Fanfic: DW/F Xover -- The Ghost in the Machine -- Chapter 1 (/3?)
Title: The Ghost in the Machine
Rating: K
Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama, Angst, Slight Romance
Spoilers: through 4x13 "Journey's End" on DW, including one reference later on to the Ten and Rose novel The Stone Rose, and 3x22 "The Day We Died" for Fringe
Summary: If any man knows the importance of one man's influence on the universe, and how to bring about existence from nonexistence, it's the Doctor.
Characters: TenII, Rose, Olivia, some of the Alternates.
Pairings: TenII/Rose, Peter/Olivia (this is a no-brainer on both counts)
Disclaimer: Fringe belongs to Fox and Bad Robot. DW belongs to Russell T. Davies and the BBC (or at least, that particular era does).
Note: This is a sequel to last year's summer x-over fic The Planets Bend Between Us, which can be read here: Chapter 3 (previous chapter links included). Best to read that to avoid any confusion.
CHAPTER 1
The Doctor really hated it when time would decide to re-write itself. Or, to be technical, when some total numps decided to re-write time for his or her self and the rest of the world was forced to live based on that re-working. Once upon a time, it had been the Time Lords who had that power - and it was they and they alone - and it was for good reason that the cosmos worked that way. If one didn't understand the workings of time completely through and through, as the Time Lords foolishly thought that they did, one had the capacity to completely ruin the universe because of one silly decision. The Doctor had made more than a few of those in his 900+ years of time and space travel, and because of that he knew a bad decision when he saw one. And the decision that had re-worked time in this instance appeared to be a whole lineage and ancestry full of bad, with an extra set of relatives in the bad family waiting on a nearby lift in the skyscraper of horrible decisions.
It was always a strange thing for he and Rose to have to work around - these shifts in time. As difficult as it could be for a regular person to understand that one man's life could alter the fate of an entire universe, it was a situation the Doctor had seen one time too many for he to write off the circumstance as unimportant. Especially when said person's existence had been the cause of over a dozen laws being written and had led to a covert war with another universe. Add in to that the fact that said person's existence apparently meant a lot to a woman who had the ability to tear apart the walls between universes and put them back together, as the amazing and brilliant Olivia Dunham apparently could do, and well...the Doctor was of the opinion that this universal re-write was something that should be unwritten pretty quickly.
Certain abilities of his had been taken from him when he sprung from the hand that had once belonged to his fully Time Lord self. He could no longer regenerate, and he could only mentally connect with people who had shown a brain where the mental barrier was already strained, and due to his lack of TARDIS he was now stuck traveling through time unilaterally with the rest of mankind. (That is unless he managed to jiggery pokery himself up a vortex manipulator, but the ensuing nausea made it seem as though it wasn't really worth the effort. Especially when one took the time to consider how often the current time line seemed to require his assistance, especially with the continuing rifts in the universe).
He was now literally only half the alien he had been before (and the other half of himself was taken from a certain fiery tempered red-haired human that he didn't much like to mention by name these days because he seemed to have been dosed with human emotions and when he thought of one Donna Noble he often found himself hit with what he had often heard termed to be "grief" or "angst.") But the part of him that was still Time Lord functioned just the same as always in one particular sense. In addition to the 900+ years of alien knowledge, he also had kept his "spidey sense," as Rose so affectionately called it. The Doctor could still "feel" the small changes in time, just as he always had, and unlike the rest of the humans crawling on the planet's face, he remembered the way things had been before the change. This trait used to make for a somewhat lonely existence, as any of his relationships with a companion could be overwritten suddenly by a stranger's influence on time, but he was lucky now. Rose's relationship with time had changed slightly upon her looking into the Time Vortex all those years before, and so did her relationship with reality. Now, when reality changed, though her memory of things was slightly less clear than his own, she did remember things from before, especially major events. Her memories were flawed, but there nonetheless, which was a real help when he needed an accomplice to help him save the universe (or, in this case, the multiverse).
The Doctor was a big believer in the universe telling its occupants quite clearly what it wanted. Before becoming trapped in what he lovingly still called "Pete's World," this had entailed the TARDIS dropping him somewhere he had not intended to be. Quite often, these events ended with he and his companions running for their lives, and with the life sacrifice of some poor friend they had happened to make along the way, but the Doctor had always been able to see that where he turned up was exactly where he was meant to be. Now, the hints were a lot more subtle and linear and Earth based, but no less evident. Time had been re-written and no matter how much the Doctor tried to ignore the changes and live around them, the change continued to eat at him. Ergo, he was pretty sure the universe felt wronged by the change in some way.
Plus, the universe was making it entirely too easy for he and Rose to have access to what they needed, and that was a lot less subtle than he was used to in recent years. Due to the changes caused by the lack of existence of one Peter Bishop, Olivia Dunham from the other universe had never come to Pete's World and gotten caught by the US Secretary of Defence. She had never sat in solitary for months and met Rose Tyler - hell, Rose and the Doctor had never even traveled to the States because Olivia wasn't leaving miniature rifts all over New York City. And, on a slightly more happy note, the Doctor and Rose had not been punished for their "rogue op" and been locked in solitary confinement for three weeks by Pete Tyler. (The fact that they had any luxury they could ask for during their time in the brig was something they left off of official documentation).
Due to these changes, when Britain was asked to send in informed specialists to do diagnostics on the continually degrading bridge between realities that the United States had somehow managed to covertly put together in the confines of the Statue of Liberty, Pete Tyler saw no reason at all why he shouldn't send in his two best agents - his daughter, Rose Tyler, and the Doctor, her partner and significant other. It had been all the Doctor and Rose could do to not break a rib due to repressed laughter when guards led them through the security checkpoints and into the private laboratory restricted to a mere seven personnel on each side of the rift. When the Secretary, whom the Doctor remembered Olivia had referred to as Walternate, looked at them with no recognition, the Doctor breathed an inward sigh of relief. While this meant that it would take some time to get Olivia on their side, it at least verified that they wouldn't be running for their lives the entire time as they had done before.
