jedi_of_urth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jedi_of_urth) wrote2010-03-27 09:01 pm
jedi_of_urth) wrote2010-03-27 09:01 pm
Entry tags:
Fic Revival Week, post 5.2
Title: To the Tune of Time (Chapter 2)
Author: jedi_of_urth
Characters/pairing: Rose, (Alt)Five, Mickey, Jake, Pete, (Alt)Nyssa, (Alt)Tegan, (Alt)Master. past Rose/Doctor shipping.
Rating: PG-13 ish
Disclaimer: Nope, still not mine
Spoilers: Doomsday in Rose-time, in Five-time it's a bit after Earthshock
Summary: Alternate universe with an alternate Doctor, but he's a lot different from the Doctor Rose knew.
I explained the rest of the stuff in Part 1
Chapter 2
“What, she didn’t tell you? She’s the Bad Wolf.” Rose froze, those words continued to follow her everywhere, but she didn’t know what he meant by that.
The whole group noticed her reaction to the words. The Doctor gave her that impossibly gentle stare. “I don’t know,” she told him, shaking her head.
“What’s the Bad Wolf?” Nyssa asked, looking between the Doctor and Rose.
“Red Riding Coat,” Tegan supplied, and Rose filed that away under strange idiosyncrasies of this universe. “It’s an old story, but that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’ll huff and puff and blow you down,” Rose threw at the Master, but she knew the threat wasn’t as weighty as it could have been. “What?” she asked off the other girls’ confused looks, “Three Little Pigs.” But the words Bad Wolf were still sending off alarm bells in her mind, she’d put it out of her mind after Bad Wolf Bay, it had nearly driven her mad for a couple weeks trying to work out the implications of that word choice and she hadn’t figured it out.
The Master snickered at her. “You think you’re so brave, and clever, but you’re a child and a poorly behaved one. But you’re going to listen to me, or I’ll bring you’re little Torchwood down.” He pulled a detonator out of his pocket with his hand not holding the gun.
Rose bit her lip as she cast a glance over at the Doctor, wondering if he had a plan for getting out of the. He wasn’t spewing random gibberish so she had a hard time guessing what he was thinking. She was about to consider the old standby plan of get yourself captured, figure out what they want, and then work out a daring escape, when the phone she still had in her hand rang loudly. She used the moment of shock at the unexpected noise to throw the phone at the dark robed Time Lord, causing him to have to sidestep the flying object.
She barreled towards him, the Doctor making the same quick leap into action so he was still by her side. Behind them Nyssa screamed and Tegan gasped as the Master let off a shot that missed the Doctor by only a couple centimeters, but before he could take better aim they were on him, Rose wrestled the detonator from his hand as the gun once again went flying away as the Doctor pinned him.
The Master still managed to laugh that sadistic laugh of his as the Doctor and Rose exchanged glances over his prone form. “Nyssa, Tegan, go see if you can find anything that looks like his TARDIS,” the Doctor told his companions. But Rose was once again finding herself captivated by his eyes; for all he had just faced down death at the hands of someone that was clearly an enemy of his, and now was in a position of dominance over said person, there was no anger in his eyes, no burning rage, not even any fear at the base of his actions. He wasn’t the Oncoming Storm, she wasn’t sure he ever could be.
“Rose?” Mickey’s voice echoed through the halls. “Rose, where are you?”
“Over here,” she called back, and within a minute the young man appeared around a corner and continued towards them.
“Who’s your friend?” he asked.
Rose looked at the Doctor and he met her eyes, and there was almost the silent communication she’d known with her Doctor, even though this one could have no idea how awkward this was about to get. “Mickey, we’re going to need to take the Master here into custody,” she said indicating the prone man on the ground before directing attention to Doctor. “And as far as this universe is concerned, this is the Doctor.”
Mickey’s bug eyed expression at that news may have had nothing on Rose’s giggling breakdown earlier that night, but it was certainly noteworthy. He opened and closed his mouth a few times before managing, “But not yours I take it?”
She shook her head and they both missed the Doctor’s silent shocked mouthing of ‘Yours?’ The Master may not have seen it, but he suspected it and chuckled, he would certainly keep that idea tucked away.
Pete Tyler stared across his desk as Rose and the Doctor explained what had happened during the early hours of the morning. Accepting that the man was the Doctor had taken some doing, although it made a certain kind of sense that there was a version of the Doctor in Pete’s reality, he’d only met the one from the other world and that man had both looked different and given Pete a very different impression of who he was. Strangely enough, Rose and this Doctor seemed to have quickly found a rhythm of finishing each other’s thoughts on the story.
The Doctor had quickly taken to referring to the other Doctor as Rose’s, it just seemed easier since everyone else did, but the exact nature of her relationship with her Doctor was on the list of things he needed to ask. He got some of his answers when she was explaining to Pete why the Master had come after her she eventually had to explain to Bad Wolf reference.
“It’s hard to explain, I don’t exactly remember most of it, but he’s probably referring to…” she trailed off for a moment and looked at the Doctor, he wasn’t going to like this story. “Well, when I looked into the heart of the TARDIS as a way of communicating with her, and then I used the power to destroy the Daleks. I don’t really know how…” she trailed off again as the Doctor was staring at her in shock and Pete looked on in confusion. “It was…complicated,” she faltered. “Anyway, I’m not the Bad Wolf now.”
There was silence for a moment before Pete spoke. “But Rose, you did say after-” She shot him a pleading look to not bring Norway up right now.
“What?” the Doctor asked, not letting the topic slip away.
Rose looked down and bit her lip. “Just because the words ‘Bad Wolf’ have shown up here doesn’t mean I’m still the Bad Wolf,” she said, but her thoughts were drifting away.
