Chapter 10: Letting Go

Rose knew that she was just avoiding sleep now. She was walking down the halls, letting the ship guide her again. This time, she was walking down the corridors with her eyes closed, just enjoying the feel of the ship. She ran out of wall and knew she had come to a junction between two corridors. She took two steps out to where she knew the center of the junction was, then started turning slowly in a circle, feeling for directions. When she felt she was facing the right way, she started walking forward again. After a moment, she felt like she had to stop, that she was where she was supposed to be. She opened her eyes to see the Doctor standing there, grinning like a loon.

"Hi"

He had pulled her to the infirmary, despite her protests. That was the last place she wanted to be right now, but she couldn't protest too much, because that would also have him asking too many questions. It was time to face the music, with this Doctor, at least. He had been okay with the telepathy, but this might be too much, too fast. And the TARDIS had been so "helpful" in bringing the infirmary closer.

"The Doctor will see you now." Oh my god, did he really just..? Well, it's not the first time. Come here. I think you need a Doctor.

"That was so cheesy." She was able to smile for a moment, before she went ahead and gave into the inevitable.

He hesitated for a moment, then decided on pushing her very loose pajama sleeves up her arm to expose her shoulder. Rose closed her eyes. Please, please, let let him be okay with this. She felt warm reassurance in the back of her mind from the time ship. It didn't stop her from being scared, though.

The Doctor was very gentle, no doubt remembering just how dark her bruise was just hours before. When he got to the place her bruise was on her shoulder, more on her arm than shoulder, really, she let out a breath she didn't even know she was holding and opened her eyes.

He looked at the spot, eyebrows furrowed, then he looked over to the dermal regenerator that he had planned on using, shook his head, and looked back at the bruise. Then she saw the understanding dawning on his face. He looked at her, back to the bruise, and then back into her eyes. She could practically see the thoughts swirling in his head. He opened his mouth and closed it a few times, speechless, and Rose started chewing on her lip, worried about his reaction. Just say something, dammit!

Finally, he did say something, one word, "How?"

XxXxXxXx

Four months after being trapped in the parallel world:

Rose Tyler was making her way towards Torchwood Tower as fast as she could, breaking a couple of speed limits on the way. She had been called in ten minutes ago about a ship that had landed in Richmond Park. It had been a pretty rough landing, but the aliens seemed to be okay. As far as anyone could tell, these were just people having a breakdown. But Rose knew better than to believe that without seeing the aliens for herself, she'd seen very dangerous aliens use the 'my ship has crashed' trick before.

This wasn't normally something Rose would deal with, but the aliens seemed to have no speech that the translation software could work with for communication. They seemed to communicate purely through non verbal means. The most likely being telepathy.

Still, usually Rose wouldn't have been called in on this, but the person that would have, her friend and mentor Melissa Saroyan, had learned just last week that her husband and herself had finally conceived. It was Torchwood policy that a pregnant woman could not do any field work, deal with first contact situations, teleport, or be near dangerous or unknown technology for the sake of the unborn child. This mission was requiring three of the 4 banned activities to be done. Rose was the only one that Torchwood had who was a strong enough telepath to make contact with another telepath without touch and who had experience in first contact situations.

As soon as she got to Torchwood Tower, she went straight to her office to get her gear. This included a reverse engineered Billitian stunner, the design of which had been modified to have a 'kill' setting. Rose hated the thing, but it was policy that field agents have one, and she was able to compromise by keeping it on the 'stun' settings, which were enough for almost every species.

She wouldn't have bothered, but she really needed access to Torchwood's resources and technical staff. She was making friends with two incredibly brilliant people Malcom Taylor and Toshiko Sato. Both of whom had worked on the ugly buttons that had brought her here and saved her life. Both had also been in the small group of people who knew Rose's true origins, and it was very difficult to make friends with people when your whole life was a lie-a classified lie at that.

During her downtime, Rose would sort through the archives and uncatalogued items for anything she could use in her personal project. In return for the items, she would identify whatever she could. Last week, she had found a vortex manipulator amongst the unidentified objects. These were hard to get in their proper time, much less three thousand years before they were invented. She remembered Jack's vortex manipulator, and Jack had explained it to Rose as best as he could. As far as she could tell, the only thing wrong with it was that it's xanthica crystal was broken. Xanthica crystals shared many properties with quartz, but were better and less brittle. Maybe she could get hold of another one, or a different crystal oscillator.

She grabbed her personal teleport device from the top drawer of her desk and fastened the bulky, black band around her wrist. The hated thing looked a lot like a vortex manipulator, she had thought when she was first assigned the device. She really should start keeping it on her, it had come in useful many times, even if it did make her feel nauseous. She typed in the coordinates that she had been given into the device, closed her eyes, and pressed the button, disappearing in a flash of blue light.

