Heal Thyself
Prologue
Rose Tyler had faced down demons and aliens, had watched Earth's Sun bloat and explode and raze the Earth to ribbons in the throes of its final fiery end, and she had survived. She had seen the very stars above her head wink out, one by one at first and then all in a rush, and she faced the seemingly omnipotent maniac responsible for this attempt at realicide, and she had survived.
On the last night of her life, Rose Tyler was going home to the man she loved.
Not her original home, of course. That was beyond the veil, in an Earth she was forever separated from through some quirk of wibbley-wobbley nonsense that she could never comprehend. This was her home on this Earth, one much like her own except for the ravages inflicted upon it and its populace by Cybus Industries and its brutal creations, the Cybermen.
Oh, and there were flying airships, like, everywhere. From her hazy understanding of parallel realities, it was pretty much a toss-up between goatee worlds and Zeppelin worlds.
Not her original home. For that matter, not her original man she-
No. Rose forced the thought from her mind with a conscious effort. John Smith was, in every way that mattered, the man she had fallen for, the man who had taken her from a council estate existence of chips and department store jobs and had whisked her away in his magic blue box across time and space, across the surface of the universe as easily and effortlessly as a stone skimming a pond. He had chosen her, he had protected her and they had run into danger and from danger more times than she could count, together, arms and legs pumping and heart pounding and it had been glorious.
It was beginning to rain. She shrugged her coat over her head, increasing her pace from a walk to a half-hop as she crossed the distance between the car (sleek, electric, little bit weird) and the house (massive, ornate, really weird). The house – she steadfastly refused to call it a mansion, out of some sense of loyalty to her roots – was a present from her Dad, one of the country's most powerful men in this reality instead of someone who would have needed a running start to qualify as a loveable loser in her reality. Of course, he was alive in this reality and not dead like he was in hers, which-
Lightning lit up the skies of London. Rose flinched, and then gathered herself, glad that none of the house's staff (who seemed immune to good-natured dismissal, despite her many attempts to do so) were outside to see that. She pulled on the great doors, and found to her puzzlement that they did not budge an inch. Her fist rattled the door once, twice, three times.
"Jones!" she called, hoping the old butler wasn't sitting with his headphones on listening to the Archers omnibus, and trying not to reflect on how odd it was not to have a key to her own house. The truth was, though, Rose hadn't really spent a lot of time here of late. She'd been…too busy, yes, that was it; she had a prominent position in Torchwood, after all, the organisation dedicated to stopping not only the last vestiges of the Cybermen menace but also all the other craziness that most people – even people in crazy Zeppelin-realities – never suspected lurked out there.
"Jones!" she called again, as the thunder rolled and cracked and the rain intensified. An overhang above the door was sheltering her from the worst of the downpour, but she was tired and damp and she was rich, dammit. She owned a Jacuzzi. Screw this.
Muttering darkly, she started to fish through her pockets for her phone, and it was then that the door finally opened and he appeared.
"Rose," said John Smith. "You're home."
She ducked into the house and slammed the door, leaving the storm brewing outside to do what it might against the walls. The interior, a grand hallway splitting off to the reception rooms left and right and the staircase in the middle, all marbled and statued with a sort of medieval bling, was almost in total darkness; only a few cursory lights illuminated the place.
"Meter running low?" Rose said, shrugging off her coat and wondering where everyone was. It seemed like some member of staff was always bustling about, whether it was Jones taking her coat or Mellor endlessly buffering the floors or one of the gardeners tinkering with the potted plants. She knew their names, she thought to herself defensively, she just…couldn't be bothered thinking of them right at this minute, thank you. Shut up, brain.
John Smith was dressed in one of his trademark steel blue suits. He looked always on the verge of scruffiness, but somehow he pulled it off in a way that suggested elegance. Honestly, it made her want to scream at him. He reached inside his suit jacket and produced a familiar device. A quick press or two, a brief glow, and the lights all over the house came on.
"Better?" he said, smiling dazzlingly.
It was when he smiled that he looked least like-
She kissed him then, kissed him to stop the thought from advancing any further. His lips were soft against hers and his arms held her and for a little moment the world felt right.
"Where is everyone, then?" she said. "D'you give 'em the night off?"
"I…" for a moment he seemed lost for words; in others it would have been a sign of a lack of inspiration but in him, she knew, it was almost that his brain was so far ahead of such simplistic concepts as mouths that sometimes there was a loss of synchronicity. "I told them we didn't need them anymore."
"You did?" she said, as they moved into the leftmost reception room. She'd built herself a sort of den here amidst the finery; a comfy bean bag, a stupidly huge television, and a little storage unit full of "Laser-Dees" that she could pop into her Betamax-branded player. Bloody Zeppelin realities.
He surprised her by taking her hand and guiding her to sit on one of the bigger sofas, as he sat beside her. Lightning flashed outside again, and though the thunder was muted, it was still there in the background, rumbling discontentedly.
