Disclaimer: See chapter 1 for disclaimer.
Chapter 2: Memories
Clara cracked one eye open and looked blearily around the room. She was in her bedroom on the TARDIS but couldn't remember how she got there. She decided to get cleaned up and go find the Doctor and figure out what happened.
After she had showered and changed, she was standing in front of the mirror brushing her hair when she noticed something strange. She stepped closer to the mirror and saw what it was that was out of place. There was a faint red glow in her eyes, fading rapidly.
Clara gasped as a memory flashed through her mind of a chance meeting in the park when she was a little girl. Hastily finishing with her hair, she ran from her room, down the halls, and to the console room in search of the Doctor.
She was surprised to find the console room empty, however. "Damn it, Doctor. Where are you?" she asked to the emptiness of the room. She received quite a surprise when the lights flickered once.
"Does that mean he's still on board?" Clara asked, hoping the TARDIS would cooperate.
When something on the console chirped and sounded happy, she took that as a yes.
"I need to show the Doctor something," Clara said. "I know you and I haven't gotten on well in the past, but is there any way you can help me show it to him? I don't remember the exact date and time."
Another chirp was followed by the lights dimming, except for a single panel on the main console that lit up brightly. Walking over to it, Clara noticed it was covered with some type of gel sacs. Parts of the gel sacs themselves began to dim, leaving a shadowy shape of a hand. Placing her own hand over the shape, Clara asked, "Like this?"
Two chirps answered her, causing her to remove her hand and watch as the shadowy shape morphed to a small space between two of the gel sacs. She flattened her hand and slipped her fingers between the gel sacs as she assumed that was what she was being told to do.
Only a moment later the console room lit up again and the central column began to rise and fall with that most wonderful sound in the universe. Clara laughed and smiled at the console, "Thank you. Thank you so much. I promise I will do everything I can to make this worth it."
She heard some happy chirping coming from the console, followed by rapidly approaching footsteps running towards her.
The Doctor ran through one of the side doors and skidded to a halt in front of the console, pulling a screen in front of his face to look at the readout. "What's gotten into you, eh Dear?"
"That would be me," Clara said with a cheeky smile and a little wave of her free hand.
"What?!" he said, his eyes snapping over to look at her until he noticed her hand in contact with the telepathic interface. "What are you doing?"
"We need to have a long discussion, Doctor," she told him.
"About what?" he asked with a confused pitch to his voice.
"You'll see when we get there," she responded.
"Where are we going?" he asked, trying to keep the confusion out of his voice this time. He was used to the TARDIS taking him places he didn't set course for, but for a companion to do so was unheard of. Before anything else could happen, however, the time rotor stopped and went silent after a quick thud to indicate they had landed.
"Somewhere… peaceful," Clara told him as she stepped away from the console and walked to the door. When she stepped outside, the Doctor had no real choice but to follow.
She led him over to a park bench where she sat down at one end and proceeded to cross one leg over the other while smoothing out her skirt. "Have a seat, Doctor. I need you to tell me a story."
He sat down but didn't speak immediately, instead licking his finger and pointing it up in the air as if checking the wind direction. "Earth, London, early 1990s, a couple of very powerful timelines nearby," he said before looking over at his companion. "Why here? Why now?"
"That little girl, over there by the tree," she replied with a nod in that direction. "That's me when I was a little girl."
The Doctor's eyes nearly bugged out of his head as he turned and saw the form of the little girl he met while researching to find Clara. He whipped his head back around to look at his companion and spoke quietly, but urgently.
"We really shouldn't be here!"
"Calm down, Doctor. This is as close as we're getting."
"We still shouldn't be here," he told her, still with urgency in his voice but also a little curiosity at how she knew she shouldn't get too close to herself.
"We can leave soon enough," she told him. "But first, I need you to watch this so you can tell me about my rescuer."
"What? Rescue?" he asked in quick succession, before turning again and looking as three other girls now surrounded the young Clara. He was half tempted to walk over there and get the book back for her, when he was shocked to see someone else doing just that. His jaw fell open as he stared at the younger version of someone he never thought he'd see again.
