Greetings! This is my first Ten/Rose story in a long time, and my first multichapter. It's actually been languishing in Google Docs for a long time, despite me being really into the idea, because it always seemed like other things should be prioritised. But no more! I can't promise regular updates, but I'll do my best.
Picks up at the end of Journey's End in the alternate universe and takes place entirely in that universe. I'm trying to go for a RTD flavour in the writing style too, because that was the era of Who which I enjoyed the most. Thanks to silversniper for the beta read on the early chapters, all those eons ago.
Chapter One: A Day For Ghosts
As the last whir of the TARDIS' engines faded, taking it back to the other universe, awkwardness settled in.
Rose could feel the Doctor's eyes on her, even with her back to him, and she was even more aware of the audience they had. Who knew what her mum's reaction to this was going to be? Jackie had never been exactly fond of the Doctor, and this version of him would be around permanently.
Truth be told, this was too similar to the last time he'd left her here on Dårlig Ulv-Stranden, with the fading TARDIS perhaps the last impossible thing she would ever see. He'd done his best to give her a clean resolution, but was it really? She was afraid to turn round and discover that actually, she hadn't been left with a part of him at all, that she'd made his human half up in a demented attempt to pretend she hadn't lost him once and for all. What if it was just her mum back there, without even Mickey to turn to for comfort this time? She was afraid she really would crack, splintering apart until she was just atoms, atoms still on the wrong side of the Void.
"Are you coming Rose?" Jackie asked, her footfalls crunching softly in the wet sand.
"Is he really there?" she whispered back, pushing strands of hair from her face that the wind defiantly blew back. "Or have I gone mad?"
"Oh, Rose." Jackie had been the one to help Rose through her grief at losing the Doctor the first time, helped her cope when her dreams had been so tempting and she'd wanted to give up on reality altogether. Rose felt her mum wrap one arm around hers, but she still didn't look at her. "Of course he's here."
"You promise?"
"I swear. He's here, he's got more hair than he obviously knows what to do with and a suit as sharp as the angles on his body. At least if he's going to be staying around we'll have a chance to feed him a bit more often now, eh?"
There was a huff of indignance from behind them, and Rose had to giggle.
"He's real, sweetheart. More real than he's ever been."
"I am." This was his voice, the one that had told her not five minutes ago that he loved her—the words she'd been waiting years to hear—and her knees thought the appropriate response was to go a little bit liquid at the memory.
Maybe the best thing to do was just wait until they got home and then try to process it. She'd barely had time to breathe, let alone think, over the last few weeks, and the Doctor had still managed to surprise her at every turn, just like he always had.
"Let's go then," she said, pulling her mum a little bit closer. They turned as one, to find the Doctor standing back warily, and Rose felt colour rushing to her cheeks as she met the Doctor's eyes. Strange, she'd never been bashful around him, but now that those words had been said, now that there was some kind of promise of being together, it all took on an intensity that knocked the wind out of her.
She couldn't say anything, couldn't do anything except return his stare, and it was Pete—who had been waiting for their return—who took charge of everything, ushering them off the beach and to the waiting car. From there it was long minutes of stolen glances at each other and a conspicuous amount of space between them in the back of the car. They needed privacy, Rose decided. Privacy and time. You couldn't sort anything of importance out with Jackie and Pete Tyler bickering about Norwegian road signs in the front.
They switched from the car to a small Torchwood-owned zeppelin. They sat cramped up in the tiny cabin around a table, drinking instant coffee in paper cups, Rose acutely aware of the scant line of space between her thigh and his. The conversation was Jackie's to dominate—Rose still felt too shell-shocked to talk. Jackie held court with a series of anecdotes about people the Doctor had never met, before segueing into minutiae of Tony's existence in the way only a doting mother can talk about her toddler. Pete tapped away on his comms unit, an intense expression on his face that Rose had learnt often meant he was actually skimming the sports results but pretending to be working, so he didn't need to pay attention to what Jackie was saying.
Rose had never known the Doctor be so quiet for so long.
"Did you say you've only got one heart?" Jackie asked, switching from the details of Tony's nap habits so abruptly that it took Rose a moment to digest the question.
"Mum!"
"What? It's a valid question and we need to know these things, don't we darling?" She looked to Pete for validation, who nodded and grunted without looking up from his screen.
"It's okay, Rose," the Doctor said, and even in those few words, she could hear the difference in his accent. A little bit more Chiswick, more like Donna. Would he always be like that, or would his speech alter, settling back to the way it used to be? "Yes, only one heart in this body. I'm human, I just have the memories and mind of a Time Lord."
