Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its characters belong to the BBC and RTD. I make no money off this story and I promise to return them to their places when it's over.
Author's Notes: This was written for a (very belated) Valentine's Day prompt from fannishliss, who wanted a story using the lyrics of The Pretenders' "500 Miles". I apologize as it might only be tangentially related to the song.
As usual, much love to the gorgeous develish1 for her beta work, and spotting my (unusually messy) tense shifts. :) Thank you so much!
The TARDIS arrived at the corner of the overgrown garden, wheezing and moaning as it settled on the soft green grass. Vines of morning glories twined around the lattices that surrounded the borders of the garden, and English roses and teacup flowers bloomed profusely across the open spaces. A circular marble patio stood in the middle of the garden, with white wicker chairs and tables, an umbrella providing shade over every piece of furniture.
A man, tall and lanky and dressed in a rumpled brown pinstriped suit with a blue-patterned tie, stepped out of the blue box. His eyes took in the circular patterns of the stones on the patio, the whorls of reds and silvers and oranges across the flower beds, the buzz of invisible bees. He ran a hand through his hair, a shock of mahogany that seemed to have a life of its own, and made his way across the garden, past the patio, and rapped his knuckles against the wooden doorframe at the back of a house.
The house itself seemed to be a marvel. At first glance, it appeared to be a typical two-storey garden cottage, white walls with a brown trim. The slanted roof was tiled a dark blue. There were flowers growing on the windowsills, creeping vines taking over at least one of the walls, and irregular stone steps leading up to the back door. But the more one noticed the house, the more one realized there were small details that were initially invisible to the eye: a turret here, a parapet there, annexes and halls, stables, Roman baths and Finnish saunas, all carefully tucked away under eaves, behind walls or beneath trapdoors.
The back door opened, and a pair of amber eyes beneath strands of bright blonde hair looked at the man in surprise. "Doctor!" Said the young woman who opened the door. She was in a pretty white frock, her hair braided with daisies, her pale feet bare. "It's so good of you to come."
The Doctor ducked his head as he entered the house and stepped into the sunny kitchen. "I came as soon as you called," he said quietly, his hands in his pockets.
She ushered him towards a chair and gave him a cup of tea, just the way he liked it, and sat down in front of him. Her cheeks were tinted pink with anticipation. "I... I've been having nightmares, Doctor."
"Tell me about them."
She flushed. "You'd think me mad."
He finally gave into his impulse and stretched out one hand to place it on top of hers. She's cool to the touch; he adds that to the mental list of things that he's been noticing about her since he arrived. "Tell me. Please."
"All right." She doesn't shift her hand away from his; instead she turns it, palm upward, to twine her fingers around his. "In one of them, I'm surrounded by blue ghosts. They're reaching for me through the bars of a dungeon. There's someone holding my hand, but I can't see his face. And even though I know that we're in danger, and that perhaps we're about to die, I can't help but be glad that I am with this man."
The Doctor rubbed his thumb absently over the delicate webbing of skin between her thumb and forefinger. "All right. Dreaming of ghosts is not unusual. What else?"
The young woman shifted in her seat and stood up, pulling him along with her. "It's better if I show you. It's in the drawing room."
She lead him down twisting corridors, unerringly following an invisible compass as she took sharp turns, steep steps, and spiral paths. The Doctor followed her quietly, watching the hallways unfurl like ribbons beneath their feet. Sunlight streamed from invisible windows, and he caught glimpses of rooms - one full of blue butterflies swirling likedervishes; another filled with glowing green jellyfish, pulsing in black waters, surrounded by sea-bubbles; a room full of parchment sketches hanging from the ceiling; an empty room, white-paneled and with a single window looking out into the night sky.
The drawing room was exactly what it said on the tin: a room full of drawings. Paintings lined the walls, sketches littered easels, and at the far end of the room, a scale model of an alien landscape was spread across a rectangular table. "I did that when I couldn't sleep," she said, gesturing to the model apologetically. "I don't know where it came from, with the silver trees and the orange sky and this glass-domed citadel in the mountains..." Her voice trailed off and she hung back as the Doctor stepped into the room, looking through the artwork. She had a deft hand, her brushstrokes neat, her outlines clean. One of the creatures she'd drawn had a bulbous head and slanted, beady eyes, with tentacles growing out of its mouth and a glowing orb held in one hand. Another drawing had a dome-shaped machine that looked distinctly like an old-fashioned pepper-pot, with a mechanical eye that stared malevolently from the page. The Doctor rifled through the sheets of paper. Cats in wimples. A sheet of skin suspended on a metal frame with a face drawn in the middle. Children in gas masks. A blue-hued woman tethered to wires, her body hung in mid-air, connected to screens.
