FIC: Thursday's Child (Ten & Rose) PG
Title: Thursday's Child
Author: Jess
Character / Pairing: Ten, Rose, and Donna
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~2,500
Spoilers: Through the casting spoiler for series four.
Disclaimers: The stuff that looks familiar belongs to the BBC - there rest belongs to me or to christn7.
Author's Note: Written in response to christn7's Finish Me Fic Challenge. Beta'd by the unrivaled erin2326. Forgive me if there are still tense errors - present tense is not my forte.
The bold bit is christn7's. Enjoy!
XxX
A flash of light interrupts the darkness of the approaching night. Not unusual, he thinks, except that it’s followed, rather closely, by an all too familiar scream.
That’d be his Donna, then.
The Doctor starts to stroll in the direction his newest companion wandered off in - he has to admit, if only to himself, that Donna’s shrieking doesn’t alarm him all that much. Screams at the drop of a hat, that one, and he is, if he says so himself, becoming rather apt at telling the difference between something dangerous and something spilt-on-her-new-shoes.
There are times, much like this, when he almost can’t remember why he brought her along. Almost, because try as he might, he can’t seem to forget the loneliness or the sound of his own footsteps as they echoed in the console room.
And if nothing else, his Donna, she’s good for the silence and while she can be a bit annoying, at the same time, having her about rather reminds him of his younger days.
“Doctor!”
Her voice is a little more alarmed and a lot more annoyed, and he lets out a sigh as he increases his pace to a light jog. Sometimes, times much like these ones, he really misses Martha - she at least could have taken care of herself for the five minutes it’d take to bargain for spare parts.
He thinks he’s about halfway there and about to yell out about the locals and their inclination towards flash photography when he hears another voice, one as familiar to him as his own.
He breaks into a sprint, closing the distance as quickly as his legs will carry him. She’s there when he rounds the corner, and though he’d heard her voice with his own ears, he honestly didn’t expect her to be.
He must be - must be - going insane, because it’s simply not possible. Impossible. He deemed it so, and that’s not a word he uses lightly.
She can’t be but there she is.
He skids to a stop a few feet behind her, too scared to touch her for reasons he can’t quite figure out.
Rose.
She hasn’t noticed him.
“You can’t tell him,” she says, pushing a bundle of cloth into Donna’s arms. “He can’t know I was here.”
“S’too late for that,” Donna says, nodding in his direction.
He’s dimly aware that he has a few seconds to collect himself but all he can do is stand there, his hearts caught somewhere around his throat.
She turns and the world stops spinning - that’s his Rose, all right. Dyed blonde hair, big round eyes, and she’s shocked to see him - he can tell - but what did she expect, stumbling back through his universe and accosting his companions like this?
Rose, his impossible girl.
She’s scared, too, it’s written across her face. He wonders, briefly, if it’s him she’s scared of, but when he pulls her into his arms, she clings to him just as tightly. She leans into him, all warmth and perfume, and he thinks that whatever it is, however it happened, it’s going to be okay.
That is, at least, until the bundle in Donna’s arms starts to cry.
The Doctor lets go of Rose instantly, jumping away from her and the wailing bundle. When he looks at her, she's watching him with a wry, yet somehow wary, expression.
"'S not what you think," she says, arching an eyebrow and folding her arms across her chest.
The crying quiets, and the Doctor sees that Donna is holding the wriggling swaddle of cloth close - and is she ever glaring at him!
"I'm... I'm not thinking anything." He swallows hard. Is it just him, or has the dank, foul-smelling space base just gotten about ten degrees hotter ? Ignoring the aberrant temperature fluctuation, he presses on with what he hopes is a passable grin plastered across his face. "Well, that is to say, I am thinking many things - but I'm not thinking what you think I'm thinking. Why? What did you think I was thinking - which I'm clearly not thinking."
Rose opens her mouth to retort, but she shuts it just as quickly. In his peripheral vision, the Doctor sees Donna take one giant step backward, pressing the bundle to her shoulder.
"Doctor?" Rose squeaks.
