AN: This is part of the Tardisficathon – The room prompt, given by mirandariver, was The Library.
This story is set after the events of "The Doctor Dances".
I am late with this submission - I hope I am forgiven; it has been a very long time since I tried to write. Well, here's Chapter one... more should follow (The idea turned out to be more than just a one-shot. You can blame the inspirational influence of my muse, Squirrel, for that!). It will turn into a bit of a comedy jaunt as well as a bit a fandom cross-over explosion. You don't need to know about those other fandoms though... I hope that doesn't hamper anyone's enjoyment. ^Martha.
"Where do we want to go next then?" The Doctor asked as the music stopped. Not wanting to give anyone a chance to think too deeply about what he'd just done.
Rose was still trying to catch her breath, so was pleased when Jack was the one to respond.
"Does this thing have a random setting?" he asked.
"Yes, the TARDIS does." The Doctor said, flipping a switch on the console.
"Great." Jack grinned. "Never a good idea for a rogue time agent to be too predictable."
Rose plopped down onto the jump seat as the Doctor finished pulling levers and pressing buttons, taking the TARDIS into the time vortex.
The Doctor watched the readouts on the monitor but didn't really take notice of what he was seeing. He'd been decidedly perturbed by the revelation that Rose didn't think of him as a man, and that she saw him asexual. His decision to dance with her was probably his first attempt to tell someone he fancied them in at least 750 years.
The Doctor and Jack come from a time when notions of orientation were considered rather quaint. When he made a quip about which one of them Jack wanted to dance with Rose, seeing the humour from her twentieth century perspective, had giggled happily.
Rose was from a time where some still raised their eyebrows over encounters between members of the same gender. How would she feel about sleeping with an alien? Did he want to have sex with Rose Tyler? She was barely out of her teens and he was north of nine hundred.
Sitting in that hospital in 1941 it had dawned on him that there were no Time Lords left to chastise him if he were to take advantage of a human. Should you entertain the notion of doing something wrong just because you knew you could not get caught? Did he really think it would be wrong? Did it matter at all if Rose was far more interested in Jack?
The Tardis made a loud, grinding moan, drawing him out of his thoughts. He gave the bicycle pump, embedded in the console, a few cursory compressions, just incase there was a buildup of pressure somewhere. The TARDIS screeched even louder.
There was a violent lurch and Rose almost slipped right off the jump seat. Jack was thrown into one of the metal railings. Luckily, he gripped onto it tightly and managed to ride out the bucking jolts the TARDIS made as she struggled to bring them to their next destination.
The lights dimmed for a moment and then flared brightly back to life.
Rose squinted. "What's going on?" She called in the direction of the Doctor.
"She's struggling to land." He called over the grinding noises. "The explosion of Jack's ship might have disrupted something." He tried to get to the other side of the console, clinging to it as the deck plates rolled and bucked beneath them. "I can't be sure right now. Just trying to get her down."
Five minutes of loud complaint from the TARDIS, its three inhabitants hanging on to anything fixed in the control room that they could reach, and then a soft bump brought eerie silence.
Rose exhaled loudly and tried to stand up, she kept her grip on one of the railings though, just in case.
"Rough landing," Jack said, smirking at the Doctor
"You try flying an infinite ship through the time vortex and see how you get on." The Doctor bit back. "That vortex manipulator is nothing more than a motorcycle in traffic." He added derisively.
"You say that like it's a bad thing." Jack touched his wrist fondly.
"Now, now, boys…" Rose grinned as she made her way to the doors on slightly unsteady legs. "Let's see where we've ended up… Mars? Vulcan? Earth with the dinosaurs roamnig?"
"What's with all the Star Trek this week, Rose?" The Doctor grumbled quietly, she had been obsessed with Spock while they were on Earth. He yanked the monitor back in front of his face to check on the TARDIS. "Wherever we are, we'll be staying for a while." He informed them. "The TARDIS is going to need some time to recover after that landing.
Rose pulled open the Tardis door and her grin faded. "Errr – this doesn't look like much of an adventure." She pulled a face and turned to the Doctor.
The monitor was flickering and unresponsive, the Doctor trotted down the gantry to join Rose at the door. "You're right" He sniffed a couple of times "Smells toxic."
The doors had opened to reveal nothing but a swirling mass of gas. It was almost offensively purple. Rose liked purple, so that was really saying something.
Jack was peering over their shoulders. "When you say random, you really mean random." he kidded.
"Next time I'll leave you in your exploding ship, shall I?" The Doctor lifted an eyebrow teasingly at the younger man.
"So, are we stuck in here?" Rose looked up at the Doctor.
"Yep." He turned to go back to the console. "I'll try to get the scanner back online first so we can see where we've ended up, but until then we'll have to stay put. For all we know that gas could eat right through our flesh the second we step outside the doors."
"Right, staying put it is then." Rose closed the doors, followed the Doctor and plopped back on the jump seat again to watch him work. "How long d'ya think it'll take?"
