Title: Have Blog, Will Travel
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: You know the drill. If you've seen it before, I don't own it. Especially the Doctor and Rose Tyler.
Summary: Another guess at what Tentoo and Rose are doing in Pete's World.
Notes: Okay, so I like to play with tropes and do something a little different. Lots of people expect the Doctor and Rose are working with Torchwood, and that makes some sense. Some people decided to go with Tennant's toungue-in-cheek comment they were doing organic cattle ranching, because why not? But I honestly haven't seen much else than these options among the people who are going with Tentoo and Rose don't have a TARDIS. But I got to wondering. What if they weren't working at Torchwood? What would they do without a TARDIS and with a need to make some sort of a living? This is sort of my theory.
Other notes: I don't know why no one ever just tells people he was born with a normal name and changed it legally like Sting, Bono, the Edge, etc. etc. Yes, I went with Alec Carlisle. So sue me, it's easier to mix and match character names than to bother with something new.
He'd tried, he really had.
Torchwood made sense for employment. Alien tech, saving the world, being close to Rose all the time, paying Pete back for all the things he'd done to get the Doctor established (although he really wasn't all that fond of the birth certificate for "Alec Carlisle", who had legally changed his name to "The Doctor" a la Sting, but what can you do?) et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yul Brynner eat your heart out.
The problems were, however, a tad problematic. Very problematic, actually.
The first was that he'd done this scientific advisor, cum field agent, cum alien expert thing before. Not only had he not particularly enjoyed it in his third body, but things here were even more regimented than UNIT back in the day, but there was no Brigadier, no Harry or John to poke fun at or harass, no Liz Shaw to challenge and ask questions and no TARDIS to work on to escape someday.
Nine hundred years of being his own boss, so to speak, had left him thoroughly unadapted to being somewhere at nine every morning, or earlier as people insisted he ought to be, leaving at five at night, or later as everyone insisted he ought to be, meeting fitness requirements for being in the field and the dull as dirt lunches at the main building's canteen . . . it was all awful.
More awful was watching Rose. He'd been so proud of her when she'd told him originally, but the reality was something different. Rose had a job as a field agent because she had real experience with aliens, with not panicking when faced with the unknown and a real flair for figuring out what to do in knotty situations. She didn't have any university degrees and never made any bones of the fact that she'd not got her A-levels. It had bred a lot of resentment in people there who felt that she hadn't worked for her position, and no matter how much she'd done to prove she deserved it (and the Doctor had hacked the records, comparing hers against other comparable peoples' to be sure), most of the professional types there looked down on her.
It was that more than anything else that made the Doctor hate working at Torchwood. He hated seeing people sneer at Rose as though she didn't deserve their respect, he hated seeing her face tighten every time someone muttered about how he could possibly care for "that chavvy bint". As though she didn't deserve him, as though he could find better than Rose.
It was becoming the worst recurring argument they had. They almost never argued about what to watch on the telly, where to go when they scarpered off somewhere on holiday, or when they ended up sleeping in someone's attic because neither of them had bothered to find a hotel, or hostel, or anywhere else to stay in advance. There was definitely nothing wrong with their sex life. That was brilliant and the Doctor wanted to apologise to every companion he'd ever made snide remarks to about the human sex drive, because this was, to borrow the catchphrase of his last body, fantastic. Italics definitely needed.
"I thought you were proud of me!" she'd shout.
He never wanted her to think otherwise. "Of course I am. I think you're brilliant and you should do what you want, but I hate seeing you listening to them. They say these horrible things about you-"
"You can quit, you know."
"I don't want to leave you alone with them."
"So now I can't handle myself?" she'd snap, taking what he said all wrong.
He stifled a sigh of exasperation. "Of course you can handle yourself, but there's no reason why you should have to deal with their petty, small-minded-"
"If I leave, I prove them right," Rose pointed out.
The Doctor threw his hands in the air. "What would it matter what they think if you never see them again?"
"Because they work with my Dad, and then I'll have to see them, simply because they'll be where he is? And because Dad'll ask you to help, and you know neither of us would turn him down when he does, which means we'd be seeing them again."
