Chapter Text
And just like that—she was gone.
The Doctor stared at the nothing-space where the TARDIS stood just seconds before, as if maybe—just maybe—if he looked hard enough, long enough, he might be able to detect something of her presence. But the TARDIS had vanished, not a drop of seawater or grain of sand disturbed in her wake. The cold ground where she once stood was impressionless, impassive, betraying nothing. Hollow, like the place deep inside his ribs, a gnawing-hungry feeling suspiciously close to where a second heart used to beat. As if the TARDIS was never even there.
Welp, he thought numbly. That was hardly the only thing that felt like it never happened, like it belonged to the never-was.
His eyes squeezed shut and slowly reopened, a silent wish that things might look different on the other side (fuller, maybe. Better), but they didn’t; of course they didn’t. The grey water and dull grey sand and duller grey sky still glared back at him, cold and dismissive beneath the cruel brightness of the white-hot sun. Or maybe that was just these fresh new human eyes, awfully tender for all that the world seemed blunted at the edges now. At any rate, the TARDIS was still gone, for four whole seconds—five, now, now six, now seven, and at least his time-sense hadn’t completely deserted him, even if it was trying to fade away like the traces of a lingering morning dream—and he was still there.
This is the beginning of the rest of your life , he thought, and tried not to feel queasy.
Rose hadn’t moved. Her feet had planted her several steps away, more than an arms’-length in front of him, and she seemed to have taken up root there. The Doctor could only presume she was staring at the TARDIS-empty-spot just like he was.
(“Are you all right?” he almost asked, but didn’t. It was sort of a stupid question. He was a little afraid of the answer, anyway.)
But even with her back to him, the sight of Rose relaxed some of the tension from the Doctor’s shoulders and eased the sick feeling in his gut. How could it not? As new and different and terrifying as all of this was, as much as the loss of the TARDIS shocked him like the loss of a limb, it couldn’t really be all that bad, could it? Not when Rose was there, and safe, and with him. For however long they had. Together.
(It was all still raw and frightening and new, of course, but it was far better with two—always better with her.)
Stepping in close, he reached for her hand, stifling a sigh of relief when her fingers closed around his, slotting together like the teeth of a zipper. Years apart and it was still so easy, so comfortable, a perfect fit. Second-nature like breathing, respiratory bypass or not. Rose glanced up at him, her expression inscrutable; he wondered if she felt it, too, that uncomfortable quiet, the strange battling senses of loss and simultaneous gain, the impression that everything was hurtling and stopping and freezing and burning all at once. (A suffocating freedom, he thought, brimming with a terrifying potential energy.) Maybe he could help ease that for her, the way she always did for him.
Good grief, but he felt glad to be with her. He wouldn’t change his choice for anything.
“So,” said the Doctor, his voice soft. “What’s next?”
***
For what felt like the hundredth time, Rose’s mobile chirped a cheerful tune in her pocket, and she suppressed an impatient sigh. Normally she appreciated this universe’s capability for inflight calls—dead handy for missions, it was—but right now, she would have given just about anything to have a mobile that didn’t work on an airplane.
She ended the call without so much as a glance, staring out the window at the world crawling by below. Through cottonball clouds, Rose could just make out the shapes of green countryside, interrupted by a silver snake of a road here, the blue-grey twinkling of a lake there, and distantly, she resented it all. It just seemed awfully mean-spirited of nature to keep marching onward like this, sun shining and clouds sailing and earth turning as if it all hadn’t come so perilously close to ending only hours before, like nothing was ever wrong, like nothing in the world had ever changed.
(But that was sort of the problem, wasn’t it? That nothing had changed. Not really.)
A lifetime ago, Rose would have easily fallen asleep like this, lured to slumber by the numbing buzz of the engines or the rumble of a tram on the track or the gentle background hum of the TARDIS. But she had no such luck now, no matter how comfortable the plush first-class seat may have been, how tiredly her bones may have settled into it. Sleep was evasive even on the best of days, anymore—not to mention that the usual noise of plane’s-engines was nearly lost amidst the excited chatter of celebrating passengers. News of the canceled apocalypse must have spread quickly; they’d barely been back in this universe for a handful of hours and already folks were celebrating the return of the stars wheeling overhead, joyous celebration spreading like wildfire from the beach to the streets to the airport to the plane. The flight attendants were in such high spirits that they’d started handing out free mini-bottles of liquor left and right, and all around them, passengers laughed and chattered and cried in happiness and relief.
Jackie, of course, had immediately joined the celebrations.
