my post-doomsday fic: defending the earth
Next to Rose’s bed, the red bars of the digital clock cycle through positions. Her mother found the clock in a specialty catalogue. On the alternative earth, the earth her mother is trying to make into her own, LED bars had never come into style. Black and silver flip clocks were common; so were LCD clock faces on round alarm clocks with decorative bells on top. At first, her room had one of those. At night it cast a pale green shine of numerals and clockhands on the wall. When the alarm went off, it played a sound file of bells ringing. Rose had liked that clock, a little. As much as she liked things in this world.
But Rose’s mother was going to make this earth her earth.
*
“Has she ever. . . well, has she ever been like this before?” Pete asked. He winced. Must be a better way to ask. But what did he mean to ask? When will she snap out of it?
Jackie stood at the window, staring at a glowing zeppelin while Pete did the washing up. He’d sent the help away for the evening. They made Jackie uncomfortable. And Rose. Rose made them uncomfortable. She turned her head, starting to snap at him: “What do you mean,” but broke off as she realized who she was talking to. It still took an effort to let the irritation go. Between their oversize, industrial sink and the huge apron he’d tied around himself, he looked like a boy playing in his mother’s apron. He leaned toward the cavernous stainless steel maw, almost getting his head into it. Jackie shifted her weight from foot to foot, tried to let her back relax. No good. Too much belly to support. At least the little one was quiet, not using her pancreas as a punching bag or her bladder as a trampoline.
Pete had given up the line of questioning and kept his head low, looking for a scouring pad in the sink. “Why don’t you go put your feet up, love. It’s been a long day.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” Jackie said. She turned back to gazing at the zeppelin, nearly across the sky now. “She was like this before once, you know. I don’t know what it was. Around when she stopped school. I think it was a boy.” She made a little noise, nearly a laugh. “She never talked to me about it. She just wouldn’t get out of bed for a week. Maybe it was two weeks. And then she was OK again. Well, OK enough. She’s always been, well, a bit hard, Rose has. Just a little bit cold.”
Pete had stopped washing, and watched his wife. She had started patting her belly without realizing. Then she laid both hands on her stomach, as if trying to hold the baby within.
*
Mickey sat next to her bed, talking about baking cheese crackers from scratch, but Rose had trouble following. “I just hadn’t realized you could make crackers on your own, see? It’s one of those things that they don’t even expect you to realize you can make. Just supposed to buy them in the store.”
Mickey stopped talking; she wasn’t sure for how long, or what expression he wore. She’d turned her head away from him shortly after he’d sat down.
“You told him you were working for Torchwood,” Mickey said. “I think maybe he’d be a little disappointed.”
When Rose had heard the Doctor’s voice calling her, pulling her toward the north, her family had listened to her and said they believed her. They probably shouldn’t have. She’d hardly gotten out of bed in weeks at that point. They probably wouldn’t have believed her if she had told them about the other voices. They had been the most disturbing part of the whole experience, at first. She still preferred not to think about them, not if they weren’t actively there. When they were there, she couldn’t think about anything else.
Look at you. You’re useless.
All you did was follow him around, and now that he’s gone all you do is lay in bed. Useless, uneducated, unemployable shopgirl.
No wonder he left you. He could get back to you if he tried. He doesn’t want to try.
Why should he?
“I figure they still might hire you,” Mickey mumbled. “I figure you might send in your application again, when you’re, you know. Better.”
You should just kill yourself and get it over with.
*
Pete and Jackie called in the best psychiatrists. The best psychologists. One woman who was both. Rose wouldn’t talk. She wouldn’t take pills. She hadn’t said she wanted to die, so no one could force her into hospital unless someone wanted to go to the courts and make the argument that she couldn’t take care of herself and was in danger of gradually getting worse, gradually becoming a danger to herself.
Nobody wanted to go to the courts and make that argument.
Rose mostly stayed in her bed. What worried Pete most was that she hadn’t cried since they drove away from that beach in Norway.
