CHAPTER 4
Olivia's breath hitched in her throat at the man's words, and came out as a small hiccough. Even though she was fairly certain she had heard him correctly, she found herself asking him to repeat what he had said, though she wasn't sure why.
"You have to kill me," he repeated, sounding much more sure and unemotional the second time he said it.
"Why?" she asked. She felt as though she was having an out of body experience - she could see his mouth moving and understood the words he was saying, but it was as though she couldn't comprehend him; he was speaking down a long tunnel and his words were muffled underneath the sound of her loudly beating heart. Everything about her own nervous system felt amplified - she could feel her chest expand as she breathed, could hear the carbon dioxide as it rasped out through her oesophagus, could feel her pulse in all the key arteries of her anatomy. She thought if she focused hard enough she may even be able to hear her thoughts as they bounced around her brain and joined together to form coherent sentences. Those thoughts sounded suspiciously like silence, if silence had a sound.
"Because it's my fault all of this is happening," said her friend, standing to his feet from where he had knelt in front of her moments before and running his hand through his hair in much the same way that she had seen the Doctor do when he was writing his theorems on the whiteboard. "Something happened in our original time line - I made a choice, and it ended badly for everyone. Walter saw a chance to put it right, but I was the only one who could do it, so I came back to this time from the future to put it right."
"Wait, Walter had a hand in this?" Olivia asked, standing up as well. She felt odd sitting on the sofa when her friend was pacing so emphatically back and forth across the floor in front of her.
"Like there was ever any doubt in your mind?" her friend retorted, facing her with raised eyebrows. Olivia could only nod in accession to his point. Walter was always involved. The man took a deep breath and continued speaking. "Now, I knew there was a chance that there would be major changes, especially with my own time line. Apart from having seen my fair share of sci-fi, I was lucky enough to have inherited a really high IQ from Walter."
Olivia couldn't help but cut in at this point. "You're Walter's son?" The question came out without her having a chance to check her incredulity, but the second she had asked the question, she thought herself stupid for not noticing it before. There was a striking resemblance between the man standing before her and the odd, older man she knew was watching over her in the lab as she dreamt. The younger man's slightly curly hair even resembled not only Walter, but also Elisabeth's, own curls.
The young man ignored her question - which she even admitted to herself was meant to be rhetorical - and merely sent a quick, piercing, blue eyed glance in her direction in response.
"I thought I knew what I was doing. Walter and I discussed the plan to use the Machine for weeks, and we thought we had accounted for everything. But… At first, I thought maybe the plan had succeeded with no flaws - I stood there and talked with you and Walter and Walternate and your alternate for a few minutes, but then it was like you all just ignored me. And then, after a few minutes, I found myself standing on the Machine again, even though I remembered climbing off of it moments before.
"And then I realised what had happened - I had overwritten myself. You couldn't acknowledge me because you didn't remember me. So, when I would see you or Walter or Astrid - even Brandon - I would try to speak to you. It never had any effect on anyone though. Sometimes, I thought I had gotten through to you - you would turn your head slightly when I would yell for you, but then you'd go on with what you were doing."
Olivia's heart skipped an uncomfortable beat in her chest, and she felt slightly nauseated. "It was the ringing," she muttered softly, causing her friend to turn his head to her in question. "Whenever I would enter into the bridge room, I would get this humming sound in my ears. I always thought it was because of the fact that Cortexiphan makes it so that I have slightly super-sonic hearing after I travel Over There. I just assumed it was a lighter version of that. I guess, in retrospect, it was probably just you."
"And because I'm just some weird sort of energy in our universe now, your brain could only interpret my words as electrical patterns, which caused my messages to sound like tinnitus," the man said, the confidence of his statement making him sound exactly like his father.
"I still don't understand why I have to kill you," Olivia prompted. It appeared her brain couldn't stay away from this particular problem - granted, its preoccupation with it made sense. It wasn't every day a person was told, in a matter of fact way, that one would have to kill a friend. And it was probably even more rare that the person who needed to be killed was the one encouraging the killer to do the killing.
"The point is that I was supposed to be erased completely - the re-written time line was dependant on that. You and the others were never supposed to know that I was here - no memories, no allusions, no hints."
"No tinnitus," Olivia added in, hoping some light humour would eradicate the building pressure in her chest.