Oh how he'd missed that squeak - not to mention the way she'd said his name. There is just a hint of awe in her voice, and he has to fight down to urge to clap his hands together and start explaining something that must have confounded her. He's running through the veritable encyclopedia in his mind - waffle irons? wainscoting? walruses? - when he feels a weighty ham hock of a hand clap down onto his shoulder. Painfully.
"Forget something, friend?" a voice booms overhead. The word "friend" never sounded so threatening.
The Doctor winces and looks down to his hand. He is still clutching the knitting needle he'd hoped to barter for copper wire vital to repairing the TARDIS' temporal circuitry manifold. He is also holding the length of copper wire.
He swallows again - he is now certain that not only has the temperature risen, the port's swampers have cut out altogether, leaving the air thick and dry. "Exactly. Yes." The Doctor chokes out a brittle laugh. "Forgetful. That's me." He offers the giant lout the absurdly delicate knitting needle. "Genuine Earth paracasein that is. One of kind... well, it's part of a pair, really, but who can keep track of two, eh?" He holds it out, waggling it encouragingly.
The shopkeeper grumbles something in his native tongue - something that makes "friend" sound downright friendly.
The Doctor takes a step back at the very same moment Rose steps forward. Without more than a bat of her sooty eyelashes, she takes the knitting needle from the Doctor's hand, places it in the meaty paw of the other man, and nods toward where Donna was already making her escape. "Run?" she asks from between clenched teeth.
Feeling like himself at long last, he reaches down to take Rose's hand, and they run.
X
Twenty minutes and half a dozen galaxies later, the three travelers and their one tiny charge sit in an uncomfortable silence in the console room. Well, the bundled baby isn't uncomfortable - she is burbling and babbling away, wrapped up in her own microcosm of pudgy fingers and the frayed edge of a once-blue receiving blanket.
To be perfectly honest, Donna has one foot in the baby's world too. She's cradling her against her lap, looking down into the clear features, her own face gone a little softer. The Doctor won't admit it out loud, but he's proud of Donna in this moment - not to mention, she hasn't whined once since accepting Rose's burden.
It's Rose who speaks first. "I can't stay."
He looks at her, cold and hot at the same time. "Why not?"
"You know why not!" she snaps. She rubs her hands over her face, and when she looks at him again, her cheeks are pink. "I can't."
"Who are you trying to convince?"
Her face fairly crumbles, and he feels both the stab of guilt in his hearts and the piercing glare Donna shoots him at the same time. He fixes his current companion with a helpless look, and she shakes her head in disgust.
Donna gathers the baby close and stands. "I'm going to find a place for her to sleep." Before she swishes entirely out of the room, Donna runs her gaze over them both. "I won't be back." With a not-so-subtle lift of her eyebrows, she's gone.
The Doctor looks back to Rose who is smiling faintly after Donna. "I like her," she says softly.
A door slams somewhere from deep within the TARDIS, and the Doctor leaps to his feet, whirling away from Rose.
After a beat she says, "You know I would stay. But you taught me..."
"You can't cross established timelines," he finishes miserably, turning back to face her. He toes the grated floor. "Where is he... I mean me. It is me, right? I am very clever after all - no doubt I found a way."
She smiles up at him, but it's a wan smile, one that makes his throat close. "It's you." Something in her voice -
"I've changed." It's not a question.
She doesn't have to answer. He wants to hugs her, to pull her close, to ask her why and when and how - but he knows she won't tell. She's too good.
Finally the Doctor asks, "When does he want you back?"
"Soon." He sees her glance at something on her wrist - a watch? No - "A vortex manipulator? Jack? Is he..."
She beams up at him. "Yes! Well, not all the time. He's got responsibilities now." She giggles un-self-consciously, and in an instant she's his Rose again. "Our Jack, Doctor! Who'd have thought?" She fingers the scrap of leather strapped to her wrist. "He's just the same. Have you... I guess you can't say..."
"It's in the past, Rose. I can." He grins. "He's just the same, then?"
"Oh yeah. Practically got a harem in Cardiff, him."
The silence is heavy between them again, an uncompromising iron curtain. It'd be an easy thing to find out what brings about their reunion and his demise - perhaps they're one in the same? - as well as the reason for that shadow behind Rose's eyes. He can sense she's keeping something so vital about herself from him, she's ready to burst. Can it have something to do with the child? To know, he could simply look into her mind - his Rose is as open as a book. But he knows he won't, so he simply asks.
