Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, obviously. I also don't own several of the concepts I ran into in passing in other people's fanfics and anything else you might recognise from somewhere else also doesn't belong to me.
Author's Notes: This was originally going to be a separate story, this part we're starting at here, but I'd reached a stage where there was so much written I just decided to keep going straight through. To everyone favouriting and leaving reviews, thank you. Especially the people favouriting, since I haven't thanked you all yet.
Events moved rapidly, and the Doctor, despite his best efforts to be left out of legislative issues, found himself often on call to make suggestions regarding the telepathic training and help for those with psychic limitations. He much preferred calls to universities to fill in gaps in their historical records regarding the causes of the Transportation, providing Rassilon's notes to geneticists, biologists, psychological analysts, sociologists, historians, doctors and assorted other academicians.
It was Rose who provided the Doctor the impetus to take on a project that seemed to fill him with a sort of bubbling joy whenever he was involved in it. They were at dinner, the whole family, Verce and his wife, Farah and the children unabashedly staring at the alien young woman in their midst, and the Doctor enthusiastically prodding Rose to try all his favourites and her clearly humouring him, and Marit decided to rescue the poor girl. "So, Rose, why don't you tell us something about yourself?" She may also have been determined to learn a little more about the young woman the Doctor clearly wanted as a bondmate, even if he was heartily denying it to the point the girl was utterly confused by the conflicting signals he was giving her.
"Oh, I'm not that interesting," she denied. "My mum's a hairdresser and we live in estate housing in London. That's the biggest city in the U.K., my home country," she said. "I used to work in a clothes shop until he," she jerked her head to indicate the Doctor, "blew it up."
"He blew up a shop?" Galen asked with little boy fascination.
The Doctor looked indignant. "It was packed with mannequins trying to kill you," he exclaimed. "I saved your life!"
Rose patted his hand affectionately. "You did, and then I had to point out that the London Eye's a big circular metal thing." She turned to the rest of the table. "It's a ride, yeah? Big metal circle about a hundred and thirty metres high."
"A diametre of one hundred and thirty-five metres," the Doctor cut in, "It rotates at point nine kilometres per hour, or to be relatively accurate to local terms . . ." he slowed at Rose's look. "Half a Galfrian kilometre . . . in twenty-five point four . . . five two . . . Galfrian minutes." He stumbled to a halt as Rose continued to just look at him.*
She sighed. "I was more going for the fact that you missed that it was there and all," she told him with an affectionate smile. "I don't think they need the London trivia."
"What about your dad?" Ana asked innocently. Everyone felt the sudden curious blankness from the Doctor's part of the bond that these days bespoke him hiding a distressing emotion from them.
Rose's glance at the Doctor was unreadable as she answered, "He died when I was a baby. It's just Mum and me."
"And a vicious creature she is," the Doctor said, clearly trying to change the conversation to a more lighthearted direction.
"I seem to remember someone telling her that he'd employed me as his 'companion'," she said, bringing her fingers into the air in pairs and bending the index and middle twice in time with her speech. The Doctor quickly sent them the explanation of the gesture, that it indicated quotation marks.
It took a half second for the adults at the table to understand the implication, then Verce and his wife, Farah and the Professor were all sniggering, much to the confusion of the children, and Marit felt eminently in sympathy with Rose's poor mother. "She slapped me!" the Doctor protested.
"You'd earned it," Marit told him.
"You told her to shut up when she was just trying to help. You know, right after you'd regenerated," Rose continued.
His jaw dropped and he stared at her looking vaguely wounded. It was all in play, Marit could feel. "You mean when my brain was imploding and she wouldn't stop blathering on about soup and sandwiches?"
Rose shook her head. "You mean when you had the time to take the mick about Howard's fruit?"
The Doctor gave an exasperated sigh. "The man keeps fruit in his pyjamas, Rose. How can anyone not comment on that?"
"This from the man who keeps bananas and God knows what-all else in his bigger-on-the-inside pockets," she replied.
"She makes a good point," Verce said with a grin. "You do have some unbelievable detritus in those pockets of yours."
Ana and Galen both perked up. "What's a banana?" Galen asked.
