Fic: Postcards to Gallifrey (3/5?)
Title: Postcards to Gallifrey, (3/5?)
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, and maybe various other bits.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, nor the associated characters, and am not making any money off of this. Darn.
Acknowledgements: Thank you so much to my wonderful beta and Brit-pick, sensiblecat. You are amazing, and you have no idea how much I value your imput on this.
Also, if there's a city, town suburb or other population center that you would like to see in this fic, feel free to suggest one. It might get used.
Other parts:
Part One: Zakynthos, Greece
Part Two: Bray, Ireland
Part Four: Perth, Australia
Part Five: Arcadia
“Where are we?”
Her gray jumper blends in with the surrounding trees, bare of leaves, and the cold air turns her cheeks and nose and fingertips bright red. It’s just beginning to snow here, as twilight falls over the forest they have emerged into.
He sucks in his cheeks, calculating. “Ooo, about a quarter of a mile from Fifth Avenue,” he says and points over the trees to the top edges of the buildings visible from here, as she smiles.
The thing about New York City, the one on Earth, at least, is that very few people actually belong there. Everyone else is just passing through. Some people are born here, and may even stay all their lives.
But, more often than not,
They leave, and their places are taken by others coming through to stay for a while.
There are all sorts of reasons that people come here; to find themselves; to find someone else; to hide; to make it; to break the glass ceiling.
A million threads, on one tiny island.
The TARDIS is in the southern end of a little valley called the Dene, in Central Park, not really hidden in the surrounding Kwanzan cherry trees, crabapples, and magnolias. It’s pretty obviously visible from the shelter atop the rock, and blue is not exactly the best colour for camouflage, but no one questions its presence.
Rose goes out sometimes, bundled against the cold gripping the city that winter, and leave the Doctor to his wearisome puzzle of a machine. She comes back hours later, happy and chattering.
Today, as usual, down in the open underbelly of the console, is the Doctor, when Rose comes in from the cold. Wedged beneath the control panel and surrounded by wires and lifted grating, the grease and ruffled hair and frustration all build up, as she watches him silently. “Doctor,” she says finally, trying to gauge the right moment to speak. Too soon and he won’t want to give up yet.
Apparently this time she’s spoken too late. He shoves himself out from his mess, uttering a wordless cry of frustration and violently throwing the sonic screwdriver across the large room. It hits the far wall with a clang, and she works to keep from flinching. She only fails a little. There are times that he’s scared her. He may not look or sound much like his former self, but the hardness is still there, covered up underneath more cheeky grins and jokes. And even though she knows he wouldn’t hurt her, it’s a human reaction to be scared or jump at something like that; survival instinct.
He approaches, standing before her, staring at her wordlessly. There so much going on, just behind his eyes, that she almost wishes that he would yell, cry, lash out, something to get it out into the open. Maybe she should slap him, shove him, just to get a reaction out of him. Instead, he turns away, kicking the base of the railing. This time she doesn’t flinch. Leaning heavily on the abused railing, he tries to compose himself.
Her voice betrays her with a tremor, when she calls to him again. He looks at her, and she can see the poorly veiled fear in his eyes before he ducks his face away again.
Rose steps up to him slowly, carefully. Taking his face in her hands, she swipes a thumb across a grease stain on his cheek. He stares down at her as she touches another smudge on his forehead. His eyes make her stop, and she has no time to react before he’s grabbed her, pulling her tight against him.
They stay like that for a short eternity, their heartbeats melding into one endless cascade of life that she can feel with her hand caught between their chests. When her brain kicks back in, she realizes that she’s been expecting him to pull away any moment now to go back to his work. She also realizes that, in the back of her head, she’s been plotting ways to get him away from that work. Surprising her, he pulls away, and then pulls her along with him by the hand, and not in the direction of the console either. Leading her through the corridors, there’s the barest hint of a grin on his mouth. “Go get dressed,” he tells her.
She can tell that he thinks he’s come up with something good, so she plays along, looking down at what she’s wearing now. “What,” she asks cheekily, “jeans not doing it for you anymore?”
