Crossroads - A Blue Gravel Path (2/13)
Title: A Blue Gravel Path
Characters: The Doctor, Rose Tyler, among others
Warnings: PG. Oh, and it’s baby!fic.
Spoilers: For the sake of this story, S4 never happens.
Beta: runriggers
Part of the Crossroads series
A now AU and non-S4 compliant story. Ah well.
Part One: Reflections
Part Two: One Day
Part Three: Choices and Chances
Part Four: A Blue Gravel Path - Chapter One
Chapter Two: Mo(u)rning in Jackie’s World..... The twins Donald and Molly are lucky, Jackie sometimes thinks: they don’t remember their older sister Rose. Jackie remembers Rose all too well, and some days, she envies her younger children their lack of memory.
Chapter Two: Mo(u)rning in Jackie’s World
Jackie Tyler woke with a start. For a moment she wondered if her mobile had been ringing, but it lay dark and silent on the bedside table, resting atop the digital clock which blinked 12:14. Blinking meant loss of power, and the strong winds at the window confirmed the possibility. It was dark in the room, and not a sound could be heard save for the weather outside of it. For a moment, Jackie wasn’t sure where she was, much less the time.
She rolled her head away from the blinking numbers, unwilling to move an arm out from beneath the warmth of the blankets to turn the clock off. The light didn’t bother her, nor did the storm outside, although she hoped Donald wasn’t in it, trying to drive home from work. Jackie almost asked Pete if he was awake and had heard Donald come in, before she realized the pillow beside her was empty. The memory sparked by Pete’s unused pillow cut like a knife, and she looked back up to the ceiling, where a red glow pulsed in time with the numbers on the clock.
Why she had a clock, Jackie didn’t know. She had nowhere to go anymore, no appointments to keep, no one to visit who did not visit her. Mickey and his daughter came every day. Theresa and Janice from the tennis club came at least twice a week. Molly, of course, was in India, or Nepal, or some other place where the telephone reception was less than stellar, but she called every day. Donald lived at home, driving out to the hospital for his night shift in the ER every evening and returning near dawn smelling of cleaning alcohol and blood.
The wind howled outside the windows, and Jackie closed her eyes, wondering if sleep would evade her again. It was the storm that had woken her, had started the clock to blinking. She wondered how long it would be before dawn, when Rose would call on the mobile as she did every morning, without fail. Today, there might even be photographs of children who grew terribly slowly and were fantastically brilliant. Jackie’s grandchildren, the ones she’d never seen nor hugged. In another world, they might have clambered over her bed and played hide-and-go-seek under her pillows. They would have called her Gran or Grammy or perhaps just Grandma, and Jackie would have showered them with kisses and hugs and sugar when their parents weren’t looking.
Jackie never tired of looking at her grandchildren. But looking at the photographs of Rose was like looking into a deep well. It was a bit, she imagined, like if she were the Doctor looking at the expanse of past and present, seeing time as clearly as if it were sitting next to her on the bus. Rose, in her pictures, looked impossibly young, the same age as her twenty-years-younger siblings, who didn’t even remember they had an older sister sometimes. It was just as well; they knew nothing of a parallel universe, or of a previous Jackie, or of Torchwood, or the Doctor. They’d known all this, once, but somehow over the course of time, the knowledge had slipped away, been forgotten, and it wasn’t truly possible to remember a sister you didn’t even know.
Jackie didn’t talk about Rose with Donald or Molly. They hadn’t asked about her in years. It simply never came up, and because Rose only ever called in the early mornings, before the rest of the world was awake, there was never a need. Sometimes, in the course of the day, Jackie would forget about Rose herself for a moment, right up to the moment she went to bed and found the mobile in her pocket. She would remember her daughter, then, the blonde laughter and the fierce longing, and Jackie would place the mobile on the bedside table, ready for when Rose called in the morning before dawn.
Sometimes, Jackie was never sure if the calls were real, or simply dreams. Perhaps she’d dreamed it all, that parallel world. Perhaps she’d never had a first Pete, did not have an older daughter named Rose, had never lived in the Powell Estates, did not once meet a man who wore a leather jacket or a brown trench coat, depending on his face.
