DW Fic: Parallels And Convergences 1/?
Author: thought_grenade
Rating: Teen
Beta: CakiieBakiie
Summary: AU of Rise of the Cybermen (spoilers till then, and an eeny-weeny, blink-and-you'll-miss-it one for Doomsday)
A/N: Written for the Time in Flux ficathon at doctor_rose_fic, where the goal was to rewrite your given episode so that the Doctor and Rose ended up together, without skewing the canon so much that the next episode couldn't happen. I got Rise of the Cybermen. This was surprisingly difficult to write for me - it's a two-parter episode, Mickey's in it, it's just after Girl in the Fireplace; but I'm actually really happy with how it turned out.
The TARDIS was drifting slowly through a place that was both everywhere and everywhen. She was aware somewhere in her circuits that her Time Lord wasn’t happy - his thoughts were rolling in waves, all jumbled up and confused. When she tuned in, finally (didn’t he realise there were spatio-temporal cracks to deal with?) she picked the feelings apart like silken strands, and found the green of jealousy. For some reason, she found this amusing. He’d always made a point of being above such petty human tendencies. The new male was certainly... affecting him. She saw - because she saw everything, and they forgot that sometimes - her Time Lord holding the wolf-girl close, and she was about to -
pain-pain-pain the cracks were spreading swallowing them up it would destroy them all keep them safe hold the wolf-girl close protect the time lord reality dissolving across the void into the nothingness light at the end of the tunnel flee flee escape the darkness the light is here the wrong light THE WRONG LIGHT power failing reserves drying up cannot will not... empty...
‘She’s dead... the last TARDIS in the universe... extinct...’ The Doctor exhaled shakily. The psychic link was raw and jagged where it had been severed. He wanted nothing more than to curl up; take his head in his hands and catharsise. He was dimly aware of Rose touching his shoulder gently. Why was she so timid? All they’d been through, all she’d seen once and he’d seen a thousand times? He lost his final shred of composure and collapsed inwards.
He was probably too heavy for her, but right then he didn’t notice. His sobs were silent, heaving his diaphragm up and down. He felt her palms flush against his spine and even then they sent tingles the entire length of it. Rose leaned against him, unyielding. Neither of them said anything. Rose held him until the cries subsided. The Doctor straightened himself slowly.
Rose reached up to untangle his hair; his eyelids fluttered shut as her fingers worked against his scalp. He rested his forehead against hers, and still they were silent. He breathed deeply, trying to regain composure. Slowly his surroundings trickled back, and he became aware of an awkwardness; neither from Rose or he but from...
Mickey-bloody-Smith. Rassilon, only that boy could find the corner of circular room and stand in it. The ape in question cleared his throat uneasily. ‘So, where are we? We gotta’ve landed somewhere, right?’
The Doctor’s throat tightened and his fists clenched. He whirled around to face him. ‘Where could we have landed? We flew across the Void, into nothingness. We could be drifting at the center of a black hole, we might open the doors and let in Hell, we could be torn apart by the Medusa Cascade -’ The enormity of the situation hit him: it wasn’t just his problem, it was theirs as well. He had stranded them here, wherever here was, and there was no escaping that he was responsible.
Rose touched his forearm gently. ‘Hey,’ she murmured, so quietly as to just be a syllable. He turned to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said numbly. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t. Please.’
‘I never should have...’ he left the sentence unfinished.
‘Doctor, none of it was your fault. You couldn’t have stopped it, alright? Stop beating yourself up over it. Now,’ her tone was tone was firmer, injected with something bordering on professionalism, ‘where are we?’
‘I told you, we could be anywhere. The Void like a Universe of nothingness, and I have no idea if we came out the other side at all.’
‘Mate, you wanna look at this,’ came Mickey’s voice. He was peering around the door. The Doctor was about to murder him for opening the door to Hell, but since when did Hell have Big Ben? And grass? And a cool breeze gentler than Rose’s touch on his face? Just when he was about to rejoice, (a dangerous decision at any point; the universe didn’t take kindly to him being happy) he looked up.
Bugger.
In an odd way, it was somewhat of an anticlimax for Rose. A welcome one, but all the same... She expected - well, she didn’t know. But to end up on her home planet, after all the woe and angst from the Doctor was somewhat... tame, perhaps? She looked at Mickey, running around madly, picking up newspapers. The dates he threw around sailed past her, but one stuck in her head. February the first... they’d landed on her mum’s birthday? This was just getting weird.
She looked at the Doctor, who was looking at Mickey. ‘Doctor, what’s going on? It doesn’t... feel right. It feels wrong. This place.’
‘It is,’ he replied quietly. There was that look in his eyes, the look where she was sure she could see golden flames in the deep brown irises.
