I KNOW you guys are reading it- would it be so awful to review? I do love reviews :D Thanks to those who have. Here's another chapter for you!

3. Blast to the Past

"Well, you've seen the future," the Doctor said brightly. "What about the past?"

"I'm not sure," Rose said musingly, mouth full of chips. They were back on the TARDIS, hanging out on one of the landings of the endless curving metal staircases winding up and up like a double helix. The Doctor was sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and stirring a cup of tea with a silver spoon. Rose was balancing on the edge of the railing, feet dangling, hair loose, munching on chips. She was idly wondering what would happen if she overbalanced and went over the side. She had the oddest feeling that she wouldn't be allowed to fall. The Doctor would just look over at her and raise an eyebrow, like, look what the stupid ape has gone and done now, and she would just stop and float there in midair, feeling very silly. "Seems to me like you owe me a few explanations."

"Perhaps I do," the Doctor said, putting down her book after first placing an embroidered bookmark into it in order to save the spine. "Well. It's like this. There's a randomizer- chaos-inducing- meta- well, thingy, installed into the TARDIS which allows it to go to random destinations. Because of some law named after some boring person whose name I can't recall at the moment, this means we have a high chance of landing somewhere where our unique skills are required, because Time tries to heal itself, and we're part of the immune system, you know? However, I can often persuade the machine to go somewhere I want to go, without invading aliens, if I really want a nice beach or something, but really, that's not half as much fun is it?"

"Um," said Rose. "Stupid ape quotient approaching fatal levels. I so totally did not understand that."

The Doctor sighed. She placed her silver spoon down on the metal grating of the floor with an audible klang! and took a long gulp of her tea in a rather dashing fashion. "Let me put it like this," she said, putting her teacup back down carefully, "don't you like having adventures?"

Rose couldn't think clearly through the slow, stupid smile threatening to plaster itself all over her face. "Yeah, I guess," she mumbled.

"Capital," the Doctor said, and standing up in one fluid motion she tossed her china teacup over the railing. With a sickening feeling Rose listened to the crash! that floated up several fractions of a microsecond later. She bent down and carefully pocketed the silver spoon. "Sentimental value," she said as she straightened up. "Now, how about the past?"

"But I don't understand," Rose asked plaintively as the Doctor swiftly pulled racks of clothing here and there. They seemed to be on rails on the ceiling or something. "I thought you said it was random where we went," she continued, pushing a bright purple feather boa out of her face.

"Indeed," the Doctor answered, examining a long sweeping ball gown before shoving it away. "The best part of travel is choosing your outfit, don't you agree?" she said, apparently rhetorically. "It's random, but I do have some degree of control, when I so choose, and right now I choose to go somewhere on your planet in the last one thousand years before your time. (Any further and it all gets rather unpleasant and harder to pass off the TARDIS as indigenous.) It's a shame we have to wear dresses; I think this incarnation is rather partial to cross dressing. Well! I think what we're looking for is a practical combination of style and functionality, don't you agree?"

Rose wasn't listening. She was staring at a long, sweeping white dress, fit for some alien dignitary, simple yet stunning. "Oooh," she whispered.

"Totally wrong time period," the Doctor said, snatching it away. However she also stared at it for some time. "Oh, this brings back memories," she said softly. "Used to belong to... a friend of mine. Long ago," she said, her voice wistful and far away. Then she forced it back into anonymity between an orange swimsuit and a purple air hostess uniform and went racing away, forcing Rose to run to catch up. She went briskly down the rows, muttering, "Good grief, this really needs to be better organized.... ah, here we are!"

Rose went wide-eyed with awe. She was six again, and trying on a princess dress her mother had bought her for five dollars at the secondhand shop because Jackie Tyler couldn't sew if her life depended on it but she did recognize the need for a little girl to be a princess. The hum of the radiator was a barely-noticed background noise as she swirled the trailing hem to and fro, pulling a headband over her forehead as a crown and imagining all the knights bowing and kissing her hand and saying, your royal highness...

"Rose?"

"It's gorgeous," she said. "Is it really... can I really wear it?"

"It's yours," the Doctor replied in an amused tone, and then was knocked off her feet by an extremely enthusiastic hug. "Oh! Ooof! Get off me, you stupid ape," she laughed.

"Oh, I can't believe it!" Rose cried, taking the dress off the hanger and dancing around with it.

"Just be in the console room, ready to go in ten minutes, okay?" the Doctor commanded, still laughing, and disappeared among the ranks of other people's clothing.

"This," Rose said, stunned, "is the past. Really the past."

"Yes," the Doctor giggled.

Cautiously Rose extended an elegantly clad foot outside the TARDIS, then snatched it back in. "I'm not gonna... age a hundred years or somethin if I touch the ground am I?"

"Where'd you get that from?" the Doctor laughed.

Rose shrugged, feeling silly. "Some Irish myffs I read once, I suppose. Okay then, here goes." Holding her breath, she placed her foot down in the snow. It crunched. She exhaled, and stepped fully out of the transdimensional wooden box.

"I don't know, it's just... more real, y'know, the whole time travel fing?" Rose said. "I mean... this is the past. Really."

"Oh for god's sake, I thought we'd gotten past all that," the Doctor said irritably, and swiftly went down the lane, forcing Rose to run to catch up, all the time trying not to trip in her elegant yet impractical footwear.

"So where exactly are we?"

The Doctor pulled out that strange watch again. "1869, Cardiff, Christmas Eve." She wrinkled her nose. "Cardiff? Can't be very tasteful alien invaders, then."

Rose smiled encouragingly at Gwyneth. People from the past really weren't so different. It was a strangely reassuring thought.

"And you have come such a long way," Gwyneth said, and suddenly she did actually seem different. Weird, even.

"What makes you say that?" Rose asked, disconcerted.

"You're from London. I have seen London in drawings, but never like that. All those people rushing about, half naked for shame." If it hadn't been so weird, Rose would have laughed at the nineteenth-century propriety. "And the noise, and the metal boxes racing past, and the birds in the sky- no, no they are metal as well. Metal birds with people in them, people are flying." Gwyneth's voice was full of awe. Then she looked back at Rose. "And you, you have flown so far, further than any one. The things you've seen- The Darkness." She looked past Rose, at something Rose couldn't see, and looked terribly, awfully frightened.

"What is it, what's wrong?" Rose cried in alarm.

"There is something on your back."

Different morality.

"Fuck this," Rose muttered.

She hadn't expected this. People dying. It wasn't what she'd signed up for.

"Take me home," she demanded as soon as the Doctor was done saying goodbye to Charles Dickens. Or rather, she began to say it, but somehow the words died in her throat as she saw the Doctor's face.

"Not what I expected either," the Doctor said shakily.

Rose started to remember other things- the Gelth had mentioned something about a War, and so had the Nestene Consciousness and Jabe- but she was only a stupid shopgirl, and how was she supposed to understand an alien?

"Do you want to go home?" the Doctor asked wearily.

She wasn't so sure, any more. She wasn't so sure of anything. "Just for a bit," she said. "To check on Mum. After that- we'll see."

There is something on your back.