Title: Wash Away the Stain
Author: ninedaysaqueen
Beta: openedlocket
Disclaimer: No ownership of Doctor Who is claimed or implied. The Doctor, in all his glory, will always belong to the BBC.
Rating: PG-13/Teen – for violence
Genre: AU/Angst/Drama/Romance
Summary: AU with Dark!Rose. Increasingly drawn to a mysterious femme-fetal, the Doctor risks everything to get closer to her; but not even he understands all that is at stake.
Written for the then_theres_us ficathon; filling a prompt made by takethewords.
The first time he meets her, she leaves him bleeding in an alley.
With brick on either side and the human refuse of urban life surrounding him, he looses consciousness; hand stretched towards her retreating ankle.
She doesn't kill him.
-X-X-X-
She's from Earth, 20th century, and he's drawn to her like he's been to no human before. She reminds of the glass hills of Niles 4, carved by the wind then exploded into dust by the ion rich atmosphere. She was forged by a fire, and he's being pulled in like a moth to the flame.
She doesn't look surprised when he follows her.
"Where I come from, mate, we kill aliens. We don't eat chips with them."
He first saw her in Southern England, but she's from London by the sound of it. Accent rich with hints of Cockney.
"Well..." he drawls as he sits down across from her, chips in hand, "I was hoping you might make an exception. Just for me."
She sighs. "I really didn't stab you hard enough, did I?"
He answers with pseudo thoughtfulness. "Oh, no! Really, trust me, you did. I was just wondering..." he pops a chip in his mouth and chews pensively. "If you are, who I think you are, I was just a bit curious as to why you didn't kill me."
She smirks and leans backwards, the tips of her elbows perched on the booth seat behind her. She looks like a sprawled butterfly caught in the wind. "You know... I wasn't expecting any complaints, but now that you've gone and asked..." She tilts her weight forward on the table, very close to his face.
"You didn't look like you were worth the trouble."
She stands up to leave, and the small bell on the door chimes in her wake.
-X-X-X-
She's from Torchwood.
And judging from the way she carries herself and how deep the hardness runs in her eyes, she's was born into the agency. Founded at least a hundred years before her birth, Torchwood was the brainchild of five of the richest families in Europe. Established with the sole purpose of eliminating alien life on planet Earth.
And by eliminate, he means kill.
Slayers are usually old blood, and if she's from London, she's a Tyler—the only English family that didn't officially leave the capital after the Blitz in the 1940s.
He wonders where she lives, and if she's a natural blond. He tries not to think about how much blood is on her hands.
-X-X-X-
"What's your name?" He may be tempting fate, but he really doesn't care. He's spent a long time thinking ofothers. Others like him, protecting them from people who would do them harm.
People like her.
"We're not going on a date, Slim, so you really don't need to be asking personal questions. What ya want?" She doesn't stop walking, hands in pockets; her stride purposeful and fast. He runs to catch up.
"Oh, not much," he answers cryptically. "Just an idea of who you are."
She stops walking.
Carving out their own little world in the midst of heavy London traffic and transit commuters, she seems to actually look at him for the first time. He wonders what she sees.
"I don't know what your game is," she begins, her voice low, "but there are a lot of people out there who would like nothing more than to see you dead. People a lot worse than me."
"Who are you protecting?" The question may appear unprompted, but the narrowed glint in her eyes tells him he's hit a mark.
She laughs, voice void of humor. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you." She cuffs him lightly on the shoulder. "Alien boy."
"Oi!" he yells after her retreating form.
-X-X-X-
There's been muck bubbling under that surface of London for awhile now, and he's been drawing attention to himself, like a lightening rod attracts a lethal electric shock. He may end up dead before he's done, but that part never really mattered. Not when one is taking a professional risk.
Relatively speaking.
"We need to talk."
He's fairly certain he'd locked that door after returning from Board meetings, but who was he to stop her from breaking into his home? Well, his borrowed home.
"Do we?" He doesn't even look up from the bits of wire he's soldering in one place to some other bits of wire in another.
"You're in danger. And I can't hold them off any longer."
"Oh, am I?" he answers, uninterested. "From someone other than you this time?"
She groans in frustration, peeking through the blinds to the street outside. "You have to listen to me." she entreats. "You need my help."
"I don't even know your name."
She leaves the window and quickly approaches to the table he's working at. Her eyes are wide, and he's not even startled when she slams her fists down in front of him.