It might have helped, if Mickey talked about Rose. He never brought her up, either. He stopped by around teatime, and Jackie always wondered if it would be the day one of them would mention her, but it never was. Mickey was older now, grey at his temples, and he needed glasses to read. This was how Rose should look, thought Jackie, when she was fifty. She would be grey, and wear glasses to see, and be a bit dumpier about the waist. There would be wrinkles at her eyes and her lips, Rose had laughed so much!
But Rose wasn’t fifty. She wasn’t even forty. Rose was thirty-two years old, and would be thirty-two for another four years of Jackie’s life. By the time Rose was fifty, Jackie would be long since dead.
That was the price of having a daughter in parallel world: Rose was trapped in time, not quite a flower in amber, because Rose wasn’t static. She moved, but so slowly that Jackie never noticed it.
It was almost worse, Jackie thought, knowing her daughter was alive and young than it would have been if she’d gone into the parallel world without further contact. No phone calls, no photographs, no way of knowing if she were alive or not. Then, at least, Jackie could have imagined her aging, imagined her children grown, imagined her daughter as a grandmother herself.
Trying to imagine these things now did not work when Rose, young and cheerful and often with the weariness that accompanies two small children, called every morning before dawn, to tell her the news of her world.
Just once, Jackie wished she could see Rose older. Knowing that Rose would live on, that was something. But to see her daughter just once, grey and wrinkled, would have given Jackie some sense of accomplishment, to know that something she had produced, almost entirely without help, would turn out all right.
The rain continued to beat down on the windowpanes, and the red light from the clock continued to blink. Now there was a tapping sound, rapping against the walls of the house, and Jackie glanced to the windows to see the old oak tree’s branches, blown close by the wind, beating a tattoo on the glass. It was rapid and uneven, much like her own heart in recent weeks, beating an untenable path to its end. The doctor to which Donald had taken her had frowned, and said she must be careful, but Jackie knew what that meant. Each beat of her heart counted down to some unknown but predetermined number, and Jackie could sense it had every possibility of losing steam and giving up before it got there.
In the thirty years since Rose had disappeared into a blue box at Torchwood, Jackie Tyler had raised two children, lived with a good man, headed half a dozen charities, and won the tennis championship in her age bracket at the club for three years running. She’d served coffee to victims of the Cyberman war, read to children at the local hospitals, hosted a smashing Christmas party that boasted at least twenty gate-crashers every year, and even had a short-lived spell as a daytime talk host before she realized she preferred whatever ambiguity the wife of Pete Tyler could afford.
She visited Pete Tyler’s grave at the base of the garden every day. The headstone had only been placed two months previously, and when she’d been able, Jackie walked down the gravel path that wound through the rose garden, past Donald’s pond and into the secluded corner where they’d laid Pete to rest. There was a bench there, and she would sit and talk to him for hours, about everything, about nothing, about her life with him, and her life with her other him.
To Jackie, it didn’t matter that this Pete hadn’t met her until those last hours at Canary Wharf. Perhaps, she thought, her first and second Petes were waiting in the same heaven for her to join them. She liked to think so. Despite the small inkling in the back of her mind that death without Rose nearby was impossible, the idea that her Petes waited for her together was the only hope she really had of seeing her daughter again.
*
The sound of Jackie’s bedroom door opening woke her up, and for a moment Jackie was surprised she’d fallen asleep again. She blinked in the sunlit room, wondering why she hadn’t woken to her mobile ringing. Rose called every morning, just as dawn broke, and it was clearly past that time now.
“Morning, Mum,” said Donald as he carried the breakfast tray into the room and set it on the dresser. Jackie watched as her son pushed back the curtains. Perhaps she hadn’t really woken in the middle of the night, unable to fall asleep again. “The storm’s blown away - you should smell the grass. Did the storm wake you?”
“My mobile didn’t ring,” said Jackie. “Donald, check my mobile.”
Donald tied back the curtains and leaned over to glance at the mobile. “No, doesn’t look like you missed any calls. Let’s get you up for breakfast, all right?” He expertly slid an arm under his mother’s shoulders and helped her sit up, rearranging the pillows behind her and pulling the blankets up over her lap. When Jackie was settled, he brought the tray and set it over her lap.
“Are you sure no one’s rung?”
“Yes, Mum,” said Donald patiently. “Make sure you eat everything.”
Jackie eyed the food. “I thought I wasn’t allowed eggs.”