"We're leaving, Rose," he said.
She couldn't reply for a moment. She wasn't going to assume anything as stupid as that he meant he was going abroad, visiting another country. She knew full well what he meant when they were leaving. She just had to figure out how she felt.
"How?" she settled for. "The TARDIS-"
On the beach, in Bad Wolf Bay, when she'd said goodbye to the Doctor after the defeat of the Daleks, he'd given John Smith a piece of "coral" as he called it. A cutting, from his own TARDIS, for the cutting from his own body that had grown into the half-human, half-Time Lord hybrid that called itself John Smith.
"You've never been able to get it to work before," she said, all in a rush, like a cork popping from a champagne bottle.
His hand squeezed hers a little tighter. "It was my human half, Rose. That was the problem. Time Lords are born with an innate knowledge of how the time/space continuum works. It's in our blood, in our DNA. It is our DNA. A Time Lord could build a time machine out of loo rolls and PVA glue. But my human half…"
He looked away.
"It's not a dirty word," Rose said.
"I didn't say that it was. You're human, Rose, and I love you more than I've ever loved anything."
She wanted to scream. Why didn't it thrill her when he said those words? Across millennia of time, from one end of the universe to the next, she had run beside the Doctor and thought those words would never come. John Smith meant every word he said. They had built a life, in this place, a life where she was important and powerful and where her Mum and Dad were impossibly together.
Yes, okay, so it was a Frankenstein life stitched together of the best parts of two separate realities. So what? It shouldn't have mattered to her. It should have felt real.
She wanted to scream because he was telling her they were leaving this pocket universe and her first thought was not for the parents or the life she would leave behind, perhaps forever, it was because her first thought above all others was that if she could go, maybe she would get to see him again.
"How?" she said again, mechanically.
He stood. He hadn't let go of her hand yet. "I want to show you," he said, and the man whose shape she loved but whose soul she couldn't bring herself to led her through that massive mansion she lived in but didn't own. They emerged into the grounds at the back of the house, he fiddled with that screwdriver of his and the raindrops fizzled into steam above their heads in a perfect crescent as they walked toward the outbuilding, a glorified shed that had been there since-
-they'd moved in-
-last week-
-forever-
-she'd never seen before.
She stopped and gasped for breath. Looking at the outbuilding made her teeth ache and her brain hurt. It was squat and square, and though originally she'd taken it to be small, now as she looked it wasn't small at all, wasn't much smaller than the mansion if truth be told, throwing the old place into its shadow. Night was falling fast as the rain spiralled down all around them and the skies above London loomed and rumbled, the city a toddler getting ready to throw a tantrum.
Lightning flashed. Colour returned to the world for an eyeblink. The outbuilding was blue, deepest deepest blue.
"What do you think?" John Smith asked softly. "I finished it last month, and yesterday, and a year ago. And maybe tomorrow too."
"What's happening?" Rose asked. Her voice was faint.
"Temporal labour pains," he replied. "TARDISes are grown on Gallifrey for a reason. The Eye of Rassilon stabilises their bloom onto the cosmos. Earth isn't accustomed to it."
Run, Rose. Run fast. She ignored the insistent voice inside her head; after all, she'd been doing it for many months now. She was good at it. "It's affecting time?"
"Everything a TARDIS will ever do is there from the moment it awakes. Imagine, Rose. Imagine being born ancient. Imagine knowing how will you die at the same instant you take your first breath."
"It's angry," she said, surprising herself with the words even as she spoke them. "It's angry and sad."
John Smith looked at her. She'd grown accustomed to that face and the owner of its original model hiding his emotions, burying them beneath banter or jokes or just plain silliness, but always just below the waterline you could see a glimpse here or there of infinite sadness, grief beyond counting, kindness without limit. She hadn't been surprised when she'd fallen in love with this man. She'd been surprised everyone else he met hadn't done the same.
"It wants to go home," he said.
She found she couldn't lie anymore, that she just didn't have the strength.
"So do I."
He flashed that smile. "Course you do! It's not enough for you, this," and he waved at the house, and the world…and at himself. "Doesn't seem real, does it – nahhhhh. Too good to be true, getting your own action-figure version of THE DOCTOR. Now with matching human emotion accessories."
"I'm sorry," she said, tears rolling down her face.
He cupped her chin tenderly then, and raised her head up gently so he could look into her eyes. "Rose," he said, his voice gentle, "you don't need to be sorry. I understand. I'm not the man you fell in love with. How could I be? I can't even build a TARDIS, even when I'm given all I should need. I can't make a girl like you love me, no matter how much I try, how much I want to. I'm half-human. I'll grow old and I'll die on this world, in this universe, half of what I should have been."
"But…" she said, confused, looking back to that great hulking presence of the outbuilding behind them, "you did build a TARDIS."
"I built a shell," John Smith said. "Even then, I had to cheat."