"No tinnitus," her friend agreed, that comforting smirk appearing on his face again. "But, pieces of me are bleeding through, and I think it's because you've been receiving electrical signals from me your whole life."
"What do you mean?" Olivia asked.
"For instance, why are you reading that book I see sitting on the table?" he asked, his blue eyes going from her green ones to the book she had previously dragged from between the cushions of her couch before he had appeared.
"I read it once about ten years ago. I thought it was sarcastic and witty. It amused me."
"But that's the thing, Olivia. In the original time line, you had never read that book before a year ago. You read it because I suggested it to you. It's my favourite book."
Olivia stared long and hard at the cover of the book - If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him - and felt something within her break apart. She couldn't help but wonder, as she had a couple of years before when memories of John Scott's bled through into her own memories, just how many of her traits and thoughts were her own and how many belonged to this nameless stranger.
"Something is keeping me here, Olivia. That Machine was supposed to be a one-time use deal - the 'bridge' was supposed to be created with my life energy and it should have sustained itself - but because I'm kind of stuck between being and not being, the 'bridge' is stuck that way too. Instead of becoming a doorway with a never-ending entry option, it's become more like a doorstop, and it's because I'm getting in the way. And it has to stop."
"He's right, you know," came another voice from Olivia's kitchen. Both Olivia and her male friend turned their head towards the right side of Olivia's apartment to see the Doctor leaning back in one of Olivia's kitchen chairs, a saucer in one hand, and a cup of tea in the other held halfway toward his mouth, his feet propped up on the kitchen table. The Doctor took a sip of the tea, and then scrunched up his face in disgust. "Blech, your tea is cold. Blimey, even the inside of your head takes a frigid stance." He must have seen the disapproving glares that Olivia was sending his way because he began gaping his mouth like a fish out of water and quickly set his chair down on all fours before standing with his hands going in his trouser pockets. "BUT, more important things than tea. Right. Um, yes, anyway…"
The Doctor cleared his throat.
"Your non-corporeal friend is correct though. His connection to you - unknowingly being partly in your head - is why the 'bridge' is breaking down. He's - to use our previous computer analogy - overloading your universe's system. For everything to be set to rights, the Machine needs to be destroyed."
"You two keep talking about a Machine," Olivia inserted. "I've never seen any Machine. What Machine are you talking about?"
"You have seen it, Olivia," the Doctor added. "You just don't acknowledge it. There's a portion of the lab in the 'bridge room' that neither you nor anyone else in your group will approach. You give the area a wide berth, even though you don't outwardly think about it. But you never step there because even though you can't see it, a part of you is physically aware of its presence. And that's where your friend here has been this whole time. Standing there, in the world but not a part of it at all. For your whole life, and yet only for a few months."
"I can't believe I'm listening to this and not thinking you're insane," Olivia muttered, sitting back down on the couch and putting her head in her hands. She was surprised at her lack of flinch when she felt someone sit next to her and felt a warm hand brace itself on her shoulder. It felt foreign to her, and at the same time she knew somewhere deep inside her that it was far from the first time that the owner of that hand had done such an action. The lack of familiarity of it on her part made her want to weep.
"Well, in all fairness, this whole conversation is happening in your head, so to think me insane means to think yourself insane," the Doctor said, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet on the opposite side of her coffee table.
"It certainly wouldn't be the first time," Olivia retorted, lifting her head out of her hands and turning towards her still silent friend. "You're awfully quiet about all this."
"Hey," her friend answered, chuckling in a slightly self-deprecating way, "I was willing to write myself out of existence before now. It just didn't really work the first time."
"That other reality must have really sucked, huh?" Olivia asked, only half joking.
Her friend was remarkably serious and the hard look in his blue eyes caused her heart to skip in a much more pleasurable way than it had done previously in the conversation. "It had its perks," was all he said, and then looked away from her back towards the Doctor.
"So, I'm guessing that since we're both in Olivia's head and not Walter's, that she's the one who has been keeping me grounded here?" her friend asked the man in pinstripes.
"Yep," said the man still bouncing in his plimsolls, popping the "P" with an un-necessarily loud enunciation. "Agent Dunham here has been keeping quite the bed and breakfast of mental visitors. But, as with all the others whom have wandered in her brain before you, it's time for you to check out, Mr Bishop."