And words, words he could read, words that were written in swirls and constellations, written beneath each drawing. Words that he thought only he could decipher, only he could inscribe.
"Rose," he said, finally turning around, "what do you remember?"
She tilted her head and looked at him strangely. "That's my name? I don't remember my name, Doctor."
"Rose," he said again, louder, stronger, even as his twin hearts broke all over again to see her reduced to this strange, simple girl. "Rose Tyler. You're from London in the twenty-first century. You live in the Powell Estates with your mum, Jackie, who once slapped me so hard I felt like I was going to regenerate. You held my hand when I told you to run. You're the Bad Wolf. You're the girl who saved my life."
But she shook her head and gave him a beatific smile. "No. I don't remember them. I just wanted you to stop the nightmares, Doctor."
He strode over to where she stood by the door and cupped her face tenderly in his hands. "Rose, Rose. You have to remember."
She looked up at him. "I'm scared," she said, in a small voice.
"You don't have to be scared." He pressed his fingers against her temples, feeling for the barriers erected in her mind. He could feel her memories swirling beneath the mental blocks that were placed in her mind, pearlescent in the void. "I'm here, Rose."
"Please stop calling me that. That's not my name, Doctor."
"It is. You know it is. You know it to be true, Rose." The barriers were crafted intricately, layers upon layers of forgetfulness placed in her mind, blocking out everything she could ever remember, everything she could ever call her own. This was how much they feared the Bad Wolf.
Tears welled up in her eyes. "Please, Doctor, stop it. It's hurting me."
"That's not me, Rose. That's you. That's all your memories, trying to escape the barriers in your mind." He held her, his fingers cradling her head, nose to nose, his eyes staring into hers. "You called for me. That means you're remembering. That means you know who I am. Who am I?"
"You're the Doctor," she said shakily.
"Yes, yes I am." He could feel her mind pulsing, trying to break the seals on her memories. They were there; her true self, buried beneath layers and layers of tricks and drugs and pain and fear. "Do you remember how you got here? To this house?"
"No! Stop it, Doctor!" she screamed, pushing him away, small fists pummeling his chest. He endured her onslaught and kept her close. "It hurts!"
He could feel the seals cracking as her memories started spilling to the surface. "It's all right, Rose," he said over her screams, pulling her towards him and wrapping his arms around her slender, trembling shoulders. "It's all right, I'm here, I found you."
And he had found her: he'd scoured the entire universe ever since she was taken from him in the busy marketplace of Dextris Seven. One minute, he was looking through holographic metalwork and the next; he'd heard her screams as she was taken from his side. He remembered the pounding of his hearts as he'd raced through the crowds, leaping past startled shoppers and following the mercenaries that had captured her.
Of course they'd eluded him - when he finally arrived at the spaceport, they had already taken off. He'd followed their trail, hopping from one galaxy to another, keeping the TARDIS on full alert for Rose's artron-enhanced bio signature. It was a full month and more uses of the sonic screwdriver than he could mention before he'd finally discovered the masterminds behind the taking of Rose. Slavers, paid in full by a shadowy council that they refused to name, the money routed through channels that the Doctor could spend several regenerations trying to unravel. And en masse, they'd all taken a pill that stopped their vital functions. At this point, the trail had gone cold, and Rose's bio signature was no longer transmitting at the frequency he'd been using - or on any frequency at all.
And despite all the jiggery-pokery he'd done on the TARDIS and despite calling on favors and promising favors of his own to less than savory characters of the galactic underworld, he still couldn't find Rose. Not until he'd heard her voice in a dream, on one of his rare moments of sleep, calling for him.
Doctor, Doctor.
She whimpered, her eyes squeezed shut, pain furrowing her forehead and driving her to bury her face against his chest. "They were afraid of me, Doctor," she managed to say between sobs, her tears staining the front of his pinstriped jacket. "They were afraid of the Bad Wolf. What does that even mean?"
"Shhh," he said, stroking her hair. "It's okay now."
