A somewhat different flavor for
a Reunion Fic: 12th/Rose
01
Lost
Finding the Way Home
Universes were born and died in instants, the people in them blinked in and out of existence and few knew of the passing of such universes as didn't make it unless you managed to escape before the final destruction. Nobody knew that better than Rose Marion Tyler. She had only barely managed to grab Tony as Bad Wolf had flamed gold to yank her out of Pete's World before their version of the same child kicked another ball and it flew into traffic instead of into a pond...and was destroyed. So simple to lose all she'd known. Except her little brother, whom she'd managed to grab. Her Doctor had not been there and her mum and Pete were standing too far away...so she only managed to save her brother.
She didn't know where she was except that she was definitely in her home universe, although it didn't really feel like her original Earth should feel, exactly. It felt much younger than her's had been, fresher and less careworn, somehow. She knew from the feel that the meadow she stood in was downtown London, though and she sighed in resignation as her sharp eyes spotted several wooly mammoth grazing at the far end of the field.
"Well, Hel, yeah?" She muttered.
"Well, guess we'd better make a cave or something to live in while I try to figure out when we are." She wondered if the TARDIS would notice, grunted and shook her head. Of course the TARDIS would notice, the question was did she note Tony's presence? Rose sure hoped so, because with just here living here, obtaining things like food with a toddler on her hip wasn't going to be an easily done thing. She supposed the best thing she could do for meat was going to be fish and whatever she could set snares for. I really hope I get the one after, the bow-tied one, at some point after the Library." She told the babbling baby as she loaded her old, bulky, anti-dalek rifle with smaller...much smaller...charges: She needed meat, not ashes.
She knew she was on the tag end of the last Ice Age, and if she hadn't already been wearing a survival pack...like everyone else had near the end, she'd be a lot more worried than she was. Still, those supplies were limited and the best thing she could do was to draw on the many, many lessons and skills she'd picked up from running around this universe with the Doctor and make as much as she could from local materials. She had the basics she needed, though, like utility knives, rope made from something other than grass, other useful things like modern medicine which would also have to last until she could make other things from local plants.
Still fairly full from discoveries collected during her void hopping days, her pack held advances most people's didn't, like a tool that could hollow out local stone for easy, effective shelter when needed, though instead of picking a medium boulder, this time she went looking for a cliff face that GeoHistory in school had claimed used to be here...but had been built on so many times and quarried for so long that it had been reduced to sea level many centuries ago. At this point, she realized, it should still be here.
"Here goes, if she's paying attention, she'll notice. If she doesn't like it, she's free to interfere." She told her baby brother. She carefully didn't think about her mum, Pete or Duncan, which was the name her Doctor has picked. Not too weird, not too common, but lost when the other place collapsed...taking her Doctor with it. He was supposed to be the one she could keep, love and openly be loved by, but it hadn't worked out that way had it? Stubbornly, she restrained the tears that wanted out and got to work creating a livable home for the pair of them. She knew that the Doctor, the full Time Lord one, didn't want her and there was no point in crying over what could not be changed. Far better to just get to work, the pain of loss would fade in time.
Twelve years passed in relative calm, infrequently punctuated with the invariable bits of danger such as could be expected for two modern humans living in pre-historic Britain, from predators, mostly. They'd managed to capture a few wolf pups to raise as...well, not pets, exactly, but family members anyway. They had a good, breeding pack now, with the yearlings taking care of looking after the cave defenses and the older ones helping with hunting.
As she'd expected, it had been very difficult until Tony was about four, since she couldn't take him far or leave him alone until the younger wolves were old enough to watch him along with their own litters while she took their pack leaders hunting. So at first, it had been mostly fish and garden vegetables for food...constantly. A snared rabbit or hare, or a netted grouse or other game bird had been rare, but welcome treats.
From her survival pack, she'd taken a collapsible yard tool that she had different heads for, including shovel, rake and hoe and had cleared an area near the cave-mouth of first snow, then debris. Firewood had taken a long time to gather, but eventually she had enough to last at least a week and while she'd gathered that, she gathered other things into pouches as well, plants she knew were edible if not delicious, but which would give them the nutrients they needed. Flavor they'd just have to get used to and she knew that if Tony got hungry enough, he'd learn to eat them. She had ignored the complaints when he did, knowing they had no choice.