The laboratory they entered was fairly nondescript. The walls and ceiling were painted eggshell white, and the floor glistened with wax, the Doctor and Rose's pairs of plimsolls squeaking on the hard surface. There were rows of long lab tables going around the sides, covered with lab equipment that was considered state-of-the-art by the day's standards, but which the Doctor still thought of as primitive. At the end of the row of tables, in a prominent position in the room, was a sight that made the Doctor shudder. Standing on a dais in the front was a large metal construction that he knew Olivia had termed "the Doomsday Device." The Doctor had seen many Doomsdays in his time, most of which he wanted to forget, and he was not really sure the machine he was looking at qualified. While it definitely did destroy, it also had somehow created the room he was standing in - this bridge, which after months of helping to facilitate diplomatic talks between warring dimensions, was starting to break down and cause more problems than it was solving. The Doctor had not been called in to the fix the machine - a machine that had not been mentioned in conversations at all in the months since the re-write had occurred - but rather he had been called in to see if he could come up with a "patch" on the universes. Technically, that would be all too easy - he was pretty sure the Secretary's team of scientists and the other version of Walter had come up with one long ago - but in practicality, it was nearly impossible. The technology simply didn't exist yet, and wouldn't in this galaxy for hundreds of years. The long and short of the problem was that the reality needed Peter Bishop - the Doctor remembered that drawing he had found in the Secretary's office the year before all too clearly - and reality no longer had him, nor realised he had been there in the first place.
Luckily for reality, the Doctor had also disappeared from existence numerous times, and he had always found a way back. He had just needed a little help from someone who cared enough about him to find a way. And thankfully, the Doctor knew exactly who would care enough about Peter Bishop to make sure he came back, assuming the Doctor could make her trust him enough to believe him and be willing to help.
The Doctor stared at the imposing figure at the end of the room - the black hulk of metal that he could see occupied two places at the same time. The Doctor was hit with the strange urge to giggle and fought the impulse to turn to Rose and make a crack about being in two time zones at the same time. He almost gave into his urge and did so anyway (he knew Rose would find it funny, though she'd roll her eyes to save face that she hadn't thought of it first), but he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
Most would ignore it - the things they see in the corner of their eyes. But not the Doctor. He often overlooked those things right in front of him, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident, but he never glanced over mere glimpses from the side. They were, more often than not, the most important things to note. And what the Doctor had seen was something he definitely thought was worth remembrance. For the briefest of seconds, when he wasn't *really* looking, he had seen the figure of a man, his arms stretched out and locked inside the restraints of the machine, his head thrown back in a painful grimace. And he didn't seem to really be there, but was instead flickering in and out of focus, like an old film left under the projector for too long. The importance of this image was further solidified when the few others in the lab appeared not to notice.
"Rose, do you see what I see?" the Doctor asked, his arm pointing towards the far end of the room.
Rose gave a brief glance before turning to the Doctor with raised eyebrows. "Sure, I do. The wall is lovely, Doctor," she answered, patting the top of his arm with a firm hand in the spirit of a person humouring a friend.
"No, no, no, no, no," the Doctor muttered, circling her by stepping in front of her and then running around behind her, putting one arm over her shoulder and once again gesturing towards what his companion had previously described as the wall. "Look very closely, straight ahead of you. And concentrate, Rose. Concentrate hard. There's something in this room that doesn't belong."
The Doctor watched as Rose began to see what he had seen after a few mere seconds. He knew the second her mind re-asserted itself to its previous set on information about "the machine." Her eyes, always a deep honey brown, gained gold flecks towards the centre near her pupils as the tiny slivers of Bad Wolf which lay continuously dormant in her system allowed her mind to access the general idea of her previous adventure with the machine.
"Do you see it now?" he whispered to her, his eyes flickering towards every side of the room.
"Yeah. It's weird. It's like, when I look for it, I have no problem seeing it, but...if I'm not looking at it, I know it's there - somehow, in the back of my mind anyway - but I don't want to know."
"It's a temporal distortion. Works almost like a cloaking device - it's how the TARDIS operated really - but it's a bit more rudimentary than truly being invisible. As you can see, the scientists and such are giving the area a wide berth. They know it's there on a molecular level - hard-wired into them - but it's like there's a mental block around the information." The Doctor blew out a puff of air, frustrated. The situation just kept getting more and more complicated, and to top it off he was getting a temporal headache. Distortions in time always made him a bit nauseous, and due to the longevity that this distortion had been in place, the physical effects were starting to become more severe. He had shook hands with an ambassador going to the other side, named David Robert Jones, the previous week, and in addition to getting the insane urge to listen to more David Bowie than the human body could handle, the Doctor had also been struck with a sense of illness so strong that he had vomited for two straight hours afterward. He hadn't even been able to listen to David Bowie to lessen the sickness because, sadly, the man had never become a musician in this universe and had instead become a hair stylist, to the Doctor and Rose's neverending amusement.
"You alright?" Rose asked, her voice turning worried as the Doctor felt his face flush.
"I'm always alright," he answered, his trademark I'm-definitely-not-okay-but-you'll-never-hear-me-say-those-words smirk going up one side of his face. He gave Rose a small nudge in her back as he saw a scientist approach them.
The scientist was wearing the familiar white lab coat, a plain button down dress shirt and black slacks beneath it. His hair was a short, slightly messy brown and the name on his labcoat said Brandon. The man gave off a slightly geeky vibe, but the Doctor felt himself ill at ease, regardless of the apparent innocence. There was something slightly malicious in the scientist's smile, and while the Doctor was used to men leering at Rose when they met her, he was disturbed to find that "Brandon's" leer was less undressing-with-the-eyes and more investigate-your-innards-with-a-scalpel. The Doctor unconsciously moved Rose so that she was half-hidden behind him.
"My name is Brandon, and I work for the US Department of Defence. I take it you two are the ambassadors from Britain's Torchwood Agency."
"That's us," Rose announced, putting on her all too familiar guise of being the slightly clueless Vitex heiress who only managed to work for such a prestigious government agency due to nepotism. The Doctor glowed with an inner pride. Not only was she one of the most intelligent and brave women he had ever known - and exceptionally good at hiding it when the situation called for it - but somehow he had managed to get such a woman to fall in love with him. There were random moments, such as when the two of them were trying to look totally ignorant and innocent about how to cross between universes - that he was reminded of just how much he had to lose now that he was half human. "So, are they really different from us? I mean, we in Britain have heard all kind of rumours. That they keep those pepper-pot things that terrorised us two years ago AS PETS. I've even heard that the stars are still out over there."
