Undiscovered Country - 5/10 DW/TW crossover, Ten/Rose, Jack PG-15
A sequel to Life in Cardiff.
My apologies to everyone who's been waiting for this update. I was temporarily distracted by a redhead with a big hatbox.
WORDS: 3976
SPOILERS: TW S2 up to Day in the Death (AU) Basically, this is a story about how those events might have gone with the Doctor and Rose around, and emotionally involved with Jack.
DW-wise, it's post VOTD, but pretty much AU from there.
CHARACTERS: Ten/Rose/Jack, Martha, Owen, Tosh, Gwen/Rhys, Ianto
RATING - PG so far. Some strong language and general creepiness.
DISCLAIMER - Obviously, the BBC thought up the original characters and storylines, and the credit for that goes to them. This is just for fun, not personal profit.
CREDITS - Illustration by bmshipper. Thank you to wendymr and dark_aegis for sterling work as beta readers and brainstormers. This story would have gone way off track without them, I am sure.
Lyrics quoted are from the show "Follies" by Stephen Sondheim.
The Bad Wolf is back with a bang. Will Rose feel "wrong" to the Doctor, and can Jack help them? But the person who needs them most of all is probably Owen.
To die, to sleep, -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, - 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
Hamlet Act III sc 1
Jack lay propped up on one elbow, watching Rose as she slept. He hadn’t done this for a long time - too long. He wondered how much she’d remember when she stirred, whether the IV line the Doctor had quickly put in her arm contained some Time Lord refinement of Retcon as well as the saline he claimed she needed. He’d taken some bloods, and maybe sometime tonight he’d get around to analysing them, confirming what he probably already knew. Or maybe not. He’d been in the med lab with Owen for hours now; Jack had a feeling Owen was turning out to be good distraction therapy.
There was a time he’d have let himself get angry at the thought of the Doctor avoiding Rose. Not any more. Life, even his life, was too short. Too much time already wasted. It put him in mind of a Broadway number that had always moved him to tears:
So much time wasted, merely passing through,
Time I could have spent, so content, wasting time with you
Content. That was the right word for the way he was feeling right now. He wouldn’t have things any different. Something had changed him, the moment he’d realised what was happening with Rose. He knew the Doctor would have problems with it, just as he’d had problems with him, but he knew with equal certainty that somehow they’d get through it. The important thing was that he’d something to offer her, something that was his and not the Doctor’s - this was the kind of love that needed a mutuality of gifts the way a pair of human lungs needed oxygen. He wouldn’t be the dog under the table, licking up the crumbs any more.
Not that he’d resented it, he told himself. Well, okay. Maybe he had, a little. All that time they’d had together, without him, to build a world for two, and two alone. A world the Void had cruelly shattered, leaving the Doctor weaker, but ultimately both of them stronger. There were times, some of them as recent as the last few months, when he could hardly bear to watch them, so complete in themselves, yet knowing he was outside, and wanting to invite him in. But these things took time. Time together; it didn’t count if you weren’t together, even if it had been longer than a hundred years.
He reached out again and took Rose’s heavy hand. She lay with her face turned towards him, her nose wrinkled up in a half-smile he wished could last for ever. It wouldn’t; soon she’d wake up, he’d have to tell her what she’d done, and everything would change for her. Nobody had been there when it had happened to him, but he bore her no ill-will because of that. In fact, the prospect of getting her through it took away the sting of his own memories, stopped them seeming futile.
He wasn’t going to think about Owen just yet. Let the Doctor and Martha handle him. He was needed right here, and he realised now that all the ways he believed the team needed him, both real and imaginary, were barely more than a shadow of this joy, this homecoming, to be so necessary to someone he loved so very much.
And the Doctor, too. Jack had seen the doubtful undercurrents swirling in his eyes. He was really going to struggle with this, fight it every inch, because a part of him wanted this so badly and another part preached against it. Jack had progressed to the kind of love that recognised limitations. There were things about the Time Lord you’d never change, and there were things you would change, but not quickly or easily. His attitudes moved on a geological timescale compared to human ones. But move they did. Jack remembered the look in his eyes through the door of the Radiation Room. That was when he knew it wasn’t impossible. They’d find their way home.
Now the dynamic had shifted. One Time Lord, two Time Humans. He was outnumbered; he’d snap and sulk and rant and rave and do everything he could to deny it had happened. But it had, and nothing could change it.
What the heck. Jack could carry him for a while. It wouldn’t be the first time.
******
“So what are you going to do with me, Doctor?”
There was a man who ought to be dead sitting up on the bed and looking at him. Owen Harper didn’t simply look at you, either. His stare eviscerated you and left your internal prejudices shivering in the cold air. Even when the guy had been alive, he’d never felt at ease with him.
Most people had a chip or two on their shoulders. Owen had enough planks to make a floor.
“I suppose you do know how to fix me?”
He held Owen’s gaze over his glasses, which were unnecessary at the moment. He could read the instruments around him perfectly well without their help. They all said the same thing. No beating heart, no movement of air in or out of the lungs, zero metabolism, body temperature identical to the surrounding air. Owen was literally a dead man walking. It would have been fascinating if he hadn’t felt responsible for what had happened to him.