“Today’s special, and I’m thinking the extra protein will give you some more strength. Call it doctor’s orders.” Donald collapsed onto a nearby chair and propped his feet on the bed, grinning at her. He was handsome, her son, blue eyes, close-cropped hair, and an affinity for dark leather jackets. He looked a little like Pete Tyler, really, and someone Jackie didn’t remember very well. All the same, when Jackie had learned that Donald intended to study medicine at university, she had laughed herself silly.
“What’s special about today?” Jackie picked up the spoon, nearly dropped it again, and clutched it harder on the second go.
“Surprise.”
“I haven’t forgotten a birthday?”
“Not one I know about. Are you going to eat your toast?”
Donald asked it every morning, and just like every morning, Jackie replied, “No.” He nicked the triangles from her tray and began to munch happily. The morning fell into its typical routine while he told her the gruesome tales from the emergency ward’s night shift. Jackie listened to her son talk, not paying terribly close attention, so she almost missed it when he began describing one of the patients.
“…we’re pretty sure it’s a trick, of course - something to do with a slipped pacemaker, maybe. Jones called it an advancement in the evolutionary process, but what does Jones know, she’s practically senile anyway.”
“What’s a trick?” asked Jackie, confused.
Donald popped the last bit of toast into his mouth. “Double heartbeat. Double hearts. Oddest thing, listening to it. You listen to one side of the chest, and boom boom boom, and the other side of the chest, you get boom boom boom. They were carting her off for X-rays when I was coming home, so I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow what was going on, but there’s a pool now, if it’s evolution like Jones says or just an echo.”
Jackie laid down her spoon, her own heart beating wildly. “Two hearts?”
“Thought we would have known about a body with two hearts before now. You have to think it would be written up in all the journals out there. How was your egg?”
Jackie looked down at her tray to discover the egg still sitting there, untouched. “What’s her name?”
Donald frowned. “You know I can’t tell you that, Mum. Doctor patient confidentiality. And anyway, I don’t know it, I wasn’t the attending and I was on my way out the door.”
“But you saw her?”
“A glimpse yeah - you tellin’ me you know a girl with two hearts, Mum?”
“Of course not, but-"
Somewhere below them, the doorbell rang, and Donald swung his feet off the bed. “That’ll be the day nurse; eat your egg, Mum, I’m going to let her in.”
Jackie tapped the hard-boiled egg with her fork, before slicing it neatly in two. Two bright yellow eyes looked back at her as the egg wobbled a little on the plate, perfect round circles, perfectly paired.
A pair of yolks, a pair of hearts.
Jackie set her fork down, unable to eat a bite, and waited for Donald to return with the nurse so that he could take the tray away.
*
The surprise arrived with lunch, shortly after noon. The mobile had remained deceptively quiet all morning, and Jackie was unable to concentrate on much of anything. The nurse, of course, noticed, and Jackie was sure something was said to Donald outside of her hearing, but she couldn’t be bothered about it. Rose was not ringing, and Rose had rung every morning at dawn like clockwork for several years.
“Hello, Mum!” said Jackie’s surprise cheerfully, carrying in the lunch tray, and Jackie looked up from her quiet mobile to see her younger daughter, Molly, at the foot of the bed.
“Molly,” breathed Jackie, almost forgetting the mobile in her lap. “But you’re in India!”
“Not in the last five days,” Molly said, setting the tray down on the floor. She crawled up from the foot of the bed to give her mother a hug. “Zeppelins take such a long time. Oof, you’re thin. Doesn’t Donald feed you?”
“Why are you here?” scolded Jackie. “You’re not supposed to be home for another four months.”
“Oh, got tired of India. A whole country without hamburgers, I don’t know how anyone can stand it. Donald stood me for the ticket and here I am.” Molly gave her mother a squeeze. “What do you think? Lovely surprise?”
“Very. Only, you didn’t need to come home.”
“Course not,” said Molly evenly, and she hopped off the bed to fetch the lunch tray. “Ugh, soup and toast. No wonder you’re so thin. I’ve been craving steak like mad.”
“When did you get in?”
“Oh, a few hours ago. Gavin’s going to take me for tea, d’you suppose he’ll be all right if tea consists of beef?”
“Let me look at you,” said Jackie, and Molly set the tray down again, grinning at her mother.
