Chapter Six
Rose couldn't remember falling asleep, but it wasn't hard to figure out why she might have done. Waking up now, she still felt completely exhausted, like her limbs were so heavy they were seeping down into the soft surface she was lying on.
Rose opened her eyes and then immediately shut them again from the pain of the bright lights making her irises contract sharply. Her whole head seemed to throb. She moaned slightly before prying her eyelids apart again, squinting.
It took a while for her eyes to adjust, but Rose eventually made out that she was lying in a bed in a very white looking room. A hospital, she thought. Was she sick? It would explain why she felt like crap, anyway.
Oh, but no. Rose inhaled deeply suddenly, her eyes widening, clinging onto those very real sensations to try to convince herself that the feeling of being awake wasn't imagined.
She should be dead. She remembered that much.
And yet.
That explained why she was in hospital, anyway, though Rose would have expected to have ended up in the morgue instead of some private recovery room.
A soldier in a red beret, with long rifle-like gun in hand, walked past window of that room. All right, Rose thought, maybe not a hospital.
That uniform was unmistakable. UNIT. What was Rose doing inside UNIT?
"Hello?" she croaked.
No one answered.
"Anyone there?" she called again, and then coughed. Her throat felt clogged somehow, or perhaps just underused.
It took a while, calling out for someone to come along, before the door to the room opened. Rose squinted at the woman who entered.
"I know you," she said, though she wasn't entirely certain it wasn't a lie. The woman looked familiar, sure, but Rose really couldn't place her. She might have been any old UNIT officer, really. In that uniform, and with their uniformly stern faces, they all tended to blur together to her.
"Captain Erisa Magambo," the woman re-introduced herself. "We met at Easter."
"Right," Rose said, drawing the word out and letting her head fall back on the pillow tiredly. "The stingray things. I remember now. You kept asking me stupid questions."
Magambo gave her an unamused sort of smile. "Yes, well. While I wouldn't use the word 'stupid', I will have to continue the trend of asking you questions."
"How about I start?" Rose suggested. "What am I doing here? And where is here?"
"You're inside UNIT Headquarters in London."
"Yeah," Rose said sardonically, "I'd kind of guessed that from the abundance of UNIT soldiers, actually. Believe it or not, I have a lot of experience dealing with you lot."
"And yet," Magambo said, "we have next to no knowledge of you, besides your status as an associate of the Doctor. You can see how that might fail to tally up with your story."
"Sorry," Rose said. "Not my problem. I just want to leave."
"It is your problem, actually," Magambo corrected, warning. "We need you to help us make sense of it."
"Or what?" Rose asked.
Magambo cleared her throat. "Do you know why you're here?"
"Because UNIT's kidnapped me to interrogate me?" Rose suggested sarcastically. "You're certainly giving off that impression. I thought that that sort of thing was more Torchwood's area, really, but I guess every organisation has their secrets."
Magambo ignored her. "Do you remember what happened to you?"
Rose looked away. "I died. Or, well, I thought I did. Clearly not. Lucky me, eh?"
"So you remember the radiation?"
Rose looked directly at Magambo, her expression hard. "Pain like I've never felt – which is saying a lot, let me tell you – and someone I love screaming for me? Yeah, that sort of thing sticks with a person, actually. I remember."
"How did you survive?"
"How did I get here?" Rose countered.
Magambo explained, "Radiation vented through the chamber you were standing in, and the UNIT surveillance near the Naismith house picked up the readings. By the time a hazmat team was put together and they all converged on the house, the radiation had stopped flowing. Unfortunately, it was still held contained within the chamber with you, and the chamber failsafe remained locked off until the radiation was dealt with. Ingenious design, really."
"Sure," Rose said bitterly. "Ingenious. How smart of them to make it so I couldn't get out of the damn thing without killing myself, or near enough."
Magambo looked slightly uncomfortable at that, but then said, "But clearly you aren't dead, Ms Tyler."
"You still haven't answered my question," Rose said. "What, UNIT decided to take me in for a bit of testing once they realised I wasn't dead? Is that why I'm here?"
Magambo shook her head. "We thought you were dead, actually. For days, UNIT was under that impression. You seemed dead, and it was hours before we could vent the radiation out of the chamber safely enough to unlock the door and remove your body from inside. A cursory on-the-scene check didn't reveal life signs, even. We'd locked your body away for testing after we decontaminated you. It was purely by chance that one of the medical staff noticed the rise and fall of your chest. You didn't appear to have been breathing until then."
"Slowed life signs, probably," Rose said. "Bit like a coma?"
"So you know what it is?"
"I'm guessing," Rose said, glaring at Magambo. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out. Anyway, that's not the question. That's all just side issues. The question is still how come I'm here. Not just why I was brought here, but why I'm still here. How long has it been?"
"Eight days," Magambo answered promptly.
"And what, none of my friends came looking for me?" Rose asked incredulously.
"The Doctor came for you, of course. After he was released."
Rose frowned. "Released? What? Where is he, then?" she asked.
"He would have insisted on taking you from the house, while there was still radiation everywhere," Magambo said. "He'd gone completely mad, we thought, and had to be restrained just so we could deal with the Naismith building safely. You couldn't be removed, until you'd been decontaminated. The spread of that radiation would have been catastrophic."
"So, what, he thinks I'm dead?" Rose asked in dawning horror. "You haven't told him I'm not?"
"Evidently, he was just as fooled as we were. When the soldiers entered, he was clearly in mourning. His grief was ... to put it kindly, shall we say, uncontrollable? He lashed out at the members of the hazmat team. Here," she said, and picked up some sort of remote control and flicked it at the screen across from Rose.