*
In Rose’s dream, her devotion to the Doctor was absolute. Impenetrable. They stood in a cave or bunker of some sort, facing off against a military man with glowing eyes.
But then, as he often did, the Doctor started talking, and things got confusing. He was calling her an emotional cripple. A social misfit. Evil inside of her. Couldn’t even finish school.
She woke up, not angry at the Doctor, but puzzled as to how to fit this dream into her life with him. Somehow, she wanted to treat it as real. But it couldn’t be.
Later, sitting in the console room’s rumble seat and paging through an NME that Mickey had left, she asked, “Hey, can the TARDIS-well, it reads your thoughts, right?”
He’d been staring at the monitor. Probably playing Tetris again. He fiddled with a lever and said, “In a manner of speaking.” He pulled his head back from the monitor and looked up toward the ceiling. He smiled. “Of speaking. Of speaking. Yes. It reads your thoughts of speaking, certainly.”
She turned a page of the magazine, almost as if she had been reading it. “It’s just. . . does it keep them?” Realizing her feet were propped up on the console, she took one off, then the other, casting the magazine onto the cushion next to her and sitting up.
But the Doctor was back to the screen again, jaw down, tongue visible. He’d somehow gotten his glasses out while her eyes were off him, and bright green streaks danced on the lenses. “Keep them what?”
“I was having this dream, see,” she said, “and I think you were in it. Except it was a different you, maybe. And you were calling me an emotional cripple. A social misfit.”
The Doctor’s mouth shut. His eyes narrowed, as if he were squinting. Rattling at the keyboard, he said, “That. . . that doesn’t sound like me. Does it?” He made eye contact for the first time in the conversation, pulling his glasses off his face and standing up. He sloped over to her, hands in his pockets. “In this dream, you were where? A spaceship?”
“More like a cave.”
“An alien cave.”
“More, you know, military. Earth military. Like a, what do you call it, a bunker.”
“A bunker. And I was there, but I wasn’t me. I was taller.”
“No, shorter. And more Scottish.”
“And I was saying-I was saying what?” He frowned; his head shook slightly, as if telling someone no.
“All this stuff. Insulting stuff. And I was just wondering, if somehow the TARDIS might have kept someone’s thoughts and then let them out later. Like, like breathing or something.”
The Doctor’s shoulders drooped for a moment, but then shot back up. He strode back to the console and moved the control sphere from one section to another.
“Doctor?” she asked.
“Of course it’s not possible,” he said. “What a daft thing for her to do! Of course it’s not possible. Well, I say it’s not possible, but. . .” He turned a dial, lifted his hand above the console, formed a fist, and looked for a place to hit it.
“But,” Rose prodded.
“Well, I say it’s not possible but really it would just be silly, wouldn’t it! Utterly silly. Speaking of speaking. That word utterly, that’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Speakingly? Speakingly silly.”
“Well, if you don’t want to talk about it,” Rose said.
He hit the console, then shook out his hand with the pain. “Talk about it? Talkingly, speakingly silly is what it would be if this old, old wreck of a travel capsule-” He stopped talking, his face relaxed, and he looked over at his other hand, which held the control sphere up high, as if about to shot-put it. Clearing his throat, he gently put the sphere down on a section of the console.
He turned back to Rose, calm again. “To answer your question, no,” he said. “It can’t store up memories. It must have just been a strange dream.”
“All right,” Rose said. And she swallowed, and she didn’t bring it up again. Part of her knew that, at the beginning, she would have called him on it. He might not have been lying, somehow, but there was definitely more there. But she didn’t call him on things anymore. Because then he might call her on them, too.
*
Rose mostly stayed in bed, but once a day Jackie pulled the quilt off her. “Time for your walk, sunshine!” The first time Jackie did this, Rose had let herself slump, dead weight, until her pregnant mother started trying to lift her bodily out of the bed, grunting. Then she’d frowned, but not said a word as she got up on her own. Now she rolled out of bed mechanically, compliant but blank-faced.
