Chapter Text
When Rose walks onto the bridge at 0700 the next morning, the Doctor isn’t there.
He should be. The duty roster has both he and Donna on bridge duty this morning, but neither of them appear to be on deck – the captain’s chair and Donna’s usual station are both empty.
“Lieutenant Tyler?”
Rose turns at the sound of Lt. Commander McShane’s voice. “Good morning, Ace. How’s things?”
The other woman grins at her. “Just fine, ma’am. Got clearance to run tactical drills today, so keep your eyes an’ ears open.” An alert from her workstation draws Ace’s attention, and she looks away from Rose, down to the softly beeping console. “The Doctor was lookin’ for you. He’s in his ready room with the commander.”
Rose’s ping at the ready room door is answered almost immediately, as the Doctor’s voice, sounding harried and bit annoyed, shouts “Come in!” from the other side.
When Rose enters the room, it’s to the sight of the Doctor with his arms crossed, slouched in his chair and scowling at the console on his desk. Despite having just invited her in, he doesn’t so much as look up to acknowledge her – his attention, for the moment, seems wholly consumed by the activity of glowering at the console screen. Donna, however, catches Rose’s eye from where she’s standing just behind the Doctor, waving her over.
While she crosses the room, Rose hears an unfamiliar voice come from the Doctor’s desk console. “Has my audience grown, then?”
As she comes up behind the Doctor to stand next to Donna, Rose sees that the bright, female voice belongs to a woman in a Starfleet captain’s uniform – human, middle-aged but still very pretty, with brown hair and brown eyes. The Doctor clears his throat when Rose sidles up behind him, glancing up to meet her eyes – just once, quickly and almost nervously – before sputtering, “Ah, yes. Sarah Jane, my chief helmsman, Lieutenant Rose Tyler.”
“Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant Tyler. Captain Sarah Jane Smith, of the USS Bannerman.” The other woman smiles politely and inclines her head in greeting. “I trust that my old chair is treating you well?”
Rose smiles tightly. She knows, of course, that the helmsman’s chair has belonged to others before her, and that one day it will belong to others after her – but, as irrational as it might be, she still doesn’t like to think of it as anyone’s but hers. “Yes, ma’am, it is.”
“Good to know. If you’ve managed to keep the Doctor in one piece so far, I trust that you’re quite a talented pilot indeed.” The older woman’s mouth quirks up a bit at the corners, and Rose finds her annoyance receding as quickly as it’d come.
“Thank you, ma’am.” Rose smiles again – genuinely, this time. “I try my best.”
“I am a grown man, you know.” The Doctor scowls at Captain Smith’s face on the screen. “Got my own ship and everything.”
Captain Smith’s face goes sour, then, and her voice turns a bit sharp. “And yet I’m still playing the middle part in this inane game of intergalactic telephone, as if we’re all still primary school students and not Starfleet officers.”
The Doctor fiddles with a powered-down datapad that’s sitting on his desk, idly twirling it this way and that as he steadfastly avoids meeting the withering stare being directed at him from the screen. “If the Brigadier wanted something, he could’ve just asked for it himself.”
Captain Smith’s face twists into an expression that can’t seem to decide if it’s fond or amused. “He prefers that you address him by his actual rank, you know.” The Doctor makes a scoffing noise and slumps in his chair. Donna rolls her eyes and kicks at the base of it, as if to tell him to sit up, but the Doctor firmly refuses to budge. Rose finds herself resisting the urge to giggle.
Captain Smith, however, either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. “Admiral Lethbridge-Stewart seems to be under the impression that you’ve been ducking his communications. I can’t imagine why. He requested that I convey this particular order to you. And rather politely, given the circumstances.”
The Doctor sighs. “Fine. What’s he want now?”
“We’ve lost contact with the Torchwood.” The Doctor’s eyes narrow, and he straightens up from the petulant, slumping position he’d taken in his chair. “Their last known position isn’t too far off your logged astrogation charts – it’d hardly be going out of your way to investigate the loss of communication.”
“Sarah–” the Doctor begins, but the other woman cuts him off before he can expand on the complaint.
“It’s Captain, if you don’t mind, Doctor.” The other woman’s tone is firm, but not unkind. “I know you don’t like being ordered about, but seeing as you’ve been declining promotion for years and years now, I’m afraid there are still quite a few people in Starfleet who technically outrank you. The admiral is one of them.”
The Doctor and Captain Smith sit, locked in a staring contest, for a few moments of tense silence before he breaks, muttering, “Fine. But you can tell the Brigadier I’ll expect a favor off of him for this.”
“I doubt you’ll get any such thing,” Captain Smith says primly. “It’s an order, Doctor, not a favor.”
The Doctor makes a skeptical tsking sound, as though he can’t imagine not being rewarded for going to the trouble of actually following orders. “Send the coordinates along, Sarah Jane. Donna, can you apprise the bridge?”