Rose was really laying it on thick, twisting her fingers nervously and shuffling her feet like a person unsure of what to do with her legs. Despite the Doctor's worry that she might have been over-selling it, the trick apparently worked. The scientist puffed his chest out in importance and seemed quite happy to be well aware of things of which such a well-known heiress was apparently ignorant.
"Oh no, they're all perfectly normal. They're nowhere near us in terms of technological advancement, of course. To be honest, their science seems quite out-dated, and instead of doing the smart thing and having a division devoted to Fringe cases, they merely allocated a part of their FBI. The FBI of course being an agency that, I'm sure you know, we in this universe deemed obsolete decades ago."
The Doctor forcibly bit his tongue and refrained from blurting out just how much knowledge he knew about the true history of this universe. For instance, he knew that the FBI had not been deemed obsolete by any means. The heads of the Bureau had all been killed in a massive outbreak of poisonous natural gases that had sprung from a rift that popped up in downtown Washington, DC and the other branches had been sealed in amber as needed. While working for Fringe Division in Pete's World was indeed an honour - just as much of an honour as serving in Torchwood London - the sight of a Fringe Agent was not something people greeted with happiness in the streets. The only reason the other side had no official Fringe Division was that they had no need of one yet, a situation that the Doctor was more than sure would change over time.
"Anyway," Brandon continued, "I'll need to have your Show-Mes; they don't use them over there. And I'll need any sort of weapon your government has requisitioned for you."
Rose frowned but handed over her gun. The Doctor merely lifted his empty hands and then patted down his suit jacket, showing he carried no weapons with him. The sonic screwdriver was hidden in his dimensionally transcendental pockets, but he saw no reason to draw attention to that. Brandon nodded and the Doctor rolled his eyes as some other scientists patted them both down anyway, despite their cooperation. When Brandon was satisfied that the Doctor and Rose had relinquished all their guns and sharp objects, he placed Rose's gun in a cabinet with extremely thick glass, which was positioned near the door to the room.
"Now, when you switch dimensions, everything should look the way it does now. Although, there may be a different person in the room than me. However, the other side knows you're coming, so they shouldn't try to arrest you. I will warn you though that the people from the other side don't think like us. So far our cooperation has been very diplomatic and peaceful, but that could change at any time. Trust them, but only so far as you have to do. Those are the orders from the Secretary. In his experience, they want to destroy our universe as much as we want to save it. So figure out the problem and get back."
With that, Brandon gave them a nod and left the room, the other scientists filing out behind him. The door clicked shut behind the final glance of white lab coat with an ominous sounding click that reverberated around the too-large and empty room. The Doctor and Rose glanced at each other and both were aware of a strange ringing in their ears and a bright flash of blue light, accompanied by a few microseconds of nausea. The Doctor blinked and when he looked around the room again, it was to see that nothing much had changed. The tables were still in the same layout, there was still a thick glass case near the door (now empty of Rose's gun), the walls were still that annoying eggshell white, and that damned headache causing machine was still barely in focus at the front of the room.
The door opened with a loud click, and the Doctor and Rose hurriedly turned around from their initial sweep of the room. The Doctor had assumed that the first person they saw would be this dimension's version of Brandon (and, he reminded himself, he needed to come up with a name for this universe as well, or he may confuse even himself before the day was over). However, it was not. The person opening the door was a familiar figure. It was a woman with long, straight blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She was wearing a white blouse and dark slacks, her trousers matching the colour around her eyes. As when he and Rose had met her before, there was strong evidence of a lack of sleep and a strong, indomitable will. The green eyes he remembered were burdened beyond her mere 30 something years, and instead resembled his own. The only difference between the woman he had met before and the woman he was seeing now was that her eyes lacked a bit of the life he had seen before - this was a woman who knew nothing but work and misery. Any sort of happiness or friendly camaraderie was something long forgotten.
She walked up to them, the sound of her business-like strut familiar to his ears. "So, you two must be the experts the Other Side was sending. I hope you know more than the last two because we're running out of time. Grab whatever stuff you need; we have work to do," she announced, giving them a brief glance up and down. The expression on her face showed her lack of hope and corresponding lack of faith in their abilities. The Doctor felt half challenged, half indignant, and all insulted. Before the Doctor could formulate a clever retort, she had turned her back and was walking for the door, wordlessly conveying that she expected them to follow post haste. The Doctor and Rose shared a mutual look of annoyance and walked briskly after her. They had only known this version of Olivia Dunham for a few moments, but that was more than enough for them to know that whatever had changed in her life after having Peter Bishop taken from it, had made her a much more hard-hearted woman.
The Doctor tiredly rubbed his eyes as he waited for Rose to pass him at the doorway. Getting Olivia to believe his theory was going to be much trickier and time-consuming than he had hoped.
<0>
Olivia Dunham was not a happy FBI agent. This was not a statement of her overall attitude or regular personality (though she knew some on her team would argue), but rather a confession of current assessment. It was supposed to be her night off, but in typical Broyles fashion, she found herself being called in and having her first good night of sleep in two months ruined. And the only thing she was being asked to do was fill in two scientists on a problem of which she was certain they were already well aware.
For the first four months, the bridge that had mysteriously opened between the two universes had felt like a godsend - a sort of random miracle that she didn't feel comfortable enough to question. Everything had felt so fragile, both in terms of the physicality of the bridge which defied the laws of quantum physics, and in the tenuous relationship between the representatives from the Other Side. Just as they had been making progress, and just as Olivia had begun to somewhat trust her alternate self and the alternate versions of her team, the bridge had started breaking down. At first, both sides had blamed each other for the continuing degradation, but it soon became clear through the cacophony of hurled insults and accusations that both sides were terrified and confused about the turn of events. Whatever unseen power maintained the bridge was starting to wear down, and given that none of them knew of any power sources in the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty that could cause such massive amounts of energy, they were all at a loss. Now, they were basically clinging to hope - something Olivia never put much stock in - and putting their faith in people whose credentials Olivia knew nothing about.