“I didn’t break you,” he said. True, but unfortunately there was a difference between acknowledging something was your fault and taking responsibility for it.
“Got to admit it’s intriguing, though, isn’t it?” Owen asked. “Back from the other side, not once but twice. If I was a religious bloke I might say it was meant to be.” He paused. “Anyway, at least I get the satisfaction of seeing a smug bastard like you shitting his pants.”
“That’s something you’ll probably never do again, Owen,” said the Doctor, trying without success to look beyond Owen’s wall of hostility. “No more ingestion, no more elimination, only very limited sensory input. You’re right. It is intriguing. The longer we can last by looking at it that way, the longer we can avoid the way it makes us feel.”
“Cold and clinical, that’s me. Well, cold at least. But you still haven’t answered the question. Can you fix me?”
“I don’t know. It depends on what you mean by fix. And what did this in the first place. I don’t think it was the Resurrection Glove. I’ve been monitoring Rose and Jack for the last few hours and there’s no sign of any energy drain from either of them.”
“Well, that’s your bases covered,” Owen sneered.
The Doctor frowned. “Owen, what’s your problem? I don’t mean the being dead and then back alive problem. That goes without saying. I mean…”
Oh, he was useless at this. And, even if he wasn’t, this would be the wrong time to bring it up.
“Why am I such an arse?” Owen helpfully suggested. “Oh, I was born sneering. The medical profession’s just an outlet for my warped sense of humour. And now I’m the biggest joke of all. It’s going to be interesting, having two of us around the place who can’t die. Maybe I can be the face he keeps in a jar by the door?”
The Doctor didn’t like where that image was taking him to. Yet Paul McCartney’s words seemed remarkably apt. There was more to Owen than this seemingly impenetrable crust of sarcasm. Had to be. Trouble was, the two of them were too much alike. Their defence mechanisms had moulded into a carapace, hiding everything underneath.
He used to believe that process was impossible to reverse. Then Rose reversed it in him. But not, he reflected, by pestering him with questions about the past.
He glanced away at some instrumentation, which told him nothing he didn’t already know. There might be possibilities. Assuming Owen’s body was frozen in time from the moment of his revival, he’d be fragile. Wounds wouldn’t heal, bones wouldn’t knit together. The everyday human pleasures of digestion, sensation and sexual arousal would be forever lost to him. If he stayed in one piece for long enough - not a reassuring thought - a time might come when they were nothing but a distant memory.
Extreme physical atrophy - the neatest possibility - or a slow, relentless process of wear and tear, eventually becoming so intolerable that amputation would be necessary. Prosthetics, cyborg parts, head-in-a-tank life support would all be, theoretically, possible, allowing for discreet manipulation of Owen’s personal timeline. He’d seen the hyper-aged, clinging to some kind of physical life at any cost. Whether it was worth the sacrifice was hardly for him to judge, since he was in the privileged position of having an almost infinite lifespan.
But in any case all that speculation was based on what might well turn out to be an incorrect assumption; that Owen was a typical specimen of the walking dead. He probably wasn’t. He appeared to be, right now, but if it was the power of the Time Vortex that had brought him back to life, then he’d expect to see some potential for regeneration. After all, that had happened with Jack. It wasn’t Jack’s consciousness that was frozen in time and protected from decay; it was his body.
That was a frightening thought, when he stopped to think of what Jack had gone through on the Valiant. All those memories and their dangerous consequences not obliterated by physical death but stacked up in a human mind without a Time Lord’s resources to handle their horror and the trauma involved. He hadn’t given that nearly enough consideration. He should be wiser, less ready to assume that physical perfection meant mental health as well.
Most of the time, Jack looked fine. Great. Brilliant. But then, people had said that about him. Well, he’d said it about himself. “I’m always all right.” Yeah, right, as Rose would say with that look he knew so well.
Rose…No, she was with Jack now, best possible person, and he’d no right to be wanting her as badly as he did right now. He pulled his attention back to Owen. The guy deserved answers, even if those answers were “I don’t know.”
“How much do you know about what happened to Jack?” he asked. “Why he can’t stay dead?”
“He’s never been the type to volunteer that kind of information,” Owen replied. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with me?”
“A lot. Possibly everything.” The Doctor pulled up a chair. “Just before you came back the second time, Rose kissed you-”
“Lucky me,” said Owen. “What did I do to deserve that?”
“She doesn’t know why she did it,” said the Doctor. “She was barely conscious at the time, certainly not completely in control of her own actions.”
“When I was in medical college we called that date rape,” said Owen. The Doctor resisted the temptation, which was considerable, to see whether that dead face would take a punch. The younger man’s reaction showed clearly that he’d got the message; that was a snide remark too far.
“Rose was once exposed to the power that drives the TARDIS, the Time Vortex itself,” the Doctor explained. “For a few minutes, she had all the ability to manipulate reality running through her. She didn’t know it at the time, but that was when she brought Jack back to life. Oh yes, he really was dead, that first time. Went down in a last stand against the Daleks.”
