Fic Revival Week, post 4
Mar. 25th, 2010 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthSo now we're moving into the realm of unfinished fics for Fic Revival Week
Title: Untitled (some more)
Author: jedi_of_urth
Characters/pairing: Rose, Jackie, Alt-Nine, Alt-Jack
Rating: PG-13 or so
Disclaimer: Nope, still not mine
Spoilers: Doomsday
Summary: Rose would have thought she'd be happy to see them again...
Why I never posted it: It's a *long* way from done, and I don't even remember where I was going to go with it now so it's pretty unlikely it will get done (also haven't touched it in more than three years). It's a concept I remember being really excited about because it was pretty different than most stuff out there, but apparently not excited enough to actually finish it.
It was an ordinary day at Torchwood, and while that didn’t resemble anything ordinary to most of the world, it was always too ordinary for Rose Tyler. Sure her job involved cataloguing alien artifacts and figuring out how to reverse engineer alien technology, but her job involved a lot of sitting in her office, filing reports, and attending meetings during a standard work shift. When a year earlier she would have been as likely to walk (or more likely run for her life down) the streets of civilizations that had died before humankind learned to walk upright, as attending the Australian Ballet in the First Intergalactic Empire, how could even a daily life like this compare?
And at the end of the ordinary day, she returned from her ordinary job that most people would consider otherworldly, to her ordinary home, so much more posh than anything she known growing up in the Powell Estate, with her ordinary family, with parents that were on their second marriage to each other after both being widowed and a brother more than twenty years her junior. It sounded extraordinary, it had every right to be extraordinary, but to Rose it very seldom felt like it. Fantastic yes, better than any way she wouldn’t have imagined her life to go for the first nineteen years of it and it was still wonderful, and she was happy most of the time, but…there was always the ‘but’.
“Hello Rose,” a voice, a familiar voice said when she’d arrived home. “So glad you could join us, we need to talk.” Her day got a lot less ordinary when she came home to find the house held hostage by Captain Jack Harkness.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, more stunned than frightened at the sight of Jack pointing his blaster at her.
“You see, that’s just the thing doll, I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said, motioning her further into the sitting room where her dad was unconscious and mum was clutching James to her in fear. Rose made a quick decision not to wonder where the servants were right now. “I know, and I’m sure you do too, that you’re not supposed to be here. Now be a good girl and come with me.”
Rose was starting to worry, the reaction most people would have had first to finding a man holding their family captive with a sonic blaster, but it was more the fact that it was Jack doing it that frightened her. “Jack what are you doing?”
That got his and Jackie’s attention. “You know him?” Jackie demanded, still shaking.
“Long story,” Rose said.
“You’ll have to tell me sometime,” Jack said with a smile that lacked any of the charm Rose would have expected of him. “But you will be coming with me. Now I’d rather take you alive but I’m sure I can work it even if you’re not.”
Rose blinked several times, and she could feel her mouth gaping. Finally she pulled herself together enough to gape at him and say, “Jack you’re better than this, you can’t be that different.”
“Always hate to disappoint,” he said, and there was a flash of the charming Jack she’d known in his face as he did. “But I also hate to let something as useful as you get away.”
Not something ‘as lovely as you’, not anyone ‘as wonderful as you’, not someone ‘as worth dying for’, just something ‘useful’. Where was the honorable man she knew buried inside this Captain Jack? So many of the people she knew that existed in both universes were the same on so many levels, not always as the Jackie Tyler of this world proved, but a lot of the time. Shouldn’t Jack still be bigger on the inside?
“Well, Captain Harkness, we meet again,” said another familiar voice, one that Rose hadn’t heard in almost as long as Jack’s, the old Doctor with the Northern accent strode into the Tyler’s sitting room. But although Rose stared at him, and Jackie stared at him, the Doctor didn’t seem to pay them much mind, fixing Jack with a glare as bad as, if not worse than, any Jack had received even during the nano-gene plague.
“Stay back Doctor, I’m warning you,” Jack said pulling a second weapon so he could train one on Rose and one on Jackie. “You know I’ll shoot them.”
