New fic: Five And A Half Hours
Title: Five and a half hours
Pairing: Nine/Rose (no surprises there)
Content: Graphic Sex; Drama; Humour; Angst; Romance; Everything else you can think of.
Rating: Adult for later chapters.
Chapters: 1/10
Disclaimer: Not mine, not even close. In fact, this story has written itself.
Summary: Life didn't have a rewind button. There wasn't any going back. Unless...
Chapter 1: The Girl in the TARDIS
Two hours was just swanning off. She was familiar with swanning off. He’d been halfway through swanning off the second time she met him, after all. Usually, about two hours was as long as he could last on his own before he got bored and wanted an audience again.
Three hours was swanning off plus an excuse. Like, sorry Rose, I got captured by the Bee-People of Baksharat, or ‘a funny thing happened on the way to the TARDIS’. And they’d have a cup of tea and laugh about it.
Four hours was when the line between amusement and gut churning, clammy handed fear was crossed, and she finally started imagining what would happen if he never came back. This time, he’d made it pretty clear that he was going. Jumping a horse through a mirror into the past with no way back was a fairly convincing way to say goodbye. She even understood why he’d done it, because standing around and watching someone’s head get chopped off hadn’t been a form of entertainment in polite society since the French had stopped polishing their guillotines. It was just that the French were a bit of a sore point for her, right at the moment, and she had absolutely no idea what to do if he didn’t come back.
At four and a half hours, when she was imagining how slowly her mother would kill him if she ever found out he’d broken his promise to keep her safe, she realised that she knew precisely what to do. She’d done it before, or he’d done it for her.
She couldn’t remember how to fly the TARDIS; all she knew about the last time she’d been stuck in it on her own were some vague details he’d dropped into conversation once over breakfast. Pass the butter dear, and did you know you wiped out the Emperor of the Daleks? Or along those lines at least. But he didn’t look the sort to break his promises, and maybe there was another emergency programme lurking in the databanks just waiting for this sort of disaster. She couldn’t believe he’d just leave her, and Mickey, without a way home.
Mickey, she sighed. This wasn’t turning out to be such a great first adventure for him either. He was off searching for food, doing the practical and ordinary things that defined him. There wasn’t really anything wrong with Mickey, as long as you ignored the fact that he wasn’t the Doctor. At least he’d never left her. She didn’t really want him laughing at her though, if she couldn’t get the TARDIS to tell her anything useful, so she decided not to call him until she’d had a try on her own.
Closing the door behind her, and listening to the sound of her lonely footsteps echoing up the ramp, she acknowledged to herself that if there was another message from the Doctor waiting for her to find it, and if it was anything like the last time he’d said goodbye, she’d rather see it by herself. The TARDIS was cold, and empty, without his energy buzzing around inside it like a caged wasp, and she had the distinct impression that it was sleeping. The longer she spent in it, the more alive it seemed and she could easily believe that in another eight hundred and eighty odd years time she’d be talking to it as much as he did.
Without him though, it was useless, exactly like it had been last Christmas. Exactly like it always was, apart from the single, glorious occasion when she’d persuaded it to work on its own. She strolled across to the viewscreen, almost hoping to catch it unawares, sidling up to it with an enforced calm that she didn’t feel. The picture had gone back to the swirling blue circles that she thought of as a screensaver, but which probably had a much more elaborate name that meant the same thing.
After some searching she located a keyboard, hidden beneath a pile of spare parts that she hadn’t seen moved for over a month. This new Doctor wasn’t as mechanically minded as the last one, although at least she’d never caught him polishing bits of the TARDIS in his spare time. It was only very recently that her mind had stopped flashing her images of short hair and the smell of leather every time someone said his name. She even quite liked the new one, he was certainly more use in conversations about girls things like fashion, and hairstyles, and he’d come to Christmas dinner with her mother, which was more than the last one had ever done. And he was far less inclined to start shouting at her, or to sit for hours staring into space with that look on his face that made her want to hug him tight.
But he was still just a little bit too new, and at night, when she dreamed, it was blue eyes that haunted the darkness.
She thanked the god of translation circuits for the fact that she could understand the letters, and without thinking too hard about what she was doing, she typed ‘emergency programme’ into the keyboard. The letters flashed up onto the screen, replacing the circles and she watched them, half expecting something spectacular to happen immediately. Nothing did. The letters blinked at her. She blinked back. She had no idea what to do next. Of all the stupid, stupid ideas in the world, a human trying to fly a TARDIS had to be the most stupid, she thought, glad that Mickey wasn’t there to agree.
The only thing she could think of to do next was even more ridiculous. Taking a deep breath, and acutely aware that she was talking to thin air, she said, ‘Start.’