He stepped away from her, letting go of her hand, moving toward the outbuilding and its doors – huge great things, Rose saw, but each one with three windows, almost as a homage to the TARDIS she knew and loved. She felt a shudder of sympathy go through her for this man at that moment; his entire existence was a homage, a lesser copy of a greater sire, and she knew from the look in his eyes that he knew it. Who could possibly hope to live up to the Doctor?
RUN. ROSE, RUN. TURN AND RUN AWAY AS FAST AS YOU EVER HAVE AND DO NOT LOOK BACK, EVEN ONCE.
The voice was so insistent that Rose actually felt herself take a step back reflexively, before she caught herself. The strangest thing was that it had seemed for a moment the voice – the thought, whatever it was – had spoken in a cadence that was not even her own; still a female voice, but older somehow, impossibly rich, a voice that normally should sound sultry and powerful and a bit like him really but now just sounded urgent.
"Come away with me, Rose Tyler."
"My Mum…" she said weakly, knowing she was moving forward and trying to justify it to herself as she did so, "…my Dad…?"
Her fingers reached out and interlaced with his and they ran, together, covering the short distance to this gargantuan TARDIS and its doors, arms and legs pumping and heart pounding. At the doors, he fished for a key incongruous in its smallness and gave her another megawatt smile.
"They're already inside," he said, and threw the doors open.
Light bathed Rose, intense white light so strong her eyes needed a few moments to adjust, but when they did, when she could finally see what lay inside John Smith's TARDIS, she finally understood many things. She understood what he meant when he said her Mum and Dad were already inside. She understood what had made his TARDIS work after so long defunct.
Above all, she understood that it was far too late for her.
There was only one room inside that massive shell. And it was much, much-
"Smaller on the inside," John Smith said, as he thrust the point of the sonic screwdriver into Rose's back so hard it pierced her heart.
She gulped, once, twice. Blood was filling her throat. She looked down. Green light was emitting from her chest. He'd left the screwdriver in there.
He was in front of her again, kissing her, now supporting her and helping her stand, and talking, always talking. "I'll fix this," he was saying, his eyes full of tears. "I'll fix all of it, Rose, believe me I will. I'll fix the Time War, I'll fix your father's death. I have the strength to do what he couldn't, don't you understand? I had the strength to kill the Daleks. He didn't. That's why he exiled me here. He's afraid of me, of what I can do. Fixed points in time," he scoffed, and he staggered to support her weight as she began to lose the use of her legs, dragging her towards the central console of his TARDIS and the shining light emitting from beneath it, "when I'm through the only fixed points will be the ones I will fix."
Through failing sight, Rose managed to look up at the bodies of her father and mother, suspended upside-down from the ceiling directly above the TARDIS central console. White energy was transferring from them to the console below as it thrummmmd and whirrrrd and made all the wrong sort of noises.
"Vortex energy," John Smith said, sobbing openly now. "The kick this TARDIS needed to ignite, d-d-don't you see? He knew it would come to this…no, Rose, no…" he said desperately, as her eyes fluttered shut, he shook her until she came back from the brink of oblivion, her third and last time rising to the surface. "It needed more. It had to be you. You're going to be the heart of my TARDIS, Rose Tyler. You're going home with me, and we're going to travel forever, you and I, and we're going to see everything-"
She gasped something. Eager to hear, he stopped babbling. "Rose? Rose, what did you say?"
Rose gathered her strength, even as reality irised into black around her, even as she felt the last ebb of herself bleed away into the void. She looked him straight in the eye and made sure to speak slowly and deliberately.
"I feel sorry for you," she said, "when he finds you."
Her eyes closed for the final time. John Smith held her for longer than he should have, before the urgent flashing of the sonic screwdriver protruding from her chest finally reminded him of what needed to be done. Pressing a button on the central console, an access hatch opened to the heart of the TARDIS, a weak pulse of white light, a stuttering heartbeat.
John Smith kissed the only woman he'd ever loved one last time, and then he shoved her body down into that hole, closing the access hatch as quickly as he could-
The flash could be seen from Earth orbit.
The TARDIS cried out, a newborn being smacked, using its lungs for the first time to holler its anger at the cosmos. A ribbon of brilliant white light surged up from below, through the console, incinerating the bodies of Jackie and Pete Tyler in a fraction of a second, consuming their bodies and the meagre amount of vortex energy still residing within. Rose had been the main course.
John Smith sat with his back to the console. The sobs did not come. His eyes were red-rimmed, but there were no tears left. For who knew how long he sat, in that tiny room, listening to the cooing of his ancient, newborn TARDIS.
He stood, slowly, turning to face the controls. Breaking through the barrier between parallel universes was one of the most difficult feats of temporal engineering of all, but for this TARDIS, he knew it would be no problem.
Rose would want to go home.
"Allons-y," he said, to no-one in particular, and began the dematerialisation sequence.