Previously:
"She is complete," the head droid said. "It begins." As one, they hit their teleports and disappeared.
The three of them looked around the now empty room. "What's happening?" Rose asked.
"One of them must have found the right time window," the Doctor answered. "Now it's time to send in the troops. And this time, they're bringing back her head."
Chapter Ten
Dizziness swept over Rose, and she grabbed at the computer console to stay upright. She didn't know Reinette, but the thought of letting her die was painful. "Can you find the right window?" she asked. "We've gotta save her."
The Doctor nodded, screwdriver already out and aimed at the console. "Now that I know what I'm looking for, it'll be easy-peasy. Clockwork droids might not be able to find the right window on the first go, but I'm a Time Lord."
For once, his arrogant declaration filled her with relief instead of aggravation. "Great, just hurry," she said, putting a hand to her head as her vision started to grey out.
"Found it." He adjusted the sonic's screwdriver and Reinette's voice filled the room. "Fireplace Man! I need you now; you promised."
"Is that coming from the time window?" Rose asked. "Why can't we see it?"
The Doctor's posture went completely stiff, from his locked knees to the tight, corded muscles in his neck. He adjusted the sonic again, and a large window appeared on the wall in front of them. "Right in front of us the whole time," Rose muttered.
On the other side of the window, a French masquerade ball had turned into a horrible parody of the real thing as clockwork droids marched through the guests, throwing them aside willy-nilly in their eagerness to reach Reinette.
Rose felt the frantic working of the Doctor's mind as he looked for a solution. The more Reinette called for him, the worse he felt, and the dizzier Rose became.
"So let's go through and save her."
The Doctor shook his head, his lips pressed into a thin line. He ran around the terminals, waving his sonic frantically at various connection points. "They knew I was coming; they've blocked it off."
But the droids weren't ever able to land that accurately before. "I don't get it; how come they got in there?" Rose asked.
"They teleported!" the Doctor said, using a spanner to fix connections on one of the terminals. "You saw them. As long as the ship and the ballroom were linked, short range teleports will do the trick."
"Oh, we'll go in the TARDIS!" Rose suggested, feeling just as anxious as the Doctor.
"Can't take the TARDIS, we're part of events now!"
Rose raised an eyebrow, feeling like they'd used the TARDIS before to land them closer to where they needed to be, but it was his ship.
The Doctor shook his head, knowing exactly what Rose was thinking. There was a reason he couldn't take the TARDIS; by the time he got the coordinates set, events would have progressed to their ultimate end on the other side of the window. Since the ship the TARDIS was on was linked to the ballroom via the windows, they wouldn't be able to go back and fix it without crossing their own timelines.
He scanned the ship's systems, hoping they would tell him something other than what he'd already figured out. The droids had teleported to Reinette, age thirty-seven, and then they'd cut the link between the ship and the windows. They would let him watch as they destroyed her, but they would not let him come to her rescue.
"Can't we just smash through?" Mickey asked.
"Hyperplex this side, plate glass the other. You'd need a truck to get through that glass," he told Mickey and ran to another part of the controls.
"We don't have a truck."
"I know we don't have a truck!" The Doctor shoved his hands in his hair. Timelines were disintegrating around him. Reinette, Louis XV, France in the eighteenth century... everything was changing, and he didn't have a way to keep it from happening.
"Well we've got to try something!" Rose exclaimed.
"No, smash the glass, smash the time windows—there'd be no way back." No matter how uncomfortable it felt to be completely exposed to Rose, he still wouldn't leave her.
He tried using the sonic to reopen the windows, but nothing worked. In France, Reinette was using her considerable power to calm her court, but he knew she was only maintaining her own calm because she believed her childhood imaginary friend would come to save her once more.
Rose gasped in horror. "Doctor. They've got her on her knees. I think... I think they're gonna behead her. They don't need her feet, they said—just her brain."
The shifted timeline grew stronger. The Doctor vaulted over the terminal and stared at the window, hopelessness clawing at his gut.
Rose slipped her hand into his. "Doctor, you've got to save her! It isn't supposed to happen like this."
He looked at Rose quickly, noticing for the first time that the queasiness in his mind wasn't all his own. Is she... sensing timelines?
Whatever the answer, she was right. It couldn't happen like this, but what could he do? In truth, there was only one answer, but he still rebelled against it.
"Going through the glass is the only way, yeah?"
He looked at the window and then back at her. "Yes," he said, unable to lie.
"Stay here, I know what we need." He watched in bemusement as she disappeared down a corridor, but when she returned a minute later with Arthur, he knew what her plan was.
