Homecoming
Title: Homecoming
Author: aibhinn
Pairing/Characters: Rose/OMC, Ten/Rose
Beta: larielromeniel, sensiblecat, and joely_jo
Rating: PG
Spoilers: "Doomsday". Also "Parting of the Ways" and Torchwood "Everything Changes," if you squint.
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: BBC's toys, my words.
Summary: This isn't forgetting. It's healing. It's moving on. It's getting past her grief and living the fantastic life he always wanted her to lead. It's got a happy ending, I promise.
Challenge: dwliterotica March Challenge: I-Ching #18. Now strength can be used to reshape things that would have been difficult while the old order held sway. But first take stock and clear away the debris of the old.
Author's notes: Written for the March challenge on dwliterotica. All quotations are from the Tao Te Ching. The translation I used can be found here. This is the second of a four-story series. The others are You Can Go Home Again, Spiralling Towards Home, and Home is Where the Heart Is.
Other people have more than they need;
I alone seem to possess nothing.
I am lost and adrift with no place to go.
Darlig Ulv Stranden
Rose isn't dead. She moves; she breathes; her blood pulses through thousands of miles of arteries and veins despite the enormous, Doctor-shaped hole in her heart.
It's Mickey who comes to her and takes her by the shoulders and leads her tenderly back to the car. She climbs into the back seat and leans her head against the window and lets the world rush past her in a blur. Back to London-back to the mansion that isn't home with the Pete who isn't her father and the life that isn't what she wanted, not ever.
***
Before the universe was born
there was something in the chaos of the heavens.
It stands alone and empty,
solitary and unchanging.
It is ever present and secure.
London, 2010
Pete is indulgent (of Jackie's wishes more than Rose's, Rose suspects) as well as loaded, and so her new bedroom has an enormous skylight in the ceiling. She positions her bed beneath it, and she lies there at night, staring up at stars that should be familiar but aren't. These are not the stars she explored with the Doctor. This is not the galaxy that she roamed with someone who was her best mate and more.
But it's better than nothing. And sometimes, lying awake in the small hours, the glint of white on black is the only thing that can comfort her, for if they're not the exact same stars, at least they're close. Whatever created her universe created this one, she's sure. There's a connection of sorts.
When she thinks about the millions of inhabited worlds, and the hundreds of thousands of species dotting the galaxy, the concept of 'impossible' seems almost laughable. And that's comforting, too.
Even if her dreams still wake her with sobs.
***
If you want to become whole,
first let yourself become broken.
London, 2011
One day, Rose is cleaning her teeth before bed and realises with a start, I've not thought of him all day. From the time she'd awakened, all through the busy day at Torchwood, and into the evening, she'd somehow not thought of the Doctor once.
It frightens her. She stands, tense and distressed, one hand clutching the TARDIS key that she still wears around her neck and the other still holding her toothbrush, staring at her startled face in the mirror. How could she forget him? How could she ever forget?
It takes a few minutes for the truth to penetrate: this isn't forgetting. It's healing. It's moving on. It's getting past her grief and living the fantastic life he always wanted her to lead.
She can do this, she thinks, still gripping the TARDIS key like a talisman. She has to. If it's the last gift she can give him, she'll make sure it's spectacular.
She spits, rinses, and puts her toothbrush away, then heads for bed. For once, she turns over and goes straight to sleep. Tomorrow will be even busier than today.
That night, she dreams of him again, but they're happy dreams, and she wakes smiling.
***
A journey of a thousand miles
starts with a single footstep.
University of West London, 2011
Step one: entrance exams. They're this Earth's version of A-levels, except they go one better: if you score high enough, you can be excused from certain classes. World history, first-year English literature, and astronomy she passes without incident and gets waived; and she's placed in an advanced maths and advanced physics course. Pete is over the moon. Jackie is cautiously happy-despite her new status as one of the wealthiest women in the world, she still has a fear of her daughter developing 'airs and graces'. Mickey is so proud he could burst.