The Doctor was very confused, but it was becoming clear that Rose probably was what his rival was after here, if for no other reason than she’d been capable of holding the power of the Time Vortex and survived. “This is fascinating. No wonder the Master’s after you.”
“Great,” Rose muttered.
“But how would he know?” Pete asked, which drew both their attentions. “I’m just saying, that it no one knew about this then how did he find out?”
“I have an idea about that,” the Doctor said quickly. “Mr. Tyler, if you wouldn’t mind me borrowing your daughter for a while, I think I could get all the answers you want.” Pete nodded, something in the Doctor’s tone told him the other man wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he knew Rose wouldn’t care what he said. “Oh and it you could ask Mr. Smith to have Nyssa and Tegan meet me back at the TARDIS.,” he added as he started to leave the room.
Rose looked between the Doctor and Pete for a moment and shrugged. “I guess he can be a bit rude sometimes too. You’ll let me know when they find out if the Master took anything else right?” Pete nodded again and Rose left the room after the Doctor.
Pete called Mickey to pass along the Doctor’s message, and couldn’t help but wonder if he should tell Jackie that Rose had left with the Doctor, but decided he’d wait and hope it really was only a short time she was gone.
Rose caught up with the Doctor waiting for the lift. “So what are we doing?” she asked.
He studied her briefly with a sideways glance, but she wasn’t looking at him. In fact, though her eyes were focused on the display for how close the lift was, he could see that her thoughts were still occupied elsewhere. The very human urge to know what his alternate self was like was hard to resist but he did. At least for the moment, he’d find out soon enough he was sure. “Just some tests to run,” he said facing forward himself as her attention turned towards him. Why did it feel as though she could see through him but he couldn’t even be sure what she was seeing?
The ride down the many floors between them and the TARDIS was one of awkward silence, and the fact that the Doctor was less than certain why it was awkward only make it more so. He felt the highly unusual urge to reach out and take her hand, instinct telling him that was what she wanted him to do, but he couldn’t. “I’m not him,” he told her quietly after several long moments.
The breath she drew was unsteady. “I know,” she said with a slight nod. She blinked rapidly still trying desperately not to cry. She didn’t want to look at him, she knew he wasn’t her Doctor, there wouldn’t be love in his eyes, he didn’t even know her any better than she knew him. It wasn’t like when he’d regenerated and it had still been him looking out at her from a new set of eyes, there was so much different about this Doctor and so much beyond his looks, but somehow she kept expecting to turn and see him suddenly there somehow.
She folded her arms across her chest as they exited the lift a few more long moments later, as if she was trying to hold herself together when she couldn’t reach out and find the comfort of his hands that would not be the ones she wanted anyway. He had companions of his own, no doubt better suited for who he was while she was accustomed to a man who was lost and alone and needed her in a way she already understood this man couldn’t. And she was relieved for that, this Doctor shouldn’t have to understand what his counterpart lived with.
She stopped suddenly as the thought occurred to her and looked at his lean form as he turned back to her after a couple steps. “What?” he asked, again unsettled by the way she studied him.
“What regeneration are you?” she blurted out.
“Forth regeneration,” he said, and he had a nagging feeling where she was going with this when her expression suddenly turned from introspective to externally troubled.
“No,” she gasped slightly. “That is not good. That makes you version five, I knew nine and ten, he told me so. And that means…” She trailed off and looked away, she didn’t want to say what she was thinking and couldn’t look at his innocent face and feel anything but sorrow for him.
“You think he was me?” he asked. “Any particular reasons you think that?”
“You don’t understand,” she said and forced herself to look him in the eye again. “I really hope you’re not.” She tried to make him understand just how much she hoped that. She couldn’t be sure if it would be better or worse for her Doctor to know that in another universe things had turned out differently, but she knew it wouldn’t make him feel better to know they had turned out the same; there was no way anyone, particularly him, could wish that on someone else.
The Doctor looked at her and she looked at him hard. He remembered what she’d said about her Doctor being the last of his kind, that she said she had looked into the heart of the TARDIS, the way she talked about him; maybe there was a good reason he was considered “hers” and he had an inkling why this girl could appeal to him in other circumstances. Finally he nodded, “I hope so too.” And finally he extended a hand to her and waited for her to take it, and when her fingers slid around his and she moved to stand at his side, he knew it would be easy for her to belong there, but she never truly would because she already belonged somewhere else.
He started adding calculations for a trip through to her world to his list of things to work on.
“Out of tune with the universe,” that was how the Doctor had described it. And the Master was more in tune with out of place things in the universe than the rest of the Time Lords had noticed her presence before anyone else. It wasn’t the background radiation from the Void that did it, or even the energy signature of someone who had traveled through time, it was the Vortex energy that had seeped into her cells when she had looked into the heart of the TARDIS.
“But,” she said once he’d finished and the information had taken a while to sink it, “that still doesn’t explain what he wanted with me.”
“Just curiosity I suspect,” the Doctor said. Rose studied him from the back as Nyssa helped him pack away some of his equipment, but Rose was far from sure he was telling the truth.
“You’re sure?” she asked slowly. She was never satisfied when the Doctor tried to protect her, and this one protecting her from the truth was no different.
Tegan nodded with her. “You said he was making something.”
“That’s right , he did,” Rose agreed smiling at the older woman, glad she wasn’t the only one that thought the Doctor was being a bit dodgy.
“Well I suppose we’d better ask him,” the Doctor said, pushing the last of the equipment back into the cupboard. “I suspect Mr. Tyler would let us talk to the Master.”
The Doctor was halfway out the door before Rose realized he was leaving the room so quickly. He certainly worked on his own clock now, and she wasn’t sure if that was a difference between the Doctors or if she was just out of practice with knowing the direction he was heading. Or out of tune, she thought ruefully.