‘Well, we made it!’ yelled Mickey. ‘London, England, Earth!’
Rose looked at the Doctor. He was looking at the newspaper thrust into his hand by Mickey.
‘Yep. London, England, Earth. Exactly as we left it,’ he said emotionlessly.
‘Yeah,’ nodded Mickey, but his ecstatic grin had shrunk by a few teeth. ‘That’s the one!’
‘And that includes the zeppelins?’
Rose, who had been looking steadfastly down at her trainers the entire time - maybe if she didn’t look, it wouldn’t raise her hackles - finally craned her neck skywards. The airships filled the sky - a brilliant winter’s blue crisscrossed by exhaust fumes billowing out from behind them like aeroplane trails’ negatives. Well, what else was there to expect? After the crash, the death and the hurt, how could they even dare to hope that this might be an ordinary day? There was no such thing, and they of all people should have known that.
‘So this isn’t our universe. We came out the other side, but into another universe...’ She sat down on the grass slowly, ignoring the damp seeping through her jeans. Her thoughts were tangled. Were there people she knew here? Why were there zeppelins and not planes? Would they - could they? - get back? She heard and felt the Doctor flop beside her.
‘I know what’s going through your head, and the answer is, I don’t know. That’s always the worst, the not knowing. Being in a prison cell and not knowing if you’ll have to regenerate the next day. Being faced with genocide and not knowing if it’s the lesser of two evils.’ He stared fixedly ahead, and added almost inaudibly, ‘Being in love with someone and not knowing if they love you back.’
Rose’s eyes snapped up to look into his, but he was already moving away. He joined Mickey, who was looking at the adverts for some phone company. Reluctantly, she followed. However, before she got to him, she was distracted by an altogether more disturbing advert.
‘Trust me on this,’ the picture boomed behind him. The Doctor whirled around - he knew that voice, and the cheeky, Del-Boy grin. It was partially obscured by Rose’s blonde head of hair, utterly still apart from where the breeze ruffled it.
‘A parallel world where my dad’s still alive,’ she whispered.
‘Rose, no! He is not your father. Your father died in a hit-and-run twenty years ago. You were there. You saw what happened!’
‘Yeah, but...’ The Doctor knew she wasn’t listening to him, and got steadily more frustrated.
‘Rose. Listen to me. That is not your Pete Tyler, that is a Pete Tyler.’
‘He’s successful. All those daft little get-rich-quick schemes, they worked.’
He gave up. ‘We can’t go and see him. For all we know there might be another Rose Tyler. We’ve already seen there’s another Jackie.’
‘What?’ Evidently, this was news to her. He showed her the newspaper, and she looked at the headline article. He saw the details leap out at her as her hazel eyes scanned the pages. ‘She’s having a party. Her fortieth birthday this year. Doctor, can --’
‘No, I told you Rose. We can’t interfere with this. It’s not our world to interfere with!’
‘It might be, from now on. If the TARDIS is dead, then how do we get back? How do we make a life for ourselves if we don’t interfere with stuff?’
The words hit close to home, and he realised that he had to at least try to repair the TARDIS if he was to sleep at night. How could he damn them to a life in the wrong universe without doing everything in his power to get them out?
‘Alright. I’m going to try and fix the TARDIS. I have no idea where I’ll start, but I’ll try.’
‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
He turned to walk back to the TARDIS and actually made it a few step, before he stopped and called Mickey over to come with him.
Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor raked a hand through his unruly hair. It was true that he had no idea where or how to start. There was no chance of finding anything that could even suffice as a TARDIS part on this backward planet. He would need to go off-world. And if he could go off-world, he wouldn’t need to pick up the parts for the TARDIS. A never-ending loop.
‘So, what do you need me for, exactly?’ asked Mickey.
‘I don’t. I wanted to talk to you.’ The Doctor sat on the torn jumpseat and motioned for Mickey to join him. ‘Because I don’t know where I stand.’
Mickey was obviously taken aback, it was written in the furrows of his brow. ‘You don’t know where you stand. You don’t know where you stand. How the hell do you think I feel?! One minute she’s hanging on your every word, the next minute she’s kissing me on the cheek and telling me she’s glad I’m here! You’re confused? Try being the one she left behind!’
‘I know.’ Again, the furrows of shock appeared on his forehead. ‘I need to know, Mickey... are you two still together?’
There was no shock on Mickey’s face now, just anger. ‘What do you think, Doctor? You two were practically making out in here earlier, and you think I want us to be together? I know when I’m not wanted, Doctor.’ A pause. ‘You know what? If you get this hunk of junk fixed, don’t be too surprised if I don’t come back with you.’ Mickey turned on his heel and left without another word.
