Crossroads - A Blue Gravel Path (6/13)
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 ~ Chapter Three ~ Chapter Four ~ Chapter Five
Chapter Six: A Woman Not Rose..... As Director of Torchwood, Mickey Smith doesn’t often investigate the aliens who invade Earth. He’s making a special exception for this one.
Chapter Six: A Woman Not Rose
Mickey Smith had not forgotten Rose Tyler, but he was ashamed to admit he did not think of her as often as he once had. He had trouble remembering her face sometimes, and often grew confused about when she had been with them in the parallel world, and for how long. Sometimes he remembered her present at events when no one else did. Most everyone laughed and teased him, saying the Director of Torchwood couldn’t possibly be losing his memory so soon. Mickey laughed with them, but after a while he simply did not mention Rose at all, to anyone. If he remembered her being present, he didn’t say. It was easier to leave her out of things than have others question his sanity.
He knew, of course, that Rose continued to talk to Jackie on a daily basis. The intervening thirty years since Rose’s disappearance had brought some significant advances in the fields of technological science, particularly in the world of measuring and evaluating alien tech. For the past ten years, the blue box in Room Negative 27 had been under close surveillance, its previously unreadable measurements catalogued and recorded for Mickey’s private evaluation. The box remained stable, and in its stability, had become just a bit more active, particularly in the early morning hours, which Mickey later realized corresponded with every one of Rose’s phone calls to her mother.
However, Mickey had not actually seen the blue box for some time, and so after leaving the Tyler residence, after having assured Jackie Tyler that the box was safe and untouched, he immediately went to ensure it was so.
He barely glanced at the trunk in the corner, where the leftovers of his frantic rescue were still safely locked away. The box was not humming - hadn’t hummed in years. Mickey wondered what Rose’s last moments were like, before she fell through it - had she seen something there, and followed it? Or had she tripped, and lost her balance? Mickey had never thought to ask. He supposed it didn’t really matter; the Doctor had been there to catch her.
Funny, that. Rose might have been clever and capable, but she always needed someone to catch her in the end. Mickey had caught her after the debacle with Jimmy Stone. Pete Tyler had caught her from falling into the Void at Canary Wharf. Mickey remembered a story about the famous Captain Jack Harkness catching Rose when she fell off a barrage balloon in 1941. Mickey wondered if she’d needed catching since the Doctor had done it on the other end of the blue box.
Mickey glanced at the sensometer, sitting quietly on the floor near the blue box. It went about its business, recording and measuring, but Mickey knew that there hadn’t been a spike on its charts in two days, not since the last time Rose had called Jackie. A corresponding meter in his private office would have told him of any such activity. If the woman at the hospital was Rose Tyler, she hadn’t come home through the crossroads.
Mickey gave the blue box a long stare, and wondered.
*
Jackie Tyler would have been pleased to see Mickey’s top-floor office. There was a view of London through the large plate-glass windows. The bookshelves were neatly organized and spacious. Best of all, the floor was covered in a lush, dark red carpet. It was an office that befitted the director of Torchwood, and it took Mickey nearly three months before he finally came to terms with it actually being his.
Still, it usually gave him something of a thrill to see how others reacted to it. The young Torchwood physician who waited for his return from Room Negative 27 was completely tongue-tied and instantly nervous to have been caught alone in the director’s office, much less sitting on a chair provided for visitors. Mickey held out his hand for the boy to shake.
“I’m Mr. Smith,” said Mickey. “I believe you are Eric Jenson?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Jenson shook Mickey’s hand, and did not let go immediately.
“I’m told you can brief me on the woman at Princess Grace Hospital.”
“Oh, yes, fascinating case,” said Jenson, still shaking Mickey’s hand, and Mickey gave him a quick squeeze, which seemed to shake the doctor out of his reverie. Jenson dropped the hand, and laughed nervously. “Fascinating. At approximately 4:30 a.m. yesterday morning, a woman was brought into the emergency care ward, suffering from extreme hypothermia, dehydration, and labored breathing. She was semi-conscious but quickly slipped into a coma, which is when the physicians on duty discovered that she had two functioning hearts. There is some evidence of oddities with her respiratory system as well, but otherwise she appears to be human in form.”
Jenson seemed to calm down as he spoke, the comforting medical jargon giving him some sort of life raft in an unusual location. Mickey had seen it many times in the two years since he’d become the director, and he knew how to use it.
“We don’t believe she is human, do we?”
“Not unless she’s taken an evolutionary leap, but if she’s alien - and we believe she is - we have yet to identify her. There are simply no records of any sort of species with her particular physiology.”
“She has not regained consciousness?”
“No. We - if I may be blunt, sir?” Mickey nodded, and Jenson continued. “We believe she’s dying.”
Mickey raised an eyebrow. “You cannot identify her, and yet you have reason to think she is dying? How do you know this isn’t her general biological state?”
The doctor steadied himself on the nearby chair. “Sir,” he said, his unease showing through again, “we are certain. Her systems have been growing steadily weaker since we first began monitoring her. She produces no brain patterns and makes no movement. She is unresponsive to every test we have been able to do. Her temperature has been going down at a steady rate and her hearts show clear signs of stress. Her entire body is breaking down. We very much doubt if she will ever wake to tell us so much as her name.”
Rose.
Mickey shook his head - the woman was not, could not be Rose. It was impossible. Rose was in a parallel world, thirty years behind the rest of them. She was with the Doctor, safe in the TARDIS.
And Rose was human.
“Take me to her,” said Mickey.
*
Princess Grace Hospital wasn’t the most convenient to Torchwood Tower, but it was one of the few private hospitals in London where secure rooms were located, where patients of questionable origin could be safely kept until they could be relocated to the tower itself, which had its own medical facility, to include doctors, nurses, and any number of useful instruments and machines. The woman with two hearts, however, was in such a fragile state, when it came time for her to be transferred to Torchwood, her first stop would likely be the morgue.