Donna nods, gives Rose what is probably intended to be a significant look, and leaves for the bridge. Then Captain Smith signs off without a word, the Doctor’s console reverting to a static display of the Starfleet logo, and a thick silence falls over the room.
The Doctor, to Rose’s surprise, is the first to break the silence. “So,” he says uncomfortably. He rises from his chair, then turns to look at her, gaze leaping from her face to her feet and back up to her face again as he awkwardly jams his hands into his trouser pockets.
Once again, all of Rose’s words desert her. “So,” she repeats, not sure where they ought to start – unsure what, if anything, they’re pretending hasn’t been said.
“It’ll be an away mission, I expect.” The Doctor taps at his console, bringing up the coordinates Captain Smith had sent on a projection of the TARDIS’ astrogation pattern. “Last known location of the Torchwood is about an hour’s journey from here. Not much there, far as I can tell. A planetoid or two, maybe.”
“So who’re you gonna take along?” Rose tries her best not to let the bitterness seep through – to be calm, collected, professional – but she’s pretty sure the fact that she can’t tear her eyes away from the Doctor’s face negates any sense of composure she’s trying to project.
“Why?” The Doctor’s voice comes out high and a bit nervous-sounding, and he stops to clear his throat before continuing with, “Don’t you want to come?”
The pettiest part of Rose wants to say no, you bloody tosser. It’s a rather small bit of her, though, and for the most part all she can feel is yesyesyesyes, bubbling up inside until it finally bursts out in a giddy, breathless “Well, yeah.”
There’s no other word for the expression on the Doctor’s face but relief. “I just thought,” he begins haltingly, stumbling over his words in a wholly uncharacteristic way, “because I’d – you know–”
“I thought – because you–” Rose sighs, resigned, before saying very quietly, “I thought you might not want me anymore.”
The Doctor smiles at her, then, and it’s the first real smile she’s seen from him in weeks – a wide, brilliant thing that sends a warm shiver all through her body. “Oh,” he says breathily, the grin somehow seeping into his voice, coloring it with delight. “I’d love you to come.”
—-
They do, in fact, find one very small D-class planetoid at the coordinates provided by Captain Smith.
What they don’t find is the Torchwood.
“What is this place, exactly?” Rose asks, as she steps over a hunk of charred metal and directs her torch down the darkened hallway ahead.
“Looks like some kind of monitoring station,” the Doctor says, from a few feet ahead. He has a tricorder in one hand and a torch in the other, and is slowly taking readings as they move down the hallway of the only point of interest on this deserted hunk of space rock.
Preliminary readings of the planetoid – what ones they could actually get, through the odd interference around the planet that’d confused the larger part of the TARDIS’ sensor array – indicated a very thin atmosphere, no indigenous life, and few significant resources. The only clearly identifiable oddity about it was this place – a old, apparently deserted prefab structure with a (decaying) artificial atmospheric shell, out on the far side of the planetoid.
“And we’re sure they’ve been here?” Rose asks skeptically, before hissing in pain as she stubs her toe against another hunk of disfigured metal on the floor. “It looks like it been ages since anyone’s been in this dump.”
“Oh, they’ve definitely been here. Came here, stopped here,” the Doctor looks up from his tricorder, glancing over at Rose. “But apparently didn’t leave here.”
“What was the Torchwood doing this far out in the quadrant?” Rose shuffles past the Doctor, further up the hallway, running the beam of her torch from side to side across the dim space. “I didn’t think their mandate was deep-space exploration.”
“It’s not,” the Doctor says darkly. “They’re mixed up with Intelligence. Covert missions, technology retrieval, all that rot.”
“So we’ve got no idea why they were here, and no clue where they’ve gone.” Rose muddles forward in the dark and nearly trips again, this time over a piece of exposed wire rather than a chunk of metal. “Brilliant.”
Then she turns a corner, and runs straight into another person.
It’s a woman – human, by all appearances – with dark skin, curly black hair, and a blue Starfleet uniform.
“Oh my God,” the woman stutters, putting a hand to her chest in surprise. “You just about scared me to death!”
“What?” Rose splutters. Encountering another person is so far out the range of possibilities she’d been entertaining that she finds herself momentarily speechless, unable to summon words.
The Doctor, of course, has no such difficulty. He’s beside them in a flash, one hand flying straight to Rose’s arm – as if he thinks she needs steadying, even though it’s the other woman who appears visibly shocked and unbalanced. “You all right?” he asks, and Rose has no idea whether he meant the question for her or the newcomer.
The dark-haired woman, however, is the one who answers him. “I’m fine, really,” she says, holding her hands up. “Just startled.”
“Who are you?” the Doctor asks, a bit more sharply than Rose would’ve thought necessary. “I just scanned this station for life signs not ten seconds ago, and I’m sure there weren’t any.”
