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rabid1stYes...we have gone to 26 chapters...sadly...25 should be up in an day or so...I came down with a terrible cold and it's making me far to fluffy headed to correct anything. And the betas said I was rushing things...so no rushing.
DISHEVELED
by Rabid1st
Doctor Who
Ten/Rose
Ratings: Adult +
Beta Babes: Keswindhover, larielromeniel, and thewinterqueen also, Measi and queenrikki_hp. With a special shout-out to Lil and Jei for their YIM help.
Spoilers: Well...it's AU, isn't it? Some for Doomsday. A few vague references to S3, nothing that will spoiler a person. Oh, and I made up what happens on Life on Mars...only saw the first episode...but that's okay because it could be different in Pete's World.
Summary: This is the story of how she died. Spoilers to Doomsday but pretty well AU beyond it.
Disclaimer: I work my little fingers to the bone and I'm still not entitled to any royalties. Nobody invites me to the sound stages in Cardiff. I had to sneak into the company picnic, avoiding security and such while I ate fried chicken and potato salad, but that's okay because all rights to Doctor Who and it's characters belong to the BBC, Russell T. Davies and assorted production companies.
CLICK HERE FOR ALL PREVIOUS PARTS
PART TWENTY-FOUR
Wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets, skin-on-skin with her Doctor, Rose floated in utter bliss. This was her favorite part of loving him--when he fell asleep next to her, when they were naked and sated and bundled up together. Knowing he trusted her enough to be willingly vulnerable made her giddy, even as it inspired a liquid bloom of heat low in her belly. Knowing the TARDIS trusted her to keep him safe and content made her feel complete. She'd found her purpose in life and was fulfilled. No, more than fulfilled, enriched by it.
“Rose?” Her name whispered through the air. “Rose?” The breathy sound tickled along her cheek.
He was calling her. Why was he calling her?
Disturbed, she stirred, reaching for him, wondering why he was no longer beside her. They'd been touching a moment ago. Where could he have gone? When she tried to focus on his voice, she lost it and her deep contentment swirled away as well. Sitting up, she pushed the covers back and saw he was gone from their bed. The room seemed to expand around her, leaving her isolated on an island of blankets and pillows. She swung her feet to the floor.
And the scene changed.
She was running down an endless hallway, panting and looking over her shoulder, running and running toward a distant door. The door meant safety. It glowed as bright as the sun, beaming constant reassurance, but she knew she would never reach it. The narrow way stretched ahead of her on and on into eternity. There was sand underfoot. Her skin overheated as she struggled not to slide sideways, lifting her knees high, as if she were climbing beach dunes. She was burning up, burning away into nothing. The wall roundels got smaller and smaller in the distance. When they vanished, Rose knew she would die. Needing to break free of this nightmare, she turned around, only to find her retreat cut off by a smooth white wall. No roundels, she realized, panic seizing her. This wasn't her home. She didn't belong here.
Let me back. Let me back.
Blinded by tear-thinned mascara, invisible fingers choking off her air, she smacked the flat of her hand against the featureless wall. Her palm stung as she struck again and again, demanding reality relent--the universe obey her. Let. Me. Back. Drowning, she started to gasp, struggling for her life. He was right there. She could feel him, leaning his cheek into hers. Her wracking sobs abated. She shifted to mirror him, carefully positioning the tips of her fingers above his. Even on the other side, he was still part of her. He quieted her weeping, calmed her churning mind. He helped her draw her first full, deep breath in her new world. They sighed as one, exhaling tension.
Oh, Rose. Rose. Help me.
She felt ashamed of her weeping. He was so alone, unable to save her--help her. He wanted to, she knew, but he simply couldn't. It would mean destroying both worlds. She couldn't ask him to do that. She had to be strong. Knowing he was waiting for her to answer him, her shoulders slumped. She felt him acknowledge her surrender, sensed him fading away, diminished and heartsick. As he drew back to leave, her knees started to buckle. She leaned heavily into the wall to keep from crumpling to the floor in a heap. She wanted to wail and tear at the plaster until her nails were broken and bleeding.
“No. No. He needs me. Let me back!”
“Rose?” Her mother spoke soothingly. “Rose, sweetheart, wake up.”
She woke with a start, the shrill pleading still echoing in her head. Her nose was stuffy, her throat sore. Her fingers were stiff claws curled into the sheets. It hurt to straighten them. She often woke this way, stiff and sore as she tumbled into an alien reality. For a second or two, all she recognized was her mother. She looked around the small room, struggling to place it. It had the look of a hotel.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Stavanger, Norway,” Jackie said, plainly worried. “Don't you remember? You've had a fever. Been in and out of it for two days. We had to get a nurse in. I've been beside myself.”
Eyes fixed on her mother, Rose drew an unsteady breath. Jackie Tyler had changed. Gone were the dark roots and shiny polyester robes. This new Jackie dressed in combed Egyptian cotton and silk. Her hair color had the sheen of professional high-and-low tones. Even first thing in the morning, worried for her daughter, she had perfectly powdered cheeks and freshly manicured nails. But she was still Rose's mum, from the true Earth. She seemed somehow more...real...than anything else in the room.
“I remember,” Rose said, rubbing her brow. “We came to see him. The Doctor. He called me here?”
“And you would stay there on that beach, in the cold and the wet, for hours,” Jackie scolded, holding her arms open for Rose to receive a hug.
“Always wait five and a half hours,” Rose muttered, letting her mum gather her in. “It's our rule.”
“So you said,” Jackie said resigned to it, stroking a hand up and down Rose's back. “But you nearly caught your death. You've been burning up, sweetheart. And raving about walls.”
“I do feel a bit peculiar,” Rose said. “Like I'm...empty.”
A pricking in the corner of her eyes, brought her hand up to pinch the bridge of her nose. But she didn't weep. She'd run out of tears, shed the last of them on the beach. From now on, she intended to leave the crying to her dreams. There she would weep and wail. Every night she dreamed of him. Every morning on waking, she had to reacquaint herself to her loss and gasp her way to normal breathing. Pillowed against her mother's breast, she listened to Jackie's heart beating and willed herself to relax. Slowly, the shuddering chill ebbed away, leaving her wrung out but almost whole again.
“You're still having those dreams, aren't you?” Jackie asked, gently combing her fingers through Rose's hair. When she nodded, Jackie said, “I wish you'd reconsider about seeing the therapist, sweetheart. I don't normally hold with such busy bodies, but now you've seen the Doctor, now you know he can't get back to you...well, your father says this friend of his is very good. Helped him deal with the separation and the idea of divorce. And how weird is that? Thinking about the other me...divorcing him?”
Sitting straighter, Rose shifted to one side, to look at her mother as she answered. “I don't know what I would say to a therapist.” She tried out an opening line. “Hi, I'm here from another world and I'm having a little trouble adjusting? Or maybe...I've lost everything...my life...my future...the only man I'll ever love and...” Her chipper facade cracked and she turned her head to the side, blinking away tears. “I never even told him, Mum. Not until it was too late. I should have said it everyday, but whenever I tried...I'd just get so choked up.”
“He knows now,” Jackie said, sandwiching her daughter's hands between hers. “And I bet he always knew. He married you, didn't he?”
Darting a shy glance at her mother from beneath lowered lashes, Rose swallowed hard. “I'm sorry, we didn't tell you about that. We were going to, honestly, but I thought you would be upset...and I thought there'd be plenty of time.” She fell silent, letting the last excuse hang heavy in the air, shutting her eyes again to deal with the pain. She'd thought they would have forever.
“Now, hush. I won't have you upsetting yourself. You've been sick." She plumped up Rose's pillows, settling her against them. "Are you hungry? I can ring for room service.” She reached for the phone. “A bit of tea and toast?”
“Look at you...ringing for service,” Rose grinned.
“I could get used to this life,” Jackie agreed with a theatrical pat to her hair. Focusing on Rose in all seriousness, she added, “So could you. You have to put that other life behind you.”
“I can't...you don't know...”
“I do know,” Jackie said, gently, “I lost the man I loved once. He was my world and I had to go on all alone.”
“You had me,” Rose reminded her. Jackie's sympathetic murmur readily acknowledged this and Rose struggled with her need to tell her mother the whole truth. Staring up at her, she sighed. “I...it's just...there's one more thing I never told you,” she said, faintly. Avoiding her mother's questioning eye, she stroked her fingers along the neckline of her pajamas. Then, her gaze lifted. “Have you seen my necklace? The TARDIS key?”
Jackie scanned the room and spotted the leather thong Rose usually wore. It lay curled in a tray on top of the hotel room dresser. “There it is,” she said, indicating the direction with a bob of her head. “We wouldn't lose it.”
“I want to show you something,” Rose said. Scrambling around her mum, she tried to get out of bed but found she was too weak. When the edges of her vision went black, she flopped back down onto her pile of pillows and said, “Can you get it for me?” Jackie murmured her assent and went to the dresser. “Oh, and I could use a few of those tissues, too, please. My nose is dripping.”
Receiving her bounty, Rose thanked her mother as she settled the box of tissues by her hip. She took a moment to fondle the leather cord of her necklace, sliding it through her fingers, before settling it in her lap so she could tend to her nasal drip. She blew and blotted and disposed of the used tissues in a tiny bin by the bed. Finally, composed, she picked up the key again, and edging it aside, showed Jackie a slim silver tube hanging on the cord as well.
“Wha's that?” Jackie asked, peering at it.
“You'll see,” Rose said as she gripped the tube and pointed it toward the far wall. Her thumb shifted slightly, pressing a hidden mechanism and an image appeared in midair, a paused movie still of Rose whirling around, arms outstretched. “Can you close the curtains?” she asked, fiddling with the tube.
Jackie moved to obey but faltered when another picture bloomed to life, a moving video this time with high definition so precise it looked more like a window in the wall than a recording. In the bright square, the Doctor was flying a kite. With an incoherent whimper, Rose quickly changed the scene. To Jackie's delight and amazement, there appeared to be lots of home movies on the device. Scenes skimmed by in a blur of color. She saw Rose several times and thought she saw Mickey. She would have asked to see more but the white-line set to her daughter's mouth made her nervous.
“The TARDIS records everything,” Rose told her in a monotone. “I don't know how it works, but this,” she released the pressure on the device and the flashing images slowed, “lets me play back whatever I want to see again.”
Jackie watched in amazement as Rose and the Doctor made snow angels in the virtual window. She absorbed the happy grins and playful cuddles they gave one another as they danced and shopped and saved a dozen worlds in quick scene-skipping succession. She'd seldom seen a more perfectly matched couple. In fact, she could think of no one else in her acquaintance. She and Pete had argued constantly. But Rose and her Doctor seemed genuinely delighted with each other. Of course, it was easy to appear happy in photographs, but seeing them again, she remembered how they had been when they visited her. They had sported about the place, even in the worst sort of circumstances, laughing and sharing secret glances.
When the fast forward stopped, one scene held steady on the wall. The illusionary window showed an alien landscape, orange and rocky. Herds of some horned animal grazed in the distance, while in the foreground a young girl of about twelve sat on a rocky parapet. The wind ruffled her brown, shoulder-length hair. Her heavy brows were furrowed in concentration as she studied a piece of machinery in her lap. It was easy to see her father in her.
But Jackie immediately recognized Rose's mouth and nose and exclaimed in wonder, “Gawd, never say I'm a Granny.”
“We had a child,” Rose confirmed, misty eyes focusing on the scene. Jackie squeaked in amazement, but before she could blurt out her first question, Rose pressed on, “A little girl, named Susan. We lost her.”
Swallowing down her original line of inquiry, Jackie processed the painful ramifications of those simple words. She spoke with motherly consideration. “You lost her? But she's...did she die?”
“No.” Rose shook her head, but then reconsidered. “Or, yes...I suppose she did...in the Time War. I, God, this is so hard to talk about,” she murmured, casting her gaze to the ceiling. She pressed the knuckle of her free hand to her upper lip. Her wrist jerked and the image on the wall changed. Now, there was a still shot of Mickey arguing with some furry aliens.
“I've got a granddaughter and I didn't know. Why does she look so old in this picture? I'm only forty-one and you're only...” It struck her mid-calculation that Rose had lost a daughter as well as a husband. She remembered very clearly how the soft baby scent of her infant Rose helped her cling to life after Pete died. “Oh, my Rose, you've lost so much.”
“Close the curtains,” Rose repeated in a very small voice and Jackie hastened to pull the cord.
In the semi-dark room, the image seemed to become part of the wall and appeared startlingly vivid. Returning to the video of Susan again, Rose said, “I got pregnant straight away. As soon as we started...the first time we...”
“Just like me and your dad,” Jackie nodded. “And your aunt Caro. And cousin Louise. It's almost a family tradition.”
“Tell me about it,” Rose groaned. “I never wanted that to happen to me. I was so careful with Mickey and Jimmy. But the Doctor... I suppose I didn't think it could happen. And he didn't understand why I wasn't happy. You wouldn't believe how excited he was. He was bouncing around.”
“Nothing new about that,” Jackie said, dryly.
Unable to force a chuckle through her clenching throat, Rose choked on it. “No, I guess not,” she said though her coughing laugh. Shaking off the wave of melancholy that threatened to consume her again, she went on, “Anyway, I had a complete melt down. I didn't want to have a baby. I wasn't ready...”
“Oh...sweetheart...you didn't...?” She glanced at the image again, reassured that Rose couldn't have had an abortion if the girl was sitting right there on a rock. Though, you never knew with aliens, they could get up to all sorts of things, maybe the girl could come back from the dead like her father.
“No,” Rose shook her head quickly. “I mean, I thought about it. But the Doctor wouldn't hear of it, of course. He was furious. We had this horrible fight. And then, before we could decide what to do...something else happened...I...well, I went to see his people...”
