Mmm, Easter eggs. I'm so tempted to make them arrive at Easter and have lots of chocolate... :P
Anyway, moving on. This is a bit of a short chapter, but the next one will be much longer. Promise!
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who.
xxx
The TARDIS lurched sickeningly and threw Martha roughly to the ground, sparks flying from the consol as the lights flickered and flashed. Martha clung desperately onto the railings she'd been thrown into as the room swayed around her, until finally there was an almighty explosion from the centre of the room that sent the Doctor and Jack flying backwards, as flames rose up and spread across the ceiling before dying away. Martha dared to open her eyes, and saw… nothing. For a moment, all she saw was darkness. Then as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, she could make out the outline of the consol, and the objects in the room. Next to her the Doctor and Jack began to sit up, recovering from being thrown across the room.
The Doctor looked around with wide eyes, then quickly jumped up. He walked up to the consol, and ran his hand over the side, the vibrations of a live TARDIS gone. Jack stood up and watched the Doctor silently. Martha unsteadily made her way to her feet.
"What happened?" she whispered.
"The TARDIS is dead," the Doctor said quietly.
"What?" Martha couldn't quite believe what she was hearing. "Can't you fix it?"
"Should be able to, could last time," the Doctor replied, leaning under the consol.
"Where are we anyway? What happened?" Martha was tempted to go out the doors, but knew she probably shouldn't. The Doctor stood up straight, and also looked to the doors.
"We should be…" he paused nervously, almost afraid to think it in case it wasn't true. He walked slowly to the doors, and gently pushed them open.
xxx
The Doctor stepped outside into the London street, and his gaze instantly went to the sky.
When Martha and Jack came out, the Doctor was staring at the sky, which for some reason was full of zeppelins.
"Is this London?" Martha gasped, scanning the familiar but different city around her. "I mean, it looks like London, but it can't be…" she noticed a newspaper on the edge of a table of a café near them, and ran over to it. She grabbed the paper and read the date. "24th March 2012," she read aloud, "five years in the future," she looked back up at the sky, "things can't have changed this much in five years."
"Five years…" the Doctor said thoughtfully, "it's only been a couple of years here…" he looked down from the sky, his eyes wide and mouth hanging open in sheer disbelief. He turned round to his two companions, one of which was beginning to smile, the other was beginning to understand what had happened.
"You said she was in a parallel universe," Martha said, "is this it? Is this a parallel universe?" she looked at the Doctor, who suddenly grinned from ear to ear.
"Oh yes!" he laughed, "Ha!" Martha didn't think she'd ever seen him so happy. She watched as he and Jack both cheered and hugged each other, barely able to keep in their excitement. The Doctor then ran over to her and grabbed the paper off her and looked at the date. "Thursday," he read, then looked at his watch, "3:47pm, she should be at work. Martha!" he dropped the paper on the table and gave her a big grin, "any idea where Canary Warf is?" She looked around her, as she tried to figure out where in London they were.
"That way…" she said, pointing in a vague direction, "I think." The Doctor glanced around at where she was pointing, then looked back at her. He then pulled her into a hug and kissed her on the forehead.
"Let's go!" he said happily, running in the direction she'd pointed, closely followed by Jack. For a moment, all she could do was stare. The closest he'd got to her before was holding her hand to pull her along, and he'd just hugged and kissed her… he must be really happy.
A second later Jack poked his head round the corner of the building he and the Doctor had just run behind.
"You coming?" he asked, and she grinned and ran after them.
xxx
Martha led them down various roads and paths to where she hoped Canary Warf was. The London traffic crawled by as they ran straight past, pushing their way through the crowds. Before long, they could see the huge building towering above them, with the Torchwood logo on the glass doors. They tried to calm down as they reached the entrance, deciding that bursting through demanding to know where Rose Tyler was would probably get them locked up.
Jack eyed the logo on the doors, thinking briefly about how weird it was that Torchwood, so secret on their world, was so public on this one. The Doctor was the first to go through the doors, running up to the counter and skidding to a half just in front of it, which earned him a few odd looks. Jack and Martha quickly ran after him, as he waited eagerly to talk to the woman behind the help desk.
"Hello!" he greeted as the person before him walked away, "I'm looking for Rose Tyler. Don't suppose you could tell me where she is?"
"Rose Tyler?" The woman confirmed, and he nodded. She looked down at her computer as she typed the data in.