When they made it back to the consol room they found Mickey and Jake pacing frantically but they looked up quickly when the other group entered. They quickly explained that the Master had escaped and they knew his TARDIS had taken off, and the only other thing they had found missing was half a dozen Void buttons, and of course it turned out Rose’s phone wasn’t working and they hadn’t had any idea how to find her inside the TARDIS.
“But the Void buttons don’t do anything,” Rose pointed out, “I know that the Void buttons don’t do anything.”
“What are Void buttons exactly?” Tegan asked.
“They allowed people to hop between this world and my universe,” Rose explained quickly. “But once the breach was sealed they didn’t work anymore. Could the Master be trying to open another breach?” She turned from Mickey to the Doctor who was gaping at her. “But why?”
“A universe without Time Lords,” Mickey observed, and they all spun and gaped at him for making the leap. “I mean you say the rest of them are after him here, he’d be free there.”
“But they could follow him between worlds right?” Nyssa pointed out.
The Doctor shook his head slightly. “If he had succeeded at capturing Rose earlier it would have been like searching for a needle in a haystack, a small needle in a large haystack at that. And the Council wouldn’t have organized a full search of the extent needed. By taking her he would be able to prevent us from finding the right universe after he’d gone.”
“What about Jackie and me? Of the records of the Cyberman war crossing dimensions?”
“Cybermen?” Tegan gasped. “There were Cybermen on Earth?”
“Of course, where’ve you been?” Jake asked.
“Jake they’re not from this time,” Rose reminded him, he’d been working with the crew looking for the Master’s explosives and hadn’t spent time around Nyssa and Tegan before. “Or this planet,” she added indicating Nyssa, “right?” The younger girl nodded.
“Could we focus here?” the Doctor called the attention of the other five people in the room, though he himself moved to the consol and just seemed to want them quiet. “Now he may still be going through with it, so I need to find were there’d be a weak point between universes.”
“I’d have thought Torchwood would be the center of it,” Rose said. “This is where most of it happened before and it was all controlled from the other Torchwood.”
“It would have to be somewhere out of the way,” the Doctor said.
“Well if it’s not here, maybe…” she trailed off and looked at Mickey.
He nodded in understanding and agreement. “Try Norway, a place called Dalig Ulv Stranden.”
The Doctor looked up, surprise written on his face. “Bad Wolf Bay?”
They nodded, but Rose explained, slowly and deliberately. “It was the last crack between universes, and it’s very out of the way.” Mickey crossed the rather small consol room and slid an arm around her shoulders comfortingly.
“What happened?” Nyssa asked compassionately laying a hand on her other arm.
She sighed and wiped at her still dry face before answering. “It was where we said goodbye,” she explained. The Doctor’s hand stilled over the controls for a moment as a shadow of surprise drifted over his face, but then it was gone.
“But the Master called Rose the Bad Wolf and now we’re going to Bad Wolf Bay,” Tegan reminded them when there was no more explanation offered. “And, no offence, but being the Bad Wolf can’t be a good thing. Sounds like it would be…bad.”
“That’s what we thought,” Rose said with a nod. “Until it turned out that it was…the way back.” She stumbled over the last few words and Mickey squeezed her a bit tighter, he no doubt knew what she was thinking.
The time rotor began to move and Rose and Mickey both instinctively braced themselves in preparation for erratic travel motion. But it was only Rose that staggered as they entered the vortex, the flight itself smooth but it unsettled her and she was glad Mickey had a hold on her. “Sorry,” the Doctor said, he would have moved to her side but Mickey and Nyssa already supported her, “side effect of being out of tune with the universe. Are you alright now?”
“Yeah,” she said with a nod, but her head still hurt a bit. “Could have done with a warning.” She caught her breath for a moment which gave her time to think. “Also, how much damage is he going to do if he does rip open the universe?”
“A lot,” was all the Doctor said as the rotor wound down, their short trip ending already.
“How much is a lot?” Jake demanded.
“A lot,” the Doctor repeated.
“What, more climate change? Drilling a hole through the Earth? What?” he insisted.
“If he says a lot, he probably means the end of the world,” Tegan answered.
“Oh he does that here too?” Rose scoffed. “Is he still Mister, exactly a bit, ish?” That got an honest smile from Tegan directed at Rose, who could guess that meant it was common facet across dimensions.
She also noted that this Doctor had the beginnings of a good pout, his innocence did allow him to pull that off passably. “Focus,” he reminded them again.
“Right, end of the world,” she said with a nod. “So are we there?”
The Doctor hit a switch on the consol and on the wall a panel lowered revealing the view screen. They all stared as the viewed was revealed by the slowly lowering screen to show that outside was the desolate, windswept beach of Dalig Ulv Stranden and no sign of anything else.
The group stood, still staring at the screen, with a few glances at each other for several long moments. “Well, that wasn’t what I expected,” Rose admitted dryly.
“Bit anticlimactic,” Jake added.
“I think it was about here,” Rose offered standing still in the spot she thought she had stood a year earlier when she’d last seen her Doctor. The blond Doctor was patrolling nearby trying to sense if there was still a weak point between universes here, while Jake, Nyssa, and Tegan were searching to find any sign if the Master had been here.
“No, you were further over there,” Mickey offered pointing further down the beach past where the blond Doctor had recently walked.
“No, I think I’d remember,” Rose reminded him.
Mickey huffed. “Not likely, mess you were,” he teased compassionately. “I on the other hand was just watching so I remember.”
She glared at him half seriously and he looked apologetic for his teasing. She sighed, her breath misting around her as she did, and pulled her leather coat tighter around herself in an effort to do something against the cold. Really, she knew he wasn’t being mean, she wasn’t even really upset by his teasing, but being here was not easy for her; but after a day like this, it almost shouldn’t be a surprise.