"Surveillance," Magambo explained, as what looked like CCTV footage started playing on the screen. "We were unable to hack into the Naismith mansion prior to the incident for any number of privacy and political reasons, but after the fact we were able to lay our hands on these internal security recordings."
Rose really didn't want to see it, but she couldn't quite look away from the visual of what appeared to be her own death, though obviously hadn't actually been. It was hard to believe that she was still alive, watching how the radiation had caused her to writhe about in pain until her body gave up the struggle.
Harder still to watch than her own pain was the Doctor's reaction. The footage had no sound, but Rose didn't really need it. She could tell well enough what sort of noises were being made, from the view of the Doctor's face alone. First he was shouting, trying to tug the door of the glass cubicle open to get to her, to no avail. Then he was making a low pained noise as he sank to his knees, his arm still hanging off the door handle as if unwilling to lose contact. Then, at last, he was crying.
Rose felt like an interloper watching the Doctor's grief, even though it was about her. Perhaps it was worse because it was about her, actually; she shouldn't have been able to watch the impact of her own death on someone she cared about. Rose wondered how many UNIT members who had never even met the Doctor in passing had sat and taken notes while watching him cry. Something so rare and personal for him was probably treated like a curiosity. The thought of it made Rose angry.
A team of soldiers and people dressed in hazmat suits showed up on the footage, then, and they all seemed to stop, waiting for the Doctor to move (probably having barked out some order, Rose thought, though she couldn't tell for sure without any sound to support her guess). When the Doctor stayed exactly where he was, crumpled against the glass, his body still shaking slightly, a small group of soldiers moved towards him and attempted to physically remove him.
Rose had seen the Doctor act completely wild before, but not like that. Not wildly violent. Not physically throwing a punch, and then another, to prevent others from touching him. He struggled as he was bodily dragged away from the area, even catching one of the officers in the face with a swipe of his elbow.
God, Rose realised, Magambo was right. He'd snapped. Dealing with the Time Lords returning with the end of the universe in their wake, and losing the Master again, and Rose herself dying in front of him ... he'd just lost it. That man that she was watching on the screen didn't even look like the Doctor anymore. She'd seen him regenerate, with all the surface alterations inherent in that, but the sort of change she was witnessing on the screen was on an entirely different level. It scared Rose a lot.
The soldiers eventually bodily dragged the Doctor away from the scene, while the hazmat team moved cautiously in and presumably went about finding a way to filter the radiation safety out of the chamber. Rose had no idea how long that might have taken them, because Magambo turned the recording off.
"Where's the Doctor now?" Rose ground out.
"We're uncertain. The Doctor was put in custody for approximately 32 hours before it was decided that, on a balance, it was likely he didn't present an immediate threat to himself or UNIT or the public. We took into account his past actions in assisting us, and chose to caution him and set him free. With appropriate surveillance to ensure he didn't have some sort of relapse while still on Earth, of course."
With another flick of the remote control, the screen came to life again, but with an entirely different recording. This one didn't appear to be CCTV surveillance, but some kind of portable video camera, with sound and all. The picture was dodgy, though, with the camera jolting around seemingly uncontrollably for a while until it steadied, presumably as the camera operator ceased moving.
At first, Rose couldn't figure out what she was seeing. There were uniformed UNIT soldiers streaming through what looked like civilians, and not a one of them looked as if they were in any hurry or had any specific purpose. They milled around for a while before ambling out of shot. Once enough people moved to sit off to the sides slightly on what looked like benches, Rose recognised that the recording was of a church.
Was that Sylvia Noble? Yes, and there was Wilf beside her. Rose squinted at the screen, looking for Donna, who was nowhere to be seen.
The camera looked around as well, and Rose caught sight of a coffin.
"Oh. My. God," Rose said, looking at Magambo incredulously. "Is this a funeral? Did you take home movies of a funeral? How sick are you?"
"Not 'home movies', Ms Tyler. This was a live surveillance feed, taken covertly. We wanted to avoid having to prevent him from attending, and the only way to do that was to keep a constant eye on him."
Magambo gestured at the screen.
Well, Rose thought, there was Donna. Standing beside her, both of them off to the side of the church away from the seating area, was the Doctor. His expression was completely closed off, and his arms were crossed defensively across his chest. He looked like he was about to bolt at any moment, actually, as if only Donna's arm clutching at him was keeping him still.
Rose didn't blame him for that. The Doctor wasn't really the funeral type. She wondered why ...
Oh. She was an idiot.
"You let them give me a funeral?" Rose asked darkly. "Even though I'm not dead? And you recorded it? Okay, I take back what I said before. That's sick. Was this before or after you realised I was alive?"
Magambo remained silent, and Rose took that to mean 'after'.
"But why did they ... there wasn't even a body."
"We informed them that your body would have to be incinerated due to the radiation."
"Why lie?" Rose asked.
"At the time," Magambo said carefully, "we believed that to be true."
"And, what," Rose said disbelievingly, "you just forgot to send out the memo when you realised you were wrong?"
Magambo shifted. "It was decided that you would have to be contained inside UNIT for the foreseeable future. That would have become impossible if we'd informed your people that you were still alive."
"Why?"
"Because, Ms Tyler, we believe that you may be a significant threat," Magambo said. Rose could tell from her tone that, however much she might regret some of what had been done, that was something that she completely stood behind. "And while the Doctor was attempting to get to you, dead or not, he presented an even greater threat. You saw that recording at the Naismith location. He couldn't be trusted."
"I can't believe this," Rose said, frustrated. "All right, maybe you don't have personal experience in this. I'll tell you now, I've been through enough death to know. That's what happens when people think someone they're close to has died. They grieve. Sometimes they're not all that rational about it. But funny thing, Captain. If it turns out that the person they thought had died actually didn't, that would usually make them happy. Then you wouldn't have to worry about them acting out of character or whatever."