"Wait, you knew the whole time who would be in my head?" Olivia asked, suddenly angry at the knowledge that this overly exuberant man that she apparently had met on an adventure she didn't remember taking, knew more about her own personal history than she herself did. She couldn't help but wonder what other little things about her past, and her relationship with this nameless yet familiar stranger were things the Doctor was already aware of and didn't deem important to impart to her.
"I told you it was a 'he,' didn't I? You didn't think I was just guessing, did you?" the Doctor asked, quirking one eyebrow up at her. Olivia tried not to feel as though he was rating her mental intelligence based on her question, but his expression made that difficult. "After all, he wasn't just your best friend. He was also, at one point, the son of Dr Walter Bishop and also the son of the Secretary of Defence, and then - presto chango - one day, he wasn't anymore. Major change like that occurs, and you think it doesn't occur to me that maybe he had something to do with it?"
"So, what do we do?" Olivia asked, her heart already feeling heavy, though she didn't quite understand why. "How do we write him out of existence?" Olivia kept her eyes carefully trained on the Doctor as she asked this question. For some reason, the thought of looking at her friend while talking about making him completely gone just felt wrong. And it hurt something inside of her and made her feel queasy in her stomach. 'Survivor's guilt,' she told herself. 'He's not even gone yet, and I've already got survival's guilt.'
The Doctor gave her a piercing, sympathetic look with his deep, brown eyes. But surprisingly, he said nothing. Instead, he merely glanced over at her friend's direction and though she did not see her blue-eyed compatriot's response, the facial expression given must have been more than answer enough for the Doctor.
"I think it's best Mr Bishop give you those answers, Agent Dunham. I actually only came to tell you that you need to wake up. You said 6.02 a.m. was when the 'bridge' was formed, so to destroy it we should use the same time. And it's 5.50 a.m. now. I thought there would be less shock to you this way. I'll give you both a couple of minutes, and then I'll wake you, Miss Dunham."
The Doctor gave them both a small, hesitant smile and then disappeared from the room.
Olivia felt like there was a lead weight in her chest, pulling what little bit of hope she had down into the region of her stomach. She felt the air going in and out of her lungs, but she still felt like she was struggling for oxygen. In a few minutes, no matter what method it was that her friend told her to use, he would be gone. She would no longer have tinnitus in the 'bridge room,' and she would no longer probably have such a vested interest in random books with sardonic humour. Hell, hundreds of little quirks about herself would probably disappear, and her best friend would truly be gone, and…
And she would never even know that anything was missing. Hell, she almost hadn't known he was missing this time around - she had simply become an amalgamation of her own quirks and his. Now she would simply be herself, and while the thought was freeing in its idealism, the notion now just made her feel lonely. He was sacrificing everything for her universe and she would never even know he had done it. The unfairness of it all made her inner cop bristle in indignation. And the woman inside of her - the part that was simply Olivia, and had lost so much already - just wanted to curl up alone in a room somewhere and cry for something that she was about to lose and yet will have never lost at all.
"So, how do I do it?" she asked after a few silent seconds. His blue eyes quickly left the place on the floor that the Doctor had been standing on moments before. "How do I kill you?"
The man stared at her for a few seconds, and it was as he did this that Olivia realised that what she had been classifying as 'staring,' was, in fact, not 'staring' at all. He was memorising her, as though she was something precious and rare - as though she was so complex that all the pieces of the puzzle that make up Olivia Dunham could be easily mismatched and sullied. It made Olivia feel distinctly uncomfortable and yet pleased.
"You have to let me go, Olivia," he said, standing up from where he was sitting at her side, and coming to stand in front of her. "Your feelings for me - and Astrid's and Walter's too, to a lesser extent, I guess - kept me here even when I wasn't supposed to be here. You three loved me enough to try and keep me here, even subconsciously." Olivia felt herself flush when he said the word 'love' so casually, but then reminded herself that he didn't necessarily mean it in a romantic sense (even if the looks he had been giving her since he first appeared on her couch hinted that the romantic inclinations were there, at least on his side). "And I would love all three of you for that, even if I didn't love you all more than anything already. But, for this to work, you have to let all that go."
"I don't know how I can make them forget."