She rematerialized at the park, right next to the black van that was always dispatched to these sorts of things. After she was sure she wasn't going to lose the last thing she had eaten (pizza, again), she knocked on the back doors, calling out "Agent Tyler, reporting."

The doors opened a second later, and she was looking at the smiling face and spiky bleached hair of Jake Simmonds. Jake and her childhood friend, Mickey, had both been brought into the fold on Rose's secret. Rose's mum, however, was still kept out of the loop. Jackie was 3 months gone on her pregnancy, and a bit irritable, because her morning sickness was still hitting her.

"What's up, Jakey boy?" Rose questioned as soon as she got in, finding out if anything had changed in the status of the mission in the last fourteen minutes.

"No change, Tyler," Jake replied, "we're in a holding pattern until we can get some communication going. It's pretty much your show right now." He then proceeded to show her everything they had on these aliens, including pictures of them and more angles of the ship they were in. Rose was happy to find out that she did in fact know this species, or at least one that looked and communicated the same. These were Vilanatocca. At least that's what the Doctor had called them. They probably called themselves [picture of several of their people]. Their communication was purely telepathic, though they did have a written 'language' to convey messages across space.

The Doctor and Rose had dealt with a Vilanatocca merchant once, back when he was all leather and ears. When they had left the merchant, the Doctor had told Rose about them. They were peaceful, and this would be easy.

What Rose had forgotten was that she had encountered the Vilanatocca merchant 1500 years in the future and in another universe. These two people had been fleeing from war, and were easily spooked. The stance of the humans wasn't helping anything, either, but they wouldn't back off of being on guard.

Rose was also unused to the method of communication. They communicated in pictures and feelings, sort of like the TARDIS would communicate sometimes, but the Old Girl would communicate in pictures that Rose could understand, whereas the Vilanatocca communicated in pictures that meant something to them.

It was a simple misunderstanding, so simple, but because of it, Rose wound up on the wrong end of a Haladana sword and the the skittish Vilanatocca were killed as soon as Rose dropped.

The Torchwood doctors said that Rose should have taken close to 6 weeks before she was healed enough to be able to be back in the field. That there should have been some rehab. Three days after the accident, you couldn't even tell that Rose had been injured in the first place, except for some tenderness, and the area being a slightly lighter color. This time, only Pete, the doctors who had worked on Rose, and Jake knew. Everyone else had been told that the injury wasn't much more than a flesh wound.

Rose knew that she had to be on guard now. She'd work for Torchwood, but get the old Preachers team back together, just in case. She didn't trust a bunch of humans with her secrets and technology of other times and places.

Dear God, she was getting as bad as the Doctor. The thought should be disturbing, but it gave Rose a thrill.

A week after the accident, Rose was woken in the middle of the night by a familiar and very welcome voice calling her name.

"Rose."

XxXxXxXx

"I don' know," Rose admitted, "I found out about the fast healing 4 months after being trapped there. About a week before Bad Wolf Bay. I had taken a pretty bad wound from a pair of crashed aliens who were skittish. We had a bit of a misunderstanding."

The Doctor was sitting in the chair next to the bed she was sitting on, head held in his hands. He mumbled something that Rose couldn't understand.

"What was that?" Rose questioned.

"How did you become telepathic and have healing that's...that quick, and none of us know about it?"

Before she could even think about what she might say in response to that, he shot up out of the chair and grabbed a scanner. He scanned the shoulder that had the faint traces of the bruise on it, then went over to her other side and scanned the other shoulder, She supposed that it was for comparison. The whole time he did this, he was mumbling in Gallifreyan. He watched the monitor as the results came up, mumbling more and running his fingers through his hair. Being as this was her body he was looking at-

"Doctor?" She said, in a small voice, "say something in a language that I'll be able to understand, please, you're scaring me a bit."

At her words, he stopped and looked at her, eyes a bit frantic. "I'm sorry, Rose." He started scratching his head and shuffling from one foot to the other, all manic energy. "Did you happen to run any tests after the accident?" he asked.

"Of course I did. There wasn't much we could look into, at the time, what little we were able to find out pointed to my cellular regeneration rate being off the scale. What did your scan tell you?" she wondered, nodding at the device, worried about the answer.

"Pretty much the same thing," the Doctor said, somewhat distractedly, as he picked up a different piece of diagnostic equipment.

"Doctor," she warned, " I do not want to be a test subject."

"I need to know if-"

"No."

"Just one vial of blood?"

"No."

"A scan, then, just one," he practically begged, "I need to be sure that you are okay, Rose."

Oh dear, how could she turn that down? "I'm fine, Doctor, but I'll give you your one scan for your piece of mind, under one condition."

