Work Text:
When Pete first meets the blue-suited Doctor—well, first is a misnomer, to begin with. But when he and the newly-part-human man first shake hands, Pete can’t help but to look carefully at the man standing next to Rose, to examine and try to estimate timelines in his own faulty, purely-human way.
(He’s read studies on this: when asked to estimate how much time has passed since an event, humans don’t do too well on accurately gauging the minutes, seconds, hours, without an external timepiece. When predicting how much time will have passed, humans do the opposite: they’re far more accurate. Faultiness of memory inherent in the recall of the past, but far better predictive abilities when set a task.
Handy, that. An evolutionary predilection for anticipation.)
Still tall, still thin. New age on a face that wasn’t meant to age, according to Rose, but the sort of aging that’s come hard-won with tragedy. Pete knows the look; he recognizes it from himself, from the bad years, after Jacks and before Jackie. But not the oldest he’s seen from the man.
“Pete! Pete Tyler,” says the Doctor, shaking his hand vigorously. “Glad to see you still kicking about, especially with the missus’ cooking.” He delivers the second phrase sotto voce, but not quite sotto voce enough, and fails to avoid a swat from the aforementioned missus, and Jackie scoffs.
“Goes to show what you know,” she says, wrapping her coat tighter around herself. Lord, Norway’s cold, and this beach reeks of brine and the sea and the faint, cosmic tang of split dimensions. “I’ve got a cook and all. Me! A cook and a mansion. Imagine that!” She shoots a grin and a wink to Pete, which he happily returns.
Rose, however, smiles dimly at her mother’s continued amazement about finances, and Pete watches the Doctor hone in on that small smile like a life-ring to a man drowning. The man (man? Alien? Jackie had been her usual self when calling for a lift, and hadn’t explained things much beyond “He’s gone and starfished himself!”) murmurs something in her ear that Pete can’t hear, one hand curled around her upper arm…
…and her smile disappears. Rose steps away from the Doctor, takes a breath, and looks at Pete and Jackie.
“I’ll see you in the zeppelin, yeah?” she says—not asks, the day Rose asks for permission or help or anything of the sort is the day the sun rises in the west—and begins trudging up the beach to where the zeppelin’s anchored. Jackie makes a sound, calls after her daughter, and Pete—
Well. As the Doctor curls in on himself minutely, his lips pressed together and thin with pain—Pete watches a man drown on dry land.
—
Rose keeps up her silent treatment for the first part of the zeppelin ride back to London. It’s not that the Doctor and Jackie don’t try; they do, heroically keeping up conversation like everything’s normal, trying to loop Rose in as much as possible. But she’s refusing to engage, like she did before the beach last time. Patterns and cycles, and Rose’s pattern is avoidance or dismissal until she can figure things out in her own time. Or, alternately, kicking the world in the teeth in her refusal to accept what is. Girl after his own heart, she is; seems like she’s taking the first option this time.
Pete is piloting the zeppelin and keeping a weather ear open. The Doctor had come up, once, during a lull in the back-and-forth he’d been keeping up with Jackie. He’d poked around, asked questions, made full eye contact, seemed sure in his skin.
Pete’d considered asking what the whole metacrisis event entailed, but shook the thought away. This man was the Doctor; this man loved Rose. Good enough for him. Instead, he’d explained the evolution of zeppelin technology in this universe ("Pete’s World! That’s what Rose and I called it, when—well—” ), the death of the monarchy (“Ahhh, Torchwood Estate. No one to stop the lupine wavelength haemovariform, although—” ), and the Great War (“Nineteen-twelve, not nineteen-fourteen? Oh, fascinating!” ) before the Doctor had gotten visibly antsy. It’s when he starts to leave the co-pilot’s seat that Pete clears his throat.
“Doctor,” he begins, staring out the viewscreen in a pointless effort to make this upcoming conversation less awkward. “Give her time.”
Even in his peripheral, Pete can see the Doctor’s raised eyebrow; the man is pointedly unimpressed.
“I know Rose Tyler,” he says, lowly, his voice absent of all the previous jocularity. It’s steady and cool, and this is a voice that Pete knows. “I’m well aware that she needs time. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try in the meanwhile.”
“Nah, Doctor,” Pete says. His hands are sweating, minutely. He shakes himself mentally. “We’ve measured the timelines, you know. It was two—well, some of our scientists argued three, but we’ve agreed by now—it was two years and some change for you, yeah? After Canary Wharf?”
There is silence in the cockpit, and Pete barrels on. “And how long did you travel with Rose, too? Same story, right? Two years and some change if you’re asking Rose, three years and some change if you’re asking my wife.”
“Two years, four months, five days, seven hours, thirty-one minutes.”
