A/N: Holy... holy cow, did powerfelicia just update the story? YES SHE DID LITTLE DALEKS. I'm gonna finish this story like a cheescake, for all of you amazing followers deserves it.
Now this chapter (and the following... five? Something like that) will be flashbacks, meaning this is what happened when Rose first disappeared. So you'll get the explanation. Right. Begin.
- Chapter fourteen -
The Flashback Part One
Peter Alan Tyler. My dad; the most wonderful man in the world. Born 15 September 1954, died in 1987, 7 November.
And then he died again.
Rose wasn't having a very good day.
A broken phone had made her late for the bus; traffic had made her late for work; and work had made her late for dinner.
After hours and hours of hard work—and seven missed calls from John—she had finally managed to get some time over to call him, only to get strictly to voicemail. An hour after that, her dad had called and informed her of John's location; he was with Pete himself. Out on a field mission. Of course.
Apparently, there had been readings of some sort of alien technology at the Buckingham Palace and they feared for the royal family's safety. John was their top man in that area and had been first to come, bouncing at the balls of his feet of excitement as he ran around in the corridors and rambled about it smelling like cinnamon. According to him, that meant revolutionary news and they would probably be late home.
Rose sighed and slumped in her chair, for she had been looking forward to a night home together with John, but since that wasn't happening, she could stay late as well.
"Miss Tyler," said a voice at the door and she looked up.
"Yes, Mathilda?"
"Miss Tyler, there is something I think you would like to see."
"And what is that?"
Mathilda made a face. "It's a surprise, miss Tyler, and if I tell you… well, then it won't be a surprise anymore, will it?"
"You know I hate surprises."
"I'm afraid you don't have a choice," she said and sounded a bit hurt.
Rose peered at her. "And why's that?"
"Because it's important."
"Mathilda! I have other things to do! Tons of paper to be sorted, agreements to be signed, discoveries to—"
"Miss," Mathilda said, "you're coming with me if I so have to drag you out of that chair myself." Rose sat up straighter in surprise and Mathilda gave her a cheeky smile. "Shall we go then, miss?"
"I—I suppose so," Rose said slowly and rose from the chair. "Where are we going, exactly?"
"The labs, miss." Mathilda headed off down the corridor and Rose almost had to jog beside her to keep up with the long legs her assistant possessed. "It's professor Docherty that has asked to see you. She said it was a matter of importance equal to code mauve."
"Ah," Rose said, frowning. Almost nothing was equal to code mauve these days.
It was dark outside. Rose squinted in suspicion. She hadn't realized it was that late already, no wonder the office was so empty. She looked back up at Mathilda and tried to remember if there was any particular reason to why her assistant still was here.
"Mathilda?" she asked.
"Yes, miss?"
"Why are you still here? I mean, it must be over ten, right? Everyone else has left for the day."
"Actually," Mathilda said as they turned a sharp right, "its half past eleven, miss Tyler. Do you wish for me to put up a watch on your office wall?"
"Yes," Rose said absently. "That would be nice, thank you." She couldn't help but notice that her question hadn't been answered, but before she could ask again Mathilda stopped and gestured at the door.
"Professor Docherty is waiting for you inside, miss Tyler."
"Yeah—yeah don't do that, okay? I'm Rose." Rose stretched a hand out. "Just Rose. Hi."
Mathilda raised an eyebrow but shook the hand. "Nice to meet you, miss Rose." Then she spun around and walked away before Rose could say anything else.
Feeling a bit bemused, Rose turned back to the door and stepped inside the lab. It was small, smaller than most of the Torchwood labs, and felt a bit cramped together with all the computer screens and advanced technology equipment.
At the desk sat a lonely woman in her late fifties, her fingers flying over the computer keyboard with an incredible pace.
Hesitantly, Rose cleared her throat and the woman spun around in her chair, staring in bewilderment before registering who it was standing before her.
"Oh, miss Tyler, how great of you to come right away!" she said and flew up to her feet to shake Rose's hand.
"I wasn't under the impression that I had any choice," Rose said with a smile, but let her tone be sharp and warning. "What did you want to show me, professor?"
The woman's face fell immediately and she cleared her throat, not sure where to look. "The thing is, miss Tyler—or do you mind if I call you Rose? Okay, thank you—that I've made some rather serious discoveries… and I suppose now is the time to tell you that no one else but me knows about this."
"Not even Mathilda? Or my da—or director Tyler?"
"No one," professor Docherty said and shook her head. "What I'm about to show you… it's—it's sort of hard to melt and I didn't know how to tell anyone. I got it just yesterday, by accident really..."
"Is there any particular reason to why you are telling me all this?" Rose asked carefully. "Why not director Tyler? Or someone else—I mean… I'm not that highly ranked, you know."