“His people? But, you said, they were all dead.”
“They are.” Rose scratched behind her ear, squinting as she thought about how convoluted her life was on the TARDIS. “It's too hard to explain...I'm not sure I even understand it properly...the simple answer is we had a time machine. I got sick."
"Oh," a light dawned in Jackie's mind, "Is that what was wrong with you? When you came home that time?"
"Yeah, because you can't have a baby in the TARDIS and...”
“Well, he might have thought of that before he got you pregnant,” Jackie grumbled.
“I don't think he thought about anything..not while we were...intimate.”
“Typical man.”
“But he's not,” Rose said. “That was the problem. Sometimes we didn't speak the same language. He didn't understand what I was on about. Like whether or not we needed protection. I should have spelled it out more clearly. He thought I'd be happy, too. See? His people didn't really have children the old fashioned way anymore, hadn't for ages. It was all done with test tubes or some such. But even back in the day...they still didn't keep their children around. They'd just settle for a bit for the pregnancy, and then leave their children behind. The Doctor assumed we would leave her, Susan, with Sarah Jane and just...”
“Sarah Jane?” Jackie yelped, indignantly. “Sarah Jane! I like that. And why wouldn't you leave her with me, I'd like to know? I'm your mother. Her own family. What's wrong with the two of you? Why would you have a baby and then just leave her somewhere when...”
“Mum,” Rose snapped. “Look, we didn't get to sort it all out. I wasn't going to leave her anywhere. But, the TARDIS sent me back in time, all on my own, and I got sick and I had to give her up.”
“Give her up? Like adoption?”
“No! No, I wouldn't do that. But...I didn't have a lot of choices. I met another Doctor...you know how he changed his face?” Jackie nodded, but Rose paused to think for a moment. They'd come a long way in their relationship. Rose had shared a lot of her feelings. But the entire story would only confuse Jackie, so she edited it severely. Pressing on without a qualm about lying, she said, “Well, he's done that a bunch of times. And this other Doctor, he helped me and he has our baby.”
“He has her? She's with her father,” Jackie said on a sigh, relaxing out of her bristle as she accepted it. “A little girl?” she breathed, suddenly awed by the news. “My granddaughter. Is this the only picture?”
Rose flicked the device in her hand and another picture bloomed. This one of the same dark-haired girl only older. She was standing in front of a pile of junk and clutching a stack of school books. She wore Capri pants and a jumper that would have been modish in 1960.
Going to the wall, Jackie studied Susan closely. She reached up to stroke the image, touching hair and cheek. “How old is she here?”
“Fifteen. This was taken in London. In 1964. She attended one of our schools for a few months.”
“Oh, she looks just like you, sweetheart.”
“I see him.”
“She's got his coloring, all right. And that stubborn chin. But that's your nose and mouth. Even the eyebrows.” Jackie turned back to beam at her daughter. “Oh, Rose, she's beautiful.”
“She is,” Rose said, biting her lip to steady it before adding, “And brilliant, too. Just like her dad. She rescued the TARDIS from a junkyard and tinkered on her until she got her working again. That other video was the first thing recorded by the TARDIS after the refit.”
“The Tylers have always been good with machinery. Look at your father, inventing all those gadgets.”
“Only the TARDIS isn't a machine, not really. She's more like a person.”
“Well, you were always good with people,” Jackie said, unruffled by the correction. “You get on with everybody...even aliens.”
“Speaking of,” Rose sighed, regretfully turning off her mini-projector. “I should be getting up. We need to get back London. All of us missing from Torchwood can't be good for the planet.”
“Your father said there's no rush. We'll go when you feel up to it, sweetheart. You know you don't have to work anymore.”
Despite the lump in her throat, Rose laughed. “I do have to work. You have the house to look after and your club meetings. But I can't just sit around all day. I've got to be...out there. Torchwood needs me. I know about aliens and I can still translate their languages.”
“Don't you think that's odd?” Jackie asked. “When the Doctor was ill you couldn't?
“Maybe...maybe it's a sign that...” She swallowed her qualifier, thinking her mother wouldn't understand or appreciate her efforts to find a way back home.
But Jackie surprised her by saying, “You think it's a sign you have to keep looking for a way back to him?”
“Yeah,” Rose said on a breath. “If we're still in contact somehow...if he can come through like he did on the beach...maybe there's a way for me to go home. He told me not to try. But how can I just...give up?”
To her relief, her mother didn't argue this point. Instead, she gave a happy little bounce and said, “Right, breakfast. I'll have them send up your favorite: cinnamon sprinkle toast.”
Rose huffed in exasperation as her mother beat a hasty retreat. “Mum?” she whined in a carrying voice, wincing as her feet hit the cold floor and made her aware of a pressing need for the bathroom. “I'm not six, you know. You can't cheer me up with toast.”
The last word caused her a twinge as she remembered the Doctor's fascination with toasters. Making for the tiny bathroom, she resigned herself to her loneliness. It wasn't the first stabbing memory of the day and it wouldn't be the last. Everything reminded her of him, of their aborted future. She turned her head away when she saw couples holding hands in the park and burst into dry sobs over Tickle Me Elmo ads. Yet, somehow, she managed to function despite being lacerated by longing every hour on the hour. She managed to keep going.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Keep going...keep going...DAMN!” Mickey growled, slamming his palm down on the desktop, as his pixilated alter-ego dissolved into a bloody smudge on the computer screen.
“Do the people upstairs know they are paying you to play Flags of Empires?” Rose said from his doorway.
Spinning his chair around, Mickey pressed a hand to his chest. “Rose? Stop sneaking up on me, like that. Nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“Worried about getting caught?”
“Not much. I can usually hear approaching footsteps echoing along the hall...all that tile. Besides nobody comes down here except you and Jake. Not until there's bad guys on the radar. I'm a soldier, babe,” he said, giving her a fly hip-hop hand gesture. “I'm a warrior on the mean streets of alternative Earth. Ready to saddle up any time, day or night.” He leaned forward to tap the handset of his desk phone. “Just waiting for the call.”
Weary from the most annoying workday yet, Rose sank into the edge of his desk and, bracing her hands behind her hips and crossing her legs at the ankles, asked, “Am I invisible?”
He peered at her. “You might be a little transparent," he said, casually, then he laughed at his lame pun. Processing the pained glare she gave him, he clicked the game window of his computer closed, folded his arms and gave her his full attention. “You seem solid enough to me," he said, then leeringly added, "especially in that suit.” Rose rolled her eyes but didn't fight it when her mouth tipped up in a hint of a smile. Mickey grinned back at her, obviously happy to have lightened the mood, and said, “What brought this on? Suzi ignoring you again?”
Rose lost her slight smile. “It's not just her. Ever since Norway...I...” She sighed and started over. “Look, I'm not crazy. I know I was upset yesterday, about the explosion, but...”
“Rodriguez apologized, right?” Mickey asked. “It had to be scary for you, but that sort of thing can happen. Momentary loss of concentration.”
“I could have been killed.”
“He thought you'd cleared the building, that's all. The sensors must have been on the blink.”
“It's not just that. Costello and Hank aren't the only ones ignoring me. I waited for thirty minutes at the lunch cart today and never got served. And I just gave a ten minute report on the Loqu from NGC2024 and nobody listened to a word I said. They kept talking all they way through my report. Most of them didn't even look my way.”
“Marines?” Mickey asked, making it sound like an excuse. When Rose nodded, he shrugged. “Come on, Rose. Those guys live for the fight. They aren't interested in alien signals, not unless there's going to be bloodshed.”
“I suppose,” Rose grudgingly admitted. Tugging at her hoop earring, she frowned at the view out his open door. “Nobody cares about diplomacy until its too late to apply it and then they're ringing your line. Or mine.” She put on a barking military voice and said, “Miss Tyler I'm afraid there have been some losses in Cardiff. Can you tell us why this thing is barbecuing the Mayor?”
“Are these Loqus the sort to cook a minor politician?”
“How should I know? We've only just made contact. And...” She bit her lip, her gaze flitting by his like a restless butterfly. After a moment's hesitation she turned to face him squarely. Leaning closer, she whispered, “And, between you and me, it's completely gone now. I can't translate anything. The languages sound familiar, yeah? But I'm not hearing English.”
“Nothing but static?” He asked. When she nodded confirmation, he set his jaw and considered the problem. “Why static? When the Doctor was sick you heard alien just like everybody else, right?”
“The Doctor and I got a lot closer during the last few years. I figured I got some vibrations or something from him.”
“Like how you heard him calling to you?” Mickey guessed.
“Yeah. You know what I think? I think closing the final crack in the universe sealed me off from him and the TARDIS. And now, I can't understand aliens any better than the rest of you.”
“But we're not getting static,” Mickey pointed out. “It's weird, I mean, why static? You should have asked the Doctor about it when you had the chance.”
“We only had two minutes,” Rose reminded him. “Two minutes. And there were so many things I wanted to say.”
Mickey stood and clasped her shoulders, giving them a squeeze. “Hey, it's okay. You still know more about aliens than anybody else on this planet. Unless there's a parallel Doctor.”
“I wish you would stop going on about that,” Rose growled, shoving him away. “There are no parallel Time Lords. It's a Time Lord thing.”
“Right, because they're transdimensional,” Mickey said, parroting back the reason she'd given him a dozen times.
“At least you listen to me once in a while,” Rose sighed. “That means we'd have to be a lot further away from our Earth, somewhere not parallel, to even approach something like Time Lords. They used to create these parallel dimensions, yeah?”
“I love it when you talk technical,” Mickey smirked.
“Be serious.”
“I'm just saying,” he remarked, but he tried to focus. “So when something went wrong with history...like zeppelins, but no airplanes...the Time Lords made this world?”
“Yeah, and the only way we would have a Time Lord around is if he's been imprisoned here. And that wouldn't be good.”
“He...or she? Could be a Time Lady, right?” Mickey said hopefully. “One that's looking for a handsome and daring young man to show around the universe?”
Rose laughed in spite of her gray mood. “You wish. But, I think I'm the only one imprisoned here. Just your luck, hey? And you've checked and rechecked the Torchwood files, right? No sign of them?”
“Nope. But don't you think it's strange? You weren't here. He's not here. But we have a Torchwood just the same?”
“Not really. Time fractures. Universes slide off like icebergs from a glacier. Queen Victoria still had werewolf troubles. She still learned about aliens at the Torchwood Estate and Sir Robert still gave his life defending her.” Rose brushed a spec of imaginary dust from her skirt. “The only humbling thing is history didn't really need us: the Doctor and I. It fixed itself just fine.”
“Except the monarchy fell and the Republic took its place.”
“The Queen got a bit more than a nip in this universe,” Rose agreed, feeling better than she had all morning. Talking to Mickey always cheered her up. He reminded her of home. “That'll teach her to banish the Doctor.”
Mickey changed the subject, before Rose lost her good mood. “So, how's your mum doing?”
“Her ankles are swelling and her back hurts. But she's over the morning sickness. She keeps saying she's a cow, but she's hardly showing.” She thought about her brief pregnancy. Would she have looked as lovely as her mother did right now?
“She's glowing, hey?”
“I hope I look that good if I ever have a baby?”
“If? I thought you'd decided to become a nun. Is there a man on your horizons? I only ask because your mother demands to know what I know every time she sees me, and I'm coming over for Sunday dinner.”
Rose went pale, turning her head to stare out the window, as she said, “I thought she'd stopped asking...there's no one and there never will be.” Whipping back to glare at him, she demanded, “Mickey, how can you even...?”
He held up both hands in surrender. “I'm sorry,” he said with sincerity. “I know you'll carry that torch forever. But you wanting kids is a new development and...”
“I just thought maybe I might use a donor. Someday. No man involved.”
“It's like that is it?” Mickey took his jacket from his chair back and slipped it on. “Seems to me there's got to be a little involvement.” He nudged her with an elbow. “If you're looking to go with a turkey baster, you'll have to count me out, Martha's got me on a tight rein.”
Forgetting her brimming tears, Rose laughed, flashing the pink tip of her tongue at him. “I was thinking of looking up Jack Harkness.”
“Captain Hair Gel? Please! You can do better.” When Rose failed to respond to his teasing, he said, “Isn't he a criminal mastermind or something, now? He would have kept on with the conman stuff, right? Since you never rescued him?”
“I wonder,” Rose mused, obviously following her own train of thought. “I made him immortal, you know? I looked into the TARDIS and...” She fell silent, staring at the transparent reflection of her body in the window glass. She looked like a ghost against the night sky beyond the window. Something tugged on her mind and, all at once, she needed to get out of the office. The walls were too white and bare. She pushed away from the desk, saying, “No roundels.”
“The musical group?”
“What?” Halfway to the door, she paused to throw a scowl over her shoulder at him.
“Martha and the roundels?”
“No, it's...” Hand to her forehead, she snorted, dismissively, “never mind.”
“Got a headache?”
“Look? Speaking of Martha....I know the two of you are bursting with young love, but if you're going to bring Miss Martha Jones by the house, can you talk to her about being so loud? She woke me up last night with the soliloquy.”
“With the who?” Mickey said, gathering up his keys and heading for the door. “Best come on, I'll buy you a sandwich. You haven't eaten and you've started to babble.”
“I'm not babbling. Last night,” Rose said, hurrying to catch him before he reached the elevators. “I heard Martha stomping around in the house must have been two in the morning. She was quoting Shakespeare, I think. Bellowing it out.”
“I don't know what you heard,” Mickey laughed, “But Martha and I were in town last night, visiting her folks.”
“It couldn't have been the telly, it sounded just like her.”
“Maybe you were dreaming,” Mickey said. “Sometimes I dream about this huge explosion and the noise wakes me up.”