Dr. Jenson led the way down the blue and white hall, whisking by open doorways and nurses’ stations with a quick gait before stopping at a closed door. He pressed his Torchwood badge against the card reader on the doorframe, and with a soft click, the door swung open. The room behind it was dark, with a single light shining onto a single bed, in which lay the woman.
Not Rose.
Mickey walked into the room, eyes focused on her. She was old, her skin feathery and transparent, her hair thin and white, crushed by her slumber, but surely it had floated like a halo when she was well. The hospital blankets were draped over her, and she was so thin they nearly lay flat on the bed. Numerous machines surrounded her, each buzzing or beeping in a symphony only they could follow.
Mickey gripped the rails alongside the bed and closed his eyes, lowering his head. He hadn’t really expected to see Rose there, but somehow knowing for certain that it was not her brought a profound disappointment. It didn’t answer any of the other questions, of course, but nonetheless, despite the report of the woman’s imminent death, he couldn’t help but wish it had been Rose, just so that he could have closed the books on her one last time.
“We know nothing about her, nothing at all?” said Mickey gruffly.
“Not really. She was found in Regent’s Park, near the lake. Apparently she was incoherent, speaking a mix of languages. English, Greek, Russian, and a few alien tongues - Sycorax and Nestene among them, and those are the ones I can pronounce out of what was recognized.”
“What did she say?”
“That’s the trouble, bits of flotsam and jetsam, nonsense really. She was apologizing, mostly, and sometimes cursing. She might have been calling for someone, but we can’t be sure. There wasn’t time for translators or transcribers, all we have to go on are the witness accounts, because within minutes of entering the hospital, she lost consciousness.”
The door opened, but Mickey didn’t notice it. “I thought we had someone on staff.”
“Doctor Jones called us the minute the second heart was found.”
“He should have called us sooner,” snapped Mickey.
“There wasn’t much point,” said a cool, female voice, and Mickey turned to see a woman standing in the doorway, lit by the hallway behind her. He couldn’t make out her face until the door slid shut again, and his eyes refocused in the dim light. She was tall, he noticed, and her dark hair was pulled into a low ponytail. She might have been near Mickey’s age. There were faint lines around her dark eyes, and she did not look one bit amused.
“Doctor Jones?” asked Mickey.
“Director Smith,” replied Dr Jones. “Fancy seeing you here. I would think you’d have better things to do than witness the death of a medical oddity.”
“Hardly a medical oddity, Dr Jones. You’re certain she won’t wake?”
Dr Jones didn’t answer him immediately; instead, she walked over to the patient and felt her wrist for a pulse, eyes on the clock as she counted. Mickey watched her closely, wondering why he hadn’t caught any whiff of perfume, but he supposed she spent too much time in the hospital to smell like anything but soap and rubbing alcohol. She didn’t wear any jewelry, save for the thin gold necklace and a thin gold ring on her right ring finger.
Dr Jones sighed when she was done reading the pulse, and straightened the covers over the woman. “Is it so important to you that she wakes up?”
“I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”
She shrugged, turning to look at him. “Nothing is certain in medicine, Mr. Smith. I can only tell you what I believe, and I believe the patient will die in the next 24 hours. It’s highly unlikely she will regain consciousness. I’ve had experience with alien life forms, but while hers is new to me, it’s not entirely unfamiliar. She resembles humans quite a bit, in her general structure, apart from a few key differences. I’m certain she is dying, Mr. Smith, even if medical science is not.”
Mickey closed his eyes, the disappointment rolling over him. It wasn’t Rose in the bed, but nonetheless he couldn’t help but feel that the woman might have been a link slipping through his fingers. All he could do was watch her die.
“Mr. Smith?”
Mickey looked back at Dr Jones, who watched him with a worried frown. “It’s nothing, Dr Jones.”
She clearly hadn’t been expecting his reaction. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you better news.”
“We don’t even know her name,” said Mickey grimly. “There’s nothing we have to go on, to learn who she is.”
Dr Jones took a step closer to stand alongside him. “Actually - I think we might know something.”
Mickey’s eyes were sharp. “Tell me.”
“She was barely conscious when she came in - mostly moaning, but I thought I heard her say something before she slipped into the coma. There’s no other identification, and it’s not really a name, but we’ve had no other for her.”
Mickey tried to rein in the sudden hope he felt - perhaps there was still a chance, a last message. She might have said anything - she might have said everything. “What did she say?”
“Just one word,” said Dr Jones. “At least, one in the dozen or so that I recognized. It’s not even English.”
“Dr Jones - tell me what she said.”
Dr Jones looked from the woman in the bed to the man standing next to her. Before she even spoke, Mickey felt his hopes dashed to the floor.
“Theta. She said theta.”
*
Mickey Smith did not like the Torchwood library, but he spent the night there anyway. The task of determining what “theta” meant, apart from a Greek letter, was too important to either give to one of the junior staff or to let wait until morning. It wasn’t as if Mickey planned to sleep anyway - his nerves were shot, and his mind raced in a way it hadn’t done since he’d had part of himself on the other side of the blue box in Room Negative 27.
There was not very much in the Torchwood files on an entity or being called Theta, not in the previous 150 years. Mickey’s eyes burned from staring too long at the computer screen, and he was beginning to think nothing existed at all. Perhaps the woman had been reciting the alphabet. Perhaps she hadn’t realized she’d said anything resembling an actual word.
“Theta” was a stupid name for an alien, anyway.
Mickey walked around the library’s reading room, trying to stretch the cramp in his legs. It was a beautiful old room, circular in the same style as most grand library rooms across the western world, windowless and dark, with catwalks stretching overhead. It was while Mickey was walking along the catwalk that he happened to look down at the peculiar design of the shelving that circled the desks below. The shelves were arranged in a circular pattern, enclosing the desks within as they followed the exterior walls. The circle was broken by a bright green carpet running straight through it, denoting the only path leading in or out of the reading room.