And the Doctor stopped. That as much as anything told Rose that this Jack would shoot them. For all the anger that had come out in 1941, he had never believed Jack a threat except by his incompetence. “Jack stop it,” she said, she was trying to be commanding but she felt her lip tremble in spite of herself.
“You’re getting sloppy Captain,” the Doctor said, still not seeming to pay the Tylers any mind. “It wasn’t hard to find you at all. What, you couldn’t be bothered to try your distraction techniques this time?”
“What’s he getting on about?” Jackie asked. “Is this how you know him Rose? Did you and the Doctor fight him before?”
That finally got the Doctor’s attention, although it was barely a moment’s glance before his eyes returned to Jack. “She one of yours Doctor?” Jack asked. “That could explain things.”
“I’ve never met her before in my life,” the Doctor said with a shrug. “She’s more your type isn’t she?” Rose told herself that she couldn’t afford to have her heart break right now, and barely succeeded at containing it. He didn’t know her, of course he didn’t, but it still hurt.
“You should answer her question Rose,” Jack said, still looking more predatory than charming. “What do you know about me and the Doctor here?”
“You want to know what I know, stop pointing a gun at me,” she said, nearly finding her command voice again. It wasn’t quite as strong as the one that could face down Daleks, but it was at least good for challenging authority.
Jack let off a shot that went within inches of Jackie’s ear. “You don’t get to set terms here, remember that or the next one doesn’t miss. And you can figure out then who I’ll hit.”
“And then what do you think I’m going to do?” the Doctor demanded. His voice was so angry and cold and hard that Rose almost shivered. He wasn’t so different from her Doctor, it had just been so long since she’d heard that particular tone of hatred and this voice that it was hard to take.
“You see Doctor, you just don’t scare me anymore,” Jack said with a shrug that didn’t actually move his guns at all. “How many times could you have killed me? How many times could you have shot me since you walked in the room if you carried a gun?”
“You’re not going to get away with this. Now if you don’t mind Miss Tyler, would you be willing to explain how you know Captain Harkenss here? Or why your mother mentioned me?”
Rose turned and caught the Doctor’s eyes and regretted it. Those ice blue eyes were so familiar, but they were also the eyes of a stranger. He didn’t shake the hard look he was directing at Jack when he looked at her. He didn’t hate her the way he hated Jack, but there was no kindness, no secret communication, no love, in his eyes when he looked at her. But even if he didn’t know her, didn’t share with her, she knew him, and his nod to encourage her story told her had a plan, she just wasn’t privy to what it was.
“Well,” she began, “Jack’s right, I don’t belong here.” Oh how she’d been trying to keep herself from phrasing it like that for the past year, because even though it was true that she didn’t belong, it always seemed bad form to tell people that. “I’m from another world, a different Earth, a different dimension. I’ve been stuck here,” another word she tried not to use outside of her own mind, “for a little over a year.” Thirteen months and twelve days, give or take a few hours and she could have said exactly if pressed.
“More fallout from the Cybermen,” the Doctor scowled, but Rose followed his glare at Jack and wondered at the reason for it.
Rose nodded. “The Cybermen came to my world. And then there were…” she paused and looked at the Doctor again. “And then there were the Daleks. And we had to suck them all into the Void. But I couldn’t hold on long enough and I ended up here.”
She looked up and met the Doctor’s eyes again and this time she saw compassion in them. He may not know her, but she wasn’t a stranger any more either. “And when you say we…”
She suspected he’d already figured out the answer, but she told him anyway. “You and me,” and she decided to leave off the fact that it was a different him, the next him in fact.
“Now ain’t that touching,” Jack drawled, probably intentionally spoiling the moment. “See Doctor, she is one of yours.”
“And seeing as this is your fault, you could leave her alone now,” the Doctor said
“Hey, I’m as sorry as anyone that the Cybs got their hands on that tech, but it’s not going to stop me now.”
But over his protest, Rose glared at Jack, feeling more horrified than she had in a long time. “Your fault? How is it your fault?”
“Tell her Captain. Tell her that the Cyber-war is a good site for self cleaning cons, but that one got away from you. Tell her that you’re the reason the Cybermen figured out how to cross dimensions. Tell her all that and I think I’ll watch as she rips your head off.”