Pink-cheeked and giggling over her (third? fourth?) tiny bottle of fizz, Jackie gaily chatted at the metacrisis-Doctor--or the man who said he was the Doctor, or the new Doctor, half-Doctor, semi-Doctor, something-very-nearly-almost-Doctor, whoever or whatever he was--and silently, Rose was very glad, because this gave Jackie something very concrete to focus her inebriated attention on, something that was not Rose, or Rose’s strangely quiet demeanor, or Rose’s distant stare, or why aren’t you happy like everyone else, Rose? The last thing Rose wanted right now was her mum abandoning her good mood to fret and fuss over her. (Well, no, the last thing Rose actually wanted right now was exactly what she got, but it wasn’t like she had a choice in the matter, was it?) At any rate, the sort-of Doctor put up with Jackie good-naturedly enough, chuckling at the appropriate moments, humming agreement here, nodding there. It would have made Rose smile if he had been the other Doctor. The real Doctor , she reminded herself.
Rose tried not to hear his voice. A difficult task, as he sat right next to her, so close she could feel the warmth of his leg almost-pressed against hers, inescapably close and frustratingly real. And really, Rose just wished she could open up the emergency hatch and jump out. She didn’t care about how silly or melodramatic that sounded. Every word the almost-Doctor spoke was a stabbing pain in her ears, a grotesquely unfair reminder of the nearly-was.
She could still taste him on her lips, the not-quite-Doctor. Soft and sweet and surprisingly human, tinged with salt from the ocean spray on the wind. Rose couldn’t lie—it was a nice kiss. A very nice kiss. Wonderful, even. Hit all the right notes, made her stomach flutter and heart stammer and chest swell and head swim while little heavenly choirs erupted in song in the back of her mind. And when he’d clutched her close, with a grip that bordered on the desperate, it was all she could do to keep her legs from turning to jelly.
Fine. A perfect kiss, then.
But the grind and groan of the disappearing TARDIS had ruined all of that worse than a slap to the face. Funny how one of the best moments of your life can so quickly devolve into one of the worst, isn’t it?
Typical, she thought with a grimace. Things with the real Doctor were never what you thought they were, even if his boyish charm and that stupid pretty smile of his all worked overtime to convince you otherwise. It was a good mask; one could almost believe his carefree performance. And it was certainly very him to let all of this happen—let her kiss the sort-of Doctor as a distraction, so he could slip away unnoticed. No questions or self-doubt or second thoughts, no room for lingering looks or completed confessions or wondering why.
He didn’t even say goodbye, this time.
As discreetly as she could, Rose brushed her thumb over her bottom lip, wiping away all traces of the nearly-Doctor there. If Mickey were there, he would have teased her about sending mixed signals, would have joked about how now the Doctor knew exactly how he used to feel.
If Mickey were there.
Rose suddenly felt like she might be sick.
Shifting in her seat, Rose grimaced, every movement recalling the bruises and aches sustained over the last few days. A hand gently covered hers, and without even looking, without even thinking, Rose knew it was him. The not-Doctor. The touch of him was warm--reassuring, almost, except he was so much warmer than the proper Doctor--and she froze, trapped between the urge to pull her hand away and the desire to press their palms close and never let go.
“Rose?” the Doctor said quietly, beneath the sounds of her mother’s nonstop nattering in the background. With no small amount of effort, Rose forced her gaze away from the window, looking his way, and—god, he looked just like him. Same body, same face, same wild hair and questioning eyes and expressive mouth and ridiculous sideburns and stupid concern written in the wrinkles between his eyebrows. He was identical to every last freckle, right down to the dusting of them on the back of his hand, the one curled around hers. Rose couldn’t have gotten a more authentic copy if she’d tried.
All that time searching the multiverse, all that work, and this was what she got? Thanks for playing, but the real Doctor’s in another castle?
(Except the man beside her was the real Doctor, or his real memories anyway, all 900-something years of him sewn up into a brand-new human suit. Rose could feel the rightness of him like she used to feel the undercurrent of the TARDIS, like she once heard the song of the Vortex. But he wasn’t real. He just wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Because if he was—)
“Feeling alright, there?” asked the Doctor.
Rose shook herself. “Yeah,” she murmured. “I’m fine. It’s just…”
“A lot to take in?”
She nodded. This, at least, was comforting; no need to lie if he chose her words for her.
The Doctor squeezed her hand. “But stuck together, that’s not so bad. Right?”
A smile threatened to quirk the corners of Rose’s mouth before she reminded herself with a tensing jaw that no, no , that memory wasn’t really his, he didn’t hear those words, not with those ears anyway, and he didn’t have a right to say them. Never mind that her treacherous skin seemed hellbent on believing his fingers twined with hers, that the press of their hands together was all at once so startlingly foreign and intimately familiar that Rose wanted to scream.
“So why’s there two of you again?” asked Jackie, and quick as a blink, the new Doctor pulled away from Rose, leaving her both relieved and strangely cold. “Are you a clone, or what?”