“But I was already awake...” Rose mumbled.
Something hummed in her right ear. Wincing, she pressed her hand to the shell of it. She could hear her blood rushing through her veins. The sound of her breathing overshadowed the ding of the arriving lift. Mickey stepped into the elevator car and she followed him, but as the doors were closing, clear as a bell, she heard the Doctor say, “Give me your huddle masses yearning to breath free.” She lunged at the closing door panels, jamming her arm into the shrinking space.
“Doctor?” she yelped, before turning to Mickey. “Did you hear that?” she demanded, forcing her way into the hallway, again. “Did you hear him?”
“I don't hear anything?” Mickey said, straining to listen.
“It was him, the Doctor!” Rose shrilled impatiently. “Be quiet and listen. He just spoke. He quoted that Statue of Liberty thing.” She rolled her hand through the air, encouraging her memory. “Give me your yearning masses...?”
Mickey's expression was openly skeptical. “You heard the Doctor? Just now?”
The rushing in her ears subsided. She gave her head a tentative shake, tipping it to the side as the subtle sounds of the hallway returned to her. Hearing only the air conditioning running and distant machinery and voices, she turned this way and that, trying to pick up the signal again. Finally, her shoulders slumped.
“It's gone. He's gone. But I swear, I heard him. Just as we were getting on the lift, I...” She gazed back along the empty hallway.
Mickey confirmed what her eyes were already telling her. “There's nobody here, Rose,” he said, soothingly. “Maybe it was a trick of position, a voice floating up the lift shaft. Could be someone on another floor?”
“No, it was right behind us. I know his voice. It was him.”
She spun in a circle, frustrated by the lack of evidence supporting her claim. When she stopped, the hall continued to whirl and spin. The floor dipped to the right and she staggered, a hand flailing to the wall to steady herself. Dimly, she heard Mickey say her name, felt him gather her into his arms, but her attention was captured by the roundels on the walls. There were roundels on the wall. Where had they come from? And why was she suddenly so dizzy? She looked toward the lift but, instead of seeing it, she saw the interior of the TARDIS. The console room with its Time Rotor. The Doctor was there and a red-haired woman, Rose didn't recognize. She lunged forward, an exclamation of delight on her lips and plummeted into blackness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Once again, the first voice she heard on waking was her mother's. But this time she wasn't in bed. She opened her eyes and looked up at her family as they stood grouped around her. She was sitting in a chair at home.
“Oh, Pete,” Jackie was saying, “Look at her...she's glowing.”
Glowing?
“You should have seen her before,” Mickey interjected. “She looked...radioactive. I don't know how I got her out of the building without anyone stopping us."
"And it just came over her?" her father asked. "No warning?"
"She said she heard the Doctor," Mickey said, causing Jackie to hiss an indrawn breath. "And then her eyes...they..." Mickey patted behind him for the arm of the sofa. Finding it, he collapsed onto it like his knees had given out. His tone turned reverent as he fumbled for words, "They were...they had this...fire inside. Like hot coals or the sun or...I don't know what. It made my skin crawl. She just stared right through me for about two seconds, and then...pop...gone...faded.” He squeaked, clutching at his throat. “I've seen a lot of strange things...but this...it was like there wasn't any Rose there. Just a Rose shape. Then, she came back and passed right out. It's got to be alien, am I right?”
“Silly,” Rose said. But nobody seemed to hear her. She struggled to get out of the chair, feeling suddenly claustrophobic, but her feet couldn't seem to find traction. She lifted her hand and saw that it had become almost transparent. “I must be dreaming.”
"Is she coming around? Rose, darling, can you hear me?"
Her dad shook his head. Turning to Mickey, he asked, “What was she working on? Anything classified?”
“Translation of that first contact recording,” Mickey said. His eyes widened. “But she said she felt invisible. And another thing, she's been getting static from the aliens.”
“Trouble, you mean?” Jackie asked. “I don't want her mixing with the wrong sort, Pete. You promised me you'd keep an eye on her.”
Pete was doing more than keeping an eye on her, he was staring at her, squinting in concentration. He looked confused. His hand rose to pinch the bridge of his nose as if he were fighting a headache. Rose tried to hold his eye, but it was like he didn't want to see her. She looked at her mother and then Mickey but they didn't meet her eye either.
“Why are you all hovering over me?” she demanded crossly, “Acting like I can't hear a word you say?”
Jackie was the only one who responded. “Oh, sweetheart, you've come back. You gave us such a fright,” she declared, leaning over to smooth a few stray hairs from her daughter's brow. “Can you remember what happened?”
“Of course, I can,” Rose said. She pressed both hands into the chair arms and, as if the laws of physics were just enacted, she shot to her feet. She staggered and Mickey put his hand out to steady her. But her father seemed to be staring beyond her. “I was on the beach,” she began, but then seemed unsure. “No, wait...was that yesterday?”
“That was three weeks ago, sweetheart. You were back at work. Don't you remember?.”
For a second or two, she didn't. Then, she got a flash of a dream image. “I was...running down this corridor...at work?” She looked at Mickey. “Right. We were waiting for the lift. And I heard the Doctor.”
“Calling you again?”Jackie asked.
“No,” Rose murmured, shaking her head. “No. He was just talking to someone.” She glanced at her father, standing there staring into the fireplace. There wasn't even a fire burning. What could he find so fascinating? “Dad?” Jackie and Mickey looked questioningly from Rose to the unresponsive Pete.
Jackie prompted him. “Pete? She's talking to you.”
“Who?” he asked.
“Your daughter, Rose,” Jackie said.
“From the womb?” Pete asked, chuckling as he wrapped an affectionate arm around his wife's shoulders. He kissed Jackie's temple lightly and added, “That's a fine name, Rose. But I was thinking we could name her after my grandmother, Marion Louise?”
“Pete?” Jackie exclaimed, ducking away from his embrace and waving her arm in an arc. “I'm talking about my Rose, right there.” Pete swept the room with a curious glance, but didn't even hesitate as his gaze glided by his adopted daughter. Eyes focusing on Mickey, he lifted his brows in inquiry. “What's she on about?”
“Uh-oh,” Mickey said.
“There's the understatement of the century,” Rose snarled at him. She stepped in front of her dad and waved at him frantically. “Can't you see me, Dad? Dad?”
“Pete? Why don't you say something?” Jackie asked him.
“There's no one there,” he told her, staring straight through Rose.
It soon became heartbreakingly apparent that Pete Tyler had forgotten her. It wasn't just that he couldn't see her. He could only hold her in his mind for a second or two. Mickey and Jackie explained who she was and what had happened, but within a few minutes, Pete had to be told again. Jake also seemed unable to remember her unless constantly prompted. It turned out the household staff and her coworkers at Torchwood had no recollection of her at all.
She walked in and out of Torchwood setting off the sensors but never stopped for an identity check. Mickey ran several diagnostic tests on her but could find no anomalies. She simply didn't register with adults at first. Children still saw her, she learned and animals. She took comfort in petting the guard dogs at work and cuddling Martha's cat at home. Martha wondered why Mickey spent so much time talking to thin air.
“I've told her it's a secret surveillance project. She thinks your on a stakeout somewhere. But she can't hear you.”
“I've vanished from their reality,” Rose told him “You and mum had places here to step into, but I never existed in this world. I don't think people believed in me. It's like the TARDIS cloaking device, I'm not invisible, I'm just not supposed to be here. So they don't see me.”
People started humoring Mickey and Jackie. They would patiently listen to the explanation about Rose's invisibility. They would nod and soothe and occasionally offer helpful suggestions. But within a few minutes they forgot about her again. Probably the forgetting was the only thing that kept Jackie out of a mental hospital, since Pete finally admitted that not only did he not see Rose any more, but also, as far as he knew there had never been a Rose Tyler. He remembered the Doctor bringing Mickey to his world, he remembered being reunited with Jackie, but he insisted the Doctor had been alone. There was no convincing him otherwise.
“I don't exist for him,” Rose told her mother as they sat side by side on the porch swing. “People don't want to see me.”
“They want to, honey, they just can't.”
“I mean...it's like...they look over me, through me, like I've got a chameleon circuit.”
“I don't know what that is,” Jackie remarked. “But Mickey is working on a way to make you visible again. We won't give up on you, I promise.”
But day after day, week after week, Mickey came home with no idea how to fix things. Rose stopped going to Torchwood when the sensors stopped beeping at her. But she bombarded Mickey with questions and ideas. She told him of the Gelth and how they'd been cast out of their proper dimension.
“They needed to find new bodies. Maybe I'm like them now.”
“Do you think we need to make you a new body? Like the cybermen?”
“I don't know. I'm not using dead people,” Rose said, even though she had more sympathy for the Gelth, now, that she was losing her place in reality. “All I know is I'm disappearing. I'm like the TARDIS. I can't function here. I'm just...dead. Maybe when I had the Vortex in me...it changed me somehow. Or maybe it was what the Doctor did to me.”
“What did he do? Exactly.”
Rose looked at him sitting across from her at the patio table. She liked being outside. The sun still felt warm on her back. The breeze still tugged at her hair. She ran the flat of her palm over the bumpy marbled surface of the tabletop, as she pondered how to answer Mickey's question.
“I shouldn't go into this with you, but...it might help.” She took a deep breath and said, “The Doctor and I are connected. You know, how a human man joins with a woman?”
“Do I know how to shag? Yeah, I think I remember that,” Mickey said, grinning.
“Shut up,” Rose said, leaning across the small table to smack his shoulder. “I'm trying to tell you something personal...and important. Try to behave.”
It felt so good to make contact with him, that she scooted closer. For a second, she settled her hand on him, let it linger. Their eyes met and all she wanted was to do was shag him breathless. She remembered how good it used to feel and for a brief moment she wanted to do it again, to feel alive just for a little while. One last physical indulgence, would that be so bad? Yeah, it would. Especially, if Mickey forgot her, too. Every moment they had left needed to be spent on solving this problem. Reluctantly, she turned her head away.
“Sorry, babe, I'm listening,” Mickey said as she gave him a friendly pat and withdrew her hand. He propped his elbows on the table and gave her his complete attention.
Once she was certain he wasn't going to laugh at her, Rose went on. “The Doctor isn't like a man. He doesn't have...” she gestured vaguely at her lap.
“You're kidding me,” Mickey exclaimed. “If I'd known that, I would have pitched my case a little differently.”
“Mickey?”
“Sorry. Sorry. No equipment. You were saying?” he prompted, but he couldn't help smiling.
“He has equipment,” Rose informed him huffily. “But it's not like yours...and I'm not going into what it's like..” She sighed again. “Look? Maybe we should just forget about this,” she grumbled. “I don't know why I wanted to tell you.”
“Because you're fading away,” Mickey said, reaching out a hand and wrapping his fingers around hers. “And we're friends and I'm trying to help. Seriously, Rose. You know, I'm working on this all the time.”
She did know that. He was as frantic as her mother. Gripping his hand hard, she stared into the tree branches overhead for a moment or two, eyes glistening with unshed tears. Sucking in a breath, she held it for a long ten count, and then exhaled. Her line of sight dropped, until she was gazing into his warm, brown eyes.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “You're my hero. So...the Doctor is alien. A Time Lord. He looks like us, but he's not like us. His people are telepathic, for one thing. That's how they bond with a TARDIS. And it's also how they...bond with each other. When two of them get together, they have...”
“Mind sex,” Mickey crowed. “I've heard about that. Some of the guys at Torchwood say there are these kinky aliens who suck out your brains while you're...”
“All right,” Rose interrupted testily. “It's not about sucking brains. And it's not about being kinky...it's...beautiful. He's got these..." She wondered how to explain. "Well, they're called cnidocysts. They're a sort of specialized cell in his skin, on his arms and chest and tongue. They bristle like a cactus...or no,” drawing her teeth along her lower lip, she frowned as she searched for the right comparison, “more like a jellyfish, yeah? These little harpoons inject a drug into me..."
"A drug?" Mickey yelped, obviously appalled by this idea.
"To make me more...receptive. Not like...against my will, or anything. More like...ready for him. When he was feeling...interested. They would...” She used stiff fingers to poke at her arm as she said, “penetrate. So, we could...” Again, she indicated her lap.
To his credit, Mickey didn't so much as crack a smile. “Down there?” he asked in a small voice, squirming a bit at the thought of stingers or needles near his sensitive manhood.
“All over,” she corrected. “It helped to link our nervous systems. Once we were...joined...I could feel what he felt...and he could feel what I felt. It was like we had one body, one...soul. Everything we did together was echoed and magnified. You have no idea...”
By the look on his face, Mickey was just as glad he couldn't imagine what she was describing in greater detail. Time Lord sex still sounded alarmingly alien to him. But he was too kind to share his disgust in the face of Rose's obvious distress. Instead, he fell back on instinct and made a joke. “So, once you've gone Time Lord there's no going back?”
Rose laughed with him. “I guess not. But that's not why I'm telling you all this is...what if doing that...linking to the Doctor? Changed me? What if this is happening because of my connection to him. He could be drawing me back to him somehow. Or maybe...I don't know...maybe I'm just dying because we're apart.”
“You're not dying,” Mickey insisted. “We'll figure this out.”
Rose knew he would try, but more and more each passing day, her situation seemed hopeless. “If only the Doctor were here.”
It was her constant lament as she wandered through the world leaving less and less of an impression on it. She lived alone, now. People moved around her like shadows, ghosts. She still felt real, solid, still had the urge to eat and use the loo. She still slept and amused herself with books and exploring. But nobody noticed her on her long rambles. Even when she threw a tantrum and broke windows or vases, it didn't seem to bother anyone. After a time she found she couldn't break things. And she started to walk right through walls. She tried to avoid doing that, because it gave her the chills. Eventually, only Jackie remembered her. And she knew one day that connection would be lost, too. Losing Mickey sent her into a dark depression. She considered leaving the house, then, before she lost her mother, but she couldn't bring herself to let go of her last human contact.