It resembled the Greek letter theta.
Mickey flew down the circular steps at the end of the catwalk and quickly walked along the bookshelves, although he couldn’t see anything particularly noteworthy about them. As far as he knew, they’d always been placed there, and there were no secret compartments or messages in them. When Mickey completed his circuit, he went straight to the center desk, where normally a librarian kept watch. As it was nearing 2 a.m., however, the desk was empty, but there was still a telephone number clearly posted for emergencies. Mickey didn’t stop to consider what might constitute an emergency at 2 a.m.; when one was the director of Torchwood, anything could be an emergency. He picked up the telephone and dialed.
“Cooper,” said the half-asleep voice after half a dozen rings.
“Why are the shelves in the reading room placed as they are?” demanded Mickey.
Cooper, whoever she was, did not seem the least bit fazed at the oddness of the question; perhaps she’d had stranger ones in the middle of the night. “It’s the original design of the library. We can’t move them; they’re fixed to the floor. Devil of a time replacing the hardwood when the place flooded two years ago.”
“When was the library built?”
“Turn of the last century, I think. 1899? Before Queen Victoria died anyway, she apparently approved the design herself. It’s in one of the histories on Torchwood - Room B, Lane 46, Shelf 5, if you want it.”
Mickey couldn’t help but be impressed. “Thanks,” he said before hanging up the phone, and thought that if Cooper was right about the shelf, he’d see about giving her a promotion, or at least someone else to do the evening call-duty.
Mickey found the histories of Torchwood exactly where Cooper had said they were, and he collected the ten volumes off the shelf and carried them back into the reading room. He went straight to the building of Torchwood Tower, skipping the preambles and charters and the rest, and after about five minutes, found a single line:
Queen Victoria particularly approved of the shape of the library, and its inclusion of the Greek letter theta, which had of course been present when she founded the Institution twenty years previously.
Mickey flipped backwards through the book, immediately switching tactics, and found the chapter outlining the origins of Torchwood. It wasn’t long before he found another passage of interest.
It was then that Queen Victoria found herself with the two mysterious strangers. They seemed more intrigued by the werewolf than the possibility of escape. Indeed, while they sped the Queen to safety, they laughed as though in the midst of a merry chase, coaxing the wolf ever closer, until at last the small party consisted of only the Queen herself, the man with the Northern accent known only as Theta, and the woman with the long, dark hair.
Mickey turned the page, and a drawing stared up at him. The caption indicated it was the man known as Theta and his unnamed female companion. There could be no mistaking the sharp edges of his face, the close-cropped hair, or the ears that sat like handles on a jug. Even the leather jacket was the same: it was the Doctor, as Mickey first knew him. The woman was familiar only as a younger form of the woman who lay dying at Princess Grace Hospital, but Mickey’s eyes were focused squarely on the Doctor.
Theta. If Mickey had any doubt left, it was gone now. The woman had called for the Doctor, using the name Theta for some reason. Perhaps that was his name, or at least the name she knew him by. Mickey tore his eyes away from the picture and kept reading, shaking his head as he went. The sense of déjà vu was overpowering - but in his version, it was the other Doctor, the pinstriped pretty boy who had bested the beast, and he’d done it with a blonde girl named Rose.
Parallel universes, not so different from each other. Mickey wondered why he’d never questioned how far back the differences went. They hadn’t seemed so deep...but clearly, this world had split from the world he’d been born into long enough ago that it was a different Doctor, a different companion, who inspired the creation of Torchwood.
Mickey rested his head on the book and listened to his own breath. There could be only two explanations, and Mickey didn’t know which was correct: either this Doctor was Mickey’s Doctor from before he met Rose, or - and this is the theory that Mickey believed - he was a different version of that Doctor, one who had lived in this world all along.
The Doctor had been so sure there was only one of him...but he had been sure of lots of things - the impossibility of Rose Tyler’s return chief among them. That a second Doctor might exist did not surprise Mickey in the least.
Mickey didn’t know why this Doctor, who called himself Theta, traveled with this woman, or how he’d come to be in the parallel world, or where he could be found. The only person who could answer Mickey’s questions lay in a hospital bed, hours from death.
*
It was an hour before dawn, and the hospital was silent. Mickey sat on the chair next to the woman’s bed and watched her labored breathing, so shallow that he almost couldn’t see her chest rise and fall. The machines around her had long since been silenced, and no nurses had stopped by in several hours. It wasn’t that they were not attentive, but that Mickey had asked them to stop coming. Nothing would save the woman now. There was little need to disturb her rest.
An hour before dawn - across the city, Mickey knew, Jackie was waiting for her mobile to ring, but he had an idea that Rose would not be calling that day, either. It was the third day Rose would not call her mother, and Mickey intended to go to Jackie as soon as the woman died, so that he could tell her what he did not know. He wasn’t sure if he would mention the Doctor, or the mysterious Theta. He imagined he would think of something when he got there.
“Just one question,” Mickey said aloud, his voice a whisper in the darkened room. “That’s all I really need, just the answer to one question. Where is the Doctor, the one you call Theta? Why did he leave you?”
A breeze brushed the back of his neck, and Mickey turned to see the door opening as Dr. Jones entered the room. She stopped partway, staring at Mickey. “Oh - I didn’t think anyone was here,” she stammered, the light from the hall spilling in around her.
“Thought someone should sit with her,” explained Mickey. “Do you need to-?” He waved his hand at the machines, and Dr Jones shook her head.
“No, there’s nothing I can do. I was going to sit with her, but if you’d rather-"
“It’s all right, if you want to stay.”
The doctor smiled at him, shyly, and let the door close quietly behind her as she pulled up a chair next to him. “Did you find what you needed?”
“No,” said Mickey. “Only more questions she can’t answer. I believe I know what she was - a race called the Time Lords, but they’re long since extinct.”
“So she’s the last?”