Mickey looked at her intently as she focused on kicking a small hole in the ground where she thought it should be. “You doing okay?” he asked seriously; she knew he’d been wanting to ask her that ever since she’d told him the blond stranger was this universe’s Doctor.
She sighed again and dug the hole a little deeper by digging her toe in. “I’d be better if we had any idea where the Master is so we could stop him,” she replied.
“Rose…” he started.
“Mickey right now we’ve got bigger problems. And I know he’s not the Doctor, not the one I know, but-”
“And I’m not Rickey and you’re parents haven’t actually been married for 25 years no matter what people think,” he pointed out.
“Is that what this is about? You think I’m going to…Mickey it’s not going to be like that,” she said in a hushed voice.
He shook his head though she could barely see it, staring at the ground in front of her feet. “I just worry about you,” he said, trying to lighten the mood a bit with his tone though he was being serious. “Don’t want you getting hurt.”
The Doctor stopped several meters in front of Rose, though several degrees off of the direction Mickey had pointed in. The wind whipped around them as he stood and considered a moment, then took one step closer to Rose and stopped again. “That it?” she said loudly over the wind.
“I believe so,” he said back.
Rose cautiously stepped towards him, not sure, what if anything she would notice. She fought off imagining it was a another day months ago, a day much like this, maybe a bit less sunny, and stepping over there somehow his features would become those she remembered so well, that she’d step back into that moment and they would have more time.
He held up a hand to stop her before she, and Mickey just behind her, reached him. “Hold on. The fracture must have been weakened, we should take some readings before he disturb it further.”
“The Master?” Rose asked.
“I would suspect so, yes,”
“How? Why?”
He gave an exaggerated shrug and grinned at her. “We’re not going to find out standing here. Come on,” he said, turning to head back to the ship.
“Should we get the others?” Rose called after him. He gestured them off and Rose and Mickey exchanged glances for a few seconds before nodding. He moved off at a quick jog down the beach to find the rest of the crew and Rose went after the Doctor.
She caught up with him by jogging a few steps. “We could call Torchwood,” she told him. “There’s still some equipment for monitoring rifts.”
He shot her a sideways glance, but didn’t answer until they reached the TARDIS. “How did Torchwood gain the technology in the first place?” he asked harshly barely looking at her as he started working controls again.
She flinched, she probably should have expected the question at some point, not that she had anything to do with the development, but his snapped question wasn’t one she wanted to answer. “No one exactly knows, someone hacked into the Cybermen programming and next thing anyone knows they’ve vanished off the face of the planet. Torchwood was able to decipher enough of it to engineer some functional equipment to follow after them. I have a theory if you want to hear it. Although it’s not exactly mine, I helped with the last bit after I got here.”
He nodded without looking at her even as she moved to lean back against the consol near him. “I think someone started Lumic on creating the Cybermen in the first place as part of creating soldiers for some other army and their disappearing act was supposed to be them reporting for duty, but because of the Daleks Void ship they got sucked into my universe rather than wherever they were supposed to go.”
He kept poking at the controls giving her another chance to study him. He was being moody; yes, pouting came just as easily to him in this life as it did on her Doctor. But rather than filling the silence with chatter he was content to busy himself working out the puzzle before them. She didn’t think he was actually upset, or disappointed in the human race, or likely to launch into a rant about how small and stupid everyone else was but she wasn’t sure, she hadn’t worked out all his tells.
“Perhaps this might support your theory,” he said and the view outside on the screen was replaced with an image of a web of lines. They both moved around the consol to study the display more closely. He made several “Hmmm” noises as they looked it over.
“What do you think it is?” she finally asked.
He looked happy that she finally asked. “I was scanning slightly through the rift to where it goes, and this is what it is.” He pointed out in front of them slightly tracing some of the lines, “Fractures along the surface or the world, your Doctor did a good job of sealing it from breaching.”
“But this is way bigger than the Master wanting to break through the Void,” she said, coking her head so she was looking at him.
He turned and smiled at her as he brought his hand back down to his side. “You’re quite good at this you know?”
“Well I’ve got some experience,” she reminded him. And then she blushed slightly and turned her gaze off him a bit.
He looked like he wanted to ask her something but instead shook his head and moved back around the consol to poke at the controls some more. She sighed after a moment of awkward silence, “What is it?”
At this point she was sure he was just fidgeting with controls to avoid looking at her, a habit that was as familiar as it was endearing and frustrating on either of them. “I was considering asking if you might let your friends handle monitoring this end and travel with us for a while. Maybe just until we track down the Master, but I think you would fit in here.”
She was surprised by his question. Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, again, at him suggesting that, but managed not to make such a display of herself this time. She wanted to say yes, the realization of that also surprised her no small bit, but she couldn’t help the part of her that thought wanting to say yes was disloyal to the memory of her Doctor. And not fair to her mother, she remembered.
And still she wanted to say yes. “Well…” she started, not certain how she would finish. “I…maybe,” she finished lamely. He glanced up at her, a little hurt, a little amused. “It’s not that it’s not tempting,” she said in a rush, “it’s just I hadn’t thought about…this.”
‘This’ was something she hadn’t thought about, yes. She’d spent so much time the last year thinking about what she’d do if her Doctor ever found a way though the Void, imaging so many scenarios she couldn’t remember most of them. And she’d spent a good long time trying to figure out ways to get through on her own, a quest she’d been getting frustrated with lately as if continuously seemed impossible to do without damaging the world. ‘That’ her mother accepted Rose would choose first, ‘that’ was the life she dreamed about going back to. ‘This’ was a new idea, tempting and amazing, but not ‘that’ life.