"I hope you don't mind me saying that it does make me happier knowing that. I mean you - he - the first one, him not being human didn't exactly make me happy. I know Rose has said that in the future humans go off and marry all kinds of other races, but we're still here and now, and I just want a nice human boy for my girl."
"MUM!"
"No, Rose, I understand what she's saying," the Doctor continued. "There were certain incompatibilities between us before that aren't there now."
His words were soft, but his stare was as intense as it had been on the beach. Rose stifled the urge to curl into a ball and hide away from it.
"See," Jackie said, "he gets it. I was only ever looking out for you, sweetheart."
Rose kept her balled fists under the table where her mum couldn't see them.
Pete snapped down the lid on the communication portal. "That's all that sorted out, then. Got most of the debriefing done so I've got less paperwork to fill in when we get back to the office." So apparently he had been working after all. "A few people know some of the situation—although I haven't given them the full picture. That's your story to tell, if you want to tell it, Doctor."
"Thank you," he replied. "Probably wise not to, just yet."
"Have you given any thought to what you want to do?"
Rose huffed in annoyance. "Pete, he's only been in this universe for a couple of hours, and in existence for a few hours longer than that. Can you give him a chance to think!"
"He said he's still got a Time Lord mind. Surely that means he thinks faster than the rest of us."
"I'm flattered, Pete - and hurt, Rose. You underestimate me that much as a human?" He was joking, but underneath there was an unspoken question. How did she see him - as the same Doctor or an inferior copy? That was another subject to left for when she had time to really examine her feelings, and time alone to discuss it properly.
"No," she protested. "Even Time Lords can't plan out the rest of their lives in a couple of hours."
"Who says I've just been thinking about this for a couple of hours?"
"Well, you can't have been thinking about it for longer, can you? It only just happened."
The Doctor just raised an eyebrow, causing Jackie to tut. "He might not be an alien anymore, but he's still going to talk in riddles, isn't he?"
"Jackie," Pete warned gently, before addressing the Doctor again. "What did you have in mind then. Did you ever think about working with something like Torchwood or UNIT?"
"I have worked with UNIT before, actually, and if Torchwood is as different as Rose claims it is here, then I would be happy to. I know this universe won't be exactly the same, but it's a very close parallel, so most of what I know will still be applicable and hopefully useful. I think John Smith will be an asset to Torchwood."
Definitely more Chiswick. For some reason, that made him seem more human, less otherworldly.
"So you'll be going with that name, then? John Smith?" asked Jackie.
"It's served me well, for a long time too. It blends in. No one questions the existence of another John Smith."
"You could choose something different, though, " said Pete. "You'll be stuck with this name for the rest of your life. Are you sure you don't want something a little more unique?"
"Do you know, I'd never thought of it like that." The Doctor sat up straight, his face brightening into a smile. "I could be Mitchell Mahoney, maybe—or Sergio Hornblow! No, wait, Moses-Moon Bunion! Can't get more unique than that."
Now this was the Doctor as Rose knew him, speaking a million miles a minute, letting his thoughts come tumbling out as words without any chance for editing. Still, sometimes he needed cutting off before his flight of fancy grew wings that couldn't be clipped.
"Maybe you should stick with John Smith," Rose suggested gently. "I like John. It's a good name." Inside, she wondered if she would ever come to think of him as that - John, rather than Doctor.
"Oh, I agree," Jackie said, after Rose kicked her under the table to prompt her. "We considered it for Tony, you know."
The Doctor looked around the group, who all smiled and nodded encouragingly. "Alright. John Smith it is—but only if I can be a Doctor. It's a hard title to let go of."
"That's no problem," said Pete. He kept the Doctor's attention on him, so Rose felt okay to blow out her breath in relief, and Jackie only just managed to suppress her laughter. "We can sort out all the paperwork when we get back to London, to prove that you exist officially."
"Being a doctor will mean you get a decent salary too, won't it?" asked Jackie.
"How many times am I going to have to 'mum!' you in this conversation?"
"What? He's got no money and the world isn't an easy place to get along in when you're broke."
"It isn't like we're going to cast him out in the streets, is it?"
"No, I'm just thinking on a long term basis. You need to be able to rely on him, Rose."
Rose sat back in her chair and folded her arms. "I'm done with this conversation. I'm starting to get a headache and you really aren't helping."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Jackie asked, her voice rising with every syllable.
"Leave it, Jackie," Pete murmured. "She's had a stressful time of it. We can sort all this stuff out when we've had chance to rest."
