Title: Realizations
Disclaimers: I don't own nothing….. I only play with these characters and make them say what I want to hear.
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She leaned heavily against the strut staring at him. "You're the Doctor?"
"Yup", he smiled back at her.
"You're really the Doctor?" Rose's face betraying her disbelief. "You don't look or sound or ….. Really?"
The Doctor turned to her, "Alien, remember," he said pointing to himself, "not human. It means that I do alien things Rose. But it's still me," He looked at her intently, "your Doctor." "Do you remember Rose …. .do you remember what you said to me?"
Rose stood very still for a moment, blinking. "I get it …. Alien…. I just forget sometimes and then you do something so…."
"Alien?"
"Yeah," she agreed off handedly, "then you do something so alien and it all comes rushing back that you're not human and ….. I just got used to the ears," her voice complaining and petulant, her brow furrowed.
"I'm good now. I think… " Rose shook her head slightly, then winced. "I get it, you regenerate, you cheat death. You get to maintain yourself in the time line of the universe." Her arms were waving a bit and her voice was a bit sharpish. She stopped for a moment, her head tilted sideways, her eyes questioning, "how often do you regenerate?"
"A Time Lord gets 13 lives,"
"More than a cat then." She interjected wryly.
"Yeah, more than a cat. This would be regeneration 10." Saying it made him stop suddenly. "I have 3 left." The sudden realization of his mortality hit him. Standing at the TARDIS console he steadied himself. "13 seems like such a lot when you've got 10 lives left, now that I've only the 3…."
"Time seems a bit more precious now, eh Doctor?" Rose smirked. "Ooooooohhh my head. Every nerve in my brain feels like it's been burnt. I'm going to have a sleep Doctor. I need to adjust and get rid of this pain."
Rose pushed herself off the strut and steadied herself. "If you did all the work, why do I feel like hell? And why can't I remember anything after looking into the TARDIS?" Rose complained as she shuffled unsteadily towards the door that lead to the sleeping quarters. The walk seemed so long and she stopped in the doorway, resting her head against the cool of the TARDIS.
The Doctor looked after her. He too was a bit disoriented but the TARDIS needed co-ordinates before he could rest. He reached out to flip a toggle and hit the wrong one. The TARDIS lurched to one side.
"Oi….easy, some of us feel like death warmed over." Came a weak voice from the doorway.
The Doctor looked at her suddenly, alarmed at how weak she sounded. "Sorry, arms aren't as long as the last pair. New bodies take a bit of time to get used to you know."
Rose nodded slightly. Swirling images of Daleks turned to dust and surging, burning energy filled her mind, making her head ache more. She turned to continue to her room when she was brought up suddenly in the hall.
Her Doctor? What the bloody hell does that mean?
Confused and more exhausted with every breath Rose stumbled into her rooms. She crawled under the blankets and curled into a ball, holding herself. Sleep overtook her quickly and her last thought, before falling into exhausted blankness was "Jack!"
In the console room the Doctor sat heavily on a stair. "She doesn't remember. She doesn't remember killing them all. Perhaps that's a good thing." He was talking to the TARDIS and he knew she was listening. As if on cue the lights dimmed and the door out of the console room opened slowly.
"Bed eh old girl? You're right, I need to rest. Regeneration is a bit hard on the body. Especially at 900." Pushing himself up heavily he walked out of the console room towards his own quarters.
She was dreaming, dreaming of the heat and the swirling vortex of time that stared back at her. An abyss of forever beckoning her towards it, to step down into it to be consumed by it. She saw them, thousands of them in space, converging on the station and her Doctor, on his knees. "No, never on his knees, and never to fight this enemy again. They have caused too much suffering." In her dream Rose heard the voice say "my Doctor" and saw the Daleks turn to dust and felt the breath return to those who had died on the station. And then the burning, the incredible searing burning that was destroying her.
Rose woke up screaming. The pieces were falling into place, she, not the Doctor, had destroyed the Daleks. She had been their killer, their destroyer. But not her. The TARDIS had used her. Taken her form, overrode her and saved the Doctor and all of humanity.
