Chapter 13 – Building Walls
The Doctor lifted his unconscious wife and carried her into their bedroom. Susan followed after, eyebrows drawn down in concern.
"It's okay, Susan, really, she'll be fine," he reassured his granddaughter, wondering at her insecurity. She'd just done something absolutely brilliant, so why was she wringing her hands and looking so worried.
"I'm not worried about the biological aspects, Grandfather. I'm worried about the rest of it. After all, we've dropped her into a Time Lord consciousness rather precipitously. I am concerned about how difficult it will be for her to adjust, that's all." She informed him and he nodded. He still remembered the shock of the conversion back from John Smith and yet he'd had the memories of hundreds of years of being a Time Lord to bolster him.
"Susan dear," he soothed. "I'm her husband and I can support her in this, until she's able to cope on her own," he reminded her and Susan suddenly got a somewhat embarrassed expression on her face. Of course, he realized, she'd never been able to have a real connection with her husband, David. He'd been human, without an ounce of telepathy in him. She'd never had the opportunity and with so few of their kind left, she might never have it.
"Then I should leave you to it," she murmured and he had the feeling her blush was from something else than this conversation, some memory that she was hiding from him. He opened his mouth to pursue that, but Rose stirred in his arms and Susan fled the room.
"Doctor?" Rose's voice was wondering, her eyes on him widening, and she stared at him as though she'd never seen him before.
"Rose Tyler," he answered, his mind following the way her timelines curved out and away, entwined intimately with his own, stretching off into the centuries.
She reached up trembling fingers to try to touch the things she could suddenly see, but her hands passed through them and she frowned.
"You are seeing Time, Rose, as well as all sorts of energies that have been invisible to you up to now," he explained and she nodded.
"You're gorgeous," she whispered and he grinned at her.
"You too," he sighed out and kissed her lightly. "Absolutely brilliant, you are." She was softly glowing to his mental vision. She had expanded from her human self into a complicated bundle of space and time, a creature of vast potential and incredible beauty. It was close to how he'd perceived her as the Bad Wolf, but with the benefit of it not killing her.
"I can feel you!" she giggled and then cuddled against him. "I can feel what you're thinking!" She was radiating joy and excitement, a pure undiluted happiness that made his hearts swell and he knew he was grinning fit to explode.
He broadcast his love to her, pouring his own joy and happiness into her and feeling the way she absorbed it and then reflected it back to him, her own blissful content added in. It wasn't a conscious sharing, not yet, she responded as a Gallifreyan child would, with instinct and no control, but that would come in time, with training.
Her mind drifted and he gasped as her spike of arousal went through him.
"Oh my," he choked out and she grinned broadly, intrigued by this new toy she'd been given.
"Blimey, this could be fun," she teased and let her mind roam, images of things she wanted to do to him, memories of the way he made her feel, all serving to make his hearts race and his breath come in gasping shudders.
"Yes, but for a very short time if you don't go a bit slower, Rose." he managed to get the words out, but it was tough. She eased up and then pulled herself up in his arms. She embraced him, mouth seeking his own and then she uncoiled the smallest tendril of arousal and dragged it along his mind. He jerked and clutched at her, gasping again.
"Better?" she asked him, her eyes filled with mischief and the promise of things to come.
"Yes," he squeaked. If this was her without training, he realized, once she got some, he was a dead man. He tried to care but couldn't make himself mind at all. What a way to go, after all.
Rose found that she was having trouble walking. Everywhere she looked she saw the tangled skeins of Time. On one level she knew it was just her mind visualizing and making sense of her new understanding, but she kept trying to step over or around things that weren't really tangible. The TARDIS control room was particularly hard, the way that the console affected time meant that the lines bent around it at long curving angles and her eyes kept trying to cross as she followed them.
It was really confusing.
But nowhere near as confusing as the sudden onset of telepathy was. Malla had had the gift of broadcasting her emotions and it seemed that she had passed that gift on to Rose. It came along with an increased empathy, above even that of other Time Lords. This was proving to be a real problem for her.
She'd feel a sudden flash of worry and her hearts would speed up. (Which was also weird, her pulse sounded like a drumbeat in her ears sometimes and she kept thinking she was having a heart attack.) The worry wasn't hers, though, it was the Doctor's or Susan's and she couldn't always tell whose.