Professor Docherty moistened her lips nervously. "When you see it, I think you'll understand."
Rose tried to smile. "Okay…? Then, what is it? What is this new discovery?"
The professor wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans before turning to her computer and pushing a couple of buttons. "Now—now don't panic or anything, and I don't want to scare you, but I want you to be prepared, okay?"
Rose nodded and Docherty pressed a last button, then all the screens lit up with the same picture, which quickly started to move and Rose realized that she was watching a video—a video that made her take a sharp breath and a step back in surprise, with a hand pressed tightly against her mouth.
Rose hurried down the corridors, not really seeing what was in front of her.
Oh my god, oh my god.
She had to call John. He had to know. He was their only chance.
"Rose!" someone called and she froze, glaring at the wall ahead of her, because that voice sounded an awful lot like…
"Jonathan," she said, forcing a smile on her lips as she turned around. "What are you doing here? At this hour?" Bothering me?
Jonathan grinned his sickly sweet smile and Rose resisted the urge to gag. "Rosie," he said, "I hate to ask you for favors—"
"Then don't."
"—but sometimes life has new, strange ideas for you, and you're doing things you didn't originally plan for, right?"
"Then reschedule."
"And you're my girl, so—"
"Jonathan," Rose said, barely managing to keep her voice even. She wanted to cry and scream and run, but pressed back all those feelings by digging the nails into her palms. The pain got her something else to think of. "Jonathan, I'm actually rather busy right now, but you can ask Mathilda—"
"A troop found it on the field today, and I was going to leave it at the AT Department this morning but things got in the way and you know… " He shrugged apologetically, even though his whole appearance said that he wasn't sorry at all.
"As I said," Rose started, "I'm very busy and—"
"Thank you, darling, I owe you one." He dropped something into Rose's hand and she automatically gripped for it, and before she could say anything else he had already gone through the front doors and was jogging up the pavement towards hot Christine from HR.
Rose stared after him in disgust, almost forgetting everything else for a second, then felt the weight of the object in her hands and looked down. Her heart almost skipped a beat as she saw what it was; a vortex manipulator.
It looked almost exactly like the one Jack had had, only slightly newer—but a giant crack leaped through the entire display and even a blind man would have been able to tell that it was broken. Now it wasn't more useful than piece of rock when it came to time travelling, but the familiar shape and weight felt good in her hands, and she only sighed as she wrapped her fingers more tightly around it.
Oh, how she missed captain Jack Harkness, and all his crazy stories about even crazier adventures. She thought of the time they had first met, right during the London Blitz… but he had been just as charming as ever. And then of course, it had been that creepy kid with the gasmask, but the Doctor had—
She cut the thought off like one may cut off a string and began to walk in a brisk pace down the corridor, heading for her office. Once she was there, she glanced down at the vortex manipulator one last time before letting it slid into her right drawer, carefully locking it afterwards. It could wait for later, when she had less catastrophic things to think about.
Instead, she picked up her phone and dialed the number to John, but after minutes of waiting, it became clear that he wouldn't pick up. She tried calling her dad, but it went straight to voicemail.
Just as she thought about giving up, maybe breaking down in tears and driving home, the display lit up with a picture of her mum calling.
"Mum?" she answered in surprise. "Why are you calling this late? I thought you'd gone to sleep hours ago. Don't tell me Tony and his nightmares are keeping you up again; I told him that there are no monsters under his bed, for John and I have scared them all away."
"Sweet—sweetheart," her mum sobbed. "It's not Tony."
"Mum?" Rose said, feeling panic grip her chest. "Mum, are you crying? Are you all right? What's going on?"
"It's your dad…" Jackie's voice broke and her cries got muffled. She took a sharp breath before speaking again. "Rose sweetheart, it's your dad. There's been an accident and—and he didn't make it."
Rose could never remember how she had gotten to the hospital, only that she'd stumbled in through the doors to the waiting room and met her mother's swollen eyes from across the room—and broken down completely.
She'd cried for minutes, just sobbing into her mum's chest, getting the shirt all damp and wrinkled up, but not even the otherwise so tidy Jackie could come to care. She was crying as heavily herself, pressing her face into Rose's hair.
When Rose finally could breathe normally again, she sat down at the hard bench and stared at something far, far away, an empty look haunting her eyes.
She knew that John had gotten there at some point, and that he was sitting beside her now, the tips of his fingers so close to her hand, but he didn't dare to take it. Sometimes she wanted to be angry at him for his incredible hesitance. She wanted to yell and scream, just to make him snap and scream back, so that he would dare to look her in the eyes and say what he was really thinking. She hated that he thought that she saw him as a stranger, no matter of how hard she tried to convince him otherwise, even though she was very aware that to think like that was unfair and cruel. Besides, her actions must have said otherwise, and what comfort would her words then give him?
