The Other Side
By TwinEnigma
04.
Rose knows something's wrong the moment the Doctor steps into the lab.
He's shaken and pale, entire body tense and his hands are shaking.
"Doctor, what's going on?" she asks, immediately standing and going to him.
He catches her by the arms and she can feel it – he's scared. "I'm going to take the TARDIS. I want you to go home, get everyone and go to a safe house."
"What?" she says, incredulous, "No, whatever it is, I'm going with you. We're a team, you and me."
The Doctor shakes his head quickly. "No, not this time, Rose. Please, just... You have to go, right now. There isn't a lot of time. I'll explain later."
She takes a deep breath and resists the urge to slap him – really, she hates it when he says that. "Then you can explain it to me in the TARDIS on the way."
The Doctor blanches and she knows exactly what he's going to say next. This is hardly the first time he's ordered her home, regardless of how capable he knows she is, and as irritating as it can be, she knows he does it because he loves her. But she'd been left behind before and, long ago, she'd promised she'd never be left behind again. Not even motherhood had stopped her and she's not about to start now. She has so much more to fight for now.
"Rose, you don't understand," the Doctor says and the way he stares into her eyes right then almost freezes her in place. He's not just scared, he's terrified and it scares the hell out of her.
"What's wrong?" she asks quietly, brushing her fingers against his face. "Please, you're scaring me."
The Doctor's gaze slides away and his body follows. He runs a hand through his hair like he always does and lets out a heavy sigh. "It's a long story – complicated, really."
She doesn't interrupt. Over the years, she's learned when he needs to take his time and right now his posture is screaming that he'll only say this if she lets him just talk.
"You've heard me talk about the Time War before, how there were no survivors," he says. "I was wrong. There was another Time Lord who survived, just one – the Master, a madman."
The Doctor pauses and she can see he's searching for the words. "I'd never thought I'd actually have been as glad that you were here in this world as I was then. Do you remember Martha, the Martha Jones back in the other universe? To the Master, anyone with me is just a means to an end, just another way he can hurt me. And Martha, well, he wasn't able to get his hands on her – she had some help there and, oh, she was brave-, but her family wasn't so lucky. And after what he did to her family... I can't blame Martha for leaving after that. They needed her."
She wonders what this Master did to the family of Martha Jones in the other universe to make that brave woman she'd seen leave the Doctor's side. She wonders if she really even wants to know and tries to ignore that part of herself that's asking what would have happened if she'd been there, if it had been her family. She thinks of her baby and a sliver of real terror curls like acid in her gut.
"If I'm right and it is him, if it is the Master," he says quietly, "It's not going to be safe for you or any of our family. You have to understand, Rose, it isn't about how strong you are or any of that – you're my Rose, Defender of the Earth, Defeater of the Dalek Emperor, and you're brilliant and I love you so much, but the Master is different. He just wants to hurt me: it's like a game to him. He made me watch as he tortured Martha's whole family for a year, Rose."
The baby flickers back in her mind, all chubby fingers and curling toes and laughing in her mum's arms and little Tony looking so torn between a child's curiosity and revulsion of the idea of babies. Rose can't stop the shudder that sweeps through her as her imagination paints sinister hands reaching for them because she's seen torture and she'd do anything to prevent her family from meeting that fate.
"Please, Rose," he begs. "I can't... If I lose either of you..."
He'd die. Maybe not right away, but he'd give up inside and, one day, he'd just let go. She'd seen it once, six years ago, in a universe long gone, and she sees it still in the way he looks at her sometimes, like she, her family and their new old friends are the only things tying him to the world.
She leans forward, until her forehead is pressed against his slightly cooler one, and lightly cradles his face with her hands. Then, she slowly raises her head, kisses him on the forehead and pulls him into a hug. "Mum's been talking about having a holiday, just us girls, and Tony could use some practice being an uncle, yeah?"
"Yeah, I suppose so," the Doctor murmurs, holding onto her like he's afraid she'll vanish.
"It's a plan then," she says at last and pretends she hasn't conceded anything.
He pulls back, murmuring apologetically as he turns to gather some things from his desk and she quickly catches his shirt, tugging it sharply.
"Come back to me," she says. "That's an order."
He smiles a little and gives her a tiny salute. "Yes, ma'am."
The Doctor finds Jimmy waiting for him outside, flipping through tourist brochures with a casual interest. Nearby, the two TARDIS ships wait for their pilots, hidden in plain sight by the perception filters.
"The twenty-first century," Jimmy says, not looking up. "Everything changes then. You live in an exciting time."
"I try not to think about it too much," the Doctor lies. He's tried to turn his eyes away from the futures he senses in his head and limit his glimpses to the immediate future, but when it comes down to the wire, he always looks. He can no more shut off the ability than he can stop the beating of his lone heart, and the look Jimmy is giving him says that he can see right through him.
"So, are you going to tell me what's going on?" Jimmy asks, replacing the brochures.
"I'll explain when we get there," the Doctor tells him as they start for the ships. He's still reeling a little from explaining the Master to Rose, something he'd hoped he'd never have to do in this universe, and, very soon, he'll have to explain the Master to Jimmy, too. He knows that what he told Rose was far too brief and near clinical in comparison to his memories, but she didn't need to know what he saw when he was on the Valiant, just like she didn't need to know what he saw during the Time War. "Does your TARDIS have isomorphic controls?"