It was nice to actually be able to feel her husband's love for her, to have the strength and depth of it becoming a nearly tangible force that wrapped her up, enveloped her, and supported her. That part she rather liked. Last night had been… wow… she had never had a single complaint about their sex life, but the added layers of being able to actually know what turned him on, to actually feel what he was feeling and let him feel her as well. It had been absolutely mind-blowing.
She caught a wave of pleased amusement from him and a sudden slamming feeling that she realized was Susan shielding herself tightly.
"Too much information, Rose," the other woman called out and looking at her, Rose could see her face pink with embarrassment. Oops. Her shielding might be good, but she kept forgetting to tuck her emotions behind those walls and not just let her mind wander.
She had finally figured out the reason the Doctor had always seemed so distant to her before, when he was a Time Lord. It had been, it seemed, about manners. To broadcast one's emotions to other Time Lords was rude and intrusive. They learned early on to control themselves, to keep their feelings tucked behind the massive walls that they shielded themselves with. Her thoughts flashed to old Star Trek episodes she'd watched with Mickey and she grinned. Like Vulcans, it wasn't that they didn't feel anything; it's that they felt so much that they had to keep it carefully contained. A Time Lord's mind was also capable of overwhelming a human's with ease. Too powerful a flood of emotion could change the feelings of "lesser species".
"Sorry! Still getting the hang of all this," Rose apologized, but a heated look from her husband banished her dismay and replaced it with a sudden wave of longing, his for her and her own returning back to him.
Her Doctor had always loved her. He'd just been careful not to broadcast that to her. He'd been afraid that the very strength of his emotions would overpower her. He had wanted her love to grow from real feelings on her part, not from his will dominating her own. For all the frustration and anger she'd felt at his reticence, she could now see the incredible gift he'd given her. He'd never pushed her mind, the way he could so easily have. He could have had her drooling and begging with a mere touch of his mind and he never had.
"I never would," he assured her, his eyes serious, filled with his love and the desperate need that was coiling up between them.
"Really! Too much!" Susan interrupted, this time a trifle put out sounding and they both blushed, feeling very much like misbehaving children. Susan laughed at that mental image and shook her head. "You two!" she sighed out in resignation.
"I'll get better, I promise!" Rose assured her and the Doctor leaned in and whispered in her ear.
"You get too much better and you'll kill me, Rose Tyler," he murmured seductively. The thoughts that that comment conjured up made Susan run out of the room with her fingers stuck in her ears.
They exchanged mischievous looks and then burst into laughter.
Andred wished that he wasn't the only adult Time Lord on the planet just then. Davian was doing his best, but despite his physical body's apparent age, he was just a child and his control was nonexistent. If Leela were a Time Lady, she could help… but then he probably wouldn't love her as much as he did. He had never really thought Time Ladies were much fun, after all.
They were sitting in one of the basement labs, this one wasn't used very often and the walls were shielded against most forms of energy, which made it useful for what Andred was trying to teach Davian. What he wouldn't do for a proper Zero Room right then, though. He'd found a spot in the center of the room, an area where he could push the tables back and they could sit on the cement floor facing each other. The soft buzz of the fluorescent lights was the only sound besides their breathing.
"Try again," Andred repeated, his voice and mind as calm as he could make them.
He monitored the boy as Davian carefully began building his shields up again. This was not Andred's forte, and he knew that his war-ravaged mind, his soldier's experiences and suffering, made him about as unsuitable a tutor for the Time Tot as could be. But he was the only one left. He was all alone here on Earth. Omega, what had it been like for the Doctor to think he was completely alone for so long? At least he knew he just had to cobble stuff together until Susan came back.
"I can still feel them, Andred!" the boy whimpered and Andred carefully reached out and encompassed him in his own shields as well, giving him some respite. The dark skinned boy slumped in relief. "Why are they so loud?"
"Humans aren't telepathic, Davian, they can't hear themselves and therefore have never learned to keep their minds quiet," Andred explained, feeling a deep welling of sympathy for the boy. To awaken to your Time Lord powers unprotected and surrounded by a billion human minds must have been terrible for him. What had Susan been thinking?
"In Lady Susan's TARDIS, it was like they were shouting at me all the time! Even here, every time they get near me it's so painful!" he wailed and Andred sighed out.