At least she assumed they'd be together. Because they would be. He wasn't spending any more time without her than he had to. "Just . . . think about it, Rose. Please," he'd finish, and the fight would be over. But it got a little worse every time, a little more tearing for them both.
He blew up the day that Jackie stuck her nose into the argument. "I want to talk to you," she'd said, stomping into the flat he and Rose shared.
She looked like she was in a slapping mood, so he hastily arranged himself on the chair furthest away from her as he could without looking like he was avoiding the Open Palm of Doom. "Oh? What about, Jackie?"
"I want to know what you're thinking, telling Rose she should leave the best job she's ever had," Jackie told him. "She'd never have had an opportunity like the one she's got now, back home. She's got no A-levels and no prospects here, not even a recommendation that would get her another job in a clothes shop like she had at Henrik's." Rose's mother glared at him. "And she keeps coming to me, crying about how you want her to stop it. What's wrong with you? You turning out like all those blokes who can't stand to see their girlfriends supporting themselves?"
"Of course not," he snapped. "So, you're the one that's keeping her there? Telling her she should put up with everyone at Torchwood calling her a chav? Claiming she got the job because she's Pete's daughter, not because she's better at it than they are?"
That slowed Jackie down a mite. "They what? That's why you want her to quit?"
"Yes," he told her. "I think she's better than a collection of . . . a collection of wankers who think they're better than her because they've been to a university that gives them no experience in dealing with alien cultures, while Rose has actually learnt to talk with and understand aliens."
Jackie's lips twitched a little. "Wankers? Never thought I'd hear you talking like that," she said. "Doesn't even sound like you back when you had the ears."
"It's not," he admitted. "But there aren't words in English for what they are that are both accurate and not ejaculatory terms of opprobrium-"
"Swearing?" Jackie asked, cutting him off. "I still think you're wrong, because we all have things we have to put up with that we don't like, but I'll stay out of it and I'll tell Rose not to assume you're being all . . ." she waved a hand in the air a moment. "Like a typical bloke that doesn't want his wife working. Speaking of which, when are you two getting married?" she asked. As she always did.
He talked at her really fast, trying to distract her, she let him, but told him she was letting him, and then left.
But that changed things, because it meant Rose was possibly staying in that job because she thought she couldn't do better. They had another fight that ended with her crying. "It's not like I have credentials to show anyone!" she shouted through tears. "I can't just apply for any old job, because I don't have references I can give people and I don't have a degree to show them and I don't have any experiences here except at Torchwood, and that's all classified, so I can't exactly use that for anything!"
"Rose-" he reached for her, desperate for her to understand that they could find something else. Anything else.
"You want to travel?" she demanded. "How are we gonna fund that without a job that gives us enough money to do it? A job that gives enough holiday time to do it?"
"Holidays that get interrupted to come back and bail them out," he muttered rebelliously. There were real down sides to being the Earth's best and only alien expert.
She wasn't listening and she was crying. "I do hate it, okay? I hate listening to them all telling me I don't deserve it, I don't work as hard as they do, and I hate listening to them get all smirky when I don't know all the fancy words they do."
"You are better than that," he told her fiercely. "You're better than them, and you know it. I just . . ." it still sometimes was hard to force the words out, but he had to say them, because Rose deserved to hear them. "I love you and I want you happy," he told her. "And that means I don't want you at a job where people say horrible things about you behind your back, and I don't want to work somewhere people say horrible things about you to me."
He didn't know who moved first, but they hugged and he breathed in the scent of Rose, eyes closed as he let his other senses envelop him in everything that was her. "I know," she said. "I love you too. But we have to live here and now. We don't-" she cut herself off before she mentioned the TARDIS that was lost to them both, something that would always hurt him.
That day he devoted himself to finding something, anything that would get Rose away from there, that would let them both be happy. It was chance that it happened in the end, rather than any of his direct efforts, but wasn't that just how things went for him normally anyhow?