"Rose," he said, his voice barely a whisper.
Clara nodded to herself, glad that she had remembered her name correctly, then scooted closer to the Doctor to rest her head on his shoulder. "Tell me about her," she said.
.oOo.
Rose stared in shock at the blank wall in front of her. Her parallel father just saved her from the void, but for some reason, that just left her with a void inside herself. She felt cold and empty, like being wrapped in a frozen wet blanket, as if warmth was something she would never feel again.
"No," she cried out with a gasp. Her hair started flowing around her in a nonexistent wind and her eyes flared bright gold as previously suppressed memories suddenly burst to the front of her mind. "Clara," she said in a whisper as the memories swam through her mind.
She whipped around and snatched one of the dimension hoppers from Pete and slammed her palm against it violently as if the harder she pressed it, the faster it would take her home. But nothing happened. Rose threw the device to the floor and ran towards the blank wall, slamming her fists against it, trying to open the path back to her universe.
"Take me back. Take me back!" she cried out as she pounded on the wall. She had to get back. The Doctor couldn't be on his own and she had to find Clara.
"It stopped workin'" Pete said as he removed the hopper from around his neck. "He did it," he continued in a solemn voice. "He closed the breach."
The memories were still unfolding within Rose's mind though, and she remembered the sliver of power that she had left within herself as Bad Wolf. She reached deep down within herself and grabbed onto that power. As she did, her entire demeanor changed. She stopped crying, her eyes flared an even brighter gold, and a brilliant aura of golden energy sprang up from within her, radiating outward and causing her mother to gasp in shock.
Rose placed her hands flat on the wall and turned her ear to it as well, trying to find any last trace of a crack between the worlds that she could escape through. She found none. And with one last cry of desperation, she collapsed to the floor in a heap, all trace of golden glow fading from her instantly.
Jackie rushed forward to check on her daughter, glad to find that she was still breathing, and called Pete over to help her. She had no idea what had just happened to Rose, but she was going to do everything she could to be there for her daughter.
.oOo.
The Doctor was staring at the space where the hologram had just vanished from. He had just said goodbye to his best friend, the pink and yellow human that had melted his cold shell and helped him to really live again. He was never going to see her again, and it was tearing him up inside.
He was shocked out of his despair, however, by a sudden voice shouting from the other side of the console. "What the hell is that supposed to mean? Tell WHO that Bad Wolf sent me?"
The Doctor spun around on his heels and saw a flash of golden energy disappear, leaving a redhead in a wedding dress. "What?" he asked out of sheer confusion.
The bride spun around and let out a squeak of surprise.
"What?" the Doctor said again, his confusion addled brain being stuck on that word.
"Who are you?" the redhead said, quickly getting over her shock.
"Bu…" he tried to say, his confusion still impeding his speech. That shouldn't be possible, a human being can't just appear in the TARDIS like that.
"Where am I?" the bride said, raising her voice in anger at not having any of her questions answered.
"What?" the Doctor said again, deciding to give up trying to understand it right then and just figure out what to do next.
"What the hell is this place?!" she shouted.
"What?!" he shouted right back. This was going to be a long day.
.oOo.
Rose was not looking forward to this. They had all just helped to save all of the universes across the void, and now she was going to have to break this man's heart. The Doctor had just left, leaving his clone with a chunk of TARDIS to grow one of his own, when she turned back to face the man she was supposed to help, according to the Doctor. But this man didn't need her help, and she knew it.
"Doctor," she started to say to the clone before he interrupted her.
"I know," he said with a slightly sad grin on his face.
"You… what?" Rose asked. She was confused now.
"Part Time Lord, remember? I saw the timeline as I was forming. I know that Bad Wolf… you might say… had a hand in my creation," he said, wriggling the fingers of his formerly chopped off hand.
Rose looked at him in shock for a moment, before bursting into giggles at his horrible joke, which caused him to chuckle a bit as well.