He looked over at her again and started to open his mouth, but whatever he was planning to say didn’t happen, as all around them the whole world seemed to explode.
Author: jedi_of_urth
Characters/pairing: Rose, (Alt)Five, Mickey, Jake, Pete, (Alt)Nyssa, (Alt)Tegan, (Alt)Master. past Rose/Doctor shipping.
Rating: PG-13 ish
Disclaimer: Nope, still not mine
Spoilers: Doomsday in Rose-time, in Five-time it's a bit after Earthshock
Summary: Alternate universe with an alternate Doctor, but he's a lot different from the Doctor Rose knew.
I explained the rest of the stuff in Part 1
Chapter 2
“What, she didn’t tell you? She’s the Bad Wolf.” Rose froze, those words continued to follow her everywhere, but she didn’t know what he meant by that.
The whole group noticed her reaction to the words. The Doctor gave her that impossibly gentle stare. “I don’t know,” she told him, shaking her head.
“What’s the Bad Wolf?” Nyssa asked, looking between the Doctor and Rose.
“Red Riding Coat,” Tegan supplied, and Rose filed that away under strange idiosyncrasies of this universe. “It’s an old story, but that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’ll huff and puff and blow you down,” Rose threw at the Master, but she knew the threat wasn’t as weighty as it could have been. “What?” she asked off the other girls’ confused looks, “Three Little Pigs.” But the words Bad Wolf were still sending off alarm bells in her mind, she’d put it out of her mind after Bad Wolf Bay, it had nearly driven her mad for a couple weeks trying to work out the implications of that word choice and she hadn’t figured it out.
The Master snickered at her. “You think you’re so brave, and clever, but you’re a child and a poorly behaved one. But you’re going to listen to me, or I’ll bring you’re little Torchwood down.” He pulled a detonator out of his pocket with his hand not holding the gun.
Rose bit her lip as she cast a glance over at the Doctor, wondering if he had a plan for getting out of the. He wasn’t spewing random gibberish so she had a hard time guessing what he was thinking. She was about to consider the old standby plan of get yourself captured, figure out what they want, and then work out a daring escape, when the phone she still had in her hand rang loudly. She used the moment of shock at the unexpected noise to throw the phone at the dark robed Time Lord, causing him to have to sidestep the flying object.
She barreled towards him, the Doctor making the same quick leap into action so he was still by her side. Behind them Nyssa screamed and Tegan gasped as the Master let off a shot that missed the Doctor by only a couple centimeters, but before he could take better aim they were on him, Rose wrestled the detonator from his hand as the gun once again went flying away as the Doctor pinned him.
The Master still managed to laugh that sadistic laugh of his as the Doctor and Rose exchanged glances over his prone form. “Nyssa, Tegan, go see if you can find anything that looks like his TARDIS,” the Doctor told his companions. But Rose was once again finding herself captivated by his eyes; for all he had just faced down death at the hands of someone that was clearly an enemy of his, and now was in a position of dominance over said person, there was no anger in his eyes, no burning rage, not even any fear at the base of his actions. He wasn’t the Oncoming Storm, she wasn’t sure he ever could be.
“Rose?” Mickey’s voice echoed through the halls. “Rose, where are you?”
“Over here,” she called back, and within a minute the young man appeared around a corner and continued towards them.
“Who’s your friend?” he asked.
Rose looked at the Doctor and he met her eyes, and there was almost the silent communication she’d known with her Doctor, even though this one could have no idea how awkward this was about to get. “Mickey, we’re going to need to take the Master here into custody,” she said indicating the prone man on the ground before directing attention to Doctor. “And as far as this universe is concerned, this is the Doctor.”
Mickey’s bug eyed expression at that news may have had nothing on Rose’s giggling breakdown earlier that night, but it was certainly noteworthy. He opened and closed his mouth a few times before managing, “But not yours I take it?”
She shook her head and they both missed the Doctor’s silent shocked mouthing of ‘Yours?’ The Master may not have seen it, but he suspected it and chuckled, he would certainly keep that idea tucked away.
Pete Tyler stared across his desk as Rose and the Doctor explained what had happened during the early hours of the morning. Accepting that the man was the Doctor had taken some doing, although it made a certain kind of sense that there was a version of the Doctor in Pete’s reality, he’d only met the one from the other world and that man had both looked different and given Pete a very different impression of who he was. Strangely enough, Rose and this Doctor seemed to have quickly found a rhythm of finishing each other’s thoughts on the story.
The Doctor had quickly taken to referring to the other Doctor as Rose’s, it just seemed easier since everyone else did, but the exact nature of her relationship with her Doctor was on the list of things he needed to ask. He got some of his answers when she was explaining to Pete why the Master had come after her she eventually had to explain to Bad Wolf reference.
“It’s hard to explain, I don’t exactly remember most of it, but he’s probably referring to…” she trailed off for a moment and looked at the Doctor, he wasn’t going to like this story. “Well, when I looked into the heart of the TARDIS as a way of communicating with her, and then I used the power to destroy the Daleks. I don’t really know how…” she trailed off again as the Doctor was staring at her in shock and Pete looked on in confusion. “It was…complicated,” she faltered. “Anyway, I’m not the Bad Wolf now.”
There was silence for a moment before Pete spoke. “But Rose, you did say after-” She shot him a pleading look to not bring Norway up right now.
“What?” the Doctor asked, not letting the topic slip away.
Rose looked down and bit her lip. “Just because the words ‘Bad Wolf’ have shown up here doesn’t mean I’m still the Bad Wolf,” she said, but her thoughts were drifting away.
The Doctor was very confused, but it was becoming clear that Rose probably was what his rival was after here, if for no other reason than she’d been capable of holding the power of the Time Vortex and survived. “This is fascinating. No wonder the Master’s after you.”