Nothing happened.
She tried, ‘emergency programme one,’ and ‘begin,’ and ‘enter,’ and even ‘open sesame,’ because he did, after all, have a strange sense of humour. And then she closed her eyes and thought the same words very, very hard, just in case she had become telepathic in the last five minutes. She would have given up completely if she hadn’t had the very strange sense - almost like catching a flicker of movement out of the corner of one eye and turning to find no one there - that the TARDIS was listening. She hit the return key.
The doors clicked closed. The engine started to move. With a sudden panic, she remembered she’d left Mickey outside on his own. Running down the ramp faster than her legs would carry her, and crashing into the doors as a result, she tried to get out before the ship finished dematerialising. And then, even as she was still hammering on the metal she heard a voice behind her that knocked all the strength from her body.
It was him. That him. The old him. The him who had set this escape route up for her in the first place, the him who had only left her alone because he was dying.
‘This is emergency programme one,’ he said.
She couldn’t look round. She didn’t want to be reminded of the way she’d felt the last time she’d seen him. She’d moved on, for goodness sake. She was coping. Even if it wasn’t exactly the same with the new version, even if she’d found out that when he looked at the world, he saw more women than just her in it. Life didn’t have a rewind button. There wasn’t any going back. Ever. No matter how much she might want to, no matter how many things she’d thought of that she hadn’t told him when she’d hung up his empty jacket in the wardrobe afterwards. It made no difference if she cried in the night, or even just sighed to herself when the new him wasn’t paying attention.
The hologram said her name, and she turned, the way she always did, despite herself, remembering that that this image would only last for a few seconds before she lost it too. Hesitantly, with one hand braced against the doors for support, she looked, and then she couldn’t look away. He was so unbearably familiar, standing there, a fragment of the past caught out of time.
He was looking at her with those eyes that told her he’d never seen anything else, and her own blurred into a haze of tears. This was the man who had replaced her old life with himself, and she’d thought it a good exchange, before she lost him, twice over now. With her hands clenched into fists, and reminding herself sternly not to cry, she decided that she’d had quite enough of being left behind.
By the time he got to the bit about hoping for a good death, she’d also realised that she was angry. Rip your arm off and beat you over the head with it angry. I am utterly bereft without you angry. Angry enough to abandon the platitudes she’d peddled to herself that just because he looked a bit different didn’t mean that anything between them had changed. He’d never had the shouting at he deserved.
‘Call that a good death?’
She stormed up the ramp towards the him that wasn’t him, her volume increasing with every step.
‘That was a rubbish death, pathetic. Awful. Want to know why?’
The hologram was twittering on to itself about the TARDIS now. She could barely hear it as she screamed her loss into its face.
‘Because you didn’t even fight it. You just let it happen. You didn’t lift a finger to stop me until it was too late and then you just gave up. When it came right down to it, you gave up.’
The image turned its head away from her vehemence to look at a spot she wasn’t standing on this time round.
‘Have a good life,’ it pleaded.
She stamped her foot at it, her rage beyond reason.
‘How could I have a good life without you?’ she howled past the scraping of her throat and the tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘You left me. I loved you and you left me behind. And I never even told you…’
She wasn’t even sure which Doctor she was talking to anymore. The projection flickered off and the unnoticed engines behind it came to a standstill. She groped her way down the ramp and out of the doors, just wanting to run as far away from the hurt as possible. Outside she stopped, leant back against the TARDIS, and sobbed her heart into the cold air. A voice, and the sound of running footsteps froze her tears in their tracks.
‘I knew it,’ said Mickey, out of breath. ‘I was all the way down Clifton parade and I heard the engines and I thought...’ He trailed off as she turned her horror-struck face towards him. ‘What’s the matter?’
It took several years for her mouth to fall open, while time dragged its heels and decided to have a little lie down. Her brain waded slowly though quicksand. Last time she’d seen Mickey he'd been wearing something different on a spaceship millions of miles and thousands of years away. And he hadn’t been saying things she knew she’d heard before.
Behind her, the TARDIS made a little tut-tut-tutting noise, like an engine on a hot day, and the doors felt unusually warm to the touch. She knew this. She looked around and she knew where she was, the tower blocks, the street, even the cloud patterns looked familiar. More than that, she knew when she was. Emergency programme one was set up to bring her home, and it had to have a time, as well as a location included within it, or she’d have ended up eaten by dinosaurs or enslaved by Martians.
He’d promised to save her, and he had, but she’d come back, back into her own history, back before she looked into the vortex, back before she destroyed the Daleks, back before he left her. She’d crossed her own timeline, whatever that meant. It seemed that her life did have rewind button after all, and she’d pushed it hard.
The relief and the confusion overwhelmed her and she cried in Mickey’s arms.