You'd be proud of me too, Doctor, she thinks as she shoulders her new rucksack, filled to the brim with textbooks, and sets out for her first day of university. I know you would.
On her second day, she runs into a bloke from one of her classes. Literally runs into him; she rounds a corner without looking and smacks right into his chest, and he has to steady her to keep her from falling. She buys him a cup of tea as an apology, and they start talking. His name is Alan; they share their physics lecture, and are both taking calculus from the same professor though at different times. "We might study together," he says in a carefully neutral tone, sipping his tea and watching her over the rim of the cup.
"Yeah, all right," she says in a similarly neutral tone, trying to quash the feelings of guilt. She's not betraying anyone, no matter how painful it feels.
They both earn their degrees three years later, and two weeks after graduation, they marry in a small but lavish ceremony at Pete and Jackie's house. The day before her wedding, Rose puts the TARDIS key into her jewellery box, along with a pair of earrings that had once been immortalised in stone and a somewhat old-fashioned looking phone that had once been jiggery-pokeried into something far more than a mobile. The door of the jewellery box closes with a soft click that somehow feels infinitely final.
***
Giving birth and nourishing,
making without possessing,
expecting nothing in return.
To grow, yet not to control:
This is the mysterious virtue.
Barcelona, 2037
Emily is twenty-three and Jack is twenty-one when the first message comes through.
Rose and Alan have moved from Torchwood facility to Torchwood facility, trying to keep ahead of anyone who might notice her unchanging face. They are currently living in Spain, monitoring a small Rift there: a job which has the advantage of being completely out of sight of anyone of any rank in Torchwood. She knows it's only a stop-gap and that at some point she'll have to deal with the consequences of this…whatever-it-is…that is keeping her from ageing. Something to do with the TARDIS, she supposes, though Mickey and her Mum both travelled in the TARDIS at different times, and neither of them has stopped ageing. Still, she travelled longer than they did; perhaps that's why.
She is walking from the market back to their flat when the words over a dance club hit her between the eyes: Lobo Mal.
Bad Wolf.
She swings round swiftly, turning on the spot. Spray-painted on a brick wall to her left: Lobo Mal. Chalk-marks in a childish scrawl on the pavement: Lobo Mal. A bumper sticker on a nearby car: Lobo Mal. It surrounds her, terrifies her. Clutching her canvas bag of groceries, she all but runs home and slams the door behind her, leaning back against it and panting with fear.
She knows what Bad Wolf is. She knows what it means. It is a note from herself to herself: This is your way back to him.
But does she want to go?
Her eyes take in the photographs on the mantel piece. Her family. The life she's created for herself. It truly is a fantastic life, filled with all the adventures of marriage and raising children. Could she leave all of them behind-her husband, her children-to return to a man she'd loved twenty-some-odd years before?
Either thought is painful: to have the Doctor finally make it across the Void and then send him away alone, or to go with him and leave her husband, her children, her heart and soul and life behind. She can't possibly make that decision.
"Not now," she says aloud, blinking away tears. "Please. I can't."
***
Three out of ten celebrate life,
three out of ten celebrate death,
and three out of ten simply go from life to death.
What is the reason for this?
Because they are afraid of dying,
therefore they cannot live.
Bristol, 2049
Rose watches, dry-eyed, behind her fine mesh veil as the casket is lowered slowly into the ground. Her son's hand on her shoulder, she steps forward to drop a rose on the polished wood, then moves aside to a spot where she can stand in her uncomfortable shoes and receive the condolences of friends and strangers.
So this is how it ends, she thinks. Thirty-five years of marriage, cut off by a patch of ice on a back road. She'd not slept at all in the days since his crash; she'd lain awake, staring at the stars and remembering the years they'd had together.