"The baby, Rose... is she...?"
Rose laughs suddenly, the rich, honeyed sound filling the console room the way hasn't done in years, her face sunshine to chase the shadows away. "Of course not! She's... well, she's another one of yours."
The Doctor looks up, alarmed. Rose's tongue is poking out from its usual place between her teeth. He grins and arches an eyebrow. "One of mine, then? It's not Donna, is it? I will not have a teenage version of her on my ship, Rose!"
"No - well, you know I can't say. But she's goin' to grow up right and she's goin' to save the world one day. An' you're not raising her - you've just got to get her somewhere safe. Earth was... well, you know what the 28th Century was like."
The Doctor tugs his ear, a vague sense of disappointment tingling his diaphragm, making his breath come a bit more shallow. "Well, that I can do. But, ah, why all the secrecy then? Why the cloak-and-dagger?"
Rose looks away. "You should know that, too."
He does.
"I should be gettin' back now. He'll...well, you know how it is."
"Why did he send you, Rose? Why couldn't he do it?" The ire in his voice is so thick, he almost gags on it. Oddly, Rose doesn't look surprised.
"I wanted to come."
"Even if you couldn't..."
"I knew I would."
He closes the distance between them, pulling her to him roughly and holding onto her - Rose, his first port in the storm. "You're not crossing your time line! You can stay! You... we..." Here comes the word vomit, he thinks, stuttering over the more eloquent phrases trying to ram themselves in between the words he's saying.
She curls her face into his shoulder, and he can feel the stir of her warm breath on his neck. He stops talking, stops thinking of things to say. Gooseflesh spreads down his spine, and he buries his face in her hair, inhaling her. He's not going to be able to let her go, not again, not ever.
Almost before he knows what's happening, he feels her small hand inside his jacket pocket. As deft as any of Fagin's finest, she finds the screwdriver and lays it against his temple.
"Rose, I... I didn't get to say..."
She lays a finger to his lips, smiling gently, her fragile features trembling with the force of the tears threatening to spill over. "I know. And you'll have more chances."
He feels the cold metal burr against his face, and in that instant, Rose slips from sight, and even while her perfume hangs in the air, he can't remember how warm she felt pressed against him, or the exact shade of brown in her eyes, or the way she looked at him and saw more than just an alien and sometime traveler. She's gone.
He turns to the console, shaking off the disquieting feeling that he's just missed something important. With a shrug to shake off his raised hackles, he turns a few knobs, flips a switch, and resets the TARDIS' course.
Donna rejoins him just as he is settling into the jump seat for what he hopes will be a smooth ride. She's carrying a small bundle of rags on her shoulder.
"You all right, Donna? What've you got there? Laundry already? You're not going to sew are you?"
The bundle stirs and makes a quiet sucking noise. The Doctor peers at it and then back to his friend. "Donna? Something you care to share?"
"'S just the little girl we picked up back at the space port, or have you forgotten already?" Donna clucks her tongue at him. "Stupid Martian," she chides, but her jibe lacks its usual level of mockery. Her foolish nickname for him almost sounds like a term of endearment.
Momentarily mystified, he does his best to pretend to know what she means. "Little girl? Oh yes. We have to... take her...somewhere?" Why can't he remember?
"To her family," Donna offers in the gentlest tone he's ever heard her use.
He looks at her peculiarly. When she sticks her tongue out at him over the baby's downy head, he smiles. Perhaps he'd just not slept enough recently - he certainly wouldn't have allowed a baby into the TARDIS without good reason after all.
"What do you think of Sto, Donna? D'ya think her family is there? I've always wanted to visit for a bit of a holiday. Their star showers are very nice this time of century - and the pie! Fantastic pie on Sto."
"Sounds fine, Doctor."
He stretches out, lacing his fingers behind his head and closing his eyes. He is warm all over, and when he turns his head just so, he could swear he smells a very familiar perfume on his jacket collar. Content for the first time in weeks, the Doctor dozes off - and in his dreams, he finds Rose Tyler.