Pairing: Nine/Rose (no surprises there)
Content: Graphic Sex; Drama; Humour; Angst; Romance; Everything else you can think of.
Rating: Adult for later chapters.
Chapters: 1/10
Disclaimer: Not mine, not even close. In fact, this story has written itself.
Summary: Life didn't have a rewind button. There wasn't any going back. Unless...
Chapter 1: The Girl in the TARDIS
Two hours was just swanning off. She was familiar with swanning off. He’d been halfway through swanning off the second time she met him, after all. Usually, about two hours was as long as he could last on his own before he got bored and wanted an audience again.
Three hours was swanning off plus an excuse. Like, sorry Rose, I got captured by the Bee-People of Baksharat, or ‘a funny thing happened on the way to the TARDIS’. And they’d have a cup of tea and laugh about it.
Four hours was when the line between amusement and gut churning, clammy handed fear was crossed, and she finally started imagining what would happen if he never came back. This time, he’d made it pretty clear that he was going. Jumping a horse through a mirror into the past with no way back was a fairly convincing way to say goodbye. She even understood why he’d done it, because standing around and watching someone’s head get chopped off hadn’t been a form of entertainment in polite society since the French had stopped polishing their guillotines. It was just that the French were a bit of a sore point for her, right at the moment, and she had absolutely no idea what to do if he didn’t come back.
At four and a half hours, when she was imagining how slowly her mother would kill him if she ever found out he’d broken his promise to keep her safe, she realised that she knew precisely what to do. She’d done it before, or he’d done it for her.
She couldn’t remember how to fly the TARDIS; all she knew about the last time she’d been stuck in it on her own were some vague details he’d dropped into conversation once over breakfast. Pass the butter dear, and did you know you wiped out the Emperor of the Daleks? Or along those lines at least. But he didn’t look the sort to break his promises, and maybe there was another emergency programme lurking in the databanks just waiting for this sort of disaster. She couldn’t believe he’d just leave her, and Mickey, without a way home.
Mickey, she sighed. This wasn’t turning out to be such a great first adventure for him either. He was off searching for food, doing the practical and ordinary things that defined him. There wasn’t really anything wrong with Mickey, as long as you ignored the fact that he wasn’t the Doctor. At least he’d never left her. She didn’t really want him laughing at her though, if she couldn’t get the TARDIS to tell her anything useful, so she decided not to call him until she’d had a try on her own.
Closing the door behind her, and listening to the sound of her lonely footsteps echoing up the ramp, she acknowledged to herself that if there was another message from the Doctor waiting for her to find it, and if it was anything like the last time he’d said goodbye, she’d rather see it by herself. The TARDIS was cold, and empty, without his energy buzzing around inside it like a caged wasp, and she had the distinct impression that it was sleeping. The longer she spent in it, the more alive it seemed and she could easily believe that in another eight hundred and eighty odd years time she’d be talking to it as much as he did.
Without him though, it was useless, exactly like it had been last Christmas. Exactly like it always was, apart from the single, glorious occasion when she’d persuaded it to work on its own. She strolled across to the viewscreen, almost hoping to catch it unawares, sidling up to it with an enforced calm that she didn’t feel. The picture had gone back to the swirling blue circles that she thought of as a screensaver, but which probably had a much more elaborate name that meant the same thing.
After some searching she located a keyboard, hidden beneath a pile of spare parts that she hadn’t seen moved for over a month. This new Doctor wasn’t as mechanically minded as the last one, although at least she’d never caught him polishing bits of the TARDIS in his spare time. It was only very recently that her mind had stopped flashing her images of short hair and the smell of leather every time someone said his name. She even quite liked the new one, he was certainly more use in conversations about girls things like fashion, and hairstyles, and he’d come to Christmas dinner with her mother, which was more than the last one had ever done. And he was far less inclined to start shouting at her, or to sit for hours staring into space with that look on his face that made her want to hug him tight.
But he was still just a little bit too new, and at night, when she dreamed, it was blue eyes that haunted the darkness.
She thanked the god of translation circuits for the fact that she could understand the letters, and without thinking too hard about what she was doing, she typed ‘emergency programme’ into the keyboard. The letters flashed up onto the screen, replacing the circles and she watched them, half expecting something spectacular to happen immediately. Nothing did. The letters blinked at her. She blinked back. She had no idea what to do next. Of all the stupid, stupid ideas in the world, a human trying to fly a TARDIS had to be the most stupid, she thought, glad that Mickey wasn’t there to agree.
The only thing she could think of to do next was even more ridiculous. Taking a deep breath, and acutely aware that she was talking to thin air, she said, ‘Start.’
Nothing happened.