Pete and Jackie were both gone as well, Pete from a heart attack, Jackie from a virulent form of cancer that had no cure in this world or the other. She understands the Doctor's dilemma now, for she shares it. No matter whom she chooses to be with, they will all wither and die while she remains eternally twenty. How had he borne it for nine hundred years?
"Mum," Emily says softly, and Rose realises with a start that everyone's gone and the car is waiting. There is a reception at a local hotel, paid for by the Vitex company, in which both Emily and Jack are major shareholders. The family, of course, is expected there.
"I don't want to go," Rose says.
"Just for a little while," Emily says soothingly. "Just put in an appearance. Then we'll have the car take you home."
That's not exactly what Rose means. She means she doesn't want to leave the cemetery; she wants to stay and watch Alan's casket be covered, the turf laid down, the wreaths taken away. She wants to watch the flowers on the neighbouring graves wither and dry up. She wants to observe the turning of the earth, the changing of the seasons; wants to watch the trees grow from seedlings to great ancient oaks. She wants to feel Time, every nanosecond of it, forward and backward. She wants to make the world stand still.
"All right," she says, and suffers herself to be led away.
That night, she packs a rucksack with clothes, a little food, money, and her passport, and hangs her TARDIS key round her neck, tucking it beneath her shirt where it lay warm against her heart. She puts a note prominently on her dining table, along with an enduring power of attorney in her daughter's name, and disappears into the darkness.
***
The [Tao] Master acts on what she feels and not what she sees.
She shuns the latter, and prefers to seek the former.
Washington state, USA, 2049
Another beach facing west over the ocean, but a different ocean. The Pacific, this time. Behind her, tall Douglas Fir trees stand, all their branches growing away from the water because of the omnipresent wind off the ocean. Fifty miles south of here is a tourist trap of a town; slightly more than that north of here is Neah Bay, the westernmost point of this American state. This is a quiet cove nestled among rocky beaches, out of sight of any but the most rabid of hikers-or someone entirely determined.
It took two planes, a hired car, and a good set of hiking boots to make it this far, but somehow, from the moment she put her TARDIS key around her neck, she'd never wavered. Despite never having been here before, she'd been drawn here just as surely as she'd been drawn to a strange beach in Norway so many years ago, rewarded with glimpses of 'Bad Wolf' along the way as though to prove to her that she was right.
She finds a spot above the high-water line where previous campers had built fires, and so she builds one there herself, using deadfall and driftwood. It takes a few false starts, but she manages to get enough of a fire going to boil some water for tea to warm herself up. Once the water boils, she puts the fire out and curls up inside her anorak, waiting.
Four hours after she arrives, so does the TARDIS. Just to the right of her, on the edge of the forest, in the only clear, flat patch available on this beach. She smiles to herself softly, rises to her feet, and waits.
When he comes out, he looks just as he had before Canary Wharf: a little older, perhaps, and a little more careworn, but still in a brown suit and white Converse, still thin as a rail with an untidy mop of hair at the top, and still with the smile that could light up a city.
She takes a deep breath, and feels a tension she hadn't known she'd been carrying melt away. In three quick strides he crosses the space between them, and then she's caught up in his arms and the rest of the world fades. There are no words; there is nothing that can be said aloud that is not said in this embrace.
At last they pull away just slightly, looking into each other's eyes. She blinks, realising she's teared up. "I had a fantastic life," she says.
The smile returns. "Good," he says.
"But I don't age. I don't know why. It's been almost forty years, and I haven't aged."
"It's all right," he says reassuringly. "We'll sort it. But there's something much more important than that." He cups her face with both hands. "Rose Tyler," he says softly but intensely, "I love you." And he kisses her, a gentle kiss with more than a hint of promise. The world stops again.
An unknowable time later, he draws away. "Come on," he says with a smile. "Jack's waiting for us."
He picks up her knapsack and holds out his hand, and she takes it as though they've never been apart. Hand in hand with her Doctor, Rose Tyler goes home.
***
All creatures in the universe
return to the point where they began.