So, she tarried, until one morning she woke to singing and a room stripped of all remaining signs of her. Her music and make-up and clothing were all gone. Glancing down at herself, she saw she was wearing a black leather jacket, pink arm warmers and jeans. The same clothes she'd been wearing on the beach in Norway. Where I died, she thought, and realized for the first time that she'd begun to think of herself as a ghost. To offset the rush of despair that accompanied that thought, she turned her mind to her theories. She mulled over possible explanations for her predicament as she sat on her bed, watching Carmen, the housekeeper, take down her curtains and put up ones with pink bears and bows on them.
What if the Doctor was calling her home? Reaching out to her like he used to do in his sleep? Wandering this world was very much like wandering the halls of the TARDIS at night. She felt as helpless and lonely. And when she slept, she dreamed of the TARDIS walls shifting around her.
Her mother came in with a bundle in her arms and shopping bags hanging from her wrists. “Good, once the curtains are up, I can see about having someone cart all this furniture away.” Focused on Carmen, Jackie didn't look at Rose, but that wasn't particularly alarming. Sometimes she wouldn't risk a conversation when there were other people in the room. “I've got the interior design people coming this afternoon.”
“Morning, Mum,” Rose called. “Been shopping?”
“I've found the dearest blanket,” Jackie went on, without even glancing toward Rose. “Wait, I'll show you.” She settled her packages on the dresser and rummaged in the shopping bags until she found what she was searching for.
“Mum? Can you hear me? Just nod or wink or whatever.”
“Look? It's covered with roses. Because I was thinking, Rose, for a name. Maybe Marion in the middle. Pete is so set on Marion, but I like the name Rose. Rose Marion Tyler, what do you think?”
Rose screamed. “Mum? Mommy?”
Tears streamed down her face as she shouted in her mother's ear. She tried to smash the mirror, pummel the walls, kick the furniture. But nothing she did mattered. The mirror mended itself. Every sound she made seemed designed for her ears only. Everyone she loved had forgotten about her. They simply moved on with their new lives, in their new world. She couldn't bear it. It was worse than death. No one mourned her passing. No one remembered her at all.
She couldn't stand to watch them laughing and eating and sharing family moments. They never even mentioned her. The baby had usurped her name and her place in their lives. Finally, unable to tolerate the pain she broke and ran. Leaving her family and her own memories behind, she ran and ran until she needed to stop for breath. How odd it was to feel her heart beating, to gasp for air when she surely had no lungs, no substance.
“Look at me,” she snarled at strangers, flailing her arms in front of them. “Talk to me. Someone.” She punched at people. Mooned them. Insulted them. Grimaced in their faces. She felt herself going mad, losing her grip on reality, and wondered if it would matter if she did. Reality had lost its grip on her. Did she have a mind to lose? How would her madness impact the world?
Desperate for some validation of her existence, she sought out mediums and soothsayers. But none of the fakirs with shingles in shop windows showed the slightest interest in her haunting them. They went on laying out tarot cards and gazing into crystals oblivious to her mugging and shouting. She'd hoped to find someone like Gweneth. But true psychics were rare it seemed. Disillusioned with them, she gave up hope. Then, one day, as she paused outside a coffee shop, a girl glanced up from her steaming mug and made eye contact. Rose paused, a tingle of shock passing through her. She looked over her shoulder, certain the girl must be focused on someone else. But there was nobody close. Rose waved and the girl, after glancing around self-consciously, twiddled her fingers in reply.
“Oh, thank God,” Rose exclaimed, as she dashed into the cafe, forgetting, in her haste, to use the door “You can see me! Can you see me?” The girl gave the tiniest of nods. “You can hear what I'm saying?” The girl, a faded slip of a thing with pinkish blond hair and milky blue eyes, tapped her pen against her open journal. She'd been writing in it when Rose had first seen her. Rose glanced down at the page.
--Can't talk.—the girl had written.
“People would think you were crazy, yeah?”
The pen scrawled again. --Can you write?--
“I don't think so,” Rose said. “I can't touch things anymore.”
--Try-- the girl wrote.--Use my hand.--
It was hard to use another person's hand. It took all of Rose's concentration but she managed to settle her arm over the girl's and move the pen across the page.
--My name is Rose Tyler—Rose wrote and then paused to think of what she wanted to say to this stranger in a coffee shop. Should she try again to reach Mickey or her Mum? Would they listen? No, she realized. They were part of whatever was happening here. Every impact she made on this world faded into nothing. If these were her last words, she should make them count.. Focusing her attention, she began to write rapidly.
--This is the story of Torchwood. The last story I'll ever tell.-- She settled into a rhythm. --Planet Earth. This is where I was born and this is where I died. For the first nineteen years of my life nothing happened, nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called The Doctor...--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The girl, whose name she learned was Mary Alice Elder, proved an attentive listener. She had been born mute, but was compensated for the loss of her voice with the ability to see beyond what she called the black veil. She worked as a postal clerk and rented a room in Chelsea. Rose followed her home and, having nowhere else to go, haunted the place. Mary Alice didn't seem to mind the company. They watched telly and played guessing games on paper. Rose found she could talk easily to Mary Alice and they chatted away about all sorts of things.
“Sometimes the dead come out from behind the veil,” Mary Alice explained via her ever present notepad. “The Cybermen went into it. They followed a round ship.”
“The orb ship. There were Daleks inside. Metal monsters.”
“I've seen a few monsters,” Mary Alice told her. “They come out of the black veil, too.”
“We call it the Void,” Rose told her. “But some people call it Hell or the Howling.”
“Sometimes the undead bleed through, beings from other worlds. You're not like them. You glow.”
“Mickey said that, too. I can't see it,” Rose said, holding out her hand to study it. It looked like her hand, ordinary, pink skin and short nails. “Do you think it's my soul glowing? Or maybe the light I'm supposed to follow?”
“I've never seen that light,” Mary Alice scribbled. “Only the black veil and white or silvery ghosts. And you. You're all gold and shiny.”
“I met a werewolf once,” Rose mused, “back when I was alive. And he told me I burned like the sun.”
“Could be there's a part of you alive somewhere,” Mary Alice wrote. “Once, I met a spirit who had left his body because it was very sick. In a coma.”
“Like Life on Mars,” Rose said, nodding. She'd watched the show after her death, perched on the edge of Mary Alice's bed. She was sitting in the same position, now, looking over the girl's shoulder to read her responses.
“Well...you are named Tyler,” Mary Alice wrote, laughing soundlessly. Then, she sobered and added, “Maybe I've made you up. Maybe I'm really just crazy.”
“You aren't crazy,” Rose told her. “You're special. You have a gift. And you're very important to me.”
“Do you think...could you have been in some sort of accident?”
“It's possible, I suppose. At Torchwood? Lots of strange stuff going on there. Just my luck, I get knocked out of my body but not into an earlier decade, yeah? I could stand to dress in flares and leather.” She lay back on the bed, stretching languidly, trying to conjure a greater sense of self, to have sinew and muscles. “I don't know though, I can't help thinking this is about the Doctor, somehow. I only wish,” she sighed, “I wish he could help me.”
“Maybe he can?” Mary Alice scrawled in big letters. “Have you tried reaching out to him?”
“Every day,” Rose said. “Every hour. Just like clockwork. Could be he has to be thinking about me at the same time. He never mentions people, once we've gone. I thought I would be different...we were so close...but maybe he just went on without me...same old life, he said.”
“You love him?”
“Always. Forever,” Rose sighed. “And that's funny, now, because I don't feel anything anymore.”
It was true. She'd stopped feeling things. Just as she'd stopped using the loo and breathing. She no longer shuddered from the cold; no longer felt lonely. When first denied food, she'd been ravenously hungry. But the need for food and warmth left her one day, sighing off without fanfare. She didn't notice the desire passing away until she realized she hadn't eaten for a week or more. The realization left her gripped by an unholy panic. She was losing herself and knew it. Her body had dissolved to the point where it had no physical urges, no surging hormones to interpret as feelings. She tried to be afraid, but without blood and breath to sustain it fear turned out to be nothing more than a bad habit. She let it go and it vanished. After a time, she forgot to be sad about her losses. She no longer wailed for her mother, no longer prayed for rescue. She simply existed.
The world turned under her. Every morning she crossed the ocean to America. Every evening she returned to Mary Alice's flat. Mary Alice began to lose touch with her, too. But Rose had nowhere else to go. She'd forgotten most of what it meant to be flesh and bone, remembering only her love. When even her love took abstract shape, she decided to follow the one thing she had left, the light in the back of her mind. Rose wandered aimlessly, longing to be whole again, but she couldn't put a name to the thing she needed. She had no tongue for words. No chemical mind to summon memories. At a loss, she let the longing guide her footsteps. It steered her across land and sea to a shoreline in Norway.
There, facing Bad Wolf Bay, she put down roots on a rocky outcropping. The wind whipped her hair if she imagined it could. If she imagined her body, she wore the same clothes he'd last seen her wearing. He would find her waiting if he ever returned. But she was no longer sure he would come. Probably he had forgotten her, too. She wasn't sure if she would feel anything if he came back for her anyway. She couldn't feel the breeze on her skin no matter how vividly she tried to imagine it. A lonely sentinel looking out to sea, she waited and watched the shifting tides and the changing sky until the tide and the sky disappeared.
She was gone...into the dark...
....dark....dark...
....howling dark...
....nothing...not even memories...
....nothing...
....something...
....bright...glowing...
....light....so very bright against the emptiness....a door....
....and a questing...sweeping...something...
....a question...
....not a voice...but a question...a ping at the back of her mind...
....she had a mind...and her mind had a back...and a front...and a middle...
...and a sense of self...
....I am! I exist!
The question continued to bounce off her...on a loop...pinging against her returning awareness...
---ROSE?---ROSE?---ROSE?---
“HERE!” She screamed as soon as she realized she could. “HEAR! Hear me...I am...Rose, that's me. I am Rose.”
The light responded, not the Doctor but the wolf in the dark. It focused on her with its glowing eye, shuffling through her memories before it hooked into her. There was a painful tug on her consciousness, an insistent pulling, taut and demanding as a fisherman's line. And she started to sense...movement. She was moving toward something...out of the void...the golden light expanded, engulfing her. And then, like a landed bass, she flailed into another reality, a reality full of noise and shapes and meaning.
She seemed to be lying on a smooth, slightly curved floor. There was something organic about her surroundings, the floor felt alive under her hand. The rounded space had the comforting warmth of a womb. She could even feel a pulse, beating through her. Not her pulse, but the heartbeat of a cybernetic mother, this living machine. She wondered about reincarnation, thinking she might be reborn, as she stared up at the confused tangle of clear tubing and glowing metal above her. Visually tracing the curve of a creamy arch, she saw it flowed through a heavy iron grating. Looking to the right, she saw a curving stair made of the same type of iron. A round column was rising and falling into her sacred space and there was a grinding roar all around her. She recognized the sound.
“It's the TARDIS,” she said, startled to hear her own voice echoing through the room. Then, she realized she hadn't spoken--couldn't speak. She still had no breath or tongue. The impression of sound came, not from her mouth but from the walls. They pulsed with color as she formed thoughts and somehow the color became sound for her.
She returned her attention to the door in her head, focusing on it as she formulated a question. "Where am I?"
To her utter amazement, the walls answered her. Not in words, but in images and flashing binary codes. They fired a flurry of information into her mind. Dreamlike impressions flowed trough the door in her soul and became a concept.
---Home---
She was home, on the TARDIS. Yet, it was, also, inside her somehow, explaining things. It told her it had brought her here for the Doctor. Because she'd gone missing. Because it needed her to complete the circuit with him. They would become whole again. She couldn't be separate from the whole. She was part of the whole, they belonged together, the three of them.
---You are the interface---the TARDIS told her, gently insistent---No other plug-in is possible for this system, therefore you must...you will...reintegrate---
END THIS PART
DISHEVELED
by Rabid1st
Doctor Who
Ten/Rose
Ratings: Adult +
Beta Babes: Keswindhover, larielromeniel, and thewinterqueen also, Measi and queenrikki_hp. With a special shout-out to Lil and Jei for their YIM help.
Spoilers: Well...it's AU, isn't it? Some for Doomsday. A few vague references to S3, nothing that will spoiler a person. Oh, and I made up what happens on Life on Mars...only saw the first episode...but that's okay because it could be different in Pete's World.
Summary: This is the story of how she died. Spoilers to Doomsday but pretty well AU beyond it.
Disclaimer: I work my little fingers to the bone and I'm still not entitled to any royalties. Nobody invites me to the sound stages in Cardiff. I had to sneak into the company picnic, avoiding security and such while I ate fried chicken and potato salad, but that's okay because all rights to Doctor Who and it's characters belong to the BBC, Russell T. Davies and assorted production companies.
CLICK HERE FOR ALL PREVIOUS PARTS
PART TWENTY-FOUR
Wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets, skin-on-skin with her Doctor, Rose floated in utter bliss. This was her favorite part of loving him--when he fell asleep next to her, when they were naked and sated and bundled up together. Knowing he trusted her enough to be willingly vulnerable made her giddy, even as it inspired a liquid bloom of heat low in her belly. Knowing the TARDIS trusted her to keep him safe and content made her feel complete. She'd found her purpose in life and was fulfilled. No, more than fulfilled, enriched by it.
“Rose?” Her name whispered through the air. “Rose?” The breathy sound tickled along her cheek.
He was calling her. Why was he calling her?