“It would seem so, but I believe she had a companion at one time. A man I knew - or thought I did. I’d hoped she could tell me what happened to him.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dr Jones quietly.
“Yes, well - I’ll never know. Gotten used to never knowing, really. One can’t know every outcome of every possibility in the world. This or any other.”
Another breeze brushed the back of his neck, and Mickey turned again, but the door remained closed.
“I understand perfectly,” sighed Dr Jones with a slight smile. “I just wish more of my patients did. Explain to a cancer patient trying to choose between one treatment or another that you can’t know for sure what will happen in either case - not for certain, anyway.”
“You said something like that earlier.”
“Did I? I suppose I’ve stopped believing in certainties. I didn’t think the director of Torchwood would ever step foot in this room, but here you sit.”
“Here I sit,” repeated Mickey softly, turning his attention to the woman on the bed.
“I - I hope I’m not being too rude, but if you don’t mind me asking - you said you knew her companion?”
Mickey hesitated. “In a way, I did. I traveled with him for a little while. It’s how I came here, actually. It was an accident, at first, landing here. I decided to stay.”
“Oh - I thought - your accent was London.”
Mickey laughed once, sharply. “I was born in London. Just not this London. A different London, on a parallel world, one where Time Lords existed. Well, he existed. He was the last in that world. I suppose she’s the last in this world. Her companion, the one she called Theta - I think he was this world’s version of the man I knew.” He sighed, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck stand in the breeze, and glanced at the doctor sitting beside him. Her expression was masked in the dark. “I must sound a little mad to you. I’m not. I don’t usually tell people I come from a different version of London.”
“I can understand why not,” said the doctor quietly. “It does sound a bit far-fetched. What happened to him? This Time Lord of yours?”
“He went back. Saw him once, three years later. I haven’t seen him in thirty years, but I know someone who wants to talk with him quite badly. Her daughter traveled with him - still does, or should. I’d like to think this woman’s Theta could help me. It’s complicated.”
“Sounds it,” said Dr Jones. One of the machines began to beep softly, and she quickly sprang to her feet to look at it, before turning to Mickey with a hollow look in her eyes. “Mr Smith - it’s time.”
Mickey stood and took the dying woman’s hand in his. Her skin was cold to the touch - he wasn’t sure how a person could be so cold yet still alive. Every breath she took caught in her throat, and Mickey leaned close, watching the clear struggle on her face.
She was not Rose. But Mickey thought she must have been beautiful, once, in a way that the drawing in the library book couldn’t show. And she’d traveled with him, her Theta - they’d laughed and joked together, much in the same way that the Doctor had done - did do - would always do - with Rose. Mickey felt such a rush of certainty, holding her hand, that despite the deep disappointment which came with it, he managed to speak the words she needed to hear.
“It’s all right,” he whispered to her. “I don’t know who you are, or what you were to him. But if he isn’t here, he must be dead - he’s waiting for you. I’m sure of it.”
The woman let out a last breath, long and deep, and moved no more. Mickey felt something change in her hand - as though the spark of life slipped out of her in her breath and floated away. He looked at Dr Jones, who stood near the machine, watching silently.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice thick, and Mickey nodded, unable to speak for a moment. He rested his free hand on the woman’s forehead, and then pulled away, shoving his hands into his pockets before turning to leave the room.
In the shadows, just beside the door, stood a figure that made Mickey freeze.
She was tall and thin, with long, dark hair, and large green eyes. She wore a shift-like dress that had no color to it, but that might have been because she had little color to her at all, apart from the eyes that burned into Mickey as though searching his soul. Mickey stood completely still, watching her. He wasn’t sure entirely how the woman stood there, when she had just died in the bed behind him, but he knew without a doubt that he was looking at a younger version of the mysterious woman.
“Hello,” he said finally, and the woman took a step forward. She wasn’t quite transparent, but she wasn’t corporeal either; Mickey could only barely see the walls behind her.
“How did you come here?” she asked. Her voice wasn’t quite transparent either; it sounded full and complete, as though she really existed. Mickey supposed she really did, in a way. “To this world - from your own?”
“The Doctor brought me in the TARDIS. We slipped through a hole in the Void. He went back and closed it.”
The woman wrapped her arms around herself. “You know the Doctor?”
Mickey’s heart began to thump; he could hear the blood in his ears. “You know him?”
She nodded, rubbing her hands against her upper arms. “Yes, I-"
“Where is he? Why did you call him Theta? Why isn’t he here?”
She shook her head. “No - you don’t understand. That’s - that’s not exactly me in that bed. I didn’t call him Theta. She did.”
“You’re her,” Dr Jones interrupted. Mickey had forgotten Dr Jones was even in the room; he didn’t dare look away from the woman in the corner, for fear she would vanish into the cold air. “You’re her, aren’t you?”
“No,” repeated the woman, her gaze now resting on Dr Jones. “I was her once, but then - she journeyed on a different path than I did. Her path brought her here, to this world, this hospital, this death. My path - it took me to a parallel world, a different world, a different death.” The woman looked back at Mickey. “In that world, there was a man named the Doctor. And I loved him, but he left me. He lived on, when all the rest of us died. It was as it should have been, but I wanted to see something different. So I came here, to this world, to see what might have been, if I’d stayed with him. This is how it would have ended for me, dying alone in a hospital bed - not quite so different.”
“I don’t understand,” said Dr Jones.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said the woman. “But I think Mr Smith might. Don’t you, Mr Smith?”
“You’re from my world,” said Mickey. “Aren’t you?”
She smiled then. “Yes. I think so.”
“Who are you?”
The woman glanced at the older, other version of herself for a moment, considering. “In this world, I am no one; I am the outcome of a chance not taken. A ghostly possibility, I think that’s what she would have called me. But in your world - the world into which I was born and died - the Doctor called me Carissa.”
Wondering why Carissa rings a bell? Here’s where you can refresh your memory.
Jump to Chapter Seven (where the mystery of Carissa will also be explained further).