"No it's not. I don't know what happened, and how, and... Doctor, is there an earthquake?"
Around them, the house began to contract. Slipping one hand away from her shoulders, the Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver and swept the area. Walls began to shudder and shake off the paintings hanging on them. The sonic buzzed angrily and the Doctor glanced at the readout on the barrel. "The house is collapsing. It's tied down to your mental state. Once the barriers in your mind start breaking, the house is affected too."
Rose cowered beside him. "What do we do?"
He grabbed her hand and gave her a manic grin. "What we do best - run!"
They fled, hand in hand, as the timbers of the house split into two, dust and debris raining down on them. She matched his rhythm as they ran, as the walls collapsed and the roof caved in, stone and wood and masonry reduced to rubble as they made a beeline for the door. The Doctor yanked it open, and they stumbled out into the sunlit garden just as, with a loud groan, the cottage crumbled completely like a house of cards.
Rose coughed once, twice, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Well, that was certainly an adventure," she said. She had a mischievous grin hovering over her lips, but tearstains still marked her face.
The Doctor caught her in a hug, pressing her close to his chest. "Don't ever do that to me again, Rose Tyler."
She chuckled against his chest, her arms around him as well. "I'd say, don't lose me in marketplaces then."
"I'd have to keep you on a leash," he said, burying his face in her soot-dusted hair. The fear and panic and loneliness that he experienced while she was gone rushed to the forefront, and long-denied tears suddenly prickled his eyes. "Oh Rose," he said, in a trembling voice. "I thought you were gone forever."
She kept him close to her, molding her body against his. "I promised you forever, Doctor, and I meant it."
He finally released her and carefully captured her face with his hands, as though he couldn't believe that she was real and here and in his arms. "Do you remember what happened?"
Rose nodded. "They were frightened of the Bad Wolf. They took me to this med-bay, like yours, and a woman with a long red robe and a golden headpiece told me that they needed me to forget, that they needed to keep the Bad Wolf at bay before the world ends. And then I slept. I slept for a very long time."
"Well, human do like their sleep," quipped the Doctor, and Rose laughed weakly.
"Anyway, I remember waking up in the cottage as though I had been there my entire life. And then the dreams started happening, and... well, you know I'm rubbish at drawing, but for some reason, I managed to create all of that. It was like somebody else had borrowed my hands." Rose scrunched her nose. "And I knew I missed someone terribly, but I didn't know who it was, but your name kept on floating in my head, like it was a childhood song that I'd forgotten the words to, but I could still hum the melody."
"I heard your psychic signal," he said. Hand in hand, they walked back to the TARDIS, which was still sitting serenely beneath an apple blossom tree. "I followed it here, to this tiny planet. It's called Prima Vera Seventeen, the seventeenth moon of the Vera galaxy. It's very hard to track down; only comes into satellite view every five hundred years. I'm not surprised they tried to hide you here. They must've thought that I wouldn't want to come near here."
"How come?"
"We're in the Kasterborous system. Gallifrey was, ooooh, perhaps a few hundred light years away from where we are right now."
"That's your home planet, yeah?" Rose laid a comforting hand on his arm. "I'm sorry."
A darkened look passed over the Doctor's eyes. He looked up, squinting in the sunlight, and then gestured to the TARDIS door. "Do you still have your TARDIS key?" he asked.
She nodded, lifting the delicate chain from beneath her dress. "They didn't take it away from me."
"Good. There's not a lot of those around, and the TARDIS changes the locks every regeneration." The Doctor motioned for her to open the door of the TARDIS, when a circular pendant that hung on the same chain as the key caught his eye. "Rose, what's that?"
Rose caught his eyes, and for a moment, he saw the swirl of universes, the braided filaments of time twisting and turning in her gaze. "It's a pocket watch. Mum gave it to me, she said it belonged to my dad."
"May I see it?"
She unclasped the chain from behind her neck and handed both key and pocket watch to the Doctor. The ornate pocket watch was delicately carved with a familiar design - circles within circles and angles that had neither beginnings nor endings. He looked up once more at the familiar face of Rose - her smile and her eyes and the light of the sun caught in her hair. Is that why she was able to become the Bad Wolf in the first place? Is that why he could hear her inside his head? Is that why she felt so right, beside him?
There was only one way to find out.
He cradled the pocket watch in his palm, and released the clasp.