Disturbed, she stirred, reaching for him, wondering why he was no longer beside her. They'd been touching a moment ago. Where could he have gone? When she tried to focus on his voice, she lost it and her deep contentment swirled away as well. Sitting up, she pushed the covers back and saw he was gone from their bed. The room seemed to expand around her, leaving her isolated on an island of blankets and pillows. She swung her feet to the floor.
And the scene changed.
She was running down an endless hallway, panting and looking over her shoulder, running and running toward a distant door. The door meant safety. It glowed as bright as the sun, beaming constant reassurance, but she knew she would never reach it. The narrow way stretched ahead of her on and on into eternity. There was sand underfoot. Her skin overheated as she struggled not to slide sideways, lifting her knees high, as if she were climbing beach dunes. She was burning up, burning away into nothing. The wall roundels got smaller and smaller in the distance. When they vanished, Rose knew she would die. Needing to break free of this nightmare, she turned around, only to find her retreat cut off by a smooth white wall. No roundels, she realized, panic seizing her. This wasn't her home. She didn't belong here.
Let me back. Let me back.
Blinded by tear-thinned mascara, invisible fingers choking off her air, she smacked the flat of her hand against the featureless wall. Her palm stung as she struck again and again, demanding reality relent--the universe obey her. Let. Me. Back. Drowning, she started to gasp, struggling for her life. He was right there. She could feel him, leaning his cheek into hers. Her wracking sobs abated. She shifted to mirror him, carefully positioning the tips of her fingers above his. Even on the other side, he was still part of her. He quieted her weeping, calmed her churning mind. He helped her draw her first full, deep breath in her new world. They sighed as one, exhaling tension.
Oh, Rose. Rose. Help me.
She felt ashamed of her weeping. He was so alone, unable to save her--help her. He wanted to, she knew, but he simply couldn't. It would mean destroying both worlds. She couldn't ask him to do that. She had to be strong. Knowing he was waiting for her to answer him, her shoulders slumped. She felt him acknowledge her surrender, sensed him fading away, diminished and heartsick. As he drew back to leave, her knees started to buckle. She leaned heavily into the wall to keep from crumpling to the floor in a heap. She wanted to wail and tear at the plaster until her nails were broken and bleeding.
“No. No. He needs me. Let me back!”
“Rose?” Her mother spoke soothingly. “Rose, sweetheart, wake up.”
She woke with a start, the shrill pleading still echoing in her head. Her nose was stuffy, her throat sore. Her fingers were stiff claws curled into the sheets. It hurt to straighten them. She often woke this way, stiff and sore as she tumbled into an alien reality. For a second or two, all she recognized was her mother. She looked around the small room, struggling to place it. It had the look of a hotel.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Stavanger, Norway,” Jackie said, plainly worried. “Don't you remember? You've had a fever. Been in and out of it for two days. We had to get a nurse in. I've been beside myself.”
Eyes fixed on her mother, Rose drew an unsteady breath. Jackie Tyler had changed. Gone were the dark roots and shiny polyester robes. This new Jackie dressed in combed Egyptian cotton and silk. Her hair color had the sheen of professional high-and-low tones. Even first thing in the morning, worried for her daughter, she had perfectly powdered cheeks and freshly manicured nails. But she was still Rose's mum, from the true Earth. She seemed somehow more...real...than anything else in the room.
“I remember,” Rose said, rubbing her brow. “We came to see him. The Doctor. He called me here?”
“And you would stay there on that beach, in the cold and the wet, for hours,” Jackie scolded, holding her arms open for Rose to receive a hug.
“Always wait five and a half hours,” Rose muttered, letting her mum gather her in. “It's our rule.”
“So you said,” Jackie said resigned to it, stroking a hand up and down Rose's back. “But you nearly caught your death. You've been burning up, sweetheart. And raving about walls.”
“I do feel a bit peculiar,” Rose said. “Like I'm...empty.”
A pricking in the corner of her eyes, brought her hand up to pinch the bridge of her nose. But she didn't weep. She'd run out of tears, shed the last of them on the beach. From now on, she intended to leave the crying to her dreams. There she would weep and wail. Every night she dreamed of him. Every morning on waking, she had to reacquaint herself to her loss and gasp her way to normal breathing. Pillowed against her mother's breast, she listened to Jackie's heart beating and willed herself to relax. Slowly, the shuddering chill ebbed away, leaving her wrung out but almost whole again.
“You're still having those dreams, aren't you?” Jackie asked, gently combing her fingers through Rose's hair. When she nodded, Jackie said, “I wish you'd reconsider about seeing the therapist, sweetheart. I don't normally hold with such busy bodies, but now you've seen the Doctor, now you know he can't get back to you...well, your father says this friend of his is very good. Helped him deal with the separation and the idea of divorce. And how weird is that? Thinking about the other me...divorcing him?”
Sitting straighter, Rose shifted to one side, to look at her mother as she answered. “I don't know what I would say to a therapist.” She tried out an opening line. “Hi, I'm here from another world and I'm having a little trouble adjusting? Or maybe...I've lost everything...my life...my future...the only man I'll ever love and...” Her chipper facade cracked and she turned her head to the side, blinking away tears. “I never even told him, Mum. Not until it was too late. I should have said it everyday, but whenever I tried...I'd just get so choked up.”
“He knows now,” Jackie said, sandwiching her daughter's hands between hers. “And I bet he always knew. He married you, didn't he?”
Darting a shy glance at her mother from beneath lowered lashes, Rose swallowed hard. “I'm sorry, we didn't tell you about that. We were going to, honestly, but I thought you would be upset...and I thought there'd be plenty of time.” She fell silent, letting the last excuse hang heavy in the air, shutting her eyes again to deal with the pain. She'd thought they would have forever.
“Now, hush. I won't have you upsetting yourself. You've been sick." She plumped up Rose's pillows, settling her against them. "Are you hungry? I can ring for room service.” She reached for the phone. “A bit of tea and toast?”
“Look at you...ringing for service,” Rose grinned.
“I could get used to this life,” Jackie agreed with a theatrical pat to her hair. Focusing on Rose in all seriousness, she added, “So could you. You have to put that other life behind you.”
“I can't...you don't know...”
“I do know,” Jackie said, gently, “I lost the man I loved once. He was my world and I had to go on all alone.”
“You had me,” Rose reminded her. Jackie's sympathetic murmur readily acknowledged this and Rose struggled with her need to tell her mother the whole truth. Staring up at her, she sighed. “I...it's just...there's one more thing I never told you,” she said, faintly. Avoiding her mother's questioning eye, she stroked her fingers along the neckline of her pajamas. Then, her gaze lifted. “Have you seen my necklace? The TARDIS key?”
Jackie scanned the room and spotted the leather thong Rose usually wore. It lay curled in a tray on top of the hotel room dresser. “There it is,” she said, indicating the direction with a bob of her head. “We wouldn't lose it.”
“I want to show you something,” Rose said. Scrambling around her mum, she tried to get out of bed but found she was too weak. When the edges of her vision went black, she flopped back down onto her pile of pillows and said, “Can you get it for me?” Jackie murmured her assent and went to the dresser. “Oh, and I could use a few of those tissues, too, please. My nose is dripping.”
Receiving her bounty, Rose thanked her mother as she settled the box of tissues by her hip. She took a moment to fondle the leather cord of her necklace, sliding it through her fingers, before settling it in her lap so she could tend to her nasal drip. She blew and blotted and disposed of the used tissues in a tiny bin by the bed. Finally, composed, she picked up the key again, and edging it aside, showed Jackie a slim silver tube hanging on the cord as well.
“Wha's that?” Jackie asked, peering at it.
“You'll see,” Rose said as she gripped the tube and pointed it toward the far wall. Her thumb shifted slightly, pressing a hidden mechanism and an image appeared in midair, a paused movie still of Rose whirling around, arms outstretched. “Can you close the curtains?” she asked, fiddling with the tube.
Jackie moved to obey but faltered when another picture bloomed to life, a moving video this time with high definition so precise it looked more like a window in the wall than a recording. In the bright square, the Doctor was flying a kite. With an incoherent whimper, Rose quickly changed the scene. To Jackie's delight and amazement, there appeared to be lots of home movies on the device. Scenes skimmed by in a blur of color. She saw Rose several times and thought she saw Mickey. She would have asked to see more but the white-line set to her daughter's mouth made her nervous.
“The TARDIS records everything,” Rose told her in a monotone. “I don't know how it works, but this,” she released the pressure on the device and the flashing images slowed, “lets me play back whatever I want to see again.”
Jackie watched in amazement as Rose and the Doctor made snow angels in the virtual window. She absorbed the happy grins and playful cuddles they gave one another as they danced and shopped and saved a dozen worlds in quick scene-skipping succession. She'd seldom seen a more perfectly matched couple. In fact, she could think of no one else in her acquaintance. She and Pete had argued constantly. But Rose and her Doctor seemed genuinely delighted with each other. Of course, it was easy to appear happy in photographs, but seeing them again, she remembered how they had been when they visited her. They had sported about the place, even in the worst sort of circumstances, laughing and sharing secret glances.
When the fast forward stopped, one scene held steady on the wall. The illusionary window showed an alien landscape, orange and rocky. Herds of some horned animal grazed in the distance, while in the foreground a young girl of about twelve sat on a rocky parapet. The wind ruffled her brown, shoulder-length hair. Her heavy brows were furrowed in concentration as she studied a piece of machinery in her lap. It was easy to see her father in her.
But Jackie immediately recognized Rose's mouth and nose and exclaimed in wonder, “Gawd, never say I'm a Granny.”
“We had a child,” Rose confirmed, misty eyes focusing on the scene. Jackie squeaked in amazement, but before she could blurt out her first question, Rose pressed on, “A little girl, named Susan. We lost her.”
Swallowing down her original line of inquiry, Jackie processed the painful ramifications of those simple words. She spoke with motherly consideration. “You lost her? But she's...did she die?”
“No.” Rose shook her head, but then reconsidered. “Or, yes...I suppose she did...in the Time War. I, God, this is so hard to talk about,” she murmured, casting her gaze to the ceiling. She pressed the knuckle of her free hand to her upper lip. Her wrist jerked and the image on the wall changed. Now, there was a still shot of Mickey arguing with some furry aliens.
“I've got a granddaughter and I didn't know. Why does she look so old in this picture? I'm only forty-one and you're only...” It struck her mid-calculation that Rose had lost a daughter as well as a husband. She remembered very clearly how the soft baby scent of her infant Rose helped her cling to life after Pete died. “Oh, my Rose, you've lost so much.”
“Close the curtains,” Rose repeated in a very small voice and Jackie hastened to pull the cord.
In the semi-dark room, the image seemed to become part of the wall and appeared startlingly vivid. Returning to the video of Susan again, Rose said, “I got pregnant straight away. As soon as we started...the first time we...”
“Just like me and your dad,” Jackie nodded. “And your aunt Caro. And cousin Louise. It's almost a family tradition.”
“Tell me about it,” Rose groaned. “I never wanted that to happen to me. I was so careful with Mickey and Jimmy. But the Doctor... I suppose I didn't think it could happen. And he didn't understand why I wasn't happy. You wouldn't believe how excited he was. He was bouncing around.”
“Nothing new about that,” Jackie said, dryly.
Unable to force a chuckle through her clenching throat, Rose choked on it. “No, I guess not,” she said though her coughing laugh. Shaking off the wave of melancholy that threatened to consume her again, she went on, “Anyway, I had a complete melt down. I didn't want to have a baby. I wasn't ready...”
“Oh...sweetheart...you didn't...?” She glanced at the image again, reassured that Rose couldn't have had an abortion if the girl was sitting right there on a rock. Though, you never knew with aliens, they could get up to all sorts of things, maybe the girl could come back from the dead like her father.
“No,” Rose shook her head quickly. “I mean, I thought about it. But the Doctor wouldn't hear of it, of course. He was furious. We had this horrible fight. And then, before we could decide what to do...something else happened...I...well, I went to see his people...”
“His people? But, you said, they were all dead.”
“They are.” Rose scratched behind her ear, squinting as she thought about how convoluted her life was on the TARDIS. “It's too hard to explain...I'm not sure I even understand it properly...the simple answer is we had a time machine. I got sick."
"Oh," a light dawned in Jackie's mind, "Is that what was wrong with you? When you came home that time?"
"Yeah, because you can't have a baby in the TARDIS and...”
“Well, he might have thought of that before he got you pregnant,” Jackie grumbled.
“I don't think he thought about anything..not while we were...intimate.”
“Typical man.”
“But he's not,” Rose said. “That was the problem. Sometimes we didn't speak the same language. He didn't understand what I was on about. Like whether or not we needed protection. I should have spelled it out more clearly. He thought I'd be happy, too. See? His people didn't really have children the old fashioned way anymore, hadn't for ages. It was all done with test tubes or some such. But even back in the day...they still didn't keep their children around. They'd just settle for a bit for the pregnancy, and then leave their children behind. The Doctor assumed we would leave her, Susan, with Sarah Jane and just...”
“Sarah Jane?” Jackie yelped, indignantly. “Sarah Jane! I like that. And why wouldn't you leave her with me, I'd like to know? I'm your mother. Her own family. What's wrong with the two of you? Why would you have a baby and then just leave her somewhere when...”
“Mum,” Rose snapped. “Look, we didn't get to sort it all out. I wasn't going to leave her anywhere. But, the TARDIS sent me back in time, all on my own, and I got sick and I had to give her up.”
“Give her up? Like adoption?”
“No! No, I wouldn't do that. But...I didn't have a lot of choices. I met another Doctor...you know how he changed his face?” Jackie nodded, but Rose paused to think for a moment. They'd come a long way in their relationship. Rose had shared a lot of her feelings. But the entire story would only confuse Jackie, so she edited it severely. Pressing on without a qualm about lying, she said, “Well, he's done that a bunch of times. And this other Doctor, he helped me and he has our baby.”