He’s still not really grinning, but they’re getting there as an eyebrow quirks up. “Well, they’re great, yeah, and you could probably pull anything off; but not really for a night out on the town.”
Her smile almost makes up for the lack of one on his face, it’s so big. “Really?”
“Yep. Anything you want to do Rose Tyler. On me.”
She scoffs at him, jolly. “Sure, it sounds great, Mr. Man-with-no-money.”
Shaking his head, he shoos her off down the hall towards their room. “You let me worry about that.”
Finally, as she dances off down the corridor, he smiles.
*
They fight. They don’t remember what it was about in the first place, and soon it doesn’t matter. They’re shouting at one another across the room, when she suddenly goes still and silent, with narrowed eyes. Turning on her heel, she disappears out of the door. The Doctor waits for a few minutes, letting her cool down. But when he steps into the wet spring air, she’s nowhere near.
An hour or two later, when she doesn’t come back, he checks to make sure that she’s taken her cell phone with her, and calls Mio, the friend that he guess she’s staying with. Wherever they have ended up for any length of time, Rose gathers people about her in networks, and for once he’s glad of it. His call is bounced from friend to friend to one that finally confirms that, yes, Rose did show up, and no, she has no desire to speak with him.
He tells himself that this is fine with him, and that she’ll be okay without him. Throwing himself into futile work again, he tries to avoid thinking about her. For a while it works, and just as he feels he’s about to go mad with the not-thinking, three days later, the Ice Warriors invade New York.
As improbable as it is on an ice-clad island of over a million panicked humans, they run into each other, almost literally, on the street. They run. And after they’ve faced the invaders, and the Doctor has challenged them and defeated them, she is left sitting on a park bench in the leafy oasis of the siren-loud city.
He doesn’t press her to rescind her decision. He just turns and walks away from her, neither of them saying a word. Later that night, he asks her what she would have done if she hadn’t come back. She doesn’t have an answer anymore.
But things are quiet for them, for the next few months. Quiet to the point where Rose knows and expects that something is going to go wrong. Because that’s how things have always gone with the two of them.
*
The door slams, and Rose jumps. “There you are,” she says.
He doesn’t respond. She watches him as he charges around the console room pulling levers and poking buttons and staring at the scanner. “What are you doing?” She asks, knowing he doesn’t do this sort of runaround for no reason, and hoping for something exciting. But she has the nasty feeling that he wants to leave, again. And it never gets easier, and he never asks.
“You should get your things together,” he tells her, hands flying about as he calculates and punches in numbers and long, circular phrases in his flowing script. “We’re going.”
Instead of dashing off as he’s suggested, she folds her arms across her chest. “Why are we doing that?”
Frustrated, he runs his hand through his hair, not for the first time, because it’s sticking out in a hundred different directions. “Does it matter?” Then he’s off again, bouncing around the console.
Somewhere in between muttering about plugs and vortices and polarised neutron flows, he notices that Rose is still standing in the same place. He looks at her expectantly. “Well?”
She’s angry though and her voice and stance both strongly reflect this. “Doctor,” she says, her voice with an edge of cold to it, “Why are we leaving?”
Six and a half months, they’d been here, not all that long, and she’s not ready to leave just yet. The Doctor steps away from the console, towards her. He thinks he’s worked out the situation in his head, and knows he should tread carefully, though he won’t if he doesn’t feel like it. “I have to leave, I can’t be here.”
“Why not?”
She’s not going to leave this alone. He runs a hand through his hair again. “Because I’m going to be here sometime soon; and two Doctors in one place can be bad,” he nods, “as you’ve seen. So we need to go before I show up.”
She works this out silently. “How do you know?” she asks to clarify.
He taps his temple. “Time Lord thing. Like a premonition, sort of. Now come on.” He goes back to his work, expecting her to accept this answer, as to him it’s perfectly reasonable.
She stands there silently for a moment more before protesting. “No.”
Looking out around the console in astonishment, he asks, “No? What do you mean ‘no’?”
There are so many things running through her mind, and she just picks the first thing that she can put into words at that moment. “You said you can’t be here.”
