The One True Free Life (1/26)
Title: The One True Free Life (1/26)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: This chapter is all ages. Ratings will go up and down depending on chapter, but if you don't want to read a story that will at some point go Adult for a time, stop now.
Spoilers: Everything
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues? In this story I promise you at various times: Action! Intrigue! Romance! Smut! Thinky Thoughts! Drama! Return of beloved characters!
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
They only heard Jackie Tyler's half of the conversation when she rang to let her husband know they were safe and sound, and to arrange transportation. Standing on the beach, still desultorily holding hands, both looking rather shell-shocked, Rose and this strange new Doctor didn't speak. They didn't even look at each other. There were too many things to say, there didn't seem like there was enough air, in this universe or any other, to allow it. They just listened to half of a phone conversation and squinted in the glare off the water.
"We're back...yes, everyone's fine. Yes, she came back as well. You're joking! Oh, I'm absolutely going to murder that skinny bastard!" Jackie covered the handset with her palm and whispered to the skinny bastard she was standing right next to, "Not you, sweetheart." She then continued shouting down the line to Pete. "Is Tony okay? You didn't tell him we were- Right, okay, good. What's that? I didn't hear you; I thought you said you.... But how could they? Oh bugger, don't answer that, my mobile's running out of juice. Just send a zeppelin to Bergen. Yes, Norway. Yes, again. You still have the company one at least, yeah?" She pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen. "Damn."
Things sounded quite complicated on the home front and Rose wondered how whatever crisis that was apparently brewing there would fit in to the million different ways her own heart was breaking and mending simultaneously. She felt like she perhaps needed to sit down. Or lie down. Or sleep, for at least a week. The Doctor, the different-but-the-same Doctor, still squinted off in to the distance. Rose broke their hands' embrace and approached her mum, who looked exhausted and upset.
"What is it, what's happened? Is everyone at home all right?"
Jackie took a moment before turning to her daughter and pulling her in for a hug. "Pete says we've been gone for three months."
They were both familiar enough with the imprecision of travel in the TARDIS to not even have to ask how that had happened, and Rose immediately understood the implications for Jackie. "Oh no, poor Tony! He must have missed you terribly!"
At that Jackie broke in to sobs, the exhaustion and the wild fluctuation of emotions in the last couple of days (from her perspective) getting the better of her. Rose clung to her tight, holding her up.
Jackie let out another loud sob and mumbled in to Rose's shoulder, "They told him mummy and sissy went on holiday, but he must have thought I'd abandoned him, my poor little man!"
Rose caught a glimpse of the Doctor out of the corner of her eye. He was standing, hands in pockets, slouching a little, looking extremely uncomfortable while shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He scrunched up his nose and started feeling around his jacket pockets for his glasses, which of course was a lost cause. As she continued to hold Jackie and allow her to let off some steam, she felt emotion well up in her own throat and made some fairly unattractive faces in an effort to push it back down. Not now, not here, not in front of him. Please, not now.
"Tony's still so young, in a couple of days, he won't even remember we were ever gone." Rose disengaged from their embrace and held Jackie out at arm's length. Her make-up was smudged and her eyes red and puffy, and she reached out to wipe off some mascara that had run. "C'mon mum, I know we're both-" She glanced over to the Doctor. "We're all at loose ends a bit here, but it'll be okay. We saved the world! Don't cry." Rose continued the sentence to herself in her head: Don't cry, because if you keep on crying then I'm going to cry and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stop.
Jackie wiped her nose on her sleeve, for lack of anything else. "And Pete's been sacked from Torchwood."
The Doctor visibly stiffened his posture on hearing the name.
"By who?" Rose demanded as she made efforts to corral her mum and the Doctor and get them moving up that all-too-familiar path to the nearest village. "I mean, they can't do that. Can they?"
"Pete's not the bloody King of Torchwood you know. There's a board of directors, and it's them that's done it."
"Did he say what the reason was?" Both Jackie and Rose started at hearing the Doctor's voice again, and they looked back to where he was shuffling along behind them. He just gave them a couple of raised eyebrows in reply.