“He has her? She's with her father,” Jackie said on a sigh, relaxing out of her bristle as she accepted it. “A little girl?” she breathed, suddenly awed by the news. “My granddaughter. Is this the only picture?”
Rose flicked the device in her hand and another picture bloomed. This one of the same dark-haired girl only older. She was standing in front of a pile of junk and clutching a stack of school books. She wore Capri pants and a jumper that would have been modish in 1960.
Going to the wall, Jackie studied Susan closely. She reached up to stroke the image, touching hair and cheek. “How old is she here?”
“Fifteen. This was taken in London. In 1964. She attended one of our schools for a few months.”
“Oh, she looks just like you, sweetheart.”
“I see him.”
“She's got his coloring, all right. And that stubborn chin. But that's your nose and mouth. Even the eyebrows.” Jackie turned back to beam at her daughter. “Oh, Rose, she's beautiful.”
“She is,” Rose said, biting her lip to steady it before adding, “And brilliant, too. Just like her dad. She rescued the TARDIS from a junkyard and tinkered on her until she got her working again. That other video was the first thing recorded by the TARDIS after the refit.”
“The Tylers have always been good with machinery. Look at your father, inventing all those gadgets.”
“Only the TARDIS isn't a machine, not really. She's more like a person.”
“Well, you were always good with people,” Jackie said, unruffled by the correction. “You get on with everybody...even aliens.”
“Speaking of,” Rose sighed, regretfully turning off her mini-projector. “I should be getting up. We need to get back London. All of us missing from Torchwood can't be good for the planet.”
“Your father said there's no rush. We'll go when you feel up to it, sweetheart. You know you don't have to work anymore.”
Despite the lump in her throat, Rose laughed. “I do have to work. You have the house to look after and your club meetings. But I can't just sit around all day. I've got to be...out there. Torchwood needs me. I know about aliens and I can still translate their languages.”
“Don't you think that's odd?” Jackie asked. “When the Doctor was ill you couldn't?
“Maybe...maybe it's a sign that...” She swallowed her qualifier, thinking her mother wouldn't understand or appreciate her efforts to find a way back home.
But Jackie surprised her by saying, “You think it's a sign you have to keep looking for a way back to him?”
“Yeah,” Rose said on a breath. “If we're still in contact somehow...if he can come through like he did on the beach...maybe there's a way for me to go home. He told me not to try. But how can I just...give up?”
To her relief, her mother didn't argue this point. Instead, she gave a happy little bounce and said, “Right, breakfast. I'll have them send up your favorite: cinnamon sprinkle toast.”
Rose huffed in exasperation as her mother beat a hasty retreat. “Mum?” she whined in a carrying voice, wincing as her feet hit the cold floor and made her aware of a pressing need for the bathroom. “I'm not six, you know. You can't cheer me up with toast.”
The last word caused her a twinge as she remembered the Doctor's fascination with toasters. Making for the tiny bathroom, she resigned herself to her loneliness. It wasn't the first stabbing memory of the day and it wouldn't be the last. Everything reminded her of him, of their aborted future. She turned her head away when she saw couples holding hands in the park and burst into dry sobs over Tickle Me Elmo ads. Yet, somehow, she managed to function despite being lacerated by longing every hour on the hour. She managed to keep going.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Keep going...keep going...DAMN!” Mickey growled, slamming his palm down on the desktop, as his pixilated alter-ego dissolved into a bloody smudge on the computer screen.
“Do the people upstairs know they are paying you to play Flags of Empires?” Rose said from his doorway.
Spinning his chair around, Mickey pressed a hand to his chest. “Rose? Stop sneaking up on me, like that. Nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“Worried about getting caught?”
“Not much. I can usually hear approaching footsteps echoing along the hall...all that tile. Besides nobody comes down here except you and Jake. Not until there's bad guys on the radar. I'm a soldier, babe,” he said, giving her a fly hip-hop hand gesture. “I'm a warrior on the mean streets of alternative Earth. Ready to saddle up any time, day or night.” He leaned forward to tap the handset of his desk phone. “Just waiting for the call.”
Weary from the most annoying workday yet, Rose sank into the edge of his desk and, bracing her hands behind her hips and crossing her legs at the ankles, asked, “Am I invisible?”
He peered at her. “You might be a little transparent," he said, casually, then he laughed at his lame pun. Processing the pained glare she gave him, he clicked the game window of his computer closed, folded his arms and gave her his full attention. “You seem solid enough to me," he said, then leeringly added, "especially in that suit.” Rose rolled her eyes but didn't fight it when her mouth tipped up in a hint of a smile. Mickey grinned back at her, obviously happy to have lightened the mood, and said, “What brought this on? Suzi ignoring you again?”
Rose lost her slight smile. “It's not just her. Ever since Norway...I...” She sighed and started over. “Look, I'm not crazy. I know I was upset yesterday, about the explosion, but...”
“Rodriguez apologized, right?” Mickey asked. “It had to be scary for you, but that sort of thing can happen. Momentary loss of concentration.”
“I could have been killed.”
“He thought you'd cleared the building, that's all. The sensors must have been on the blink.”
“It's not just that. Costello and Hank aren't the only ones ignoring me. I waited for thirty minutes at the lunch cart today and never got served. And I just gave a ten minute report on the Loqu from NGC2024 and nobody listened to a word I said. They kept talking all they way through my report. Most of them didn't even look my way.”
“Marines?” Mickey asked, making it sound like an excuse. When Rose nodded, he shrugged. “Come on, Rose. Those guys live for the fight. They aren't interested in alien signals, not unless there's going to be bloodshed.”
“I suppose,” Rose grudgingly admitted. Tugging at her hoop earring, she frowned at the view out his open door. “Nobody cares about diplomacy until its too late to apply it and then they're ringing your line. Or mine.” She put on a barking military voice and said, “Miss Tyler I'm afraid there have been some losses in Cardiff. Can you tell us why this thing is barbecuing the Mayor?”
“Are these Loqus the sort to cook a minor politician?”
“How should I know? We've only just made contact. And...” She bit her lip, her gaze flitting by his like a restless butterfly. After a moment's hesitation she turned to face him squarely. Leaning closer, she whispered, “And, between you and me, it's completely gone now. I can't translate anything. The languages sound familiar, yeah? But I'm not hearing English.”
“Nothing but static?” He asked. When she nodded confirmation, he set his jaw and considered the problem. “Why static? When the Doctor was sick you heard alien just like everybody else, right?”
“The Doctor and I got a lot closer during the last few years. I figured I got some vibrations or something from him.”
“Like how you heard him calling to you?” Mickey guessed.
“Yeah. You know what I think? I think closing the final crack in the universe sealed me off from him and the TARDIS. And now, I can't understand aliens any better than the rest of you.”
“But we're not getting static,” Mickey pointed out. “It's weird, I mean, why static? You should have asked the Doctor about it when you had the chance.”
“We only had two minutes,” Rose reminded him. “Two minutes. And there were so many things I wanted to say.”
Mickey stood and clasped her shoulders, giving them a squeeze. “Hey, it's okay. You still know more about aliens than anybody else on this planet. Unless there's a parallel Doctor.”
“I wish you would stop going on about that,” Rose growled, shoving him away. “There are no parallel Time Lords. It's a Time Lord thing.”
“Right, because they're transdimensional,” Mickey said, parroting back the reason she'd given him a dozen times.
“At least you listen to me once in a while,” Rose sighed. “That means we'd have to be a lot further away from our Earth, somewhere not parallel, to even approach something like Time Lords. They used to create these parallel dimensions, yeah?”
“I love it when you talk technical,” Mickey smirked.
“Be serious.”
“I'm just saying,” he remarked, but he tried to focus. “So when something went wrong with history...like zeppelins, but no airplanes...the Time Lords made this world?”
“Yeah, and the only way we would have a Time Lord around is if he's been imprisoned here. And that wouldn't be good.”
“He...or she? Could be a Time Lady, right?” Mickey said hopefully. “One that's looking for a handsome and daring young man to show around the universe?”
Rose laughed in spite of her gray mood. “You wish. But, I think I'm the only one imprisoned here. Just your luck, hey? And you've checked and rechecked the Torchwood files, right? No sign of them?”
“Nope. But don't you think it's strange? You weren't here. He's not here. But we have a Torchwood just the same?”
“Not really. Time fractures. Universes slide off like icebergs from a glacier. Queen Victoria still had werewolf troubles. She still learned about aliens at the Torchwood Estate and Sir Robert still gave his life defending her.” Rose brushed a spec of imaginary dust from her skirt. “The only humbling thing is history didn't really need us: the Doctor and I. It fixed itself just fine.”
“Except the monarchy fell and the Republic took its place.”
“The Queen got a bit more than a nip in this universe,” Rose agreed, feeling better than she had all morning. Talking to Mickey always cheered her up. He reminded her of home. “That'll teach her to banish the Doctor.”
Mickey changed the subject, before Rose lost her good mood. “So, how's your mum doing?”
“Her ankles are swelling and her back hurts. But she's over the morning sickness. She keeps saying she's a cow, but she's hardly showing.” She thought about her brief pregnancy. Would she have looked as lovely as her mother did right now?
“She's glowing, hey?”
“I hope I look that good if I ever have a baby?”
“If? I thought you'd decided to become a nun. Is there a man on your horizons? I only ask because your mother demands to know what I know every time she sees me, and I'm coming over for Sunday dinner.”
Rose went pale, turning her head to stare out the window, as she said, “I thought she'd stopped asking...there's no one and there never will be.” Whipping back to glare at him, she demanded, “Mickey, how can you even...?”
He held up both hands in surrender. “I'm sorry,” he said with sincerity. “I know you'll carry that torch forever. But you wanting kids is a new development and...”
“I just thought maybe I might use a donor. Someday. No man involved.”
“It's like that is it?” Mickey took his jacket from his chair back and slipped it on. “Seems to me there's got to be a little involvement.” He nudged her with an elbow. “If you're looking to go with a turkey baster, you'll have to count me out, Martha's got me on a tight rein.”
Forgetting her brimming tears, Rose laughed, flashing the pink tip of her tongue at him. “I was thinking of looking up Jack Harkness.”
“Captain Hair Gel? Please! You can do better.” When Rose failed to respond to his teasing, he said, “Isn't he a criminal mastermind or something, now? He would have kept on with the conman stuff, right? Since you never rescued him?”
“I wonder,” Rose mused, obviously following her own train of thought. “I made him immortal, you know? I looked into the TARDIS and...” She fell silent, staring at the transparent reflection of her body in the window glass. She looked like a ghost against the night sky beyond the window. Something tugged on her mind and, all at once, she needed to get out of the office. The walls were too white and bare. She pushed away from the desk, saying, “No roundels.”
“The musical group?”
“What?” Halfway to the door, she paused to throw a scowl over her shoulder at him.
“Martha and the roundels?”
“No, it's...” Hand to her forehead, she snorted, dismissively, “never mind.”
“Got a headache?”
“Look? Speaking of Martha....I know the two of you are bursting with young love, but if you're going to bring Miss Martha Jones by the house, can you talk to her about being so loud? She woke me up last night with the soliloquy.”
“With the who?” Mickey said, gathering up his keys and heading for the door. “Best come on, I'll buy you a sandwich. You haven't eaten and you've started to babble.”
“I'm not babbling. Last night,” Rose said, hurrying to catch him before he reached the elevators. “I heard Martha stomping around in the house must have been two in the morning. She was quoting Shakespeare, I think. Bellowing it out.”
“I don't know what you heard,” Mickey laughed, “But Martha and I were in town last night, visiting her folks.”
“It couldn't have been the telly, it sounded just like her.”
“Maybe you were dreaming,” Mickey said. “Sometimes I dream about this huge explosion and the noise wakes me up.”
“But I was already awake...” Rose mumbled.
Something hummed in her right ear. Wincing, she pressed her hand to the shell of it. She could hear her blood rushing through her veins. The sound of her breathing overshadowed the ding of the arriving lift. Mickey stepped into the elevator car and she followed him, but as the doors were closing, clear as a bell, she heard the Doctor say, “Give me your huddle masses yearning to breath free.” She lunged at the closing door panels, jamming her arm into the shrinking space.
“Doctor?” she yelped, before turning to Mickey. “Did you hear that?” she demanded, forcing her way into the hallway, again. “Did you hear him?”
“I don't hear anything?” Mickey said, straining to listen.
“It was him, the Doctor!” Rose shrilled impatiently. “Be quiet and listen. He just spoke. He quoted that Statue of Liberty thing.” She rolled her hand through the air, encouraging her memory. “Give me your yearning masses...?”
Mickey's expression was openly skeptical. “You heard the Doctor? Just now?”
The rushing in her ears subsided. She gave her head a tentative shake, tipping it to the side as the subtle sounds of the hallway returned to her. Hearing only the air conditioning running and distant machinery and voices, she turned this way and that, trying to pick up the signal again. Finally, her shoulders slumped.
“It's gone. He's gone. But I swear, I heard him. Just as we were getting on the lift, I...” She gazed back along the empty hallway.
Mickey confirmed what her eyes were already telling her. “There's nobody here, Rose,” he said, soothingly. “Maybe it was a trick of position, a voice floating up the lift shaft. Could be someone on another floor?”
“No, it was right behind us. I know his voice. It was him.”