Storming off would have been more effective, because Rose needed the space right now, but there was nowhere to go. Instead she shut her eyes, leaning the side of her body against the plastic wall of the cabin, willing her mind to shut up. A nap would have been incredible, but there was no chance of it happening. Jackie was breathing loud enough to let everyone know that she was annoyed, Pete was tapping away on the communication portal again, and the Doctor was still staring at her. Even if she couldn't see him, she knew he was.
Truth be told, she wanted to be staring at him too. She'd been starved of his face for years and it had always been one of her favourite things to look at. The man was pretty, for want of a better word, if oblivious to his own good looks, and he had the single most expressive face of any person she'd ever met. She knew how every emotion looked when he wore it: the crinkles around his eyes when he smiled that beaming grin, the slight pout when he was deep in thought, the dance his eyebrows did when those thoughts paid off in the form of another genius plan, the depth of the pain when he lost someone, even one of his enemies.
Except that wasn't this man. This man had willingly destroyed his enemies, wiped them out of existence, without it causing him a moment's pause. And that was apparently why he'd been left in her care.
How far did the differences go? Was this Doctor...John Smith...whoever he was...was he really so fundamentally different to her Doctor to be able to do something like that? What if the differences ran too deep? Or was he just like the Doctor had been when Rose first met him, fresh from destroying the Daleks the first time? Would she be able to mellow him, restore that compassion to him as he claimed she once had, or was she dealing with someone too fundamentally flawed?
In her mind's eye, she saw this Doctor, blue suit instead of brown pinstripe. Was that the only difference? She wanted the time to really look at him, examine him for differences, if there were any, but the truth was she'd probably get too caught up in how handsome he was. She always had. When you were running for your life it was easy to keep a clear head, but in quiet moments on the TARDIS, she'd lost minutes—hours—to gawping at him, memorising the lines of his face and the movement of his mouth. When he did that thing where he paused, the tip of his tongue just behind his teeth...Rose had built entire fantasies around those moments.
Right now, she didn't really know who this man beside her was, how close he was to her Doctor. Instinctively she wanted him, wanted to be with him in every way he would have her, but she needed to put the brakes on. If they threw themselves right into this and it turned out he wasn't the man she loved, or if he wasn't close enough that she could accept the changes, this would all come crashing down around them. She'd hurt him too, if she made him promises and then later backed out on them. She needed to be sure of her feelings, for both of their sakes.
It turned out that napping was actually possible, because Rose's next lucid thought was to wonder when the Doctor had started wearing woolly jumpers, and that woke her from the dream. When she blinked her eyes open, the cabin was darker than before, and someone was snoring softly next to her. She glanced across to the see the Doctor with his head tipped back, mouth wide open, fast asleep.
"I knew he'd be a snorer," Jackie whispered to her from across the table, and Rose knew she was forgiven for snapping earlier. Jackie had a paperback book open, this universe's equivalent of a Jackie Collins, and Pete was still on the communication portal.
"Well, I could have told you that already," Rose mumbled, wiping the sleep from her eyes. The rest had done her body some good, but her brain and emotions still felt as frazzled as before.
"You want to hear what's been on the news. Your da—Pete was just reading it out."
Pete put the tablet down. "I think most people reckon this is a slow news day, but we might look into this anyway. Apparently, in the past few hours there's been a spike in ghostly activity."
"Ghosts," Rose said flatly. "When you say ghosts, you mean..."
"Not like the last time, sweetheart," said Jackie. "Not those kind of ghosts. Just hauntings, when weird stuff happens but no one can explain it."
"A lot of places that are supposed to be haunted have been reporting it happening this evening," Pete explained, reading off the comms unit. "Things are being moved and no one can explain why, there are noises with no source, some rooms are feeling cold when they shouldn't be. But it all started happening at the same time and has been consistently happening since then."
"And this is on the news?"
"It wouldn't have been if it hadn't happened at Buckingham Palace," said Jackie. "They had the usual tourists being taken around the ruins and they all freaked out when the lights started blinking on and off."
"Did you ever come across ghosts when you travelled? The real kind, I mean?" asked Pete.
"No, I just presumed they didn't exist The Doctor even said so. I mean, this might be something extraterrestrial, but couldn't it just be people's imaginations? Lights blinking just sounds like faulty wiring to me."
"I agree, but we're dispatching a team to look into this anyway."
In the end, the Doctor had to be shaken awake when they reached the port, and he dozed straight back off as soon as they were in Pete's car, headed back to the Tyler mansion.