"Didn't say, and then my mobile went dead. He'll send the company zeppelin to Bergen for us. You can ask him about it yourself. Though as far as I'm concerned it's high time he stopped fussing about with all that business. I reckon Tony's getting to be an age where he needs his dad around more." Jackie turned her reddened eyes on Rose. "And you too, missy. I don't like the idea of you going back to that place." She glanced at the Doctor and then back to her daughter. "You should settle down, get a proper job. You're not a kid any more."
"Mum." Rose raised an eyebrow and tried to telepathically communicate that any talk about settling, or downing, or anything at all having to do with the new Doctor in any way real or implied, needed to stop immediately. The Doctor, thankfully, looked like he had stopped paying attention to Jackie's lecture pretty much from the first words. Rose noted the similarity to how the old Doctor would have behaved with a pang that could have been grief, and could have been excitement, and also could have been both at once.
"Besides," Rose continued, "I doubt I'll have a job waiting for me when I get back, if they've sacked Pete. It wouldn't do to have his daughter knocking about the place now that he's gone, would it?"
The climb up to the path that would take them to the village of Lavik was steep and a good excuse to stop trying to fill the air around them with words. Rose realised that she'd never really heard the Doctor be as out of breath as he was sounding now and she looked back to make sure he was alright. He seemed, as they all were, to be having a hard time with the footing and Rose instinctively stopped her own progress and offered him a hand up over a particularly large boulder.
"You all right?" she asked as she let her mum go ahead of her.
"Fine," he said and drew his mouth in to a thin-lipped smile. They stood that way for a long moment, regarding one another, listening to the other's breathing, smiling uncomfortably. The spectre of their kiss on the beach-really, if she was honest with herself, her kiss on the beach-flitted around the edges of their view, silently chortling to itself.
"Oi, you two!" Jackie called from her perch now at the top of the bluff. "I want to get home at some point in this century!"
The bubble of silence around them popped, for the moment. "After you." The Doctor gestured with a hand and refused to budge until Rose had gone ahead of him.
"So," Rose began tentatively as they resumed their climb towards the impatiently waiting Jackie, "what should we call you?"
"What?" He sounded bemused, with just a hint of being rather cross should his inkling of what she was asking turn out to be true.
"Your name. What should we call you, for your name?"
"I'm the Doctor," he replied matter-of-factly, as he always did when someone asked him his name, as if being called the Doctor was the most normal thing in the world. "I hope, Rose Tyler, that you are not often in the habit of snogging men when you don't know their name."
And there it was. Rose kept her eyes trained on the ground, staring hard enough to probably count every single rock and pebble. "You know what I mean."
"No, not really. I'm the Doctor, that's my name. You're Rose Tyler and that's yours. Unless you want us all to pick new names, which might be a bit of a laugh. Could confuse everyone terribly though, and I doubt you'd like very much what I'd come up with for myself."
They fell in to step on the narrow path at the top of the bluff, a few yards behind Jackie, who seemed lost in her own thoughts, or perhaps just much more canny about Rose's situation than either of them would ever give her credit for.
"I'm not sure what it will take to convince you, though I'm going to give it a go, especially as we seem to be kind of stuck with each other for the time being. I'm him. He's me. We're...well, we. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say here. About me. And you. And him. Us. Feel free to stop me at any time and tell me you understand, as I'm about to run out of pronouns."
Rose continued to stare at the ground. "Can we not talk about this, right now?"
"I don't see why we shouldn't. Are you going to pencil me in for later, then? A week Tuesday, say?" He caught the bitter sound in his own voice and immediately began to revise his tone. "That was rude, sorry. But, well, I'm rude. And still not ginger, bugger it all," he added as an afterthought. "Besides, you started it, with all this name business."
"Sorry," she mumbled. "This is all sort of...." She struggled to find a word that wouldn't be offensive. "Weird." That was not it.
Jackie had to suppress a relieved giggle on hearing the Doctor's wounded, "Oi!"