She spun in a circle, frustrated by the lack of evidence supporting her claim. When she stopped, the hall continued to whirl and spin. The floor dipped to the right and she staggered, a hand flailing to the wall to steady herself. Dimly, she heard Mickey say her name, felt him gather her into his arms, but her attention was captured by the roundels on the walls. There were roundels on the wall. Where had they come from? And why was she suddenly so dizzy? She looked toward the lift but, instead of seeing it, she saw the interior of the TARDIS. The console room with its Time Rotor. The Doctor was there and a red-haired woman, Rose didn't recognize. She lunged forward, an exclamation of delight on her lips and plummeted into blackness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Once again, the first voice she heard on waking was her mother's. But this time she wasn't in bed. She opened her eyes and looked up at her family as they stood grouped around her. She was sitting in a chair at home.
“Oh, Pete,” Jackie was saying, “Look at her...she's glowing.”
Glowing?
“You should have seen her before,” Mickey interjected. “She looked...radioactive. I don't know how I got her out of the building without anyone stopping us."
"And it just came over her?" her father asked. "No warning?"
"She said she heard the Doctor," Mickey said, causing Jackie to hiss an indrawn breath. "And then her eyes...they..." Mickey patted behind him for the arm of the sofa. Finding it, he collapsed onto it like his knees had given out. His tone turned reverent as he fumbled for words, "They were...they had this...fire inside. Like hot coals or the sun or...I don't know what. It made my skin crawl. She just stared right through me for about two seconds, and then...pop...gone...faded.” He squeaked, clutching at his throat. “I've seen a lot of strange things...but this...it was like there wasn't any Rose there. Just a Rose shape. Then, she came back and passed right out. It's got to be alien, am I right?”
“Silly,” Rose said. But nobody seemed to hear her. She struggled to get out of the chair, feeling suddenly claustrophobic, but her feet couldn't seem to find traction. She lifted her hand and saw that it had become almost transparent. “I must be dreaming.”
"Is she coming around? Rose, darling, can you hear me?"
Her dad shook his head. Turning to Mickey, he asked, “What was she working on? Anything classified?”
“Translation of that first contact recording,” Mickey said. His eyes widened. “But she said she felt invisible. And another thing, she's been getting static from the aliens.”
“Trouble, you mean?” Jackie asked. “I don't want her mixing with the wrong sort, Pete. You promised me you'd keep an eye on her.”
Pete was doing more than keeping an eye on her, he was staring at her, squinting in concentration. He looked confused. His hand rose to pinch the bridge of his nose as if he were fighting a headache. Rose tried to hold his eye, but it was like he didn't want to see her. She looked at her mother and then Mickey but they didn't meet her eye either.
“Why are you all hovering over me?” she demanded crossly, “Acting like I can't hear a word you say?”
Jackie was the only one who responded. “Oh, sweetheart, you've come back. You gave us such a fright,” she declared, leaning over to smooth a few stray hairs from her daughter's brow. “Can you remember what happened?”
“Of course, I can,” Rose said. She pressed both hands into the chair arms and, as if the laws of physics were just enacted, she shot to her feet. She staggered and Mickey put his hand out to steady her. But her father seemed to be staring beyond her. “I was on the beach,” she began, but then seemed unsure. “No, wait...was that yesterday?”
“That was three weeks ago, sweetheart. You were back at work. Don't you remember?.”
For a second or two, she didn't. Then, she got a flash of a dream image. “I was...running down this corridor...at work?” She looked at Mickey. “Right. We were waiting for the lift. And I heard the Doctor.”
“Calling you again?”Jackie asked.
“No,” Rose murmured, shaking her head. “No. He was just talking to someone.” She glanced at her father, standing there staring into the fireplace. There wasn't even a fire burning. What could he find so fascinating? “Dad?” Jackie and Mickey looked questioningly from Rose to the unresponsive Pete.
Jackie prompted him. “Pete? She's talking to you.”
“Who?” he asked.
“Your daughter, Rose,” Jackie said.
“From the womb?” Pete asked, chuckling as he wrapped an affectionate arm around his wife's shoulders. He kissed Jackie's temple lightly and added, “That's a fine name, Rose. But I was thinking we could name her after my grandmother, Marion Louise?”
“Pete?” Jackie exclaimed, ducking away from his embrace and waving her arm in an arc. “I'm talking about my Rose, right there.” Pete swept the room with a curious glance, but didn't even hesitate as his gaze glided by his adopted daughter. Eyes focusing on Mickey, he lifted his brows in inquiry. “What's she on about?”
“Uh-oh,” Mickey said.
“There's the understatement of the century,” Rose snarled at him. She stepped in front of her dad and waved at him frantically. “Can't you see me, Dad? Dad?”
“Pete? Why don't you say something?” Jackie asked him.
“There's no one there,” he told her, staring straight through Rose.
It soon became heartbreakingly apparent that Pete Tyler had forgotten her. It wasn't just that he couldn't see her. He could only hold her in his mind for a second or two. Mickey and Jackie explained who she was and what had happened, but within a few minutes, Pete had to be told again. Jake also seemed unable to remember her unless constantly prompted. It turned out the household staff and her coworkers at Torchwood had no recollection of her at all.
She walked in and out of Torchwood setting off the sensors but never stopped for an identity check. Mickey ran several diagnostic tests on her but could find no anomalies. She simply didn't register with adults at first. Children still saw her, she learned and animals. She took comfort in petting the guard dogs at work and cuddling Martha's cat at home. Martha wondered why Mickey spent so much time talking to thin air.
“I've told her it's a secret surveillance project. She thinks your on a stakeout somewhere. But she can't hear you.”
“I've vanished from their reality,” Rose told him “You and mum had places here to step into, but I never existed in this world. I don't think people believed in me. It's like the TARDIS cloaking device, I'm not invisible, I'm just not supposed to be here. So they don't see me.”
People started humoring Mickey and Jackie. They would patiently listen to the explanation about Rose's invisibility. They would nod and soothe and occasionally offer helpful suggestions. But within a few minutes they forgot about her again. Probably the forgetting was the only thing that kept Jackie out of a mental hospital, since Pete finally admitted that not only did he not see Rose any more, but also, as far as he knew there had never been a Rose Tyler. He remembered the Doctor bringing Mickey to his world, he remembered being reunited with Jackie, but he insisted the Doctor had been alone. There was no convincing him otherwise.
“I don't exist for him,” Rose told her mother as they sat side by side on the porch swing. “People don't want to see me.”
“They want to, honey, they just can't.”
“I mean...it's like...they look over me, through me, like I've got a chameleon circuit.”
“I don't know what that is,” Jackie remarked. “But Mickey is working on a way to make you visible again. We won't give up on you, I promise.”
But day after day, week after week, Mickey came home with no idea how to fix things. Rose stopped going to Torchwood when the sensors stopped beeping at her. But she bombarded Mickey with questions and ideas. She told him of the Gelth and how they'd been cast out of their proper dimension.
“They needed to find new bodies. Maybe I'm like them now.”
“Do you think we need to make you a new body? Like the cybermen?”
“I don't know. I'm not using dead people,” Rose said, even though she had more sympathy for the Gelth, now, that she was losing her place in reality. “All I know is I'm disappearing. I'm like the TARDIS. I can't function here. I'm just...dead. Maybe when I had the Vortex in me...it changed me somehow. Or maybe it was what the Doctor did to me.”
“What did he do? Exactly.”
Rose looked at him sitting across from her at the patio table. She liked being outside. The sun still felt warm on her back. The breeze still tugged at her hair. She ran the flat of her palm over the bumpy marbled surface of the tabletop, as she pondered how to answer Mickey's question.
“I shouldn't go into this with you, but...it might help.” She took a deep breath and said, “The Doctor and I are connected. You know, how a human man joins with a woman?”
“Do I know how to shag? Yeah, I think I remember that,” Mickey said, grinning.
“Shut up,” Rose said, leaning across the small table to smack his shoulder. “I'm trying to tell you something personal...and important. Try to behave.”
It felt so good to make contact with him, that she scooted closer. For a second, she settled her hand on him, let it linger. Their eyes met and all she wanted was to do was shag him breathless. She remembered how good it used to feel and for a brief moment she wanted to do it again, to feel alive just for a little while. One last physical indulgence, would that be so bad? Yeah, it would. Especially, if Mickey forgot her, too. Every moment they had left needed to be spent on solving this problem. Reluctantly, she turned her head away.
“Sorry, babe, I'm listening,” Mickey said as she gave him a friendly pat and withdrew her hand. He propped his elbows on the table and gave her his complete attention.
Once she was certain he wasn't going to laugh at her, Rose went on. “The Doctor isn't like a man. He doesn't have...” she gestured vaguely at her lap.
“You're kidding me,” Mickey exclaimed. “If I'd known that, I would have pitched my case a little differently.”
“Mickey?”
“Sorry. Sorry. No equipment. You were saying?” he prompted, but he couldn't help smiling.
“He has equipment,” Rose informed him huffily. “But it's not like yours...and I'm not going into what it's like..” She sighed again. “Look? Maybe we should just forget about this,” she grumbled. “I don't know why I wanted to tell you.”
“Because you're fading away,” Mickey said, reaching out a hand and wrapping his fingers around hers. “And we're friends and I'm trying to help. Seriously, Rose. You know, I'm working on this all the time.”
She did know that. He was as frantic as her mother. Gripping his hand hard, she stared into the tree branches overhead for a moment or two, eyes glistening with unshed tears. Sucking in a breath, she held it for a long ten count, and then exhaled. Her line of sight dropped, until she was gazing into his warm, brown eyes.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “You're my hero. So...the Doctor is alien. A Time Lord. He looks like us, but he's not like us. His people are telepathic, for one thing. That's how they bond with a TARDIS. And it's also how they...bond with each other. When two of them get together, they have...”
“Mind sex,” Mickey crowed. “I've heard about that. Some of the guys at Torchwood say there are these kinky aliens who suck out your brains while you're...”
“All right,” Rose interrupted testily. “It's not about sucking brains. And it's not about being kinky...it's...beautiful. He's got these..." She wondered how to explain. "Well, they're called cnidocysts. They're a sort of specialized cell in his skin, on his arms and chest and tongue. They bristle like a cactus...or no,” drawing her teeth along her lower lip, she frowned as she searched for the right comparison, “more like a jellyfish, yeah? These little harpoons inject a drug into me..."
"A drug?" Mickey yelped, obviously appalled by this idea.
"To make me more...receptive. Not like...against my will, or anything. More like...ready for him. When he was feeling...interested. They would...” She used stiff fingers to poke at her arm as she said, “penetrate. So, we could...” Again, she indicated her lap.
To his credit, Mickey didn't so much as crack a smile. “Down there?” he asked in a small voice, squirming a bit at the thought of stingers or needles near his sensitive manhood.
“All over,” she corrected. “It helped to link our nervous systems. Once we were...joined...I could feel what he felt...and he could feel what I felt. It was like we had one body, one...soul. Everything we did together was echoed and magnified. You have no idea...”
By the look on his face, Mickey was just as glad he couldn't imagine what she was describing in greater detail. Time Lord sex still sounded alarmingly alien to him. But he was too kind to share his disgust in the face of Rose's obvious distress. Instead, he fell back on instinct and made a joke. “So, once you've gone Time Lord there's no going back?”
Rose laughed with him. “I guess not. But that's not why I'm telling you all this is...what if doing that...linking to the Doctor? Changed me? What if this is happening because of my connection to him. He could be drawing me back to him somehow. Or maybe...I don't know...maybe I'm just dying because we're apart.”
“You're not dying,” Mickey insisted. “We'll figure this out.”
Rose knew he would try, but more and more each passing day, her situation seemed hopeless. “If only the Doctor were here.”
It was her constant lament as she wandered through the world leaving less and less of an impression on it. She lived alone, now. People moved around her like shadows, ghosts. She still felt real, solid, still had the urge to eat and use the loo. She still slept and amused herself with books and exploring. But nobody noticed her on her long rambles. Even when she threw a tantrum and broke windows or vases, it didn't seem to bother anyone. After a time she found she couldn't break things. And she started to walk right through walls. She tried to avoid doing that, because it gave her the chills. Eventually, only Jackie remembered her. And she knew one day that connection would be lost, too. Losing Mickey sent her into a dark depression. She considered leaving the house, then, before she lost her mother, but she couldn't bring herself to let go of her last human contact.
So, she tarried, until one morning she woke to singing and a room stripped of all remaining signs of her. Her music and make-up and clothing were all gone. Glancing down at herself, she saw she was wearing a black leather jacket, pink arm warmers and jeans. The same clothes she'd been wearing on the beach in Norway. Where I died, she thought, and realized for the first time that she'd begun to think of herself as a ghost. To offset the rush of despair that accompanied that thought, she turned her mind to her theories. She mulled over possible explanations for her predicament as she sat on her bed, watching Carmen, the housekeeper, take down her curtains and put up ones with pink bears and bows on them.
What if the Doctor was calling her home? Reaching out to her like he used to do in his sleep? Wandering this world was very much like wandering the halls of the TARDIS at night. She felt as helpless and lonely. And when she slept, she dreamed of the TARDIS walls shifting around her.
Her mother came in with a bundle in her arms and shopping bags hanging from her wrists. “Good, once the curtains are up, I can see about having someone cart all this furniture away.” Focused on Carmen, Jackie didn't look at Rose, but that wasn't particularly alarming. Sometimes she wouldn't risk a conversation when there were other people in the room. “I've got the interior design people coming this afternoon.”
“Morning, Mum,” Rose called. “Been shopping?”
“I've found the dearest blanket,” Jackie went on, without even glancing toward Rose. “Wait, I'll show you.” She settled her packages on the dresser and rummaged in the shopping bags until she found what she was searching for.
“Mum? Can you hear me? Just nod or wink or whatever.”
“Look? It's covered with roses. Because I was thinking, Rose, for a name. Maybe Marion in the middle. Pete is so set on Marion, but I like the name Rose. Rose Marion Tyler, what do you think?”