In all honesty, she was kept busy just trying to stop the effects of the realistic breakdown from becoming too obvious to the public, a vocation that was becoming more difficult and impossible as time wore on. They were doomed from the start - from the second she first heard of ZFT and John's involvement in subjects way beyond her original knowledge - and it had only gotten worse since Jones and the acknowledgment of Walter and the Cortexiphan trials.
Olivia felt as if she had aged ten years in what was, in actuality, only three. But, she often reasoned to herself, she was an agent "gone to seed" and it was beginning to show. Before working for Fringe Division, she had maintained a virtually flawless case record in the FBI. While some suspects, like the Artist, had taken a few years to catch due to the fact that they would go away for years before resurfacing to get caught, she always got them in the end. Her losses in Fringe Division far outweighed her gains. Five whole blocks in New York City were still out of bounds to the public after a vile toxin was let loose by Jones in his determination to get her to realise her Cortexiphan abilities. While she did eventually show signs that she had been a test subject in the trials, it had become evident a few minutes before the toxin was let loose that she wasn't going to be able to make the lights cut out and her superiors had made her exit the building. And then a year later, she had failed again when a building got pulled from reality because she couldn't identify which building it would be. Most recently, a whole apartment complex had disappeared from reality as well. All those lives, gone forever, simply because she couldn't work some "ability" that Walter and another crazy man had insisted she had. And that was to say nothing of her personal failures, which had been going on for much longer - her sister, her mother, Nick, Charlie...John.
If there was one thing that Olivia had learned throughout the last three years, it was that everything had its time and everything died, and it always happened sooner rather than later.
She finally came to the door to the computer labs that held all of Brandon's logistics and diagnostics that he had been able to run, and swiped her Massive Dynamic card through the lock. Immediately, she moved a little to the right and put her chin on the chin guard, waiting for the familiar red light to sweep across her retinas.
"Retinal Confirmation. Agent Dunham, Olivia," droned the computerised voice.
She listened for the familiar hiss of the door being depressurised and held it open for her two "guests." She glanced over them again as they moved into the room, unassuming and perfectly at ease with this new dimension they had never entered before. It gave Olivia a brief pause. She had only entered Walternate's universe a couple of times since the bridge had been built, but she had always stayed as briefly as possible. There was something about the air over there that made her nervous - queasy in the stomach - and a feel of being hunted always seemed to pervade the environment. She wanted to describe it as deja vu, and would have described it to her own version of Walter as such a few years ago, but given that she knew his theory on what deja vu was (a theory that had extreme credence, given her day to day life), she avoided doing so. After all, with his theory that deja vu was caused by alternate versions of herself having done her action before in a different reality, she thought it was quite possible she was merely catching a back draft of such an experience. Before meeting Walter, she would have said that deja vu was a symbol that she was where she was meant to be, and that it probably explained why she rarely felt deja vu, but her previous explanation of events didn't really seem to match up anymore. In any case, she couldn't decide whether the new scientists' lack of awe and trepidation made her more comfortable with them or more wary.
"So, Agent Dunham," announced the male scientist, clapping his hands once with a loud bang that sounded throughout the lab. She almost asked how he knew her name, but then remembered the security system had announced it quite loudly. "Where do we start? We can do this the time consuming way and I can go through all your data and my trusty-though-slightly-less-techno-savvy companion Rose-"
"Oi!" yelled the blonde scientist indignantly. Olivia surmised this was Rose, not that she felt that particular deduction was all that difficult really.
"Well, you are a little less techno savvy. Don't worry. It's not your fault," the pinstriped man said, a smile on his face. The girl - Rose - looked far less amused and merely glowered at him, rolling her eyes and looking at Olivia. Rose raised her eyebrows, and made an expression that said quite plainly "can you believe him?" Olivia was even less amused and found herself wishing they would stay on topic. If they had this little attention at the start of the night, she did not want to imagine what they would be like after a few hours. She briefly entertained the thought of leaving them with Astrid or Walter while she went and did paperwork, but dismissed the notion quickly. Even less work would get done if Walter was with them with no supervision, and Astrid was one of the only agents allowed in the building that Olivia could stand and she didn't want to risk pissing the junior agent off and having Astrid leave Walter with Olivia for longer than five minutes. Olivia had only limited patience for the man, and she knew Astrid was aware of what a punishment it would be for Olivia to be stuck with him and his antics for too long.
"Just do whatever you have to do," Olivia announced, putting a hold on the ensuing playful argument she could instinctively tell was about to arise between Rose and her male friend. "Run diagnostics, put together some weird contraption I can't pronounce, talk with Walter and Brandon and Nina Sharp. I don't care. Just tell us whether or not you can help." She ended her little bout of instructions and frustrations with a tiny huff and it was all she could do not to throw her hands in the air in surrender. She was running on two months of little sleep and endless worry, and her temper in recent days was nonexistent. She was a woman who *wanted* to give up, but couldn't - her personality wouldn't allow for it - but her hope of things getting better dwindled every day. She almost wished the world *would* end so that she would stop worrying about the inevitability of its happening. However, some higher power - she bet it was those Observers that had plagued her life for three years before they mysteriously disappeared - kept putting little bursts of hope in her path. The sunlight in the morning, the few times when she was able to save someone in the last few years, the time she had awoken from a vegetative state when everyone had expected her to die (though that was a bittersweet thing as it had led to Charlie's death, and she was plagued with migraines ever since). All of these things kept her from losing hope completely, though part of her wished her hope would die; believing in something when you have no visible reason to do so was exhausting.
She wanted to dislike the two scientists - it suddenly occurred to her that the man still hadn't introduced himself - but she found herself unable to do so. She didn't trust them and wasn't sure they were even qualified to handle the problem - they looked too young to be experts (though she knew looks were misleading), and they seemed too blase and carefree about the problem - but something in her was trending towards trusting them. She loathed that part of herself for it tended to get her into more trouble than was worth it.
"Right. We'll go about it the quick way then. First, you'll have a seat, Miss Dunham, and then you'll tell Rose and I all about what's been going on the last six months on this side of the rift. And then, when you've told us all the little details and we've deduced what's changed from before, we're going to help you fix it by giving you back what you've lost. I'm the Doctor, by the way." The Doctor, as the man had introduced himself, said all of this very fast and confidently. It was all Olivia could do to keep up. When her brain worked out everything he had said and comprehended it all as best as she could, Olivia did something she hadn't done since before she could remember, and it was really an automatic reaction and more incredulous than anything else...