Author: aibhinn
Pairing/Characters: Rose/OMC, Ten/Rose
Beta: larielromeniel, sensiblecat, and joely_jo
Rating: PG
Spoilers: "Doomsday". Also "Parting of the Ways" and Torchwood "Everything Changes," if you squint.
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: BBC's toys, my words.
Summary: This isn't forgetting. It's healing. It's moving on. It's getting past her grief and living the fantastic life he always wanted her to lead. It's got a happy ending, I promise.
Challenge: dwliterotica March Challenge: I-Ching #18. Now strength can be used to reshape things that would have been difficult while the old order held sway. But first take stock and clear away the debris of the old.
Author's notes: Written for the March challenge on dwliterotica. All quotations are from the Tao Te Ching. The translation I used can be found here. This is the second of a four-story series. The others are You Can Go Home Again, Spiralling Towards Home, and Home is Where the Heart Is.
Other people have more than they need;
I alone seem to possess nothing.
I am lost and adrift with no place to go.
Darlig Ulv Stranden
Rose isn't dead. She moves; she breathes; her blood pulses through thousands of miles of arteries and veins despite the enormous, Doctor-shaped hole in her heart.
It's Mickey who comes to her and takes her by the shoulders and leads her tenderly back to the car. She climbs into the back seat and leans her head against the window and lets the world rush past her in a blur. Back to London-back to the mansion that isn't home with the Pete who isn't her father and the life that isn't what she wanted, not ever.
***
Before the universe was born
there was something in the chaos of the heavens.
It stands alone and empty,
solitary and unchanging.
It is ever present and secure.
London, 2010
Pete is indulgent (of Jackie's wishes more than Rose's, Rose suspects) as well as loaded, and so her new bedroom has an enormous skylight in the ceiling. She positions her bed beneath it, and she lies there at night, staring up at stars that should be familiar but aren't. These are not the stars she explored with the Doctor. This is not the galaxy that she roamed with someone who was her best mate and more.
But it's better than nothing. And sometimes, lying awake in the small hours, the glint of white on black is the only thing that can comfort her, for if they're not the exact same stars, at least they're close. Whatever created her universe created this one, she's sure. There's a connection of sorts.
When she thinks about the millions of inhabited worlds, and the hundreds of thousands of species dotting the galaxy, the concept of 'impossible' seems almost laughable. And that's comforting, too.
Even if her dreams still wake her with sobs.
***
If you want to become whole,
first let yourself become broken.
London, 2011
One day, Rose is cleaning her teeth before bed and realises with a start, I've not thought of him all day. From the time she'd awakened, all through the busy day at Torchwood, and into the evening, she'd somehow not thought of the Doctor once.
It frightens her. She stands, tense and distressed, one hand clutching the TARDIS key that she still wears around her neck and the other still holding her toothbrush, staring at her startled face in the mirror. How could she forget him? How could she ever forget?
It takes a few minutes for the truth to penetrate: this isn't forgetting. It's healing. It's moving on. It's getting past her grief and living the fantastic life he always wanted her to lead.
She can do this, she thinks, still gripping the TARDIS key like a talisman. She has to. If it's the last gift she can give him, she'll make sure it's spectacular.
She spits, rinses, and puts her toothbrush away, then heads for bed. For once, she turns over and goes straight to sleep. Tomorrow will be even busier than today.
That night, she dreams of him again, but they're happy dreams, and she wakes smiling.
***
A journey of a thousand miles
starts with a single footstep.
University of West London, 2011
Step one: entrance exams. They're this Earth's version of A-levels, except they go one better: if you score high enough, you can be excused from certain classes. World history, first-year English literature, and astronomy she passes without incident and gets waived; and she's placed in an advanced maths and advanced physics course. Pete is over the moon. Jackie is cautiously happy-despite her new status as one of the wealthiest women in the world, she still has a fear of her daughter developing 'airs and graces'. Mickey is so proud he could burst.
