Notes: This chapter borrows heavily from the novel Lungbarrow by Marc Platt. The Doctor revisits his second childhood and Rose finds more questions than answers.
Chapter 4
"John?" Rose called out. No reply.
"John? Where are you? What's happenin'?"
They were sitting on the sofa in the living room of their luxury home in Notting Hill, in the city of London which is in the British Isles on the planet Earth, and no longer on the planet Gallifrey.
"That was weird," Rose said. "It was like everythin' ceased to exist."
"Yeah," John said running his hand through his hair. "That's as far as those memories go. After that it all goes blank."
"What do you think it was? Memory wipe? Alternate time line?" she asked him.
"I really have no idea. I've been thinking about it for years and still don't know. I get the feeling though that I wasn't supposed to be able to remember those events."
"So what happens next then? How are things different?"
"Oh Rose," he laughed. "You have no idea. Imagine The Addams Family meets the Borgias. Ready?"
Rose nodded her head and off they went, back to a very different Lungbarrow House.
The first thing Rose noticed was the 'feel' of the house, it was 'off'. It was as though the house was sulking or brooding. John was right when he mentioned the Addams Family, she could almost hear the whistled tune and clicking fingers.
They were in a room full of pipes, tubes, cables and high tech equipment. Walls were covered with control panels and monitors that hummed and whirred, with the occasional hissing noise as a pressure release valve normalised pressure within the pipework.
In the centre of the room was an elongated 'egg', large enough to hold a person. A lot of the cables and pipework attached to this seemingly important piece of equipment.
"OK, where are we?" Rose asked him in that 'here we go again' tone of voice.
"This is the Lungbarrow loom room." He stopped and thought about it and then grinned. "Loom room, I like that, a room with a loom."
"John!?" He stopped and looked at her.
"Oh, right. Explanations. This is now after the fall of Pythia and all Gallifreyans are sterile. Wellll, when I say sterile, women still ovulated and men still... well you get the idea. But no eggs would fertilise, and no one knew why."
"Pythia's curse," Rose said.
"Yeah, that's what it was called. The loom was invented by Rassilon's scientists, it takes the genetic material from the eggs and sperms and combines it 'in vitro'. It then grows a person who is a fully grown adult with an infant's brain."
"It all feels wrong John. It's like Frankenstein's castle, there's an atmosphere of forebodin' hanging over the place."
"You can feel it can you? For me it was home, but having the other memories means I can feel the difference. The weird thing is though, I can remember being in there," He pointed at the 'egg' in the middle of the room.
"I can remember waiting to be born... It was like being all strung out. All unravelled inside the Loom. I was spread really thin… I couldn't think. Not put thoughts together.… But I knew where I was and what was happening. I couldn't wait to get out. And then I was born. My lungs nearly burst. The first rush of air was so cold... No one I told believed me, because it wasn't possible."
"Another mystery," Rose said slowly, deep in thought. "It's as though you time travelled from that funeral to this loom. How could you do that?"
"No idea, it couldn't be a TARDIS, people would see and hear it."
"What about a vortex manipulator that... Jack Harkness used? You don't think? No... It couldn't be... Could it?" Rose looked at John wide eyed and mouth open.
"No, definitely not!" He stopped and thought about it. "No, not Jack. No. There was this one mystery character called The Other, y'know, the one celebrated on Otherstide, he was from the time of Pythia."
"Could he have used a vortex manipulator? Or could he have been Jack?"
"No, I don't think he was Jack. I saw the shadowy figure once in a vision when I was in my seventh regeneration. Susan recognised him and thought it was the first me," he told her. "He had this device called 'The Hand of Omega', it could have been that I suppose. I'll explain about that later"
While they were thinking about this, they heard footsteps approaching and then the door burst open. 42 people filed into the room and made way for two elderly individuals who radiated authority.
"Ah here come the Borgias," John said with a smile. "Rose, these are my loom cousins. The elderly man there is Quinces, the 422nd Kithriarch of the House of Lungbarrow, the father of the house if you like. The rather stern looking old hag with the staff is Satthralope, she's the mother of the house and never really liked me."
Quinces moved over to a control console near the 'egg' and studied the display. "He is ready," he announced and pressed a sequence of buttons. There was a whirring and hissing as refrigeration gases vented from the loom and chilled the air.
The front of the loom moved forwards and upwards on jointed arms revealing a green glow behind the fog of gas. As the fog cleared, Rose could see the naked body of the First Doctor. He appeared to be the same age as the one at Juleshka's funeral.
The Housekeeper stepped forward and slapped her hand across the First Doctor's upper thigh. He gave a gasp, drew in a lung full of refrigerated air and let out a yell.
"Bitch," John muttered under his breath.
Various cousins started sniggering and pointing at the naked figure in the loom. Rose thought they were pointing and laughing at his manhood and felt they were being very unkind, as she had no complaints in that department. In fact... She started blushing at her next thought.
"Why are they laughin' at you?" she asked him, all confused.
"It's not that!" he said, waggling his eyebrows. That got her blushing even more. "I have a navel."