(To Chapter 2)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: This chapter is all ages. Ratings will go up and down depending on chapter, but if you don't want to read a story that will at some point go Adult for a time, stop now.
Spoilers: Everything
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues? In this story I promise you at various times: Action! Intrigue! Romance! Smut! Thinky Thoughts! Drama! Return of beloved characters!
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
They only heard Jackie Tyler's half of the conversation when she rang to let her husband know they were safe and sound, and to arrange transportation. Standing on the beach, still desultorily holding hands, both looking rather shell-shocked, Rose and this strange new Doctor didn't speak. They didn't even look at each other. There were too many things to say, there didn't seem like there was enough air, in this universe or any other, to allow it. They just listened to half of a phone conversation and squinted in the glare off the water.
"We're back...yes, everyone's fine. Yes, she came back as well. You're joking! Oh, I'm absolutely going to murder that skinny bastard!" Jackie covered the handset with her palm and whispered to the skinny bastard she was standing right next to, "Not you, sweetheart." She then continued shouting down the line to Pete. "Is Tony okay? You didn't tell him we were- Right, okay, good. What's that? I didn't hear you; I thought you said you.... But how could they? Oh bugger, don't answer that, my mobile's running out of juice. Just send a zeppelin to Bergen. Yes, Norway. Yes, again. You still have the company one at least, yeah?" She pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen. "Damn."
Things sounded quite complicated on the home front and Rose wondered how whatever crisis that was apparently brewing there would fit in to the million different ways her own heart was breaking and mending simultaneously. She felt like she perhaps needed to sit down. Or lie down. Or sleep, for at least a week. The Doctor, the different-but-the-same Doctor, still squinted off in to the distance. Rose broke their hands' embrace and approached her mum, who looked exhausted and upset.
"What is it, what's happened? Is everyone at home all right?"
Jackie took a moment before turning to her daughter and pulling her in for a hug. "Pete says we've been gone for three months."
They were both familiar enough with the imprecision of travel in the TARDIS to not even have to ask how that had happened, and Rose immediately understood the implications for Jackie. "Oh no, poor Tony! He must have missed you terribly!"
At that Jackie broke in to sobs, the exhaustion and the wild fluctuation of emotions in the last couple of days (from her perspective) getting the better of her. Rose clung to her tight, holding her up.
Jackie let out another loud sob and mumbled in to Rose's shoulder, "They told him mummy and sissy went on holiday, but he must have thought I'd abandoned him, my poor little man!"
Rose caught a glimpse of the Doctor out of the corner of her eye. He was standing, hands in pockets, slouching a little, looking extremely uncomfortable while shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He scrunched up his nose and started feeling around his jacket pockets for his glasses, which of course was a lost cause. As she continued to hold Jackie and allow her to let off some steam, she felt emotion well up in her own throat and made some fairly unattractive faces in an effort to push it back down. Not now, not here, not in front of him. Please, not now.
"Tony's still so young, in a couple of days, he won't even remember we were ever gone." Rose disengaged from their embrace and held Jackie out at arm's length. Her make-up was smudged and her eyes red and puffy, and she reached out to wipe off some mascara that had run. "C'mon mum, I know we're both-" She glanced over to the Doctor. "We're all at loose ends a bit here, but it'll be okay. We saved the world! Don't cry." Rose continued the sentence to herself in her head: Don't cry, because if you keep on crying then I'm going to cry and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stop.
Jackie wiped her nose on her sleeve, for lack of anything else. "And Pete's been sacked from Torchwood."
The Doctor visibly stiffened his posture on hearing the name.
"By who?" Rose demanded as she made efforts to corral her mum and the Doctor and get them moving up that all-too-familiar path to the nearest village. "I mean, they can't do that. Can they?"
"Pete's not the bloody King of Torchwood you know. There's a board of directors, and it's them that's done it."
"Did he say what the reason was?" Both Jackie and Rose started at hearing the Doctor's voice again, and they looked back to where he was shuffling along behind them. He just gave them a couple of raised eyebrows in reply.