“Hm?” He’s impatient, but she won’t budge until she’s satisfied.
“You said that you can’t be here. What about me?”
He’s become very still, looking around the console until he thinks he’s hidden his fear deep enough to not be seen, “You not coming? Had enough of me then?” he asks with the fake cheerfulness she knows he uses when he’s upset.
For the briefest moment, she considers saying yes, just to get something more from him. But after the moment passes, she shakes her head. “No,” she answers softly. Then, with more strength and the smallest hint of desperation, “No. But if I’m going to be dragged around like a human pull-toy, then I want to know why.”
“Why what?” he questions back at her, his voice as loud as hers.
He’s about to point out that being with him is her choice, and if she doesn’t like the way she’s apparently being ‘dragged around’ then she can’t leave right now, if she wants. But she beats him to it with a lateral jump. “Why did we leave Ireland?”
He’s caught off guard, staring at her and trying to come up with a way to avoid responding. Silently, he turns away, adjusting more controls, though there’s not much left to do.
Rose is getting impatient. “Why did we leave?” It comes out as a near shout, and even she’s surprised at her forcefulness. She supposes that maybe she’s not dealing with this whole situation as well as she thought.
“Why does it matter?” He’s yelling now; not nearly as loud as her, and not with that same tone Rose inherited from her mother, but yelling just the same. Apparently, he’s not doing as well as she thought either.
Rose stares at him. “We were just settling in; we were making friends; we were -.”
He cuts her off, quite rudely. “Would it have been better in five years? Ten maybe? Hm? When you’re all settled in and all your friends knew you and wanted you around? Better to leave when we did.-.”
She returns the favour and cuts him off by talking over him. “But you, you’re like a bad landlord! Everything’s fine and then one day it’s ‘oops, here’s your 30 day notice. Sorry ‘bout that!’ It can’t go on like this!”
He realizes she isn’t going to stop unless he gives her the real reason. So, in a leap of courage and, quite possibly, he thinks, stupidity, he does. “It felt too much like home,” he says clearly instead of loudly, his frank words cutting off her Jackie-esque rant.
Instantly, all sorts of responses jump to her tongue, involving clichés about hearts and hearths and hats, but some part of her tells her that this is something with more meaning than those. So she waits for him to speak again. When he doesn’t, she prompts him with a softly-spoken, “What do you mean by home?”
Now they’re stumbling into territory as yet uncharted between the two of them. She can tell by the little way his shoulders fall, and the slight downturn of his mouth as he leans heavily against the console. “Ireland is such a thin place,” he says, taking his usual roundabout way of answering. “The walls between worlds, the barriers between myth, belief, reality, are all so blurred.” He looks up at the column, still for now. “When I was young,” he says, quietly, “on my planet, so many years of power had worn things thin. Especially where I lived. You could feel it up there. And it affected the world around it. For example, there was this hermit who-.” Though he had been picking up steam, he stops. The truth that they’re all gone hits him again, hard as ever. He gathers himself. “The world-walls were too thin,” he finishes, staring down at his hands, resting on the controls.
Rose absorbs all of this silently. Then she asks softly, because she’s curious and has never had occasion to ask before, “What was its name? Your planet?”
For a long moment, she doesn’t think that he’s going to answer her. Facing away from her, in a whisper, she barely hears. “Gallifrey. I’m from Gallifrey.”
Said like that, so softly, filled with loss and longing and guilt and regret, and all of the other things he’ll never show to her, it sounds like a prayer, though to what or whom she has no idea. He sets his hands in motion once more, moves another control on the dash. “You probably have some business to finish with before we leave.” It’s not a suggestion.
She hesitates, but nods finally, and slowly walks to the doors and out into the muggy night air of early summer. Above the surrounding trees, all in full summer leaf, the sky hangs silently. Any stars, even the brightest ones, are blotted out by the glow of the sodium-vapour streetlights. Bouncing off every surface, including the bottoms of the few scattered clouds, they give the blank sky an orange hue. Rose breathes out as she whispers the name, just the once, to the invisible stars, and walks away.