"We couldn't risk the Doctor attempting to retrieve you from inside UNIT," Magambo said unemotionally.
"God," Rose groaned, "what is wrong with you people. He's not an idiot. And he's not some violent monster."
"We very much hope you're right," Magambo said. "But he wouldn't have taken no for an answer about seeing you if he'd known you were alive. We couldn't risk him finding a way to break you out of UNIT. We've seen the Doctor at work often enough; we know he would have been able to manage it."
Rose scoffed. "And what, I'm a prisoner?"
"You're under quarantine."
"Why?" Rose asked. "I was only a public threat so long as the radiation was all stuck to me or whatever. Clearly the radiation's all gone now, or you wouldn't be standing right there talking to me."
Magambo shook her head. "It isn't the radiation you're being quarantined for at this stage. UNIT believes you pose a potentially much larger threat. Anything that could survive that level of radiation must be cleared before it can be let out into the public."
Any thing, Rose noted. That really wasn't a good sign.
She squinted suspiciously at Magambo. "And how do I go about getting 'cleared', exactly?"
"Well, supposing you really aren't any threat, it's simple enough. If you comply." The way Magambo stressed those last three words gave Rose a sinking sort of feeling. She wasn't feeling particularly compliant at the moment, actually. "We have three questions for you to answer, Ms Tyler, and then we will review whether you are free to go."
"You can't keep me here," Rose said, frowning. "You're not exactly some super-secret organisation that's above the law. UNIT's part of the government, and I'm a human being. I have rights."
"That," Magambo said pointedly, "is currently in doubt. You are listed as no longer being a citizen of the United Kingdom, having apparently died several years ago in the Battle of Canary Wharf. Now you are showing signs of beyond-human capabilities. For all we know, you are not actually Rose Tyler. That makes you a potential alien threat. UNIT has the capacity to keep you isolated indefinitely. That is, unless you give us the information we need in order to revoke the status of 'alien threat'."
Rose shook her head. "I'm not an alien, or a threat," she insisted. "Honestly, UNIT. You lot never see shades of grey, do you?"
"If you're not a threat, the answers will be simple, and you will be free to go. We're not unreasonable."
That was debatable.
Rose sighed. "Questions?" she prompted tiredly.
"The first is how you survived the radiation."
"I don't know," Rose lied. "I expected to be dead," she added, and that part was not so much a lie.
"Ms Tyler, don't play games."
"I'm not," Rose responded. "I don't know."
Magambo looked her over and clearly decided the best tactic for now was to let it lie. That didn't encourage Rose to feel hopeful that she'd be getting out of there any time soon, somehow.
Rose saw in her peripheral vision as Magambo fast-forwarded the recording of the funeral, which had kept playing while they'd been talking even though Rose had refused to look in its direction. She really didn't want to watch her own funeral, let alone watch a zoomed-in image of the Doctor and Donna throughout her funeral.
The sound came back on, signalling that the recording was once again playing at normal speed. Rose still didn't look directly at it. Magambo cleared her throat pointedly.
"I don't want to see it, Captain," Rose said forcefully. "Surely you can imagine why. It's completely disgusting, making me watch my fake funeral."
"If you don't watch, we can't ask you the questions we need to. If you can't answer the questions, we can't let you go. Be reasonable."
Rose scowled and looked up at the screen just in time to see the Doctor, stone-faced, snap something unintelligible at Donna, clearly rounding off a fight of some sort. Donna attempted to reach for the Doctor to comfort him. He promptly shrugged her off and paced across the church away from her.
The camera operator, judging by the recommencement of the earlier shaking and movement of the image, stood up and followed. A few moments later, though, he or she stopped a fair distance away from where the Doctor had also ceased moving.
Rose squinted at the image until it stopped shaking around. Then her eyes widened.
River Song. At Rose's funeral. That was not right.
The Doctor seemed to agree.
"You don't get to be here," he said loudly. "Not here. I don't care who you are to me one day. Right now, I want you gone."
River looked at him sadly. "So you can go off and do something stupid?"
"What's it to you?" the Doctor barked.
"Who do you think asked me to come?"
The Doctor looked incredulous, then. "There's no way I'd want to send you here," he said. "Ever."
Then their voices dropped too low for the camera to pick up from that distance. The visual pretty much said it all, though. The two of them clearly hissed angrily at each other. The Doctor gestured pointedly at what Rose recognised even from a distance, even taking into account the slightly-below-perfect quality picture, as a Vortex Manipulator around River's wrist.
After awhile, Rose caught the word, "Go," as the Doctor raised his voice slightly again. "Look, I won't do anything stupid. Just ... let me have this time. I need you to not be anywhere near this. Or near me, right now."
River hesitated, but then nodded. She looked like she wanted to hug him, but she could apparently tell as easily as Rose could that the Doctor wouldn't have stood for it. Instead, she just turned around and left.
The Doctor turned around as well, and headed back towards the front end of the church. Towards the camera. Directly towards the camera, as it happened.
"And you," the Doctor called out, looking just slightly upwards of the camera lens, presumably at the person the camera was attached to. "The funeral is over. UNIT has no business hanging around now, if they ever did."
"Sorry, sir," a man's voice – the cameraman, Rose supposed – said, "but we're just paying our respects."
"No," the Doctor said, his voice low and dangerous. "That's what these other people are doing." Rose noticed that he didn't include himself in that number. "You are spying on me. Now is not the time for you to try your hand at that, trust me. So you can just turn around and walk away now, before both of us end up regretting it. Because if there's anything you don't want to do right now, right at this moment in time, it's get on my bad side."
