Two
A breeze, cool and humid, tousled Rose's hair as she nibbled her chips. The day was overcast, but the weather had held so she and her mum had been able to sit at one of the pub's handful of outdoor tables squeezed onto the sidewalk. It was a lovely day and she usually enjoyed these lunch dates, but she was finding it hard to focus on the food or on talk of a charity dinner or even on Tony's latest toddler antics. Instead, she kept seeing the Doctor sitting on the sofa in the dark.
Most of the time she thought the Doctor was settling in to his new life, to his human life, but then she would catch something in his expression, like she had last night. A sort of discontent. And she could understand that–she felt it too. After seeing the universe, being part of history, it was hard to go back to the humdrum of everyday life, even if that life was punctuated with excitement thanks to their less-than-typical day jobs at Torchwood. But she worried, too, that it was more than that, that maybe this "adventure" of living life everyday wasn't, after all, really enough.
"You could have told me that he didn't like pears."
Rose snapped back to attention. "What?"
Having already polished off her plate, Jackie had been eyeing the dessert menu and now pointed to an item halfway down the list. "It's right here. Baked pears drizzled with caramel sauce. The same thing we served at that dinner party last week. You could've told me John would make such a fuss about them."
"You don't have to call him 'John' when it's just us two."
Jackie shrugged and looked back down at the menu again. "I suppose, but it's strange calling him the Doctor when he's settled down like he is now."
Fork in hand, Rose impaled one of the remaining chips on her plate and frowned at it. "It's not like he stops being the Doctor just because he stops travelling around." The breeze picked up, disarranging her hair again. She brushed it out of her eyes and looked up at her mum. "There was this one time when we thought we'd lost the TARDIS, we thought it'd been destroyed and that we were stuck on this–" She waved her hands vaguely. "This... space base."
"Stuck?" Rose groaned inwardly at her mum's outraged expression. "He almost got you trapped in space and you're only telling me this now?"
She supposed it was a good thing she'd left out the part about the black hole. "I'm here, aren't I? We weren't stuck. That don't matter. The point–"
"Oh there's a point now, is there?"
"The point," Rose continued, pitching her voice a smidgen louder, "is that if we had been stuck, the Doctor would still be the Doctor."
"All right, but that was still the other Doctor."
Rose glowered at her mum. "So are you going to start calling Tony's dad 'the Other Pete' or is it my dad who's the 'other' bloke now?"
A pained expression flashed over Jackie's features. "Oh Rose, it's not the same. I loved your dad. And Pete–"
"How's it not the same? The Doctors–both of them–they've got the same memories, right up the point that there were two of them. He's a part of the Doctor–the one that's all Time Lord–but as far as he remembers it, he is the Doctor." She hated talking about it. She felt like every time she did, she cheapened it somehow, made him sound like some sort of consolation prize, when what she really wanted to say, what she really wanted to explain was that the Doctor had given her a piece of himself–his right hand technically, but really it was more like he had given her one of his hearts, like that was why he only had the one heart now. He had given that to her to keep. Forever.
"Hello, Jackie! Lovely to see you." Rose and Jackie both started at the cheerful greeting and looked up to find the Doctor striding towards them, a grin plastered all over his face. "Do you mind if I borrow your daughter for a bit?" Hovering over Rose's shoulder, he paused to duck down for a second, and, with that daft grin still on his face say, "Hello."
"Hello," she replied, her lips parting into what she was sure was an equally daft-looking smile.
Arms crossed, Jackie scowled up at the Doctor. "You couldn't wait until her lunch break was done?"
"'Fraid not."
"And you couldn't call?" Jackie said, miming a phone with her thumb and pinkie finger.
"No, needed to see her in person. Right now. So if you'll just excuse us..." He glanced at Rose, jerking his head and raising his eyebrows, beckoning her to come along.
"Right now?" Jackie repeated.
Rose stood.
"No time like the present," the Doctor quipped, taking Rose by the elbow. "Though 2049 is a good time too. Fabulous weather. But like I said, things to do. With Rose. Right now."
But Jackie wasn't done yet and Rose suppressed a groan. "If you're going to be carrying on at all hours you could at least let her finish eating first."
"Mum," Rose hissed.
The Doctor's brow crinkled. "Carrying on?" And then understanding washed over his features like a frothy breaker. "Ooooh. No, no, no. Not those sorts of... things. Official things. Top secret Torchwood official business things. Not..."
Rose turned to her mum and offered an apologetic smile. "I've got to get back to work, mum. There's probably an alien ship stranded in Cardiff or something like that. I'll call later."
Finally Jackie did let them go, albeit grudgingly, and the Doctor tugged Rose along with him, the humour melting out of him as soon as they were away from the pub.
"All right, let's have it," Rose said. "What was that about?"
"The breach between this world and ours was supposed to have sealed itself, but it hasn't. Something's coming through."
Rose's step faltered. She stared up at him. "What d'you mean? What's coming through?"
"You, Rose."
"What?"
Taking her by the shoulders, he spun her around to face an electronic billboard. It flashed to life, advertising a new line of perfume that offered "a taste of the wild." There were flashes of darkened woods and a racing lupine form. And then in big bold letters it spelled out the words, "Bad Wolf".
ooo
There was a tiny park not far from the office. They sat together on one of the benches, silent, surrounded by the city sounds, the drone of street traffic and zeppelins swallowing them.
"What does it mean?" Rose said.
The Doctor, one arm stretched along the length of the bench, didn't look at her as he spoke. "It means you're calling yourself back."
"But why, what for?"