“Let’s get you walking around the room,” Jackie said, pulling Rose’s arm around her shoulders and wrapping her own arm around Rose’s back. Rose’s hair fell across her face; her lower lip stuck out. Jackie could hear her breathe. “Oh, Rose,” she said. “You’ve lost more weight. I swear you’re bonier than you were yesterday.”
They started circling the room, Jackie letting Rose lead, but pushing her along as necessary. Jackie looked down at her own belly: She’d forgotten how big it would get near the end of term. She’d forgotten nearly everything about pregnancy, somehow. The nausea, the heartburn. The periodic panic that somehow, she’d made a mistake and would be left to fend for herself and her child. Her children.
“He’s not worth it, you know,” she said to Rose. “No man’s worth this. Not even him.” They shuffled forward a few more steps. “Oh, I know I’m one to talk. I lost Pete once, but then I get to come here. He’s not the same, you know. He’s different. But he’s still Pete somehow. It’s like those people you hear about, they lose a husband and then marry his brother? It’s like that. That always seemed strange to me before, but it makes sense now.”
Rose thrust a foot forward, and Jackie put one forward. Rose put the other foot forward, and Jackie followed. Thump, shuffle, thump, shuffle.
What had it been like after Pete died? Neither of them could really remember very well. Rose was just a baby, and for quite a while Jackie hadn’t been herself. It was cruel of the world to make her love this man, this sweet but worthless, worthless man who couldn’t take care of her and her baby, to make her criticize and carp out of fear that he never would turn it around. And then to take him from her, this worthless, but sweet, sweet man. For quite a few years afterward she wasn’t sure how to make sense of the world or her place in it.
“You shouldn’t take me as an example, Rose. You shouldn’t, you know.” Jackie considered trying to explain what she meant, but couldn’t find a way to say it without saying other things that she simply wouldn’t, couldn’t say.
*
Mickey sat at the bed, hunched over. Every time he came here he could feel sweat running out of his armpits. Once he discovered his forehead was slick and beaded with sweat. It wasn’t hot in here; it wasn’t dangerous. He had faced cyberplatoons more calmly. Like a black hole, he thought. A black hole of grief. I just talk and talk, and it’s never enough, and it just gets sucked away from me and the meaning goes right out of it, like color being washed out in bleach.
After he’d been babbling for about an hour, he ran out of things to say. He ran his hand over his face.
He said it as if it were a continuation of whatever he’d just been saying: “I love you Rose, but I can’t wait for you forever. I’m not that guy anymore.”
Nothing. He’d thought about saying that for weeks, maybe months. He’d held off, thinking, but what if it doesn’t work? Because if it didn’t work, maybe she didn’t love him. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe not recently. Maybe not ever.
He sighed. One more trick. One more way to jolt her back to the world. But this was his last try.
“Rose, he was here. On this earth. He was the same. The older versions of him, when he knew Sarah Jane Smith. The geezer with the white curly hair, the crazy scarf guy. But then something happened. The autons, those plastic guys, only attacked a long time ago, not recent like they did to us. The Slitheen family tried to do their scam in America and got toasted by the FBI. You know, I looked in the Torchwood files from our earth, before the sphere opened. I wanted to see what they knew about the Cybermen, but they didn’t know anything useful. They’d heard of the Daleks, though. On our earth. A bunch of mixed-up descriptions, but no pictures. They’d been sighted in the 60s, then some kind of weird time thing in the 70s or 80s. So, it figures, Doctor, Daleks. But not here. On this earth, they haven’t seen the Doctor for decades. And the thing is, no Daleks at all on this earth, ever. Torchwood hasn’t ever seen any trace of one. Not just no pictures, no record, no story, not even a legend. And no Doctor since the one with the scarf. Dunno what to make of it, really.”
Rose hears all of this; she hears most of what Mickey says, thin and wavering through the harsh metallic tones of the voices, the real voices.
Look at you, just in bed all day. Worthless. He expects better of you.
But why does he? Why? He should know better. He does know better. He knows you’re worthless.