It was a different one to the house Rose had visited the first time they were in this universe. After his Jackie's death, Pete had sold the place and moved to a flat in the city so he was close to the Torchwood office. Then when Jackie and Rose became a permanent fixture in his life, he bought a new estate for them all to live in, with a wing of the house often taken up by Torchwood staff. Rose had a suite of rooms on the top floor, with views stretching out across the estate, London a sprawling jungle in the distance.
When they pulled up to the house the only person that came to greet them was Tony's nanny and the housekeeper, which Rose presumed meant there was nobody from Torchwood on site, or they'd have been there in a flash, curious to find out what it was like travelling between universes.
"Can we have a room made up, Linda?" Jackie asked the housekeeper. "We've got an unexpected guest." She gestured to the still sleeping Doctor in the backseat.
"Not in the Torchwood rooms," Rose said. "The guest bed in my rooms, please."
Rose couldn't be sure, but Jackie's smile was worryingly close to approving.
They let him sleep until the bed was ready, then Pete helped him up the stairs, Rose only ever a step behind. The Doctor could barely keep his eyes open and only took his shoes and tie off before crawling under the covers and passing out again. Rose was pacing outside the room when Jackie arrived with a mug of tea in her hand.
"I'm worried about him, mum," Rose whispered. "This isn't normal, is it?"
"Do you not remember Christmas Day, when he changed that first time?" Jackie replied. "So unconscious we thought he was dead, and all he needed was a cup of tea."
"But he's human now. Do you really think it could be something like that?"
"Well, the tea isn't going to make it worse, and it's worth a try. You go sleep yourself, love, and I promise you that if he's still like this tomorrow we'll worry about it then."
Getting into bed was easy, getting to sleep was the tricky part. Not worrying was always easier said than done. He only had one heart. One heart was good enough for the rest of them, but suddenly it didn't seem enough. Two was the right number, in case anything happened to the first one. Right now, he was just too breakable, and the Doctor never could stay out of trouble.
His humanity, which should have been a boon to Rose, was seeming like anything but.
When the ticking of the clock in the hallway became too annoying, a constant niggling reminder of her failure to sleep, Rose gave it up as a bad job. It could only be the early hours of the morning and the house was silent, apart from that annoying tick tick tick, and the muffled snoring from the guest room.
She pulled on a fluffy dressing gown and matching slippers and headed for the living room, where she huddled down on the sofa, switching the telly on and turning the volume right down to almost silent. She needed to acclimatise herself back to this universe and all those subtle differences to her own, and the news was a good place to start.
BBC 24 was recapping sports results when she flicked to it, but just as she was ready to turn over they returned to their rolling news. Not much would be happening right now, but she'd get a recap of the big stories from the last day or so.
"Ghosts silent at Buckingham Palace" read the caption across the screen, and Rose turned the subtitles on so she could follow what was happening. Some poor journalist was apparently reporting from there—'Live', it said, in big red letters—in the middle of the night, wrapped up in a coat and with an inch of make-up trying to cover the bags under her eyes.
"Yes, Jenny," she said to the presenter in the studio, answering some inane question. "The unusual activity that has been occurring here, and at dozens of locations across the country, finally ended about an hour ago. It's now completely silent but people are waiting to see if the activity - the hauntings, as they're being called - will start again."
This must be the ghost stuff her mum had mentioned on the boat.
"I understand, Natalia," said Jenny in the studio, "that although there are dozens of eyewitnesses to many of these events, any attempt to record the noises have failed."
"That's correct," said Natalia. "We've been here since an hour after the noises here starting happening, at about 9pm last night. Although all of the crew here, including myself, could clearly hear the sounds that people were reporting, which included some extremely eerie wailing, when our sound engineer attempted to record them, all he could pick up was static. Remember, we're talking about state of the art digital recording equipment, and it wasn't just ours having this problem. Although here only strange noises happened, in other places where objects were being moved, any attempt to film them simply failed. And that, of course, is leading people to speculate that this is either genuine ghostly activity, or a massive hoax."
"And Scotland Yard are investigating this, of course."
"They are, Jenny, and from what I've heard, they seem to be leaning towards the hoax explanation, and will be combing the ruins here in daylight. For now, they've been cordoned off, as they always are after dark."
The camera pulled back from the journalist to pan across the facade of Buckingham Palace, with the ruined wing, a mass of crumbled stone, surrounded with blue and white police tape.
"Of course," Natalia continued, "if it is a hoax, this is a particularly cruel one for the Queen, although the Royal Family have declined to comment so far."
An image of Queen Elizabeth appeared, her young face just visible in the backseat of a Bentley, pulling away from a sea of photographers.
The door creaked behind Rose and she sat up straight, peering behind her to find her mum in the doorway.