You'd be proud of me too, Doctor, she thinks as she shoulders her new rucksack, filled to the brim with textbooks, and sets out for her first day of university. I know you would.
On her second day, she runs into a bloke from one of her classes. Literally runs into him; she rounds a corner without looking and smacks right into his chest, and he has to steady her to keep her from falling. She buys him a cup of tea as an apology, and they start talking. His name is Alan; they share their physics lecture, and are both taking calculus from the same professor though at different times. "We might study together," he says in a carefully neutral tone, sipping his tea and watching her over the rim of the cup.
"Yeah, all right," she says in a similarly neutral tone, trying to quash the feelings of guilt. She's not betraying anyone, no matter how painful it feels.
They both earn their degrees three years later, and two weeks after graduation, they marry in a small but lavish ceremony at Pete and Jackie's house. The day before her wedding, Rose puts the TARDIS key into her jewellery box, along with a pair of earrings that had once been immortalised in stone and a somewhat old-fashioned looking phone that had once been jiggery-pokeried into something far more than a mobile. The door of the jewellery box closes with a soft click that somehow feels infinitely final.
***
Giving birth and nourishing,
making without possessing,
expecting nothing in return.
To grow, yet not to control:
This is the mysterious virtue.
Barcelona, 2037
Emily is twenty-three and Jack is twenty-one when the first message comes through.
Rose and Alan have moved from Torchwood facility to Torchwood facility, trying to keep ahead of anyone who might notice her unchanging face. They are currently living in Spain, monitoring a small Rift there: a job which has the advantage of being completely out of sight of anyone of any rank in Torchwood. She knows it's only a stop-gap and that at some point she'll have to deal with the consequences of this…whatever-it-is…that is keeping her from ageing. Something to do with the TARDIS, she supposes, though Mickey and her Mum both travelled in the TARDIS at different times, and neither of them has stopped ageing. Still, she travelled longer than they did; perhaps that's why.
She is walking from the market back to their flat when the words over a dance club hit her between the eyes: Lobo Mal.
Bad Wolf.
She swings round swiftly, turning on the spot. Spray-painted on a brick wall to her left: Lobo Mal. Chalk-marks in a childish scrawl on the pavement: Lobo Mal. A bumper sticker on a nearby car: Lobo Mal. It surrounds her, terrifies her. Clutching her canvas bag of groceries, she all but runs home and slams the door behind her, leaning back against it and panting with fear.
She knows what Bad Wolf is. She knows what it means. It is a note from herself to herself: This is your way back to him.
But does she want to go?
Her eyes take in the photographs on the mantel piece. Her family. The life she's created for herself. It truly is a fantastic life, filled with all the adventures of marriage and raising children. Could she leave all of them behind-her husband, her children-to return to a man she'd loved twenty-some-odd years before?
Either thought is painful: to have the Doctor finally make it across the Void and then send him away alone, or to go with him and leave her husband, her children, her heart and soul and life behind. She can't possibly make that decision.
"Not now," she says aloud, blinking away tears. "Please. I can't."
***
Three out of ten celebrate life,
three out of ten celebrate death,
and three out of ten simply go from life to death.
What is the reason for this?
Because they are afraid of dying,
therefore they cannot live.
Bristol, 2049
Rose watches, dry-eyed, behind her fine mesh veil as the casket is lowered slowly into the ground. Her son's hand on her shoulder, she steps forward to drop a rose on the polished wood, then moves aside to a spot where she can stand in her uncomfortable shoes and receive the condolences of friends and strangers.
So this is how it ends, she thinks. Thirty-five years of marriage, cut off by a patch of ice on a back road. She'd not slept at all in the days since his crash; she'd lain awake, staring at the stars and remembering the years they'd had together.