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 ~ Chapter Three ~ Chapter Four ~ Chapter Five
Chapter Six: A Woman Not Rose..... As Director of Torchwood, Mickey Smith doesn’t often investigate the aliens who invade Earth. He’s making a special exception for this one.
Chapter Six: A Woman Not Rose
Mickey Smith had not forgotten Rose Tyler, but he was ashamed to admit he did not think of her as often as he once had. He had trouble remembering her face sometimes, and often grew confused about when she had been with them in the parallel world, and for how long. Sometimes he remembered her present at events when no one else did. Most everyone laughed and teased him, saying the Director of Torchwood couldn’t possibly be losing his memory so soon. Mickey laughed with them, but after a while he simply did not mention Rose at all, to anyone. If he remembered her being present, he didn’t say. It was easier to leave her out of things than have others question his sanity.
He knew, of course, that Rose continued to talk to Jackie on a daily basis. The intervening thirty years since Rose’s disappearance had brought some significant advances in the fields of technological science, particularly in the world of measuring and evaluating alien tech. For the past ten years, the blue box in Room Negative 27 had been under close surveillance, its previously unreadable measurements catalogued and recorded for Mickey’s private evaluation. The box remained stable, and in its stability, had become just a bit more active, particularly in the early morning hours, which Mickey later realized corresponded with every one of Rose’s phone calls to her mother.
However, Mickey had not actually seen the blue box for some time, and so after leaving the Tyler residence, after having assured Jackie Tyler that the box was safe and untouched, he immediately went to ensure it was so.
He barely glanced at the trunk in the corner, where the leftovers of his frantic rescue were still safely locked away. The box was not humming - hadn’t hummed in years. Mickey wondered what Rose’s last moments were like, before she fell through it - had she seen something there, and followed it? Or had she tripped, and lost her balance? Mickey had never thought to ask. He supposed it didn’t really matter; the Doctor had been there to catch her.
Funny, that. Rose might have been clever and capable, but she always needed someone to catch her in the end. Mickey had caught her after the debacle with Jimmy Stone. Pete Tyler had caught her from falling into the Void at Canary Wharf. Mickey remembered a story about the famous Captain Jack Harkness catching Rose when she fell off a barrage balloon in 1941. Mickey wondered if she’d needed catching since the Doctor had done it on the other end of the blue box.
Mickey glanced at the sensometer, sitting quietly on the floor near the blue box. It went about its business, recording and measuring, but Mickey knew that there hadn’t been a spike on its charts in two days, not since the last time Rose had called Jackie. A corresponding meter in his private office would have told him of any such activity. If the woman at the hospital was Rose Tyler, she hadn’t come home through the crossroads.
Mickey gave the blue box a long stare, and wondered.
*
Jackie Tyler would have been pleased to see Mickey’s top-floor office. There was a view of London through the large plate-glass windows. The bookshelves were neatly organized and spacious. Best of all, the floor was covered in a lush, dark red carpet. It was an office that befitted the director of Torchwood, and it took Mickey nearly three months before he finally came to terms with it actually being his.
Still, it usually gave him something of a thrill to see how others reacted to it. The young Torchwood physician who waited for his return from Room Negative 27 was completely tongue-tied and instantly nervous to have been caught alone in the director’s office, much less sitting on a chair provided for visitors. Mickey held out his hand for the boy to shake.
“I’m Mr. Smith,” said Mickey. “I believe you are Eric Jenson?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Jenson shook Mickey’s hand, and did not let go immediately.
“I’m told you can brief me on the woman at Princess Grace Hospital.”
“Oh, yes, fascinating case,” said Jenson, still shaking Mickey’s hand, and Mickey gave him a quick squeeze, which seemed to shake the doctor out of his reverie. Jenson dropped the hand, and laughed nervously. “Fascinating. At approximately 4:30 a.m. yesterday morning, a woman was brought into the emergency care ward, suffering from extreme hypothermia, dehydration, and labored breathing. She was semi-conscious but quickly slipped into a coma, which is when the physicians on duty discovered that she had two functioning hearts. There is some evidence of oddities with her respiratory system as well, but otherwise she appears to be human in form.”
Jenson seemed to calm down as he spoke, the comforting medical jargon giving him some sort of life raft in an unusual location. Mickey had seen it many times in the two years since he’d become the director, and he knew how to use it.
“We don’t believe she is human, do we?”
“Not unless she’s taken an evolutionary leap, but if she’s alien - and we believe she is - we have yet to identify her. There are simply no records of any sort of species with her particular physiology.”
“She has not regained consciousness?”
“No. We - if I may be blunt, sir?” Mickey nodded, and Jenson continued. “We believe she’s dying.”
Mickey raised an eyebrow. “You cannot identify her, and yet you have reason to think she is dying? How do you know this isn’t her general biological state?”
The doctor steadied himself on the nearby chair. “Sir,” he said, his unease showing through again, “we are certain. Her systems have been growing steadily weaker since we first began monitoring her. She produces no brain patterns and makes no movement. She is unresponsive to every test we have been able to do. Her temperature has been going down at a steady rate and her hearts show clear signs of stress. Her entire body is breaking down. We very much doubt if she will ever wake to tell us so much as her name.”
Rose.
Mickey shook his head - the woman was not, could not be Rose. It was impossible. Rose was in a parallel world, thirty years behind the rest of them. She was with the Doctor, safe in the TARDIS.
And Rose was human.
“Take me to her,” said Mickey.
*
Princess Grace Hospital wasn’t the most convenient to Torchwood Tower, but it was one of the few private hospitals in London where secure rooms were located, where patients of questionable origin could be safely kept until they could be relocated to the tower itself, which had its own medical facility, to include doctors, nurses, and any number of useful instruments and machines. The woman with two hearts, however, was in such a fragile state, when it came time for her to be transferred to Torchwood, her first stop would likely be the morgue.