"Rose, if I break the glass…"
Rose's hair drifted around her face as she shook her head. "Doctor, I don't know why, but I know she can't die, not right here. It's… there's more that has to happen, yeah?"
He gulped. Definitely sensing timelines then. No time for that now. "Yeah. Well, not her... but yeah."
"Then go."
He took the reins and swung up on the horse. Mickey looked on in horror. "Rose, what are you doing? You're gonna let him just leave us here?"
"Oh, and there's Ricky the Idiot! You think I'd leave Rose stranded on a spaceship in the fifty-first century?"
He looked back at Rose. "I'll find a way to get back. I promise."
She smiled, but he could easily feel her discomfort over their connection. His concern for her was now equal to his concern for the woman in eighteenth century France, but he obeyed her wishes and kicked the horse into motion.
Arthur ran full steam, straight at the window. At the last second the Doctor ducked his head, protecting his face from the glass with his arms. A moment later, he felt the horse land and he looked up; they were in the ballroom. He couldn't help a glance over his shoulder. The window was broken, like he knew it would be. Worse, he could tell immediately that his connection with Rose and the TARDIS was just as broken, separated as they now were by time and space.
Wheeling Arthur around, he focused on the droids and not the emptiness in his head. Reinette looked at him with stars in her eyes, and he smiled back at her. "Madame de Pompadour, you look younger every day."
"What the hell is going on?" King Louis XV asked.
Reinette blinked. "Oh. This is my lover, the King of France."
"Hello, Your Majesty," he said, then stared at the droids. "I'm the Doctor, and I'm here to fix the clock." He yanked the mask and wig off the nearest one.
The droid held out its sharp appendage, and the Doctor sneered at it. "Forget it, it's over. For you and for me," he said, looking again at the broken mirror. The emptiness in his mind ate at him. "Talk about seven years bad luck. Try three thousand."
The droid looked too, and the Doctor saw the exact moment his clockwork brain worked out the consequences of what had happened. It hit its teleport over and over, trying to find the connection to the ship.
"The link with the ship is broken. There's no way back." He leaned closer and whispered in a mocking tone, "You don't have the parts."
The gears slowed, and the Doctor took all his anxiety over getting back to Rose out on it. "How many ticks left in that clockwork heart? A day? An hour? It's over. Accept that. I'm not winding you up," he said, finally delivering the pun he'd been dying to use.
The ticking slowed even further, and then the droid's head drooped toward its chest. Around the room, the rest of the cadre also slowed and then tipped over, their gears stopping. A droid dressed in a vibrant purple coat fell backward, the impact with the ballroom floor causing his pieces to break and scatter around him.
The proper timeline snapped back into place. Reinette would stay with the King of France, who would not be killed by clockwork droids. His son would still be the ineffectual Louis XVI, whose reign would lead to the French Revolution.
"Are you all right?" the Doctor asked Reinette, helping her to her feet.
"What's happened to them?" she asked, looking around the room at the now defunct droids.
"They've stopped. They have no purpose anymore."
"I suppose you will be going," Reinette said stiffly.
The Doctor looked over his shoulder at the broken mirror. "It won't be as easy as just… getting back on the horse and riding back to where I came from," he told her. "It may be hard to understand, but that mirror was my only doorway home."
"In saving me, you trapped yourself," she said slowly. "Did you know that would happen?"
He shrugged and swallowed hard. He wasn't quite trapped. All he had to do was locate a version of himself who could take him back to his own timeline, but a quick scan of his memories told him it would be decades before he accidentally took Susan, Ian, and Barbara to the French Revolution.
He would be forced to take the slow path, the bane of a time traveler's existence.
"And yet you came."
"Yeah, I did. Catch me doing that again," he muttered, all the while knowing that if timelines were in danger, he would never have a choice.
Judging by the look on her face, he hadn't fooled her. "There were many doors between my world and yours," she said. "Can't you use one of the others?"
He shook his head. "When the mirror broke, the shock would have severed all the links with the—with my home," he quickly corrected. "There will be a few more broken mirrors and torn tapestries around here, I'm afraid. Wherever there was a time window. Um, I'll pay for any damage," he offered.
And how am I going to do that? The full ramifications of his long exile on Earth struck him. "Ah, that's a thought—I'm going to need money! I've always been sort of vague about money. Where do you get money?" he asked, feeling lost.
She laughed, and then an edge of calculation entered her eyes. A moment later, she grabbed his hand and pulled him down another corridor. "It's a pity," she said as they passed gaping courtiers, "I think I would have enjoyed showing you how we mere mortals live."