"Let's try again," he soothed and began patiently helping the boy in a man's body learn to protect himself from billions of loud, boisterous human minds.
Susan sat quietly in the zero room and began carefully working to build her own shields into something that could withstand Rose's inability to hide her feelings.
Her TARDIS has made the room look like an Italian plaza, complete with a tinkling fountain in the middle. Susan was sitting on hand-painted tiles, with her back against a tall tree, the roughness of the bark rubbing against her blouse. A perfect blue sky was above her and the light was warm and gentle. She could hear the soft whisper of a breeze thorough the tree tops and watched as a flock of doves winged by overhead. The illusion was amazing, which told Susan that her TARDIS was a bit concerned about her.
Fixing her shields was awkward, because she needed enough sensitivity to feel other Time Lords, but not enough to be inundated with images about her own grandfather that made her blush to the roots of her hair. She supposed that she ought to feel offended or upset, but the genuine love and warmth between them was so lovely, that she found herself forgiving Rose's lapses rather quickly. It was nice to see that sort of love between a married couple. Aside from Malla and Rand, Susan had never seen a husband and wife who felt so strongly for each other.
Gallifrey had been a disappointment to her after so long on Earth. She'd imagined that all marriages had been like her own. The shock of finding out that most were arranged along political alliances, and to strengthen family connections to other powerful houses, had been enormous. She'd appreciated what her grandfather had saved her from with far greater understanding than she'd had before.
Especially after what they'd done to her in the Tower. She turned her mind resolutely away from that painful line of thought and reached out for the image that had sustained her through so much pain.
David, his smiling face rising in her mind, made her hearts ache with the remembered pain and joy. How she'd loved him. She had wanted so much to be with him forever.
Memories rose up in her mind. The image of her grandfather, with his recorder in his hand, visiting her and romping with the adopted children she had taken in, David on the floor with little Alex, playing with blocks. David and her grandfather, now in a floppy hat and scarf wound around him, laughing as he handed out jelly babies to the kids. Another memory of David coming in from work, covered in dirt and sweat, but grinning ear to ear, holding a gold band out to her, something he'd found in the rubble, a wedding ring, something that he hadn't been able to give her before. She let her hand drift to the golden ring, where it hung on a chain around her neck, a constant reminder of both true happiness and its ultimate price.
Another image of her grandfather, who looked barely older than she did then, even though hundreds of years were passing for him, while she lived a mere forty. Now he was blond and full of quiet laughter, teaching the kids to play cricket in the rubble of London, their shouts and laughter drowning out the usual sounds of hammers and building.
There had been so many orphans on Earth at that time; the Dalek invasion had destroyed so much. She had never been short on youngsters to care for and David had loved kids as much as her grandfather had. She had always been busy caring for them, living her life. She had wished desperately for children of their own, so that she could have had some part of him with her forever, but that was not possible; their biology was far too disparate.
Still, they'd been so busy, rebuilding a world had taken up so much of their time, loving each other, raising their loud rowdy brood. It was a full life and filled with so much joy and laughter.
Then one day, she'd looked up and realized that David was old. The years of rebuilding, his life as a fighter, had taken their toll and her love, her husband, was withering before her eyes.
Holding his hand as he died and then, forcing herself to rise up from his bedside, to keep going, had been the single hardest thing she'd ever done. Tears were leaking down her face and she dashed them away angrily. Wallowing in her memories was not helping her figure out what to do about her shielding.
The things she'd learned on Gallifrey were needful now, but drawing on that knowledge was painful for her. She'd learned it the hard way, defending her mind from them, trying to break her, to open her up to the timelines without the hindrance of her conscious mind's interference. It's what they did to children with the inspiration; however, she'd not been a child when they'd started. The years away, a life of her own, being wife, mother, and friend, had strengthened her.
Somehow, her grandfather had known what it would take for her to withstand them and had given it to her. She weathered everything they threw at her.
So they'd sent the Master in. The memories of that encounter were both incredible and terrible, and the legacy of that meeting was a tangled up mess in her heart and her mind that had no resolution in sight. That psychopathic mass murderer had had the most exquisitely beautiful soul she'd ever encountered, locked away behind a web of madness, compulsion, and pain. He'd been twisted, broken, and reworked by his own kind, turned into a tool for them and left to his fate with complete unconcern. It broke her hearts just thinking about it.
