Notes: I know some of you have been reading this since it was first published (a good 10 months ago! Eep!), so you might not quite remember the earlier chapters as well as some of the "newer" readers. This chapter links with Part 1, so if you're a bit confused, go back and read the end of part 1 to bring yourself up to speed again. :) One of you guys alsomentioned in your review that I don't often update, and you're right, I don't. I "take my time", so to speak, when I'm writing a big story, because my writing suffers if I rush myself, but I do still try to keep my updates fairly regular. Feel free to nag me if the wait gets too long in-between updates, though. :)

Enjoy!

Part 11 - Doctor Who

Five years of Rose's life later…

"Did he tell you his name?" Jack had asked.

And Hope had replied, "Yeah. Doctor."

And then Jack was off.

He rushed down the stairs from the Tylers' flat, taking two or three steps with every leap, and swinging round the banisters as he took each corner, until he got to the ground floor and torpedoed out the door. His feet pounded over the flagstones as he sprinted in the direction of the park, the place where Hope had just encountered a man they had been praying to see again for a long time.

"DOCTOR!" he roared as he reached the children's play area and ran around it like a lunatic. He got more than his fair share of strange looks from both the kids and their parents alike who were in the vicinity, but he didn't care; some things were more important than pride.

He eventually came to a stop in the centre of the park and then turned round and round on the spot, looking in every direction for that familiar leather jacket. "Doctor!" he yelled again.

As he took one final sweeping glance of the place, he noticed that a young couple sat on a bench nearby were staring intensely at him, and they drew back in terror when he suddenly resolved to walk in their direction; "Hey," he said, disregarding their apprehension, "Have you seen a man round here wearing a leather jacket and dark jeans? A good six foot tall with blue eyes, rather large ears, and --" But the couple rapidly shook their heads - they were just desperate to get rid of him.

Jack heaved a great sigh. "Well, thanks anyway," he said.

The Captain wasn't to be discouraged, though, and he made a circuit of the playground, asking the same question to every individual in sight - a trio of nattering young mothers, an elderly couple, four young boys playing football, and so on and so forth - but he received the same negative answer from each and every one of them. No one had seen the Doctor.

"Damn," Jack cursed as he mooched away from the park and began to make a hasty search of the surrounding streets. Maybe around one of these corners he would see the TARDIS…? Maybe he'd bump right into that rough-and-ready Time Lord any second…? But he walked street after street, and checked car park after car park, and found no sign of the man.

As this failure sank in, the knowledge that he and Rose had been so close to being reunited with the Doctor again, and had missed out by mere minutes, Jack slumped down onto a bench and stared numbly into space. How ironic that the Doctor had gone straight to young Hope earlier and not realised who she was…

He smirked at that thought before he realised that the darkness was setting in, so got to his feet and began to walk home.

----

It must be said that Rose hadn't been sat idle whilst Jack was out searching. She, too, had shot to her feet as soon as Hope had told her about the stranger named 'Doctor', but (not being the Rose of six years ago) she had refrained from running off in pursuit. Instead, she had given her mum an apologetic look and asked her to keep the tea warm in the oven, before she and Hope had walked back to the park together, hand-in-hand, where she had then asked her daughter to tell her again what had happened.

Hope pointed out the slide beneath which she'd met the Doctor, and explained his movements to her mum, whilst Rose, having not seen him for so long, desperately tried to picture it all in her head. She could just imagine it, her Time Lord rushing around with his sonic screwdriver, dashing at full pelt across the tarmac whilst his coat flapped about in his wake. And to imagine him kneeling down beside their daughter, and talking to her with all the friendliness and flippancy she had come to expect from him! That was such a wonderful thought.

It was a bittersweet thing, really, to know that he had been sat beside Hope and not realised - had not even considered - that she was his own flesh and blood. But one did not always see the obvious if one wasn't looking for it.

Rose went and knelt down on the spot where Hope told her the Doctor had sat, and she ran a hand over the ground, as if this was as close as she could get to feeling his skin beneath her fingers again.

It wasn't long until the sky overhead began to look overcast, though, so she and Hope walked back home, and all the way Hope was full of questions: 'Why do you want to find him, mummy?', 'Why are you so worried, mummy?', 'Why were you touching the dirt, mummy?'… why, why, why. Rose wasn't sure whether or not to answer. The subject of the Doctor had been taboo for the past few years, as if, for some reason, they had all become afraid to speak of him, and of the possibility that he might come back. Or worse, the possibility that he might not.

The fact was, Hope didn't know. She had never really questioned why the space of 'daddy' was vacant in her household before, she had just accepted it, but she was getting to the age where she would soon realise that it wasn't normal not to have a daddy at all. Rose knew that it was high time she came clean with her little girl.

Jack still wasn't back when they reached the flat, and Jackie had disappeared, leaving a note on the mantelpiece ('Gone to see Colleen - be back around 8pm'), so Rose and Hope ate their tea without them and then waited. It wasn't until seven o' clock that Jack mooched through the door. He found Rose sat with her daughter at the dining table, where Hope was drawing in her sketch book with some chunky wax crayons.