“Biological metacrisis, actually,” the Doctor replied with a grin. “See, that blast from the Dalek was deadly—sort of hate to admit it, but he got me good, definitely would have bragged about it to all his little Dalek mates back home, given the chance—and, like it does, my other body started trying to regenerate. But I didn’t want to give up that body or face so soon, and well, can you blame me?” (Here he threw Rose a wink, and she furiously refused to blush.)
“So I retained the energy needed to repair the damaged tissues and siphoned out the remaining regenerate material into a biological vessel, being this hand here, my handy spare hand, handily preserved in a biomatter containment unit nearby. Add a little tactile contact from someone steeped in Huon energy at precisely the optimum moment post-trauma, and hey-presto! There’s me, the same me, just in a new body, growth sped up a billion times by the rapid cell duplication enabled by that special patented Time Lord triple-helix deoxyribonucleic acid. Brilliant regeneration theory, if I do say so myself.” He beamed at Jackie. “And I do say so!”
Jackie stared at him blankly. “So…are you a clone, or what?”
He sighed. “I grew out of a hand.”
“Huh. Not the worst place a bloke could come from, I s’pose,” Jackie mused. “And I’d know a little something about that. Been with men from all over, mind you don’t tell Pete that. Men’s egos are such fragile things. No offense, Doctor.”
“None taken.”
“However it happened, you’re here, or some version of you anyway, and that means Rose is here, and I can’t say I’m not happy about that. Did you know she was going to up and leave me here? Completely deserted and all alone?”
“Except for Tony and Pete and all your friends,” Rose said quietly.
“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the crisis-Doctor-thing,” Jackie sniffed, sipping her fizz. “Thirty-six hours I was in labor with her,” she says to the Doctor, “raised her all by myself, no help from anyone, got her through school and all manner of terrible boys and that nasty little funk she fell into after we came over here to this universe, and she was just gonna desert me without so much as a by-your-leave, just skip away into the sunset with some bloke . No offense, Doctor.”
“None taken,” he said, reasonably.
“She was gonna go running right back to the other universe and leave everything here behind. Not a second thought about her family or her job or her old mum, how much she might like to be taken along back home.”
Rose clenched her fists in an effort to stop herself from rising to the bait. It would be too easy to fall back into this conversation, the same way a needle slips into the well-worn grooves of an oft-played record. This is your home now, Mum. You have everything and everyone you ever wanted here, Mum. You’re happy, Mum.
And you’re gonna tell me you’ve never been happy here? Jackie would always reply. You gonna sit there and act like you never had the chance? Of course Rose never had a proper answer for her. Nothing that wasn’t at least a little bit of a lie.
Jackie leaned forward to shoot Rose a dirty look. “I knew straight-off just how fishy it was, you taking on that UNIT job.”
“Oh, so this universe has got a UNIT as well?” the Doctor asked Rose, pleasantly surprised. “And you’re with them now? Excellent. Whatever happened to Torchwood?”
“It got absorbed,” Jackie replied before Rose had a chance. Just as well; Rose didn’t particularly feel like answering, anyway. “UNIT, Torchwood, it’s all the same thing, now. And I dunno what Miss over here’ll do now that she got what she needed out of it. Only took the job in the first place so she could leave me for him. ”
“It wasn’t like that, Mum,” Rose mumbled as the Doctor shifted uncomfortably next to her. A familiar ache was creeping into her head and she tiredly massaged her temples, willing it to go away. Didn’t she already feel bad enough? “I had to get hold of the Doctor. He was the only one who could stop the stars going out. You know that.”
“Just left the family and me behind like so much rubbish. Her poor old mum, victimized by some mad alien cradle-robber. No offense, Doctor.”
“Erm…none taken?”
“What if I hadn’t gone after you, eh?” Jackie asked Rose, her words punctuated with a wet hiccup. “Would you really have let your brother grow up without his sister, never understanding where she went, never knowing why? What if this one hadn’t come along?” she needled, slapping the Doctor’s arm. Ignoring his jump of surprise, she continued, “You wouldn’t have even given it a second thought, would you? Cos nothing else matters to you, does it? You would have left everything behind for the real Doctor.”
At that, the Doctor stiffened, as if his entire body was saying what his mouth wouldn’t— offense very much taken .
“Life isn’t some fairytale, you know,” said Jackie, and Rose bit the inside of her cheek to keep from snapping back at her. “Dropping everything for your one true love is all good and well in a storybook, but real life doesn’t work like that. In real life, you’ve got friends, and a family, and a job and a home and a community and a mum who already lost you for a year and she can’t do it again, she really can’t. In real life, people get hurt, Rose.”