XxX
Author: Jess
Character / Pairing: Ten, Rose, and Donna
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~2,500
Spoilers: Through the casting spoiler for series four.
Disclaimers: The stuff that looks familiar belongs to the BBC - there rest belongs to me or to christn7.
Author's Note: Written in response to christn7's Finish Me Fic Challenge. Beta'd by the unrivaled erin2326. Forgive me if there are still tense errors - present tense is not my forte.
The bold bit is christn7's. Enjoy!
XxX
A flash of light interrupts the darkness of the approaching night. Not unusual, he thinks, except that it’s followed, rather closely, by an all too familiar scream.
That’d be his Donna, then.
The Doctor starts to stroll in the direction his newest companion wandered off in - he has to admit, if only to himself, that Donna’s shrieking doesn’t alarm him all that much. Screams at the drop of a hat, that one, and he is, if he says so himself, becoming rather apt at telling the difference between something dangerous and something spilt-on-her-new-shoes.
There are times, much like this, when he almost can’t remember why he brought her along. Almost, because try as he might, he can’t seem to forget the loneliness or the sound of his own footsteps as they echoed in the console room.
And if nothing else, his Donna, she’s good for the silence and while she can be a bit annoying, at the same time, having her about rather reminds him of his younger days.
“Doctor!”
Her voice is a little more alarmed and a lot more annoyed, and he lets out a sigh as he increases his pace to a light jog. Sometimes, times much like these ones, he really misses Martha - she at least could have taken care of herself for the five minutes it’d take to bargain for spare parts.
He thinks he’s about halfway there and about to yell out about the locals and their inclination towards flash photography when he hears another voice, one as familiar to him as his own.
He breaks into a sprint, closing the distance as quickly as his legs will carry him. She’s there when he rounds the corner, and though he’d heard her voice with his own ears, he honestly didn’t expect her to be.
He must be - must be - going insane, because it’s simply not possible. Impossible. He deemed it so, and that’s not a word he uses lightly.
She can’t be but there she is.
He skids to a stop a few feet behind her, too scared to touch her for reasons he can’t quite figure out.
Rose.
She hasn’t noticed him.
“You can’t tell him,” she says, pushing a bundle of cloth into Donna’s arms. “He can’t know I was here.”
“S’too late for that,” Donna says, nodding in his direction.
He’s dimly aware that he has a few seconds to collect himself but all he can do is stand there, his hearts caught somewhere around his throat.
She turns and the world stops spinning - that’s his Rose, all right. Dyed blonde hair, big round eyes, and she’s shocked to see him - he can tell - but what did she expect, stumbling back through his universe and accosting his companions like this?
Rose, his impossible girl.
She’s scared, too, it’s written across her face. He wonders, briefly, if it’s him she’s scared of, but when he pulls her into his arms, she clings to him just as tightly. She leans into him, all warmth and perfume, and he thinks that whatever it is, however it happened, it’s going to be okay.
That is, at least, until the bundle in Donna’s arms starts to cry.
The Doctor lets go of Rose instantly, jumping away from her and the wailing bundle. When he looks at her, she's watching him with a wry, yet somehow wary, expression.
"'S not what you think," she says, arching an eyebrow and folding her arms across her chest.
The crying quiets, and the Doctor sees that Donna is holding the wriggling swaddle of cloth close - and is she ever glaring at him!
"I'm... I'm not thinking anything." He swallows hard. Is it just him, or has the dank, foul-smelling space base just gotten about ten degrees hotter ? Ignoring the aberrant temperature fluctuation, he presses on with what he hopes is a passable grin plastered across his face. "Well, that is to say, I am thinking many things - but I'm not thinking what you think I'm thinking. Why? What did you think I was thinking - which I'm clearly not thinking."
Rose opens her mouth to retort, but she shuts it just as quickly. In his peripheral vision, the Doctor sees Donna take one giant step backward, pressing the bundle to her shoulder.
"Doctor?" Rose squeaks.