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, and maybe various other bits.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, nor the associated characters, and am not making any money off of this. Darn.
Acknowledgements: Thank you so much to my wonderful beta and Brit-pick, sensiblecat. You are amazing, and you have no idea how much I value your imput on this.
Also, if there's a city, town suburb or other population center that you would like to see in this fic, feel free to suggest one. It might get used.
Other parts:
Part One: Zakynthos, Greece
Part Two: Bray, Ireland
Part Four: Perth, Australia
Part Five: Arcadia
“Where are we?”
Her gray jumper blends in with the surrounding trees, bare of leaves, and the cold air turns her cheeks and nose and fingertips bright red. It’s just beginning to snow here, as twilight falls over the forest they have emerged into.
He sucks in his cheeks, calculating. “Ooo, about a quarter of a mile from Fifth Avenue,” he says and points over the trees to the top edges of the buildings visible from here, as she smiles.
The thing about New York City, the one on Earth, at least, is that very few people actually belong there. Everyone else is just passing through. Some people are born here, and may even stay all their lives.
But, more often than not,
They leave, and their places are taken by others coming through to stay for a while.
There are all sorts of reasons that people come here; to find themselves; to find someone else; to hide; to make it; to break the glass ceiling.
A million threads, on one tiny island.
The TARDIS is in the southern end of a little valley called the Dene, in Central Park, not really hidden in the surrounding Kwanzan cherry trees, crabapples, and magnolias. It’s pretty obviously visible from the shelter atop the rock, and blue is not exactly the best colour for camouflage, but no one questions its presence.
Rose goes out sometimes, bundled against the cold gripping the city that winter, and leave the Doctor to his wearisome puzzle of a machine. She comes back hours later, happy and chattering.
Today, as usual, down in the open underbelly of the console, is the Doctor, when Rose comes in from the cold. Wedged beneath the control panel and surrounded by wires and lifted grating, the grease and ruffled hair and frustration all build up, as she watches him silently. “Doctor,” she says finally, trying to gauge the right moment to speak. Too soon and he won’t want to give up yet.
Apparently this time she’s spoken too late. He shoves himself out from his mess, uttering a wordless cry of frustration and violently throwing the sonic screwdriver across the large room. It hits the far wall with a clang, and she works to keep from flinching. She only fails a little. There are times that he’s scared her. He may not look or sound much like his former self, but the hardness is still there, covered up underneath more cheeky grins and jokes. And even though she knows he wouldn’t hurt her, it’s a human reaction to be scared or jump at something like that; survival instinct.
He approaches, standing before her, staring at her wordlessly. There so much going on, just behind his eyes, that she almost wishes that he would yell, cry, lash out, something to get it out into the open. Maybe she should slap him, shove him, just to get a reaction out of him. Instead, he turns away, kicking the base of the railing. This time she doesn’t flinch. Leaning heavily on the abused railing, he tries to compose himself.
Her voice betrays her with a tremor, when she calls to him again. He looks at her, and she can see the poorly veiled fear in his eyes before he ducks his face away again.
Rose steps up to him slowly, carefully. Taking his face in her hands, she swipes a thumb across a grease stain on his cheek. He stares down at her as she touches another smudge on his forehead. His eyes make her stop, and she has no time to react before he’s grabbed her, pulling her tight against him.
They stay like that for a short eternity, their heartbeats melding into one endless cascade of life that she can feel with her hand caught between their chests. When her brain kicks back in, she realizes that she’s been expecting him to pull away any moment now to go back to his work. She also realizes that, in the back of her head, she’s been plotting ways to get him away from that work. Surprising her, he pulls away, and then pulls her along with him by the hand, and not in the direction of the console either. Leading her through the corridors, there’s the barest hint of a grin on his mouth. “Go get dressed,” he tells her.
She can tell that he thinks he’s come up with something good, so she plays along, looking down at what she’s wearing now. “What,” she asks cheekily, “jeans not doing it for you anymore?”