"I don't think you need to worry about them," the scientist answered. "I think they used whatever connecting energy they had with me just to keep me between realities in the first place. But you already had more energy when it comes to the walls between dimensions than anyone we've ever met, including the Doctor. At least, that's what you told me when you came back from your adventure Over There last year. And I think you've been using that energy to keep me here, even if you didn't realise you were doing it."
"Is that why I get a headache every time I go to the 'bridge room?'" she asked, certain parts of her recent history finally beginning to make sense with this development.
"Exactly. You are unknowingly using what little energy you have to feed the Machine - to keep me alive - and it's killing you. Even if it was just for that reason alone, I would tell you to stop."
"But how do I do that?"
"You just…decide. The energy will reach its nexus at 6.02 a.m., and you're going to have to make a choice, the same as I did six months ago. And you have to decide to forget. And then the 'bridge' will run on a different sort of energy, this crisis will have never happened, the Doctor will use the 'bridge' to go back Over There, and you…you'll live the life I always thought you deserved to have."
Olivia wasn't sure why, but she was pretty sure her heart was breaking. Even though she knew that in a few minutes, she would have no memory of this conversation - that her friend's sacrifice would mean absolutely nothing to her at all - she wanted to take this moment to acknowledge it. She stood up to face him eye to eye.
"Thank you," she said, her voice coming out more breathy than steady, even though she had tried hard to make it even.
"Think nothing of it," he said with a smile that was decidedly fake. "Your life will probably be a whole lot less complicated now that Walter won't have made half the mistakes he made before, and I'm not there to make wise ass remarks every five minutes."
"I sincerely doubt that," Olivia muttered, barely comprehending the turn the conversation had taken. In less than an hour, she had met a man she must have known previously, gotten comfortable with him, grown to see him as a friend, and now, in less than five minutes, she would be back to never having thought of him before. She felt like an awful person, and she hadn't even written him out of existence yet.
"Olivia," her friend said, using his right index finger to lift her chin up to stare him in the eyes, "don't blame yourself over what you have to do. I want to do this. You - the universe - you're both worth it. I'm sorry the responsibility falls to you, and that's partially my fault, I'm sure. But, you can do this. I know it. You're the only one who can."
Olivia, for reasons she could not understand, found herself fighting back tears. Aside from Walter and Elisabeth, she had never met anyone who had such unquestioning faith in her. She wondered briefly if maybe that was what she had been missing that night at the light box, in Jacksonville, and in front of that apartment complex - someone who had unceasing faith in her abilities. Olivia realised then that a part of her, even though she could not have named it if she had tried, had been missing him for her entire life. She had never felt empty, or that anything was missing - she didn't dream of dark haired strangers on those few nights she slept, and she didn't hear his voice whispering to her in the dark depths of her mind. But maybe on a more physical level she had been missing him and not known it.
Olivia felt a warm tear work its way down her cheek as her friend placed a stubbly kiss to her forehead. It should have felt strange or awkward, or any number of bittersweet things. Instead it only felt sad. An innocent, sweet goodbye from a friend she had never had the chance to meet or get to know. And he was sacrificing himself for the woman she may have been, the woman she was, and probably all the versions of herself she could never be. And she couldn't even find it within herself to meet his eyes as she felt a second tear work itself from her eyes. Olivia breathed in on a slight, breathy sob.
And opened her eyes to see the Doctor and Rose Tyler staring at her, the Doctor's fingers on her temples.
Rose watched as Olivia quickly took stock of the 'bridge room,' and came to the realisation that she was truly awake. Rose averted her eyes from Olivia as the older blonde haired woman tried to covertly wipe away the small tear tracks from around her eyes while everyone looked at her. Rose, Astrid, and the Doctor all did the best they could to pretend not to notice the usually stoic federal agent show a tiny bit of emotion. This effort was wasted as Dr Bishop handed Olivia a large handkerchief and told her that she should never be embarrassed to shed a few tears over absent friends.
Olivia merely kept her eyes on the handkerchief and avoided eye contact with Walter as she thanked him. Rose didn't miss the pointed look between the Doctor and Olivia, and Rose guessed that Olivia had either been told or had guessed that the guest in her head was in some way related to Dr Bishop. Rose did not envy Olivia the burden of that knowledge.