“I’m a mess, haven’t even showered for days,” she declared, but waited for her inspection anyway. Her dark blonde hair was cropped short and curly, and her brown eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. There was something else there, too, Jackie noted - Molly was hiding something in her eyes, in the easy way she turned in circles for her mother’s assessment. Molly moved quickly, always running from one place to the other. Now she seemed at rest, patient almost, calm and serene. At least, calm and serene as far as knee-high lace-up boots, denim skirt and purple zip-up sweatshirt with ragged patches could allow.
“Mum,” said Molly after a minute. “You’re staring.”
“You look lovely.”
“Do not,” said Molly, pleased. “Let’s toss your soup out the window, and I’ll sneak you out past Nurse Ratched and we’ll find something more palatable.”
“Soup will do me very nicely.”
“Suit yourself.” Molly set the tray over her mother’s lap. “I should have brought grapes.”
“Tell me about India.”
“Oh, I hate that. I never know how to begin.”
“All right. Tell me what time it is in India and what you’d be doing right now if you were there.”
Molly grinned and fell back onto the bed to answer without a moment’s hesitation. “Right now? Curry with Kirti and Mike….” Molly was off like a rocket, talking Jackie through her evening plans, and Jackie let her daughter’s voice wash over her without paying much attention to the words. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about Molly’s experiences, but that they were so foreign and unusual, Jackie didn’t feel she had any sort of reference for them. Rose had been the same, coming back from some journey with the Doctor, holding some trinket in her hand and full of unusual stories, none of which made much sense to Jackie.
Molly’s sudden reappearance ought to have been a happy event; instead, it merely reminded Jackie that her mobile had been silent all morning.
“Mum? Are you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening,” said Jackie. “How long are you staying?”
Molly shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Three weeks, four.” Her daughter’s lazy grin was almost infectious. “I might never go away again, how’s that, Mum?”
“You stay put? Never,” said Jackie. “Tell me more about the curry in India.” As soon as Molly was off again, Jackie closed her eyes. There was little doubt in her mind what Donald had said to his wayward, wanderlusting sister to make her come home.
*
The next visitor was Mickey Smith, and Jackie wasted no time in shooing everyone else out of the room.
“Mickey Smith,” demanded Jackie, looking him straight in the eye. “What have you done with the blue box?”
Mickey stared at Jackie for a moment, not comprehending. “What are you talking about, Jackie?”
“The one at Torchwood, the one you’re keeping safe for Rose. What did you do to it?”
Mickey sat heavily on the chair next to the bed. “Nothing, Jackie, nothing! I saw it two days ago, it’s fine. There’s so many safety combinations on that room, even I can’t get in without my own authorization.”
Jackie settled back on her pillow and nodded her head at the still silent mobile on the bedside table. “Rose didn’t ring this morning.”
Mickey frowned and reached for the mobile. “Let me see it.” She handed it to him, and he flipped it open. He pressed the buttons as if looking for something, flipped it over to check the battery, and then pressed a few more buttons. After a moment, the mobile in his pocket began to ring.
“Well, your mobile is dialing out,” he said finally. “The history on it shows no incoming call this morning, so you haven’t missed one. It also shows the incoming calls from the previous two weeks. All very regular, every morning near 5:30.” Mickey frowned, looking up at Jackie. “Odd that she’d have the timing so exact, isn’t it, when the flow still shifts one way or the other?”
“Perhaps it’s stabilized.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Mickey, but didn’t elaborate. “Perhaps something happened to the crossroads on their end?”
Jackie’s heart thudded. “Mickey.”
Mickey dug into his pocket for his phone. “He gave me a number, once - the Doctor did, I mean. Said to ring him if I ever thought-" He glanced up at Jackie, briefly, before flipping his phone open and beginning to hit the numbers with his thumb. “I’ll try ringing through, and see if he answers.”
“No. Not until…Mickey,” said Jackie. “There’s a woman at hospital, Donald told me about her. She has two hearts.”
Mickey paused before hitting the last number. “Two hearts?”
“Donald didn’t catch her name. He doesn’t know anything about her, really, he was heading home when she was being examined. Only - two hearts, Mickey. I’ve never heard of anyone having two hearts, except for the Doctor.”
Mickey flipped the phone shut. He stared at Jackie as if he’d never seen her before in his life. “I should go talk to her.”
“Why do you think I told you?”
Mickey swallowed. “You don’t think-"
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Another Time Lord?”
Jackie closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “Just tell me what she says.”