"Thought I heard something," Jackie said. "Couldn't sleep?"
"No. I tried, but my head's just too...full..."
"I know. I haven't even been to bed, I've just been sat in Tony's room, watching him sleep. Hard to believe how close we all came to never coming back."
And that said it all, Rose thought. Jackie had Pete, and she had Tony, and she had the life she'd always dreamed of. In her mum's head, Pete was Rose's Pete, and they were father and daughter, even if Rose and Pete didn't quite see it like that. So long as Jackie had her family, she was happy in this universe and it was her home.
For Rose, things just weren't that simple.
"Maybe you should have a bath, eh, and see if that makes you any sleepier," Jackie suggested. "You won't find all the answers on there," she said, pointing at the television.
"Yeah, I'll give that a go." A bath did sound like a good idea, if only to get all the grime off her skin and loosen her tired muscles up. "What are you going to do?"
"Well, there's no point getting into bed when Pete will be snoring away like the devil with a drill. I'll probably finish my book, then try and nap when we've got Tony off to nursery. I'll see you in the morning, sweetheart."
It might have been the lavender-scented bubble bath, or the heat of the water, but Rose only lasted ten minutes in the bath before having to admit defeat and head for bed, where dreamless sleep greeted her.
The trouble with sleep was that, unless you were the kind of person who solved problems in your dreams, those problems were still there the next day. Rose was not that kind of person, and the first thing she heard when she swam up into consciousness in the morning was the Doctor's voice. He must be up and about, and talking to her mum from the sounds of it.
She considered just burying her head back into the pillow and ignoring the world for as long as she could, but the world would soon come looking for her. It was easier to drag herself into the shower and attempt to steam her troubles away instead.
There was a mug on her nightstand when she returned from the en suite bathroom, and a note underneath it, "Cup of tea was just what the Doctor ordered. I told you!" scribbled across it.
So he had just been tired from his own sort-of regeneration, if her mum was right. Or maybe he was just as human as the rest of them now, and running around half the universe had taken it out of him.
Getting dressed was an exercise in driving herself to insanity. She didn't want to look like she was trying too hard, but neither did she want to look like she didn't care at all. Sadly, her wardrobe ventured towards the not-caring, since she hadn't had much occasion to try in this universe. Plus she'd had to veer towards practicality, always ready for the next Torchwood mission. This meant she was stuck with dozens of pairs of jeans, and a lot of t-shirt and hoodies, unless she wanted to wear one of the suits she wore for important meetings at Torchwood.
She spent more time rummaging through t-shirts looking for the perfect one than was entirely appropriate, and somewhere in the back of her head she admitted to herself that she was stalling, but it paid off because she did actually own the perfect top. Shoved into a drawer, and luckily wrinkle free, was a Union Jack shirt. Not the one she'd worn when they'd ended up in the Blitz—that had been lost with all her other clothes—but a replica she'd bought. She hadn't been able to resist it when she saw it, on sale following the Queen's coronation.
When he smiled at her, she knew he remembered the significance of that t-shirt. His smile was bright, and his greeting was enthusiastic, but it was hard to miss the wariness in his eyes when she walked into the living room.
"Morning!" He held another mug in his hand, and Rose noted he did seem to have his vitality back. The room just seemed brighter around him. Or was that the way she saw the world?
"Morning. Did you sleep well?"
Inane pleasantries was about all she could manage right now. She noticed he was in that blue suit again. His feet were bare, though, and his hair was still damp from his own shower. Her knees did that wobbly thing again.
"Do you know, I did. I didn't dream much but that's probably for the best, considering all that happened yesterday."
"Yeah."
Just like that, she was out of words, but this was the Doctor—in some form or other—and he could carry on a conversation with anyone.
"I must say that the housekeeper is an absolute diamond. She had my suit cleaned, dried and ironed within the space of an hour - although she was a bit perturbed by me wandering round in a dressing gown. What's her name?"
"Linda."
"Linda! Yes! She deserves a raise. She makes a cracking cuppa too. Oh, I met Tony as well. Isn't he cute as a button? He's got the biggest brown eyes I've ever seen and the chubbiest little hands...and Pete will be up shortly. He had an early morning meeting to sort out my paperwork, and we're going into the offices later on."
"Are we? I'm not scheduled to be in the office until next week."
"He said that, but we're not going to the new headquarters. We're going to the old ones."
"Canary Wharf? Why? There's hardly anything left there."
"Exactly. This isn't going to be official Torchwood business, and the fewer people that know the better." He reached into the inside jacket pocket and pulled out a chunk of what looked like coral. "We're going there to grow a TARDIS."