“Bet you could tell me down to the attosecond, couldn’t ya?”
“I’d really rather not. Where are you going with this?”
“Point is, Doctor,” Pete says, dragging in a breath through his nose. “Point is, you had two and a bit with Rose. She and Jacks have been here nearly seven years, now. I’ve called her my daughter for most of that time. Hell, I felt it ever since I caught her, even if I didn’t know it at the time.”
Here, Pete chances a look at the man next to him. The skin of his face is pale against the noxious cobalt of his suit, and there’s the beginning of an unpleasant realization sinking in.
Knowing that he is hammering nails into this man’s growing horror, his growing sadness, Pete continues:
“I also know Rose Tyler, Doctor. Not like her mum, because she’s always going to be Jackie’s baby girl, but I know her. She’s the daughter who fell into my arms and she’s the better mirror of me. And I’m telling you that Rose needs time.”
He feels awful, playing at a pissing match no one asked for, this odd display of masculinity fitting awkwardly around his shoulders like an ill-made coat. But he knows he’s said what has to be said, especially as the Doctor pulls an odd-looking coral thing out of his jacket pocket and studies it. He knows that coral; he’s seen it before, a glimpse of otherworldly majesty that he has not yet begun to fully comprehend.
For both their sakes, Pete is nearly sick with relief when the Doctor says nothing, just clenches his jaw and begins to leave the cockpit. But Pete cannot help but to vomit more words instead, to attempt to salve a wound that must be inflicted to preserve a causal loop.
“Doctor—before you go back in—”
“Oh, what now?” the other man asks, exasperation working double-time to hide what Pete knows must be a pressing terror. But he stops in the doorframe anyways, his eyes bright and wet.
“She loves you,” Pete says. “She really, truly loves you. Fought tooth and nail to get back to you. She’s older and harder, and god knows how much of that is my fault, letting her go on all those missions, but she’s still in there.” He knows it’s true as he says it. His daughter has survived dangerous parallel worlds, galvanized broken souls, and she’s brokered peace treaties between warring races, and she did all while trying to live a life fantastic, if shattered. “I know her, Doctor, and that hasn’t changed.”
Then Pete lets his words take him a little too far: “That won’t change, Doctor. Trust me on this.”
The Doctor studies Pete, his face dispassionate and flatly alien—no tics, no giveaways, nothing to hang a reference from—before he breaks into a grin, brilliant and sure.
“Oh, Pete Tyler. You’re almost as clever as your daughter, you are.” Then he throws the coral in his hand, flipping it in the air before catching it deftly. “Transtemporal mechanics are a bit of a nightmare for human minds. And here you are, year after year, waiting for the right time. Tell me, though—does she know?”
Pete shrugs. “Dunno what you’re talking about there, Doctor.” He wills his face to be as stone as the alien’s was previously, and the Doctor lets out a loud HA! before he leaves the cockpit.
“Hope,” he says as he walks out. “I quite like hope!”
Pete breathes out a sigh. He, too, hopes.
—
In his tiredness, Pete doesn’t recognize the sound at first, but the large blue box that shifts into view in the dank underground of Torchwood is a familiar sight, if only through a single glance and subsequent surveillance photos, surreptitiously archived by Mickey and sent over the breach.
Even then, he’s surprised when the Doctor—in a blue suit, this time, and it was a bit awful, really—bounds out of the TARDIS. It’s a relief: Mickey’d said he’d be able to help, and his appearance here must mean that he was ready to solve this Cyberman prob—
“Hello, Pete! Pete Tyler. Not here to solve your Cyberman problem, unfortunately.” The Doctor is beaming as he says this, and Pete’s heart both sinks in disappointment and, just as quickly, engulfs itself in rage.
“Doctor,” he says lowly. “I think you’ll find that if you’re following Agent Smith’s directions—”
“I’m not!” the other man interrupts. “Honestly, Pete, give it a week. Things will be… ah, solved isn’t a great word for it, not really, but the breach will be mended. A few things might slip there—a transmission, a thought, you should really listen to Rose when she says something about that—but that’s not why I’m here.”
Pete stands behind his desk, and he forces his fists to unclench from the tools in his hands. He’d been fixing one of the dimension jumpers, the ugly things. “I think you’ll find that it’d better be why you’re here, Doctor.” The Doctor, wholly unperturbed, sticks his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels.
“Honestly, Pete, it’s… taken care of. Or it is in my timeline, anyways. You’ll catch up in about… oh, seven years or so? Keep an eye out for that, make it very sneaky-like when you first see me. Or maybe not first, maybe during the zeppelin ride. Don’t forget to pull some proprietary fatherly stuff in there, too—but I’m getting off track. Sorry! I’m here on a mission from you, actually.”