“Great,” Rose muttered.
“But how would he know?” Pete asked, which drew both their attentions. “I’m just saying, that it no one knew about this then how did he find out?”
“I have an idea about that,” the Doctor said quickly. “Mr. Tyler, if you wouldn’t mind me borrowing your daughter for a while, I think I could get all the answers you want.” Pete nodded, something in the Doctor’s tone told him the other man wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he knew Rose wouldn’t care what he said. “Oh and it you could ask Mr. Smith to have Nyssa and Tegan meet me back at the TARDIS.,” he added as he started to leave the room.
Rose looked between the Doctor and Pete for a moment and shrugged. “I guess he can be a bit rude sometimes too. You’ll let me know when they find out if the Master took anything else right?” Pete nodded again and Rose left the room after the Doctor.
Pete called Mickey to pass along the Doctor’s message, and couldn’t help but wonder if he should tell Jackie that Rose had left with the Doctor, but decided he’d wait and hope it really was only a short time she was gone.
Rose caught up with the Doctor waiting for the lift. “So what are we doing?” she asked.
He studied her briefly with a sideways glance, but she wasn’t looking at him. In fact, though her eyes were focused on the display for how close the lift was, he could see that her thoughts were still occupied elsewhere. The very human urge to know what his alternate self was like was hard to resist but he did. At least for the moment, he’d find out soon enough he was sure. “Just some tests to run,” he said facing forward himself as her attention turned towards him. Why did it feel as though she could see through him but he couldn’t even be sure what she was seeing?
The ride down the many floors between them and the TARDIS was one of awkward silence, and the fact that the Doctor was less than certain why it was awkward only make it more so. He felt the highly unusual urge to reach out and take her hand, instinct telling him that was what she wanted him to do, but he couldn’t. “I’m not him,” he told her quietly after several long moments.
The breath she drew was unsteady. “I know,” she said with a slight nod. She blinked rapidly still trying desperately not to cry. She didn’t want to look at him, she knew he wasn’t her Doctor, there wouldn’t be love in his eyes, he didn’t even know her any better than she knew him. It wasn’t like when he’d regenerated and it had still been him looking out at her from a new set of eyes, there was so much different about this Doctor and so much beyond his looks, but somehow she kept expecting to turn and see him suddenly there somehow.
She folded her arms across her chest as they exited the lift a few more long moments later, as if she was trying to hold herself together when she couldn’t reach out and find the comfort of his hands that would not be the ones she wanted anyway. He had companions of his own, no doubt better suited for who he was while she was accustomed to a man who was lost and alone and needed her in a way she already understood this man couldn’t. And she was relieved for that, this Doctor shouldn’t have to understand what his counterpart lived with.
She stopped suddenly as the thought occurred to her and looked at his lean form as he turned back to her after a couple steps. “What?” he asked, again unsettled by the way she studied him.
“What regeneration are you?” she blurted out.
“Forth regeneration,” he said, and he had a nagging feeling where she was going with this when her expression suddenly turned from introspective to externally troubled.
“No,” she gasped slightly. “That is not good. That makes you version five, I knew nine and ten, he told me so. And that means…” She trailed off and looked away, she didn’t want to say what she was thinking and couldn’t look at his innocent face and feel anything but sorrow for him.
“You think he was me?” he asked. “Any particular reasons you think that?”
“You don’t understand,” she said and forced herself to look him in the eye again. “I really hope you’re not.” She tried to make him understand just how much she hoped that. She couldn’t be sure if it would be better or worse for her Doctor to know that in another universe things had turned out differently, but she knew it wouldn’t make him feel better to know they had turned out the same; there was no way anyone, particularly him, could wish that on someone else.
The Doctor looked at her and she looked at him hard. He remembered what she’d said about her Doctor being the last of his kind, that she said she had looked into the heart of the TARDIS, the way she talked about him; maybe there was a good reason he was considered “hers” and he had an inkling why this girl could appeal to him in other circumstances. Finally he nodded, “I hope so too.” And finally he extended a hand to her and waited for her to take it, and when her fingers slid around his and she moved to stand at his side, he knew it would be easy for her to belong there, but she never truly would because she already belonged somewhere else.
He started adding calculations for a trip through to her world to his list of things to work on.
“Out of tune with the universe,” that was how the Doctor had described it. And the Master was more in tune with out of place things in the universe than the rest of the Time Lords had noticed her presence before anyone else. It wasn’t the background radiation from the Void that did it, or even the energy signature of someone who had traveled through time, it was the Vortex energy that had seeped into her cells when she had looked into the heart of the TARDIS.
“But,” she said once he’d finished and the information had taken a while to sink it, “that still doesn’t explain what he wanted with me.”
“Just curiosity I suspect,” the Doctor said. Rose studied him from the back as Nyssa helped him pack away some of his equipment, but Rose was far from sure he was telling the truth.
“You’re sure?” she asked slowly. She was never satisfied when the Doctor tried to protect her, and this one protecting her from the truth was no different.
Tegan nodded with her. “You said he was making something.”
“That’s right , he did,” Rose agreed smiling at the older woman, glad she wasn’t the only one that thought the Doctor was being a bit dodgy.
“Well I suppose we’d better ask him,” the Doctor said, pushing the last of the equipment back into the cupboard. “I suspect Mr. Tyler would let us talk to the Master.”
The Doctor was halfway out the door before Rose realized he was leaving the room so quickly. He certainly worked on his own clock now, and she wasn’t sure if that was a difference between the Doctors or if she was just out of practice with knowing the direction he was heading. Or out of tune, she thought ruefully.
