AN: I really must thank littlewhomouse of tumblr fame, my fabulous beta lastincurableromantic, and my man writer knight for making this chapter happen. I could not have done it without their help. A big thanks to you also for reading! As always, comments are welcomed. Hope you enjoy.
"But if that's Rose Tyler, who is she?"
Rose chalked the last night's impulsive kiss up to desperation and temporary insanity on the Doctor's part. All signs pointed to her being right, as this morning things had returned to normal... or whatever you called this ever-present tension that hung in the air since her return.
She was eating breakfast in the kitchen when he appeared, so quietly she didn't even notice him in the doorway until he finally spoke.
"May I join you?"
"'S your TARDIS," she mumbled a bit grumpily, throwing in a casual shrug. He made no move forward and she sighed, relenting. "Yeah, of course. Water's still hot. You want tea?"
"Had some," he answered simply. Then added with a wan smile, "Thanks."
Rose nodded in return, not really sure on what topic to venture forward. He strode towards her slowly; the scrape of the chair as he pulled it from the table seemed deafeningly loud against the silence of the room. She was almost relieved once he was still, sitting across from her.
The Doctor had a theory, a hope, really, that there was another way he could try to get through to her.
"Te semble mejor oggi," he said, deliberately blocking the translation matrix for both of them.
For a moment she just stared at him blankly and he thought he'd guessed wrong and had better explain. Then she answered.
"Yo sono, un po. Grazia."
He nodded resolutely, exhaling a breath held in anticipation. Rose confirmed his suspicions; she'd picked up the regional dialect from natives on the island, a bastardized mixture of Spanish, French, and Italian. To him, the shared Latin root made the language nearly indistinguishable from English, but to Rose it must have been a completely foreign tongue.
"So you weren't alone," he remarked thoughtfully. "That dialect was used over a century before you were stranded there. The natives were supposed to all be long gone."
"Well, obviously they were still there," Rose snapped, already displeased with the current trajectory of this conversation.
"Rose," the Doctor breathed, almost pleading. "You said you'd talk to me."
"After we find the gypsy," she retorted, taking a big bite of toast to signal the discussion was over.
According to plan, they returned to the park right after breakfast. The weather was brilliant and sunny again, but it was a weekday so attendance was even scarcer than the day before. There was absolutely no sign of the gypsy woman. Rose circled the middle section of the midway three times, peeking around every corner, between every booth.
"I don't understand," she said finally, standing in the very spot where she had collapsed. "We were right here yesterday."
"I didn't see her, Rose. And it doesn't look like there's a fortune telling stall. Maybe..." His voice trailed off indecisively.
"Maybe, what?" she growled, anger riling at the implication of his unfinished statement.
"Well," he began, tugging absently on his earlobe, an easily recognizable nervous habit. "You said you spoke to her just before you collapsed. Maybe it was just after you collapsed."
"I didn't make her up," Rose insisted fervently. "She was standing right over there. I talked to her. She was real."
The hand worrying his ear moved back to ruffle the hair at his neck. "I'm sure she was real to you."
"I can't even..." Rose shook her head as though trying to brush off his words. Then she fixed him with a fiery glare. "You don't believe me."
"No," he protested firmly. "I didn't say that. I believe you saw what you thought you saw."
"But not that she was here," she proposed.
His averted gaze and continued hair-ruffling told her all she needed to know.
"Fine," she resolved. "You keep chasing nothing. I'm gonna find her."
She turned and started to brush past him toward the rest of the midway.
"Rose," he called wearily, reaching out a hand to grab her arm.
Rose shifted sharply, backing away from his hands. "Just stop."
The Doctor watched as she dissolved into the crowd, weaving her way through the families until her form was lost in the wash of people.
Rose was determined to find the gypsy woman. She started on 'the domestic approach,' as the Doctor called it, questioning the other vendors and employees to no avail. She was discouraged to say the least; her resolve began falter as morning turned into afternoon and afternoon into twilight. Tired and frustrated, she sat down heavily on an empty bench.
It wouldn't have been so bad if the Doctor had just taken her seriously. This time he didn't. Rose could tell because she knew what it looked like when he did; the sonic came out, theories were rambled off into the air, evidence was taken back to the TARDIS to be processed, and of course there was always a good bit of running, all of it done with hands held and mouths smiling - together. But silent fidgeting and worried faces where he couldn't even look at her was definitely not taking her seriously.
Rose closed her eyes and leaned back with a sigh, rubbing her temples in a futile attempt to prevent the headache threatening to overtake her. She remembered hunger being a possible factor in these headaches and walked over to a nearby food vendor to order her old familiar comfort food as 'french fries.'
Returning to the lonely bench with her snack, a suspiciously curious seagull screeched and flew by dangerously low. On its second pass, he managed to nab one of the chips from her hand, but dropped it from his beak as she shooed him away with a violent flail of her arm. The bird flew away with an angry cry of complaint at having lost his stolen treasure.
Staring grumpily after the bird, Rose thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye as she discarded the last few chips in the rubbish bin. She caught a whiff of incense in the air. Ahead of her was a section of the boardwalk closed off with a chain link fence and a sign that read in large red letters 'CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.'