“You really shouldn’t let your friends play with such dangerous toys,” said Owen. “Someone could get hurt.”
He didn’t want to answer that. Of course he wouldn’t. Once again, it came down to that old distinction between culpability and responsibility. From the moment he’d taken the TARDIS and fled Gallifrey, he’d been in charge of the incredible forces that powered his ship, his planet and, to some extent, his people. Power without responsibility - both romantic and terrifying. It had become his mission to seek out those who took such power and set limits on it to protect the vulnerable. Yet he’d neglected to protect those closest to him; those whose lives were changed by their loyalty to him.
“I don’t think she was playing at the time,” he protested. “But point taken.”
Owen couldn’t hide his response to that; the idea of the Doctor, Mr Know-it-all, conceding a point to him was obviously pretty radical. “So, you in the habit of letting Rose do her Sleeping Beauty act, then?” he asked.
He shook his head. “I thought I’d taken the Time Vortex out of her. It cost me my life - well, one of them.” With a deep sigh, he carried on. “But you know all this, don’t you? And now…” He slapped his knees. “It’s rethink time.”
“Well, at least you’re not dead.”
“Yep,” he agreed. “All things considered, would you rather be dead, Owen?”
“Is that an option?”
“No. But it might be the beginning of a care plan.”
“You know what I think?” Owen, looking remarkably alive at that precise moment, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and looked him in the eye. “I think you should stop pretending to be interested in me, and decide what you’re going to do about Rose. How did you get it out of her the first time around?”
He looked towards the door. He didn’t want to answer that.
*****
Rose woke up and put her hands over her ears, because she wanted the singing in her head to stop. She blinked and discovered that the strange tethering sensation she felt was caused by a drip in her arm. Scattered images flashed into her memory, only to drift out of reach like distant night music on shortwave radio. Everything was just a little off kilter, out of range.
Then came Jack’s voice. Better still, his hand closing reassuringly around her arm. “Hey,” he said, “I’m here.”
He was exactly the person she wanted around right now. The Doctor, much as she loved him, would have been preoccupied by whatever strange - and no doubt fascinating - thing was going on. Jack, by contrast, was focussed one hundred percent on her. Sometimes you didn’t want an adventure. You just wanted to know what was going on, and have someone to walk you through it.
She tried to sit up, but a thunderbolt of pain shot through her forehead and she winced. “I had this weird dream,” she said. “I dreamt I kissed Owen and he opened his eyes.”
She watched Jack’s expression. He probably thought he was keeping it neutral but she knew him better than that. Something had happened. Not just Owen dying; weirder and maybe worse than even that.
“You don’t remember what happened?” he asked carefully.
She shook her head. Suddenly, she felt frightened, young and vulnerable. She wanted Jack to hug her - wanted it badly. He knew without being told and she sank against his chest. His hands spread across her back, offering protection and absolute trust. Rose wondered if she was going to cry.
“Owen died,” she said. “The Glove…And then he died again?”
“You brought him back to life, Rose,” Jack said.
Everything in her reacted against it. No! She was the ordinary human one.
“No! It was the Glove. Had to be. Why should it be me?”
“We’re both hooked up to monitors,” Jack said, gently. “There’s no energy drain from either of us. The Glove’s destroyed. But something’s keeping Owen alive. He’s with the Doctor now.”
“I don’t want this,” Rose gasped, dismayed. She did remember; the less she wanted to, the more came back. Bad Wolf, with the power to pluck a human soul out of the net of Time. And it freaked her out. She’d seen plenty of weird things but this was different. It attacked her from inside, stopped her being the touchstone of normality that everything else could be measured against. Most of all, she feared that the Doctor wouldn’t love her. She knew what Jack had gone through. She wanted to trust the Doctor but she knew he was often a prisoner of his own values and prejudices, and how hard it was for him to change.
“Yeah, it’s scary,” Jack agreed. “But you’ve got me.”
Me. Not us. Rose knew what he was thinking.
“You hadn’t anybody when it happened to you,” she said. That was one of the most frightening possibilities raised by all this - that she might have an existence like Jack’s, Dying and coming back to life again and again? Never ageing, watching people you loved die, and those who remained regarding you with increasing fear and mistrust? How could she stand it. She knew Jack would help her, but that only made her feel worse. He’d had to walk this path alone. It wasn’t fair.
“That’s not the point, and it’s nobody’s fault,” he consoled her.
“Yes it is. It’s mine.”
“Stop this, Rose,” he ordered, sounding angry for the first time. “First, we don’t know whether you’re the same as me. Not yet. You kissed me just before you went in to Owen. The Doctor thinks there might have been some kind of transfer of the life force between us. It might only work that way. Might never work again. We just don’t know.”
She sat, rigid with fear and horror, imagining Owen walking around in another room because of her. What if he hadn’t come back properly, but as one of those zombies without the ability to enjoy life, heal if he got hurt, be properly human? It seemed that humans were getting scarcer around here. It wasn’t long since she’d sat in the library with Jack and the Doctor and talked so glibly about being the first Time Human. It was easy to discuss these things until they touched you.
