Chapter 2 – in which explanations are given
Eleven hours later, and while night and morning don't technically exist in the TARDIS, the Doctor and Jack are in the TARDIS galley having what would be described anywhere else as breakfast. Although, as Jack continues to pester him, the Doctor is beginning to wish he'd stayed in the console room and just had a banana.
"Like I told you last night Jack, she didn't say; I didn't ask."
"How can you not have asked? People don't just appear out of nowhere. Not into the TARDIS. Not without some sort of explanation." Jack has been repeating the same incredulous questions since the Doctor told him about finding Rose. The Doctor has moved beyond patient and is now firmly entrenched in annoyed. Particularly because people appearing out of nowhere iis/i something that happened in the TARDIS with disturbing regularity. Never used to be that way. Used to be the TARDIS walls were impregnable; he's not quite sure when that all changed. He looks around at the walls with concern as Jack continues to pace about and ask questions he doesn't have answers to. Perhaps he should take apart the ionic dampeners and replace the filter? Although where he's going to find a replacement filter is a bigger problem. Oh well, maybe it's for the best. If the dampeners had been working, Rose would not have been able to get in. He sees Jack looking at him expectantly and realizes he's waiting for an answer.
"She said was tired. She needed rest. She'd just crossed dimensions - who knows how - to end up unconscious on the floor of the console room. I wasn't about to start grilling her for details. Besides, she said she'd explain everything when she got up," he snapped.
"Maybe we should…" Jack tries again.
"No, we shouldn't," the Doctor retorts sharply. "She'll get up when she's rested, and not a minute before. Your curiosity – and mine – are just going to have to wait." Honestly, he's having a hard enough time keeping his own curiosity in check without needing to settle Jack down like an eager puppy.
"S'alright," comes a voice from the doorway. "Didn't mean to get everyone worked up." She is standing with one hand on the doorway, the other unsuccessfully combing the bird's nest of her hair with her fingers. "It's just that it's a long story, and you wouldn't believe how tired I was. Knew if I did start talking, you'd never let me stop."
"Rose!" calls Jack gleefully. "Welcome back, honey! How are you feeling?" The Doctor moves towards Rose but Jack jumps up and gets to her first. "Did you get enough rest? Do you want something to eat? Some tea? Coffee? And, oh – what the hell is going on?" Jack continues. Then, seeing the look on the Doctor's face, he quickly adds, "When you're ready to tell us, of course, Sweetheart."
Rose laughs, gives Jack a big hug. "Good to see you too, Jack!" She squeezes him tightly and he lifts her off the ground, twirling her round.
"For someone I'm never supposed to be able to see again, I've got to say, I'm glad you keep popping up!" Jack puts her down gently, and the Doctor pulls her into a – slightly gentler – hug of his own.
"Good morning, Rose Tyler." He grins at her. "I believe tea is next on your to-do list?"
She smiles at him; a real smile this time, with very little of the sadness that had haunted her eyes the night before. "Please iGod/i yes! I feel like I've slept for days. How long was I sleeping?"
"Just over eleven hours," the Doctor replies, releasing her reluctantly from the hug. He turns to put the kettle on and begins pulling out the things he needs – a teabag, some milk and sugar. He hesitates when opening the cupboard with the mugs in them; there in the back is Rose's favourite mug, oversized, pink with little white polka dots. After staring at it for a second, he takes it out of the cupboard and puts it down on the counter, waiting for the kettle to boil.
"So, I s'pose we'll start with the basics." Rose studies her fingernails intently for a moment, gathering her thoughts (and maybe her courage?). "How long, exactly, has it been for you since I left?"
The Doctor looks at her solemnly, seeing where this is likely heading. "Relative time for me – three months, three days. Jack was back at Torchwood for six months of his time, then came on the TARDIS with me to help with repairs eleven days ago." He pauses for a beat. "And you?"
"Well, I can't be quite that precise," she says with a smile that flashes across her face for just an instant, then is gone. "But it was July when you dropped us off and when I left it was April, so that's what? Ten months?" She looks down again at her cuticles. "That'd make it sixty-two years and ten months, I s'pose."
She pauses to give them both time to digest this news.
"Bad Wolf." This from the Doctor, flatly. His face has grown dark and withdrawn. It has been decades, but she knows immediately where his mind is going.
"Stop it. Now, Doctor, I'm just not having it, so you can just chuck that guilt out right now. I might have been young then, but the decision was mine, not yours." She is standing directly in front of him now - finger poking him in the chest. "You did everything in your power to protect me, and I ichose/i to open the TARDIS. I ichose/i to come back. Anything that happened because of that is my fault, my responsibility. And I wouldn't change any of it, even if I could." She can see by the way his eyes had closed off that he doesn't believe her.
"You were my responsibility, Rose. Whatever happened, it happened because you were with me. There's no use trying to deny that."
"I'm not denying it, because you're right. It never would've happened if I'd never met you. But if I never met you, Mum and I would've died in the Cyberman invasion. How would that've been any better? I don't expect you to be happy for how things turned out, but you need to accept it. Cause this is the way things are and no amount of brooding or sulking is going to change that. Got it, Mister?"
"I don't sulk," realizing even as he says it that it sounds rather… sulky.
"Right, then. Moving on. Yes, Doctor," - looking at him pointedly - "Bad Wolf left me some surprises. Took a few years for us to notice, though. When you're in your twenties, you don't tend to worry about not looking or feeling any older. I'd heal faster, but I thought that was a leftover of the nanogenes Jack gave me in World War II."