She laughed.
Rating: K
Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama, Angst, Slight Romance
Spoilers: through 4x13 "Journey's End" on DW, including one reference later on to the Ten and Rose novel The Stone Rose, and 3x22 "The Day We Died" for Fringe
Summary: If any man knows the importance of one man's influence on the universe, and how to bring about existence from nonexistence, it's the Doctor.
Characters: TenII, Rose, Olivia, some of the Alternates.
Pairings: TenII/Rose, Peter/Olivia (this is a no-brainer on both counts)
Disclaimer: Fringe belongs to Fox and Bad Robot. DW belongs to Russell T. Davies and the BBC (or at least, that particular era does).
Note: This is a sequel to last year's summer x-over fic The Planets Bend Between Us, which can be read here: Chapter 3 (previous chapter links included). Best to read that to avoid any confusion.
CHAPTER 1
The Doctor really hated it when time would decide to re-write itself. Or, to be technical, when some total numps decided to re-write time for his or her self and the rest of the world was forced to live based on that re-working. Once upon a time, it had been the Time Lords who had that power - and it was they and they alone - and it was for good reason that the cosmos worked that way. If one didn't understand the workings of time completely through and through, as the Time Lords foolishly thought that they did, one had the capacity to completely ruin the universe because of one silly decision. The Doctor had made more than a few of those in his 900+ years of time and space travel, and because of that he knew a bad decision when he saw one. And the decision that had re-worked time in this instance appeared to be a whole lineage and ancestry full of bad, with an extra set of relatives in the bad family waiting on a nearby lift in the skyscraper of horrible decisions.
It was always a strange thing for he and Rose to have to work around - these shifts in time. As difficult as it could be for a regular person to understand that one man's life could alter the fate of an entire universe, it was a situation the Doctor had seen one time too many for he to write off the circumstance as unimportant. Especially when said person's existence had been the cause of over a dozen laws being written and had led to a covert war with another universe. Add in to that the fact that said person's existence apparently meant a lot to a woman who had the ability to tear apart the walls between universes and put them back together, as the amazing and brilliant Olivia Dunham apparently could do, and well...the Doctor was of the opinion that this universal re-write was something that should be unwritten pretty quickly.
Certain abilities of his had been taken from him when he sprung from the hand that had once belonged to his fully Time Lord self. He could no longer regenerate, and he could only mentally connect with people who had shown a brain where the mental barrier was already strained, and due to his lack of TARDIS he was now stuck traveling through time unilaterally with the rest of mankind. (That is unless he managed to jiggery pokery himself up a vortex manipulator, but the ensuing nausea made it seem as though it wasn't really worth the effort. Especially when one took the time to consider how often the current time line seemed to require his assistance, especially with the continuing rifts in the universe).
He was now literally only half the alien he had been before (and the other half of himself was taken from a certain fiery tempered red-haired human that he didn't much like to mention by name these days because he seemed to have been dosed with human emotions and when he thought of one Donna Noble he often found himself hit with what he had often heard termed to be "grief" or "angst.") But the part of him that was still Time Lord functioned just the same as always in one particular sense. In addition to the 900+ years of alien knowledge, he also had kept his "spidey sense," as Rose so affectionately called it. The Doctor could still "feel" the small changes in time, just as he always had, and unlike the rest of the humans crawling on the planet's face, he remembered the way things had been before the change. This trait used to make for a somewhat lonely existence, as any of his relationships with a companion could be overwritten suddenly by a stranger's influence on time, but he was lucky now. Rose's relationship with time had changed slightly upon her looking into the Time Vortex all those years before, and so did her relationship with reality. Now, when reality changed, though her memory of things was slightly less clear than his own, she did remember things from before, especially major events. Her memories were flawed, but there nonetheless, which was a real help when he needed an accomplice to help him save the universe (or, in this case, the multiverse).
The Doctor was a big believer in the universe telling its occupants quite clearly what it wanted. Before becoming trapped in what he lovingly still called "Pete's World," this had entailed the TARDIS dropping him somewhere he had not intended to be. Quite often, these events ended with he and his companions running for their lives, and with the life sacrifice of some poor friend they had happened to make along the way, but the Doctor had always been able to see that where he turned up was exactly where he was meant to be. Now, the hints were a lot more subtle and linear and Earth based, but no less evident. Time had been re-written and no matter how much the Doctor tried to ignore the changes and live around them, the change continued to eat at him. Ergo, he was pretty sure the universe felt wronged by the change in some way.
Plus, the universe was making it entirely too easy for he and Rose to have access to what they needed, and that was a lot less subtle than he was used to in recent years. Due to the changes caused by the lack of existence of one Peter Bishop, Olivia Dunham from the other universe had never come to Pete's World and gotten caught by the US Secretary of Defence. She had never sat in solitary for months and met Rose Tyler - hell, Rose and the Doctor had never even traveled to the States because Olivia wasn't leaving miniature rifts all over New York City. And, on a slightly more happy note, the Doctor and Rose had not been punished for their "rogue op" and been locked in solitary confinement for three weeks by Pete Tyler. (The fact that they had any luxury they could ask for during their time in the brig was something they left off of official documentation).
Due to these changes, when Britain was asked to send in informed specialists to do diagnostics on the continually degrading bridge between realities that the United States had somehow managed to covertly put together in the confines of the Statue of Liberty, Pete Tyler saw no reason at all why he shouldn't send in his two best agents - his daughter, Rose Tyler, and the Doctor, her partner and significant other. It had been all the Doctor and Rose could do to not break a rib due to repressed laughter when guards led them through the security checkpoints and into the private laboratory restricted to a mere seven personnel on each side of the rift. When the Secretary, whom the Doctor remembered Olivia had referred to as Walternate, looked at them with no recognition, the Doctor breathed an inward sigh of relief. While this meant that it would take some time to get Olivia on their side, it at least verified that they wouldn't be running for their lives the entire time as they had done before.