"What? And they don't?"
"No they don't. If you're grown in a loom, you don't need one. It's just another mystery about me."
"This is like that story about the prince who swaps places with a street urchin," Rose said. "You've been taken from a lovin' family and dumped... here."
"'The Prince And The Pauper', Mark Twain. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was his real name; he was a real joker he was. He got the idea for 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' from me," John rambled on.
"John. Can't you feel it? There's no love here like there was back there... wherever 'there' was."
John's face was impassive as he looked at his wife. "And now you know why I stole a TARDIS and ran away."
Quinces wrapped a gown around the new arrival and helped him out of the room.
"Aaagh! What the hell is that?" Rose screamed in surprise. A large, polished wooden man stood outside the door and picked up the First Doctor.
John laughed. "That'd be Lurch," he joked. "It's called a Drudge, a kind of mechanised servant."
They walked behind the Drudge as it carried its precious cargo through the house towards his room. The house looked pretty much the same as Rose had seen it in John's previous memories, but it felt completely different.
"The more I experience this John, the more it feels like the alternate reality that Donna created with that time beetle on her back."
"Really? That's very interesting. I wonder if The Other or The Hand of Omega had the power to create a different reality just for me, without changing other peoples perception of reality?"
"So you think it was one of them then?" Rose asked.
"I still don't know, but they're the prime suspects."
Rose looked back at the cousins who were now drifting off in various directions.
"So what are they like then these cousins of yours?"
"Quinces was kind and nurturing, I think I was his favourite because I was such a genius. He wanted me to become Lord Cardinal, but I just wanted to get out and explore," he started to explain.
"Growing up, I was closest to Innocet." He pointed to a young woman with red braided hair, walking away from them. They walked into another memory as sunlight dazzled on the leaves and on the river.
They heard the clacking antlers of jousting neversuch beetles. The First Doctor poked one beetle, almost a hand long, with a cut reed. It droned its flightless wings and snapped at the reed with its mandibles. He poked it again and watched it scuttle for cover.
There was a cry of despair behind them. They turned and saw a young woman struggling down the sandy bank to the shore. It was Innocet, looking about twenty years old. Her robe, absurdly heavy for such an expedition, had caught on a thorny root. It was riding up, showing off her underskirts.
She scolded the First Doctor as he laughed. She tried to pull herself free, but the basket she carried tipped up and tipped berries all down the bank.
Her footing slipped and she slithered down after them, landing with a squelchy thump.
"We'll be late for supper," she said, as she tried to flatten down her wayward skirts, she was laughing as well.
They continued following the Drudge. "She looked out for me and stood up to Satthralope when I got into trouble. Glospin over there." He pointed to a black haired individual with a cane who looked like the achetypal villain.
"He was the old hag's favourite, he was a scheming bully and actually murdered Quinces in an attempt to become the next Kithriarch. He tried to frame me for his murder and threatened to expose me as an interloper into the Lungbarrow loom."
"What, you mean he knew you'd been inserted into the loom somehow?"
"No, I don't think so, but he was a geneticist and he found that my DNA didn't quite match the other cousins. It's like I'm some sort of cuckoo."
"Isn't that more evidence for you being time travelled into the loom or somethin'?"
"Yeah, I suppose it is, but we still don't know by whom or for what reason."
"The rest of them were fairly OK I suppose, just like any other family I suppose."
"And what was your childhood like this time?"
"It was OK actually, I didn't remember my past life at this point, so I had nothing to compare with it. Oh, and I underwent my brainbuffing."
Rose giggled. "You mean they take your brain out and give it a polish?"
John laughed. "No, all loomlings have eight years of brainbuffing, it fills your head with stuff you need to know to be an adult."
They were now in a classroom with the First Doctor, and a large, furry, curly horned badger, who appeared to be teaching him the history of Gallifrey.
"Ahhh, there's Badger look, he was my tutor. He was an avatroid that Quinces programmed and gave to me, we became really good friends."
"Your tutor was a robot badger?" Rose asked suspiciously. Was he making these memories up?
"Yeah, it was great. Because I was such a genius, I saw it as part of my education to work around his logic circuits, baffle him and then skip class to go and play with my cousins."
The scene changed again. They were now in the Citadel, but it was different to how Rose remembered it from his previous memories. It was still beautiful, in that alien sort of way, but the architecture was different.
John saw the look on her face and explained.
"They rebuilt the city after the fall of Pythia and the student rebellion. I came to live here while I studied at the academy, and then got a job in the Chapterhouse's Bureau of Possibility when I finally graduated."
Rose bumped his shoulder and grinned. "Who'd have thought it, you havin' a job an' livin' in a city."
"Yeah. And I hated it. I wanted to be out there." He looked up at the apricot sky. "It may have been some previous memories bleeding through. But I felt I was just biding my time until I could escape."
He ran his hand through his hair in that unconscious gesture of his.
"Anyway I quit that job after a few decades, my bosses disagreed with my overzealous political involvements. After that I became a Scrutationary Archivist at the Bureau of Continual Observation until my past caught up with me and I managed to leave."