“What’s it like?” she asked him.
He wasn’t prepared to tell her. “Let’s wait and see,” he said. “When we know what ‘it’ is, then we’ll talk about what it’s like. Rose, look at me.” The urgency in his tone made her turn towards him. “You’re still you,” he said, and the intensity of feeling in his eyes showed he meant every word. “Still worthy of all the love, all the care and comfort and protection you always were. And you’re gonna get it. Whatever you need. I don’t want you to think about me and what I went through. That’s history. What matters is you don’t go through this thing alone. Okay?”
His finger stroked her under the chin, making her turn and raise her head to look at him.
“Okay,” she repeated, her voice almost a whisper. “Jack, I’m scared.”
“You’ve every right to be.” He pulled her into his arms again.
“I’m scared that every time we…do this…I don’t want anyone to suffer…”
He kissed her. It made her feel a lot better, and she kissed him back. “What about the Doctor?” she asked. “Do you think he’ll be able to handle this?”
“Might take him a while,” he said. “He’ll make a project out of you, put on the clever specs and try to figure it out so he doesn’t have to work out how he feels about it. But he’ll get there. This is nothing compared to some of the stuff he’s had to deal with.”
She looked at the IV line in her arm. “How long do I have to lie with this thing in?” she asked.
Jack took out his phone. “I’ll call him,” he said. “Doc, it’s me. She’s awake. How’s Owen?”
The Doctor didn’t waste any time. He came running down the corridor and burst into the room. Rose had been wondering what he’d do, whether she’d see that Time Lord ice in his eyes, the hardening of his mouth and the withdrawal into remoteness. She feared it, not only because it came between them, but also because she knew it made him unhappy. It was something he felt he ought to do, a crusting-over of his nature that seemed to crack a little more every time it happened.
“I’m sorry,” she told him, looking at him. “I never wanted this to happen.”
“Rose,” he murmured. “Oh Rose…”
She watched the struggle going on behind his eyes. It was like a speeded-up movie of clouds scudding across an April sky. Darkness, then sunlight in rapid, bewildering succession. Jack squeezed her hand. He’d been there. Been to worse places, probably.
“You know,” said Jack quietly - and Rose knew he wasn’t addressing her - “it’s okay to learn from your mistakes.”
The Doctor’s lips formed into the beginning of a word, probably his trademark, “What?” but it faded away unspoken. “I can’t do this any more,” he burst out, scooping her into his arms. “I can’t go on letting my people tell me who feels right and who feels wrong.”
“You’re still my Rose,” he said. She could feel the clenched muscles around his mouth soften against her shoulder. Not quite a smile yet, but he was getting there. His incoherence spoke more to her than excessive words ever did. Change hurt him - physically - but he put himself through it for her.
He felt guilty, and she knew he wouldn’t want her to thank him for what he interpreted as his own lack of love. “It’s okay,” she whispered, and stroked his hair. “You’ll work it out somehow. You always do.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed, looping his free arm around their shoulders.
“How’s Owen?” she asked.
“I’m not bad for someone who’s dead.” Was she just imagining it, or was Owen’s voice a little warmer and less cutting than usual? But before Rose could reply, Jack’s phone beeped.
“Tosh,” he said. “Yeah, he seems okay. What? Okay, I’ll be right over.”
“Duty calls?” the Doctor asked. He came over to Jack. “I suppose I’d better take this IV line out, then?”
“What’s happening?” asked Owen.
“You’re relieved of your duties,” Jack said. “I’ll get Ianto to sign you off.”
“Oh, come on! That’s a bit harsh!” Rose protested.
Jack’s whole manner was transformed. “Look, Owen’s dead. We’re still figuring out what’s happening to him and there’s no procedure for this situation. I’m in command here and he’s relieved of his duty until further notice.”
The brutality of it shocked Rose. Not so much the decision as Jack’s attitude. Why should she get all the sympathy? Because she was young, blonde and fanciable? She glanced at Owen, but she didn’t know him nearly well enough to guess what he might be thinking.
Frowning, she let the matter drop - for the time being. “So, what’s going on?” she asked.
Jack was already strapping on his holster and pulling on his coat. “Abnormal energy spike,” he replied. “Started round about the time…well, when Owen came back. The second time.”
The Doctor looked troubled. Rose remembered his warnings of scavengers in the Vortex. “Where’s it coming from?” he asked.
“Seems to be the Parker estate,” Jack explained, breathlessly. “He’s a bit of a Howard Hughes character. A recluse, loaded, collects alien tech. We’ve been keeping an eye on him for years. Now it looks like he’s sitting on something that’s about to explode.”
“I’m coming with you,” said the Doctor. “Owen, Rose, you stay here for monitoring. We’re not taking any stupid risks.”
Owen looked at Rose. “Looks like Dr Jones is on zombie duty,” he remarked.
