A Glass Darkly
A Doctor Who Fanfiction by Seriana Ritani
In Sum: Rose Tyler, struggling with little success to resume a normal life, has a chance encounter with someone she's never met . . . someone she thought she'd never see again.
Rating: PG. Squeaky clean. Mostly.
For Malaïka, in memory of the salle de Harry Potter, thesalle de Docteur Qui, the days when Christian and Charlemagne needed to be shot, and most particularly the TEDREE en pelluche—the Fuzzy Tardis.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1 Corinthians 13:12
Chapter 1
The Key
Not for the first time, Rose Tyler wakes up with the sense of faint disorientation that comes from sleeping in a strange bed.
Half asleep, she tries to work out just why that is. She's enshrouded in the soft warm comfort of her bed, but the blankets feel unnaturally smooth. The mattress is a touch too soft, curving deeply around her body. Something's missing from the scent of the air—a mix of old fur coats, motor oil, and static electricity, familiar enough to go unnoticed until it disappears. All she can smell is fresh air and lavender, pleasant but unexpected. And the soft hum of noise in her ears is not the reassuring pulse of the engine, but a rhythmless whine from far away, punctuated by high, sharp cheeps.
Birds. Those are birds. And the hum is the dirigibles over London, and the lavender smell is the soap the maids use to wash her sheets, and she's in her own bed in her own room in her father's house.
She remembers now. She forgets every night, and remembers every morning, that this fairy tale has become her life. It's a beautiful life—she has both her parents, she has a little sister whom she loves, she has a boyfriend who couldn't be more wonderful, she has money and fame and a big huge beautiful room all to herself—but there's always that moment every morning where her heart and lungs shudder to a halt, frozen in dismay.
She forces herself to breathe. Now that the first shock of it is over, the rest of the day won't be so bad.
She showers and dresses and goes downstairs, studiously ignoring the newspaper on the dining room table. The pictures on the front page start talking if you look at them too long. Just another headline gimmick, her dad says, but her mum about screamed her head off the first time the paper told her, in the Prime Minister's rather tinny voice, that the Exchange was at a record high. Jackie isn't used to surprises like that. Not like Rose is.
Her mum is in the nursery with baby Sarah, trying to get her into a rather awful pink onesie. "There you are, Sweetheart, all lovely and cozy, and if you get mashed peas on this one you'll be wearing nothing but mashed-pea-green until you're twelve. Right. Good morning, Rose love."
"Morning, Mum." Rose smiles, half a real smile for the joy of having a baby sister, half a clumsy, forced smile for her mother, who can't bear to see Rose fretting over the way things used to be Back Then. "Dad gone off to work already?"
"Yeah. Left at about seven. Always was the crack-of-dawn sort. Had your breakfast yet?"
"Yeah," Rose lies. "Just grabbed a quick bite. I'm going to get moving myself. I've only got about six billion tons of reports to read this morning."
"Well, have a good time, and stop back for lunch if you can tear yourself away from your desk. Dad's promised to come, and I can call Mickey and have him over, too."
"I'd like that. I'll try to be there."
"Go on then. And don't forget your driving permit. You always do when you leave it in the pocket of your green coat."
Rose picks up baby Sarah and snuggles her face into the warm, squishy, wriggling, powder-scented tummy. Sarah gets a handful of her big sister's hair and pulls enthusiastically. Rose gently untangles the pudgy hand and puts the baby back down on the carpet. "Bye-bye, Sarah Tyler. Love you, Mum."
Her green coat is hanging in the front closet. Rose never used to hang her coats up when she took them off, but she does now. It seems impolite a mess around this big, beautiful house. Despite the fact that it's her house, she still feels like a guest. She fishes in the pocket for her permit and her credit card and keys. It's a big bunch of keys. There's one to the house, one for her car, one for her office at Torchwood, one for her filing cabinet, one for the closet where they keep all the silver, and one more that doesn't open anything in the whole universe.
That one's on its own ring, along with a key fob in the shape of a staff and serpent. It's the international symbol for health care. It means "doctor" in all those terrestrial languages that Rose doesn't speak anymore. She wanted to use the universal symbol of health care, a green crescent, but no one seems to make them and she didn't want to call attention to her precious memento by having a fob specially made.
She puts the keys in her pocket and goes to work.
"Miss Tyler, Mr. Cartwright from Intelligence is here to see you."
Rose looks up from the packet of papers she's reading, her mind swirling with bits and pieces of UFO sighting reports. Her secretary (she's always surprised that she has a secretary; "Rose Tyler's secretary" sounds so odd) is standing in the doorway of her ridiculous office. "Oh. Thanks, Elsie. You can let him come in."