She tried, ‘emergency programme one,’ and ‘begin,’ and ‘enter,’ and even ‘open sesame,’ because he did, after all, have a strange sense of humour. And then she closed her eyes and thought the same words very, very hard, just in case she had become telepathic in the last five minutes. She would have given up completely if she hadn’t had the very strange sense - almost like catching a flicker of movement out of the corner of one eye and turning to find no one there - that the TARDIS was listening. She hit the return key.
The doors clicked closed. The engine started to move. With a sudden panic, she remembered she’d left Mickey outside on his own. Running down the ramp faster than her legs would carry her, and crashing into the doors as a result, she tried to get out before the ship finished dematerialising. And then, even as she was still hammering on the metal she heard a voice behind her that knocked all the strength from her body.
It was him. That him. The old him. The him who had set this escape route up for her in the first place, the him who had only left her alone because he was dying.
‘This is emergency programme one,’ he said.
She couldn’t look round. She didn’t want to be reminded of the way she’d felt the last time she’d seen him. She’d moved on, for goodness sake. She was coping. Even if it wasn’t exactly the same with the new version, even if she’d found out that when he looked at the world, he saw more women than just her in it. Life didn’t have a rewind button. There wasn’t any going back. Ever. No matter how much she might want to, no matter how many things she’d thought of that she hadn’t told him when she’d hung up his empty jacket in the wardrobe afterwards. It made no difference if she cried in the night, or even just sighed to herself when the new him wasn’t paying attention.
The hologram said her name, and she turned, the way she always did, despite herself, remembering that that this image would only last for a few seconds before she lost it too. Hesitantly, with one hand braced against the doors for support, she looked, and then she couldn’t look away. He was so unbearably familiar, standing there, a fragment of the past caught out of time.
He was looking at her with those eyes that told her he’d never seen anything else, and her own blurred into a haze of tears. This was the man who had replaced her old life with himself, and she’d thought it a good exchange, before she lost him, twice over now. With her hands clenched into fists, and reminding herself sternly not to cry, she decided that she’d had quite enough of being left behind.
By the time he got to the bit about hoping for a good death, she’d also realised that she was angry. Rip your arm off and beat you over the head with it angry. I am utterly bereft without you angry. Angry enough to abandon the platitudes she’d peddled to herself that just because he looked a bit different didn’t mean that anything between them had changed. He’d never had the shouting at he deserved.
‘Call that a good death?’
She stormed up the ramp towards the him that wasn’t him, her volume increasing with every step.
‘That was a rubbish death, pathetic. Awful. Want to know why?’
The hologram was twittering on to itself about the TARDIS now. She could barely hear it as she screamed her loss into its face.
‘Because you didn’t even fight it. You just let it happen. You didn’t lift a finger to stop me until it was too late and then you just gave up. When it came right down to it, you gave up.’
The image turned its head away from her vehemence to look at a spot she wasn’t standing on this time round.
‘Have a good life,’ it pleaded.
She stamped her foot at it, her rage beyond reason.
‘How could I have a good life without you?’ she howled past the scraping of her throat and the tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘You left me. I loved you and you left me behind. And I never even told you…’
She wasn’t even sure which Doctor she was talking to anymore. The projection flickered off and the unnoticed engines behind it came to a standstill. She groped her way down the ramp and out of the doors, just wanting to run as far away from the hurt as possible. Outside she stopped, leant back against the TARDIS, and sobbed her heart into the cold air. A voice, and the sound of running footsteps froze her tears in their tracks.
‘I knew it,’ said Mickey, out of breath. ‘I was all the way down Clifton parade and I heard the engines and I thought...’ He trailed off as she turned her horror-struck face towards him. ‘What’s the matter?’
It took several years for her mouth to fall open, while time dragged its heels and decided to have a little lie down. Her brain waded slowly though quicksand. Last time she’d seen Mickey he'd been wearing something different on a spaceship millions of miles and thousands of years away. And he hadn’t been saying things she knew she’d heard before.
Behind her, the TARDIS made a little tut-tut-tutting noise, like an engine on a hot day, and the doors felt unusually warm to the touch. She knew this. She looked around and she knew where she was, the tower blocks, the street, even the cloud patterns looked familiar. More than that, she knew when she was. Emergency programme one was set up to bring her home, and it had to have a time, as well as a location included within it, or she’d have ended up eaten by dinosaurs or enslaved by Martians.
He’d promised to save her, and he had, but she’d come back, back into her own history, back before she looked into the vortex, back before she destroyed the Daleks, back before he left her. She’d crossed her own timeline, whatever that meant. It seemed that her life did have rewind button after all, and she’d pushed it hard.
The relief and the confusion overwhelmed her and she cried in Mickey’s arms.