The colorful flags that hung overhead between the lights were dingy in comparison in the rest of the park. A breeze picked up and Rose could hear a loose board somewhere slapping loudly in the wind. With her arms crossed to ward off a chill, she watched a faded flyer depicting a cartoon mascot tumble in the wind. There! Rose glimpsed the gypsy beside a broken and abandoned popcorn booth, flicking a cigarette butt away. Before Rose could call out, the woman disappeared though the passage between defunct rides.
Hurriedly Rose dashed to the fence, just barely squeezing through between two loose posts. She sprinted to the corner where she saw the gypsy woman escape. Ahead of her, she saw the shadow in the fading light, as Rose followed the shadow retreated and she gave chase, running and jumping now, dodging fallen steel rods and wooden cutouts broken on the ground.
The shadow ducked into what looked to be an old funhouse, so Rose pursued through the open doorway. She ran through the hallway and ended up in a mirror maze. The dim glow of twilight scattered and refracted, giving her a dizzy, disoriented feeling that slammed the distant twinges of a headache back into full force.
Rose took a step forward. A heavenly visage stared back at her in triplicate, fractured by the tilted mirrors before her. That golden glow, the determined countenance of a vengeful goddess. This was Rose as the Bad Wolf, imbued with the power of the Vortex. Beautiful and terrible, a moment in time the Doctor only spoke of with grave reluctance.
"I want you safe, my Doctor."
Another step, she met a different face. Her image reached even more of the mirrors now, multiplying down the long row ahead of her. A flash of pink and yellow; the old zip-up hoodie and shiny lip gloss, long blond hair and big silver hoops, dark eyes and even darker mascara. Rose Tyler at nineteen, the shop girl who didn't know she was waiting for the Doctor to come running into her life that very day.
"You'd be dead if it wasn't for me."
She took another few steps, now faced with the image she didn't dare to look at in the mirror before. A wash of dingy and muted colors, torn clothing and tangled locks, a patchwork of scars and the sharp eyes of a hunter. This was herself, just a few short days ago when the Doctor finally found her. Lupa, the natives had called her, the she-wolf. A woman broken and reformed into something stronger, fiercer, darker.
"Too late. I rescued myself."
Rose stumbled forward, no longer able to look into that predatory stare. The images scattered all around her, so many different echoes and reflections of her past selves.
A cheeky blonde in a Union Jack asking the Doctor for a dance.
"I trust him 'cause he's like you."
One brave time-traveling human wearing denim and gray and speaking for the whole planet.
"Someone's got to be the Doctor."
Rose Tyler on the worst day of her life, stuck between losing her family or losing the Doctor.
"If these are gonna be my last words then you're gonna listen."
Different colors, sounds and textures, but not only that. The words and feelings - hope, anger, fear, and excitement - her whole life with the Doctor laid bare in a moving jungle of outfits, hairstyles, and a gradually changing body. A face that was aging but also hardening, becoming someone else with each passing day.
"There'll be this woman, this strange woman walking through the marketplace. On some planet a billion miles from Earth. But she's not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She's not even human."
And scattered amongst the myriad reflections, the gypsy woman appeared, dark and shadowed with the veil still covering her face. This was a trap. Too late Rose realized and she was already caught in the snare. The only way to go was forward.
"One who follows his nature keeps his original nature in the end," the gypsy drawled cryptically.
"Who are you?" Rose called out clearly, her voice resounding in the labyrinth of mirrored surfaces.
"You're big and strong," the gypsy woman purred. "You just don't know how to take care of yourself. So how could you take care of me?"
Rose shook her head, trying to cast off the images and voices floating around her. The reflection of the gypsy shifted, moving closer, flickering in and out of her own faces all around her.
"What are you doing on Earth?" Rose tried again.
The gypsy moved closer still, reflected images of her form flashing in the mirrors around them.
"You feel it, don't you? The pain of just being alive?"
Rose gathered a deep breath, reaching to a place deep inside herself for logic and reason. "Listen, if you need help, we can help you. The Doctor, he knows..."
The gypsy woman stepped through the mirror ahead of her and into the empty space in front of Rose.
"Oh, you're going to help me. Rose Tyler."
There was something off about the woman, something different from the day before. Rose reached up quickly, snatching the veil that obscured the woman's face. Dark features that were once smooth and young were now old and wrinkled - and not just that, the woman's face was starting to look desiccated, as though the life had been sucked right out of her.
"It's you," Rose said in a shaky voice. "But you've gotten older. It's only been a day."
The gypsy woman grabbed Rose's wrists, holding tight enough to bruise.
Rose struggled, yanking her arms roughly and stumbling backward. "Get off!"
She tried to put up a fight but felt as though her strength was draining right out of her bones, the gypsy's hold claiming both body and mind at the same time. Rose had one last coherent thought all her own, something about really not wanting to black out again.
But then, of course, her world went dark.
AN: You may recognize some of the gypsy's creepy dialogue from the 1948 film noir The Lady from Shanghai. Credit where credit is due.