The camera operator did, in fact, promptly turn and walk away. Briskly, if the increased jostle of the camera was any indication.
Rose didn't blame him. The Doctor had plainly been wearing his Oncoming Storm face. Whole legions had fled at the sight of it. One human man wasn't exactly likely to stick around, unless he was very foolish and had little or no self-preservation instincts.
The cameraman's voice came over the link once the recording showed he'd completely exited the church. "Report," he said. "The target has clearly undertaken several confrontations with human beings over the course of the event with no physicality or other serious threats ensuing. Suggest that it is safe to recommence usual minimum surveillance on him during his time on Earth. Suggest also, however, that UNIT forces keep reasonable distance from the target for the foreseeable future. Finally, request that information be compiled on the unknown female associate of the Doctor, taking into account the presence of alien equipment in the form of a wristband. End transmission."
Then the camera was obviously switched off, as the screen went black.
"So," Magambo said finally. "The second question we need you to answer is who that woman was, and what was her purpose in being here?"
"That's two questions," Rose said.
"Don't get cute," Magambo warned.
"Fine. Her name's Donna Noble," Rose bluffed, "and she's –"
"We're well aware of who Ms Noble is," Magambo interrupted. "I was referring to the second woman."
"Never seen her before," Rose said flippantly.
"We know she's from the future," Magambo continued heedlessly, "based on our awareness of the origin of her wrist device. We also know that she used that device to get here, rather than being brought here by the Doctor. As you clearly saw, the Doctor treated her with hostility far beyond his reactions to others at the funeral, leading us to believe they are enemies. Yet the Doctor has chosen to give her free reign in our time. You can imagine, Ms Tyler, that UNIT is very wary of this, especially considering the Doctor's recent behaviour in acting against us."
"He's saved the world multiple times," Rose said angrily. "If it weren't for him you wouldn't even be here!"
"Yes," Magambo said. "We are well aware of that fact, thank you. That was the only reason the Doctor was deemed free to go up until now."
"But you're treating him like a criminal!" Rose said, exasperated.
"No," Magambo countered, "we're merely keeping an eye on him, for his benefit as much as the Earth's. This woman, on the other hand, has no past actions to recommend her to us, and the Doctor does not seem to be on good terms with her."
"Not yet," Rose muttered under her breath.
Magambo narrowed her eyes at Rose, but clearly hadn't quite caught the words, because she continued, "We require information about her and her purpose here."
"I literally can't give you information about her," Rose said. "I don't know her."
"Pardon me, ma'am, but I find that hard to believe, based on your reaction to seeing her at your supposed funeral."
"I was annoyed at seeing some woman making eyes at the Doctor, actually," Rose said, trying to keep her tone calm and pretty much completely failing. "You can imagine how that might make me feel, I'm sure, especially considering the setting."
"Perhaps," Magambo conceded. "That's probably even part of it. I don't believe, however, that that's all there is to it."
"I can't tell you something I don't know," Rose said.
"All right," Magambo said. "Then I'll put the last question to you. This one's an answer that you definitely will know. Has the Doctor become a threat to Earth?"
Rose bared her teeth angrily in a parody of a smile. "Oh, I see. You're just watching him to help him out, sure. But what you really want to know is whether you should lock him up in a cage and question him."
"You're not in a cage," Magambo reasoned.
Rose looked around. "The bars are solid walls instead. I see no other difference."
"Just tell us whether the Doctor is a threat."
"Go. To. Hell," Rose enunciated.
Magambo sighed at her response. "Then, unfortunately, we can't allow you to leave. Until you can prove you are willing to comply, you yourself remain an unknown risk."
"I told you, I'm not a threat!" Rose cried.
Magambo tipped her head at Rose. "We'd like to believe you, ma'am. Really. But it isn't safe to take your word for it. Not with the safety of six billion human beings on the line if we let you go. We need proof."
She walked out and left Rose sitting up alone in the bed, holding in the loud noise of frustration that battled the tight feeling in her throat, vying for release.
The door shut and an electronic lock was enabled. The sound was solid. Final.
Rose gritted her teeth and couldn't quite stop herself from pounding her fist down on the mattress.
"Are you ready to talk yet, Ms Tyler?"
"You keep asking that. The answer hasn't changed. I don't know the answers to your questions."
"You could leave if you would just talk to us."
"You could set me free without me having to say a word. This has nothing to do with you wanting to make sure I'm safe to be let into the public. You just want answers."
"Regardless of whether that's the case or not, it's in your best interests to tell us what we want to know."
"I can't."
"We've discovered a sort of energy combined with your DNA, Ms Tyler. You can't possibly tell me you were unaware of it."
"Can't I?"
"If you don't start being honest with us, you'll be locked away permanently. UNIT has cells for just that purpose, as you're probably aware. And they really aren't anywhere near as comfortable as this room."
"I don't do well with threats."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Does the state of your fingernails and hair have anything to do with the energy I mentioned last time I was in here?"
"I couldn't say. I might be just badly groomed. Two-tone's a good look, don't you think?"
"If you insist on making a game out of this, Ms Tyler, you know what will happen. UNIT doesn't appreciate having its time wasted."
"You mean you don't."
"That too."
"Sorry. I don't work to other people's schedules."
"Stop being stubborn. You could have been out of here by now, presuming you're actually telling the truth about not being dangerous."
"If you're going to presume that, then you can just let me out now."
"If you're not a threat, then you can just answer our questions."
"Sounds like stalemate to me, Captain."
"That's a shame. All of this could have been avoided, you know."
"Yeah, it could have. It could have been avoided if you'd never left the people I care about to think I was dead once you knew otherwise. I think we've gone a bit far for 'if only', don't you?"
