A/N: This is the sequel to my previous story, "Maps", which is also archived here - more sense will likely be made if read in order. This is Alt!Jack, and post-Doomsday by a year. Many thanks to my beta, misssara.
Chapter One
The floating seeds of timeless travel
Come to rest in planes that don't exist
Visiting worlds of crystal beauty
Offering dreams so very hard to resist
I've seen the past, I've seen the future
Beyond dimension and into empty space
Finding questions, never answers
Living time behind another face.
Space, outer space, all that is beyond the Earth and the tiny young solar system, and past what twenty-first century technologies have tried to capture and photograph - all of the unimaginably vast, blackest black of it, strewn with innumerable burning stars and luminous planets spinning in the farthest reaches of forever. Longer than long stretches of pure emptiness hang in between the reaching, sparkling arms of galaxies that hold suns and worlds that flourish and die and are born in the blink of an eye.
A flash of metal and a whir of an engine, a machine made by human hands in the strangeness of the outermost edge of the galaxy - a pinpoint of a ship, so minuscule in its surroundings, a blip on the radar of space-time.
Inside, Rose Tyler huddles against the heavy, curved, window and presses her forehead to the glasslike surface, and attempts unsuccessfully to wrap her mind around all of what is above and below and ahead and behind. The enormity of what she does not know from where she stands makes her head swim slightly, and she turns away from the stars that are billions of years older than herself.
"D'you know how old you are?"
Jack looks up, distracted. "What?"
She begins to pace slowly about the ship, looking all around. Considering things in order, one and then another. "I dunno know how old I am - in Earth years, I mean. Lost track, all of that travelin' back and forth." Just the nights that were now and the days that were then.
Jack considers, raises a brow. "In earth years? Solar days? Intergalactic Time Units? Astronomical units? Parsecs? Carbon half-lifes? Planck units?"
"Yes," she says, prodding at a few small buttons in the wall.
"Don't touch that."
"Why? What is it? Teleport? Nanogenes?"
"Microwave."
Rose rolls her eyes. "Right. So...Captain, where are we headed?" She wanders away from the wall and resumes pacing, trailing a hand against uneven metal walls. Jack's ship alternates between spacious and cluttered, dark and flooded with artificial light.
"Somewhere under the radar for fuel and supplies. There are a few repairs I need to take care of." He springs to his feet to poke at an overhead monitor. "We'll stop at one of the colonies out here."
"Earth colonies?"
"Hm." He thumps the side of the screen with a good amount of malice, which flashes and flickers to life. "There," he indicates, waving a hand at the screen. "Colony E-3524. We should be able to stay unnoticed until I can get this piece of junk running properly."
Rose leans forward and peers at the monitor curiously, at the tiny human outpost hanging in orbit around a star, an echo of an imitation of Earth. "And when are we?"
"Just jumped ahead about...five hundred years."
She feels slightly giddy. "Never gets old, this." You can go back and see days that are dead and gone, and a hundred thousand sunsets ago...no wonder you never stay still. "After everything...didn't think I'd ever see any of it again."
Jack has to dismiss the sentimentality, not unkindly. "We can sightsee later. For now let's concentrate on staying alive." There was never any blue box to hide inside, at least not that he has seen.
"So far so good, yeah?" She kicks a foot idly against the grated floor and grins at Jack unrepentantly until he stops frowning.
"Catch," he advises, and easily tosses a piece of equipment her way.
She does, it is light, and turns it over and around in her hands. "What's it do?"
"Comm." He taps his ear. "I have one too, they're at the same frequency. Cell phone won't work out here."
"Used to," Rose thinks out loud, adjusting the comm around her own ear.
"Testing," Jack says, and she can hear him in her head.
She closes her eyes reflexively as they land, but stays on her feet.
Jack strides briskly out of the ship, she follows a few paces slower, experimentally toeing the dusty ground and looking every direction at once. It is warm and subdued, and she can taste water on the air and feel a breeze, and looks up to see a sky unexpectedly similar to Earth at twilight. They are on a bit of flat, elevated ground scattered with ships and vehicles of all shapes and sizes - car park, Rose thinks amusedly, and wonders at the nighttime.
"Artificial atmosphere," Jack explains upon seeing the question. "Five hundred years into your future back on your planet, and human beings make the edges of the galaxy look like Earth. We're a little reluctant to let it go."