Elsie withdraws. Just outside the door, Rose hears her say "Miss Tyler will see you now" to someone out of view.
Miss Tyler will see you now, she repeats in her head. Honestly. She's talks like I'm the ruddy queen.
Mr. Cartwright from Intelligence is ushered into the royal presence. He's a short, fidgety man, mostly bald, whose tie is cinched just a little too tightly around his neck. He's got a manila envelope under his right arm, which causes him some trouble when he tries to shake hands with her. The envelope's contents go flying across the carpet. Rose drops to her knees, grateful to have something physical to do, and helps him pick them up. "No, really, it's all right," she insists as he apologizes over and over.
"I'm so terribly sorry, Miss Tyler. I know how busy you must be, and—"
"I'm bored out of my mind, actually," says Rose. "And please call me 'Rose.' I've been trying to get Elsie to do it, but she always forgets. What's your first name?"
"Arthur," says Arthur, now blushing so fiercely Rose can feel the heat coming off his face.
"Arthur, then," Rose insists. "Arthur and Rose. I really can't be 'Miss Tyler' when I'm only twenty." She's actually probably nearly twenty-two now, but it was very hard to keep track of things like birthdays Back Then and she's lost count of her age. She picks up the last sheet of paper and helps Arthur up off the floor. "Now then, Arthur, what did you want to see me about?"
"Well, I've got some, um, some photographs. From our agents in Dublin. There's been, um, some vandalism incidents over the past two days and they wanted to know if they looked like anything you might recognize."
"Well, sit down and let's have a look." She speaks with more confidence than she feels. This is what Torchwood pays her to do: to seek out things that she recognizes from her travels. It's not half stressful. She knows a lot about the universe, much more than anyone on this Earth does, but there're still vast amounts that she doesn't know. She only traveled for a little while, after all. And all of Time and Space is a lot of material to memorize.
She pulls the photographs out of the envelopes and leafs through them. The first few are rather useless-looking pictures of crowded Dublin streets. There are dozens of people hurrying about their business; the back half of a bus takes up the better part of one frame. In the background of each picture is a red brick wall.
The next picture is of the wall itself. Hundreds of marks are scribbled on it in something white, either paint or chalk. They're in long columns, running from about ten feet above the ground all the way down to the sidewalk.
Rose leafs quickly through the other pictures. There are different walls, with different arrangements of marks, but they all have the same look to them, and it's a look that she knows.
She reaches into her pocket and discreetly wraps her hand around the fob on her keys.
It's the Tomarabez alphabet, she remembers him saying. In her memory, he brushes back his overcoat to stick his hands in the pockets of his pin-striped trousers, rocking back on the heels of his white trainers. Used all over this galaxy. A good alphabet's a valuable thing. Once you've got one, everyone wants to use it. And so many things are so much easier when everybody's using the same one one. Keyboards and stencils and sounding things out and all that. Unless, of course, you're speaking English and the spelling makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You English put a perfectly good Roman alphabet completely to waste. I mean, E-N-O-U-G-H? What drunken medieval Scrabble player thought of that one?
A smile tugs at one corner of her mouth, her body going warm with the memory of being happy. And then the wash of sadness comes, twisting her mouth back down. So she neither smiles nor cries: she just sighs a little at the thought of her mother, who's so eager that she should forget about everything she's lost. It's hard to do when all you do at work is try to remember.
"Well," she says to Arthur, "I do recognize it. It's the Tombaranez alphabet, so it's definitely alien. But it's used to write hundreds of languages all over the place, so I've got no idea which aliens might have done it or what it says. It could just be a sort of 'Kilroy Was Here' thing."
"M-hm." Arthur doesn't seem to share her optimism. Rose gets that a lot. No one else at Torchwood has had the benefit of spending time in the company of a pleasant, cheerful, compassionate alien. "Well, thank you, Miss . . . Rose. I'm sure that—"
"Hold on a minute." Rose has flipped through the remaining papers to a map of Dublin. Each vandalism site is marked on it with a black dot. "It looks like they're in an arrangement. Look, I can almost draw a crescent. We're just missing a couple of points up here."
Arthur nods uncertainly.
"Are you going to send out an agent to investigate this?"
"Well, it's the Dublin office's business, really, and as it's only chalk they're not much concerned about it. They might send someone. I don't know."
She frowns a little at the map. "I might just hop out there and have a look. Just for curiosity's sake."
Arthur nods a little again, though he looks as though he's dreading she'll ask him along. "If you want, I can try to get the request for expenses through the Intelligence department. You're not a regular agent, but you are Rose Tyler, so—"
"So I can use my dad's aeroplane," Rose finishes for him. "It's not a big secret mission. It's just a day trip, to see if I can find some aliens and swap the latest gossip with them. Maybe learn how to spell in the Tombarenez alphabet." She stands up, and Arthur does likewise. "Thanks for the photographs, Arthur. It was nice talking to you."