"I'm sorry you feel that way."
"Not sorry enough."
After a month, Rose realised that Magambo hadn't been lying. They really were prepared to just keep her in this room for as long as it took her to tell them what they wanted to hear.
Rose had been through torture before. Painful torture. Torture that might have killed a woman with a lesser physical constitution, if she was honest. She didn't break easily.
However, even though she'd had a month to dig in her heels, she had also spent a lot of that time thinking.
There was one question she was never going to answer, no matter what UNIT said or did. Rose wasn't going to talk to them about the Doctor. She wouldn't betray him like that.
As for the other two questions, the secrets she was protecting wouldn't do UNIT any good anyway. There was some small hope that answering those questions would buy her enough good will to get her the hell out of there. With that in mind, it really wasn't worth continuing not telling them her answers to those questions just for the sake of being stubborn. Not if they were really never going to give in otherwise.
A month, Rose kept thinking. It was nothing, really, on her end. She'd been through far worse. She was comfortable enough, if completely bored and really rather pissed off at UNIT. But for the Doctor ...
He'd spent over a month thinking she was dead. She needed to see him, to let him know that she really wasn't, as soon as possible. Because if it had been her, thinking he was dead, she knew just how terrible that time would have seemed. She knew the sorts of things she might have been driven to.
The Doctor was smart. He knew a lot more than Rose did. He knew not to mess around with timelines, certainly. Usually. However, he hadn't seemed all that stable on those recordings Rose had seen. Rose didn't have any delusions that the Doctor wasn't capable of doing terrible things. He wasn't known as the Oncoming Storm for nothing.
Rose never had thought she'd be grateful for River Song. If the other woman had managed to get the Doctor to see reason, though, Rose thought she just might be willing to put aside any resentment she was harbouring towards the other woman. For now. She couldn't make any long-term promises on that front.
Still, enough was enough. Rose had to see him.
When Magambo walked in for that day's interrogation (disguised, as always, as pleasant questioning), Rose didn't even wait for her to open her mouth.
"I lived because of a type of energy," Rose said. "It's time energy that was inside my body for so long that it altered me on a biological level so that my cells combat degeneration of different sorts. At least, that's what I think happened. I don't age. I don't get sick. I heal really quickly when I'm injured, to a point. But I can still die. I thought I would have died, with that radiation. I've never been injured that badly, so I don't really know the limits."
"So it could hypothetically be limitless," Magambo interrupted, looking far too interested for Rose's comfort. "You could live through anything."
"No," Rose said firmly. "Bomb explodes? I'm dead. There's nothing to heal, you see. I just don't know where the exactly the line is drawn. Apparently the radiation was on this side of that line. It just hurt me a lot. My damaged cells took a while to replace, obviously, but they clearly managed. The replacement process tends to speed up when it needs to, you see. Hence the nails." Rose held up her hands, with their ridiculously long fingernails, up in demonstration. "And the hair. They always grow faster than they should – which makes it hell to keep up on the dye job, let me tell you – but not like this, usually. Not this much.
"But here's the thing," Rose continued. "You can't duplicate the effect. It's not something that you can use to make an army, or to save lives. It was a one-off. Even if it wasn't, the process was fatal. It just so happened that, in the circumstances, it was fatal to someone else instead of me. Knowing about it won't help you."
"If it's dangerous, you remain a danger to the population," Magambo reasoned.
"No," Rose said. "I'm really not. The process itself is dangerous, but I've been fine for hundreds of years. It's stable."
"Hundreds of years?" Magambo asked, sounding disbelieving. "UNIT records place you at approximately 24 years of age."
"UNIT records also say I'm dead," Rose shot back. "Guess they aren't all that accurate, huh?"
"It's all very well to give us this story, but you can't provide any proof to back it up," Magambo said then.
"You've seen the tests," Rose said. "You know there's a type of energy inside me, and you know it isn't radiation or anything else that's doing any harm, to me or anyone else. Also, even though you haven't mentioned it, I daresay you've tried to isolate the energy from my cells and couldn't. I know this because Torchwood did the same. The rest you'll just have to take my word on. Or not, I suppose," Rose laughed mirthlessly.
The rest of her life could potentially last for a very long time. Rose would hate to spend it stuck inside UNIT.
"All right," Magambo said. "I'll convey the information to our scientists, and if they're satisfied, UNIT will be satisfied. Provided, of course, that you provide us with the further information we've asked you about."
"I wasn't lying, you know," Rose said. "I really don't know that woman. I've never met her."
"But you recognise her," Magambo said. It wasn't a question.
"I know who she is, yes," Rose said. "She travels with the Doctor sometimes, that's all. The only reason she was here in this century was for him. He probably even sent her himself, by the sound of it. A future him, I mean."
"It didn't look like he was happy to see her," Magambo remarked.
Rose looked at her shrewdly. "Imagine, Captain, that you met someone who apparently knew you in your future, and was apparently very close to you. Would you want her hanging around at your current dead lover's funeral, do you think?"
For the first time throughout any of the questioning Rose had been put through, Magambo looked truly regretful, rather than just slightly uncomfortable. "Of course not. But you haven't told me who she is, still."
"And I won't," Rose said. "It's not something UNIT needs to know, and I don't know for sure that telling you information about someone from the future wouldn't harm the timelines. It's not worth it, just to satisfy your curiosity. She's not a threat. Not to you, anyway."
"Somehow I don't find that comforting. And the Doctor?"
"Like I said the first time, I'm not talking about him, except to say that you're idiots if you turn your back on everything he's done for you up until now."
"I believe your exact words were 'go to hell'," Magambo pointed out.