When they made it back to the consol room they found Mickey and Jake pacing frantically but they looked up quickly when the other group entered. They quickly explained that the Master had escaped and they knew his TARDIS had taken off, and the only other thing they had found missing was half a dozen Void buttons, and of course it turned out Rose’s phone wasn’t working and they hadn’t had any idea how to find her inside the TARDIS.
“But the Void buttons don’t do anything,” Rose pointed out, “I know that the Void buttons don’t do anything.”
“What are Void buttons exactly?” Tegan asked.
“They allowed people to hop between this world and my universe,” Rose explained quickly. “But once the breach was sealed they didn’t work anymore. Could the Master be trying to open another breach?” She turned from Mickey to the Doctor who was gaping at her. “But why?”
“A universe without Time Lords,” Mickey observed, and they all spun and gaped at him for making the leap. “I mean you say the rest of them are after him here, he’d be free there.”
“But they could follow him between worlds right?” Nyssa pointed out.
The Doctor shook his head slightly. “If he had succeeded at capturing Rose earlier it would have been like searching for a needle in a haystack, a small needle in a large haystack at that. And the Council wouldn’t have organized a full search of the extent needed. By taking her he would be able to prevent us from finding the right universe after he’d gone.”
“What about Jackie and me? Of the records of the Cyberman war crossing dimensions?”
“Cybermen?” Tegan gasped. “There were Cybermen on Earth?”
“Of course, where’ve you been?” Jake asked.
“Jake they’re not from this time,” Rose reminded him, he’d been working with the crew looking for the Master’s explosives and hadn’t spent time around Nyssa and Tegan before. “Or this planet,” she added indicating Nyssa, “right?” The younger girl nodded.
“Could we focus here?” the Doctor called the attention of the other five people in the room, though he himself moved to the consol and just seemed to want them quiet. “Now he may still be going through with it, so I need to find were there’d be a weak point between universes.”
“I’d have thought Torchwood would be the center of it,” Rose said. “This is where most of it happened before and it was all controlled from the other Torchwood.”
“It would have to be somewhere out of the way,” the Doctor said.
“Well if it’s not here, maybe…” she trailed off and looked at Mickey.
He nodded in understanding and agreement. “Try Norway, a place called Dalig Ulv Stranden.”
The Doctor looked up, surprise written on his face. “Bad Wolf Bay?”
They nodded, but Rose explained, slowly and deliberately. “It was the last crack between universes, and it’s very out of the way.” Mickey crossed the rather small consol room and slid an arm around her shoulders comfortingly.
“What happened?” Nyssa asked compassionately laying a hand on her other arm.
She sighed and wiped at her still dry face before answering. “It was where we said goodbye,” she explained. The Doctor’s hand stilled over the controls for a moment as a shadow of surprise drifted over his face, but then it was gone.
“But the Master called Rose the Bad Wolf and now we’re going to Bad Wolf Bay,” Tegan reminded them when there was no more explanation offered. “And, no offence, but being the Bad Wolf can’t be a good thing. Sounds like it would be…bad.”
“That’s what we thought,” Rose said with a nod. “Until it turned out that it was…the way back.” She stumbled over the last few words and Mickey squeezed her a bit tighter, he no doubt knew what she was thinking.
The time rotor began to move and Rose and Mickey both instinctively braced themselves in preparation for erratic travel motion. But it was only Rose that staggered as they entered the vortex, the flight itself smooth but it unsettled her and she was glad Mickey had a hold on her. “Sorry,” the Doctor said, he would have moved to her side but Mickey and Nyssa already supported her, “side effect of being out of tune with the universe. Are you alright now?”
“Yeah,” she said with a nod, but her head still hurt a bit. “Could have done with a warning.” She caught her breath for a moment which gave her time to think. “Also, how much damage is he going to do if he does rip open the universe?”
“A lot,” was all the Doctor said as the rotor wound down, their short trip ending already.
“How much is a lot?” Jake demanded.
“A lot,” the Doctor repeated.
“What, more climate change? Drilling a hole through the Earth? What?” he insisted.
“If he says a lot, he probably means the end of the world,” Tegan answered.
“Oh he does that here too?” Rose scoffed. “Is he still Mister, exactly a bit, ish?” That got an honest smile from Tegan directed at Rose, who could guess that meant it was common facet across dimensions.
She also noted that this Doctor had the beginnings of a good pout, his innocence did allow him to pull that off passably. “Focus,” he reminded them again.
“Right, end of the world,” she said with a nod. “So are we there?”
The Doctor hit a switch on the consol and on the wall a panel lowered revealing the view screen. They all stared as the viewed was revealed by the slowly lowering screen to show that outside was the desolate, windswept beach of Dalig Ulv Stranden and no sign of anything else.
The group stood, still staring at the screen, with a few glances at each other for several long moments. “Well, that wasn’t what I expected,” Rose admitted dryly.
“Bit anticlimactic,” Jake added.
“I think it was about here,” Rose offered standing still in the spot she thought she had stood a year earlier when she’d last seen her Doctor. The blond Doctor was patrolling nearby trying to sense if there was still a weak point between universes here, while Jake, Nyssa, and Tegan were searching to find any sign if the Master had been here.
“No, you were further over there,” Mickey offered pointing further down the beach past where the blond Doctor had recently walked.
“No, I think I’d remember,” Rose reminded him.
Mickey huffed. “Not likely, mess you were,” he teased compassionately. “I on the other hand was just watching so I remember.”
She glared at him half seriously and he looked apologetic for his teasing. She sighed, her breath misting around her as she did, and pulled her leather coat tighter around herself in an effort to do something against the cold. Really, she knew he wasn’t being mean, she wasn’t even really upset by his teasing, but being here was not easy for her; but after a day like this, it almost shouldn’t be a surprise.