Oh how he'd missed that squeak - not to mention the way she'd said his name. There is just a hint of awe in her voice, and he has to fight down to urge to clap his hands together and start explaining something that must have confounded her. He's running through the veritable encyclopedia in his mind - waffle irons? wainscoting? walruses? - when he feels a weighty ham hock of a hand clap down onto his shoulder. Painfully.
"Forget something, friend?" a voice booms overhead. The word "friend" never sounded so threatening.
The Doctor winces and looks down to his hand. He is still clutching the knitting needle he'd hoped to barter for copper wire vital to repairing the TARDIS' temporal circuitry manifold. He is also holding the length of copper wire.
He swallows again - he is now certain that not only has the temperature risen, the port's swampers have cut out altogether, leaving the air thick and dry. "Exactly. Yes." The Doctor chokes out a brittle laugh. "Forgetful. That's me." He offers the giant lout the absurdly delicate knitting needle. "Genuine Earth paracasein that is. One of kind... well, it's part of a pair, really, but who can keep track of two, eh?" He holds it out, waggling it encouragingly.
The shopkeeper grumbles something in his native tongue - something that makes "friend" sound downright friendly.
The Doctor takes a step back at the very same moment Rose steps forward. Without more than a bat of her sooty eyelashes, she takes the knitting needle from the Doctor's hand, places it in the meaty paw of the other man, and nods toward where Donna was already making her escape. "Run?" she asks from between clenched teeth.
Feeling like himself at long last, he reaches down to take Rose's hand, and they run.
X
Twenty minutes and half a dozen galaxies later, the three travelers and their one tiny charge sit in an uncomfortable silence in the console room. Well, the bundled baby isn't uncomfortable - she is burbling and babbling away, wrapped up in her own microcosm of pudgy fingers and the frayed edge of a once-blue receiving blanket.
To be perfectly honest, Donna has one foot in the baby's world too. She's cradling her against her lap, looking down into the clear features, her own face gone a little softer. The Doctor won't admit it out loud, but he's proud of Donna in this moment - not to mention, she hasn't whined once since accepting Rose's burden.
It's Rose who speaks first. "I can't stay."
He looks at her, cold and hot at the same time. "Why not?"
"You know why not!" she snaps. She rubs her hands over her face, and when she looks at him again, her cheeks are pink. "I can't."
"Who are you trying to convince?"
Her face fairly crumbles, and he feels both the stab of guilt in his hearts and the piercing glare Donna shoots him at the same time. He fixes his current companion with a helpless look, and she shakes her head in disgust.
Donna gathers the baby close and stands. "I'm going to find a place for her to sleep." Before she swishes entirely out of the room, Donna runs her gaze over them both. "I won't be back." With a not-so-subtle lift of her eyebrows, she's gone.
The Doctor looks back to Rose who is smiling faintly after Donna. "I like her," she says softly.
A door slams somewhere from deep within the TARDIS, and the Doctor leaps to his feet, whirling away from Rose.
After a beat she says, "You know I would stay. But you taught me..."
"You can't cross established timelines," he finishes miserably, turning back to face her. He toes the grated floor. "Where is he... I mean me. It is me, right? I am very clever after all - no doubt I found a way."
She smiles up at him, but it's a wan smile, one that makes his throat close. "It's you." Something in her voice -
"I've changed." It's not a question.
She doesn't have to answer. He wants to hugs her, to pull her close, to ask her why and when and how - but he knows she won't tell. She's too good.
Finally the Doctor asks, "When does he want you back?"
"Soon." He sees her glance at something on her wrist - a watch? No - "A vortex manipulator? Jack? Is he..."
She beams up at him. "Yes! Well, not all the time. He's got responsibilities now." She giggles un-self-consciously, and in an instant she's his Rose again. "Our Jack, Doctor! Who'd have thought?" She fingers the scrap of leather strapped to her wrist. "He's just the same. Have you... I guess you can't say..."
"It's in the past, Rose. I can." He grins. "He's just the same, then?"
"Oh yeah. Practically got a harem in Cardiff, him."
The silence is heavy between them again, an uncompromising iron curtain. It'd be an easy thing to find out what brings about their reunion and his demise - perhaps they're one in the same? - as well as the reason for that shadow behind Rose's eyes. He can sense she's keeping something so vital about herself from him, she's ready to burst. Can it have something to do with the child? To know, he could simply look into her mind - his Rose is as open as a book. But he knows he won't, so he simply asks.