"I'm still sorry, Doctor," she told him.
"It's ok. I think I'll stick around for a while, maybe help out Pete's Torchwood."
Rose smiled sadly at him but nodded in understanding. She even thought it would be a good idea, working as part of a team rather than trying to do everything on his own. She took a step back and began to glow with golden energy.
This time, the Doctor's clone did look surprised. "Bad Wolf," he said in shock. "But I thought I took it out of you. How can Bad Wolf be here?"
"We hid a small portion of the power away," she said in her melodic voice.
"And you've survived for this long with it," he added for her with a nod.
"Goodbye, Doctor"
"Goodbye, Rose Tyler. Go and be fantastic!" he told her with a genuinely happy smile.
And just like that, she was gone, leaving the alternate Doctor staring where she had been, before he smiled to himself and walked down the beach towards the nearest town, whistling a merry tune as he went.
.oOo.
Captain Jack Harkness was sitting at a bar on a starliner that was visiting the solar system. He was sipping his first drink of the night, his first of many he expected. It had been six months since he had almost sacrificed his grandson, but he still felt like shit about it.
Then there was the Doctor. He popped in last night and set him up with someone as his way of saying goodbye. Alanzo was a nice guy, but they were just too different for it to be more than a one-night fling.
Jack had just cut his remaining ties to Earth, saying goodbye to Gwen and her husband, before coming back to the ship and starting his drink. He needed to get as far away as he could. Somewhere deep down, however, he knew nowhere would ever be far enough.
He had just finished his drink and was about to order a second when a frantic beeping from his vortex manipulator caught his attention. Flipping it open and checking the readout, he was surprised to see that someone was in the old travel office that had been the front for Torchwood. What was more surprising was that the perimeter alarm had never been tripped.
The Hub was sealed, he had seen to that months ago, and the travel office had been seen to close down at the same time, so no one should be in there, unless they knew what they were looking for. If they were looking specifically for Torchwood, chances were, they were up to no good at all.
Jack let out a long, drawn out sigh. He never considered that this would even be possible, let alone that he'd feel the need to go back to Earth before he'd even really left it far enough behind. With a groan, he got up from his bar stool, pressed a few buttons on his vortex manipulator, and disappeared in a flash of light.
When he reappeared, he was just outside the door to the travel office. With another press of a button, he heard the door locks disengage and he closed the cover of his manipulator. Pulling his gun from under his coat, he flung the door open and jumped inside.
"Stop right there!" he commanded before his eyes registered a head of blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. His breath caught for a moment, thinking that somehow, Rose was back in their universe. He didn't have long to think about that, however.
In a blur, the figure before him spun around and kicked the gun from his hand, up into the air, where she caught it and pointed it right between his eyes.
"Who are you?" she asked in a no-nonsense tone.
"Captain Jack Harkness," he answered calmly. She hadn't tried to kill him yet, so he might as well see what he could learn.
"Where are we?" she asked, again with a tone of authority, but with the slightest trace of nervousness in her demeanor as well.
That caught Jack off guard a bit. "Cardiff," he replied.
"Less specific," she commanded.
"Earth?" he said in a cheeky manner to diffuse some of the tension. He was surprised however to see her eyes widen visibly at that answer.
"Earth?" she said mostly to herself as if trying to piece something together. "Why would she send me to Earth instead of to Dad, or even Donna or Martha?"
Now it was Jack's turn to look shocked. "You know Martha and Donna?"
"Yes," she said, eyeing him wearily. "I take it you do as well?"
Rather than answer, he asked another question. "Are you a friend of the Doctor?"
"He's my Dad," she replied matter-of-factly.
Jack's eyes bugged out for a moment before they crossed as he looked at the gun pointed between his eyes and then back to her.
"Hey, you pointed it at me first," she said. She then proceeded to flick the revolver open, drop the bullets into her hand, flick it closed again, and handed the gun back to Jack.