Pete and Jackie were both gone as well, Pete from a heart attack, Jackie from a virulent form of cancer that had no cure in this world or the other. She understands the Doctor's dilemma now, for she shares it. No matter whom she chooses to be with, they will all wither and die while she remains eternally twenty. How had he borne it for nine hundred years?
"Mum," Emily says softly, and Rose realises with a start that everyone's gone and the car is waiting. There is a reception at a local hotel, paid for by the Vitex company, in which both Emily and Jack are major shareholders. The family, of course, is expected there.
"I don't want to go," Rose says.
"Just for a little while," Emily says soothingly. "Just put in an appearance. Then we'll have the car take you home."
That's not exactly what Rose means. She means she doesn't want to leave the cemetery; she wants to stay and watch Alan's casket be covered, the turf laid down, the wreaths taken away. She wants to watch the flowers on the neighbouring graves wither and dry up. She wants to observe the turning of the earth, the changing of the seasons; wants to watch the trees grow from seedlings to great ancient oaks. She wants to feel Time, every nanosecond of it, forward and backward. She wants to make the world stand still.
"All right," she says, and suffers herself to be led away.
That night, she packs a rucksack with clothes, a little food, money, and her passport, and hangs her TARDIS key round her neck, tucking it beneath her shirt where it lay warm against her heart. She puts a note prominently on her dining table, along with an enduring power of attorney in her daughter's name, and disappears into the darkness.
***
The [Tao] Master acts on what she feels and not what she sees.
She shuns the latter, and prefers to seek the former.
Washington state, USA, 2049
Another beach facing west over the ocean, but a different ocean. The Pacific, this time. Behind her, tall Douglas Fir trees stand, all their branches growing away from the water because of the omnipresent wind off the ocean. Fifty miles south of here is a tourist trap of a town; slightly more than that north of here is Neah Bay, the westernmost point of this American state. This is a quiet cove nestled among rocky beaches, out of sight of any but the most rabid of hikers-or someone entirely determined.
It took two planes, a hired car, and a good set of hiking boots to make it this far, but somehow, from the moment she put her TARDIS key around her neck, she'd never wavered. Despite never having been here before, she'd been drawn here just as surely as she'd been drawn to a strange beach in Norway so many years ago, rewarded with glimpses of 'Bad Wolf' along the way as though to prove to her that she was right.
She finds a spot above the high-water line where previous campers had built fires, and so she builds one there herself, using deadfall and driftwood. It takes a few false starts, but she manages to get enough of a fire going to boil some water for tea to warm herself up. Once the water boils, she puts the fire out and curls up inside her anorak, waiting.
Four hours after she arrives, so does the TARDIS. Just to the right of her, on the edge of the forest, in the only clear, flat patch available on this beach. She smiles to herself softly, rises to her feet, and waits.
When he comes out, he looks just as he had before Canary Wharf: a little older, perhaps, and a little more careworn, but still in a brown suit and white Converse, still thin as a rail with an untidy mop of hair at the top, and still with the smile that could light up a city.
She takes a deep breath, and feels a tension she hadn't known she'd been carrying melt away. In three quick strides he crosses the space between them, and then she's caught up in his arms and the rest of the world fades. There are no words; there is nothing that can be said aloud that is not said in this embrace.
At last they pull away just slightly, looking into each other's eyes. She blinks, realising she's teared up. "I had a fantastic life," she says.
The smile returns. "Good," he says.
"But I don't age. I don't know why. It's been almost forty years, and I haven't aged."
"It's all right," he says reassuringly. "We'll sort it. But there's something much more important than that." He cups her face with both hands. "Rose Tyler," he says softly but intensely, "I love you." And he kisses her, a gentle kiss with more than a hint of promise. The world stops again.
An unknowable time later, he draws away. "Come on," he says with a smile. "Jack's waiting for us."
He picks up her knapsack and holds out his hand, and she takes it as though they've never been apart. Hand in hand with her Doctor, Rose Tyler goes home.
***
All creatures in the universe
return to the point where they began.