The laboratory they entered was fairly nondescript. The walls and ceiling were painted eggshell white, and the floor glistened with wax, the Doctor and Rose's pairs of plimsolls squeaking on the hard surface. There were rows of long lab tables going around the sides, covered with lab equipment that was considered state-of-the-art by the day's standards, but which the Doctor still thought of as primitive. At the end of the row of tables, in a prominent position in the room, was a sight that made the Doctor shudder. Standing on a dais in the front was a large metal construction that he knew Olivia had termed "the Doomsday Device." The Doctor had seen many Doomsdays in his time, most of which he wanted to forget, and he was not really sure the machine he was looking at qualified. While it definitely did destroy, it also had somehow created the room he was standing in - this bridge, which after months of helping to facilitate diplomatic talks between warring dimensions, was starting to break down and cause more problems than it was solving. The Doctor had not been called in to the fix the machine - a machine that had not been mentioned in conversations at all in the months since the re-write had occurred - but rather he had been called in to see if he could come up with a "patch" on the universes. Technically, that would be all too easy - he was pretty sure the Secretary's team of scientists and the other version of Walter had come up with one long ago - but in practicality, it was nearly impossible. The technology simply didn't exist yet, and wouldn't in this galaxy for hundreds of years. The long and short of the problem was that the reality needed Peter Bishop - the Doctor remembered that drawing he had found in the Secretary's office the year before all too clearly - and reality no longer had him, nor realised he had been there in the first place.
Luckily for reality, the Doctor had also disappeared from existence numerous times, and he had always found a way back. He had just needed a little help from someone who cared enough about him to find a way. And thankfully, the Doctor knew exactly who would care enough about Peter Bishop to make sure he came back, assuming the Doctor could make her trust him enough to believe him and be willing to help.
The Doctor stared at the imposing figure at the end of the room - the black hulk of metal that he could see occupied two places at the same time. The Doctor was hit with the strange urge to giggle and fought the impulse to turn to Rose and make a crack about being in two time zones at the same time. He almost gave into his urge and did so anyway (he knew Rose would find it funny, though she'd roll her eyes to save face that she hadn't thought of it first), but he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
Most would ignore it - the things they see in the corner of their eyes. But not the Doctor. He often overlooked those things right in front of him, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident, but he never glanced over mere glimpses from the side. They were, more often than not, the most important things to note. And what the Doctor had seen was something he definitely thought was worth remembrance. For the briefest of seconds, when he wasn't *really* looking, he had seen the figure of a man, his arms stretched out and locked inside the restraints of the machine, his head thrown back in a painful grimace. And he didn't seem to really be there, but was instead flickering in and out of focus, like an old film left under the projector for too long. The importance of this image was further solidified when the few others in the lab appeared not to notice.
"Rose, do you see what I see?" the Doctor asked, his arm pointing towards the far end of the room.
Rose gave a brief glance before turning to the Doctor with raised eyebrows. "Sure, I do. The wall is lovely, Doctor," she answered, patting the top of his arm with a firm hand in the spirit of a person humouring a friend.
"No, no, no, no, no," the Doctor muttered, circling her by stepping in front of her and then running around behind her, putting one arm over her shoulder and once again gesturing towards what his companion had previously described as the wall. "Look very closely, straight ahead of you. And concentrate, Rose. Concentrate hard. There's something in this room that doesn't belong."
The Doctor watched as Rose began to see what he had seen after a few mere seconds. He knew the second her mind re-asserted itself to its previous set on information about "the machine." Her eyes, always a deep honey brown, gained gold flecks towards the centre near her pupils as the tiny slivers of Bad Wolf which lay continuously dormant in her system allowed her mind to access the general idea of her previous adventure with the machine.
"Do you see it now?" he whispered to her, his eyes flickering towards every side of the room.
"Yeah. It's weird. It's like, when I look for it, I have no problem seeing it, but...if I'm not looking at it, I know it's there - somehow, in the back of my mind anyway - but I don't want to know."
"It's a temporal distortion. Works almost like a cloaking device - it's how the TARDIS operated really - but it's a bit more rudimentary than truly being invisible. As you can see, the scientists and such are giving the area a wide berth. They know it's there on a molecular level - hard-wired into them - but it's like there's a mental block around the information." The Doctor blew out a puff of air, frustrated. The situation just kept getting more and more complicated, and to top it off he was getting a temporal headache. Distortions in time always made him a bit nauseous, and due to the longevity that this distortion had been in place, the physical effects were starting to become more severe. He had shook hands with an ambassador going to the other side, named David Robert Jones, the previous week, and in addition to getting the insane urge to listen to more David Bowie than the human body could handle, the Doctor had also been struck with a sense of illness so strong that he had vomited for two straight hours afterward. He hadn't even been able to listen to David Bowie to lessen the sickness because, sadly, the man had never become a musician in this universe and had instead become a hair stylist, to the Doctor and Rose's neverending amusement.
"You alright?" Rose asked, her voice turning worried as the Doctor felt his face flush.
"I'm always alright," he answered, his trademark I'm-definitely-not-okay-but-you'll-never-hear-me-say-those-words smirk going up one side of his face. He gave Rose a small nudge in her back as he saw a scientist approach them.
The scientist was wearing the familiar white lab coat, a plain button down dress shirt and black slacks beneath it. His hair was a short, slightly messy brown and the name on his labcoat said Brandon. The man gave off a slightly geeky vibe, but the Doctor felt himself ill at ease, regardless of the apparent innocence. There was something slightly malicious in the scientist's smile, and while the Doctor was used to men leering at Rose when they met her, he was disturbed to find that "Brandon's" leer was less undressing-with-the-eyes and more investigate-your-innards-with-a-scalpel. The Doctor unconsciously moved Rose so that she was half-hidden behind him.
"My name is Brandon, and I work for the US Department of Defence. I take it you two are the ambassadors from Britain's Torchwood Agency."
"That's us," Rose announced, putting on her all too familiar guise of being the slightly clueless Vitex heiress who only managed to work for such a prestigious government agency due to nepotism. The Doctor glowed with an inner pride. Not only was she one of the most intelligent and brave women he had ever known - and exceptionally good at hiding it when the situation called for it - but somehow he had managed to get such a woman to fall in love with him. There were random moments, such as when the two of them were trying to look totally ignorant and innocent about how to cross between universes - that he was reminded of just how much he had to lose now that he was half human. "So, are they really different from us? I mean, we in Britain have heard all kind of rumours. That they keep those pepper-pot things that terrorised us two years ago AS PETS. I've even heard that the stars are still out over there."