“Lieutenant Costello, USS Millennium,” the other woman says. “And I doubt I’d have shown up on your tricorder – the interference patterns this station’s giving off tend to run roughshod over most Starfleet instruments. You’ll find that your comm lines are down as well – there’s only a few places in here where the frequencies aren’t interrupted.”
“The Millennium?” The Doctor squints at Lieutenant Costello. “Not the Torchwood?”
The lieutenant pauses for a moment before nodding. “Yes,” she confirms, then says again, “yes, the Millennium.”
“How’d you get out here, then?” The Doctor removes his hand from Rose’s arm, and she finds herself missing the contact almost immediately. “We’re under orders to investigate loss of contact from a completely different ship. And the Millennium’s just as missing as the Torchwood, if it’s supposed to be around here, but no one mentioned that.”
“I’m on loan to the Torchwood,” Lieutenant Costello says quickly. “Or was, as it were. I’m in the science division. They needed my…skills for a particular mission.” She pauses again, apparently distracted by the way that the Doctor is studying her face intently. “I’m sorry, is something wrong?”
“It’s just–” The Doctor’s squint intensifies, his brows furrowing together and his lips pursing in a thoughtful expression. “It’s just that you look a bit familiar, is all. Did you take advanced neoparticle physics in 2251? Ever play on the Academy table tennis team?”
“No.” Ensign Costello shakes her head, looking at the Doctor quizzically. “No, I’m sure we’ve never met. I don’t recognize you.”
Something passes over the Doctor’s face quickly, but it’s gone before Rose can analyze it, replaced with a blandly cheerful expression. “Right then. I’m the Doctor, captain of the TARDIS, and this here’s Rose.”
Rose lifts the hand not holding her torch to wave. “Hello.”
—-
Lieutenant Costello leads Rose and the Doctor away from the hallway the transporter had put them down in, along a series of similarly dank, dirty and cluttered corridors, and finally into a dimly lit room full of debris and ancient-looking consoles. A row of lockers line the right wall, and the lieutenant heads towards one while Rose and the Doctor take stock of the room.
“You ought to be able to get your comms back up in here,” Lieutenant Costello says airily, tugging open one of the lockers and beginning to root around inside it. “There’s less interference than in some of the other parts of the base, though it’s still pretty spotty.”
Rose takes out her tricorder, meaning to search for any drop in the interference levels, while the Doctor settles himself up against a dusty console on the left side of the room. “So, Lieutenant,” he drawls. “What exactly was this ‘particular mission’, and why is it that the Torchwood’s gone missing in action, with only you left behind?”
The lieutenant continues to root around in the locker, her reply somewhat muffled by the echo inside the metal box. “I’m not sure that I’m at liberty to discuss that, Captain.” She pops her head out of the locker to shoot him a polite, insincere smile. “I’ve no idea what your Intelligence clearance level is.”
The Doctor shoots a brittle, icy smile right back at her. “Oh, Intelligence isn’t too fond of me. For good reason.” He pushes himself up off the console and starts towards the bank of lockers. “I ask too many questions. Notice too much. And I don’t like keeping quiet when things don’t add up.” He pauses halfway across the room, eyes fixed on the spot where the lieutenant is still digging in one of the lockers.
The other woman visibly stiffens, and she draws her upper body out and away from the locker. “Such as?” she asks, and Rose can hear the tension in her voice.
The Doctor keeps advancing, and his voice goes low and dark, the way it always does when he’s holding himself back. “Like the fact that the Millennium was decommissioned eight months ago. And the fact that do know you, Commander Costello, of the USS Torchwood.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says tightly, and for a moment Rose is sure the Doctor’s just read the situation wrong.
Then the other woman draws a phaser out of the locker and points it at the Doctor.
Rose draws her own phaser within a second, dropping the tricorder to the floor in her haste. “Put it down, Costello,” she barks, not giving a toss what the Doctor thinks about nonviolence – not if it means keeping him alive. “Now,”
Costello, however, doesn’t have a chance to respond.
“Well, look at this pretty picture,” says a voice, from somewhere behind Rose. Lieutenant – well, Commander, apparently – Costello whips towards the sound of it, aiming her phaser away from the Doctor and towards Rose and the unknown voice. “Now, I’d be the first to admit that I’m not great at keeping up-to-date on Starfleet rules and regulations. But I am damn certain that shooting your captain in the back and then leaving him to die is considered bad.”
Rose still hasn’t turned to look at the source of the voice. The Doctor, however, appears glued to the sight of whoever is speaking, visibly gaping at the new arrival for a second or two before spluttering, “Jack?”
Rose finally chances a quick look behind her, and is met by a brief glimpse of a man – tall, human, handsome and dark-haired, with a brilliant smile that she can’t resist matching. “Hi,” he says, sounding irrepressibly cheerful, even though his gold uniform is streaked with blood and dirt. “Captain Jack Harkness.”