But ripping his head off wasn’t Rose’s first instinct. She wanted it not to be true, she wanted to cry that it couldn’t be true. She waited a moment for him to deny it, even try to deny it, before she realized that she didn’t care if it had been another accident.
Then she gave into her second instinct and lunged at him intending to rip him limb from limb. He wasn’t Jack, wasn’t her dear trusted friend, wasn’t one of the men she’d loved most in any universe; he was the enemy, and wearing Jack’s face while being the reason she was stuck here just made it worse.
She grabbed the arm holding the gun trained on her and twisted it out of his grip. She punched him in the nose, smearing blood across his face that no longer seemed as handsome as it had in her own universe. He fired his other gun but fit the wall at least three meters from where Jackie sat. Jackie yelped unhelpfully.
As Rose was about to punch him again, Jack went limp before her and fell to the floor, the Doctor standing next to him with the sonic screwdriver pressed into Jack’s side. “There you go, that’ll settle you for a bit. We’ll have you back where you belong before you know it.”
“Is he…dead?” Jackie asked, staring between the other people in the room, unsure where to look.
“No, just stunned. Heavy sedative, should keep him out long enough for me to get him back where he belongs and where they can deal with him.” Then he looked up at Rose. “I’m so sorry.”
In spite of herself, and the tears she was already crying, Rose almost laughed and cried harder at the same time. “You always say that,” she said in a trembling voice.
“You never did say how you knew him,” the Doctor said slowly as he stood up.
“He traveled with us for a while.” If she’d been more able to notice things, she would have noticed that that surprised the Doctor a fair amount. “He was a good man even though he tried to hide it at first. He was…so much bigger on the inside than that.”
The Doctor laid a hand on her shoulder and, even as she threw her arms around him and cried into his chest, a part of her knew that even showing that much concern took a lot for him to show, but the rest of her didn’t care. He was real, he was here, and it didn’t matter that he looked like her Doctor but wasn’t, she needed to hold on to him right now.
The silence was awkward after they’d carried Jack back to the TARDIS. She knew she was expecting him to ask her to go with him, even if she hadn’t made up her mind what her answer would be. He knew she was expecting him to ask her to come with him but he wasn’t sure what he wanted her answer to be. Rose was also still trying to decide whether it was surprising that the TARDIS looked the same in this reality or not, and that because it did, it felt more like home than dad’s large house ever had.
Finally, into the silence Rose asked, “Doctor, back there; did you know where I came from? That I would react that way to finding out what Ja…he did?”
“Had my suspicions,” he said, still staring at the monitor and not looking at her.
“So you played me.”
“I suppose I did, yeah.” Silence again, but the confusion and hurt-feelings rolled off her as if they were spoken until he finally faced her, leaning back from the consol and crossing his arms. “What?”
Rose continued to frown as she had been. “Just thinking about all the people I’ve seen you do that sort of thing to. Guess you sort of did it to me too when you first asked me to came with you.”
He sighed inwardly that she had to bring that up. “Wasn’t me, but I guess I might as well ask what he did.”
She looked at him, her eyes still sad even as she smiled a little before launching into the story. “I’d just got done saving your life and the world, and you…he asked if I wanted to go with him,” she still tripped a little on the pronoun confusion. “I said no, I needed to check on my mum and all that. He just back in the TARDIS calm as you please and left, but I hadn’t gone five steps when it reappeared and he asked again. Finished the sales pitch more like it because he knew I hadn’t really wanted to say no the first time.”
The Doctor frowned. That was unusual, and certainly not the sort of thing he could picture himself doing. But then, if she had just saved his life as she said she had the other Doctor; and this time she had helped to stop the man that had been a thorn in his side for months, although that had been an obvious emotional reaction rather than a logical one.
“Look,” she said, deciding to just come out and ask, “do you want me to come with you?”
“Do you want to come with even though I’m not him?” he shot back. Before he asked, he hadn’t thought that was what was stopping him. He had plenty of other, better, reasons for hesitating; he wasn’t sure he wanted a companion anymore, he wasn’t sure the life he was left with fit with having a companion, and we wasn’t sure about her, for all she might have traveled with another him, he hadn’t seen her do those things yet.
She puzzled that for a moment before she nodded. “Yeah, I think I do. I think we should give it a try.