"All of that space travel, an' we still can't rearrange the furniture," Rose says, and takes her eyes off the stars. There are buildings nearby, roads without cars, distant noises that sound like a familiar city. It glows softy in innumerable different colours and teems with energy, and they set off together.
"Just don't wander off," Jack tells her, intent on finding, Rose guesses, whatever the space colony equivalent to an auto parts store is nearby.
She trails behind, watching the throngs of people of every size, colour, and shape - some more human-looking than others, and manages to obey his instructions for a good two minutes. The rush of noise and movement is distracting, and she pauses, listening to chatter and shouting and trying to pick out familiar words – unidentifiable new languages that are now strange, the odd phrase in English here and there. Untranslatable, now.
Jack is nowhere to be seen, but she shrugs - they have not gone far from the Bad Wolf, and she has a comm. Someone brushes past, pushing her forward, and she sets off walking. Feet pressing against ground that no one from her time has seen or felt.
A bustling street marketplace, of sorts, tall tall buildings crowned with blinking lights and small square ones dotted with windows, spindly blue trees that line the street Rose travels down, streaming with people. She walks and walks, and half-wishes for someone to talk to, to marvel with, at everything, at the strangeness of the blue trees, at the thrill of exploring.
Jack steps back outside, looks to both sides – no sign of Rose. He is irritated, although not even vaguely surprised. A passerby on the road notices him searching, and stops.
"Are you lost?"
"No. Just looking for someone. Haven't happened to see a blonde running around here, have you?"
This earns a chuckle and a shrug. "Plenty. Depends on what you're looking for."
Jack has time to smile briefly before the sky caves in.
Rose frowns, perplexed, at the sky above - like clouds roiling before a storm, but with an artificial atmosphere? Something worries at the back of her mind as the sky begins to churn, and the warning bells scream shrilly a split second before a clap of thunder echoes, deafening, she can feel the ground vibrate beneath her feet.
But not thunder, Rose realises, and instinctively crouches close to the street and presses her palms against her ears as the sound booms and shrieks through the atmosphere - glass rains down onto the sidewalk beside her, the fragments crunch beneath the feet of people rushing past in alarm, yelling and shouting to be heard above the din.
She looks up again, sees a flash of metal against the sky, something huge. She shivers.
"Shit," she thinks out loud, and instinctively gets ready to run.
The comm buzzes and crackles in her ear, she holds a hand to it and can hear Jack's voice urgently in her head above the smothering noise.
He is yelling, and it is the first time she has heard him sound so frantic. "Rose! Can you hear me? Where are you?"
"I - I don't know," she replies helplessly, and looks around, trying to keep her balance admidst the shaking and rushing crowd, and thinks the worst.
"Well, figure it out," Jack advises, sounding strangled. "I'm sure this goes without saying, but we have to get out of here ten minutes ago."
Running is something Rose knows how to do with great, practised skill, and she takes off sprinting back the way she came, dodging people and broken windows and fallen tree limbs.
He spots her first, grabs her by the wrist without a word and she stumbles slightly in effort to keep up with him.
"What's going on?" She has to nearly scream to be heard.
Jack is grim. "That's a Time Agency ship up there. Give you three guesses why they're here." He barely notices how tightly his hand is wrapped around hers.
Rose pretends that she can not smell burning behind them, and tries for optimism. "The shopping?"
"Shut up and run," Jack advises, and the Bad Wolf appears over the rise of the hill.
She is out of breath by the time they reach the ship, and leaps inside, heart pounding in her ears. Jack slams into the console, and she presses against the window and looks at the metal sky as the ship jumps and shudders and groans to life with effort.
"What are they gonna do?" she asks, still able to feel the ground shake, despite fearing the answer.
Jack doesn't answer.
He throws a control and the ship rockets upwards with enough force to throw Rose down onto the metal grating.
She feels about two seconds of elation at their getaway before the ship is rocked violently, every fibre of it vibrates and shrieks, and the sky outside lights up terribly, and she grabs on to whatever is nearest to pull herself up to the window, and sees a glimpse of smoke and sparks and the torn debris that used to be Colony E-3524 rushing toward them before the Bad Wolf rips a hole in time and flashes away.