"Now, we have approximately one minute before the Machine sends out its final pulse, and then the 'bridge' will either collapse and take both universes with it, or we can dismantle it manually - and by 'we,' I mean you, Agent Dunham - and then we'll experience a true re-write, assuming what you do works."
"How is a 'true' rewrite different from the rewrite that's already happened?" Olivia asked, her brow wrinkling as her confusion worked its way across her face.
"It'll be true in that even Rose and I will have no memory of this event. Time will be completely over-written. No hiccoughs. The two realities will have never merged."
"And my friend will be completely gone," Olivia muttered. The woman looked as though she had aged even further in the last hour since she had climbed in the tank - the dark circles around her eyes had enough baggage for a year abroad, and there was a defeated slump in the woman's shoulders. And her eyes! Her eyes carried a sadness to them that Rose hadn't seen since she and her first incarnation of the Doctor had stood on the pavement together in London after watching the Earth burn and he had revealed to her that he was all alone in the universe. Rose wished with every fibre of her being that there was something she could do to help the agent; she and the Doctor were, to put things simply, taking her companion away and letting her roam the universe alone. Rose suddenly felt like a villain in a piece where she had intended to be an hero.
"Yes," the Doctor quietly affirmed. "I'm so, so sorry."
"I'm fine," the other woman setting, raising her chin and she faced the direction of the Machine. Her eyes took on a steely resolve as she gave one final sniff. "I'm gonna be fine. He was willing to make this sacrifice for everyone. The least I can do is honour it."
"As always, you are brilliant, Olivia Dunham," the Doctor told her, though Rose was certain the Doctor had never said it in as sombre a voice as he did just then. It lacked the usual sound of pride and exultation, and sounded more as though he was comforting her. Rose had never thought she could hear praise sound sympathetic, but it did.
Suddenly, Rose was aware of a shimmering taking over the room. Everything looked as though she were viewing it through a thing of gold cellophane while extremely drunk, though minus the lack of equilibrium that usually came with inebriation.
She watched as Olivia closed her eyes in apparent concentration. The Machine, previously out of view to everyone in the room unless they glanced it from the corner of their eye and focused, was now shimmering into focus. Rose felt like a voyeur as she watched Olivia open her eyes and stare into the eyes of the man in the Machine. And all he did was smile at her, a wide smile that reminded Rose of the sort of smile that graced the Doctor's face when he saw her after a long absence. And then, he and the Machine simply faded from existence.
And Rose and the Doctor didn't even have time to share sympathetic looks with each other before they disappeared from Olivia's universe as well.
Rose sat bored in the hallway outside of the special labs room at the Statue of Liberty. The Doctor had been asked to teach a special seminar to some of the lab technicians about String Theory and how it applied to rift technology. What the people working for the Department of Defence didn't know was that the Doctor was telling them total lies - the last thing the Doctor wanted was for a bunch of American scientists to start ripping down the walls between dimensions again. Things were still shaky from the Reality Bomb, even three years after the fact, and the Doctor was wary of the potential for such things happening again. So, he did whatever he could to quietly and discretely subvert authority.
Rose shifted slightly in her chair. It was made of plastic and the back curved slightly. It was supposed to be a healthier chair - the Department of Defence only took the most up-to-date in terms of following health and safety codes - but Rose found the whole thing distinctly uncomfortable. The curve at what was supposed to be the base of her spine actually curved halfway up her back, and the hard plastic kept sticking to her thighs. She inwardly cursed herself for wearing a skirt, which was meant more to drive the Doctor crazy than for practicality, but he had seemed distracted in any case, so she needn't have bothered. For the last few days, the Doctor had a distinct look on his face that she couldn't place. The closest description she could think of was the look on a dog's face when it has an itch that it can't quite scratch, but the Doctor wasn't a dog so the look hardly made sense.
Suddenly, Rose became aware of a ringing in her ears; the sort of which comes around after being surrounded by loud machinery for a very long period of time. She worked her jaw around and brought a finger to one ear to rub it, hoping to sooth out the symptom, but to no avail. The ringing remained.
She suddenly noticed she could no longer hear the Doctor's voice from the lab, and rose to glance in the door's tiny observation window, only to see that the Doctor too was trying to work a ringing from his ear.