It was the first time Rose could ever remember Owen making her smile. Maybe dying had improved his sense of humour.
My apologies to everyone who's been waiting for this update. I was temporarily distracted by a redhead with a big hatbox.
WORDS: 3976
SPOILERS: TW S2 up to Day in the Death (AU) Basically, this is a story about how those events might have gone with the Doctor and Rose around, and emotionally involved with Jack.
DW-wise, it's post VOTD, but pretty much AU from there.
CHARACTERS: Ten/Rose/Jack, Martha, Owen, Tosh, Gwen/Rhys, Ianto
RATING - PG so far. Some strong language and general creepiness.
DISCLAIMER - Obviously, the BBC thought up the original characters and storylines, and the credit for that goes to them. This is just for fun, not personal profit.
CREDITS - Illustration by bmshipper. Thank you to wendymr and dark_aegis for sterling work as beta readers and brainstormers. This story would have gone way off track without them, I am sure.
Lyrics quoted are from the show "Follies" by Stephen Sondheim.
The Bad Wolf is back with a bang. Will Rose feel "wrong" to the Doctor, and can Jack help them? But the person who needs them most of all is probably Owen.
To die, to sleep, -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, - 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
Hamlet Act III sc 1
Jack lay propped up on one elbow, watching Rose as she slept. He hadn’t done this for a long time - too long. He wondered how much she’d remember when she stirred, whether the IV line the Doctor had quickly put in her arm contained some Time Lord refinement of Retcon as well as the saline he claimed she needed. He’d taken some bloods, and maybe sometime tonight he’d get around to analysing them, confirming what he probably already knew. Or maybe not. He’d been in the med lab with Owen for hours now; Jack had a feeling Owen was turning out to be good distraction therapy.
There was a time he’d have let himself get angry at the thought of the Doctor avoiding Rose. Not any more. Life, even his life, was too short. Too much time already wasted. It put him in mind of a Broadway number that had always moved him to tears:
So much time wasted, merely passing through,
Time I could have spent, so content, wasting time with you
Content. That was the right word for the way he was feeling right now. He wouldn’t have things any different. Something had changed him, the moment he’d realised what was happening with Rose. He knew the Doctor would have problems with it, just as he’d had problems with him, but he knew with equal certainty that somehow they’d get through it. The important thing was that he’d something to offer her, something that was his and not the Doctor’s - this was the kind of love that needed a mutuality of gifts the way a pair of human lungs needed oxygen. He wouldn’t be the dog under the table, licking up the crumbs any more.
Not that he’d resented it, he told himself. Well, okay. Maybe he had, a little. All that time they’d had together, without him, to build a world for two, and two alone. A world the Void had cruelly shattered, leaving the Doctor weaker, but ultimately both of them stronger. There were times, some of them as recent as the last few months, when he could hardly bear to watch them, so complete in themselves, yet knowing he was outside, and wanting to invite him in. But these things took time. Time together; it didn’t count if you weren’t together, even if it had been longer than a hundred years.
He reached out again and took Rose’s heavy hand. She lay with her face turned towards him, her nose wrinkled up in a half-smile he wished could last for ever. It wouldn’t; soon she’d wake up, he’d have to tell her what she’d done, and everything would change for her. Nobody had been there when it had happened to him, but he bore her no ill-will because of that. In fact, the prospect of getting her through it took away the sting of his own memories, stopped them seeming futile.
He wasn’t going to think about Owen just yet. Let the Doctor and Martha handle him. He was needed right here, and he realised now that all the ways he believed the team needed him, both real and imaginary, were barely more than a shadow of this joy, this homecoming, to be so necessary to someone he loved so very much.
And the Doctor, too. Jack had seen the doubtful undercurrents swirling in his eyes. He was really going to struggle with this, fight it every inch, because a part of him wanted this so badly and another part preached against it. Jack had progressed to the kind of love that recognised limitations. There were things about the Time Lord you’d never change, and there were things you would change, but not quickly or easily. His attitudes moved on a geological timescale compared to human ones. But move they did. Jack remembered the look in his eyes through the door of the Radiation Room. That was when he knew it wasn’t impossible. They’d find their way home.
Now the dynamic had shifted. One Time Lord, two Time Humans. He was outnumbered; he’d snap and sulk and rant and rave and do everything he could to deny it had happened. But it had, and nothing could change it.
What the heck. Jack could carry him for a while. It wouldn’t be the first time.
******
“So what are you going to do with me, Doctor?”
There was a man who ought to be dead sitting up on the bed and looking at him. Owen Harper didn’t simply look at you, either. His stare eviscerated you and left your internal prejudices shivering in the cold air. Even when the guy had been alive, he’d never felt at ease with him.
Most people had a chip or two on their shoulders. Owen had enough planks to make a floor.
“I suppose you do know how to fix me?”
He held Owen’s gaze over his glasses, which were unnecessary at the moment. He could read the instruments around him perfectly well without their help. They all said the same thing. No beating heart, no movement of air in or out of the lungs, zero metabolism, body temperature identical to the surrounding air. Owen was literally a dead man walking. It would have been fascinating if he hadn’t felt responsible for what had happened to him.