He’s still not really grinning, but they’re getting there as an eyebrow quirks up. “Well, they’re great, yeah, and you could probably pull anything off; but not really for a night out on the town.”
Her smile almost makes up for the lack of one on his face, it’s so big. “Really?”
“Yep. Anything you want to do Rose Tyler. On me.”
She scoffs at him, jolly. “Sure, it sounds great, Mr. Man-with-no-money.”
Shaking his head, he shoos her off down the hall towards their room. “You let me worry about that.”
Finally, as she dances off down the corridor, he smiles.
*
They fight. They don’t remember what it was about in the first place, and soon it doesn’t matter. They’re shouting at one another across the room, when she suddenly goes still and silent, with narrowed eyes. Turning on her heel, she disappears out of the door. The Doctor waits for a few minutes, letting her cool down. But when he steps into the wet spring air, she’s nowhere near.
An hour or two later, when she doesn’t come back, he checks to make sure that she’s taken her cell phone with her, and calls Mio, the friend that he guess she’s staying with. Wherever they have ended up for any length of time, Rose gathers people about her in networks, and for once he’s glad of it. His call is bounced from friend to friend to one that finally confirms that, yes, Rose did show up, and no, she has no desire to speak with him.
He tells himself that this is fine with him, and that she’ll be okay without him. Throwing himself into futile work again, he tries to avoid thinking about her. For a while it works, and just as he feels he’s about to go mad with the not-thinking, three days later, the Ice Warriors invade New York.
As improbable as it is on an ice-clad island of over a million panicked humans, they run into each other, almost literally, on the street. They run. And after they’ve faced the invaders, and the Doctor has challenged them and defeated them, she is left sitting on a park bench in the leafy oasis of the siren-loud city.
He doesn’t press her to rescind her decision. He just turns and walks away from her, neither of them saying a word. Later that night, he asks her what she would have done if she hadn’t come back. She doesn’t have an answer anymore.
But things are quiet for them, for the next few months. Quiet to the point where Rose knows and expects that something is going to go wrong. Because that’s how things have always gone with the two of them.
*
The door slams, and Rose jumps. “There you are,” she says.
He doesn’t respond. She watches him as he charges around the console room pulling levers and poking buttons and staring at the scanner. “What are you doing?” She asks, knowing he doesn’t do this sort of runaround for no reason, and hoping for something exciting. But she has the nasty feeling that he wants to leave, again. And it never gets easier, and he never asks.
“You should get your things together,” he tells her, hands flying about as he calculates and punches in numbers and long, circular phrases in his flowing script. “We’re going.”
Instead of dashing off as he’s suggested, she folds her arms across her chest. “Why are we doing that?”
Frustrated, he runs his hand through his hair, not for the first time, because it’s sticking out in a hundred different directions. “Does it matter?” Then he’s off again, bouncing around the console.
Somewhere in between muttering about plugs and vortices and polarised neutron flows, he notices that Rose is still standing in the same place. He looks at her expectantly. “Well?”
She’s angry though and her voice and stance both strongly reflect this. “Doctor,” she says, her voice with an edge of cold to it, “Why are we leaving?”
Six and a half months, they’d been here, not all that long, and she’s not ready to leave just yet. The Doctor steps away from the console, towards her. He thinks he’s worked out the situation in his head, and knows he should tread carefully, though he won’t if he doesn’t feel like it. “I have to leave, I can’t be here.”
“Why not?”
She’s not going to leave this alone. He runs a hand through his hair again. “Because I’m going to be here sometime soon; and two Doctors in one place can be bad,” he nods, “as you’ve seen. So we need to go before I show up.”
She works this out silently. “How do you know?” she asks to clarify.
He taps his temple. “Time Lord thing. Like a premonition, sort of. Now come on.” He goes back to his work, expecting her to accept this answer, as to him it’s perfectly reasonable.
She stands there silently for a moment more before protesting. “No.”
Looking out around the console in astonishment, he asks, “No? What do you mean ‘no’?”
There are so many things running through her mind, and she just picks the first thing that she can put into words at that moment. “You said you can’t be here.”