Jump to Chapter Three
Characters: The Doctor, Rose Tyler, among others
Warnings: PG. Oh, and it’s baby!fic.
Spoilers: For the sake of this story, S4 never happens.
Beta: runriggers
Part of the Crossroads series
A now AU and non-S4 compliant story. Ah well.
Part One: Reflections
Part Two: One Day
Part Three: Choices and Chances
Part Four: A Blue Gravel Path - Chapter One
Chapter Two: Mo(u)rning in Jackie’s World..... The twins Donald and Molly are lucky, Jackie sometimes thinks: they don’t remember their older sister Rose. Jackie remembers Rose all too well, and some days, she envies her younger children their lack of memory.
Chapter Two: Mo(u)rning in Jackie’s World
Jackie Tyler woke with a start. For a moment she wondered if her mobile had been ringing, but it lay dark and silent on the bedside table, resting atop the digital clock which blinked 12:14. Blinking meant loss of power, and the strong winds at the window confirmed the possibility. It was dark in the room, and not a sound could be heard save for the weather outside of it. For a moment, Jackie wasn’t sure where she was, much less the time.
She rolled her head away from the blinking numbers, unwilling to move an arm out from beneath the warmth of the blankets to turn the clock off. The light didn’t bother her, nor did the storm outside, although she hoped Donald wasn’t in it, trying to drive home from work. Jackie almost asked Pete if he was awake and had heard Donald come in, before she realized the pillow beside her was empty. The memory sparked by Pete’s unused pillow cut like a knife, and she looked back up to the ceiling, where a red glow pulsed in time with the numbers on the clock.
Why she had a clock, Jackie didn’t know. She had nowhere to go anymore, no appointments to keep, no one to visit who did not visit her. Mickey and his daughter came every day. Theresa and Janice from the tennis club came at least twice a week. Molly, of course, was in India, or Nepal, or some other place where the telephone reception was less than stellar, but she called every day. Donald lived at home, driving out to the hospital for his night shift in the ER every evening and returning near dawn smelling of cleaning alcohol and blood.
The wind howled outside the windows, and Jackie closed her eyes, wondering if sleep would evade her again. It was the storm that had woken her, had started the clock to blinking. She wondered how long it would be before dawn, when Rose would call on the mobile as she did every morning, without fail. Today, there might even be photographs of children who grew terribly slowly and were fantastically brilliant. Jackie’s grandchildren, the ones she’d never seen nor hugged. In another world, they might have clambered over her bed and played hide-and-go-seek under her pillows. They would have called her Gran or Grammy or perhaps just Grandma, and Jackie would have showered them with kisses and hugs and sugar when their parents weren’t looking.
Jackie never tired of looking at her grandchildren. But looking at the photographs of Rose was like looking into a deep well. It was a bit, she imagined, like if she were the Doctor looking at the expanse of past and present, seeing time as clearly as if it were sitting next to her on the bus. Rose, in her pictures, looked impossibly young, the same age as her twenty-years-younger siblings, who didn’t even remember they had an older sister sometimes. It was just as well; they knew nothing of a parallel universe, or of a previous Jackie, or of Torchwood, or the Doctor. They’d known all this, once, but somehow over the course of time, the knowledge had slipped away, been forgotten, and it wasn’t truly possible to remember a sister you didn’t even know.
Jackie didn’t talk about Rose with Donald or Molly. They hadn’t asked about her in years. It simply never came up, and because Rose only ever called in the early mornings, before the rest of the world was awake, there was never a need. Sometimes, in the course of the day, Jackie would forget about Rose herself for a moment, right up to the moment she went to bed and found the mobile in her pocket. She would remember her daughter, then, the blonde laughter and the fierce longing, and Jackie would place the mobile on the bedside table, ready for when Rose called in the morning before dawn.
Sometimes, Jackie was never sure if the calls were real, or simply dreams. Perhaps she’d dreamed it all, that parallel world. Perhaps she’d never had a first Pete, did not have an older daughter named Rose, had never lived in the Powell Estates, did not once meet a man who wore a leather jacket or a brown trench coat, depending on his face.
It might have helped, if Mickey talked about Rose. He never brought her up, either. He stopped by around teatime, and Jackie always wondered if it would be the day one of them would mention her, but it never was. Mickey was older now, grey at his temples, and he needed glasses to read. This was how Rose should look, thought Jackie, when she was fifty. She would be grey, and wear glasses to see, and be a bit dumpier about the waist. There would be wrinkles at her eyes and her lips, Rose had laughed so much!