"Nanogenes don't work like that. You need a fresh supply every time you're injured," Jack interjects, speaking up for the first time since Rose had started talking.
"So I found out," she says with a smile. "About two years after I got back, I broke my leg skiing when John and I were on holiday. I told him not to worry about it, that I'd be fine in the morning thanks to my friendly nanogenes, and he nearly took my head off. That was when we first started to realize what had happened." She takes the tea the Doctor offers. "He cancelled our holiday and dragged me back home to Torchwood to run tests."
"Are you like me? I mean – can you... die?" Jack isn't sure what he's hoping her answer will be. Admittedly, having someone to spend the next billions of years with would be a plus, but he isn't about to wish that on someone he cares about.
"Dunno. Never been killed and I'm not in a big hurry to test it out, and it's not the kind of thing that's gonna show up on lab work. All we were able to tell for sure was that my cells are aging, just at a far, far slower rate than they should. According to John's projections, unless something happens, I should live another six or seven hundred years."
"How did you end up here – back in the TARDIS?" This is from the Doctor. He looks as if he wants to change the subject from her semi-immortality on to safer ground. But if that is his intention, it doesn't work out the way he'd planned.
"Once John understood what had happened he started planning for the future." She looks at the Doctor, wondering how he'll react to what she's about to say next. "He knew better than most what I was looking at, and he wanted to give me the option to avoid it, if that's what I wanted. It took him four years of working on what he called his 'secret research project'." She laughs and leans back to stare at the ceiling. "To be honest, I thought he was trying to grow another TARDIS. I was an idiot for not figuring it out sooner. I don't know what I would have done if I'd known what he was really doing all that time. As it was, when he told me he had rebuilt the dimension cannon to send me back to you, I slapped him and kicked him out to the couch for a week."
Jack laughs at this, but the Doctor understands exactly what John had done. "He didn't want you to have to watch everyone you loved die."
"No, he didn't," she replies softly. The Time Lord across the table looks so much like the man she'd spent decades loving, touching. It was hard to see him and not be able to reach out to him the way she was used to - to comfort and be comforted.
"But," she continues in a firmer voice, "It still was a daft idea and I told him so. I told him if he thought I was going to leave him just because I was likely to outlive him, he needed to start using the human half of his brain instead of the Time Lord half for a change." She's reflexively fingering a simple band on her finger that the Doctor is just noticing now.
"Losing people you love is hard," she continues, "but it's the price you pay for loving in the first place. Whether I lost him then or in thirty years, it was still going to hurt. I'd just as soon get as much value out of it as I could, thank you very much." When she looks up at him he sees the anger and passion in her eyes and for all the decades she's lived and troubles she's faced, at heart she's still the spirited teenager he remembers.
"It took him a while – and I don't think he ever actually accepted my choice – but he did stop pestering me about it eventually. It was only at the end, when he knew time was running out, that he brought it up again. He made me promise I would use it after he was gone. I wouldn't do it." She looks the Doctor in the eye, as though pleading for him to understand. "I didn't want to believe I was really going to lose him – and I knew he wouldn't let go until he knew... But he kept getting so upset." Her eyes were welling up and she got up to pace around the room. "I was worried if I didn't agree, it would make him sicker. I couldn't..." She pauses and clears her throat which has suddenly gotten thick. "So I said yes."
Jack looks at her sadly. "How long has it been? Since you lost him?"
"Thirteen years," she replies, then adds with just the hint of a wry smile, "I never did say iwhen/i I was going to use it. At first, it was just too hard. Everything was too raw. Then I got settled in my routine – work, eat, sleep, repeat." She thinks back to those numb days. Time had moved so fast, and yet, hadn't seemed like it had moved at all.
"Before I knew it years had passed and I was sitting at Tony - my brother - sitting at his funeral. Realized that everyone I'd known when I came into that world was gone. That's when I knew it was time." Oh - how hard that was. Leaving Torchwood was easy - they all thought she was a bit of a freak anyway. But giving up the house she had shared with John. The chair he'd sit in when he was tinkering. That place under the wallpaper where he'd written "JN hearts RT". Those thousand bits and pieces that make up a lifetime.
"I packed up a few of the important things – pictures, mementos, stuff like that, pushed the button and voila! Here I am." She tries, unsuccessfully, to end the story on cheerful note.
Jack and the Doctor just sit there in silence, taking in all that she has told them. Rose seems to understand that they need some time to process it all. She drains the last of the tea from her mug and puts it in the sink. "Now, I'm gonna go have a shower, if it's all right with you boys. Back in a bit."
She walks back down the hallway to her room, her mind a universe away. Over the past thirteen years, she's learned how to get through the day without feeling like the biggest part of her soul had been ripped out, but reliving it all this morning for them has reopened all the old wounds. She can vividly recall every single moment they'd had together, but in her mind, she sees John as he was later in life, a little wider around the middle, a little more distinguished-looking, his thick hair gone to grey. Seeing the Doctor, looking like John, but not like she remembered him has left her feelings in turmoil. She needs some time to get herself together too.
She enters her room and picks up her duffel from where the Doctor had laid it on the floor the previous night. She sets it on the bed and begins pulling things she needs out – clean knickers, a bra, t-shirt and jeans. Then her hand touches something coolly metallic. She carefully removes a small, ornately carved cylinder from her duffel and sits on the bed, looking at it with tears in her eyes. She gently brushes her fingers over the symbols on the surface, and then quickly wipes her eyes, placing it carefully on her dresser. She grabs her clothes from the bed and walks determinedly into the bathroom for her shower.