"John," she said, her voice a broken whisper. His head snapped as he came to look at her with his large, brown eyes.
"Yes, Rose?"
"What happened?"
He tried to smile. "What do you mean?"
"You know perfectly well what I mean," she said, "what happened, John? How is it that my dad is dead—again?"
John looked away, and the fact that he didn't want to meet her eyes felt like a knife in her gut. What the bloody hell had happened?
"John," she squeaked.
"We—we, um… there was a mission, Rose, they had some disturbing readings centering the Buckingham Palace, so we went there. But everything turned out to be a misunderstanding so we left rather quickly." He swallowed. "We were just heading back when—when he said he had a meeting to attend nearby, so he parked and got out of the car… and Rose, I tried to stop it, Rose, but I wasn't fast enough. He didn't see the car, and the driver didn't see him…" His voice died out and he was quiet for awhile, then he glanced down at her. She could feel him watching her carefully, her every movement and every expression, but she was plain. She felt flat as the ground, and suspected that that's how she looked on the outside as well.
"Rose?" he asked softly. "Rose, talk to me. Are you okay?"
Rose opened her mouth, but stayed quiet for a moment longer, then, "Yeah. I'm fine. Everything's fine."
But everything was not fine.
Inside, she felt the numbness being replaced by something hot, something boiling, rising and rising until biting down hard on her tongue was the only thing she could do not to scream. Anger, towards everything and nothing, towards the whole bloody unfair universe—multiverse—flooded through her veins just as much as blood, filling every little piece of her until she could no longer take it.
"This is the universe where my dad lives," she said, and was surprised by how calm her voice was. It sounded even and not at all sharp, just as if she was speaking matter-of-factly. Which she was. She said it again, louder this time, "This is the universe where my dad lives."
"Rose—"
"No!" Now she screamed. "No, don't Rose me! Back in my other universe—my real universe—that's where he died. I tried to save him, but he was always destined to die that day, and I accepted that… I bloody accepted that." She shook her head. "But he's supposed to live here. You know it, mum knows it… everyone knows it! This is the universe where my dad lives, so to hell with you!" She pulled herself free of his grip and stormed out the doors, ignoring his calls after her. She could hear her mother too, but it was like listening to something being said above water whilst you were under it. Their voices were only low, dull whispers that she didn't feel like paying attention to, for an idea had started to form in her mind.
Rose ran all the way back to the Torchwood Tower, not stopping once. When there, she first waited for the lift, but the clock was ticking and the lift slow, so she abandoned it and headed for the stairs.
Her room was on the top floors, giving her a beautiful view over London. But now, darkness ruled the skies, and she could see nothing but blackness.
She dived for her right desk drawer, breaking the lock and pulling it open with nothing but sheer human strength, gulping for air as she did so.
The vortex manipulator felt cool in her hands, and much heavier than before. It was like a new weight had been put on it, for a moment bringing her back to another life in another universe, in which she'd been traveling with her first, northern Doctor and asked to see her dad. But she'd screwed up as she'd saved his life, and lots of people had died in the alternate timeline that had created, as the reapers had tried to heal the bleeding wound.
But this is not that time, she thought angrily as she put on the manipulator, this is not even the same universe. This is the universe where my dad lives.
"Miss Tyler?"
The sudden voice made her spin around and stare at Mathilda in bewilderment. "Not now, Mathilda," she breathed, her eyes still wide.
"But, miss—"
"Not now, Mathilda!" she roared and watched her assistant jump before almost tripping over her own feet as she ran out of the room.
Rose turned back to the vortex manipulator—and froze. It was broken. Of course, of course it was broken, she'd known that. The display was pitch black and the wide crack in the glass told an unpleasant story, but she couldn't give up now.
"Come on, work," she muttered and tapped it hardly with her index finger. It remained dead. She started to hit harder, using her fist, but nothing changed. It was broken and a stubborn girl's stupid attempts to pretend otherwise would not fix it.
Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks and blurred her vision. She cursed loudly as she tried to wipe them away with the back of her hand.
But no… no, she couldn't give up. Not now.
Slowly, she turned against the desk, hesitating for a second as she glanced down at it with a calculating look—then she brought the manipulator down, hard. She did it again, and again, and again, making deep marks in the expensive wooden surface.
"Work!" she cried. "Come on, work! This is the universe where my dad lives! Work, you son of a bitch, wor—"
Then a high-pitched brightness swallowed her whole.
I am sorry and I will try to post the next part as soon as possible but since I haven't even written it yet... hrm.
I'd also like to apologize for my EXTREMELY BAD ENGLISH in the first chapters. Hopefully, I've gotten better now. I has right peephole?
Thank you for sticking with the story, even though it and I pretty much suck for the time being... I owe you (wait. wrong fandom)