But Rose wasn’t fifty. She wasn’t even forty. Rose was thirty-two years old, and would be thirty-two for another four years of Jackie’s life. By the time Rose was fifty, Jackie would be long since dead.
That was the price of having a daughter in parallel world: Rose was trapped in time, not quite a flower in amber, because Rose wasn’t static. She moved, but so slowly that Jackie never noticed it.
It was almost worse, Jackie thought, knowing her daughter was alive and young than it would have been if she’d gone into the parallel world without further contact. No phone calls, no photographs, no way of knowing if she were alive or not. Then, at least, Jackie could have imagined her aging, imagined her children grown, imagined her daughter as a grandmother herself.
Trying to imagine these things now did not work when Rose, young and cheerful and often with the weariness that accompanies two small children, called every morning before dawn, to tell her the news of her world.
Just once, Jackie wished she could see Rose older. Knowing that Rose would live on, that was something. But to see her daughter just once, grey and wrinkled, would have given Jackie some sense of accomplishment, to know that something she had produced, almost entirely without help, would turn out all right.
The rain continued to beat down on the windowpanes, and the red light from the clock continued to blink. Now there was a tapping sound, rapping against the walls of the house, and Jackie glanced to the windows to see the old oak tree’s branches, blown close by the wind, beating a tattoo on the glass. It was rapid and uneven, much like her own heart in recent weeks, beating an untenable path to its end. The doctor to which Donald had taken her had frowned, and said she must be careful, but Jackie knew what that meant. Each beat of her heart counted down to some unknown but predetermined number, and Jackie could sense it had every possibility of losing steam and giving up before it got there.
In the thirty years since Rose had disappeared into a blue box at Torchwood, Jackie Tyler had raised two children, lived with a good man, headed half a dozen charities, and won the tennis championship in her age bracket at the club for three years running. She’d served coffee to victims of the Cyberman war, read to children at the local hospitals, hosted a smashing Christmas party that boasted at least twenty gate-crashers every year, and even had a short-lived spell as a daytime talk host before she realized she preferred whatever ambiguity the wife of Pete Tyler could afford.
She visited Pete Tyler’s grave at the base of the garden every day. The headstone had only been placed two months previously, and when she’d been able, Jackie walked down the gravel path that wound through the rose garden, past Donald’s pond and into the secluded corner where they’d laid Pete to rest. There was a bench there, and she would sit and talk to him for hours, about everything, about nothing, about her life with him, and her life with her other him.
To Jackie, it didn’t matter that this Pete hadn’t met her until those last hours at Canary Wharf. Perhaps, she thought, her first and second Petes were waiting in the same heaven for her to join them. She liked to think so. Despite the small inkling in the back of her mind that death without Rose nearby was impossible, the idea that her Petes waited for her together was the only hope she really had of seeing her daughter again.
*
The sound of Jackie’s bedroom door opening woke her up, and for a moment Jackie was surprised she’d fallen asleep again. She blinked in the sunlit room, wondering why she hadn’t woken to her mobile ringing. Rose called every morning, just as dawn broke, and it was clearly past that time now.
“Morning, Mum,” said Donald as he carried the breakfast tray into the room and set it on the dresser. Jackie watched as her son pushed back the curtains. Perhaps she hadn’t really woken in the middle of the night, unable to fall asleep again. “The storm’s blown away - you should smell the grass. Did the storm wake you?”
“My mobile didn’t ring,” said Jackie. “Donald, check my mobile.”
Donald tied back the curtains and leaned over to glance at the mobile. “No, doesn’t look like you missed any calls. Let’s get you up for breakfast, all right?” He expertly slid an arm under his mother’s shoulders and helped her sit up, rearranging the pillows behind her and pulling the blankets up over her lap. When Jackie was settled, he brought the tray and set it over her lap.
“Are you sure no one’s rung?”
“Yes, Mum,” said Donald patiently. “Make sure you eat everything.”
Jackie eyed the food. “I thought I wasn’t allowed eggs.”