Guilt weighing heavy in the pit of her stomach, churning sickly in her gut, Rose stared back out the window, eyes gliding over grey clouds swollen dark with rainwater. Grey, grey, grey, never-ending, infinite, unchanging, the same as it always had been, always would be, day after day after day after day .
“I was just trying to get back to him,” she muttered.
“Well,” said the Doctor, shifting in his seat, “Good thing I’m right here, then.”
“You’re not, though.”
Silence fell between them, heavy and tense; Rose chanced a look at the Doctor and immediately regretted it. She couldn’t hold his gaze for long, couldn’t bear the confusion flashing across his face. “You’re not him, I mean,” she muttered.
The Doctor shook his head, lips parting, but before he could let loose any sort of argument, Rose continued, “I know you’ve got his face and his memories and everything, but…I’m sorry. You’re not the same. You’re not him. You’re just not.”
“I am, though. I’m still me. Just me in a different body. A new body. New new body. New new Doctor,” he said with an encouraging smile.
Rose looked away.
“Rose, we went through all of this before, last time I changed.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“It just is,” she insisted stubbornly, still not looking at him, even if she could feel his gaze weighing on her.
The new Doctor quirked an eyebrow in bewilderment. “Rose—”
Her mobile chose that moment to start ringing again, the ringtone filling the cabin with its obliviously cheerful chirp. Secretly grateful for the interruption just this once, Rose slipped it out of her pocket, turning away to answer.
“Agent Tyler.”
“So she lives, after all!” her boss barked on the other end. “I’ve been ringing you for days, Tyler. Days . Do you know what bloody day it is?”
“No,” Rose replied truthfully.
“Well then, allow me to assist: today is the day I fire your arse if it’s not planted in my office in the next ten minutes. Does that ring a bell, Agent Tyler?”
Rose bit her lip. “I’m sort of in Norway right now.”
The other end fell quiet. Then, perplexed, “…and you’re in Norway because…?”
“Long story.”
“You can tell it when you get here, then. And I want you here straightaway, understand? And Smith too. Can’t get hold of him for the life of me. Actually, put him on the line, will you?”
Rose’s eyes pinched shut. “He’s—he’s not available, right now.”
“ Not available ,” Oliver huffed. “Unbelievable, the both of you. Just--get to my office, all right? No delays, no excuses, just get here. Got it?”
“Got it,” Rose repeated, the words toneless and flat, empty of anything resembling enthusiasm. She hung up without a goodbye or anything else; she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to explain what really happened to Mickey.
She flinched at the feel of her mother glaring at her around the Doctor. “God, Mum. What now?”
“Don’t tell me you’re planning to run back to that institution first thing,” Jackie shot back. “It’s gonna be half past eleven by the time you get back, and you need a proper rest. And a good meal. And a bath, I’d wager. When’s the last time you slept, anyway?”
“I’ve got to go. It’s work.” Rose risked another look at the half-Doctor, who was watching her with something that looked suspiciously like concern. She stared at her hands in her lap instead. “Besides, I can sleep on the way.”
Jackie just scowled before settling back into her seat, resigned, arms crossed over her chest. “All right, sweetheart. If that’s what you want.”
No, Rose thought as she leaned against the window, her forehead pressed to the blessedly cool plexiglass. No, it wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want to go back to UNIT. She didn’t want to be trapped on this airplane, barred from the aisle by the almost-Doctor and caged-in by her mum. She didn’t want to be stuck back in this stupid bloody universe at all. And she absolutely couldn’t believe how cavalier the sort-of Doctor was acting about the whole thing. Or maybe that attitude of his just proved he was who he said he was, after all.
She swallowed around the lump that had sprung up in her throat. She resolutely did not think about what the man beside her had whispered in her ear, back on the beach—words the real Doctor had never spoken. And likely never would have, Rose realized, as pr es sure expanded in her sinuses. Her head ached with the need to rel eas e the moisture swelling up behind her eyes, but she furiously blinked the would-be tears away, forcing them back and cursing herself for being so pathetic.
What a waste of so much hard work. What a waste of so much trying and waiting and watching and hoping. Just what a waste .
Although, if she thought about it…
The pain in her head faded to a dull thrum as she realized—
… it didn’t have to be .
Watching the clouds crawl by below, glowing an eerie white with flashes of lightning here and there, Rose lost herself in thought. Theoretically, it could work, right? Everything was still in place, back at home. And preliminary testing had yielded positive results. So there was a chance, however implausible, however slight, that she could still change things. She could give herself the chance she deserved. The choice she had earned.
Besides. Rose Tyler wasn’t the sort to give up just because someone else told her to.
The first stirrings of a plan started to knit themselves together as Rose watched the storm building below.