He put the gun back in the holster under his coat before speaking up again. "I never knew the Doctor had a daughter. What are you doing here?"
"I don't know," she replied nonchalantly. "Bad Wolf brought me here, did something to my head, and then vanished."
Jack's breathing hitched again. "Did… did you just say, Bad Wolf?"
A fraction of a second later, the dark room suddenly lit up from the light of a swirling vortex of pale, golden energy. The two people in the room raised a hand to shield their eyes, and then just as quickly, the light was gone, leaving only the dim light from outside shining on a third person now standing in the room with them.
"Bad Wolf."
"Rose!"
"Did you miss me?" Rose said cheekily, before collapsing to the floor in a heap.
.oOo.
"Need a moment alone with your painting?" Clara asked the Doctor. She was trying to stay upbeat for him, all three of him really. But now that the other two were gone, her strength was starting to crumble.
The Doctor turned partially towards her. "How did you know?"
"Those big, sad eyes," she said, plastering an understanding smile on her face. She did understand, but she was close to breaking down herself. She just spent the better part of the day with three versions of the Doctor… and a version of Bad Wolf that didn't properly recognize her.
"Ah," the Doctor said softly, turning back to the painting.
Clara walked over to him and kissed him on the cheek as a show of support, but couldn't look him directly in the eyes for fear of him seeing her own need to be alone.
"I always know," she told him. She stepped away and walked back to the TARDIS before turning for a second. "Oh, by the way, there was an old man looking for you. I think it was the curator," she told him, before opening the door and stepping inside, closing it again behind her and collapsing against it.
After taking a few deep breaths, Clara got to her feet and walked towards where she thought her bedroom was at the moment. She was walking for several minutes before she realized she was unconsciously following a string of blinking lights along the floor of the hallways as if leading her somewhere.
When she got to the end of the blinking lights, she found herself in front of an unmarked door that was slightly ajar. Opening it, thinking the TARDIS had moved her bedroom again, she walked inside, closing the door behind her. What she saw, was most certainly not her room, however.
Inside was a large, nearly flat hammock attached to coral textured struts on either side of the room. On the hammock were several large pillows, and a thick, comfortable looking duvet the same color as the TARDIS. Looking around the slightly messy room, it was obvious that this had been Rose's room. That realization caused Clara to sink to the floor, finally giving in to her tears.
"Why!?" Clara cried out at the TARDIS. "Why would you bring me here?"
When she heard the tone of the background humming change, a realization came to her.
"You miss her too, don't you?" Clara asked.
The lights flickered once and she nodded in understanding.
"But why wouldn't she talk to me?" she asked, not really expecting an answer. She had seen Rose, or as she more suspected, Bad Wolf, with the War Doctor. The only acknowledgment she received though, was a finger to the lips indicating that she should keep quiet about seeing someone else with them.
It broke her heart to do so, but she did, even though she kept sneaking glances at her. From her slowly returning memories and the stories the Doctor told her, she knew that Rose was a special person. What she didn't know was why she felt so miserable at not being able to talk to her or even hint at her being there.
All of a sudden, she felt the unique pull of a transmat, and abruptly found herself in the hammock under the duvet. Clara didn't even bother protesting, she just pulled one of the pillows close to her, holding onto it tightly, and proceeded to cry herself to sleep, all the while wondering why she needed to see Rose so badly.
.oOo.
Rose yawned and stretched as she woke up. Something was different though. She was in an unfamiliar bed, she still had an ache within her that she couldn't describe, but the feeling of a blanket of ice being wrapped around her was gone.
Sitting bolt upright in the bed, she looked around to figure out where she was. The room was quite spartan with concrete walls and no decorations to speak of. What did stand out, however, was the metal ladder bolted to the wall that led up to an open hatch. Climbing up the ladder, she found herself in a fairly nice office full of windows looking out over a cavernous room.
"Good morning," Jack said from a doorway behind her, causing her to spin around.
"Jack?" Rose asked, before taking in the long coat, messy hair, and piercing eyes, as well as the device strapped to his wrist. She ran across the room and flung her arms around the man she thought of like a brother.