"There you are, Sweetheart. I was just about to call your office."
"I'm fine, Mum," Rose insists, stripping off her jacket and hanging it neatly in the hall closet. "Mickey and Dad here yet?"
Jackie, a smudge of mustard on her nose from the enthusiastic preparation of sandwiches, jerks her head towards the back of the house. "They're out on the patio. You can go on, and I'll bring the lunch things."
"Sure you don't need any help?"
"No, I can manage. Go on and put your feet up."
Go on and talk to Mickey, you mean, Rose thinks, but she doesn't say it. She knows how her mother feels about Mickey. To Jackie, a stable relationship between Mickey and Rose would mean that Back Then is finally gone forever.
Rose goes outside to talk to Mickey, though not because her mother wants her to.
"Hallo, Rosie," says her dad, reaching a hand up to squeeze her elbow as she approaches his chair. Rose bends down and kisses the top of his balding head. She's been braced for some cruel twist to this dream-come-true of having a father, but the cruel twist has never come. Pete Tyler has been waiting as long and as hopelessly to be a dad as Rose has been waiting to be Daddy's Little Girl. It's perfect. Her whole life is perfect beyond imagining. Except that there's a dirigible fleet over London and the newspapers talk, but these are easily overlooked. And that she misses Back Then, but there's not much point in mentioning that anymore.
Mickey jumps up the second he sees her. His smile for her, and hers for him, are genuine in a way that nothing else in this universe really is.
"Hey, Rose," says Mickey.
"Hey, Mickey," says Rose.
Her smile says Thank God for you, Mickey Smith. I'd go mad here without you.
Mickey's smile says I love you.
"Who wants sandwiches?" says Jackie.
Mickey and Rose are sitting on the dock of Pete Tyler's private man-made lake, both barefoot with their toes in the water. Pete and Jackie are still on the patio, well out of earshot. Mickey is working on his third sandwich. Rose is picking at the remaining three-quarters of her first one.
"Dublin, then?" says Mickey. "When're you leaving?"
"This afternoon, I guess. I haven't anything else to do, really. Want to come along?"
Mickey snorts, which is hard to do with his mouth full of sandwich, and swallows. "Nah. Got another round of community service stuff to do."
Rose grins. Law-abiding, ever-timid Mickey, Mickey who wielded machine guns against the Cybermen, who saved the world with guts and brains that no one (including Mickey himself) knew he had, is spending his days doing community service to atone for the traffic violations of his alternate-reality counterpart. She has such a hard time understanding Mickey sometimes, but she's always so desperately glad he's there. He's been her bridge: a familiar face from her old world, a confident guide to the new. He loves this place, and his excitement brings her out of her despondency. Mickey always did make her happy.
"But you'll call when you land?" he asks, brushing crumbs off his mouth. Worrywart Mickey.
"Course I will. It's just a stroll around the block, really. I'll be back by bedtime."
"That private jet's going to your head," says Mickey. "A stroll around the block gets you from the front door to the back door of your house. Dublin is a strange and far-away city where they all talk funny."
"A stroll around the block," says Rose before she thinks about it, "used to be Alpha Centauri."
Mickey's smile fades a little, from a half-laugh to a slow, bittersweet curve. Rose is immediately sorry she said anything, but at the same time she's glad she said it to Mickey and not to her mum.
"The good old days," he says.
Rose flings a few droplets out of the lake with her toes, watching them dance and glitter in the sunlight before crashing back into the shining whole.Just like moments we pull out of Time to examine more closely.
"Listen, Rose," says Mickey, his smile now entirely gone. "Tomorrow, after you're back from Dublin, you want to go out? Just to talk, you know."
Rose smiles, pulling her foot from the lake to let it dry on the warm boards of the dock. "Just to talk about how Mum won't let you alone until you get me to marry you?"
Mickey grins uncomfortably. "That was pretty high on the list of topics, yeah."
Rose rolls her eyes. "Mum."
"But do you want to?" asks Mickey.
"Do I want to go out tomorrow, or do I want to marry you?"
"Both," says Mickey. There's a steadiness in his voice and manner that would certainly not have been there if he'd asked her either question a year ago.
Rose looks him over, glad of him, the simultaneous strangeness and ordinariness of him.
"Yes, I want to go out," she decides. "Tomorrow. And yes, I want to marry you. But not yet." She turns her eyes to the sunlight cavorting on the lake, a million shining points that exist for an instant and are gone. "Not yet."