And that's all I got done, sorry if you wanted more
Title: Untitled (some more)
Author: jedi_of_urth
Characters/pairing: Rose, Jackie, Alt-Nine, Alt-Jack
Rating: PG-13 or so
Disclaimer: Nope, still not mine
Spoilers: Doomsday
Summary: Rose would have thought she'd be happy to see them again...
Why I never posted it: It's a *long* way from done, and I don't even remember where I was going to go with it now so it's pretty unlikely it will get done (also haven't touched it in more than three years). It's a concept I remember being really excited about because it was pretty different than most stuff out there, but apparently not excited enough to actually finish it.
It was an ordinary day at Torchwood, and while that didn’t resemble anything ordinary to most of the world, it was always too ordinary for Rose Tyler. Sure her job involved cataloguing alien artifacts and figuring out how to reverse engineer alien technology, but her job involved a lot of sitting in her office, filing reports, and attending meetings during a standard work shift. When a year earlier she would have been as likely to walk (or more likely run for her life down) the streets of civilizations that had died before humankind learned to walk upright, as attending the Australian Ballet in the First Intergalactic Empire, how could even a daily life like this compare?
And at the end of the ordinary day, she returned from her ordinary job that most people would consider otherworldly, to her ordinary home, so much more posh than anything she known growing up in the Powell Estate, with her ordinary family, with parents that were on their second marriage to each other after both being widowed and a brother more than twenty years her junior. It sounded extraordinary, it had every right to be extraordinary, but to Rose it very seldom felt like it. Fantastic yes, better than any way she wouldn’t have imagined her life to go for the first nineteen years of it and it was still wonderful, and she was happy most of the time, but…there was always the ‘but’.
“Hello Rose,” a voice, a familiar voice said when she’d arrived home. “So glad you could join us, we need to talk.” Her day got a lot less ordinary when she came home to find the house held hostage by Captain Jack Harkness.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, more stunned than frightened at the sight of Jack pointing his blaster at her.
“You see, that’s just the thing doll, I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said, motioning her further into the sitting room where her dad was unconscious and mum was clutching James to her in fear. Rose made a quick decision not to wonder where the servants were right now. “I know, and I’m sure you do too, that you’re not supposed to be here. Now be a good girl and come with me.”
Rose was starting to worry, the reaction most people would have had first to finding a man holding their family captive with a sonic blaster, but it was more the fact that it was Jack doing it that frightened her. “Jack what are you doing?”
That got his and Jackie’s attention. “You know him?” Jackie demanded, still shaking.
“Long story,” Rose said.
“You’ll have to tell me sometime,” Jack said with a smile that lacked any of the charm Rose would have expected of him. “But you will be coming with me. Now I’d rather take you alive but I’m sure I can work it even if you’re not.”
Rose blinked several times, and she could feel her mouth gaping. Finally she pulled herself together enough to gape at him and say, “Jack you’re better than this, you can’t be that different.”
“Always hate to disappoint,” he said, and there was a flash of the charming Jack she’d known in his face as he did. “But I also hate to let something as useful as you get away.”
Not something ‘as lovely as you’, not anyone ‘as wonderful as you’, not someone ‘as worth dying for’, just something ‘useful’. Where was the honorable man she knew buried inside this Captain Jack? So many of the people she knew that existed in both universes were the same on so many levels, not always as the Jackie Tyler of this world proved, but a lot of the time. Shouldn’t Jack still be bigger on the inside?
“Well, Captain Harkness, we meet again,” said another familiar voice, one that Rose hadn’t heard in almost as long as Jack’s, the old Doctor with the Northern accent strode into the Tyler’s sitting room. But although Rose stared at him, and Jackie stared at him, the Doctor didn’t seem to pay them much mind, fixing Jack with a glare as bad as, if not worse than, any Jack had received even during the nano-gene plague.
“Stay back Doctor, I’m warning you,” Jack said pulling a second weapon so he could train one on Rose and one on Jackie. “You know I’ll shoot them.”
And the Doctor stopped. That as much as anything told Rose that this Jack would shoot them. For all the anger that had come out in 1941, he had never believed Jack a threat except by his incompetence. “Jack stop it,” she said, she was trying to be commanding but she felt her lip tremble in spite of herself.