Other bits she always had with her was a reel of fishing line, sinkers, bobbers and hooks. From the shallowest, smallest streams, so as to avoid the mega fauna sized fish in larger rivers, she regularly pulled very large trout...a good source of protein and this her little brother liked much better than the wild greens whose roots she'd dug up and which she carefully planted in shallow soil, kept moist, warm and in the sun as much as she could during that late winter and then made him eat.
It was wild spinach, mostly, with a few cultivated seeds from her pack added for larger leaves and to see if the ancient variety would cross-pollinate with and actually produce viable seeds. She got lucky, they did. The result later proved to have smaller leaves than the tame ones but much larger ones than the wild. She carefully added one plant grown from cultivated seed for every ten wild plants and it worked to increase her available food resource. She also added one cultivated plant to small plots and added twenty hybrids in a circle around the tame plant. She allowed the tame one to seed out, later, as well as the three best and strongest of the new hybrids, carefully gathering and hoarding the seeds. As with any successful hybrid, the new spinaches were vigorous growers, nature gave them larger leaves, more flowers, more resistance to disease and had the carefully bred higher nutritional values, as well as the much higher resistance to drought and mold of the cultivated plant. She had them in an area that had once been solid rock, though it was now open to the sky and was only accessible from the cave. Five acres with a carved out stone wall several stories high and more than a hundred feet thick, they kept out the worst of the predators, since most hunted on four feet. The great eagles were smarter than the phrase 'birdbrain' indicated and after Rose had shot a few, the rest avoided that area.
The first spring which had followed a few months after their arrival, had brought the first of the captured young wolf pups, laborous hours putting of in rows for the rest of the food seeds she had in her pack and long hours every day hauling water and pulling weeds. She alternated garden work with building or carving more cave storage areas or adding walls, fire-pits and other things to the stone walls, like tables, seats, shelves, stone beds that could be covered in wooden slats to soften the surface and for which mattresses could be made of woven grass mats sewn along the sides and stuffed with grasses and bins she could make wooden lids for. Even twelve years in, it was primitive, but reasonably comfortable for all of that. The sheer number of things she'd picked up skill-wise on the worlds she'd walked with the Doctor were coming in really handy now, some of which he'd taught her to do himself when a place was uninhabited and they wanted a comfortable camp.
Tony was almost 13, a good hunting partner and was well trained to pull his fair share of the work, relative to his age and strength. He was a lot stronger than a modern boy the same age would have been because of the work required to simply survive in these conditions. But the TARDIS still hadn't come and she had no idea why.
She was about to find out.
Tony came running into the cave, excited and a little frightened too, actually. "Rose! People! Lots of big boys, boys my size and girls my size and big lumpy-chested girls your size!" He grabbed a spear and ran back out and this alarmed Rose enough to grab her own and follow him. He had no memory of adults other than his sister, she thought ruefully, thus 'big boys and big girls'. She had no idea if wolves had been tamed by the era's modern humans, but she called their's to her regardless because she also didn't know if these people were going to be hostile or not. She only hoped the TARDIS, with whom she had a bone to pick, was still going to translate for her after all this time. They emerged to see a large group of people about to enter the cave, stopping at Rose's yell and the deep snarls of the wolves surrounding the pair.
Now she heard the sound she'd been listening for for the last twelve years, the wheezing, groaning song of the landing Timeship. The new people panicked and ran back outside.
"Now, old girl? Seriously? I've been waiting for you for over a decade and you pick now? I'm busy!" She yelled at the ship, ordering the wolves with a 'down' command and then commanding them to 'stay', she added the 'friend' order once the TARDIS began to be visible and pulled Tony to a safe distance so the winds generated by the rematerialization didn't blow him over, but still stayed close to the materializing ship. "And don't give me that 'I didn't realize you were here' nonsense either!"
As the door opened and she saw the bow-tied version, she relaxed. "Tony, take the full pack, yes, puppies too...and go inside, she'll guide you to a garden for the wolves and send you food and the best tasting water you've ever had. Stay there until the Doctor or I come for you."