"Dunno. Could be here for days."
"Hate sittin' around waiting," Rose pouted, "always used to take a book on the bus to work cos I couldn't sit still with nothin' to do for too long." She picked at the weathered upholstery of the jump seat.
"Stop that." The Doctor swatted her hand away. "Go find yourself a book then."
"I didn't bring any with me." Rose looked up at him, injustice all over her face.
"Then go down to the library." The Doctor suggested, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
"There's a library?" She was totally incredulous.
Rose Tyler could be counted on to always wander off if they were on a dangerous planet, or end up floating across London tethered to a barrage balloon if they were on Earth in 1941, but when aboard the TARDIS she always stuck by his side. If she wasn't in her room then she was like his shadow.
Not that the Doctor was complaining.
"Can't remember the last time I was in a library." Jack strode over. "Point us in the right direction, Doc, and we'll leave you to your repairs."
The Doctor was sure that Jack understood Rose was off limits, he wouldn't have stood back and let the Doctor insist on dancing with her if he hadn't. When Jack had stood rooted to the spot as the Doctor held out his hand to Rose, the Doctor had known Jack would be a firm friend. Still, something about sending them off alone together made him uneasy.
"The TARDIS can make a start on her own." He trotted out of the console room and into the corridor. "I'll take you, it might have moved since I last went down there."
"Moved?" Jack frowned, following on the Doctor's heals
"The ship's alive." Rose told him, smiling that wide, dazzling smile as the trio headed deeper into the TARDIS.
The Doctor liked the pride in Rose's voice and on her face. She liked his ship.
The Library wasn't where the Doctor had left it. The TARDIS had a tendency to put the rooms used most closest to the console room. The kitchen and bathrooms were always near the console room. The wardrobe room was usually close at hand when he had a companion on board as were the sleeping quarters, especially when his companions were human. Humans needed much more sleep than Gallifreyans. Other rooms and old archived versions of these rooms tended to drift further out as they were used less and less. The squash courts were always a nightmare to find and the bowling alley had been known to go missing entirely.
They eventually found the library near some archived bathrooms and a millinery workshop that the Doctor couldn't remember seeing before.
He pushed open the double doors with a flourish and waltzed inside, spinning back around to see the looks on the faces of Rose and Jack. He wasn't disappointed.
Rose hardly noticed the Doctor's manic grin as her lips parted company and her eyes were drawn upwards to a ceiling that simply wasn't there. The tall bookcases on all sides rose like the walls of impossibly tall skyscrapers. In front of them were the ends of many bookcases, holding rows of shelves that stretched of farther than she could see.
The rectangular space in front of them held a desk with four chairs around it, a monitor and a couple of lamps. To the left of the door was an enormous fireplace, an armchair on either side and a sofa facing the hearth. There were a few cupboards and shelves dotted about that held things other than books, but the small space in front of them seemed almost ridiculous in comparison to the vastness of the Doctor's collection.
"Is it... everything?" Rose asked in a much smaller voice than she'd intended to use.
"No." The Doctor sagged just a tad. "Just a selection of my favourite things from wherever I go... guidebooks to a few places I'd still like to go, references to me seem to end up here too. I think the TARDIS does a certain amount of collecting herself." He walked over to the monitor on the desk ahead of them. "Just everything written by humans would take up an entire planet!" He told them.
"For all I know, this place is the size an entire planet." Rose said.
"Compensating for something?" Jack winked.
The Doctor chose not to indignify that remark any further with a response. Instead he ploughed straight into telling them how to look up what they wanted and then get directions to find it.
"We've got books, films, television, a few tanks of fiction mist, there's even some vinyl and a record player somewhere."
"Fiction mist?" Rose stared at the Doctor.
"Yeah, I think there's some in the storage tanks in the back." He pointed.
"What's fiction mist when it's at home?"
"Oh… it's like a mild, programmable hallucinogen." He said, but Rose still looked confused. It was easy to forget that there was so much she had never encountered. "It lets you live out a story. Actually see it happening around you, interact with the characters and everything."
"Like a holodeck in Star Trek?"
"Yes. But totally different." The Doctor grinned, happy that she got it.
"Right... I think I'll stick with a good book for now." Rose nodded.
The Doctor hovered over the monitor, ready to input her request. "So - what do you want to read, Rose?" He grinned expectantly.
"Choosing something new is so hard. I've still got a total book hangover from Harry Potter."
"A book hangover?" Jack's eyebrows lept up.
"You know, when you're still so caught up with one story that you can't move onto the next one." She clarified.
"Oh, sounded much more fun than that." He winked.
"Harry Potter?" The Doctor asked. "You can't have read them all, not when I picked you up in 2005."
"I actually hadn't quite finished Order of the Phoenix." She admitted.
"Well then, we'll have to see about that!" The Doctor prodded at the monitor a few times and then strode off. "This way." He called to Rose. She and Jack hurried after him into the towering rows of books.