Dr. Jenson led the way down the blue and white hall, whisking by open doorways and nurses’ stations with a quick gait before stopping at a closed door. He pressed his Torchwood badge against the card reader on the doorframe, and with a soft click, the door swung open. The room behind it was dark, with a single light shining onto a single bed, in which lay the woman.
Not Rose.
Mickey walked into the room, eyes focused on her. She was old, her skin feathery and transparent, her hair thin and white, crushed by her slumber, but surely it had floated like a halo when she was well. The hospital blankets were draped over her, and she was so thin they nearly lay flat on the bed. Numerous machines surrounded her, each buzzing or beeping in a symphony only they could follow.
Mickey gripped the rails alongside the bed and closed his eyes, lowering his head. He hadn’t really expected to see Rose there, but somehow knowing for certain that it was not her brought a profound disappointment. It didn’t answer any of the other questions, of course, but nonetheless, despite the report of the woman’s imminent death, he couldn’t help but wish it had been Rose, just so that he could have closed the books on her one last time.
“We know nothing about her, nothing at all?” said Mickey gruffly.
“Not really. She was found in Regent’s Park, near the lake. Apparently she was incoherent, speaking a mix of languages. English, Greek, Russian, and a few alien tongues - Sycorax and Nestene among them, and those are the ones I can pronounce out of what was recognized.”
“What did she say?”
“That’s the trouble, bits of flotsam and jetsam, nonsense really. She was apologizing, mostly, and sometimes cursing. She might have been calling for someone, but we can’t be sure. There wasn’t time for translators or transcribers, all we have to go on are the witness accounts, because within minutes of entering the hospital, she lost consciousness.”
The door opened, but Mickey didn’t notice it. “I thought we had someone on staff.”
“Doctor Jones called us the minute the second heart was found.”
“He should have called us sooner,” snapped Mickey.
“There wasn’t much point,” said a cool, female voice, and Mickey turned to see a woman standing in the doorway, lit by the hallway behind her. He couldn’t make out her face until the door slid shut again, and his eyes refocused in the dim light. She was tall, he noticed, and her dark hair was pulled into a low ponytail. She might have been near Mickey’s age. There were faint lines around her dark eyes, and she did not look one bit amused.
“Doctor Jones?” asked Mickey.
“Director Smith,” replied Dr Jones. “Fancy seeing you here. I would think you’d have better things to do than witness the death of a medical oddity.”
“Hardly a medical oddity, Dr Jones. You’re certain she won’t wake?”
Dr Jones didn’t answer him immediately; instead, she walked over to the patient and felt her wrist for a pulse, eyes on the clock as she counted. Mickey watched her closely, wondering why he hadn’t caught any whiff of perfume, but he supposed she spent too much time in the hospital to smell like anything but soap and rubbing alcohol. She didn’t wear any jewelry, save for the thin gold necklace and a thin gold ring on her right ring finger.
Dr Jones sighed when she was done reading the pulse, and straightened the covers over the woman. “Is it so important to you that she wakes up?”
“I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”
She shrugged, turning to look at him. “Nothing is certain in medicine, Mr. Smith. I can only tell you what I believe, and I believe the patient will die in the next 24 hours. It’s highly unlikely she will regain consciousness. I’ve had experience with alien life forms, but while hers is new to me, it’s not entirely unfamiliar. She resembles humans quite a bit, in her general structure, apart from a few key differences. I’m certain she is dying, Mr. Smith, even if medical science is not.”
Mickey closed his eyes, the disappointment rolling over him. It wasn’t Rose in the bed, but nonetheless he couldn’t help but feel that the woman might have been a link slipping through his fingers. All he could do was watch her die.
“Mr. Smith?”
Mickey looked back at Dr Jones, who watched him with a worried frown. “It’s nothing, Dr Jones.”
She clearly hadn’t been expecting his reaction. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you better news.”
“We don’t even know her name,” said Mickey grimly. “There’s nothing we have to go on, to learn who she is.”
Dr Jones took a step closer to stand alongside him. “Actually - I think we might know something.”
Mickey’s eyes were sharp. “Tell me.”
“She was barely conscious when she came in - mostly moaning, but I thought I heard her say something before she slipped into the coma. There’s no other identification, and it’s not really a name, but we’ve had no other for her.”
Mickey tried to rein in the sudden hope he felt - perhaps there was still a chance, a last message. She might have said anything - she might have said everything. “What did she say?”
“Just one word,” said Dr Jones. “At least, one in the dozen or so that I recognized. It’s not even English.”
“Dr Jones - tell me what she said.”
Dr Jones looked from the woman in the bed to the man standing next to her. Before she even spoke, Mickey felt his hopes dashed to the floor.
“Theta. She said theta.”
*
Mickey Smith did not like the Torchwood library, but he spent the night there anyway. The task of determining what “theta” meant, apart from a Greek letter, was too important to either give to one of the junior staff or to let wait until morning. It wasn’t as if Mickey planned to sleep anyway - his nerves were shot, and his mind raced in a way it hadn’t done since he’d had part of himself on the other side of the blue box in Room Negative 27.
There was not very much in the Torchwood files on an entity or being called Theta, not in the previous 150 years. Mickey’s eyes burned from staring too long at the computer screen, and he was beginning to think nothing existed at all. Perhaps the woman had been reciting the alphabet. Perhaps she hadn’t realized she’d said anything resembling an actual word.
“Theta” was a stupid name for an alien, anyway.
Mickey walked around the library’s reading room, trying to stretch the cramp in his legs. It was a beautiful old room, circular in the same style as most grand library rooms across the western world, windowless and dark, with catwalks stretching overhead. It was while Mickey was walking along the catwalk that he happened to look down at the peculiar design of the shelving that circled the desks below. The shelves were arranged in a circular pattern, enclosing the desks within as they followed the exterior walls. The circle was broken by a bright green carpet running straight through it, denoting the only path leading in or out of the reading room.