"I'm not going anywhere." At least not before you're long dead.
She pushed open a door and he nearly tripped when he realised it was her bedroom. "Oh, aren't you?" she cooed, pointing, and he choked before he realised she wasn't pointing to the bed, but to the fireplace.
"It's not a copy," she told him. "It's the original. I had it moved here, and was exact in every detail."
The unspoken meaning hung in the air. She'd trusted, all these years, that he would return at the end to save her from the droids.
"The fireplace!" he said, striding toward it, his steps getting quicker as he felt himself being pulled back to Rose. "The fireplace from your bedroom."
"It appears undamaged," she said, coming up to stand behind him. "Do you think it will still work?"
The Doctor stared at the fireplace, not quite able to believe he was so close to home, to the TARDIS and Rose. "You broke the bond with the ship when you moved it. Which means, it was offline when the mirror broke. That's what saved it," he told her, and then his mind caught up with what he was saying.
"But!" He stepped toward it, almost afraid to hope. "The link is basically physical, and it's still physically here." He ran his hand over the mantle. "Which might just mean, if I'm lucky," he rapped on it a few times, "if I'm very, very, very, very lucky…"
In the same place he'd noted the faulty connection before, the knock revealed a hollow sound. Exultation swept over him. "Hah!" he exclaimed, looking at Reinette and pulling out his sonic.
"What?" she asked.
"Loose connection!" he crowed, pointing the sonic at it. "Need to get a man in," he added, pounding on top of the mantle to hopefully jar the wiring back into place. The mechanism hummed as it turned back on.
"Will I ever see you again, Doctor?" Reinette asked.
"I expect not," he said honestly.
"Then I shall say goodbye, and thank you for saving my life so many times."
"Reinette, it was my pleasure," he said sincerely. "Wish me luck." He pulled the lever and the fireplace turned around.
As soon as he returned to the fifty-first century, the TARDIS bombarded him with a mental Howler, accusing him of abandoning Rose—Mickey too, though she seemed less fussed about that. Whoa! I always planned to come back.
She pointed out the fast return button, the one he'd never gotten around to showing Rose. Then she showed him a picture of Rose piloting the ship, and bluntly suggested she preferred the human girl's style to his own.
The Doctor ignored the insult, and the hint that he ought to teach Rose more about the ship. With all the jumping between timelines, he couldn't tell how long he'd been gone, but from the way the TARDIS was going on, it must have been a while. Strangely though, he didn't feel any anxiety from Rose.
"Rose!" He ran toward the flight deck, hoping she'd be there. "Rose!"
"Back by the TARDIS, Doctor!" she yelled back.
He had her in his arms a moment later. "How long did you wait?" he asked, trying to hold back his frantic concern as much as possible.
"Five and a half hours."
He couldn't help feeling a shot of remorse that he knew she picked up on—five and a half hours wasn't long in the grand scheme of the universe, but it was long enough to foster doubt. But all he sensed from Rose was trust.
He pulled back from the hug, a manic grin in place to hide what he was thinking. "Right. Always wait five and a half hours," he said, cringing even as the words came out of his mouth.
"Where's Mr. Mickey?" he rushed on.
Rose opened the TARDIS door. "Pouting somewhere. He didn't think you'd find a way back, wanted to me to fly the TARDIS home." Her disdain told him exactly what she'd thought of that idea.
The Doctor shrugged off his coat and tossed it over a pillar. "You could have, you know," he said, striving for a nonchalance he didn't feel. "The TARDIS loves you; she'd have helped you get home."
Rose scoffed. "What, and leave you stranded in France, or on a spaceship drifting in the fifty-first century? Not gonna happen Doctor. I'm never gonna leave you. Besides, I knew you'd get back somehow."
A million arguments rose to the Doctor's mind; she couldn't continue to just believe in him like that, he'd let her down one day and she wouldn't be prepared. But when he opened his mouth to tell her that, the smile on her face stole his words. "Well, it all worked out in the end," he said, somewhat lamely. "I'm going to take us into the Vortex, then I think we'll drift for a bit. Why don't you go make some tea?"
Rose glanced over her shoulder at the Doctor as she left the control room. The pinched look around his eyes matched the tension she sensed from him, and she got the distinct feeling that he'd suggested tea to get her out of the room.
She shook the feeling off with a laugh. Tea after an adventure was their routine—save the world, have a cuppa. Besides, the way he'd just hugged her wasn't usually how he acted when he was about to turn broody on her.