"Sure, comes standard," Jimmy answers, giving him a shrewd look. "And I locked down the rest of the fleet. They won't be able to move from where they are until Noble transmits the right codes."
That is certainly unexpected. "She can do that?"
"Oh yes – well, only for her daughter ships, which is pretty much the entire fleet," Jimmy admits, gently patting the red surface of Noble's current exterior. "She's got a lot of security features like that. Anyway, she can even transmat people out if she doesn't like them. She says she had one tosser that she kept kicking out for being a lech, back when my mum was piloting her."
Noble gave off an amused hum, her telepathic field washing over them in something that clearly affected the sense of a fond recollection.
The Doctor can't help but smile a little at that. "Sounds like someone I know."
"From here or there?" Jimmy asks, making a vague gesture that he supposes is meant to indicate the other universe.
"It's not important," the Doctor says, unlocking the doors of his TARDIS. "Shall we go then?"
"Allons-y," Jimmy agrees and disappears inside Noble.
The Doctor resists the urge to shiver at the sudden and unnervingly sharp echo of himself in the younger man and finally turns away from the doors, heading to the console. As he sets the TARDIS to follow the younger one, he tries not to think of what he'll find when he gets there or about the sudden fear that maybe what's going on isn't an isolated incident, but a symptom of a far larger problem rippling across time and space.
This time he is unable to suppress the shiver that races down his spine.
Jimmy sets Noble down in a concealed alley by the psychiatric hospital and then heads outside, just in time to watch the older TARDIS materialize. He jams his hands in his pockets and sighs, looking away for a moment. The situation is insane and he knows it. He shouldn't have done what he just did, much less steal the files or lock down the fleet – and, hell, he knows he's going to get flack for that one even if they do get this mess sorted. But something's clearly wrong here and it's tied to his ancestor, the Doctor.
He watches as his ancestor who looks too much like him – or, more accurately, Jimmy supposes that he looks too much like his ancestor – exits the blue police box and gets his first glimpse of Jimmy's time. There's no surprise, no shock, only a deceptively detached look of anticipation. It's a far cry from the frighteningly intense gaze the man had displayed earlier at the sight of Sam's file.
The man's a mystery to him. Jimmy can see the way the timelines all thread together on the Doctor, looping and twisting around him in a maddening density. Strangely, the only truly fixed point in his timeline is a date close to six years before the time they just left and before that there's nothing, as if the Doctor had just appeared from thin air, fully-formed. If he concentrates hard enough, Jimmy thinks there might be something more, something that slips and slides away from him in eddies of golden light and fire, and he wonders if it's connected to the universe the Doctor's TARDIS is from and the other Doctor that had been her pilot.
"Is this it?" the Doctor asks, looking around.
"We're close," Jimmy replies. "The grounds are just around the corner."
"Good, good," the Doctor says and starts towards the alley entrance.
"Wait, Doctor, you still haven't told me what's going on!" Jimmy says, hurrying to keep pace with the older man.
The Doctor hesitates, his steps faltering a little. "I won't know for sure until I get inside and get a look at him."
"But...?" Jimmy prompts, glaring at him. "You already have your suspicions about what it is. Sam Tyler is my friend – I want to know what you think's happened to him."
That stops the Doctor in place, his eyes widening comically. "Tyler? Your friend's last name is Tyler?"
"Yeah, why? Does it matter?" Jimmy asks. Tyler's not exactly an uncommon name – maybe the Doctor knows someone by that name.
The Doctor shakes his head, but a contemplative look remains on his face and his body language still expresses unease. "It's probably nothing." He pauses and asks, "How long has it been since you stole his file? Minutes? Hours? Days?"
"It won't be a problem," Jimmy says confidently and explains, "The original file's still in there. I made a copy and smuggled that out. Never noticed a thing. The files from the Archives, on the other hand... those I stole. And my commanding officer knows, so we should hurry. It won't take them long to figure out what my last stop was before Glasgow and send a retrieval team."
"Point taken," the Doctor murmurs and walks a little faster, putting on a pair of glasses and pulling out a thin leather wallet. "Psychic paper. I'm going to walk right in the front door."
"I'm going with you," Jimmy says, keeping pace with him as they turn the corner. He notes the man moves with all the speed of a thunderstorm.
"What's the security like?" the Doctor asks.
"Nothing a sonic screwdriver can't handle. If you can sneak one in, you should be fine," Jimmy replies. Then, he adds, "One more thing, though: this isn't an ordinary nuthouse. Many of the patients are former pilots. If you sneak one in, you have to keep your hands on it."
The Doctor's lips thin a little as he looks at the building in the distance. "Is it common for pilots to go mad?"
Jimmy doesn't answer him.
AN: This was a beast of a chapter to write. I had to figure out how to write Rose staying behind believably, which was a pain because she really didn't want to, something I hope I pulled through on in that section. Another thing which is interesting is writing MetaTenth as frightened - he's got only one life now, he can't regenerate, he's got a relatively new family, and now he's got to go up against the Master, who was dangerous enough before. That, I also hoped came through.
Jimmy assumes the Doctor is from Pete's World and has simply had an encounter or adventure with his other-universe counterpart. He'll figure it out, don't worry.
There's a bit of forshadowing this chapter.