He closed his eyes. "Anything, well, just about anything. What's your condition?"

Rose crossed her arms and gave him a hard look. "That this stays between you and me."

His face fell. "What?" he squeaked, "first, you want me to keep the telepathy from him, and now I have to keep THIS from him as well?"

"Yes," she replied. Before she could get a chance to explain it to him, he interrupted her.

"Do you have any idea what a rate of cellular regeneration at that level implies?"

"Beings who heal this fast and completely tend to have an extremely long life," Rose replied calmly, looking him right in the eyes.

"Okay, so you do know, then." He starts pacing, "Do you know why my other self is pushing you away?"

"I imagine that it's the same reasons as always, the lifespan, and genuinely not believing you're worth being loved? What I don't get is why you're – this you- isn't bein' distant."

"Yes! Do you see, this changes everything! If he-"

"Maybe that's what I'm afraid of," Rose said quietly, interrupting him.

The Doctor regarded her for a moment, then quietly said, barely above a whisper, "I don't understand this, Rose."

She thought for a minute, then said, "Put yourself in my place. You are in love with someone who's lifespan is so much greater than yours, someone for whom you'd do anything to make sure they weren't lonely, but you never are sure where you stand with tha' person," she held up her hand to stop him when he opened his mouth to say something. "But you're sure that the fact that you have such a short life compared to theirs is the number one reason why that person is hot and cold. In fact, that person pretty much said that to you before."Suddenly, you learn that your lifespan could more closely match that person's. Sounds great, righ'? All you have to do is tell them that they don' have ta worry about being alone for centuries to millennia after your death, and you get to be with that person."

She could see that the Doctor still didn't quite understand, so she said, "But would you want to finally be able to have a relationship with that someone only because you had a closer lifespan now? I'd always be wondering if the only reason we were together is because of this. I jus' wannna be accepted, flaws and human lifespan and all."

She saw the understanding in his eyes.

"But there's one thing I don't get, one thing I don't understand, why is everyone trying to push me towards you?" she wondered. "It doesn't make any sense," a thought then hit her, "unless..."

The Doctor squeezed his eyes shut, and that's when she knew she was on the right track.

"You..." she went over to the Doctor and grabbed him in a fierce hug. "Oh, my Doctor, why dinnit you tell me?" she said softly in his ear. His arms wrapped around her, and he put his face in her neck, breathing in her scent.

"It's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to admit that you suddenly went from being nearly immortal to having a lifespan closer to a human's," he whispered after a moment.

He then pulled back and looked Rose right in the eye. He then nearly quoted what he had said long ago in front of a chippy. "I age now, I don't regenerate anymore. I'm human-ish now, I'll whither and d-" he chocked on the last syllable, "And now I find out about you, and, maybe it's better, easier, if I just...Let you...go" he started backing away slowly.

"No!" She said frantically, "you can't!"

"Rose, you're not gonna wanna watch me grow old, watch me... and you're going to have to watch every….everyone except him. I'm sorry."

He turned away from her, and her heart broke. She walked over to him, grabbed his arm, and turned him back around to face her. "I. I-" she stuttered, not able to get her thoughts to form into language. Then a thought occurred to her. She held her hand up to the side of his head, as if she was going to touch his temple, but before touching, she stopped, and sent a questioning look at the Doctor. He gave a small nod, and she made contact, closing her eyes.

She poured all her thoughts and feelings on the matter into his mind. Her worry about his other self, her heartbreak for him, her love for both of them, as well as his earlier leather and ears self. She showed him her sorrow, her joy, her happiness. And how she wouldn't, no couldn't be happy with one while she knew the other was miserable.

Finally, she found words, and pulled back from the edges of his mind. When she opened her eyes, she saw the beginnings of tears in his.

"Everyone's trying to make me choose, but I could never do so," she stated, "and I don' have a clue what 'm doing, but I do know this, I will never leave you, either of you, not without a damned good reason. And a lifespan difference isn't a good enough reason to me." Another horrible thought came to her. "No-not that we have to, um,...you know. You know, whatever you want."

"Are you sure about this?" the Doctor asked, hands in his pockets, looking at her intently. He then swallowed, and said. "It's going to hurt, when I'm...you know." While he was talking, the hand that was the cut off one came out of his pocket, and he gestured at her.

"I know. But every moment of the pain will be worth it." Suddenly, his arms were wrapped around her again.

"You love me enough to put up with two of me, for however long I wind up living?" he marveled.

Rose replied by grabbing the lapels of his jacket and kissing him.

A/N: quartz crystals are actually really good crystal oscillators, and are commonly used in clocks.

You just learned something new, or maybe not, maybe that was just me.