And listen to Mickey the idiot. Listen to him. See, he knows: You can’t even get this world’s Doctor. He’s not coming for you, either, to start over.
He won’t need you, because there’s only one thing he ever really needed you for. You just happened to be there when he needed someone to care about him a little, after the Time War.
No Daleks. You know what that means. Either there wasn’t a Time War here, or he won. And he doesn’t go traveling on his own anymore, because why should he?
In this world, he has a family, too.
*
Rose sits up, gasps. She looks at where Mickey had been sitting, but he’s gone-has been gone for hours. The dim light behind the curtains fades, returns as a dirigible passes by.
He’s not coming back, Rose thinks, and it is her own thought for once. Not a voice. But this is the trouble with thinking: When you do, the voices can reply.
Not unless you make him.
Rose throws off her blankets and quilts, pushes herself off the bed, one leg leading, intending to run as soon as she hits the ground. But her knees buckle, she rolls over, weak. Using both hands, she pushes herself up, teeters as she heads for the window. But what was that? What is she trying to remember? That’s right. None of the windows open in her room.
The stairwell. The top of the stairwell.
She turns, slumping, toward her bedroom door.
Several minutes later, a maid finds her pressed up against the stairwell window, looking out to the ground, flood-lit around the driveway, some 15 yards below. “Miss Rose,” the maid says, “can I help you dear?” She inches toward her, sees in the dim light that Rose is crying, has tears streaming down her face. The window frame arches above her, a spotlight from the yard catching her wet cheeks. Her face is against the glass; her hip is against the bottom of the window frame.
“He’s not coming,” she says. “He’s not coming and I can’t even open the window. What is wrong with me?” Now the maid sees Rose is tugging at the brass latch, clawing at it with both hands.
“Oh now,” says the maid. “Now why would you want to open that window, miss? It’s climate controlled, you know. Opening windows just confuses the computer.”
“Open up! Why won’t you open up!” Rose screeches, teardrops flying, swinging her fists at the latch. “Open up!” She sobs. She begins to smack her forehead against the window. At first the maid rushes forward to stop her, fearing shattered glass, but she soon hears the dull, soft thuds, no threat to the integrity of the window. Almost upon her now, the maid can see that Rose has managed to cut her knuckles. A thin trickle of blood seeps into the windowsill.
As the maid reaches her, Rose leans against the window, wavers, and sinks to the carpet. She covers her face with her bleeding hands, fingers over her eyes, and bangs her forehead against the wall under the window sill.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
“Open up. Open up!”
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Thud.
*
Things Mickey thought about telling Rose, but didn’t:
1. One of the old companions flirted with him for several minutes in the doorway before realizing he had traveled with the Doctor. Well, with his earth’s Doctor, anyway. Then she stopped and said, “But you’re a boy! And you’re black!” She smiled. “Good for you!”
2. During the war with the Cybermen, Sarah Jane Smith, an operative who officially worked for Torchwood, had gone missing. There was no record of a robot dog. Opinion in Torchwood was divided as to whether she had been killed, or had simply used the opportunity to hide from them more expertly than she had in the past, during the other times she had tried to quit.
3. Nobody quits Torchwood. Not before “the people” claimed it. Not after.
4. Torchwood has a man in captivity who has two hearts and an inhumanly low body temperature. He has sat in a basement cell for about 100 years and has seemingly aged between five and ten years. It’s difficult to tell given that the oldest known detailed reference point is an oil painting and the first photographs are vague and blurred.
5. The flirty former companion told him, “The Doctor is kind of like going to university. No, no, he’s like going out with a rock star. Well, most rock stars, anyway. Not Paul, you know. Well, not George either. But John a little bit. Sorry. Anyway, it’s lots of fun at the time, but you don’t actually expect to have a happy life with him, do you?”
6. The first time Sarah Jane Smith quit Torchwood, she spent a year in a human skin-suit left behind by a criminal fugitive from Raxacoricofallapatorius. When a Torchwood operative finally caught her, her first words were, “Well, thanks, I guess. At least I won’t have to live in that thing anymore.”