Rose screamed. “Mum? Mommy?”
Tears streamed down her face as she shouted in her mother's ear. She tried to smash the mirror, pummel the walls, kick the furniture. But nothing she did mattered. The mirror mended itself. Every sound she made seemed designed for her ears only. Everyone she loved had forgotten about her. They simply moved on with their new lives, in their new world. She couldn't bear it. It was worse than death. No one mourned her passing. No one remembered her at all.
She couldn't stand to watch them laughing and eating and sharing family moments. They never even mentioned her. The baby had usurped her name and her place in their lives. Finally, unable to tolerate the pain she broke and ran. Leaving her family and her own memories behind, she ran and ran until she needed to stop for breath. How odd it was to feel her heart beating, to gasp for air when she surely had no lungs, no substance.
“Look at me,” she snarled at strangers, flailing her arms in front of them. “Talk to me. Someone.” She punched at people. Mooned them. Insulted them. Grimaced in their faces. She felt herself going mad, losing her grip on reality, and wondered if it would matter if she did. Reality had lost its grip on her. Did she have a mind to lose? How would her madness impact the world?
Desperate for some validation of her existence, she sought out mediums and soothsayers. But none of the fakirs with shingles in shop windows showed the slightest interest in her haunting them. They went on laying out tarot cards and gazing into crystals oblivious to her mugging and shouting. She'd hoped to find someone like Gweneth. But true psychics were rare it seemed. Disillusioned with them, she gave up hope. Then, one day, as she paused outside a coffee shop, a girl glanced up from her steaming mug and made eye contact. Rose paused, a tingle of shock passing through her. She looked over her shoulder, certain the girl must be focused on someone else. But there was nobody close. Rose waved and the girl, after glancing around self-consciously, twiddled her fingers in reply.
“Oh, thank God,” Rose exclaimed, as she dashed into the cafe, forgetting, in her haste, to use the door “You can see me! Can you see me?” The girl gave the tiniest of nods. “You can hear what I'm saying?” The girl, a faded slip of a thing with pinkish blond hair and milky blue eyes, tapped her pen against her open journal. She'd been writing in it when Rose had first seen her. Rose glanced down at the page.
--Can't talk.—the girl had written.
“People would think you were crazy, yeah?”
The pen scrawled again. --Can you write?--
“I don't think so,” Rose said. “I can't touch things anymore.”
--Try-- the girl wrote.--Use my hand.--
It was hard to use another person's hand. It took all of Rose's concentration but she managed to settle her arm over the girl's and move the pen across the page.
--My name is Rose Tyler—Rose wrote and then paused to think of what she wanted to say to this stranger in a coffee shop. Should she try again to reach Mickey or her Mum? Would they listen? No, she realized. They were part of whatever was happening here. Every impact she made on this world faded into nothing. If these were her last words, she should make them count.. Focusing her attention, she began to write rapidly.
--This is the story of Torchwood. The last story I'll ever tell.-- She settled into a rhythm. --Planet Earth. This is where I was born and this is where I died. For the first nineteen years of my life nothing happened, nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called The Doctor...--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The girl, whose name she learned was Mary Alice Elder, proved an attentive listener. She had been born mute, but was compensated for the loss of her voice with the ability to see beyond what she called the black veil. She worked as a postal clerk and rented a room in Chelsea. Rose followed her home and, having nowhere else to go, haunted the place. Mary Alice didn't seem to mind the company. They watched telly and played guessing games on paper. Rose found she could talk easily to Mary Alice and they chatted away about all sorts of things.
“Sometimes the dead come out from behind the veil,” Mary Alice explained via her ever present notepad. “The Cybermen went into it. They followed a round ship.”
“The orb ship. There were Daleks inside. Metal monsters.”
“I've seen a few monsters,” Mary Alice told her. “They come out of the black veil, too.”
“We call it the Void,” Rose told her. “But some people call it Hell or the Howling.”
“Sometimes the undead bleed through, beings from other worlds. You're not like them. You glow.”
“Mickey said that, too. I can't see it,” Rose said, holding out her hand to study it. It looked like her hand, ordinary, pink skin and short nails. “Do you think it's my soul glowing? Or maybe the light I'm supposed to follow?”
“I've never seen that light,” Mary Alice scribbled. “Only the black veil and white or silvery ghosts. And you. You're all gold and shiny.”
“I met a werewolf once,” Rose mused, “back when I was alive. And he told me I burned like the sun.”
“Could be there's a part of you alive somewhere,” Mary Alice wrote. “Once, I met a spirit who had left his body because it was very sick. In a coma.”
“Like Life on Mars,” Rose said, nodding. She'd watched the show after her death, perched on the edge of Mary Alice's bed. She was sitting in the same position, now, looking over the girl's shoulder to read her responses.
“Well...you are named Tyler,” Mary Alice wrote, laughing soundlessly. Then, she sobered and added, “Maybe I've made you up. Maybe I'm really just crazy.”
“You aren't crazy,” Rose told her. “You're special. You have a gift. And you're very important to me.”
“Do you think...could you have been in some sort of accident?”
“It's possible, I suppose. At Torchwood? Lots of strange stuff going on there. Just my luck, I get knocked out of my body but not into an earlier decade, yeah? I could stand to dress in flares and leather.” She lay back on the bed, stretching languidly, trying to conjure a greater sense of self, to have sinew and muscles. “I don't know though, I can't help thinking this is about the Doctor, somehow. I only wish,” she sighed, “I wish he could help me.”
“Maybe he can?” Mary Alice scrawled in big letters. “Have you tried reaching out to him?”
“Every day,” Rose said. “Every hour. Just like clockwork. Could be he has to be thinking about me at the same time. He never mentions people, once we've gone. I thought I would be different...we were so close...but maybe he just went on without me...same old life, he said.”
“You love him?”
“Always. Forever,” Rose sighed. “And that's funny, now, because I don't feel anything anymore.”
It was true. She'd stopped feeling things. Just as she'd stopped using the loo and breathing. She no longer shuddered from the cold; no longer felt lonely. When first denied food, she'd been ravenously hungry. But the need for food and warmth left her one day, sighing off without fanfare. She didn't notice the desire passing away until she realized she hadn't eaten for a week or more. The realization left her gripped by an unholy panic. She was losing herself and knew it. Her body had dissolved to the point where it had no physical urges, no surging hormones to interpret as feelings. She tried to be afraid, but without blood and breath to sustain it fear turned out to be nothing more than a bad habit. She let it go and it vanished. After a time, she forgot to be sad about her losses. She no longer wailed for her mother, no longer prayed for rescue. She simply existed.
The world turned under her. Every morning she crossed the ocean to America. Every evening she returned to Mary Alice's flat. Mary Alice began to lose touch with her, too. But Rose had nowhere else to go. She'd forgotten most of what it meant to be flesh and bone, remembering only her love. When even her love took abstract shape, she decided to follow the one thing she had left, the light in the back of her mind. Rose wandered aimlessly, longing to be whole again, but she couldn't put a name to the thing she needed. She had no tongue for words. No chemical mind to summon memories. At a loss, she let the longing guide her footsteps. It steered her across land and sea to a shoreline in Norway.
There, facing Bad Wolf Bay, she put down roots on a rocky outcropping. The wind whipped her hair if she imagined it could. If she imagined her body, she wore the same clothes he'd last seen her wearing. He would find her waiting if he ever returned. But she was no longer sure he would come. Probably he had forgotten her, too. She wasn't sure if she would feel anything if he came back for her anyway. She couldn't feel the breeze on her skin no matter how vividly she tried to imagine it. A lonely sentinel looking out to sea, she waited and watched the shifting tides and the changing sky until the tide and the sky disappeared.
She was gone...into the dark...
....dark....dark...
....howling dark...
....nothing...not even memories...
....nothing...
....something...
....bright...glowing...
....light....so very bright against the emptiness....a door....
....and a questing...sweeping...something...
....a question...
....not a voice...but a question...a ping at the back of her mind...
....she had a mind...and her mind had a back...and a front...and a middle...
...and a sense of self...
....I am! I exist!
The question continued to bounce off her...on a loop...pinging against her returning awareness...
---ROSE?---ROSE?---ROSE?---
“HERE!” She screamed as soon as she realized she could. “HEAR! Hear me...I am...Rose, that's me. I am Rose.”
The light responded, not the Doctor but the wolf in the dark. It focused on her with its glowing eye, shuffling through her memories before it hooked into her. There was a painful tug on her consciousness, an insistent pulling, taut and demanding as a fisherman's line. And she started to sense...movement. She was moving toward something...out of the void...the golden light expanded, engulfing her. And then, like a landed bass, she flailed into another reality, a reality full of noise and shapes and meaning.
She seemed to be lying on a smooth, slightly curved floor. There was something organic about her surroundings, the floor felt alive under her hand. The rounded space had the comforting warmth of a womb. She could even feel a pulse, beating through her. Not her pulse, but the heartbeat of a cybernetic mother, this living machine. She wondered about reincarnation, thinking she might be reborn, as she stared up at the confused tangle of clear tubing and glowing metal above her. Visually tracing the curve of a creamy arch, she saw it flowed through a heavy iron grating. Looking to the right, she saw a curving stair made of the same type of iron. A round column was rising and falling into her sacred space and there was a grinding roar all around her. She recognized the sound.
“It's the TARDIS,” she said, startled to hear her own voice echoing through the room. Then, she realized she hadn't spoken--couldn't speak. She still had no breath or tongue. The impression of sound came, not from her mouth but from the walls. They pulsed with color as she formed thoughts and somehow the color became sound for her.
She returned her attention to the door in her head, focusing on it as she formulated a question. "Where am I?"
To her utter amazement, the walls answered her. Not in words, but in images and flashing binary codes. They fired a flurry of information into her mind. Dreamlike impressions flowed trough the door in her soul and became a concept.
---Home---
She was home, on the TARDIS. Yet, it was, also, inside her somehow, explaining things. It told her it had brought her here for the Doctor. Because she'd gone missing. Because it needed her to complete the circuit with him. They would become whole again. She couldn't be separate from the whole. She was part of the whole, they belonged together, the three of them.
---You are the interface---the TARDIS told her, gently insistent---No other plug-in is possible for this system, therefore you must...you will...reintegrate---
END THIS PART
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 06:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 06:19 pm (UTC)Rae
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 06:27 pm (UTC)Rose is going home! Yeah!
And Mickey & Martha! Well, they'd make a nice couple...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 06:42 pm (UTC)[sniff] I'm so glad the next chapter will be up in the next few days, so I can find out what happened and hope that things will be fixed with Rose and the Doctor.
I hope you're feeling better soon!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 07:03 pm (UTC)I'll read as soon as I get a chance. Hope you feel better soon and hope you get to enjoy DW tonight.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 07:07 pm (UTC)Rae
wishing you a happy day
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 07:09 pm (UTC)Thanks for the well wishes...I, too, hope I enjoy DW tonight.
Rae
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 07:11 pm (UTC)Thanks for the well wishes. I'm sipping soup and cuddling up under blankets. :sniff:
Rae
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 07:28 pm (UTC)This is amazing. Rose just slowing vanishing; everyone forgetting her, even Mickey and Jackie. Can't wait to find out what happens next! Hope you feel better soon, and enjoy VotD tonight!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 07:34 pm (UTC)*is utterly breathless*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 08:07 pm (UTC)Rae
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 08:09 pm (UTC)Sorry about that...but at least I didn't end it with her vanishing...I was tempted to end it there, but it's Christmas. So, I had to give you all some hope for the future and a hint at where we are heading.
Rae
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 09:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-25 09:39 pm (UTC)She's home, at least. Now she needs to talk to the Doctor...if she can.
Thanks for the feedback. Happy Christmas.
Rae
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 12:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 02:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 02:41 am (UTC)Feel better!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 03:09 am (UTC)Thanks for the feedback...and the well wishes. I really appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Rae
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 03:42 am (UTC)About this chapter in particular: you had me tearing up here. And your depiction of Rose’s disappearance, how gradual it is, how her emotions slowly slip away, how, finally, the Bad Wolf/TARDIS takes her back… beautiful.
Why on earth did it take me so long t find this fic? Though I suppose I’m glad it did; instant gratification and all. Well, except for the final two chapters, but I think I have enough patience for that. :P
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 04:10 am (UTC)... but, TARDIS to the rescue, at long last, pulling the tiny filament of her that remains out through the cracks and back into her proper universe.
I was expecting her to be dislodged from this universe by the baby, as has happened in some other stories, but this is new. I'm looking forward to what happens next.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 04:25 am (UTC)Poor Rose. I could tell that she was somehow fading from the AU because she was returning to her own universe, but what a painful and lonely process. I can't imagine walking the world like a ghost, with not even your own family remembering you. Very, very sad. :(
Gotta love the TARDIS. I like her take on things - that Rose is now part of the Doctor and herself and is needed to complete them, so...*yoink*...back to this universe! Nice Bad Wolf tie-ins, btw. She's still insubstantial, though...I wonder if the "reintegrating" is going to take as long as the fading out did. *worries*
Rest up and get better soon!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 04:49 am (UTC)Okay we're going to try for more coherent comments this time. My heart was breaking for Rose. I mean loosing everyone, simply existing, that's worse than dying almost. :| Absolutely love how well you wrote the experience (even if it hurt my heart) because it was fantastic.
*whispers* Since this is coming to a close, see any Nine/Rose one-shots or dare I mention it, a part to Minotaur, on the horizon? *whistles and looks around innocently*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 04:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 05:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 05:44 am (UTC)By the way, though - us Americans watching Life On Mars on BBC America - we're still watching "all new" episodes of the very last season... The tv series hasn't confirmed yet what exactly is going on w/ Sam... I didn't want to know for sure yet. Just FYI.