"The baby, Rose... is she...?"
Rose laughs suddenly, the rich, honeyed sound filling the console room the way hasn't done in years, her face sunshine to chase the shadows away. "Of course not! She's... well, she's another one of yours."
The Doctor looks up, alarmed. Rose's tongue is poking out from its usual place between her teeth. He grins and arches an eyebrow. "One of mine, then? It's not Donna, is it? I will not have a teenage version of her on my ship, Rose!"
"No - well, you know I can't say. But she's goin' to grow up right and she's goin' to save the world one day. An' you're not raising her - you've just got to get her somewhere safe. Earth was... well, you know what the 28th Century was like."
The Doctor tugs his ear, a vague sense of disappointment tingling his diaphragm, making his breath come a bit more shallow. "Well, that I can do. But, ah, why all the secrecy then? Why the cloak-and-dagger?"
Rose looks away. "You should know that, too."
He does.
"I should be gettin' back now. He'll...well, you know how it is."
"Why did he send you, Rose? Why couldn't he do it?" The ire in his voice is so thick, he almost gags on it. Oddly, Rose doesn't look surprised.
"I wanted to come."
"Even if you couldn't..."
"I knew I would."
He closes the distance between them, pulling her to him roughly and holding onto her - Rose, his first port in the storm. "You're not crossing your time line! You can stay! You... we..." Here comes the word vomit, he thinks, stuttering over the more eloquent phrases trying to ram themselves in between the words he's saying.
She curls her face into his shoulder, and he can feel the stir of her warm breath on his neck. He stops talking, stops thinking of things to say. Gooseflesh spreads down his spine, and he buries his face in her hair, inhaling her. He's not going to be able to let her go, not again, not ever.
Almost before he knows what's happening, he feels her small hand inside his jacket pocket. As deft as any of Fagin's finest, she finds the screwdriver and lays it against his temple.
"Rose, I... I didn't get to say..."
She lays a finger to his lips, smiling gently, her fragile features trembling with the force of the tears threatening to spill over. "I know. And you'll have more chances."
He feels the cold metal burr against his face, and in that instant, Rose slips from sight, and even while her perfume hangs in the air, he can't remember how warm she felt pressed against him, or the exact shade of brown in her eyes, or the way she looked at him and saw more than just an alien and sometime traveler. She's gone.
He turns to the console, shaking off the disquieting feeling that he's just missed something important. With a shrug to shake off his raised hackles, he turns a few knobs, flips a switch, and resets the TARDIS' course.
Donna rejoins him just as he is settling into the jump seat for what he hopes will be a smooth ride. She's carrying a small bundle of rags on her shoulder.
"You all right, Donna? What've you got there? Laundry already? You're not going to sew are you?"
The bundle stirs and makes a quiet sucking noise. The Doctor peers at it and then back to his friend. "Donna? Something you care to share?"
"'S just the little girl we picked up back at the space port, or have you forgotten already?" Donna clucks her tongue at him. "Stupid Martian," she chides, but her jibe lacks its usual level of mockery. Her foolish nickname for him almost sounds like a term of endearment.
Momentarily mystified, he does his best to pretend to know what she means. "Little girl? Oh yes. We have to... take her...somewhere?" Why can't he remember?
"To her family," Donna offers in the gentlest tone he's ever heard her use.
He looks at her peculiarly. When she sticks her tongue out at him over the baby's downy head, he smiles. Perhaps he'd just not slept enough recently - he certainly wouldn't have allowed a baby into the TARDIS without good reason after all.
"What do you think of Sto, Donna? D'ya think her family is there? I've always wanted to visit for a bit of a holiday. Their star showers are very nice this time of century - and the pie! Fantastic pie on Sto."
"Sounds fine, Doctor."
He stretches out, lacing his fingers behind his head and closing his eyes. He is warm all over, and when he turns his head just so, he could swear he smells a very familiar perfume on his jacket collar. Content for the first time in weeks, the Doctor dozes off - and in his dreams, he finds Rose Tyler.
XxX