“I didn’t break you,” he said. True, but unfortunately there was a difference between acknowledging something was your fault and taking responsibility for it.
“Got to admit it’s intriguing, though, isn’t it?” Owen asked. “Back from the other side, not once but twice. If I was a religious bloke I might say it was meant to be.” He paused. “Anyway, at least I get the satisfaction of seeing a smug bastard like you shitting his pants.”
“That’s something you’ll probably never do again, Owen,” said the Doctor, trying without success to look beyond Owen’s wall of hostility. “No more ingestion, no more elimination, only very limited sensory input. You’re right. It is intriguing. The longer we can last by looking at it that way, the longer we can avoid the way it makes us feel.”
“Cold and clinical, that’s me. Well, cold at least. But you still haven’t answered the question. Can you fix me?”
“I don’t know. It depends on what you mean by fix. And what did this in the first place. I don’t think it was the Resurrection Glove. I’ve been monitoring Rose and Jack for the last few hours and there’s no sign of any energy drain from either of them.”
“Well, that’s your bases covered,” Owen sneered.
The Doctor frowned. “Owen, what’s your problem? I don’t mean the being dead and then back alive problem. That goes without saying. I mean…”
Oh, he was useless at this. And, even if he wasn’t, this would be the wrong time to bring it up.
“Why am I such an arse?” Owen helpfully suggested. “Oh, I was born sneering. The medical profession’s just an outlet for my warped sense of humour. And now I’m the biggest joke of all. It’s going to be interesting, having two of us around the place who can’t die. Maybe I can be the face he keeps in a jar by the door?”
The Doctor didn’t like where that image was taking him to. Yet Paul McCartney’s words seemed remarkably apt. There was more to Owen than this seemingly impenetrable crust of sarcasm. Had to be. Trouble was, the two of them were too much alike. Their defence mechanisms had moulded into a carapace, hiding everything underneath.
He used to believe that process was impossible to reverse. Then Rose reversed it in him. But not, he reflected, by pestering him with questions about the past.
He glanced away at some instrumentation, which told him nothing he didn’t already know. There might be possibilities. Assuming Owen’s body was frozen in time from the moment of his revival, he’d be fragile. Wounds wouldn’t heal, bones wouldn’t knit together. The everyday human pleasures of digestion, sensation and sexual arousal would be forever lost to him. If he stayed in one piece for long enough - not a reassuring thought - a time might come when they were nothing but a distant memory.
Extreme physical atrophy - the neatest possibility - or a slow, relentless process of wear and tear, eventually becoming so intolerable that amputation would be necessary. Prosthetics, cyborg parts, head-in-a-tank life support would all be, theoretically, possible, allowing for discreet manipulation of Owen’s personal timeline. He’d seen the hyper-aged, clinging to some kind of physical life at any cost. Whether it was worth the sacrifice was hardly for him to judge, since he was in the privileged position of having an almost infinite lifespan.
But in any case all that speculation was based on what might well turn out to be an incorrect assumption; that Owen was a typical specimen of the walking dead. He probably wasn’t. He appeared to be, right now, but if it was the power of the Time Vortex that had brought him back to life, then he’d expect to see some potential for regeneration. After all, that had happened with Jack. It wasn’t Jack’s consciousness that was frozen in time and protected from decay; it was his body.
That was a frightening thought, when he stopped to think of what Jack had gone through on the Valiant. All those memories and their dangerous consequences not obliterated by physical death but stacked up in a human mind without a Time Lord’s resources to handle their horror and the trauma involved. He hadn’t given that nearly enough consideration. He should be wiser, less ready to assume that physical perfection meant mental health as well.
Most of the time, Jack looked fine. Great. Brilliant. But then, people had said that about him. Well, he’d said it about himself. “I’m always all right.” Yeah, right, as Rose would say with that look he knew so well.
Rose…No, she was with Jack now, best possible person, and he’d no right to be wanting her as badly as he did right now. He pulled his attention back to Owen. The guy deserved answers, even if those answers were “I don’t know.”
“How much do you know about what happened to Jack?” he asked. “Why he can’t stay dead?”
“He’s never been the type to volunteer that kind of information,” Owen replied. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with me?”
“A lot. Possibly everything.” The Doctor pulled up a chair. “Just before you came back the second time, Rose kissed you-”
“Lucky me,” said Owen. “What did I do to deserve that?”
“She doesn’t know why she did it,” said the Doctor. “She was barely conscious at the time, certainly not completely in control of her own actions.”
“When I was in medical college we called that date rape,” said Owen. The Doctor resisted the temptation, which was considerable, to see whether that dead face would take a punch. The younger man’s reaction showed clearly that he’d got the message; that was a snide remark too far.
“Rose was once exposed to the power that drives the TARDIS, the Time Vortex itself,” the Doctor explained. “For a few minutes, she had all the ability to manipulate reality running through her. She didn’t know it at the time, but that was when she brought Jack back to life. Oh yes, he really was dead, that first time. Went down in a last stand against the Daleks.”