“You’re getting sloppy Captain,” the Doctor said, still not seeming to pay the Tylers any mind. “It wasn’t hard to find you at all. What, you couldn’t be bothered to try your distraction techniques this time?”
“What’s he getting on about?” Jackie asked. “Is this how you know him Rose? Did you and the Doctor fight him before?”
That finally got the Doctor’s attention, although it was barely a moment’s glance before his eyes returned to Jack. “She one of yours Doctor?” Jack asked. “That could explain things.”
“I’ve never met her before in my life,” the Doctor said with a shrug. “She’s more your type isn’t she?” Rose told herself that she couldn’t afford to have her heart break right now, and barely succeeded at containing it. He didn’t know her, of course he didn’t, but it still hurt.
“You should answer her question Rose,” Jack said, still looking more predatory than charming. “What do you know about me and the Doctor here?”
“You want to know what I know, stop pointing a gun at me,” she said, nearly finding her command voice again. It wasn’t quite as strong as the one that could face down Daleks, but it was at least good for challenging authority.
Jack let off a shot that went within inches of Jackie’s ear. “You don’t get to set terms here, remember that or the next one doesn’t miss. And you can figure out then who I’ll hit.”
“And then what do you think I’m going to do?” the Doctor demanded. His voice was so angry and cold and hard that Rose almost shivered. He wasn’t so different from her Doctor, it had just been so long since she’d heard that particular tone of hatred and this voice that it was hard to take.
“You see Doctor, you just don’t scare me anymore,” Jack said with a shrug that didn’t actually move his guns at all. “How many times could you have killed me? How many times could you have shot me since you walked in the room if you carried a gun?”
“You’re not going to get away with this. Now if you don’t mind Miss Tyler, would you be willing to explain how you know Captain Harkenss here? Or why your mother mentioned me?”
Rose turned and caught the Doctor’s eyes and regretted it. Those ice blue eyes were so familiar, but they were also the eyes of a stranger. He didn’t shake the hard look he was directing at Jack when he looked at her. He didn’t hate her the way he hated Jack, but there was no kindness, no secret communication, no love, in his eyes when he looked at her. But even if he didn’t know her, didn’t share with her, she knew him, and his nod to encourage her story told her had a plan, she just wasn’t privy to what it was.
“Well,” she began, “Jack’s right, I don’t belong here.” Oh how she’d been trying to keep herself from phrasing it like that for the past year, because even though it was true that she didn’t belong, it always seemed bad form to tell people that. “I’m from another world, a different Earth, a different dimension. I’ve been stuck here,” another word she tried not to use outside of her own mind, “for a little over a year.” Thirteen months and twelve days, give or take a few hours and she could have said exactly if pressed.
“More fallout from the Cybermen,” the Doctor scowled, but Rose followed his glare at Jack and wondered at the reason for it.
Rose nodded. “The Cybermen came to my world. And then there were…” she paused and looked at the Doctor again. “And then there were the Daleks. And we had to suck them all into the Void. But I couldn’t hold on long enough and I ended up here.”
She looked up and met the Doctor’s eyes again and this time she saw compassion in them. He may not know her, but she wasn’t a stranger any more either. “And when you say we…”
She suspected he’d already figured out the answer, but she told him anyway. “You and me,” and she decided to leave off the fact that it was a different him, the next him in fact.
“Now ain’t that touching,” Jack drawled, probably intentionally spoiling the moment. “See Doctor, she is one of yours.”
“And seeing as this is your fault, you could leave her alone now,” the Doctor said
“Hey, I’m as sorry as anyone that the Cybs got their hands on that tech, but it’s not going to stop me now.”
But over his protest, Rose glared at Jack, feeling more horrified than she had in a long time. “Your fault? How is it your fault?”
“Tell her Captain. Tell her that the Cyber-war is a good site for self cleaning cons, but that one got away from you. Tell her that you’re the reason the Cybermen figured out how to cross dimensions. Tell her all that and I think I’ll watch as she rips your head off.”
But ripping his head off wasn’t Rose’s first instinct. She wanted it not to be true, she wanted to cry that it couldn’t be true. She waited a moment for him to deny it, even try to deny it, before she realized that she didn’t care if it had been another accident.