When they'd first begun travelling he'd spent some time reading travel guides and web sites to look at how things were different here than in their native reality. He'd soon started commenting on the articles there, eventually getting a blog himself in order to chastise everyone for whinging about silly things like whether or not the telly in the hotel was working, since the point of travelling was to see places, not the telly in a foreign country.
His first article had been all about how brilliant it was to take the bus to places. Having always been in the TARDIS before, he'd never really had to worry about how to get where he was going, and he certainly had hardly ever taken such a slow and meandering route to anywhere.
But it really was brilliant. The chance to see all the countryside unfolding past the window, all the small towns, the strange decorations people would put on their houses, strange businesses you'd only see if you were travelling street by street, silly signs and bad puns in advertisements, local monuments and unexpected little local attractions that weren't in guidebooks. He'd missed out on that over so many centuries, and he'd wanted to tell everyone all about it.
Rose had been there and Jackie and Pete had eventually all but told him (or so Rose said) to stop talking about it, so he'd gone to his brand new blog.
He'd spent one talking about how lovely it was to bicycle across the countryside, another on how to find the best spot to look out the windows at mountains and other scenery when travelling in a zeppelin. He'd talked about taxis and public buses, walking and carriages, horseback riding and camels and elephants.
When Rose found out about his hobby she'd read all his entries, then joined him when he was writing his latest, cheerfully adding in hints and tips on how to store eighty little tiny jam jars in a backpack without breaking them, how to catch another bus when you'd stayed behind from the one you were on because Certain People just had to see the tiny little local museum in a small Polish town, dedicated to Catherine the Great because somehow one of her hats had wound up there.
He discussed how exciting it was to meet new people while staying in a hostel, Rose commented on how to tell a nice one from a run-down one, and helpful means of remembered where you were staying so you wouldn't have to desperately hope to find someone who spoke English to help you, especially when your regular translator had sprinted off to look at the garial reserve, leaving you to find your way back to the hotel.
She talked about all the best places to shop, whether for little jams, souvenirs or gifts for family. How to find gorgeous things to buy fashion-minded mothers and cool toys and trinkets for little brothers. He tempered this with how to find things to do in a market when the love of your life was deeply involved in whether to purchase the blue or the green bag, and if she should call home to ask her dad if her mum had succeeded at getting rid of his incredibly old, but favourite, jacket, because the green would clash with his new one and she needed to know which to go with.
People visited their blog more and more, and he loved it. He loved sitting down and reading what people had to say, getting into discussions and arguments with people all over.
But that day, just as he was desperate looking for something that would let them leave Torchwood, he got an email. He checked it for its veracity, looked at the clock that told him he'd be late for work, and went with the instincts of centuries, that were still backed with that bit of Time Lord sense of timelines that he still had, despite only being half Gallifreyan now. He ignored the clock and phoned the lead editor of Davison's Travel Magazine Online.
"Ernest Cartwright, who's calling, please?"
"Hello, this is the Doctor. I received your email just now, actually."
His mobile beeped and he glanced at the screen to see a text from Rose. Where r u?
"Ah, thank you for the quick reply," Cartwright said. "As I said in the email, I had a proposal for you. We've recently had a vacancy appear on our staff. Lewis Strickland got an offer to work for the Times, which has left me in need of a regular columnist. The blog you and your wife write is very popular, brilliant, actually. I wanted to know if you both would be interested in working for us."
Busy at home. He tapped out his reply, the land line phone stuck between his ear and shoulder. "What would you be proposing exactly?" he asked.
"There's a great deal of interest in people going on holidays a little off the beaten path," Cartwright said. "Anyone can find good advice if you want to go to New York, stay in the regular hotels, see the major museums and go up the Statue of Liberty. There's a great deal less good advice for how to cope with going wandering in rural Columbia and what's worth seeing there." There was the sound of a keyboard tapping on the line, and then Cartwright continued. "You'd be expected to travel most of the year, of course, and about half your destinations would be places the magazine sent you, but the specific details of those trips would be yours to determine. That is, you'd be told, for example, to do an African safari, but the details of that would be yours. The other half of your destinations would be your choices, albeit vetted by the office."