In the galley, Rose filled the kettle with fresh water and turned it on, her body performing the familiar tasks while her mind strayed back to the ship, but not to France and Reinette. I've never gotten dizzy like that before. The kettle boiled and she absently warmed the pot and then poured water over the tea.
Her fingers tapped an uneven rhythm on the worktop, her mind going over her moments of dizziness. She knew why it had happened—the fact that events were happening that shouldn't had been as clear as day to her. What she didn't understand was how.
Rose pulled two mugs out of the cabinet, then grabbed a third for Mickey as an afterthought. He still hadn't come out of wherever he'd retreated to, even though he could surely tell the TARDIS had dematerialised.
Into one cup went one sugar and lots of milk. In the other went a splash of milk and four sugars. She poured the tea and took both cups with her back to the control room.
The corridor lights behind her flashed, and Rose glanced over her shoulder. That way? she asked the ship, and the lights flashed again in an affirmative. She followed the ship's guidance until she stood in front of the study door. She carefully manoeuvred the cups until she held them both in one hand, then put the other on the doorknob.
Before she could get it open, she caught the faintest hint of emotion from the Doctor—fear maybe? Claustrophobia?
The lights flashed again, encouraging her to enter the room, but she hesitated, focusing instead on the Doctor. Suddenly she realised the ship was muting his emotions. What she'd gotten as a faint hint was actually an overpowering need to be alone.
She turned back the way she'd come. What were you up to? If ships could pout, the TARDIS was doing so now. I'm not gonna push him, she insisted. When he wants to talk, then…
Then she remembered all the questions she'd wanted to ask. Why had she gotten dizzy? She knew the Doctor had cottoned on to that; why wouldn't he explain?
She shoved the hurt down. Maybe he didn't know how to explain it to her. Back in the kitchen she dumped his tea into the sink and poured one for Mickey instead. It wasn't hard to guess where he was; she heard the noise of the telly coming from the media room.
"Hey," she said, holding out his cup.
He didn't take it, or even look her in the eye. "So the Doctor finally turned up then?"
"Yeah, I told you he wouldn't abandon us."
Mickey glared at her. "How can you know that, Rose? How can you trust him like that?"
"Because I know him, Mickey," she retorted. "I've traveled with him for two years now, and he's never left me behind."
"No, but he sent you home once. Alone. And he went to France. Alone. Don't you see, babe? He's always gonna think he can handle everything by himself."
"And it's my job to remind him that he can't," she retorted. "Now, are you gonna drink your tea, or should I just leave?"
Mickey turned back to the telly and crossed his arms across his chest. Rose stared at him in disbelief; she knew his anger stemmed from resentment that she'd chosen the Doctor over him, and she suddenly felt a twinge of remorse. Not for choosing the life she had, but for leaving Mickey the way she had. They had officially broken up during the long Christmas holiday, but apparently there was still some anger.
She set the tea down on the table and sat down on the other end of the sofa. "Hey. Micks." A beat passed, and he finally looked at her.
"He left us, Rose. He sent us back to the ship by ourselves and we got knocked out by those droids, and then he let us sit on those tables about to be cut up while he was doing whatever with some high and mighty French mistress. Why can't you see that you can't count on him?"
The words struck Rose, but not in the way Mickey intended. Ever since Rome and her stint as a statue of the goddess Fortuna, he'd been eager to blame the Doctor for everything that went wrong. Rose knew the Doctor would always do everything in his power to keep her safe, but… Her mind drifted back to the closed door and the distance it represented.
You sure this isn't going to drive him away? she asked the TARDIS, only feeling a little reassured by the ship's confidence.
Before her fear showed up on her face (or worse, before the Doctor could pick up on it) Rose shoved it into the recesses of her mind. "He didn't send us away, Mickey. We split up to cover more ground, and you and I got captured. That happens sometimes. No normal days with the Doctor, remember?"
"Yeah, but…"
"No, Mickey. M'not gonna let you tell me all the reasons I should be angry that he did his job. 'Cause going around, risking his life to save people? That's what he does. It's what we do—and I love it."
Rose stood up, suddenly weary of being caught between the two angsting men. "Drink your tea before it gets cold."
Mickey caught her arm as she walked by. "Hey, I'm sorry, Rose. Don't leave—it's not so fun to be alone in here."
There was true apology in his face. "No more jabs at the Doctor?"
"Promise."
She sat back down next to him. "Okay then, Mickey, let me introduce you to the wonders of intergalactic cable."