Then she gave into her second instinct and lunged at him intending to rip him limb from limb. He wasn’t Jack, wasn’t her dear trusted friend, wasn’t one of the men she’d loved most in any universe; he was the enemy, and wearing Jack’s face while being the reason she was stuck here just made it worse.
She grabbed the arm holding the gun trained on her and twisted it out of his grip. She punched him in the nose, smearing blood across his face that no longer seemed as handsome as it had in her own universe. He fired his other gun but fit the wall at least three meters from where Jackie sat. Jackie yelped unhelpfully.
As Rose was about to punch him again, Jack went limp before her and fell to the floor, the Doctor standing next to him with the sonic screwdriver pressed into Jack’s side. “There you go, that’ll settle you for a bit. We’ll have you back where you belong before you know it.”
“Is he…dead?” Jackie asked, staring between the other people in the room, unsure where to look.
“No, just stunned. Heavy sedative, should keep him out long enough for me to get him back where he belongs and where they can deal with him.” Then he looked up at Rose. “I’m so sorry.”
In spite of herself, and the tears she was already crying, Rose almost laughed and cried harder at the same time. “You always say that,” she said in a trembling voice.
“You never did say how you knew him,” the Doctor said slowly as he stood up.
“He traveled with us for a while.” If she’d been more able to notice things, she would have noticed that that surprised the Doctor a fair amount. “He was a good man even though he tried to hide it at first. He was…so much bigger on the inside than that.”
The Doctor laid a hand on her shoulder and, even as she threw her arms around him and cried into his chest, a part of her knew that even showing that much concern took a lot for him to show, but the rest of her didn’t care. He was real, he was here, and it didn’t matter that he looked like her Doctor but wasn’t, she needed to hold on to him right now.
The silence was awkward after they’d carried Jack back to the TARDIS. She knew she was expecting him to ask her to go with him, even if she hadn’t made up her mind what her answer would be. He knew she was expecting him to ask her to come with him but he wasn’t sure what he wanted her answer to be. Rose was also still trying to decide whether it was surprising that the TARDIS looked the same in this reality or not, and that because it did, it felt more like home than dad’s large house ever had.
Finally, into the silence Rose asked, “Doctor, back there; did you know where I came from? That I would react that way to finding out what Ja…he did?”
“Had my suspicions,” he said, still staring at the monitor and not looking at her.
“So you played me.”
“I suppose I did, yeah.” Silence again, but the confusion and hurt-feelings rolled off her as if they were spoken until he finally faced her, leaning back from the consol and crossing his arms. “What?”
Rose continued to frown as she had been. “Just thinking about all the people I’ve seen you do that sort of thing to. Guess you sort of did it to me too when you first asked me to came with you.”
He sighed inwardly that she had to bring that up. “Wasn’t me, but I guess I might as well ask what he did.”
She looked at him, her eyes still sad even as she smiled a little before launching into the story. “I’d just got done saving your life and the world, and you…he asked if I wanted to go with him,” she still tripped a little on the pronoun confusion. “I said no, I needed to check on my mum and all that. He just back in the TARDIS calm as you please and left, but I hadn’t gone five steps when it reappeared and he asked again. Finished the sales pitch more like it because he knew I hadn’t really wanted to say no the first time.”
The Doctor frowned. That was unusual, and certainly not the sort of thing he could picture himself doing. But then, if she had just saved his life as she said she had the other Doctor; and this time she had helped to stop the man that had been a thorn in his side for months, although that had been an obvious emotional reaction rather than a logical one.
“Look,” she said, deciding to just come out and ask, “do you want me to come with you?”
“Do you want to come with even though I’m not him?” he shot back. Before he asked, he hadn’t thought that was what was stopping him. He had plenty of other, better, reasons for hesitating; he wasn’t sure he wanted a companion anymore, he wasn’t sure the life he was left with fit with having a companion, and we wasn’t sure about her, for all she might have traveled with another him, he hadn’t seen her do those things yet.
She puzzled that for a moment before she nodded. “Yeah, I think I do. I think we should give it a try.
And that's all I got done, sorry if you wanted more