Rose was really laying it on thick, twisting her fingers nervously and shuffling her feet like a person unsure of what to do with her legs. Despite the Doctor's worry that she might have been over-selling it, the trick apparently worked. The scientist puffed his chest out in importance and seemed quite happy to be well aware of things of which such a well-known heiress was apparently ignorant.
"Oh no, they're all perfectly normal. They're nowhere near us in terms of technological advancement, of course. To be honest, their science seems quite out-dated, and instead of doing the smart thing and having a division devoted to Fringe cases, they merely allocated a part of their FBI. The FBI of course being an agency that, I'm sure you know, we in this universe deemed obsolete decades ago."
The Doctor forcibly bit his tongue and refrained from blurting out just how much knowledge he knew about the true history of this universe. For instance, he knew that the FBI had not been deemed obsolete by any means. The heads of the Bureau had all been killed in a massive outbreak of poisonous natural gases that had sprung from a rift that popped up in downtown Washington, DC and the other branches had been sealed in amber as needed. While working for Fringe Division in Pete's World was indeed an honour - just as much of an honour as serving in Torchwood London - the sight of a Fringe Agent was not something people greeted with happiness in the streets. The only reason the other side had no official Fringe Division was that they had no need of one yet, a situation that the Doctor was more than sure would change over time.
"Anyway," Brandon continued, "I'll need to have your Show-Mes; they don't use them over there. And I'll need any sort of weapon your government has requisitioned for you."
Rose frowned but handed over her gun. The Doctor merely lifted his empty hands and then patted down his suit jacket, showing he carried no weapons with him. The sonic screwdriver was hidden in his dimensionally transcendental pockets, but he saw no reason to draw attention to that. Brandon nodded and the Doctor rolled his eyes as some other scientists patted them both down anyway, despite their cooperation. When Brandon was satisfied that the Doctor and Rose had relinquished all their guns and sharp objects, he placed Rose's gun in a cabinet with extremely thick glass, which was positioned near the door to the room.
"Now, when you switch dimensions, everything should look the way it does now. Although, there may be a different person in the room than me. However, the other side knows you're coming, so they shouldn't try to arrest you. I will warn you though that the people from the other side don't think like us. So far our cooperation has been very diplomatic and peaceful, but that could change at any time. Trust them, but only so far as you have to do. Those are the orders from the Secretary. In his experience, they want to destroy our universe as much as we want to save it. So figure out the problem and get back."
With that, Brandon gave them a nod and left the room, the other scientists filing out behind him. The door clicked shut behind the final glance of white lab coat with an ominous sounding click that reverberated around the too-large and empty room. The Doctor and Rose glanced at each other and both were aware of a strange ringing in their ears and a bright flash of blue light, accompanied by a few microseconds of nausea. The Doctor blinked and when he looked around the room again, it was to see that nothing much had changed. The tables were still in the same layout, there was still a thick glass case near the door (now empty of Rose's gun), the walls were still that annoying eggshell white, and that damned headache causing machine was still barely in focus at the front of the room.
The door opened with a loud click, and the Doctor and Rose hurriedly turned around from their initial sweep of the room. The Doctor had assumed that the first person they saw would be this dimension's version of Brandon (and, he reminded himself, he needed to come up with a name for this universe as well, or he may confuse even himself before the day was over). However, it was not. The person opening the door was a familiar figure. It was a woman with long, straight blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She was wearing a white blouse and dark slacks, her trousers matching the colour around her eyes. As when he and Rose had met her before, there was strong evidence of a lack of sleep and a strong, indomitable will. The green eyes he remembered were burdened beyond her mere 30 something years, and instead resembled his own. The only difference between the woman he had met before and the woman he was seeing now was that her eyes lacked a bit of the life he had seen before - this was a woman who knew nothing but work and misery. Any sort of happiness or friendly camaraderie was something long forgotten.
She walked up to them, the sound of her business-like strut familiar to his ears. "So, you two must be the experts the Other Side was sending. I hope you know more than the last two because we're running out of time. Grab whatever stuff you need; we have work to do," she announced, giving them a brief glance up and down. The expression on her face showed her lack of hope and corresponding lack of faith in their abilities. The Doctor felt half challenged, half indignant, and all insulted. Before the Doctor could formulate a clever retort, she had turned her back and was walking for the door, wordlessly conveying that she expected them to follow post haste. The Doctor and Rose shared a mutual look of annoyance and walked briskly after her. They had only known this version of Olivia Dunham for a few moments, but that was more than enough for them to know that whatever had changed in her life after having Peter Bishop taken from it, had made her a much more hard-hearted woman.
The Doctor tiredly rubbed his eyes as he waited for Rose to pass him at the doorway. Getting Olivia to believe his theory was going to be much trickier and time-consuming than he had hoped.
<0>
Olivia Dunham was not a happy FBI agent. This was not a statement of her overall attitude or regular personality (though she knew some on her team would argue), but rather a confession of current assessment. It was supposed to be her night off, but in typical Broyles fashion, she found herself being called in and having her first good night of sleep in two months ruined. And the only thing she was being asked to do was fill in two scientists on a problem of which she was certain they were already well aware.
For the first four months, the bridge that had mysteriously opened between the two universes had felt like a godsend - a sort of random miracle that she didn't feel comfortable enough to question. Everything had felt so fragile, both in terms of the physicality of the bridge which defied the laws of quantum physics, and in the tenuous relationship between the representatives from the Other Side. Just as they had been making progress, and just as Olivia had begun to somewhat trust her alternate self and the alternate versions of her team, the bridge had started breaking down. At first, both sides had blamed each other for the continuing degradation, but it soon became clear through the cacophony of hurled insults and accusations that both sides were terrified and confused about the turn of events. Whatever unseen power maintained the bridge was starting to wear down, and given that none of them knew of any power sources in the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty that could cause such massive amounts of energy, they were all at a loss. Now, they were basically clinging to hope - something Olivia never put much stock in - and putting their faith in people whose credentials Olivia knew nothing about.
In all honesty, she was kept busy just trying to stop the effects of the realistic breakdown from becoming too obvious to the public, a vocation that was becoming more difficult and impossible as time wore on. They were doomed from the start - from the second she first heard of ZFT and John's involvement in subjects way beyond her original knowledge - and it had only gotten worse since Jones and the acknowledgment of Walter and the Cortexiphan trials.