"I don't know your name, Doctor, and you don't know mine either; but if you've ever trusted anyone, you have to believe me now."
There's a gleam in her eyes he's never seen before, and he has a vague, strange notion that he's the one who put it there.
He peers at her for moment then breaks into a manic grin. "Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly."
She smiles back.
"Let me get my coat. The pockets are bigger on the inside!"
-X-X-X-
They run through the street into the night, avoiding high beam lamps and heavy traffic.
They hears shouts in the distance.
"Friends of yours?" he asks, mildly.
She laughs. "Not anymore."
He breaks the seal on a manhole that leads to Torchwood HQ's underground sewers. He's not quite sure why he agreed to infiltrate the lion's den with a spur of the moment plan and the bits and bobs he happened to have in his pockets, but then again, he has no idea why it feels so right to trust a woman who won't even tell him her name.
"Ready?" he asks, devilishly.
"Ready as I'll ever be." She goes first, climbing down the metal ladder and landing soundlessly in the shallow rain water.
"You're certain they don't have motion censors down here?" he questions.
"They did, but I disabled them this morning. Security doesn't check all the out-of-building censors very often." She shrugs, "Not unless they've been damaged."
"Ah..." he comments and shines his torchlight over the curved walls of the old sewer. The bricks are water weary and large pieces have broken off or crumbled into dust. It's a dark, eery void of a place, and he tries to fill it with conversation.
"You from one of the old families, I assume? Well, with access like that to the security system you must have worked yourself up pretty high?" He tries to sound impressed.
"Don't ask questions, Doctor. It's best if you don't know."
Her crypticness annoys him. "Why? What's wrong with questions? I happen to like them very much, myself. Right question, right time, right place can save millions of lives. Nothing more powerful than knowledge."
"Exactly, Doctor." She shines her torch in his eyes, and he flinches from the light. "That's why I can't tell you."
She continues to slosh through the water.
He follows behind.
-X-X-X-
About a half-mile later, they come to an exit, gloriously bright and promisingly dry. Breaking the seal as he did before, his companion insists on going first. Suspecting nothing, he lets her.
"Doctor, come on up now. It's safe." He sees her motion from the surface and blindly takes the hand she offers.
He barely has his feet out of the hole when the flood lights burst to life, blinding him for just a moment and making it painfully obvious that the "deserted basement" full of all the alien do-hickey and whatchamacallits is not as deserted as some may have led him to believe.
He's been set up.
A smartly dressed women, fake smile revealing very sharp teeth, approaches him from across the warehouse-like room, heels clicking on the concrete floor. "Doctor, welcome to Torchwood. We've been expecting you all evening." Yvonne Hartman, the director of Torchwood. He'd recognize her voice anywhere.
"Well, I can see that," he answers sarcastically, straightening to his full height. "Honestly, I was expecting tea and biscuits." He tries to catch Agent Tyler's eyes; she looks away and stays behind him, out of his site.
"Oh, I'm afraid we did not have such time to prepare, Doctor." She brings her hands together in mock sympathy, while motioning her armed guards forward. "Miss Tyler only told us of your imminent arrival this morning. And I must say..." His blank stare meets Director Hartman's condescending smile, and their eyes lock in a heated glare. "I was surprised that you fell for such a simple trap."
He doesn't have an answer to that.
"Put him in the stasis lock." She commands turning away from the Doctor. "We'll put him on trial and execute him later."
Time to act.
"I suppose if I started to laugh at how hilarious this situation is, you'd only chalk it up to a sudden case of hysterics?"
Director Hartman answers, exasperated, "Your manic theatrics are well documented in the Torchwood archives, thank you Doctor. Now if you could please surrender quietly and-"
He interrupts, "Ah, but Director Yvonne Hartman, you must not know me as well as you think; because if there's one thing I never do..." he pauses for effect, "It's walk into a trap unprepared."
Pulling a device roughly to size of PDA from his trans-dimensional pockets and holding it in front of him, the Doctor turns to grab his companion's hand, tugging her closer to his side.
"Because you see, Director Yvonne Hartman, you and your people got your hands on some very dangerous Sontaran technology approximately ten months ago-a honing beacon with an encrypted algorithm that calculates the GPS location of me and my alien friends through applied relay logic using information uploaded from the Torchwood archives. Your archives."
Director Hartman was amused enough to indulge him. "I hardly see how it matters, Doctor, as I could have you shot this very instant." The Torchwood guards surrounding her attempt to cock their rifles in ready position, but the pins jam, locking the guns in safety mode.