"Yes, Rose." Tony nodded, calling the seventeen wolves of their pack to heel which was something that even the five month old cubs had been taught, then ran inside the TARDIS with the nice sized pack following.
The Doctor she simply glared at. "Twelve years! Twelve years since the other universe collapsed and Bad Wolf dropped me here...barely managed to grab Tony, mind you. Lost everyone else including Duncan! Where the Hel have you been?" She snapped. "And why now? Why wait until I built a life and was apparently about to get new neighbors?"
He wrapped one arm around her already shaking shoulders as she struggled to keep her composure, but stuck his head back in the door, looking up and listening.
"She knew someone was here, but she also knew that they weren't affecting the local population with future knowledge. She said she didn't look closer or we would have been here." The Doctor drew Rose into his arms, steadying her quaking form and held her tightly. "Now, the why now bit, that's because you were about to start affecting the local era with future knowledge."
She sighed, grumbled and then just tucked herself in tight, arms sliding under his frock coat to grip him hard around his waist. "M'not aging." She said into his shirt. "I don't believe for one moment she didn't realize I was back in this universe. You might swallow that nonsense, but I've had her in my head and I know better. She's going to have to work at it to get back on my good side, Doctor."
The ship whined at them both, sounding disgruntled.
"Yeah, I noticed that when I noticed you sent pets into the TARDIS. These people already have a few tame wolves so seeing that you also had them didn't hurt anything. We picked up most of your garden on the way in here, but the TARDIS said the new type of hybrid spinach, while a valuable new food source they didn't have before, fixes another problem so that we won't have to deal with that one later. She will allow that slight edit...it prevents a genetic bottleneck from occurring due to starvation. There are things you will leave behind, many things, because you've lost things or will forget to grab something...but mostly gardening tools or household items. Anything you need to bring...or at least, should not leave in this era?"
"Yeah, I was wearing a survival pack, still have most of the tools, a few small machines and a couple of hoppers."
"Let's go get those then." He snorted. "Prehistoric humans popping in and out of who knows which era, I don't need."
She gathered anything made from steel quickly, handing him the smaller things to pocket and bagging the rest. There were a lot of stone tools, laying amid their projects but because they were stone, he ignored them at first, until she handed them to him too, along with the projects they were for.
"Ingenious, some of this."
"Didn't knew how to make more steel, so stone was the next best thing I could use that I had."
"What I don't understand, is why last me didn't come."
"First few years I made it pretty clear to any monitoring," She poked her thumb at the TARDIS. "That I wanted either this you or the one after...or even one of the babies...any body except pinstripes. How many times did last you dump me in the middle of something I never wanted? I am not a pet for you to palm off on other people, Duncan included." She growled at him. "I am not an animal, Doctor, so please don't treat me like one, this time. Because we both know that last you did."
"Rose...I never meant it like that. I wouldn't!" He hadn't missed the pain in her voice or misunderstood how foul and low he'd made her feel. He felt sickened at the thought.
"But you did and you know you did." She pressed the point, meeting his ancient gaze unflinchingly. "You behaved exactly like someone trying to re-home a loved, but inconvenient pet. I won't tolerate it again, not at all. Try it again and I'll kick your ass, Doctor. And when I've done with that, I'll walk out and you won't see me or Tony again. You have taught me well and I can do the one thing that nobody else can...avoid you utterly." She paused to let that sink in.
"Rose...no. Don't do that, stay with me, please?"
"Are we clear? I love you dearly, but if you abuse my trust again I'll shove my foot so far up your arse I'll kick your teeth out. Understand me? I never understood why noone ever calls you to account for your behavior, but I always have and there's no reason for me to stop at this point. You, Doctor, are on notice."
He met her eyes briefly, flinched at the expression in them and then looked away before, replying softly. "I understand."
She glared at him a final time, then dropped the subject by grabbing half the packs and bags, then stalked off into the TARDIS without so much as another glance at the stunned, aching, heartsore Time Lord. He had a friendship to try to rebuild...and he wasn't at all sure he knew how to regain her trust.
~*~TBC~*~