"I stick by them, too," Rose agreed. "I've told you all you're going to get from me on that topic." Rose crossed her arms. "The rest is the Doctor's business, not yours. I'm not going to provide information on tap about his life for you. You want that? Find another source, if you can. That's all I'm willing to say."
Magambo studied her for a while, and then nodded sharply and left the room.
Two days later, UNIT released Rose without so much as an apology.
Bastards, Rose thought as she left the building as quickly as she could, glancing suspiciously behind her as she went.
"Come on," Rose said, "pick up already!"
The phone rang and rang, but no answer came. Rose hung up in frustration, slamming the payphone receiver down. Then she redialled.
"I swear, if you're just ignoring the phone ..." she breathed in annoyance, but then the phone was answered.
It wasn't the Doctor's voice.
For a horrified moment, Rose thought that he'd regenerated already, despite her sacrifice. That wasn't supposed to happen. She'd been worried that everything might have gone wrong while she'd been locked away inside UNIT. What if he'd got himself killed (or close enough)?
Then the voice said something about her having called a prison of some sort, and Rose went from near-frantic to just plain confused. Wrong number?
"I'm looking for the Doctor," she said.
There was a long pause, and some voices in the background that Rose couldn't quite make up. The next voice she heard, however, still wasn't the Doctor's. Not unless the Doctor's eleventh body was a woman.
Well, it was the one body of his since his ninth that Rose had never seen. She supposed anything could happen.
"Hello?"
"I need to speak to the Doctor," Rose said.
"He's not here," the woman said. "You've phoned the Time Vortex. Your call was diverted to me because he can't be reached, and because I'm the one most likely to be able to find him. What do you need?"
Most likely to find him. Oh, Rose thought. Now she thought she recognised that voice.
"River Song?" she asked, certain she already knew the answer.
"Doctor River Song, yes," River confirmed. "Do you know me?"
Rose hung up the phone, suddenly breathing hard.
Rose knew she had to track the Doctor down soon. She also knew that UNIT may have only let her go so that they could track her to him. They did seem to be overly interested in him lately, after all, and they'd barely explained why they'd suddenly decided to let Rose go. She wasn't at all sure that it had been merely that her explanations had satisfied them. Not with two whole days having passed before she was allowed to leave.
It stunk of a trap for the Doctor. Too bad for them, though, Rose Tyler never intended to play the part of willing bait.
She spent three days of jumping from hotel to hotel, using different aliases at each, and using every tactic she knew to throw UNIT off her trail if they were following her. On the fourth, Rose strolled out onto a bustling London street. She headed for the nearest tube stop. Many hours later, she stepped off a train into Cardiff Station.
It was just a short walk to the Bay from there. Had it not been for the fact that she was almost certain UNIT would have Torchwood under some form of surveillance, Rose would have just stood in front of the Roald Dahl Plass and waited. As it was, she hugged her arms around herself in an attempt to block out the chill breeze, and went around the back way.
When she let herself into the Hub, no one even noticed at first. Crack security, there, Rose couldn't help but think. Then one of the team – Ianto, Rose thought he was called – soon alerted the others to her presence.
When Jack saw her, he sprang to his feet as if it was an involuntary reflex caused by the shock. He stood in place for a while, just staring at her, as if he didn't really believe she was standing there. Two minutes later, he was still looking at her as if he was astonished by her continued existence.
He was one to talk, Rose mused humourlessly.
"You ..." Jack started, but couldn't quite seem to get out the rest of his thought.
"Hi," Rose said.
"Are you ..." Jack seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. "Is this after, for you?"
The hazards of time travel, Rose realised. Of course he'd wonder whether this was her from before she'd supposedly died. It really probably made more sense to him than the idea of her somehow living through it without any of them being aware.
"Yeah," Rose said. "I'm alive."
Mere moments later, there were arms around her, and Rose let herself collapse into them.
She didn't cry, but it was a near thing.
"You need my help?" Jack asked.
"Yeah," Rose said. "I need to find the Doctor."
Jack frowned. "Rose, you've got the same phone numbers I do. He hasn't contacted me since ... since." He looked incredibly uncomfortable, and Rose immediately knew he was talking about the funeral. Her funeral. "And I spoke to Donna Noble not two days ago. She mentioned she hadn't seen him and he wouldn't answer her calls."
"Have you tried calling him?" Rose asked.
"Yeah," Jack said.
"And did anyone answer?" she asked carefully.
Jack frowned. "I was calling the TARDIS. Who other than the Doctor would have answered?"
"No one," Rose said quickly. Too quickly, obviously.
Jack's face looked pitying. "Rose, if you think he'd just go and replace –"
"It's got nothing to do with that," Rose deflected, not even letting him finish the thought. If he said it out loud, that made the possibility real, she thought. Jack didn't know just how possible it was that she might be replaced, in every sense. Jack presumably had no knowledge of River.
At least, Rose hoped not. She couldn't bear to ask him more directly about River right now, just in case he revealed that he was aware of her and her relationship with the Doctor. If he'd kept something that important from Rose, she really didn't want to know about it.
Jack's eyes further softened towards her, but he let the topic drop.
"Well, anyway," Jack said slightly bitterly, "the Doctor certainly doesn't seem to be willing to pick up the phone for any of us, let alone put in a visit. Like we weren't all devastated as well."
"What, he's just shut you all out?" Rose asked with a frown.
Jack chuckled mirthlessly. "I'm not surprised, really," he said. "It's what he does, isn't it? He hasn't been seen back on Earth in the last month or so either, that we're aware of. That's not a ridiculously long amount of time for him to be away usually, but ..."
"But recently we'd been visiting more regularly," Rose finished. "And now he's not."