Digging in those pockets of his, the doctor pulled out two bananas, peeling them and handing them to the children. "Some of the best fruit ever created in this galaxy," he started, then paused even as the pair munched curiously on the fruit. His hand went into a pocket, and a moment later he pulled out a pear. He shot a fulminating look at Rose, who looked away with an amused and clearly false look of innocence on her face. "This," he said darkly, "is a pear, and one of the most vile fruity creations of your home planet. What is it doing in my pocket, Rose Tyler?"
"I told you before," she said. "This is simply aversion therapy, and when you get over your weird fear of pears you'll thank me."
Curiously, Farah reached past Rose and plucked the pear from the Doctor's hand. She bit into the fruit and said, "It's unusual, but really quite pleasant."
Rose shamelessly stuck a hand into the Doctor's pocket closest to her, up to her elbow, and pulled out another two. "Have another then," she said with a grin. She promptly started eating one of them, passing the other over. The Doctor sputtered and began digging through his pockets, mutter balefully under his breath about vile fruits. "That reminds me," Rose said. "You've got a whole garden in the TARDIS, Doctor, with stuff that you said was native to Gallifrey. Maybe you should see if they can't start up a garden or something. I mean, everyone's been asking you about it, it might be nice for people to go to a greenhouse to see some things that didn't come over in the Transportation."
"Oh, yes," the Professor said eagerly. "There's literature and various historical documents that reference so much in the way of plants and animals that simply don't exist here, I have to assume none of them were from the geographical areas the Five Cities were from." He shook his head, "There's so much that's harder to parse when we don't know what arkytior look like, or flutterwings for that matter."
Farah added, "That would be wonderful. Just to have a better idea of the whole of the ecological web our animals came from would be so wonderful. It's so much harder to do taxonomical studies when we have no fossil records."
"I could," the Doctor said softly. Joy began rippling through the bond with the family. "The TARDIS wouldn't be the last of Gallifrey." He bolted out the door, clearly heading for the ship.
Rose rolled her eyes. "He's not very good at sitting all the way through meals," she said. "He's got the attention span of a three-year-old on a sugar high."
Pleading from Farah and her bondmate made Marit roll her own eyes. She looked between them both, saying, "Yes, go on and help him."
Then Ana and Galen were pleading and the whole family moved into the ship, which gave a welcoming hum, directing Farah and the Professor after the Doctor. Rose turned to the children. "Why don't we head to the library? I bet there's some books there you've never seen. You might find something interesting."
Ana and Galen were introduced to children's books from Rose's home planet, the Professor joining them after a while to enjoy these works from an alien species. Marit began to plumb the library herself, intrigued at several interesting tomes on human psychology, and after that dinner they began meeting daily on the TARDIS, while the Doctor began the process of creating a garden, sanctuary and reference centre of Old Galfrian culture and ecology.
It was another month, and then Rose spoke up finally. "Doctor, I know you've got a lot that you want to be doing here, and I'm not saying I want to leave permanently, but could you drop me home for a while? Mum's been calling more and more and I'd like to see her, yeah?"
The Doctor sighed. "If you must," he said, sounding put-upon.
"And you're not going to take me back after months and months," Rose added. "The date Mum last called, today, is September twenty-fifth. It'd better not be much after that."
"Only the twenty-fifth?" the Doctor picked up Rose's mobile and began scanning it with the thing he claimed was a screwdriver and was clearly nothing of the sort. "But it's been far longer than that!"
Rose shrugged. "The TARDIS says she's been slowing down our timeline relative to Mum's so she wouldn't worry."
"Mm-hmm?" he murmured, eyes going distant as he consulted with the ship. "She's playing favourites," he told Rose faux-darkly, his emotions sparkling and happy that his ship liked his not-exactly-a-bondmate so well.
"So we're going?" she asked.
Before he could reply, Marit took the chance and said, "Actually, Rose said something about how much time you've spent on . . . Earth was it?" she sent an inquiring look at Rose, who nodded. "Right. I suppose I was a little interested in this planet you've adopted."
"You could take her to meet Sarah Jane," Rose suggested. The look of mischief on her face told Marit there was more to the suggestion than just throwing out the name of a friend.
