Welcome to Julsted (2/6)
Author: wareander
Rating: PG
Characters: Rose/TenII (and Jackie)
Summary: Multi-chap post JE story. As if being ditched at Bad Wolf Bay wasn't bad enough... Rose, Jackie, and the Clone quickly discover that something is very very wrong in the idyllic seaside town of Julsted. Adventure, angst, and adorableness ensue. (Did I mention that it's set on Christmas Eve?)
Author's Note: Sorry for the delay! I know, I'm the worst. Blame it on obsessive over-editing. And school. I really had trouble with this chapter, and I'm still not sure if I'm crazy about it, but I think I've done what I can. Please let me know what you think! (Here's part 1 if you missed it.)
Half an hour from the bay, and the long-gathering storm clouds finally burst. The poorly paved road ran with mud and Rose's dark mood passed agitated, moving well on towards high holy rage. Torchwood reported back that they couldn't get an answer on a single line in Julsted, and perhaps the phones were out? “Well, start dialing cell phones, then,” Rose growled, and shoved her old super-phone deep in her pocket to protect it from the driving rain. The sludgy evidence of recent snowfall lined the road and dropped from the trees, and it might have been lovely if it weren't so dismal.
With the sun dipping low behind him and Rose up ahead, this new Doctor felt himself unraveling-retreating back to that one, searing absolute. Always, Rose was gone. She didn't want him-he knew enough to know that-and he had a sneaking suspicion that without her he would cease to exist. He needed more than duplicate memories to convince himself he was real. He needed Rose.
Their uphill march was nearing the hour mark when they finally passed the large wooden sign, gorgeously hand painted: WELCOME TO JULSTED.
“As if once wasn't enough,” Rose muttered, and the Doctor looked at her. Rose glanced back. “Oh, stop with the eyes, I can't stand it.”
The Doctor blew out a long, shaky breath and carried on, repressing a strange urge to take the bait and start a fight. Instead he let himself drift, falling into the memory of that long deserted street; turning to find Rose with that big stupid gun and that big stupid grin. He remembered the Dalek and the pain but he mainly remembered her face above him, her cool smooth hand supporting his head, and words. It missed you? I missed you?
Rose.
Memories of someone else's life played out in his mind's eye, and he watched with a detached discomfort as Rose and Jackie got farther and farther ahead of him in the gathering dusk. When they crossed city limits they were drenched, cold, and caked with mud, and they all failed to notice a pair of eyes watching from the forest-a small figure keeping pace.
- ♥ -
The Doctor, frozen hands shoved deep in his pockets, ignored the uncomfortable squelching of his shoes and turned onto an outlying residential street, determined to say something to Rose, anything, just to hear her voice, or force her to look at him again, but he was brought up short by the sight of it all, and for a moment the concern that he might wink out of existence was displaced by a more immediate problem.
There was absolutely something very wrong in Julsted.
Immediately on alert, he experienced a moment of sheer panic before locating Rose and Jackie about fifty yards away, partially concealed by a wrecked mail truck. It was stalled in the road, doors open, surrounded by hundreds of scattered envelopes. A gust of wind momentarily animated the cards and bills before dying back down, but there was a howling all around them as flurries rushed along the empty spaces between buildings. The Doctor hurried to join them, and as he walked up, Rose was climbing back down from the driver's seat.
“Key's still in the ignition,” she said.
“And what does that tell us?” Jackie said, arms crossed tightly over her chest, less than thrilled with the turn of events.
Rose stared back down the road, toward the water. The sun was dipping below the horizon, and the rolling storm clouds were vividly red and orange. They were all washed in the rapidly fading light. “Nothing, I guess.”
She tried to wipe away some of the water on her face with the cuff of her jacket, but there wasn't a dry spot on her, and she made a low, frustrated noise in the back of her throat. Somewhere in the distance, a bolt of lightning leapt from sky to ground.
“There's the 'inviting chimney smoke' we noticed from the road,” the Doctor said, pointing, and then crouched to reach up under a precarious pile of flotsam and jetsam in someone's yard. Rose looked where he'd pointed to take in the smoldering shell that must have been, in the recent past, someone's small cottage home. She looked back at the Doctor, who emerged with a smudge of dirt on his cheek and studied some prize he'd found underneath.
“Yeah...” she said, mostly to herself, and slowly turned in place, surveying the area. Trash, twisted metal, and the scattered remains of disaster were everywhere. There was not a thing in place, and no one in sight, as if a very large toddler had sat at the center and turned all of town inside out. And there was a strange silence under the sounds of the storm-the silence of desertion. It was a ghost town.
“Rose,” the Doctor said, “is there a war? In this universe?”
Rose shook her head.
The Doctor picked something up. Tossed it aside. Rose noted that, to her, it looked no different than the things he was saving.
"Did some magpie get mixed in there, or is it all Doctor and Donna?" she asked, and he sent her a withering glare from where he was loading what appeared to be a pile of junk into a mail bag from the nearby truck.
“What's happened here? Where is everyone?” Jackie said.
“I don't know, I don't know” the Doctor said, worrying his hair so it stood on end. His eyes darted from one building to the next as he occasionally bent to tuck a scrap of something into the bag, or touch the tip of his tongue to a puzzling object. Jackie was eying him a mixture of disbelief and fascination, but Rose was already halfway up the street, moving toward the center of town.
“Come on!” she shouted over her shoulder. “Let's see if we can find someone who can tell us what's going on.”
The Doctor jogged to catch up and fell in step with Rose, who let him.
- ♥ -
“Looks like the rain's letting up,” the Doctor said, and Rose turned from where she was peering through someone's front window and watched him try to wring out his jacket. She dragged her eyes up from his wet, clinging red shirt, and when he sighed quietly at the state of his outfit she could see his breath.