He laughs at their shocked expressions.
Agent Tyler tightens her grip on his hand and speaks for the first time since their entrance. "You just had to convert all the weapons to the same pulse wave as the whole computer system, didn't you Director?"
The Doctor continues the thought. "A pulse wave computer system that is also stolen Sontaran technology, which is, of course, connected to your honing beacon and the entire Torchwood archive."
The reality of his plans begin to sink in, and Director Hartman stutters nervously, "You couldn't have hacked our system remotely. That's impossible!"
"Oh, but I didn't hack it remotely." He waves the device in his palm back and forth. "I just preloaded a set of signals onto this mini-satellite here." He smiles without humor. "All I had to do was get it close enough to respond to the backdoors Miss Tyler installed in your system this morning. Too bad you were so focused on killing me that you didn't even notice what she was up to."
Director Hartman stares in disbelief, her mouth gapping. "And if I'm correct..." the Doctor begins than checks his watch, "My very carefully and custom designed Bad Wolf virus, should be corrupting your entire system into complete and utter meltdown right about..."
A shower of sparks erupts from the circuit wires tethered to the far wall, and the floor shakes as an explosion goes off on a higher floor. "Now I think."
The Torchwood agents around them scatter as more sparks fall in glittering sheets from above. The Doctor, still holding Agent Tyler's hand, turns and dashes for the fire escape, the closest exit route to ground level.
"Doctor!" Director Hartman shouts from behind him, and despite all the yelling and the screaming and the fire and the explosions, he hears, perfectly as if in amplified sound, the click of a hand gun. He moves to dodge to the left, but Agent Tyler is already there pushing him out of the way.
The resounding bang of the firing chamber is the only thing he hears for a long moment.
"Rose!" he yells as she falls forward into his out-stretched arms. He has no idea where that name came from, but he only has one coherent thought in his head, a rose with thorns is always the last to whither.
"Rose, hang on!" She grabs the front of his coat with one hand and the other goes to her side, which is bleeding profusely. He pull his sonic device from his breast pocket and disables Director Hartman's non-regulation handgun from across the room, but this action is soon proven obsolete as more debris falls from the walls with a crash and settles between him and Rose and any further danger.
Rose gasps in his arms, but for some reason, she starts to laugh. "You said you would remember when you activated the Bad Wolf signal. You thought you were so clever hiding the memory trigger, even from yourself, in all those layers of coding." She groans and shifts in his arms. "I wanted to strangle you; you got so annoying."
In a sudden rush of neon colors and effervescent shades of pink and yellow, months and months of memories bloom in his mind—a captured Torchwood slayer, hours upon hours of arguing with the Board, and all the chips and endearing glares and nasty looks melting into smiles that made the entire ordeal worthwhile.
He remembers the secret talks in white walled corners, the endless planning with blueprints she'd drawn from memory, and the ingenious scheme to overcome the punishment he knew he would receive from the Board the minute he granted her unauthorized release—death as a traitor to his own kind or a complete memory wipe of the past six months he'd spent with her.
"Rose." He speaks her name softly, running his fingertips across her check. She smiles, and all the harsh lines on her face disappear for one perfect moment. "You... We... I..." For the first time in many years, he at a loss for words. "I forgot you." His tone is one of disbelief. She laughs in relief.
"Not for long. I wouldn't have let you forget for long. Now, I hate to break the moment, Doctor but..." She leans away from him, stifling another groan of pain.
He quickly remembers where he is. "Oh, yes! You're injured. We need to do something about that immediately." Pulling her closer to him, he helps her stand, half dragging her from her left side.
She presses her ear to his hearts and never lets go of her grip on his coat.
-X-X-X-
"You stabbed me."
She grins at him and fiddles with the pain-killer controls by her bedside. "You told me to."
Cringing slightly, she tries to sit up. He shushes her and adjusts the infirmary bed to a raised position.
"And let's not forget, your people took me prisoner for a few months back there. I say we call it even."
"This plan was horribly stupid. Why didn't you stop me? And I don't remember you being shot any where in the schematics. Just who-"
She quiets him with a wave her hand. "Tell me that you remember, Doctor. Tell me, you remember everything."
He sighs and takes her hand, running his fingertips over the veins that lead to her heart. "I remember everything." He kisses her hand. "Rose."
Author's Notes: Did I get you? Did I? Did I? Anyhow, this concept was inspired by the 2002 spy drama, Cypher, which you should go watch. Right now!