Rose opened the door to the lab only to see that she and the Doctor were shimmering - a shimmering look that she had never seen before, as through a drunken, golden kaleidoscope. She shook her head as the ringing became more and more uncomfortable and when she stopped she discovered that she and the Doctor were no longer in the lab room with the younger lab technicians. Instead, she was staring at a woman with long blonde hair and the Secretary of Defence (who for some reason was wearing a lab coat), and a young woman with dark, curly hair. And the blonde haired woman was lying on the ground, screaming in pain with her hands cradling her head.
Rose ran to the woman on instinct, ignoring the confused and awed looks of the Secretary and the darker haired woman. Rose put the woman's head in her lap, and ran her hands across the roots of her hair, hoping to somehow sooth her. She looked up at the Doctor, who was staring down at the woman with undisguised pity in his eyes, as though he understood the source of her pain.
"Doctor, what's wrong with her? What can we do to help?" Rose asked, wiping away the tears of pain that were unknowingly pouring from the woman's eyes.
"I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do to help. This is a battle she has to fight on her own."
"What are you talking about?"
"She's bringing something from nothing. That takes a lot of energy to begin with, but she's doing it on a metaphysical level - whatever she's created will exist because she wants it to do. That takes a lot of power."
Rose felt an inward sense of panic as the woman's nose started to bleed, and she started to seize slightly. Rose drew the woman up further in her arms, and the Doctor leant down and grabbed the woman's legs to keep them from thrashing.
"How much longer will this go on?" Rose asked, wondering if she could handle listening to the woman's nearly inhuman screams much longer.
"Only about 47 more seconds," the Doctor surmised. Rose was about to ask how he could possibly know how long it took to create something from nothing before two things happened. 1) she remembered he was the Doctor and he always just seemed to *know* these things. 2) a man was starting to suddenly flicker into being on the floor not too far ahead of them, though he was nowhere near corporeal as of yet.
"Why is she screaming like that?"
"The only way to bring a person back from non-existence is through memory. And all memories hurt," the Doctor said, dropping the woman's legs and coming up closer to her head, cradling the woman's face in his hands as her screams eased a little and reduced to mere sobs. "I'm sorry," he whispered to her. "I'm so sorry. I wish I could have warned you. But I did this the only way I could and still have a chance of it working. I know it hurts, and I'm so, so sorry. But you did brilliantly, Olivia Dunham. Just brilliant."
"Am I the only one wondering what the hell just happened here?" Rose asked, her confusion at the situation giving way to irritability with the lack of the Doctor's answers.
"Nope. I'm wondering that too," said the dark, curly haired woman.
"Me three," said the Secretary, whom Rose was now beginning to notice must be an alternate version of the man. He definitely didn't dress like the Secretary.
"We were at the nexus of a total reboot of time and space," the Doctor announced, his voice practically cracking in its excitement. "For the first time in eons, something has literally been taken entirely out the universe and space and all four of the dimensions to the point that not even I remembered its original existence, and then this woman here brought it back into being by sheer will power. Seriously, this woman is brilliant. I'm actually in awe. That never happens."
"But, how? And why do you remember?"
"For a few moments there, I didn't. And that goes to show how amazing this feat is. Until we showed up over here, I had no idea that anything had been changed - that man now lying over there, whom I'm sure you all are starting to remember - was entirely gone from reality. That's never been done before. He had no energy signature or anything - nothing to call across time and space and remind me of what had once been. But then this woman here found something in her mind - a gift I had left for her before she re-wrote time - and she used it to fix things."
Rose was starting to remember bits and pieces of what he was saying - thinking too strongly about it gave her a headache - but she remembered there was a dire situation. Something was falling apart, it needed to be fixed, and the blonde woman had to forget.
"But, won't us remembering him negate everything that just happened?" Rose asked. She was sure that she and the Doctor had discussed all this before, but her mind was fuzzy - details were blurring together and the stories were meshing, and she couldn't remember what had been and what wasn't, and what was supposed to be. It reminded her of how she had felt when she had awoken on the TARDIS with no memory of how she had somehow saved the Doctor from the year 200,100, only this time there was no singing in her head.
"Miss Dunham did a universal reboot. She wrote him out of existence just long enough for the universe to right itself - to rebuild to the walls which never should have been taken down in the first place. And then she did a system update - eliminated the 'bridge' from the equation and rewrote the universe to fit around the new individual she wanted. And then she did the impossible. Oh, how I love it when you humans do that…"
Rose couldn't help but smile as she saw the Doctor smile down on the blonde agent with unabashed pride and admiration in his eyes.
