Next chapter guys - I'm so sorry it's late, and probably really badly written. Things do actually get prett interesting soon. But enjoy anyway...
The next six months were spent in a whirl of new publicity - Theta and Rose were kept in the public eye, but also in the private one. They met with Torchwood and various governments, and had their work cut out for them in organising almost single-handedly the technology, men and weapons of a New Army - the like of which the world had never seen. They also had to deal with frequent threats from the Cult of Skaro on Barcelona, who were also competing in a race to build up an army large enough to crush the other planet. To make up the numbers, Earth made alliances with other planets nearby in the universe, but so did Barcelona. Before long, almost every planet had taken one side or the other. The war was truly on.
The Queen offered them quarters for themselves in the Palace, but both of them flatly refused, preferring to live in the Tardis, which stayed in a corner of the Powell Estate and adapted most welcomingly into a marital home. Theta loved it, which was interesting in a Doctor who didn't do "domestic". Both of them were, in fact, the essence of happiness, and if it wasn't for the fact that they were at war, the story could have ended here. Happily ever after.
But then, a turning point. An event that changed just about everything. An event with consequences that was going to rock the universe to the core.
It started on a Monday morning - it was freezing cold outside and the rain pounded on the Tardis. In their double bed, the noise woke Rose, who was, unusually, still sleeping at 9:00 in the morning. Theta insisted on a complete alarm clock ban on the Tardis, not being able to tolerate being woken up by a shrill bleeping ring. Rose still remembered the first thing he said to her when he heard he had to work: "They had better not put me on a nine to five routine..." As far as he was concerned, he'd rather be in the bowels of hell than in an office with a coffee machine. Anything to avoid the daily bore - he'd much rather be late than on time. So, no alarm clocks. It was part of the domestic Tardis.
Rose, not liking being late, did a double take when she saw the time and jumped out of bed in a panic, grabbing a dressing gown and wrapping it round herself. It was then, standing on the carpet, that she was overwhelmed by the most unpleasant and familiar sensation. Reminiscient of the time she'd downed fifteen vodkas at a birthday party.
Rose turned and made a mad dash for the bathroom.
On coming out again a short time after, her face pale, Rose staggered down the hallway and into the kitchen. Theta was sitting at a table with a pinstriped tablecloth, shoving cornflakes into himself. Upon seeing her, he frowned and examined her closely.
"Rose... are you alright?"
"Yeah... I'm fine. I just threw up back there. Must've been Jackie's cooking..."
"Ah... yes, that could explain it..." He grinned and took her hand.
And that would have been that, except that the next day, it happened again. The next morning, Theta entered their bedroom half-dressed, and shook Rose gently, who muttered something in her sleep.
"Hey! Sleepyhead!" Rose sat up and got out of bed, her face suddenely going pale again.
"Are you alright? You look a bit - " And to her intense embarassment, Rose was sick all over him, then collapsed in his arms.
Theta didn't mind too much about that, really. He placed her back on their double bed, removed her dressing gown and told her very firmly to wait, ignoring her protests that she was fine really.
Some time later he emerged, dripping wet in a new shirt and towelling his hair. He sat down on the bed.
"Now, we're gonna find out what's wrong with you..." He pulled several items out of his dressing gown pockets. Bending over her, he stuck a thermometer-like object into her mouth for a split second before pulling it out again. He fixed a pressure guage on her arm, looked into both her eyes and flashed a light in them, and used several other devices before moving away to scratch his head in frustration.
"Temperature's normal, homeostasis regulator's all fine, overall body pH fine, so what...?"
"Theta! I'M fine! Probably just a bug..."
"See, that's the thing, if it was something would've picked it up by now..."
"You worry too much!" Rose yawned suddenely and rubbed her eyes with her hand.
"Alright... c'mon you, up you get..." Theta pulled her up and motioned for her to get dressed.
It was early the next morning, while at work, that disaster struck. The Prime Minister took Rose to observe a new atomic airship in London, capable of firing burning radioactive metal hundreds of miles in a vacuum - space. The test flight was done in the outer atmosphere, but as a precaution only non-radiocative metals were used. Torchwood had developed full-body rubber suits for the Army that were resistant to radiation, intense heat and provided a source of emergency breathable air. An army aeroplane was flown up over the test site with Rose and the Prime Minister on board with the army, and while the airship was firing a hail of burning hot metal, a small team of crack soldiers jumped steadily off the plane, parachutes at the ready, down to the ground below.
Everyone waited, tense, as the airship began firing. Soon the sky was gray with falling metal, all set alight. The effect was of a sky on fire.
