods, saints; all of them are echoes of other things, other truths; all of which the land remembers. They run into so many strange things here in Ireland, almost as many as they did while traveling more widely. All things accepted as just a normal part of life by the locals.
But for the most part, out here in the pastoral lands that roll away before the eye to the crashing seas and rocks of the Wicklow area, they live an almost quiet life for a year or so. People, when they are spread so thinly over such a wide area, become naturally neighbourly. They spend New Year’s Eve that year at the pub in town, toasting in the year surrounded by people who call themselves friends, as the snow falls faintly over the countryside.
*
She’s said the goodbyes, and given what explanations she can (though they’re mostly excuses, since she doesn’t really understand either why they’re moving), while he’s got the TARDIS ready to go again. Not far, still, he still can’t fix it. But they’re off again, the Doctor’s wanderlust getting to him too much again. The house, which they were only borrowing for a little while anyway from one of the many someones who owed him a favour or two, is locked and silent again, as Rose steps from the gravel of the garden walk in through the doors of the TARDIS once more.
*