“You really shouldn’t let your friends play with such dangerous toys,” said Owen. “Someone could get hurt.”
He didn’t want to answer that. Of course he wouldn’t. Once again, it came down to that old distinction between culpability and responsibility. From the moment he’d taken the TARDIS and fled Gallifrey, he’d been in charge of the incredible forces that powered his ship, his planet and, to some extent, his people. Power without responsibility - both romantic and terrifying. It had become his mission to seek out those who took such power and set limits on it to protect the vulnerable. Yet he’d neglected to protect those closest to him; those whose lives were changed by their loyalty to him.
“I don’t think she was playing at the time,” he protested. “But point taken.”
Owen couldn’t hide his response to that; the idea of the Doctor, Mr Know-it-all, conceding a point to him was obviously pretty radical. “So, you in the habit of letting Rose do her Sleeping Beauty act, then?” he asked.
He shook his head. “I thought I’d taken the Time Vortex out of her. It cost me my life - well, one of them.” With a deep sigh, he carried on. “But you know all this, don’t you? And now…” He slapped his knees. “It’s rethink time.”
“Well, at least you’re not dead.”
“Yep,” he agreed. “All things considered, would you rather be dead, Owen?”
“Is that an option?”
“No. But it might be the beginning of a care plan.”
“You know what I think?” Owen, looking remarkably alive at that precise moment, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and looked him in the eye. “I think you should stop pretending to be interested in me, and decide what you’re going to do about Rose. How did you get it out of her the first time around?”
He looked towards the door. He didn’t want to answer that.
*****
Rose woke up and put her hands over her ears, because she wanted the singing in her head to stop. She blinked and discovered that the strange tethering sensation she felt was caused by a drip in her arm. Scattered images flashed into her memory, only to drift out of reach like distant night music on shortwave radio. Everything was just a little off kilter, out of range.
Then came Jack’s voice. Better still, his hand closing reassuringly around her arm. “Hey,” he said, “I’m here.”
He was exactly the person she wanted around right now. The Doctor, much as she loved him, would have been preoccupied by whatever strange - and no doubt fascinating - thing was going on. Jack, by contrast, was focussed one hundred percent on her. Sometimes you didn’t want an adventure. You just wanted to know what was going on, and have someone to walk you through it.
She tried to sit up, but a thunderbolt of pain shot through her forehead and she winced. “I had this weird dream,” she said. “I dreamt I kissed Owen and he opened his eyes.”
She watched Jack’s expression. He probably thought he was keeping it neutral but she knew him better than that. Something had happened. Not just Owen dying; weirder and maybe worse than even that.
“You don’t remember what happened?” he asked carefully.
She shook her head. Suddenly, she felt frightened, young and vulnerable. She wanted Jack to hug her - wanted it badly. He knew without being told and she sank against his chest. His hands spread across her back, offering protection and absolute trust. Rose wondered if she was going to cry.
“Owen died,” she said. “The Glove…And then he died again?”
“You brought him back to life, Rose,” Jack said.
Everything in her reacted against it. No! She was the ordinary human one.
“No! It was the Glove. Had to be. Why should it be me?”
“We’re both hooked up to monitors,” Jack said, gently. “There’s no energy drain from either of us. The Glove’s destroyed. But something’s keeping Owen alive. He’s with the Doctor now.”
“I don’t want this,” Rose gasped, dismayed. She did remember; the less she wanted to, the more came back. Bad Wolf, with the power to pluck a human soul out of the net of Time. And it freaked her out. She’d seen plenty of weird things but this was different. It attacked her from inside, stopped her being the touchstone of normality that everything else could be measured against. Most of all, she feared that the Doctor wouldn’t love her. She knew what Jack had gone through. She wanted to trust the Doctor but she knew he was often a prisoner of his own values and prejudices, and how hard it was for him to change.
“Yeah, it’s scary,” Jack agreed. “But you’ve got me.”
Me. Not us. Rose knew what he was thinking.
“You hadn’t anybody when it happened to you,” she said. That was one of the most frightening possibilities raised by all this - that she might have an existence like Jack’s, Dying and coming back to life again and again? Never ageing, watching people you loved die, and those who remained regarding you with increasing fear and mistrust? How could she stand it. She knew Jack would help her, but that only made her feel worse. He’d had to walk this path alone. It wasn’t fair.
“That’s not the point, and it’s nobody’s fault,” he consoled her.
“Yes it is. It’s mine.”
“Stop this, Rose,” he ordered, sounding angry for the first time. “First, we don’t know whether you’re the same as me. Not yet. You kissed me just before you went in to Owen. The Doctor thinks there might have been some kind of transfer of the life force between us. It might only work that way. Might never work again. We just don’t know.”
She sat, rigid with fear and horror, imagining Owen walking around in another room because of her. What if he hadn’t come back properly, but as one of those zombies without the ability to enjoy life, heal if he got hurt, be properly human? It seemed that humans were getting scarcer around here. It wasn’t long since she’d sat in the library with Jack and the Doctor and talked so glibly about being the first Time Human. It was easy to discuss these things until they touched you.