"I'm sorry," he said with a shrug, wearing a long face. "He's just vanished. As he always does."

Hope swung her legs against her chair as she coloured in her picture, whilst Rose just nodded and ran her fingers through her hair. She simply couldn't understand what was happening. "Why would he do this to us?" she asked. "Why would he come back and not come to find us first? He must know we're here."

"He must be here for a reason," Jack mused, slumping down onto the sofa, "But for what…?"

"He was lookin' for someone," Hope piped up, eyes not leaving her picture.

Rose and Jack both looked at her at once, wishing she had mentioned this before.

"But he needed to find the two hearts first," she continued, putting down her crayon and showing her mum her drawing. It was a stick man facing what looked like a trash can with a telescope for a nose.

Rose smiled. "What's your drawing of, sweetheart?"

Hope looked at it again with pride. "That's the Doctor and that's a monster," she said. "I just saw it in my head."

Rose's visage paled and she exchanged another glance with Jack. Sometimes she felt at a loss to be able to help, or even understand, her very special daughter.

Jack then broke the uneasy silence. "Two hearts," he muttered, staring at Hope's bright blue eyes whilst the girl, in turn, stared intently at her drawing. Then his own eyes widened. "No wonder he found you, honey," he murmured before he looked to Rose and said, as if the answer was plain, "Two hearts - the Doctor was looking for someone with two hearts." He pointed at Hope. "And he's found her."

Rose had suspected as much. "But why?" she asked. "Why's he searching for two hearts?"

Jack put his hand to his mouth and shook his head. "I don't know…"

"Coz someone else is lookin' for the two hearts," Hope added.

Rose felt suddenly sick as her child's words aroused a natural maternal instinct within her, that of a mother turning to panic as it seemed apparent that her child was in danger; death was the Doctor's constant companion, after all - would it now haunt his daughter?

She looked at Jack again and her face was so filled with worry that it made the Captain feel perturbed as well.

He turned back to Hope. "Do you know who else is looking for the hearts?" he asked her.

Hope made another shrug. "No."

"We've gotta find the Doc'," Jack resolved without question. "He needs to know about Hope."

"Hope needs to know about him," Rose countered. "I should have told her years ago."

Hope looked up as she heard her name but, again, didn't say anything.

"It's not the time nor the place," Jack rallied.

"She has a right to know. My mum never kept anythin' from me, no matter how old I was."

"Yes, but your father died in an accident, Rose. This is a bit more complicated."

Hope left them to banter and slipped off her chair, taking her drawing into the kitchen where she stuck it under a magnet on the fridge.

/'I'm the Doctor, by the way. What's your name?'

'Hope'

'Nice to meet you, Hope. Now go home, and forget me.'/

"Mummy?" she called.

There was a slight pause before Hope heard her mother rise from her seat in the lounge and come up behind her. Rose then crouched by her side and rested her hands on her shoulders, looking at the new picture now mounted on the fridge. "That looks nice," she said.

"The man…" Hope went on, staring at the two blue blobs that were her stickman's eyes. "He said to forget him."

Rose rubbed Hope's shoulders and leant her head against hers. "He would say that."

"When'd you meet 'im?"

Rose stared at the stickman and smiled, a feeling of nostalgia flushing through her veins as she remembered her very first encounter with the Doctor. She also felt that Hope's question had been an odd one, as if her daughter somehow already knew about the past. "Before you were born," she replied.

"Who is he?"

Rose stared a little longer at the drawing before she turned Hope about to look at her and said, "He's your daddy."

----

/Time Lord./

Words in her head… images suddenly given meaning…

/Time Lord./

The monsters came to Hope again that night. She saw them, hundreds and thousands of them, their eyestalks raised, their laser arms firing. There were bodies in the streets, fires in the buildings, ships in the skies, and then there was mummy, rushing toward her, shouting at the top of her voice! Her face was creased in terror and her aura was full of fear.

The surroundings changed. Hope was inside a spaceship now, surrounded by the monsters. There was Uncle Jack there, too, and daddy, and then there was mummy again, running toward her…

But before mummy could reach her, one of the monsters rose up from the shadows and yelled, "Exterminate!", and mummy was gone…

"Mummy!"

Hope sat up in bed, screaming, whilst tears rolled down her face. It wasn't long until her mother was at her side, though, and her grandma was stood in the doorway as well, wondering what the cause of the furore was.

"What is it?" Rose asked Hope in a whisper, stroking her daughter's hair and holding her in her arms.

Hope threw her arms round her mother in return and clutched her tightly. "Mummy," she sobbed again.

Rose exchanged an uneasy glance with Jackie whilst she held Hope in her arms and tried to soothe her. After a while, Hope's chokes and sobs faded to soft whimpers, and Rose whispered, "It's okay," whilst she stroked her child's hair, "It was just a dream."

"Monsters…" Hope murmured. "I don't want the monsters to come."

"There are no monsters here, sweetheart," grandma said.

"And even if there were," Rose added, wiping away her daughter's tears, "I would never let them get close." She then offered Hope a smile and said, "Now go to sleep."

"I'll try," Hope said, laying back down whilst her mum tucked her in and kissed her goodnight.

TBC…