"Didn't say, and then my mobile went dead. He'll send the company zeppelin to Bergen for us. You can ask him about it yourself. Though as far as I'm concerned it's high time he stopped fussing about with all that business. I reckon Tony's getting to be an age where he needs his dad around more." Jackie turned her reddened eyes on Rose. "And you too, missy. I don't like the idea of you going back to that place." She glanced at the Doctor and then back to her daughter. "You should settle down, get a proper job. You're not a kid any more."
"Mum." Rose raised an eyebrow and tried to telepathically communicate that any talk about settling, or downing, or anything at all having to do with the new Doctor in any way real or implied, needed to stop immediately. The Doctor, thankfully, looked like he had stopped paying attention to Jackie's lecture pretty much from the first words. Rose noted the similarity to how the old Doctor would have behaved with a pang that could have been grief, and could have been excitement, and also could have been both at once.
"Besides," Rose continued, "I doubt I'll have a job waiting for me when I get back, if they've sacked Pete. It wouldn't do to have his daughter knocking about the place now that he's gone, would it?"
The climb up to the path that would take them to the village of Lavik was steep and a good excuse to stop trying to fill the air around them with words. Rose realised that she'd never really heard the Doctor be as out of breath as he was sounding now and she looked back to make sure he was alright. He seemed, as they all were, to be having a hard time with the footing and Rose instinctively stopped her own progress and offered him a hand up over a particularly large boulder.
"You all right?" she asked as she let her mum go ahead of her.
"Fine," he said and drew his mouth in to a thin-lipped smile. They stood that way for a long moment, regarding one another, listening to the other's breathing, smiling uncomfortably. The spectre of their kiss on the beach-really, if she was honest with herself, her kiss on the beach-flitted around the edges of their view, silently chortling to itself.
"Oi, you two!" Jackie called from her perch now at the top of the bluff. "I want to get home at some point in this century!"
The bubble of silence around them popped, for the moment. "After you." The Doctor gestured with a hand and refused to budge until Rose had gone ahead of him.
"So," Rose began tentatively as they resumed their climb towards the impatiently waiting Jackie, "what should we call you?"
"What?" He sounded bemused, with just a hint of being rather cross should his inkling of what she was asking turn out to be true.
"Your name. What should we call you, for your name?"
"I'm the Doctor," he replied matter-of-factly, as he always did when someone asked him his name, as if being called the Doctor was the most normal thing in the world. "I hope, Rose Tyler, that you are not often in the habit of snogging men when you don't know their name."
And there it was. Rose kept her eyes trained on the ground, staring hard enough to probably count every single rock and pebble. "You know what I mean."
"No, not really. I'm the Doctor, that's my name. You're Rose Tyler and that's yours. Unless you want us all to pick new names, which might be a bit of a laugh. Could confuse everyone terribly though, and I doubt you'd like very much what I'd come up with for myself."
They fell in to step on the narrow path at the top of the bluff, a few yards behind Jackie, who seemed lost in her own thoughts, or perhaps just much more canny about Rose's situation than either of them would ever give her credit for.
"I'm not sure what it will take to convince you, though I'm going to give it a go, especially as we seem to be kind of stuck with each other for the time being. I'm him. He's me. We're...well, we. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say here. About me. And you. And him. Us. Feel free to stop me at any time and tell me you understand, as I'm about to run out of pronouns."
Rose continued to stare at the ground. "Can we not talk about this, right now?"
"I don't see why we shouldn't. Are you going to pencil me in for later, then? A week Tuesday, say?" He caught the bitter sound in his own voice and immediately began to revise his tone. "That was rude, sorry. But, well, I'm rude. And still not ginger, bugger it all," he added as an afterthought. "Besides, you started it, with all this name business."
"Sorry," she mumbled. "This is all sort of...." She struggled to find a word that wouldn't be offensive. "Weird." That was not it.
Jackie had to suppress a relieved giggle on hearing the Doctor's wounded, "Oi!"
(To Chapter 2)