Jack returned the hug, picking Rose up and spinning her around. "It's good to see you," he told her as he set her down.
"And you," Rose replied as she stepped back to really look at him. "But, how did I get here?"
"I was hoping you might be able to tell me that," Jack replied with confusion in his voice.
Rose proceeded to spend the next half an hour or so telling him everything she knew about Bad Wolf and what she had done, but admitting that parts were still missing from her memories. "Some of my Bad Wolf memories are still a bit fuzzy," she told him as she sat in a chair by his desk. "All I knew is I would be transporting back to my home Earth."
"So, that was part of Bad Wolf then?" he asked her with a look on his face that said he was piecing something together.
"Yeah. Why do you ask?"
"I've seen something else like your arrival before," he told her.
"What? When?" she asked him as she sat straight up in her chair at full attention.
"Come on," Jack said as he walked back over to the door. "I'll show you."
He led her out of his office, through the main section of the Hub and down into the cells where they had kept the weevils and others that came through the rift, all of whom he had turned over to UNIT before sealing the Hub. When he reached the end of the cell hall, he entered what looked to be a broken cell and pressed one of the bricks, causing it to slide into the wall and a hidden door to open.
After a short walk down another, narrower hall, they came into a large open cave containing something that caused Rose to gasp in surprise. "This appeared the same way?"
"Yes, right after the disaster at Canary Warf," he supplied for her.
Rose walked up to the sphere and carefully slid her palm across the smooth surface, feeling the cold metal texture, but also a soothing presence touch her mind. Memories flashed through her mind and she concentrated on one in particular, before stepping back as the sphere began to glow.
"What's going on?" Jack asked.
"You're not going to believe this, Jack. Not even after you see it."
"Believe what?"
As if to answer his question, the sphere seemed to melt into a ball of energy and change shape before their eyes. It pulsed a few times and began to settle into a new shape, that of a very familiar box. But this box wasn't a blue police box. Instead, it looked to be carved out of a dark purple crystal of some kind.
"It's a TARDIS!?" Jack asked in shock. Rose was right, he was having a hard time believing it, and he saw it there right in front of him.
"She's an experimental TARDIS created in the last days of the Time War," Rose said. "She was stolen by the Daleks that stole the prison ship that started the events of Canary Warf."
"And now she's yours?" he asked her in surprise.
"If she'll have me," she replied, before walking over to the crystalline TARDIS, gently pushing the doors open, and stepping inside.
Rose entered the console room and looked around in amazement. She had only really seen the Doctor's TARDIS before, and it was a mess of bits and bobs as if he designed it especially so no one else could understand it. This console room though was a work of art.
It was as if the outer shell first took the shape of a sphere specifically to reflect this room. It was dark colors, mostly black and purple, but with neat and organized panels on the side consoles. The central console was orderly with regular nobs, switches, buttons, dials, levers, and other assorted controls.
In the center of the main console, was a large translucent tube that had unbroken glowing purple rods surrounding a slightly larger central rod that was not actually connected to its counterpart below it.
Around the walls were various light fixtures that gave it a futuristic look, with tracks of light spanning the entire circumference of the room and along the rib-shaped struts that seemed to hold the walls together.
Rimming the upper portion of the room was a dark gray catwalk that led off to various doors, and below was another level with some access for repairs under the main console. All in all, it was absolutely beautiful!
"Oh, you are a beautiful girl, aren't you?" Rose said appreciatively to the TARDIS as it came to life around her.
The background hum in the room changed pitch, sounding happy and causing Rose to smile and Jack to whistle appreciatively.
"That is quite impressive," he said in awe.
"I think she's gorgeous," Rose responded excitedly. She walked all around the room, before making a pass around the center console, stopping when she found something that seemed out of place. Something was slowly raising up from the console.