The soldiers in the ship were almost too scared to jump. Almost. The Prime Minister opened the hatch and announced to the line of men, "When I count down to one, everyone jumps out as fast as possible. Don't think about it - concentrate on making it down to the ground. When you make it, run for the Army base. That shouldn't be more than 500m away. Does everyone understand?" Everyone nodded.
"Good luck." The Prime Minister began to count. "3... 2... 1... GO GO GO GO GO!"
And everyone jumped - the soldiers threw themselves off the plane one after the other, and they flew through the air like bombs through the hail of fire.
Standing there just in front of the hatch, watching them go, Rose was again overwhelmed by intense nausea and weakness. The height she was at added to the dizziness - everything suddenely went black and Rose lost all control of her senses. Before anyone could grab her, she had collapsed and fallen down through the hatch, without a parachute or an insulation suit. She was falling faster and faster to the hard ground below - if someone didn't stop her, to certain death.
The Prime Minister saw her at the last minute and stretched out a hand to grab her - too late. She could only yell after her as Rose plummeted downwards.
But then, when she was hardly 5m out from the plane, the Prime Minister saw golden dust begin to engulf Rose, as Bad Wolf suddenely began working with Rose unconscious. An almost blinding yellow light swirled around her, turning steadily whiter and more powerful. When she was covered in dust and a swirling mass of light, Rose began to fall, ever so slowly, down towards the ground, the light deflecting any pieces of burning metal that came her way. But throught it all, the more metal it deflected, the more the light was worn away. The effort it took to lift Rose and deflect metal was draining the light, with Rose unconscious - soon, it had thinned down almost to nothing. 20 feet above the ground, the light shrivelled down to a thread, then... nothing.
And Rose fell, faster and faster, until... she hit the ground. Hard.
They picked her up from the ground after she fell in a crumpled heap, took her away and bundled her into the nearest ambulance, where she was driven to hospital, breathing only shallowly through an oxygen mask.
The ambulance veered though streets at over 100 miles an hour, screeching violently, and it was only after Rose arrived at the hospital that the Prime Minister remembered, "Someone has to tell the Doctor!" She organised for her limo to arrive at the crash site, and had herself flown down. Withing minutes, the limo was racing towards Cambridge, where the Doctor was giving a lecture on alien atmospheric composition.
In an enormous room with wood-panelled floors and red leather seats, the Doctor, registered as Professor John Smith, stood in front of a blackboard that had ridiculously complicated diagrams scrawled all over it in his messy hand-writing. The Doctor looked at the crowd and tapped a drawing with the chalk.
"Now this is a prime example of a natural atmosphere without gravity. It exists because the planet is in a space pocket unaffected by the Sun's gravitational pull - in-between our universe and a universe with a black hole at the centre, if you like. Because it's in the middle - he drew an elliptical circle on the drawing - we have an area around it with not gravity, an area over here with small gravity fields, and this little area here - he shaded it in - this space pocket, has a slight, natural anti-gravity."
The scientists all nodded and wrote things down in their notebooks.
At that moment, the Prime Minister stuck her head around the door. "Doctor? I... erm... really need to talk to you. It's urgent."
"Please excuse me for a moment."
Theta frowned and walked out into the hallway, where the Prime Minister looked at him sadly.
"Yes? What is it?"
"Your wife's fallen fifty feet out of an aeroplane." And Theta just stared.
"We've got an emergency case, woman with a parachuting team fell fifty feet out of an aeroplane, still alive but possible broken bones and running on oxygen. She's arriving in under two minutes, can we have a team of doctors ready immeadiately." The ambulance driver spoke into a tannoy as the vehicle zoomed on. Rose, still unconscious, was lying on a stretcher, an oxygen mask attatched to her mouth and nose. Blood dripped into a plastic sac next to the stretcher and a heart machine beeped next to her. She was a complete mess.
The stretcher was wheeled into the hospital, and the doctors were on her within seconds. Someone shouted above the noise, "Patient pulse rate 50 by 30 at time of crash, raised to 75 by 55 within five minutes. Heart rate fine but the scanner must be broken, we're picking up a double pulse. She's on oxygen and quite stable."
The team of nurses wheeled the trolley down corridoors and into a bed at Accident and Emergency.
Meanwhile, the limo was speeding back to London, with the Prime Minister making frantic phone calls and Theta sitting there in shock.
"Yes, I'm calling about a woman who fell out of an aeroplane. Is she in this hospital? What do you mean, patient confidentiality? Do you know who I am? I'm the Prime Minister - "
Theta motioned for her to give him the phone. "I'm her husband. Now, is she here?"
The receptionist replied in the affirmative. "And that's King's College Hospital, London?"
Another affirmative.
"Right, tell the driver to step on the accelerator." He said to the Prime Minister.
In the hospital, doctors and nurses rushed around checking over Rose.