“What’s it like?” she asked him.
He wasn’t prepared to tell her. “Let’s wait and see,” he said. “When we know what ‘it’ is, then we’ll talk about what it’s like. Rose, look at me.” The urgency in his tone made her turn towards him. “You’re still you,” he said, and the intensity of feeling in his eyes showed he meant every word. “Still worthy of all the love, all the care and comfort and protection you always were. And you’re gonna get it. Whatever you need. I don’t want you to think about me and what I went through. That’s history. What matters is you don’t go through this thing alone. Okay?”
His finger stroked her under the chin, making her turn and raise her head to look at him.
“Okay,” she repeated, her voice almost a whisper. “Jack, I’m scared.”
“You’ve every right to be.” He pulled her into his arms again.
“I’m scared that every time we…do this…I don’t want anyone to suffer…”
He kissed her. It made her feel a lot better, and she kissed him back. “What about the Doctor?” she asked. “Do you think he’ll be able to handle this?”
“Might take him a while,” he said. “He’ll make a project out of you, put on the clever specs and try to figure it out so he doesn’t have to work out how he feels about it. But he’ll get there. This is nothing compared to some of the stuff he’s had to deal with.”
She looked at the IV line in her arm. “How long do I have to lie with this thing in?” she asked.
Jack took out his phone. “I’ll call him,” he said. “Doc, it’s me. She’s awake. How’s Owen?”
The Doctor didn’t waste any time. He came running down the corridor and burst into the room. Rose had been wondering what he’d do, whether she’d see that Time Lord ice in his eyes, the hardening of his mouth and the withdrawal into remoteness. She feared it, not only because it came between them, but also because she knew it made him unhappy. It was something he felt he ought to do, a crusting-over of his nature that seemed to crack a little more every time it happened.
“I’m sorry,” she told him, looking at him. “I never wanted this to happen.”
“Rose,” he murmured. “Oh Rose…”
She watched the struggle going on behind his eyes. It was like a speeded-up movie of clouds scudding across an April sky. Darkness, then sunlight in rapid, bewildering succession. Jack squeezed her hand. He’d been there. Been to worse places, probably.
“You know,” said Jack quietly - and Rose knew he wasn’t addressing her - “it’s okay to learn from your mistakes.”
The Doctor’s lips formed into the beginning of a word, probably his trademark, “What?” but it faded away unspoken. “I can’t do this any more,” he burst out, scooping her into his arms. “I can’t go on letting my people tell me who feels right and who feels wrong.”
“You’re still my Rose,” he said. She could feel the clenched muscles around his mouth soften against her shoulder. Not quite a smile yet, but he was getting there. His incoherence spoke more to her than excessive words ever did. Change hurt him - physically - but he put himself through it for her.
He felt guilty, and she knew he wouldn’t want her to thank him for what he interpreted as his own lack of love. “It’s okay,” she whispered, and stroked his hair. “You’ll work it out somehow. You always do.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed, looping his free arm around their shoulders.
“How’s Owen?” she asked.
“I’m not bad for someone who’s dead.” Was she just imagining it, or was Owen’s voice a little warmer and less cutting than usual? But before Rose could reply, Jack’s phone beeped.
“Tosh,” he said. “Yeah, he seems okay. What? Okay, I’ll be right over.”
“Duty calls?” the Doctor asked. He came over to Jack. “I suppose I’d better take this IV line out, then?”
“What’s happening?” asked Owen.
“You’re relieved of your duties,” Jack said. “I’ll get Ianto to sign you off.”
“Oh, come on! That’s a bit harsh!” Rose protested.
Jack’s whole manner was transformed. “Look, Owen’s dead. We’re still figuring out what’s happening to him and there’s no procedure for this situation. I’m in command here and he’s relieved of his duty until further notice.”
The brutality of it shocked Rose. Not so much the decision as Jack’s attitude. Why should she get all the sympathy? Because she was young, blonde and fanciable? She glanced at Owen, but she didn’t know him nearly well enough to guess what he might be thinking.
Frowning, she let the matter drop - for the time being. “So, what’s going on?” she asked.
Jack was already strapping on his holster and pulling on his coat. “Abnormal energy spike,” he replied. “Started round about the time…well, when Owen came back. The second time.”
The Doctor looked troubled. Rose remembered his warnings of scavengers in the Vortex. “Where’s it coming from?” he asked.
“Seems to be the Parker estate,” Jack explained, breathlessly. “He’s a bit of a Howard Hughes character. A recluse, loaded, collects alien tech. We’ve been keeping an eye on him for years. Now it looks like he’s sitting on something that’s about to explode.”
“I’m coming with you,” said the Doctor. “Owen, Rose, you stay here for monitoring. We’re not taking any stupid risks.”
Owen looked at Rose. “Looks like Dr Jones is on zombie duty,” he remarked.
It was the first time Rose could ever remember Owen making her smile. Maybe dying had improved his sense of humour.