It’s a storm of information delivered in frighteningly few breaths. Pete wills his shoulders to relax. God, he’s so tired, and they’re so close to collapse; it’s the hottest summer on record and even this basement is too warm. Blackouts have become commonplace and the sea levels are rising and the only thing keeping him from attacking the Doctor is his own damn exhaustion.
“I need,” he grits out, “for you to explain.”
To his utter frustration, the Doctor simply squints into the distance, like he’s seeing something in the air. “Nah,” he says after a moment of that distant study. “You don’t. You’re a sharp one, Pete Tyler—thank goodness for that, otherwise I’d really be wondering where Rose got it from—oh, don’t tell Jackie I said that—but no, you’ll figure it out. I’ve got a different goal here today.” Then he quickly walks to Pete’s desk and grabs the dimension jumper off of it, before Pete can do or say anything.
There’s a quick whirring, blue light—sonic screwdriver, according to Mickey—and then the jumper’s tossed back to Pete, and he barely catches it.
“Fixed,” says the Doctor. Then his smile drops and his face sets into something stern. “Now, Pete Tyler, listen to me.”
His voice is cool and low, and Pete, despite the muggy warmth of the basement, shivers.
“This jumper will continue to work as normal. It is imperative that you are the one who uses it, understand?” Any of the man’s overly-familiar facade has fully disappeared, but—
—but this man has lines where there hadn’t been any, during the initial Cyberman invasion. He looks older. For an alien that wasn’t supposed to age, only change—according to Mickey—how long had it been, for him?
“Pete!” the Doctor says, impatiently, leaning across the desk, crowding him. “Only you. This is also programmed to go off one last time before it stops working entirely. Pete, you must be ready to catch her. Facing north-north-west.”
There’s too much going on.
“Catch her?” he repeats, dumbly. Even as it leaves his mouth he’s ashamed, and the Doctor rolls his eyes.
“It’ll make sense in a week. Just…” and here, the Doctor’s overwhelming urgency fades, replaced with a soft sort of terror that Pete recognizes in an instant. He’d heard it in his own voice when he’d planned to infiltrate the Cybus factories with Ro—with that girl—when he’d had only a weak hope for Jacks’ survival.
Pete’s mind whirls with potentials, with possibilities. Catch her.
“Ah,” he says, softly. “I get it.”
The Doctor sniffs, raises an eyebrow. “Do you?” And there’s a challenge in that expression, a desperation, but above all… there’s a surety and trust there that feels undeserved as of yet.
Mickey’d mentioned how mental time travel could be.
“Think I do.” Both eyebrows raise this time. “Or, I expect I will in about a week’s time.”
The Doctor’s beam returns, full-wattage and nearly painful. Pete wonders if it’s fake or not. “Oh, at least the first half, I’m sure.” Then the Doctor purses his lips and squints at Pete. “Mum’s the word when you see me next, understand. Preserve this timeline, Peter Alan Tyler. Not the first time you’re doing this—well, not you-you, but other-you—oh, forget it.”
And with that, he turns and walks back to the TARDIS, and Pete catches a glimpse of towering metallic coral structures in a space too small for them to fit, and a distant figure in that biomechanical wonder moves closer to the door. He sees a flash of blond hair and a smile bright enough to power the entire grid, and his heart stutters in fear, in regret, and—
“Pete!” the Doctor calls, poking his head out of the doorway, blocking Pete’s view.
“Yeah?” he answers, weakly.
“Give her time. She can be a right terror when she’s angry—ow! Hey!” The Doctor pops out of view for a second, then comes back. “Sorry, the terror—I mean, the wife—” and this he directs with a grin back into the TARDIS, to the figure who by now is out of sight. “Anyways. Not just time; give her space, give her love. You’ll understand. Don’t forget.”
Then the doors slam shut, and there is a great grinding noise and a warm blast of wind,
and then there is nothing.
Pete Tyler stands alone in a muggy basement, holding a dimension jumper in his hands.
Preserve the timeline, the Doctor’d said. And all the other things he’d said, too.
Pete’s grip tightens on the dimension jumper, and then gentles. He cradles it like something precious.
—
He’s able to set the zeppelin on autopilot by the time they’re about a third of the way over the North Sea, so Pete takes a moment to leave the cockpit and check on Jackie, who he’s sure has talked her way into a snit. Hopefully no mother-daughter rows to defuse—not that he’d ever had much luck in doing so. He’d been much better at picking up the pieces.