-tbc-
Part Two
Rating: Teen
Beta: CakiieBakiie
Summary: AU of Rise of the Cybermen (spoilers till then, and an eeny-weeny, blink-and-you'll-miss-it one for Doomsday)
A/N: Written for the Time in Flux ficathon at doctor_rose_fic, where the goal was to rewrite your given episode so that the Doctor and Rose ended up together, without skewing the canon so much that the next episode couldn't happen. I got Rise of the Cybermen. This was surprisingly difficult to write for me - it's a two-parter episode, Mickey's in it, it's just after Girl in the Fireplace; but I'm actually really happy with how it turned out.
The TARDIS was drifting slowly through a place that was both everywhere and everywhen. She was aware somewhere in her circuits that her Time Lord wasn’t happy - his thoughts were rolling in waves, all jumbled up and confused. When she tuned in, finally (didn’t he realise there were spatio-temporal cracks to deal with?) she picked the feelings apart like silken strands, and found the green of jealousy. For some reason, she found this amusing. He’d always made a point of being above such petty human tendencies. The new male was certainly... affecting him. She saw - because she saw everything, and they forgot that sometimes - her Time Lord holding the wolf-girl close, and she was about to -
pain-pain-pain the cracks were spreading swallowing them up it would destroy them all keep them safe hold the wolf-girl close protect the time lord reality dissolving across the void into the nothingness light at the end of the tunnel flee flee escape the darkness the light is here the wrong light THE WRONG LIGHT power failing reserves drying up cannot will not... empty...
‘She’s dead... the last TARDIS in the universe... extinct...’ The Doctor exhaled shakily. The psychic link was raw and jagged where it had been severed. He wanted nothing more than to curl up; take his head in his hands and catharsise. He was dimly aware of Rose touching his shoulder gently. Why was she so timid? All they’d been through, all she’d seen once and he’d seen a thousand times? He lost his final shred of composure and collapsed inwards.
He was probably too heavy for her, but right then he didn’t notice. His sobs were silent, heaving his diaphragm up and down. He felt her palms flush against his spine and even then they sent tingles the entire length of it. Rose leaned against him, unyielding. Neither of them said anything. Rose held him until the cries subsided. The Doctor straightened himself slowly.
Rose reached up to untangle his hair; his eyelids fluttered shut as her fingers worked against his scalp. He rested his forehead against hers, and still they were silent. He breathed deeply, trying to regain composure. Slowly his surroundings trickled back, and he became aware of an awkwardness; neither from Rose or he but from...
Mickey-bloody-Smith. Rassilon, only that boy could find the corner of circular room and stand in it. The ape in question cleared his throat uneasily. ‘So, where are we? We gotta’ve landed somewhere, right?’
The Doctor’s throat tightened and his fists clenched. He whirled around to face him. ‘Where could we have landed? We flew across the Void, into nothingness. We could be drifting at the center of a black hole, we might open the doors and let in Hell, we could be torn apart by the Medusa Cascade -’ The enormity of the situation hit him: it wasn’t just his problem, it was theirs as well. He had stranded them here, wherever here was, and there was no escaping that he was responsible.
Rose touched his forearm gently. ‘Hey,’ she murmured, so quietly as to just be a syllable. He turned to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said numbly. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t. Please.’
‘I never should have...’ he left the sentence unfinished.
‘Doctor, none of it was your fault. You couldn’t have stopped it, alright? Stop beating yourself up over it. Now,’ her tone was tone was firmer, injected with something bordering on professionalism, ‘where are we?’
‘I told you, we could be anywhere. The Void like a Universe of nothingness, and I have no idea if we came out the other side at all.’
‘Mate, you wanna look at this,’ came Mickey’s voice. He was peering around the door. The Doctor was about to murder him for opening the door to Hell, but since when did Hell have Big Ben? And grass? And a cool breeze gentler than Rose’s touch on his face? Just when he was about to rejoice, (a dangerous decision at any point; the universe didn’t take kindly to him being happy) he looked up.
Bugger.
In an odd way, it was somewhat of an anticlimax for Rose. A welcome one, but all the same... She expected - well, she didn’t know. But to end up on her home planet, after all the woe and angst from the Doctor was somewhat... tame, perhaps? She looked at Mickey, running around madly, picking up newspapers. The dates he threw around sailed past her, but one stuck in her head. February the first... they’d landed on her mum’s birthday? This was just getting weird.
She looked at the Doctor, who was looking at Mickey. ‘Doctor, what’s going on? It doesn’t... feel right. It feels wrong. This place.’
‘It is,’ he replied quietly. There was that look in his eyes, the look where she was sure she could see golden flames in the deep brown irises.