7. The two-hearted man in captivity told Mickey that he came from Gallifrey, but didn’t really remember much else. “I’m guessing I’m an exiled criminal,” he said. “It seems like the kind of thing my kind would do out of mercy: Wipe my memory of anything that makes me criminal and throw me somewhere like Earth.” Naturally, Mickey asked him if he was the Doctor. The man laughed and shook his head. “I don’t remember much,” he said, “but I do know that if I were the Doctor, I would never have been kept here for a century.” Mickey just nodded. That’s what he’d figured.
8. Sarah Jane Smith married twice, but never had children. In each case, the men had filed for divorce after less than two years.
9. “The Doctor,” said the captive. “I don’t think I knew him, but I think I knew of him. Yes. The Doctor. He left home. There was something wrong with him.”
10. “They fixed it.”
*
ONE YEAR LATER
Torchwood architects and designers like gleaming modern offices, all glass, shiny black, and silver tech, but they seem to like grey stone basements about as much, Rose thinks, especially when complemented by massive wooden tables. She leans back in her chunky wooden chair, then leans forward against the table when she remembers how terribly uncomfortable the chair is. Then she sits up straight, remembering how uneven the table is: its top seems to be made of old railroad ties. All by design, she’s sure. Keep her off her guard, get her good and nervous before sending in the psychic reader. Fine. She’s ready.
She’d convinced herself she had no expectations about the psychic reader-having expectations might rattle her when they were proven to be false-but when the reader arrives, she finds, to her embarrassment, that she had assumed the reader would be attractive. An older gentleman with a full head of grey hair, perhaps, thin and trim in his well-fitted suit. A young woman, about her age. Maybe a little older. Maybe a different color, maybe Asian or black. Sure, black. But not hired because being black would round out diversity. (Why would Torchwood care either way about that kind of diversity? Their ranks included sentient beings from five different worlds.) But because she was good, although perhaps she didn’t believe that. Yes, Rose had thought, give me a reader who doesn’t believe she’s quite up to my standards. That would make it easy.
Instead, the woman has straight, rather limp red hair, a slightly plump figure, and eyes set a little close together. Her stare isn’t piercing as she walks into the room and sits across from Rose; it seems perpetually puzzled. Her navy blue blouse and slacks are rumpled.
“Ms. Tyler,” the reader says, smiles for a moment, and consults a clipboard. “Now. . .”
“Right,” Rose says. “I know what this is about. I know it doesn’t look good. You don’t have to read my mind to get at that. I was briefly depressed and psychotic.” She swallows, then shrugs. “But that was nearly a year ago. Since then, I’ve gotten better. Bit by bit, you know? I’m not sure I believe it, myself, but you can see in the records that the psychiatrists thought I might have jumped between worlds too many times. Increased-but temporary, mind, temporary-anyway, increased risk of disorders among people who jumped multiple times. And I jumped more than most. Sounds like a bunch of people trying to get a handout, if you ask me, but I’m not pretending to be a psychiatrist. The point is that I’m better now. I haven’t even been on medication for about six months. I’ve been holding down a regular job at a shop. Not because I have to. Just to show that I can.”
Through all of this, the reader has been flipping through pages, scratching out a word here and there, adding a brief note. She continues after Rose has stopped talking. When the pause is about to grow awkward, she breaks it. “Right. As I was saying: Ms. Tyler.” She smiles for a moment, exactly the way she had done before Rose’s speech. “Now, you really don’t need to go into justifications. It’s obvious that we’ll hire you. You have extensive offworld experience. It wouldn’t matter to us if you were still depressed, even if you were still suicidal. We’d find some way to work with you in some capacity.”
Rose blinks and then frowns. “Are you saying I’ve got the job?”