Olivia felt as if she had aged ten years in what was, in actuality, only three. But, she often reasoned to herself, she was an agent "gone to seed" and it was beginning to show. Before working for Fringe Division, she had maintained a virtually flawless case record in the FBI. While some suspects, like the Artist, had taken a few years to catch due to the fact that they would go away for years before resurfacing to get caught, she always got them in the end. Her losses in Fringe Division far outweighed her gains. Five whole blocks in New York City were still out of bounds to the public after a vile toxin was let loose by Jones in his determination to get her to realise her Cortexiphan abilities. While she did eventually show signs that she had been a test subject in the trials, it had become evident a few minutes before the toxin was let loose that she wasn't going to be able to make the lights cut out and her superiors had made her exit the building. And then a year later, she had failed again when a building got pulled from reality because she couldn't identify which building it would be. Most recently, a whole apartment complex had disappeared from reality as well. All those lives, gone forever, simply because she couldn't work some "ability" that Walter and another crazy man had insisted she had. And that was to say nothing of her personal failures, which had been going on for much longer - her sister, her mother, Nick, Charlie...John.
If there was one thing that Olivia had learned throughout the last three years, it was that everything had its time and everything died, and it always happened sooner rather than later.
She finally came to the door to the computer labs that held all of Brandon's logistics and diagnostics that he had been able to run, and swiped her Massive Dynamic card through the lock. Immediately, she moved a little to the right and put her chin on the chin guard, waiting for the familiar red light to sweep across her retinas.
"Retinal Confirmation. Agent Dunham, Olivia," droned the computerised voice.
She listened for the familiar hiss of the door being depressurised and held it open for her two "guests." She glanced over them again as they moved into the room, unassuming and perfectly at ease with this new dimension they had never entered before. It gave Olivia a brief pause. She had only entered Walternate's universe a couple of times since the bridge had been built, but she had always stayed as briefly as possible. There was something about the air over there that made her nervous - queasy in the stomach - and a feel of being hunted always seemed to pervade the environment. She wanted to describe it as deja vu, and would have described it to her own version of Walter as such a few years ago, but given that she knew his theory on what deja vu was (a theory that had extreme credence, given her day to day life), she avoided doing so. After all, with his theory that deja vu was caused by alternate versions of herself having done her action before in a different reality, she thought it was quite possible she was merely catching a back draft of such an experience. Before meeting Walter, she would have said that deja vu was a symbol that she was where she was meant to be, and that it probably explained why she rarely felt deja vu, but her previous explanation of events didn't really seem to match up anymore. In any case, she couldn't decide whether the new scientists' lack of awe and trepidation made her more comfortable with them or more wary.
"So, Agent Dunham," announced the male scientist, clapping his hands once with a loud bang that sounded throughout the lab. She almost asked how he knew her name, but then remembered the security system had announced it quite loudly. "Where do we start? We can do this the time consuming way and I can go through all your data and my trusty-though-slightly-less-techno-savvy companion Rose-"
"Oi!" yelled the blonde scientist indignantly. Olivia surmised this was Rose, not that she felt that particular deduction was all that difficult really.
"Well, you are a little less techno savvy. Don't worry. It's not your fault," the pinstriped man said, a smile on his face. The girl - Rose - looked far less amused and merely glowered at him, rolling her eyes and looking at Olivia. Rose raised her eyebrows, and made an expression that said quite plainly "can you believe him?" Olivia was even less amused and found herself wishing they would stay on topic. If they had this little attention at the start of the night, she did not want to imagine what they would be like after a few hours. She briefly entertained the thought of leaving them with Astrid or Walter while she went and did paperwork, but dismissed the notion quickly. Even less work would get done if Walter was with them with no supervision, and Astrid was one of the only agents allowed in the building that Olivia could stand and she didn't want to risk pissing the junior agent off and having Astrid leave Walter with Olivia for longer than five minutes. Olivia had only limited patience for the man, and she knew Astrid was aware of what a punishment it would be for Olivia to be stuck with him and his antics for too long.
"Just do whatever you have to do," Olivia announced, putting a hold on the ensuing playful argument she could instinctively tell was about to arise between Rose and her male friend. "Run diagnostics, put together some weird contraption I can't pronounce, talk with Walter and Brandon and Nina Sharp. I don't care. Just tell us whether or not you can help." She ended her little bout of instructions and frustrations with a tiny huff and it was all she could do not to throw her hands in the air in surrender. She was running on two months of little sleep and endless worry, and her temper in recent days was nonexistent. She was a woman who *wanted* to give up, but couldn't - her personality wouldn't allow for it - but her hope of things getting better dwindled every day. She almost wished the world *would* end so that she would stop worrying about the inevitability of its happening. However, some higher power - she bet it was those Observers that had plagued her life for three years before they mysteriously disappeared - kept putting little bursts of hope in her path. The sunlight in the morning, the few times when she was able to save someone in the last few years, the time she had awoken from a vegetative state when everyone had expected her to die (though that was a bittersweet thing as it had led to Charlie's death, and she was plagued with migraines ever since). All of these things kept her from losing hope completely, though part of her wished her hope would die; believing in something when you have no visible reason to do so was exhausting.
She wanted to dislike the two scientists - it suddenly occurred to her that the man still hadn't introduced himself - but she found herself unable to do so. She didn't trust them and wasn't sure they were even qualified to handle the problem - they looked too young to be experts (though she knew looks were misleading), and they seemed too blase and carefree about the problem - but something in her was trending towards trusting them. She loathed that part of herself for it tended to get her into more trouble than was worth it.
"Right. We'll go about it the quick way then. First, you'll have a seat, Miss Dunham, and then you'll tell Rose and I all about what's been going on the last six months on this side of the rift. And then, when you've told us all the little details and we've deduced what's changed from before, we're going to help you fix it by giving you back what you've lost. I'm the Doctor, by the way." The Doctor, as the man had introduced himself, said all of this very fast and confidently. It was all Olivia could do to keep up. When her brain worked out everything he had said and comprehended it all as best as she could, Olivia did something she hadn't done since before she could remember, and it was really an automatic reaction and more incredulous than anything else...
She laughed.