‘Well, we made it!’ yelled Mickey. ‘London, England, Earth!’
Rose looked at the Doctor. He was looking at the newspaper thrust into his hand by Mickey.
‘Yep. London, England, Earth. Exactly as we left it,’ he said emotionlessly.
‘Yeah,’ nodded Mickey, but his ecstatic grin had shrunk by a few teeth. ‘That’s the one!’
‘And that includes the zeppelins?’
Rose, who had been looking steadfastly down at her trainers the entire time - maybe if she didn’t look, it wouldn’t raise her hackles - finally craned her neck skywards. The airships filled the sky - a brilliant winter’s blue crisscrossed by exhaust fumes billowing out from behind them like aeroplane trails’ negatives. Well, what else was there to expect? After the crash, the death and the hurt, how could they even dare to hope that this might be an ordinary day? There was no such thing, and they of all people should have known that.
‘So this isn’t our universe. We came out the other side, but into another universe...’ She sat down on the grass slowly, ignoring the damp seeping through her jeans. Her thoughts were tangled. Were there people she knew here? Why were there zeppelins and not planes? Would they - could they? - get back? She heard and felt the Doctor flop beside her.
‘I know what’s going through your head, and the answer is, I don’t know. That’s always the worst, the not knowing. Being in a prison cell and not knowing if you’ll have to regenerate the next day. Being faced with genocide and not knowing if it’s the lesser of two evils.’ He stared fixedly ahead, and added almost inaudibly, ‘Being in love with someone and not knowing if they love you back.’
Rose’s eyes snapped up to look into his, but he was already moving away. He joined Mickey, who was looking at the adverts for some phone company. Reluctantly, she followed. However, before she got to him, she was distracted by an altogether more disturbing advert.
‘Trust me on this,’ the picture boomed behind him. The Doctor whirled around - he knew that voice, and the cheeky, Del-Boy grin. It was partially obscured by Rose’s blonde head of hair, utterly still apart from where the breeze ruffled it.
‘A parallel world where my dad’s still alive,’ she whispered.
‘Rose, no! He is not your father. Your father died in a hit-and-run twenty years ago. You were there. You saw what happened!’
‘Yeah, but...’ The Doctor knew she wasn’t listening to him, and got steadily more frustrated.
‘Rose. Listen to me. That is not your Pete Tyler, that is a Pete Tyler.’
‘He’s successful. All those daft little get-rich-quick schemes, they worked.’
He gave up. ‘We can’t go and see him. For all we know there might be another Rose Tyler. We’ve already seen there’s another Jackie.’
‘What?’ Evidently, this was news to her. He showed her the newspaper, and she looked at the headline article. He saw the details leap out at her as her hazel eyes scanned the pages. ‘She’s having a party. Her fortieth birthday this year. Doctor, can --’
‘No, I told you Rose. We can’t interfere with this. It’s not our world to interfere with!’
‘It might be, from now on. If the TARDIS is dead, then how do we get back? How do we make a life for ourselves if we don’t interfere with stuff?’
The words hit close to home, and he realised that he had to at least try to repair the TARDIS if he was to sleep at night. How could he damn them to a life in the wrong universe without doing everything in his power to get them out?
‘Alright. I’m going to try and fix the TARDIS. I have no idea where I’ll start, but I’ll try.’
‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
He turned to walk back to the TARDIS and actually made it a few step, before he stopped and called Mickey over to come with him.
Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor raked a hand through his unruly hair. It was true that he had no idea where or how to start. There was no chance of finding anything that could even suffice as a TARDIS part on this backward planet. He would need to go off-world. And if he could go off-world, he wouldn’t need to pick up the parts for the TARDIS. A never-ending loop.
‘So, what do you need me for, exactly?’ asked Mickey.
‘I don’t. I wanted to talk to you.’ The Doctor sat on the torn jumpseat and motioned for Mickey to join him. ‘Because I don’t know where I stand.’
Mickey was obviously taken aback, it was written in the furrows of his brow. ‘You don’t know where you stand. You don’t know where you stand. How the hell do you think I feel?! One minute she’s hanging on your every word, the next minute she’s kissing me on the cheek and telling me she’s glad I’m here! You’re confused? Try being the one she left behind!’
‘I know.’ Again, the furrows of shock appeared on his forehead. ‘I need to know, Mickey... are you two still together?’
There was no shock on Mickey’s face now, just anger. ‘What do you think, Doctor? You two were practically making out in here earlier, and you think I want us to be together? I know when I’m not wanted, Doctor.’ A pause. ‘You know what? If you get this hunk of junk fixed, don’t be too surprised if I don’t come back with you.’ Mickey turned on his heel and left without another word.
-tbc-
Part Two