"I don't know," he said, his face scrunching up in puzzlement. "When you looked into the Time Vortex you were able to see everything, even the gaps in the dimensional barrier. That's how we ended up with the likes of Darlig Ulv-Strande. Bad Wolf Bay. You saw it all."
"All?" Rose said, turning to look at him. "The two of us, sitting on this bench, right here, right now?"
"I'd say so," he replied, jutting his chin out. She followed the direction of his gaze, to the dustbin across the green. And there they were again, those words, in black spray paint. Bad Wolf.
He had donned a long coat in spite of the summer warmth and the hem of it flapped around his calves in the breeze. She'd taken him shopping when they'd gotten back to London. He'd happily picked out a series of pin-stripe suits and several pairs of Converse runners–two red pairs. She'd had to remind him that he also needed to get regular things like pajamas ("Or do you sleep in the buff?"), socks ("Yes, any colour you want."), and pants ("Boxers or briefs, take your pick, Doctor."). It had been a wonderful day. They'd alternately amused and exasperated the shop clerks with their bouts of laughter, and, at the end of the day, she'd taken him home and they'd squabbled about whose wardrobe took up the most space in the closet. And by the end of that he'd been less interested in trying on clothes and more interested in taking them off.
But right now, in this moment she had seen but could not recall seeing, he still wasn't looking at her.
"Doctor..." she began but didn't get the chance to get any further.
"Parallel worlds are supposed to be completely separate from one another. Landing here the first time should have been a fluke but it's as if it's... porous. It's full of holes and things keep coming through."
"Doctor," she said again.
"And why isn't there a Doctor in this world, hm? Why isn't there a Rose Tyler or a Donna Noble or a Sarah Jane Smith or a Martha Jones?"
"You... checked?"
He darted a glance at her and then fixed his gaze ahead once more. "I might have done a quick search." He held thumb and index finger a centimetre apart. "Just a little one." And then, his gaze becoming distant once more, "It's as if all the things that would draw the Doctor here never existed."
She leaned in close, raking her fingers through his hair. Finally, he glanced at her and she smiled. "I suppose there's only enough room on the planet for one Doctor."
His hand hovered for a moment over his chest. "Or half of one in any case." And then he sprang to his feet, offering her a hand and pulling her up next to him. "Enough of that. Time to be on our way."
"On our way?" Rose laughed. "Even if we can convince Goddard to let us get the dimensional transporters out of storage–and that right there's going to take some fancy talking–there's still the tiny problem of the way they work. You know, by punching a hole in the universe? I thought we were trying to avoid causing reality to collapse."
He flashed a grin, his face lighting up the way it always did when he was feeling especially pleased with himself. "But that's why I've got this," he said, pulling something out of his coat pocket. Rose's eyes narrowed as she beheld one of the familiar gray and yellow devices this world's version of Torchwood had created when trying to track down the Cybermen army. Except it wasn't. It had a pair of blue flashing lights on one side, and on the other, a rectangular projection with a tangle of cables poking out the back.
She raised her eyebrows. "And that is..."
He frowned at the device for a moment, turning it to and fro. "It doesn't actually have a name. Not yet. Would you like to have a go at naming it? We could call it Albert, I suppose, or maybe Christopher. "
Rose gave him a playful shove. "What does it do, Doctor?"
He tossed it in the air and caught it. "It hones in on causal nexus abnormalities and takes you to them. It only works if something else has already created a hole in the universe so no need to worry about collapsing reality."
This explanation she could follow, but what puzzled her was how he had accomplished this. The Torchwood techs had managed to refine the dimensional transporter's design, allowing the user to move through space so that you could leave from London in one world and end up in Leeds in the parallel world. But if you wanted to be in Leeds in 1981 then you were out of luck because the device only moved through space and not time. In an alternate reality, to help Donna travel back in time and make sure she met the Doctor, Rose and her team had had to use the dying TARDIS. But in this world, there was no TARDIS, dying or otherwise.
Sh reached out and the Doctor offered the device for for inspection. "You fused two devices together," she said, turning it over in her hands. "Is this a time vortex manipulator?"
"Mmm-hmm. I cannibalized some of the broken ones I found in storage."
"We had broken time vortex manipulators in storage?"
He shoved his hands in his pockets and gave a little shrug. "They weren't properly catalogued. I found them in a pile of altitude sensors and coordinate detectors."
The device felt warm in her hands as if it were a living thing. She licked her lips and then, trying to reign in her excitement, looked up at him. "So what you're saying is... we can travel through time?"
He broke out into a huge smile. "We can travel through time." And as she threw her arms around him, she was grinning just as broadly. His arms wrapped around her, pulling her into a tight hug. She had missed this–not the time travel exactly–but that giddiness that came when you stood at the brink of the unknown. And she had missed seeing it in him.
Before he let her go, she stole a quick kiss. "I can't believe you were working on this right under Goddard's nose."
"Well," he drawled, "it's no TARDIS, but if you've got to repair a hole in the universe it's quite handy to have." And then, reaching into his pocket, he extracted a second device. "One for you and one for me."
A zeppelin churned the air overhead and she glanced up. Even after several years spent in this world, they were still foreign to her, serving to remind her that this was not her London, not the place she'd been born and raised. It still caused her problems on an almost daily basis. On Christmas she would make some comment about the Queen's Speech and be reminded that England hadn't had a monarch since the Second World War. She'd ask about a television programme or a film only to find that it had never been made here or that different actors had been cast. She was a foreigner here; she always would be.
Rose smiled up at the Doctor. "So, just push the big yellow button?"
"That's it," he said. "All set, then? There's no telling where we might end up." He held out his hand to her. She took it, interlacing her fingers with his.
"Just how I like it."
And then together, they pushed the big yellow buttons and vanished.