Looking closer, it resembled her Doctor's sonic. It was a hand held tubular shape, but with a black and purple color scheme, much like this TARDIS. Instead of the short round emitter at the top, there was a small rectangular black cage with four small translucent purple tubes surrounding a slightly larger similarly colored tube in the middle that protruded just slightly from the angular roof-like portion of the cage section. Instead of an end cap on the bottom, it tapered down to slightly smaller black dials with a few purple rings.
Rose picked the device up and was surprised when she felt something inside that she couldn't quite describe. After a moment, she saw something pop up in her vision that looked like a diagram of the device with some explanations of how it worked. She realized after a few seconds of looking at the information, that it was coming from the device itself, projected directly into the visual center of her brain. It had what she was now coming to understand as a neural interface.
"Is that a sonic screwdriver?" Jack asked. He was still in complete awe of what he was seeing all around him, even though he had lived in a TARDIS before.
"Similar concept," Rose began as she placed it into her pocket and disengaged the neural interface. "But I think only the Doctor has a sonic screwdriver. I'll just call this a sonic and leave it at that," she concluded with a silly grin.
Jack smiled at her and sat down in a chair built onto the railing next to one of the outer ring of panels. "So, what now?"
Rather than answering, Rose walked around the central console adjusting various controls as their images and adjustments sprang into her mind before pulling the main lever, causing the central rotor to pulse up and down as they began to take off. They were only in flight for a few seconds before they landed and Jack looked at her curiously.
"You didn't really want to try to carry this lovely ship all the way back through those tunnels and halls, did you?" she asked him cheekily.
He laughed at that and walked towards the doors, opening them and stepping out into the Hub, only to be met with the barrel of a gun between his eyes.
"We really need to stop meeting like this," Jack said with a slight chuckle.
"Sorry," Jenny began. "But this box just appeared out of thin air. How was I supposed to react when it suddenly opened up?"
"Jenny?" she heard a voice say from behind Jack. "What are you doing here?"
"I should ask you that," she replied when she got a look at Rose. "You're the one that brought me here."
"Bad Wolf brought you here? Now?" Rose asked.
"Just moments before you appeared in front of us," Jenny responded. Jack had told her about Rose and how she had become Bad Wolf, or at least what the Doctor had told him about it.
"Shite," Rose muttered softly. "This is too soon. Far too soon. I'm not ready to see the Doctor yet! I still have to find her!"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa there Rosie," Jack said, using his nickname for her to try to calm her approaching panic. "What do you mean?"
"This is too soon, Jack. I remember taking Jenny from her shuttle that had run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere, but I remember doing it with the intention to bring her to the Doctor, so he could teach her about regeneration and Time Lord lessons and all that," she told him.
"But why is it too soon?" he asked her. "Why would you not be ready to see him yet?"
"You know how he can sometimes be a control freak, Jack," she began. "I can't risk him somehow finding a way to take this TARDIS away from me, not yet at least."
"I don't think he'd do that, Rose."
"I can't risk it, Jack. I still have tasks I need to complete before I can see him. I'm sorry. Please look after Jenny until I can come back," she said. Without so much as a backward glance, Rose bolted into the TARDIS and shut the doors behind her, dematerializing just a moment later.
Rose set the TARDIS to idle in the Time Vortex according to the instructions that the TARDIS was planting into her mind. This was all going to take some getting used to, but thankfully, she had all of time at her disposal now.
"Okay, Dear," Rose started as she looked up at the ceiling of the console room. "I need a quiet place where I can relax and sort out all of this information that Bad Wolf left me. Some of it is still unfolding inside my head."
In response, one of the doors on the upper catwalk opened. Walking over to it, Rose saw a string of lights at the top of the hall, blinking in a forward direction. Following them, she ended up in front of a strange looking metal door. Opening it, she saw a brightly lit, completely stark white room with no furniture at all. As soon as she stepped into the room, however, she began to float, and the light changed from blindingly white, to a soft purple color. Rose took a deep breath, arranged herself into a comfortable position floating in the air, and closed her eyes to concentrate on what little she knew of meditation.
.oOo.