As the Doctor waited, Martha saw various alien artefacts displayed around the lobby, in glass cabinets with writing and diagrams around them. She wondered toward something disturbingly familiar, and stopped by the cabinet containing a scanning device that the galactic police had used to tell if someone was human or not. On the plaque next to it, it said that the police had transported a hospital to the moon in search of an alien, but Torchwood had managed to communicate with them and they had found the alien in question with little fuss. Martha supposed that, had the Doctor not been there, the alien would have destroyed half the planet. She then wondered what happened to this universe's Doctor, and if she or Jack were also in this universe.
She looked around as she heard Jack walk up next to her.
"Have you found out where Rose is?" she asked, but he shook his head.
"There's something wrong with the network here, so she's got to e-mail people who might know. Honestly, big company like this, you'd think they could fix the computers." Martha sniggered, but her smile soon faded.
"Jack?"
"Yeah?" Martha paused, unsure if she should ask the question or not. She decided she might as well, she had nothing to lose.
"What happened to Rose?" Jack paused, and looked away from her.
"It's a long story," he muttered.
"Looks like we have a long time," Martha replied, glancing round at the Doctor who was leaning impatiently on the counter, drumming his fingers on the surface. Jack didn't answer, he just stared into space.
xxxFLASHBACKxxx
The room rocked around Jack as he heard smashes around him, as if the whole building was being bombed. He lost his footing, and fell to the ground. The Doctor had said that they had to open the breach, but that they would wait for Jack to come back up in case something went wrong, but Jack guessed they couldn't wait any longer.
He tried to make his way up the shaking stairs, back to where the Doctor and Rose were. He hadn't been through the void, so he wasn't going to get sucked in, but he knew that they would both have to hold onto something. And judging by the way the building was shaking, they'd have to be holding on bloody hard.
He made it up to the next floor and stumbled up the next flight of steps, seeing the floods of Daleks and Cybermen being pulled into the building out the windows. Every now and again a Cyberman flew past him, and he had to be careful not to get hit by one.
As he made it up the next two floors, he saw that the Daleks and Cybermen were no longer flying into the building, and guessed that they'd all been pulled in. But the breach was still open, the building still shaking.
He was finally on the right floor, and ran down the swaying corridors. Computers and machines where falling around him as he ran through a row of offices. He burst through another door into the security room, and was about to run through the next door when he heard something that caught his attention.
He looked around at the monitors displaying footage from the security cameras stationed around the building, and his attention was pulled to the one in the room with the breach. As he saw what was happening, his blood ran cold.
Rose was clinging onto the lever, her entire body off the ground from the force of the void. The Doctor was reaching out to her, helplessly calling her name, telling her to hold on. Jack could see her losing her grip, but he was to scared to move.
Then it was too late. He watched in horror as she lost her grip and fell towards the void, screaming as the Doctor screamed with her. Then he was running, the last thing he heard being the sound of the Doctor's voice as he helplessly cried out her name.
By the time he reached the room, it had all stopped. The building had stopped shaking, the howl of the void had gone. He knew it was too late, but he ran anyway. He burst through the door into the room, and came to a halt at what he saw, as a chill went down his spine and he felt suddenly empty.
The Doctor, who didn't seem to have noticed him, was standing against the far wall, with his hand resting on the white concrete. Jack stared, his mouth hanging open, hardly able to believe what had happened. The Doctor's hand dropped from the wall, and he numbly walked away from it, his eyes dead. Jack didn't need to ask what had happened. He knew what had happened.
She was gone.
xxxFLASHBACKxxx
"Jack?"
He was suddenly pulled back to reality by Martha's voice.
"Hello? You still with us?" he looked over at her, her eyes questioning. He looked behind her at the Doctor, who was still waiting for an answer.
"Let's go see if they've found Rose yet," he said, jogging back towards the help desk. Martha could only stare as he ran past her.
"Thanks for answering my question," she said sarcastically, then ran after him.
The Doctor was still waiting impatiently as Jack and Martha ran back up to him. He was tempted to just stick the sonic screwdriver over the desk and fix the computer, and he would have done if he wouldn't have then got taken away for having alien tech. Finally, the woman behind the desk smiled as she found an answer.
"I'm sorry, but Rose Tyler isn't here at the moment, she's at home," she said calmly, reading the information on screen. The Doctor sighed, after all this and she wasn't even in the building. She looked up at him with a smile that he felt completely contradicted what she said next. "She's on maternity leave."