“Hm?” He’s impatient, but she won’t budge until she’s satisfied.
“You said that you can’t be here. What about me?”
He’s become very still, looking around the console until he thinks he’s hidden his fear deep enough to not be seen, “You not coming? Had enough of me then?” he asks with the fake cheerfulness she knows he uses when he’s upset.
For the briefest moment, she considers saying yes, just to get something more from him. But after the moment passes, she shakes her head. “No,” she answers softly. Then, with more strength and the smallest hint of desperation, “No. But if I’m going to be dragged around like a human pull-toy, then I want to know why.”
“Why what?” he questions back at her, his voice as loud as hers.
He’s about to point out that being with him is her choice, and if she doesn’t like the way she’s apparently being ‘dragged around’ then she can’t leave right now, if she wants. But she beats him to it with a lateral jump. “Why did we leave Ireland?”
He’s caught off guard, staring at her and trying to come up with a way to avoid responding. Silently, he turns away, adjusting more controls, though there’s not much left to do.
Rose is getting impatient. “Why did we leave?” It comes out as a near shout, and even she’s surprised at her forcefulness. She supposes that maybe she’s not dealing with this whole situation as well as she thought.
“Why does it matter?” He’s yelling now; not nearly as loud as her, and not with that same tone Rose inherited from her mother, but yelling just the same. Apparently, he’s not doing as well as she thought either.
Rose stares at him. “We were just settling in; we were making friends; we were -.”
He cuts her off, quite rudely. “Would it have been better in five years? Ten maybe? Hm? When you’re all settled in and all your friends knew you and wanted you around? Better to leave when we did.-.”
She returns the favour and cuts him off by talking over him. “But you, you’re like a bad landlord! Everything’s fine and then one day it’s ‘oops, here’s your 30 day notice. Sorry ‘bout that!’ It can’t go on like this!”
He realizes she isn’t going to stop unless he gives her the real reason. So, in a leap of courage and, quite possibly, he thinks, stupidity, he does. “It felt too much like home,” he says clearly instead of loudly, his frank words cutting off her Jackie-esque rant.
Instantly, all sorts of responses jump to her tongue, involving clichés about hearts and hearths and hats, but some part of her tells her that this is something with more meaning than those. So she waits for him to speak again. When he doesn’t, she prompts him with a softly-spoken, “What do you mean by home?”
Now they’re stumbling into territory as yet uncharted between the two of them. She can tell by the little way his shoulders fall, and the slight downturn of his mouth as he leans heavily against the console. “Ireland is such a thin place,” he says, taking his usual roundabout way of answering. “The walls between worlds, the barriers between myth, belief, reality, are all so blurred.” He looks up at the column, still for now. “When I was young,” he says, quietly, “on my planet, so many years of power had worn things thin. Especially where I lived. You could feel it up there. And it affected the world around it. For example, there was this hermit who-.” Though he had been picking up steam, he stops. The truth that they’re all gone hits him again, hard as ever. He gathers himself. “The world-walls were too thin,” he finishes, staring down at his hands, resting on the controls.
Rose absorbs all of this silently. Then she asks softly, because she’s curious and has never had occasion to ask before, “What was its name? Your planet?”
For a long moment, she doesn’t think that he’s going to answer her. Facing away from her, in a whisper, she barely hears. “Gallifrey. I’m from Gallifrey.”
Said like that, so softly, filled with loss and longing and guilt and regret, and all of the other things he’ll never show to her, it sounds like a prayer, though to what or whom she has no idea. He sets his hands in motion once more, moves another control on the dash. “You probably have some business to finish with before we leave.” It’s not a suggestion.
She hesitates, but nods finally, and slowly walks to the doors and out into the muggy night air of early summer. Above the surrounding trees, all in full summer leaf, the sky hangs silently. Any stars, even the brightest ones, are blotted out by the glow of the sodium-vapour streetlights. Bouncing off every surface, including the bottoms of the few scattered clouds, they give the blank sky an orange hue. Rose breathes out as she whispers the name, just the once, to the invisible stars, and walks away.