She reached into that part of her memories and allowed a small trickle of what she'd learned from him to resurface. Her shields went up like rippling glass, allowing her to see out, but causing all else to veer off, rebounding harmlessly.
She took a deep breath and relaxed.
A sudden deep clanging sound propelled her up onto her feet and had her racing to the console room without a second thought.
"The cloister bell!" the Doctor shouted and lunged at the TARDIS controls as the room tipped.
"What's happening?" Rose screamed as she was flung across the console room. She grabbed at a wrought iron railing and held on tightly. She could see the temporal energy around them fluctuating and twisting and it looked profoundly unnatural to her.
"I don't know!" her husband shouted back and Susan came staggering into the room, trying to keep upright as the floor lurched under her.
"What did you do?" she accused her grandfather and he shot her a look of deep offense.
"I'll have you know that Rand was an even better pilot that I am and I did nothing to cause this!"
"Being a better pilot than you is no great task!" she shot back, but there was amusement and affection in her voice and eyes. She hauled herself to the console and began to manipulate the temporal assessment controls, trying to figure out where the fluctuations were coming from.
Rose blinked. How had she known that? Looking at the console she suddenly realized that she knew what most of the controls did. That one there stabilized flight, the other one allowed you to compensate for timeline collapses. Her mind ticked over with sudden comprehension and she smiled.
Rose jumped forward and began to help her husband and granddaughter-in-law as they flew the ship.
"Three pilots!" the Doctor crowed. "Brilliant!" Susan was grinning ear to ear, the Doctor was laughing and Rose was exultant, she understood so much now, it was wonderful.
"Miss Trelunder, are you busy?" Mr. Taylor asked and Devorah looked up at him with a polite smile carefully in place, hiding how much his presence affected her. He might be a bit overly formal, but he was kind, clever, and his heart was in the right place. He wasn't that much older than she was, yet sometimes she felt so ancient in comparison that it made her feel tired and rather sad.
"Not at all, Mr. Taylor," she assured him and gave him her full attention, fingers dropping away from the little black typewriter. He put his hands behind his back, his muted brown waistcoat, with the shiny silver buttons, shifting as he moved. Dark haired, with sharp blue eyes that missed little, the tall, slender office manager was quite attractive. She knew that he liked her, but there was something, some strange reluctance on her part to return his attentions, no matter how tempted she was.
"Thank you, Miss Trelunder, Justice Cogswaller has some dictation, if you wouldn't mind?" he asked and she rose promptly, gathering her pencil and notebook with brisk efficiency.
"Of course I don't mind, Mr. Taylor," she assured him and walked swift and sure past him to the Justice's office, her black bombazine skirts swirling and rustling as she went. She could sense that his eyes were following her, but she was careful not to look back.
"She's an odd one," Myrtle whispered to Gertrude, but Devorah's keen hearing picked up the comment easily.
"So stand-offish," Gertrude agreed.
"I dunno," Maggie murmured back. "I think she just looks sad, mebbe she lost 'er young man in the war, or somethin'." The others scoffed at Maggie, who was just the girl who cleaned the office, while they were secretaries with education and position.
Devorah stepped into Justice Cogswaller's office and the door shutting behind her cut off the whispers of gossip behind her.
A large man, who had once been a great athlete in his youth, the aging Justice was getting somewhat round in the middle from his cook's excellent meals, but he was still a powerful figure and many of the office ladies were quite intimidated by him. Eyes as black as agates and hair the same dark color, skin that was getting that paper white color that comes with advanced age, the Justice didn't frighten her at all. In fact, of all the people in the Law Firm of Cogswaller, Finney, and Grange, Devorah liked him the best.
"Justice?" she murmured softly, to attract his attention. He looked up at her and she noted the twinkle in his eye as he nodded to her. She had long suspected that the old man had a fondness for her. Not romantic in any way, he loved his wife to distraction, but more of a fatherly feeling. She allowed herself a tiny smile at him, but kept herself carefully professional in demeanor.
"Miss Trelunder, excellent, you brought your notebook?"
"Of course, sir," she assured him and settled down in the high backed wooden chair in front of his desk and looked at him attentively.
"To the Right Honorable Kazran Sardick, of the Ameline Ice Crystal Corporation, Greetings," he began and with neat tidy strokes, Devorah took down the letter.