It resembled the Greek letter theta.
Mickey flew down the circular steps at the end of the catwalk and quickly walked along the bookshelves, although he couldn’t see anything particularly noteworthy about them. As far as he knew, they’d always been placed there, and there were no secret compartments or messages in them. When Mickey completed his circuit, he went straight to the center desk, where normally a librarian kept watch. As it was nearing 2 a.m., however, the desk was empty, but there was still a telephone number clearly posted for emergencies. Mickey didn’t stop to consider what might constitute an emergency at 2 a.m.; when one was the director of Torchwood, anything could be an emergency. He picked up the telephone and dialed.
“Cooper,” said the half-asleep voice after half a dozen rings.
“Why are the shelves in the reading room placed as they are?” demanded Mickey.
Cooper, whoever she was, did not seem the least bit fazed at the oddness of the question; perhaps she’d had stranger ones in the middle of the night. “It’s the original design of the library. We can’t move them; they’re fixed to the floor. Devil of a time replacing the hardwood when the place flooded two years ago.”
“When was the library built?”
“Turn of the last century, I think. 1899? Before Queen Victoria died anyway, she apparently approved the design herself. It’s in one of the histories on Torchwood - Room B, Lane 46, Shelf 5, if you want it.”
Mickey couldn’t help but be impressed. “Thanks,” he said before hanging up the phone, and thought that if Cooper was right about the shelf, he’d see about giving her a promotion, or at least someone else to do the evening call-duty.
Mickey found the histories of Torchwood exactly where Cooper had said they were, and he collected the ten volumes off the shelf and carried them back into the reading room. He went straight to the building of Torchwood Tower, skipping the preambles and charters and the rest, and after about five minutes, found a single line:
Queen Victoria particularly approved of the shape of the library, and its inclusion of the Greek letter theta, which had of course been present when she founded the Institution twenty years previously.
Mickey flipped backwards through the book, immediately switching tactics, and found the chapter outlining the origins of Torchwood. It wasn’t long before he found another passage of interest.
It was then that Queen Victoria found herself with the two mysterious strangers. They seemed more intrigued by the werewolf than the possibility of escape. Indeed, while they sped the Queen to safety, they laughed as though in the midst of a merry chase, coaxing the wolf ever closer, until at last the small party consisted of only the Queen herself, the man with the Northern accent known only as Theta, and the woman with the long, dark hair.
Mickey turned the page, and a drawing stared up at him. The caption indicated it was the man known as Theta and his unnamed female companion. There could be no mistaking the sharp edges of his face, the close-cropped hair, or the ears that sat like handles on a jug. Even the leather jacket was the same: it was the Doctor, as Mickey first knew him. The woman was familiar only as a younger form of the woman who lay dying at Princess Grace Hospital, but Mickey’s eyes were focused squarely on the Doctor.
Theta. If Mickey had any doubt left, it was gone now. The woman had called for the Doctor, using the name Theta for some reason. Perhaps that was his name, or at least the name she knew him by. Mickey tore his eyes away from the picture and kept reading, shaking his head as he went. The sense of déjà vu was overpowering - but in his version, it was the other Doctor, the pinstriped pretty boy who had bested the beast, and he’d done it with a blonde girl named Rose.
Parallel universes, not so different from each other. Mickey wondered why he’d never questioned how far back the differences went. They hadn’t seemed so deep...but clearly, this world had split from the world he’d been born into long enough ago that it was a different Doctor, a different companion, who inspired the creation of Torchwood.
Mickey rested his head on the book and listened to his own breath. There could be only two explanations, and Mickey didn’t know which was correct: either this Doctor was Mickey’s Doctor from before he met Rose, or - and this is the theory that Mickey believed - he was a different version of that Doctor, one who had lived in this world all along.
The Doctor had been so sure there was only one of him...but he had been sure of lots of things - the impossibility of Rose Tyler’s return chief among them. That a second Doctor might exist did not surprise Mickey in the least.
Mickey didn’t know why this Doctor, who called himself Theta, traveled with this woman, or how he’d come to be in the parallel world, or where he could be found. The only person who could answer Mickey’s questions lay in a hospital bed, hours from death.
*
It was an hour before dawn, and the hospital was silent. Mickey sat on the chair next to the woman’s bed and watched her labored breathing, so shallow that he almost couldn’t see her chest rise and fall. The machines around her had long since been silenced, and no nurses had stopped by in several hours. It wasn’t that they were not attentive, but that Mickey had asked them to stop coming. Nothing would save the woman now. There was little need to disturb her rest.
An hour before dawn - across the city, Mickey knew, Jackie was waiting for her mobile to ring, but he had an idea that Rose would not be calling that day, either. It was the third day Rose would not call her mother, and Mickey intended to go to Jackie as soon as the woman died, so that he could tell her what he did not know. He wasn’t sure if he would mention the Doctor, or the mysterious Theta. He imagined he would think of something when he got there.
“Just one question,” Mickey said aloud, his voice a whisper in the darkened room. “That’s all I really need, just the answer to one question. Where is the Doctor, the one you call Theta? Why did he leave you?”
A breeze brushed the back of his neck, and Mickey turned to see the door opening as Dr. Jones entered the room. She stopped partway, staring at Mickey. “Oh - I didn’t think anyone was here,” she stammered, the light from the hall spilling in around her.
“Thought someone should sit with her,” explained Mickey. “Do you need to-?” He waved his hand at the machines, and Dr Jones shook her head.
“No, there’s nothing I can do. I was going to sit with her, but if you’d rather-"
“It’s all right, if you want to stay.”
The doctor smiled at him, shyly, and let the door close quietly behind her as she pulled up a chair next to him. “Did you find what you needed?”
“No,” said Mickey. “Only more questions she can’t answer. I believe I know what she was - a race called the Time Lords, but they’re long since extinct.”
“So she’s the last?”