"Purely by touch, she's covered in bruises but I can't seem to find any major broken bones - that's amazing! Pulse rate 90 by 70, she's almost normal."
"Why isn't she waking up?"
"No idea...what do we do?"
"I don't want to start any x-rays or scanning until she's awake - she may not be fit to be x-rayed, and she's not in a critical condition."
"Her husband's on the way... the Prime Minister just phoned reception to ask where she was..."
"The Prime Minister? No kidding! She must be important!"
At that moment, Rose opened her eyes and felt the edge of a blinding wall of pain.
"ARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!"
"Get her some morphine!" The nurses ran for the morphine and it was soon injected. Rose fell beck on the pillows, still in a lot of pain but now able to fight it.
"What... what happened?"
The doctors and nurses bustled around her immediately.
"Right, stay calm now. You fell out of an aeroplane."
"I fell out... of the aeroplane?"
"You remember the plane, then?"
"Yeah... yeah... I fell out?"
"You fell fifty feet, yes. It's a miracle you're not dead by now. Will you let us do some scans for analysis? We need to make sure you're not suffering from internal bleeding or broken bones."
"I..."
"Excellent!" And before she could speak, let alone move, the trolley was wheeled away.
A couple of hours later, Rose awoke in a hospital bed, head perched on a pile of pillows. They had taken her away to a room to x-ray her head, chest and vital organs - by the end of it she was so tired from her ordeal that she had fallen asleep again.
A doctor walked into the room, and seeing she was awake, looped his stethoscope around his neck and moved over to her bed.
"We've got the results of your scans." he said quietly. Rose sat up and looked at him.
"Is... is there anything wrong?"
"Well, contrary to all expectations after a fall like that, there's no internal bleeding. You have, however, broken two ribs, but they will heal on their own. There's also a lot of bruises to clear up, and some quite deep cuts - but you should be fine in a week or two. Now, the thing I need to talk to you about is that we've discovered something else."
"OK... what is it?" Rose prompted him as the doctor paused.
"Well, erm, the situation is rather strange, actually. We took a blood sample for analysis and... there seem to be minute golden flecks floating in your blood. We took a second sample to check. Our blood analysis team can't tell if you've been poisoned or if it's all a mistake. But the other thing... we did a full body scan on you. And it turns out that we found a foetus, as yet incredibly unhurt by the fall - it was still wholly alive, as far as we could tell. Madame... you appear to be pregnant."
Theta is going to have kittens.
The Doctor strode into King's College Hospital an hour later, taking the whole thing in with the usual authority he displayed when he was unusually worried. He went over to the reception desk and looked around.
"Hello? I'm asking about a lady who fell out of an aeroplane..."
A woman with a nail file and a uninterested expression came over. "I answered the phone... do you want to know where she is?"
"Yes - I'm her husband."
"Alright - hope you didn't bring that nutter on the phone who was pretending to be the Prime Minister. Huh - bleedin' cheek, that's what I say..." The receptionist continued the idle chatter as she searched the database for a match.
"Yeah - she was in accident and emergency but they've moved her into intensive care. It's the Jenner Ward, Bay 6. First floor, second turning on the right."
"Thank you very much." Theta ran out of reception.
He strode up flights of stairs, ran down a corridoor and stopped at Ward 6. He saw Rose straight away, ran to her and enveloped her in his arms.
"You're alright!" And Rose clung to him, suddenly really needing him. She buried her face in his hair.
He examined her quickly. "Don't you do that to me again..."
"So, what did the doctors say?" He sat down on the bed, ignoring the plastic visitor chairs.
"Apparantly, I have two broken ribs, plus various bruises and cuts, etc. etc. But nothing serious. You're gonna need to talk to them about my blood samples, though."
"Uh-oh..."
"Yeah, and there's something else."
"Theta... I..." Rose looked up at him, wondering exactly how she was going to put the fact that she was now pregnant...
When one of the nurses came in. "Miss Tyler, just to let you know, the doctors have given you the all clear, you'll be transferred to the maternity unit as soon as we have a vacancy..."
Theta's mouth dropped open. He stared at Rose.
"Did she just say what I thought she said?"
"You mean the bit about the maternity unit?"
"Yeah..." he breathed, still staring at her.
"You're... pregnant?"
Rose just nodded. And Theta's face broke into a slow, wonderful smile as he stared at her.
"You... don't mind?"
"Hey! You didn't think... I wouldn't want this child...?" He stared incredulously at her. Rose looked at him. He smiled.
"Rose... our baby, it's just... fantastic." He kissed her, stroking her hair, and she grinned up at him. The yellow sparks began to fly and suddenely they were lost in a moment again, and the universe could have ended right there but lost in each other, they wouldn't have noticed.
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