"Rose, Rose, what's wrong?" The Doctor came into the room fear on his face and breathing hard from running.
Rose realized that she hadn't stopped screaming, her voice broken now. Choking back sobs and screams Rose blinked unfocusedly past the Doctor. Trying desperately to hone in on his voice to centre her. But it wasn't the Doctor's voice. Finally seeing him she blinked and took a deep breath, startled but remembering his dramatic transformation. She reached out to him, for his hand to hold.
"She did it…." Rose looked frantically at the Doctor. "You're her Doctor, she possessed me, took me over because I wanted to die with you rather than live without you. Because you had shown me this other way to live, this better way. To die trying. But it wasn't me…. I didn't kill them all." She was crying again, her face in his hands.
He sat down beside her and held her until the sobbing subsided. "It's not easy being the destroyer. The time vortex, the soul of the TARDIS, understood what you wanted. To stop the Daleks, to save humanity and …. To save me." His voice became softer until he was whispering in her ear, rocking her gently.
"You didn't understand what a Pandora's box you were opening. The vortex gave you a taste of me, of my life. To feel time pass, to see the beginning and the end in a loop. It gave you the power of time and space and humanity isn't meant for that. You started to burn Rose, you were being incinerated synapse by synapse and I couldn't let you die. For all that you were fantastic, frightening and magnificent you didn't understand and I couldn't let you die. I promised. So I took it from you, I absorbed the vortex and released her back. That was why you were burning, you couldn't let go. I absorbed it all and I ended up dying to save you, just as you would have died to save me. I had to, I had another life to live, but you only get this one." He held her face in front of his own, in his two hands. Wiping away the tears, "Besides what would I have told Jackie?"
Rose laughed. She hadn't meant to, it just slipped out of her. A snorting kind of a laugh, which made her laugh harder. Suddenly she remembered something. "You kissed me." She said simply.
"Yeah. To absorb the energy." He held her closer now, his face in her hair, still rocking slightly.
"Lucky you." She mumbled.
She felt so weak and so terrible. She remembered how she felt in Utah, when the Dalek died in the sunlight. How her DNA made him weak and longing for death. And how she felt responsible. "Strange how the single Dalek dying in Utah made me feel much worse than killing an entire species." She looked into his eyes
"One is an understandable number. Thousands, tens of thousands, millions, they are just numbers. But one…. One is easily understood." He stood up, tucking strands of hair behind her ear. "Hungry?"
"Yeah, but I need to be clean first. A shower then a meal." Extricating herself from the bedclothes that had become twisted in her nightmares she practically fell out of bed.
"Graceful." The Doctor slyly remarked.
"Hey…. Just saved the universe here, I think I've earned a bit of clumsiness." She retorted without looking at him. Instead she was hunting the floor for a reasonably clean towel.
"Right….. and being reborn, what does that get me?" He inquired.
She strode past him, sniffing the towel and picking up a change of clothes she stopped in the doorway. "Immortality of course" she smiled and walked through the door.
He sat down on the bed, uncomfortable at first but pulling out a pile of jumpers from under the covers. "So…. I'm yours am I?" He said to the TARDIS. "You're older than I am for pity sakes. A bit long in the tooth for crushes don't you think?" His tone was kidding and he smiled. "We are bound you and I. Through death and life and companions and friends and enemies and lost worlds. But old friend, regardless of all that, if you ever threaten Rose like that again, I will destroy you!" His voice was cold now, his face impassive.
He stood up and walked out of Rose's room. In the bathing room he could hear running water and he felt the steam as he walked past.
The door opened suddenly. "Doctor?"
He stopped, not turning around, his face still cold and his hands clenched. "Yes Rose." He answered softly.
"We need to pick up Jack. We can't just leave him." She piped through the crack in the door.
"Jack was killed by the Daleks Rose." The Doctor started to turn, ready again to comfort her.
"Ummmm about that…..not so much with the dead. That was the last thing that the TARDIS and Idid.We brought them all back. So we need to get him."
The door closed and the Doctor could hear Rose singing.
"Alright Rose, we'll get Jack." He answered to the blank doorway and he smiled.