“You're turning blue,” she said.
He glanced down at himself absently. “You don't like the blue? No, you wouldn't, would you? Partial to the brown.”
Rose nearly smiled. “No, your lips.”
“My what?” he said, a little shrill, and then Rose was staring at his mouth without realizing, wondering with some surprise if she'd ever seen the Doctor blush before.
This was getting rapidly out of hand, so Rose employed a tactic she'd learned from the Doctor-babble and run away. “We should probably get you inside before you die of hypothermia. Where's mum run off to? Right, there she is.”
The Doctor pulled his jacket on uncomfortably and mumbled, mostly to himself. “I can't get hypothermia.”
“You can now,” Rose called over her shoulder, picking her way down the littered driveway.
Jackie saw her coming and called, “Why do I keep stepping in bowls of porridge?”
“What?” Rose said, and circumnavigated an overturned car on her way over to her mother. The Doctor spun to look back at the house. Bowl of porridge on the front stoop, straw goat hanging on a nail on the front door, unlit string of lights on the eaves.......oh.
“Bastard,” he muttered, and ran after Rose.
- ♥ -
The Doctor nearly bowled Rose over in his attempt to get to her before she figured it out on her own, but by the time he reached her she was already staring up at the centerpiece of town square. So much for softening the blow. He could tell from her posture that she was absorbing the impact, and he didn't say anything. He came to stand beside her, and tried not to look at Jackie, from whom he expected a fair amount of scolding.
“What the hell is that,” Rose said flatly. The Doctor looked back up, took it in. Brightly festooned and towering above everything around it, was an enormous and utterly marvelous Christmas tree. Picking up on the rhetorical nature of Rose's question, the Doctor decided to keep his mouth shut.
Rose pushed her wet, tangled hair back from her face in a gesture of sheer frustration. “Is it Christmas?”
The Doctor squirmed, finding he was still terrible at keeping his mouth shut. “Well...yes, sorry. Just realized. That's why we keep seeing the porridge; it's for the julebukk.” The last he said rather dramatically, letting it hang. When no one asked what the julebukk was, he went on, somewhat deflated. “It's an old superstition. You have to...well, basically you bribe the julebukk-Christmas goat-to leave your house out of the mischief on Christmas Eve. The last time I was in Norway at Christmas time-”
“Oh, spare us,” Jackie said. “You're just like that other one, aren't you?”
The Doctor looked at her reproachfully. “Yes,” he said, speaking as though Jackie were an especially slow child.
Jackie pulled a face.
Rose didn't seem to have registered anything they'd said. “He left me, again, in Norway, in the middle of nowhere, on Christmas.”
Jackie was already checking the date on her cell phone. “December twenty-fourth. Christmas Eve. Maybe he meant it to be nice?”
And at that, they both looked at the new Doctor, as if he was meant to explain. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, floundering. He found himself wanting to say, I'm not him, how should I know? and then felt sick at the thought. Because he was. He was, in every way, that other man who left Rose without looking back, so what difference did it make that he was here now?
“Nevermind, it's not important,” Rose said, turning away from him and looking up at the tree. There was a large chunk missing toward the top, as though something had taken a bite out if it. Many of the ornaments had been ripped from the branches and scattered haphazardly throughout the square. And still there was no one. That unsettling quiet. “Okay, let's get this place sorted. What are you thinking? Something alien, or...”
“Rose-” the Doctor said, feeling he'd missed his moment, but she ignored him, and it didn't matter because he couldn't think of anything to say.
“That would make sense. It's always Christmas, isn't it? They attack or invade, or...” Rose bent down to pluck an ornament from a pile of debris, turning it slowly in her hands. “Save the planet and have a nice Christmas dinner like a proper person...”
“Rose...” this from Jackie, a whisper, but no one paid her any attention.
"Does he mean to bookend us?" Rose said
“Doctor...” Jackie interjected, slightly more urgent now.
“Not now, Jackie,” he said, never looking away from Rose. “I don't think he meant it to be cruel.”
He stumbled over the words.
“Oh, what do you know?” Rose said, sounding slightly petulant and hating herself for it.
“I know plenty,” he said softly. “I know you. And I know him.”
Rose tried to answer, but she was horrified to find that she couldn't speak around the lump forming in her throat. She was trying to decide if it would be more embarrassing to cry in front of him or run away without a word when-
“Doctor!” Jackie shrieked, and this time something in her voice made him turn, Rose along with him, and that's when they saw it-slavering and heaving, the size of a small house, long, matted hair lifting and settling as it shook itself. It leaned towards them, straining in place, and then dragged first one twisted horn, and then the other, down the siding of the city hall building with an awful, grating shriek. It stared at them with rolling, bulging eyes, and snorted a sharp, visible breath of air. It stepped forward slightly with one large hoof. Bleated.
“What is that?” the Doctor blurted, that hint of Donna creeping into his voice. He cleared his throat.
“Well, if you don't know-” Rose hissed.
“Will you two stop bickering? How did you ever survive?” Jackie said, overloud, stumbling back in a panic. They were all tripping over one another in an attempt to widen the gap between themselves and the goat-like monster, which took another small step and pawed the sidewalk, tearing up large swaths of cement. It could close the distance between them in a few bounds, but it seemed to be taking its time, feeling them out.
“What's the plan?” Rose said, backing away slowly, slowly. Shaking with either the cold or fear.
“Run,” the Doctor whispered, his voice slightly hoarse, and Rose looked at him, dazed, hearing the word echo forward through time, across space. This was how it always started-her love affair with the Doctor. It always started when he told her to...
“Rose, Jackie, run!”
And they did.
(part three this way!)