“The question is whether you want to take it. The first thing to understand, Ms. Tyler, is that I’m not a reader the way you think I am. Anyone who has any idea that a reader might be listening to their thoughts-especially someone with your experience-will quickly make it impossible to be sure of the real story. It’s not as if I get a pure, unbroken monologue of your thoughts. I have bits and snatches. Impressions. Impossible to tell what’s motivation and what’s just a throw-away line. And that’s even ignoring the fact that you are not necessarily the best authority on your own motivations, anyway.”
Rose crosses her arms and leans back in the chair despite the fact that the wood digs deep into her shoulder blades. “Right then, Miss.” She means to say the reader’s name, but when she realizes she doesn’t know her name, she just stops as if she meant to do that. “I imagine there’s some training to begin. Maybe we should start with the, ahhh, command structure. Who is my immediate superior?”
The reader looks at her, letting the pause grow awkward again. “We allow people to think that the purpose of having a reader during the initial interviews is to assess their frame of mind. And, in part, that’s true. But we assess the frame of mind to determine what we need to make clear to them about Torchwood. We can’t afford to hire people who don’t understand what they’re getting into. No one leaves Torchwood, Ms. Tyler. We are the opposite of the Doctor, you see. He cannot stay put. We don’t go anywhere. Everyone leaves him eventually. Nobody ever leaves us.”
Rose turns her face away from the reader.
“I have to speak in terms of the Doctor, Ms. Tyler, to be sure you understand what we are. Based on all the information we have, there are two schools of thought regarding your current motivations. One is that you are, indeed, completely recovered. Over the Doctor; at peace with the fact he will never return for you. Wanting to defend the Earth because it is what he taught you to do. Idealistic, but not a problem for us.”
Having met the reader’s eyes again while she was talking, Rose now crosses her legs to match her still-crossed arms. She leans further back into the uncomfortable chair. “Only two schools of thought? That’s all, is it? You’ve got me boiled down to just two options?”
“There are variations, of course. You might want to defend the Earth to protect your new baby sister, or to be someone for your baby sister to look up to. Or to try to win back the love of Mickey Smith.”
Rose frowns. “Win back the. . . You’d have to find him first, wouldn’t you? You’re the ones who messed up that one. He must have told you that regenerated Time Lords get all crazy and invulnerable. You should have put a clamp around his neck or something.”
The reader blinks. Rose shouldn’t know that. Rose knows the reader knows that Rose shouldn’t know that. “What neither of you told us-what neither of you could have known-is that a regeneration can apparently trigger a reversal of artificially-induced amnesia. And that the only thing more dangerous than a rogue Time Lord with a TARDIS is an outright criminal Time Lord stuck on Earth without a TARDIS. Frankly, Ms. Tyler, it’s only through the resourcefulness of Torchwood that we are having this conversation at all.”
Rose looks away, so she doesn’t see the reader’s slight smile. “So one school of thought is that I’m doing this because I think it’s the right thing to do. Is that it? And what’s the other school of thought?”
The reader looks at the clipboard. She makes a motion as if to move her hair out of her eyes, but her hair wasn’t in her eyes. Picking her pen off the clipboard, she moves to make a note.
“Is this, like, your thing?” Rose asks.
The reader finishes her note and crosses something out; Rose is nearly certain the reader has just made a note and crossed the very same note out.
“Creating awkward pauses, is this your thing? Because it’s not very impressive, is it? You’re not even any good at it. You’re so obvious that I can’t feel awkward because it’s obvious you’re trying to make me feel awkward. Although. . . that is kind of awkward, when it comes to that.”
As soon as Rose stops speaking, the reader says, “The other school of thought, Ms. Tyler, is that you are not over the Doctor at all; that you consider him your one true love; that you are still basically suicidal; that you persist in believing that he is capable of coming back to you; that you have joined Torchwood, in fact, because it is the best way to get yourself in enough of the right kind of danger that the Doctor will finally come to rescue you. And if that doesn’t work, at least you’ll be put out of your misery.”
If I wait long enough, if I am in enough danger, he will come.
“And the thing you need to understand about Torchwood, Ms. Tyler, is that Torchwood is fine with that, too.”