"Exactly," Jack said. "So, I'd love to help you. You know I'd do just about anything for you, Rose. But I don't know what I can do that you can't do yourself."
Rose bit her lip for a moment, and then met Jack's eyes. "I just need you to tell me when he comes back." 'When', she'd said, not 'if'. She couldn't possibly consider that he wouldn't come back to Earth soon. The whole planet would fall apart without him checking in regularly, surely. "You've got equipment that can track him, right? When he comes to Earth."
Jack gave her an uncertain look. "Not absolutely anywhere on the planet. But we did manage to extrapolate some tracking technology from the old Doctor detector I had."
Rose nodded. "His hand; he mentioned. You must have scared your staff half to death with that sort of weird stuff lying about."
Rose shot a look at the man and woman across the Hub, who were both obviously staring at her. Caught in the act, they each immediately seemed to find something else to do with themselves. Not particularly good at covert ops, then, Rose noted.
"They seem nice," Rose added softly, gesturing at them. "Gwen and Ianto, isn't it? How is it I've inside the Hub five times now and never met them?"
Jack smiled. "Because I like to keep the separate parts of my life separate," he said, though not unkindly. "It's just easier that way."
Rose raised her eyebrows at him. "Oh, so I'm just someone to be compartmentalised away, am I?" she teased half-heartedly.
Jack, on the other hand, looked deadly serious. "Not if you don't want to be. We're still several people down. Torchwood's fairly difficult to recruit for these days. I wasn't kidding when I offered you a job that first time. The offer's still open, always."
Rose shook her head. "The Doctor will be back soon," she said, sounding much surer than she felt. "When he comes back, I'll be going with him again. No point making a commitment here and then having to run out on you."
Jack shrugged easily. "So don't make a commitment," he offered. "Just help us out for now. At least that way you'll be close at hand if our equipment locates the Doctor."
Rose closed her eyes, sighing. "I don't think so, Jack. I had to take a lot of precautions to make sure UNIT was off my back."
"I noticed," Jack said with a slight smirk. "Nice disguise. I like the hair."
"I missed being ginger," Rose admitted. "And thanks, but so not the point. The thing is, there's just no point in me announcing my presence to UNIT again by getting involved in official Torchwood business. I need to keep a low profile for a while."
"So what, you're just going to lie low?" Jack asked. "Indefinitely? You?"
"Yeah," Rose said, slightly indignantly. "Me. I've done it before."
"No offence," Jack said, "but you can't keep out of trouble for a day at a time. You're almost worse than him."
"It won't be for that long," Rose said firmly, leaving no room for disagreement. "He'll be back soon, and then I can go see him and tell him what happened. I just need you to call me, to tell me where."
Jack simply nodded. Rose silently thanked him for allowing her to keep her delusions, if that was what they turned out to be.
"Any day now," she said.
Nearly seven and a half weeks after Christmas Day, Rose received a phone call.
She'd never driven a car so fast in her life.
Brown pinstripes, hair that looked like it was reaching for the stars. Rose saw those things from a distance and her face burst into a grin, even though her lungs were about to burst in general from the exertion.
It didn't even hurt, for a moment. She was too happy just then to hurt.
But he looked sort of ... content. That was what pulled a gasping Rose, who'd been careening down the footpath towards him, first to a halt, and then behind a building to watch him from afar. She needed a moment to figure things out for a moment before she made a potentially time-altering mistake.
This couldn't be him. Not her him, at least. Not the one who'd just witnessed her death just shy of two months ago. She hadn't thought he'd be crying or anything. That wasn't what he was like. However, she'd thought he would look sort of ... shut off. Maybe there was a bit of that, looking at him now, but it wasn't nearly as much as she'd thought.
So it wasn't him. Not yet.
Damn him, she thought. This must be from when she'd been in the parallel universe still. He was alone for the moment, but Donna, or Martha, or maybe even someone else he hadn't thought to mention to Rose, was probably lurking around somewhere. Someone who had helped him cope with losing Rose and his little surrogate family during the Torchwood fiasco, and with all the terrible things that had happened to him since.
Rose wanted to leave, then. She was disappointed, certainly, but there would be another day not too far in her future when the right version of him would turn up. If there was any place someone could be assured of finding the Doctor, it was the United Kingdom, and London specifically, in the late 20th century or early 21st century. She just had to give it a little more time.
Rose had waited 450 years for him once. She could wait a few more weeks this time, no matter how much it hurt to have to do so when she'd thought the wait was over.
However, as much as she might have wanted to get away from the temptation of seeing him (which reminded her so much of her travels through timelines and universes), Rose didn't leave just then. She'd been almost about to go when she'd caught sight of someone coming up from behind the Doctor.
It was suddenly obvious that, just as Rose had thought, the Doctor wasn't alone after all. But it wasn't Donna or Martha who was with him.
It was River.
It took Rose a moment to quite believe what she was seeing, really. She'd known that the Doctor had brought River to the early 21st century a few times, of course. The Doctor spent a lot of his time there, so it had been fairly inevitable that anyone who travelled with him would end up there as well.
It was one thing for him to bring her to the general era. It was another for her to be there during what was, by all accounts, the first time the Doctor had come back since the funeral. After the way he'd reacted to River on that day, Rose would never have expected that. Nor would she have really expected he'd be so ... not upset, to have her around, looking as though she had every right to be there.
Perhaps it was ridiculous of her, but Rose really had thought that this exact time and place was ... off limits. It was hers. River didn't belong.
Then again, there'd been a time when Rose had thought River didn't belong with the Doctor at all, and hadn't quite been able to believe her eyes.
A time very similar to this one, actually.
Very similar.
Rose suddenly felt such a wave of déjà vu that she thrust herself out a bit further from behind the building she was hiding against to get a better look.