"We were at the nexus when she started doing her reboot so, even without our knowledge, the universe wanted to make sure that we were set to rights as well when she put her friend back in reality. The rest of the universe - no one outside this room - will have any memory of him not being there or of the six months with the bridge, or the war between universes. She's created a real-life deus ex machine for herself. She's a writer's dream, she is."
Rose almost sarcastically asked if he would like to get a private room with the agent before she checked herself. The woman was unconscious on her lap, and Rose actually did consider the woman a friend. Plus, she was worthy of admiration from the Doctor. Rose gently moved Olivia's head off her lap, and gave a small thanks to the curly haired woman as she - Astrid, some part of Olivia's tired mind supplied - knelt down and placed Olivia's head on her own lap in Rose's stead.
Rose stood up, giving a silent sigh of relief as blood rushed back into her numbed legs and walked over to the other side of the room where this universe's version of Dr Bishop was unabashedly checking up on the life stats of his son. His fingers were on the younger man's wrist, and Rose could see the man counting, measuring his son's pulse rate.
Rose studied the features of the younger man. She was starting to remember bits and pieces of what she had previously known about Peter Bishop, but in any case, this was the first time she had set eyes on the man. He was, to put it simply, the sort of man she would have hit on in her days pre-Doctor. To be honest, she probably would still have hit on him even while travelling with the Doctor. There was something of Captain Jack visible in his build, and she couldn't help but be attracted to that. Add in to that the fact that he was willing to sacrifice himself to the whims of time for the woman he loved, and Rose was a guaranteed fan.
What a group the two pairs of them made, she mused to herself. The women were willing to cross universes for the men, and the men were willing to re-write time for the women, even at the expense of writing themselves out of time. It was almost poetic that the two groups of them seemed fated to cross paths numerous times. People could advocate that it all came down to choice as much as they wanted to - the Doctor was one such loud-spoken advocate - but Rose couldn't help but feel that destiny worked into it somewhere. She didn't think that the two ideas were mutually exclusive.
Rose heard the man mutter the name "Olivia" in his unconscious state, and smiled softly to herself. She loved it when she got to see a happy ending.
A question suddenly occurred to Rose.
"You said you left her a gift earlier that she used to access her memories and bring him back. What gift? What memory?" Rose knew she was verging on being unforgivably nosey, but she didn't care. She was, at heart, very much a romantic. And as both parties involved were now unconscious she could hardly ask them. She also noted with undisguised amusement that both Astrid and Dr Bishop looked keen on hearing the Doctor's answer too.
"I didn't give her a memory. It couldn't be a memory - Peter Bishop had to not exist AT ALL for the reboot to work. I couldn't use anything that would manipulate that, so I ran an experiment, as I told you I would, Rose. I simply gave her a phrase that meant something to her - planted it in her head, so to speak - to think of at the appropriate time. It was a chance at least that she would remember, but that was the most I could give her."
"A chance? You staked everything on a whim?" asked Astrid, in a tone that Rose couldn't really decipher. It was either angry or awed. Rose came to the conclusion that it was probably an even mixture of both…possibly 60/40.
"Do I ever do anything else?" the Doctor asked innocently, as though the young lab assistant would have any idea as to his antics one way or the other. Rose figured that, in comparison with Walter, the Doctor and the mad scientist probably stacked up pretty evenly in the young lab assistant's estimation.
"What was the phrase?" Dr Bishop asked, lowering his eyes back to his son as he continued to soothingly stroke the younger man's hair.
"Just something that I had found in Olivia's head when I tried to wake her up. She didn't even know what it meant, but it was all over the place in her head: Einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toi."
A/N: Sorry for any mistakes that may be in this. I haven't had much time to do anything but give it a basic read through for proof-reading mistakes. A hurricane is supposed to hit us head on sometime this evening and I wanted to make sure I got this up. If I don't respond to any comments, I'm not ignoring you; I'm without power. This was the penultimate chapter. The next one ties up all the loose ends. Thanks so much to all my readers for sticking through this real mind-screw. I'm not sure even I understand half the rambling I've given out on this thing, lol. I hope you enjoyed.