Mickey looked at her intently as she focused on kicking a small hole in the ground where she thought it should be. “You doing okay?” he asked seriously; she knew he’d been wanting to ask her that ever since she’d told him the blond stranger was this universe’s Doctor.
She sighed again and dug the hole a little deeper by digging her toe in. “I’d be better if we had any idea where the Master is so we could stop him,” she replied.
“Rose…” he started.
“Mickey right now we’ve got bigger problems. And I know he’s not the Doctor, not the one I know, but-”
“And I’m not Rickey and you’re parents haven’t actually been married for 25 years no matter what people think,” he pointed out.
“Is that what this is about? You think I’m going to…Mickey it’s not going to be like that,” she said in a hushed voice.
He shook his head though she could barely see it, staring at the ground in front of her feet. “I just worry about you,” he said, trying to lighten the mood a bit with his tone though he was being serious. “Don’t want you getting hurt.”
The Doctor stopped several meters in front of Rose, though several degrees off of the direction Mickey had pointed in. The wind whipped around them as he stood and considered a moment, then took one step closer to Rose and stopped again. “That it?” she said loudly over the wind.
“I believe so,” he said back.
Rose cautiously stepped towards him, not sure, what if anything she would notice. She fought off imagining it was a another day months ago, a day much like this, maybe a bit less sunny, and stepping over there somehow his features would become those she remembered so well, that she’d step back into that moment and they would have more time.
He held up a hand to stop her before she, and Mickey just behind her, reached him. “Hold on. The fracture must have been weakened, we should take some readings before he disturb it further.”
“The Master?” Rose asked.
“I would suspect so, yes,”
“How? Why?”
He gave an exaggerated shrug and grinned at her. “We’re not going to find out standing here. Come on,” he said, turning to head back to the ship.
“Should we get the others?” Rose called after him. He gestured them off and Rose and Mickey exchanged glances for a few seconds before nodding. He moved off at a quick jog down the beach to find the rest of the crew and Rose went after the Doctor.
She caught up with him by jogging a few steps. “We could call Torchwood,” she told him. “There’s still some equipment for monitoring rifts.”
He shot her a sideways glance, but didn’t answer until they reached the TARDIS. “How did Torchwood gain the technology in the first place?” he asked harshly barely looking at her as he started working controls again.
She flinched, she probably should have expected the question at some point, not that she had anything to do with the development, but his snapped question wasn’t one she wanted to answer. “No one exactly knows, someone hacked into the Cybermen programming and next thing anyone knows they’ve vanished off the face of the planet. Torchwood was able to decipher enough of it to engineer some functional equipment to follow after them. I have a theory if you want to hear it. Although it’s not exactly mine, I helped with the last bit after I got here.”
He nodded without looking at her even as she moved to lean back against the consol near him. “I think someone started Lumic on creating the Cybermen in the first place as part of creating soldiers for some other army and their disappearing act was supposed to be them reporting for duty, but because of the Daleks Void ship they got sucked into my universe rather than wherever they were supposed to go.”
He kept poking at the controls giving her another chance to study him. He was being moody; yes, pouting came just as easily to him in this life as it did on her Doctor. But rather than filling the silence with chatter he was content to busy himself working out the puzzle before them. She didn’t think he was actually upset, or disappointed in the human race, or likely to launch into a rant about how small and stupid everyone else was but she wasn’t sure, she hadn’t worked out all his tells.
“Perhaps this might support your theory,” he said and the view outside on the screen was replaced with an image of a web of lines. They both moved around the consol to study the display more closely. He made several “Hmmm” noises as they looked it over.
“What do you think it is?” she finally asked.
He looked happy that she finally asked. “I was scanning slightly through the rift to where it goes, and this is what it is.” He pointed out in front of them slightly tracing some of the lines, “Fractures along the surface or the world, your Doctor did a good job of sealing it from breaching.”
“But this is way bigger than the Master wanting to break through the Void,” she said, coking her head so she was looking at him.
He turned and smiled at her as he brought his hand back down to his side. “You’re quite good at this you know?”
“Well I’ve got some experience,” she reminded him. And then she blushed slightly and turned her gaze off him a bit.
He looked like he wanted to ask her something but instead shook his head and moved back around the consol to poke at the controls some more. She sighed after a moment of awkward silence, “What is it?”
At this point she was sure he was just fidgeting with controls to avoid looking at her, a habit that was as familiar as it was endearing and frustrating on either of them. “I was considering asking if you might let your friends handle monitoring this end and travel with us for a while. Maybe just until we track down the Master, but I think you would fit in here.”
She was surprised by his question. Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, again, at him suggesting that, but managed not to make such a display of herself this time. She wanted to say yes, the realization of that also surprised her no small bit, but she couldn’t help the part of her that thought wanting to say yes was disloyal to the memory of her Doctor. And not fair to her mother, she remembered.
And still she wanted to say yes. “Well…” she started, not certain how she would finish. “I…maybe,” she finished lamely. He glanced up at her, a little hurt, a little amused. “It’s not that it’s not tempting,” she said in a rush, “it’s just I hadn’t thought about…this.”
‘This’ was something she hadn’t thought about, yes. She’d spent so much time the last year thinking about what she’d do if her Doctor ever found a way though the Void, imaging so many scenarios she couldn’t remember most of them. And she’d spent a good long time trying to figure out ways to get through on her own, a quest she’d been getting frustrated with lately as if continuously seemed impossible to do without damaging the world. ‘That’ her mother accepted Rose would choose first, ‘that’ was the life she dreamed about going back to. ‘This’ was a new idea, tempting and amazing, but not ‘that’ life.
He looked over at her again and started to open his mouth, but whatever he was planning to say didn’t happen, as all around them the whole world seemed to explode.