Busy w/ wat?
"How would we be compensated for this?" the Doctor asked. He was horribly aware, now that he no longer had the TARDIS, that he needed places to stay in, that in this time it was harder and harder to find people who would be willing to let you wash dishes for a free meal, transportation cost money unless you were going under your own physical power, hitch hiking or travelling illegally for the most part, and getting replacement clothing for things you wore out also cost. He'd long since sent out another silent apology to all the people he'd unknowingly insulted by deriding their determination to be financially independent, or at least better off. He couldn't hide from the police in the TARDIS after sonicking a cashpoint anymore, after all.
Just something important. He refused to give in to the tendency to write in ungrammatical, misspelled phrases in text form.
Cartwright outlined a plan. Their travel expenses would be covered by the magazine, within reason. That is, food, accommodations, transport, special expenses integral to whatever trip they were on, such as for guides, equipment or entry fees. In exchange, they'd be expected to put out a bi-weekly column in the same format they'd been doing for the bulk of the year.
"What prompted this offer?" the Doctor asked. "I know we've got a significant following, but –"
"I'll be blunt," Cartwright told him. "Your blog has been bringing a rather significant amount of advertising, and after some discussion, we want that here. The amount of traffic you'd bring to our magazine more than offsets our payment for your expenses. Furthermore, you're filling in a very specific niche here, of a more adventurous sort of travel, but still accessible in ways that a lot of other so-called extreme experiences aren't."
More important than work?
Rose's sceptical voice was almost audible. Yes.
"I need to think about this," he told the man. "This might pay for our travel now, but expenses aren't going to cover the rest of our living expenses."
They said polite farewells, and the Doctor began to hack in earnest, discovering that he was, indeed, making rather a lot of money for the blog people, bringing in significant traffic, and therefore advertising revenues.
Still, while this offer would let them travel, it wouldn't let them maintain a home in London, which meant they'd have to stay with Jackie and Pete any time they came back to visit, it meant they'd have no savings for things they wanted and for expenses beyond those the magazine would cover. He was under no illusions this was the actions of an altruistic bunch of people to help him and Rose lead lives they wanted to.
Unless . . .
When Rose came storming home that evening, she returned to the flat in a chaos of maps, comparative monetary value charts and the Doctor grinning as he chatted on the phone in a language she vaguely recognised as something Eastern European.
"I've got it Rose!" he exclaimed once he'd hung up. "We can quit and it's perfect and we never have to go back unless there's an actual invasion happening!"
He picked her up and swung her around in a circle then kissed her. "What've you got?" she asked, eyeing the mess.
At first, when he started rattling on about their travel expenses being covered and nothing else she was going to shake him and scream. They couldn't quit for that it wasn't enough. It wouldn't cover insurance, it wouldn't cover prescription medications and Christmas presents, it wouldn't cover his little jams and staying somewhere that wasn't her parents' when they were at home.
Then he explained the rest. Because while they couldn't sell their articles to other English-speaking magazines, newspapers, travel guides and what-all, they could sell them to foreign-language ones. They had foreign language followers, because he replied to readers in their own languages. They wouldn't even have to write new material, just translate, and then they could sell those same articles to foreign publications. He'd spent the day setting it up, finding people willing to accept his articles, had already got them paid for a few that they'd done recently.
He'd already negotiated that they'd have the ultimate rights to sell their work to whomever they wanted, so long as it wasn't a direct competitor for the magazine.
It had been so long since Rose had seen that eager light in his eyes, that alone was almost enough to decide her. But it wasn't just that. The plan made sense. They weren't leaping into the unknown, they would be doing the same thing they were already doing, just more.
"Well?" he finally asked. He looked uncertain now, and Rose realised he was waiting for her agreement. That he wasn't assuming anything and was waiting because he wanted her to want it as much as he did.
One month later they were watching penguins in Argentina, and he was translating for her as she apologised for his being still rude-and-not-ginger to an otherwise nice lady who was threatening to hit him with a cast iron pan.
It was perfect.
The Doctor and Rose Tyler, travelling. Just as it should be.