“Today’s special, and I’m thinking the extra protein will give you some more strength. Call it doctor’s orders.” Donald collapsed onto a nearby chair and propped his feet on the bed, grinning at her. He was handsome, her son, blue eyes, close-cropped hair, and an affinity for dark leather jackets. He looked a little like Pete Tyler, really, and someone Jackie didn’t remember very well. All the same, when Jackie had learned that Donald intended to study medicine at university, she had laughed herself silly.
“What’s special about today?” Jackie picked up the spoon, nearly dropped it again, and clutched it harder on the second go.
“Surprise.”
“I haven’t forgotten a birthday?”
“Not one I know about. Are you going to eat your toast?”
Donald asked it every morning, and just like every morning, Jackie replied, “No.” He nicked the triangles from her tray and began to munch happily. The morning fell into its typical routine while he told her the gruesome tales from the emergency ward’s night shift. Jackie listened to her son talk, not paying terribly close attention, so she almost missed it when he began describing one of the patients.
“…we’re pretty sure it’s a trick, of course - something to do with a slipped pacemaker, maybe. Jones called it an advancement in the evolutionary process, but what does Jones know, she’s practically senile anyway.”
“What’s a trick?” asked Jackie, confused.
Donald popped the last bit of toast into his mouth. “Double heartbeat. Double hearts. Oddest thing, listening to it. You listen to one side of the chest, and boom boom boom, and the other side of the chest, you get boom boom boom. They were carting her off for X-rays when I was coming home, so I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow what was going on, but there’s a pool now, if it’s evolution like Jones says or just an echo.”
Jackie laid down her spoon, her own heart beating wildly. “Two hearts?”
“Thought we would have known about a body with two hearts before now. You have to think it would be written up in all the journals out there. How was your egg?”
Jackie looked down at her tray to discover the egg still sitting there, untouched. “What’s her name?”
Donald frowned. “You know I can’t tell you that, Mum. Doctor patient confidentiality. And anyway, I don’t know it, I wasn’t the attending and I was on my way out the door.”
“But you saw her?”
“A glimpse yeah - you tellin’ me you know a girl with two hearts, Mum?”
“Of course not, but-"
Somewhere below them, the doorbell rang, and Donald swung his feet off the bed. “That’ll be the day nurse; eat your egg, Mum, I’m going to let her in.”
Jackie tapped the hard-boiled egg with her fork, before slicing it neatly in two. Two bright yellow eyes looked back at her as the egg wobbled a little on the plate, perfect round circles, perfectly paired.
A pair of yolks, a pair of hearts.
Jackie set her fork down, unable to eat a bite, and waited for Donald to return with the nurse so that he could take the tray away.
*
The surprise arrived with lunch, shortly after noon. The mobile had remained deceptively quiet all morning, and Jackie was unable to concentrate on much of anything. The nurse, of course, noticed, and Jackie was sure something was said to Donald outside of her hearing, but she couldn’t be bothered about it. Rose was not ringing, and Rose had rung every morning at dawn like clockwork for several years.
“Hello, Mum!” said Jackie’s surprise cheerfully, carrying in the lunch tray, and Jackie looked up from her quiet mobile to see her younger daughter, Molly, at the foot of the bed.
“Molly,” breathed Jackie, almost forgetting the mobile in her lap. “But you’re in India!”
“Not in the last five days,” Molly said, setting the tray down on the floor. She crawled up from the foot of the bed to give her mother a hug. “Zeppelins take such a long time. Oof, you’re thin. Doesn’t Donald feed you?”
“Why are you here?” scolded Jackie. “You’re not supposed to be home for another four months.”
“Oh, got tired of India. A whole country without hamburgers, I don’t know how anyone can stand it. Donald stood me for the ticket and here I am.” Molly gave her mother a squeeze. “What do you think? Lovely surprise?”
“Very. Only, you didn’t need to come home.”
“Course not,” said Molly evenly, and she hopped off the bed to fetch the lunch tray. “Ugh, soup and toast. No wonder you’re so thin. I’ve been craving steak like mad.”
“When did you get in?”
“Oh, a few hours ago. Gavin’s going to take me for tea, d’you suppose he’ll be all right if tea consists of beef?”
“Let me look at you,” said Jackie, and Molly set the tray down again, grinning at her mother.