Impossible, she thought.
But it wasn't. Of course it wasn't. 16 February 2010. She was an idiot.
She hadn't just seen this sort of thing before. Rose had seen this before. This exact scene. Right now, or within the next few minutes, there would be a Rose from well over a year earlier in her personal time stream lurking somewhere behind a bush, if she recalled correctly. That Rose would be watching this same scene with an even deeper sense of dawning horror than Rose herself was currently feeling.
During her travels from parallel to parallel, when Rose had seen River Song striding along with the Doctor at heel, she'd had to double check that she was in the right universe. Triple check, even. Quadruple check, for god's sake, with no apparent change to what she already knew.
It was her world, definitely. Her original universe, that was, not the one in which she'd spent the majority of her life up until then. That woman, who looked at the Doctor as if she clearly adored him, was there in the Doctor's future, in the early 21st century.
And Rose clearly wasn't.
Forget the Doctor telling her that he couldn't come for her on Bad Wolf Bay. That had been the single most devastating revelation she'd ever gone through. Decades of working towards getting back to him, and what was there to show for it? She wasn't even with him in his future, after all of that.
Rose had even jumped around the Doctor's timeline a bit, praying for it to have been a one-off. The Doctor and Rose had been momentarily separated before, after all. But no, there he was, always without Rose by his side. River had showed up more than once, though; that hadn't been a coincidence either.
Many of those times the Doctor had even worn the same face as the last time she'd seen him, all spiky hair and sideburns coupled with adorable over-enthusiasm. Rose knew the Doctor could hypothetically live for centuries in the same body, but it was the Doctor. He took too many risks. His life expectancy just wasn't that high. So some of those scenes that Rose had watched unfold in front of her, hidden away with her Vortex Manipulator poised to sweep her away to the next scene, clearly weren't that far in the Doctor's personal future.
Rose hadn't seen a lot of the later years of the Doctor's life. Admittedly, she also hadn't seen all that much detail of even the time he'd spent in this current incarnation. There was just so much to see, and Rose hadn't been sure she even wanted to know it all. She had, however, still managed to see enough to be able to draw up something of a rough timeline of the things she'd witnessed. This meeting that Rose was seeing now between the Doctor and River Song (whose name Rose hadn't known at the time when she'd first watched the two of them on this street) had fallen, for the Doctor, about thirty years after he'd said goodbye to Rose at Bad Wolf Bay.
Rose recalled that now, stricken.
She realised she'd been unconsciously holding her breath and focused on pulling long deep breaths into her lungs.
It hadn't been a month and a half since the Doctor had believed Rose had died at all. For him, it had been something like twenty-five years.
A quarter of a century. And there the Doctor and River were, already involved in some sort of relationship. So how could Rose run over there and reveal herself to be alive now?
It would be too painful. On all of them. Rose had also already seen for herself that that didn't happen. Rose couldn't just reintroduce herself into the Doctor's life now. The timelines she'd seen would collapse.
They couldn't be allowed to do that. The universe hinged on them.
The Doctor had to develop a deep enough relationship with River Song that he trusted her completely. It was necessary for a number of reasons, but for one specific fixed event particularly.
Rose couldn't change that. But neither did she think she could watch that happen right in front of her. She'd figured, when she'd realised she was gone from his life by this point, that she must have already died.
God, Rose thought silently, forcing herself fully back around the corner of the building and slumping slightly against the brick wall that was now at her back.
Rose hadn't wanted to die. Of course not. She'd lived too long already, perhaps, but she'd just found the Doctor again so recently. She'd wanted to stay with him for as long as possible. But she'd known that couldn't be forever. She'd thought that moment, in the radiation chamber, had been the reason for that.
She'd never thought it would have to be her own choice to not be there in the Doctor's future.
This was the real reason, though. Not her death, but merely the fact that too long had passed. Twenty-five missed years because of a misunderstanding engineered by UNIT. If Rose had been annoyed at them before, she was pretty sure now that she just might properly hate them for this.
Too long had passed, and now the events Rose had seen were already in motion. She had to make the rational choice, for the benefit of the whole universe. She couldn't jeopardise everything by disrupting the timelines just for her own happiness. She wouldn't be able to live with herself if she did.
It meant she might never be with the Doctor again. The idea made her ache all over, and not at all in a pleasant way. But it had to be that way. She couldn't see any way around it.
Rose heard the Doctor's voice, and what she also half-recognised as River's voice as well, passing by her hiding place. She pressed herself harder against the brick, as if that unyielding surface would somehow protect her from detection if the Doctor turned to look her way.
He didn't. Just as Rose remembered from when she'd watched this same scene from a different viewpoint, he didn't look anywhere but straight ahead, except to glance once in the exact opposite direction from where Rose was standing to look at River as she said something.
Rose slid to the ground, the back of her shirt scraping against the sharp irregularities of the wall.
He'd been right there, and she'd let him go.
She'd had to.
Was that it? Was that the last time she'd even see the Doctor? The last time she'd hear his voice?
No, Rose told herself, suddenly hardening. She wouldn't let that be the end of it. She'd see him again.
The Doctor and River had been involved in a number of fixed events throughout their acquaintance (yeah, Rose thought wryly, 'acquaintance' was the word for it, sure). Rose had seen several of those events. She knew they had to happen. But most of them happened while he was still in this body. And one, the biggest of all, had happened much later, and would happen as long as those earlier events were allowed to take place. Everything in between was a little more up in the air.
Rose might be able to get back to him, she realised. One day. If she was lucky.
There was one sure and obvious sign that the fixed points she'd seen were in his past, and already taken care of, after which Rose could find him again, and be with him.
Once he'd regenerated.