“It would seem so, but I believe she had a companion at one time. A man I knew - or thought I did. I’d hoped she could tell me what happened to him.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dr Jones quietly.
“Yes, well - I’ll never know. Gotten used to never knowing, really. One can’t know every outcome of every possibility in the world. This or any other.”
Another breeze brushed the back of his neck, and Mickey turned again, but the door remained closed.
“I understand perfectly,” sighed Dr Jones with a slight smile. “I just wish more of my patients did. Explain to a cancer patient trying to choose between one treatment or another that you can’t know for sure what will happen in either case - not for certain, anyway.”
“You said something like that earlier.”
“Did I? I suppose I’ve stopped believing in certainties. I didn’t think the director of Torchwood would ever step foot in this room, but here you sit.”
“Here I sit,” repeated Mickey softly, turning his attention to the woman on the bed.
“I - I hope I’m not being too rude, but if you don’t mind me asking - you said you knew her companion?”
Mickey hesitated. “In a way, I did. I traveled with him for a little while. It’s how I came here, actually. It was an accident, at first, landing here. I decided to stay.”
“Oh - I thought - your accent was London.”
Mickey laughed once, sharply. “I was born in London. Just not this London. A different London, on a parallel world, one where Time Lords existed. Well, he existed. He was the last in that world. I suppose she’s the last in this world. Her companion, the one she called Theta - I think he was this world’s version of the man I knew.” He sighed, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck stand in the breeze, and glanced at the doctor sitting beside him. Her expression was masked in the dark. “I must sound a little mad to you. I’m not. I don’t usually tell people I come from a different version of London.”
“I can understand why not,” said the doctor quietly. “It does sound a bit far-fetched. What happened to him? This Time Lord of yours?”
“He went back. Saw him once, three years later. I haven’t seen him in thirty years, but I know someone who wants to talk with him quite badly. Her daughter traveled with him - still does, or should. I’d like to think this woman’s Theta could help me. It’s complicated.”
“Sounds it,” said Dr Jones. One of the machines began to beep softly, and she quickly sprang to her feet to look at it, before turning to Mickey with a hollow look in her eyes. “Mr Smith - it’s time.”
Mickey stood and took the dying woman’s hand in his. Her skin was cold to the touch - he wasn’t sure how a person could be so cold yet still alive. Every breath she took caught in her throat, and Mickey leaned close, watching the clear struggle on her face.
She was not Rose. But Mickey thought she must have been beautiful, once, in a way that the drawing in the library book couldn’t show. And she’d traveled with him, her Theta - they’d laughed and joked together, much in the same way that the Doctor had done - did do - would always do - with Rose. Mickey felt such a rush of certainty, holding her hand, that despite the deep disappointment which came with it, he managed to speak the words she needed to hear.
“It’s all right,” he whispered to her. “I don’t know who you are, or what you were to him. But if he isn’t here, he must be dead - he’s waiting for you. I’m sure of it.”
The woman let out a last breath, long and deep, and moved no more. Mickey felt something change in her hand - as though the spark of life slipped out of her in her breath and floated away. He looked at Dr Jones, who stood near the machine, watching silently.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice thick, and Mickey nodded, unable to speak for a moment. He rested his free hand on the woman’s forehead, and then pulled away, shoving his hands into his pockets before turning to leave the room.
In the shadows, just beside the door, stood a figure that made Mickey freeze.
She was tall and thin, with long, dark hair, and large green eyes. She wore a shift-like dress that had no color to it, but that might have been because she had little color to her at all, apart from the eyes that burned into Mickey as though searching his soul. Mickey stood completely still, watching her. He wasn’t sure entirely how the woman stood there, when she had just died in the bed behind him, but he knew without a doubt that he was looking at a younger version of the mysterious woman.
“Hello,” he said finally, and the woman took a step forward. She wasn’t quite transparent, but she wasn’t corporeal either; Mickey could only barely see the walls behind her.
“How did you come here?” she asked. Her voice wasn’t quite transparent either; it sounded full and complete, as though she really existed. Mickey supposed she really did, in a way. “To this world - from your own?”
“The Doctor brought me in the TARDIS. We slipped through a hole in the Void. He went back and closed it.”
The woman wrapped her arms around herself. “You know the Doctor?”
Mickey’s heart began to thump; he could hear the blood in his ears. “You know him?”
She nodded, rubbing her hands against her upper arms. “Yes, I-"
“Where is he? Why did you call him Theta? Why isn’t he here?”
She shook her head. “No - you don’t understand. That’s - that’s not exactly me in that bed. I didn’t call him Theta. She did.”
“You’re her,” Dr Jones interrupted. Mickey had forgotten Dr Jones was even in the room; he didn’t dare look away from the woman in the corner, for fear she would vanish into the cold air. “You’re her, aren’t you?”
“No,” repeated the woman, her gaze now resting on Dr Jones. “I was her once, but then - she journeyed on a different path than I did. Her path brought her here, to this world, this hospital, this death. My path - it took me to a parallel world, a different world, a different death.” The woman looked back at Mickey. “In that world, there was a man named the Doctor. And I loved him, but he left me. He lived on, when all the rest of us died. It was as it should have been, but I wanted to see something different. So I came here, to this world, to see what might have been, if I’d stayed with him. This is how it would have ended for me, dying alone in a hospital bed - not quite so different.”
“I don’t understand,” said Dr Jones.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said the woman. “But I think Mr Smith might. Don’t you, Mr Smith?”
“You’re from my world,” said Mickey. “Aren’t you?”
She smiled then. “Yes. I think so.”
“Who are you?”
The woman glanced at the older, other version of herself for a moment, considering. “In this world, I am no one; I am the outcome of a chance not taken. A ghostly possibility, I think that’s what she would have called me. But in your world - the world into which I was born and died - the Doctor called me Carissa.”
Wondering why Carissa rings a bell? Here’s where you can refresh your memory.
Jump to Chapter Seven (where the mystery of Carissa will also be explained further).