“I’m a mess, haven’t even showered for days,” she declared, but waited for her inspection anyway. Her dark blonde hair was cropped short and curly, and her brown eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. There was something else there, too, Jackie noted - Molly was hiding something in her eyes, in the easy way she turned in circles for her mother’s assessment. Molly moved quickly, always running from one place to the other. Now she seemed at rest, patient almost, calm and serene. At least, calm and serene as far as knee-high lace-up boots, denim skirt and purple zip-up sweatshirt with ragged patches could allow.
“Mum,” said Molly after a minute. “You’re staring.”
“You look lovely.”
“Do not,” said Molly, pleased. “Let’s toss your soup out the window, and I’ll sneak you out past Nurse Ratched and we’ll find something more palatable.”
“Soup will do me very nicely.”
“Suit yourself.” Molly set the tray over her mother’s lap. “I should have brought grapes.”
“Tell me about India.”
“Oh, I hate that. I never know how to begin.”
“All right. Tell me what time it is in India and what you’d be doing right now if you were there.”
Molly grinned and fell back onto the bed to answer without a moment’s hesitation. “Right now? Curry with Kirti and Mike….” Molly was off like a rocket, talking Jackie through her evening plans, and Jackie let her daughter’s voice wash over her without paying much attention to the words. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about Molly’s experiences, but that they were so foreign and unusual, Jackie didn’t feel she had any sort of reference for them. Rose had been the same, coming back from some journey with the Doctor, holding some trinket in her hand and full of unusual stories, none of which made much sense to Jackie.
Molly’s sudden reappearance ought to have been a happy event; instead, it merely reminded Jackie that her mobile had been silent all morning.
“Mum? Are you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening,” said Jackie. “How long are you staying?”
Molly shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Three weeks, four.” Her daughter’s lazy grin was almost infectious. “I might never go away again, how’s that, Mum?”
“You stay put? Never,” said Jackie. “Tell me more about the curry in India.” As soon as Molly was off again, Jackie closed her eyes. There was little doubt in her mind what Donald had said to his wayward, wanderlusting sister to make her come home.
*
The next visitor was Mickey Smith, and Jackie wasted no time in shooing everyone else out of the room.
“Mickey Smith,” demanded Jackie, looking him straight in the eye. “What have you done with the blue box?”
Mickey stared at Jackie for a moment, not comprehending. “What are you talking about, Jackie?”
“The one at Torchwood, the one you’re keeping safe for Rose. What did you do to it?”
Mickey sat heavily on the chair next to the bed. “Nothing, Jackie, nothing! I saw it two days ago, it’s fine. There’s so many safety combinations on that room, even I can’t get in without my own authorization.”
Jackie settled back on her pillow and nodded her head at the still silent mobile on the bedside table. “Rose didn’t ring this morning.”
Mickey frowned and reached for the mobile. “Let me see it.” She handed it to him, and he flipped it open. He pressed the buttons as if looking for something, flipped it over to check the battery, and then pressed a few more buttons. After a moment, the mobile in his pocket began to ring.
“Well, your mobile is dialing out,” he said finally. “The history on it shows no incoming call this morning, so you haven’t missed one. It also shows the incoming calls from the previous two weeks. All very regular, every morning near 5:30.” Mickey frowned, looking up at Jackie. “Odd that she’d have the timing so exact, isn’t it, when the flow still shifts one way or the other?”
“Perhaps it’s stabilized.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Mickey, but didn’t elaborate. “Perhaps something happened to the crossroads on their end?”
Jackie’s heart thudded. “Mickey.”
Mickey dug into his pocket for his phone. “He gave me a number, once - the Doctor did, I mean. Said to ring him if I ever thought-" He glanced up at Jackie, briefly, before flipping his phone open and beginning to hit the numbers with his thumb. “I’ll try ringing through, and see if he answers.”
“No. Not until…Mickey,” said Jackie. “There’s a woman at hospital, Donald told me about her. She has two hearts.”
Mickey paused before hitting the last number. “Two hearts?”
“Donald didn’t catch her name. He doesn’t know anything about her, really, he was heading home when she was being examined. Only - two hearts, Mickey. I’ve never heard of anyone having two hearts, except for the Doctor.”
Mickey flipped the phone shut. He stared at Jackie as if he’d never seen her before in his life. “I should go talk to her.”
“Why do you think I told you?”
Mickey swallowed. “You don’t think-"
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Another Time Lord?”
Jackie closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “Just tell me what she says.”
Jump to Chapter Three