(He remembers, once-twice-thrice—Rose, hospitalized after a dangerous mission, shot or stabbed or torn, and Jackie laying into her like she’d been determined to get her own pound of flesh for herself. The horrible, cutting things Rose’d said to her mother in return, desperate and angry, and Pete could only see himself after his Jacks had died, ready to cut others open in an attempt to staunch his own bleeding.
After one particularly nasty fight, Rose fresh from a failed diplomatic mission and freshly concussed as well, Jackie had stormed out of the hospital room in tears while Pete stood awkwardly in the corner. This relationship was… a new one, only nine months old, and most of his attention had been on Jackie and her developing pregnancy.
Him! A father! At his age. After all this time.
But then there was Rose, doing her damndest to hide her tears on a hospital bed in a darkened room. And he remembered the bright flash of her grin in the distant doorway months ago, and realized that he’d seen her cry more often than he’d seen her smile and oh, how he wanted to see her smile like that again. She looked like the best parts of her mother and him, even if he’d had no part to play in her life other than giving her a job, giving her a room—
—catching her.
Him. A father, after all this time.
Time—
Give her time. Give her space. Give her love.
Well, he wasn’t a time-travelling space alien, but…
Slowly, Pete had left his corner and sat himself in Jackie’s vacated chair. He’d have to chase her down later, but for now—
Pete remembers the lack of resistance as he’d pulled Rose’s hands away from her face, remembers how she’d latched on to his own hands tightly as she curled inwards and sobbed in pain and frustration and heartbreak, remembers his own heart breaking for her. This brilliant girl who could shout down a despot who’d been grounded, her wings clipped.
“I know you’ll see him again,” he’d said to her, after she’d cried herself out, finally fast asleep. “You’ll see him, and you’ll be so happy,” he’d whispered. “So, so happy, Rose. I can’t wait.”
Pete wishes he could tell her when she was awake. He wishes he could tell anyone. But the refrain of preserve the timeline haunts him in his every word to anyone, and will for another six years.
In her sleep, though, she’d smiled.)
When Pete gets to the passenger deck, he is pleasantly surprised: Jackie’s huffily flipping through a magazine, but it’s one of her playful, pretend huffs, and he can tell she’s actually rather pleased. She looks at him as he walks in, sneakily presses a finger to her lips, and then points at the seats on the opposite side of the passenger deck.
The Doctor and Rose are bent together—no, more like Rose has curled herself around the Doctor, half in his lap and half on the seat, and he clutches her to him tightly. She’s fully passed out as he runs the fingers of one hand through her hair, skittering up her arms and chastely around her waist, and he does not look out the window in favor of staring at the woman who flung herself across dimensions for the hope of finding him.
Pete walks softly towards Jackie, but even his quietest steps alert the Doctor, who slowly, gently lifts his head to look at Pete. Rose murmurs and the Doctor smiles, whispers something in return; Rose nestles back into her spot on his shoulder. It is the softest Pete’s ever seen her since that first time at Bad Wolf Bay.
The Doctor looks at Pete, and there’s that fathomless stare once more.
You caught her, he mouths clearly.
Pete shrugs. She’s my daughter, he mouths in return. And I had help.
The Doctor nods, as though this final confirmation is all he needed. Then he closes those terrible, deep eyes, and bends his head down to rest against Rose’s, and, by all appearances, falls asleep. His desperate grasp on Rose does not change.
Beside Pete, Jackie sniffles.
“Took ‘em long enough,” she whispers.
“Thought she’d need more time,” Pete whispers back, offering his hand to his wife. She takes it and he leads them both to the cockpit, where she settles comfortably in the copilot’s seat—although still very careful not to touch any of the controls. Not her thing, she’d claimed; give her a lorry, though, and she’d paint the town red, she’d also claimed. He believed her. She’d be getting one for her next birthday, it’d already been planned.
“What do ya mean, ‘more time’?” Jackie asks once they’ve turned off the autopilot.
Pete shrugs. “Whenever Rose’s gotten like… well, like that, she needs more time, typically, so she can cool down. Think things through.”
Jackie laughs a little. “Yeah, when she’s mad about that sort of stuff. But not when it comes to him , you daft man.” Then she sighs. “She’s never taken any time when it comes to him. Not once. Not in the big picture.”
There’s a weight to her words, there. A fact, both lovely and horrific, and Pete can feel his wife's certainty to his bones. She sighs again, but it sounds happier this time.
“Oh Pete,” Jackie says. “She’s going to be so happy.” Then she leans over and kisses his cheek, smiling all the while. “I’m going to get my daughter back.”
Pete remembers, again, the figure in the TARDIS so many years ago and also years to come, and her quicksilver grin, so different from the stern, guarded figure she cuts now.
“I can’t wait to meet her,” he says.
Then he lifts his wife’s hand and kisses her knuckles gently, simply for the joy of it.