The Doctor's wide-eyed mild panic at the thought proved Marit's guess correct. "There's no need for that," he said hastily. "I'm sure I could find someone else to introduce Marit and the Professor to . . . maybe not. No, probably best if they don't talk to –"
"Anyone who might have the really good stories about you?" Rose inquired. "Sarah Jane told me all about when you regenerated and couldn't make up your mind about whether or not to be a berk and leave them to deal with the robot."
"Ah . . . I'd just regenerated you know," the Doctor told her. "Not all there yet."
She turned to Marit. "We bonded over the way he'll go on at a million miles an hour then when you can't keep up he'll look at you like you've dribbled on yourself."
"I knew you two were up to something instead of working in that school," he said, eyes narrowed.
Before they could go off on more banter, Marit asked, "So? Rose could visit with her mother and we could see some of this alien world." Now that it had been proposed, she was very interested in visiting an alien planet. Blue sky and water, green grass, animals she'd never seen before and an entire intelligent species that wasn't in the least telepathic? It sounded very exciting.
"You . . . you really want to go?" he felt both hopeful and confused as he asked. It was as though no one had ever asked him his preferences . At least, no one particularly important to him. As he so often did, he easily picked up on her thoughts, and she suddenly saw the edge of his memories, a stifling family, stifling Academy, and so many of them uninterested in seeing the universe, wanting nothing more than to stay where it was 'civilised'. But worst was the very proper horror they felt at his desire to explore the universe.
The Professor shook his head in false dismay. "Obviously he's just too ashamed to have us along," he said.
With a roll of his eyes, the Doctor said, "Oh, that's genius. Not like I didn't have grandchildren of my own to do that to."
Rose looked startled at the statement and Marit was reminded all over again just how young the girl was. Especially by comparison with the frequently utterly immature man who was literally centuries older than her own hundred years. "Anyway, if you really don't want Mum to tell them all about all the times you made her worry and insulted her cooking you can just show them around town, yeah?"
"True," he said eagerly. "No time like the present, right?"
Marit let herself get chivvied onto the ship, then stood back with an amused Rose and her mildly bemused bondmate. "Just watch him, yeah?" Rose said, getting a firm grip on one of the struts in the room. At that point the Doctor began running back and forth from one panel to another, circling around and around, while her time sense, and the Professor's as well, seemed to develop a strange sense of displacement, as though time had stopped just outside the doors.
"What is that?" she asked the Doctor, sending him her impressions.
His movements had a hitch in them, as though he would have liked to pause to consider the question, but was too busy directing the TARDIS. "That, Marit, is the Vortex. What you're feeling is that there is no time in the Vortex."
"But . . ." Marit frowned. "Time is passing right here, where we are."
"Inside the TARDIS, yeah," Rose explained. "But in here we're protected from the . . . whatever out there."
"I can just hear my Academy teachers' fits now," the Doctor said reminiscently.
Rose shot him a dark look. "This from the man who described a paradox as 'wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey?"
"They weren't too fond of me either," he admitted with some cheer. "Bunch of old sticks," he explained.
Then there was a bump and thud and the room seemed to still. A moment later there was a loud pounding on the door. "Doctor! How many times have I told you not to park in front of the telly! Corrie's on and I'll thank you to move that box of yours out of my living room!"
Dashing to the door, Rose yanked it open, even as the Doctor began muttering and pulling levers. "I told you outside," he grumped at the TARDIS. The TARDIS just sent him a wave of amused affection and a stubborn refusal to let him avoid Rose's mother.
Marit glanced at the Professor, unable to keep from laughing as she said, "I think I have to see this."
They trotted out, the Doctor following them and saying with exaggerated fear, "But she'll slap me. I think there're some intergalactic megalomaniacs that are afraid of that woman. She's a menace."
The flat they stepped out into from the TARDIS was small, but homey. That said, the colours, the patterns and decorations, they were all quite different from anything Marit had seen before. It also looked a tad . . . tacky. As they looked around, an older woman who looked a fair bit like Rose, presumably her mother, exclaimed, "There you are! You've been gone for weeks you two! C'mere," she finished and grabbed the Doctor, hugging him then practically assaulting him with her mouth.
The Professor was about to lunge forward and rescue their adopted son from this . . . attack, when they both caught the emotions creeping through the bond they had. As flummoxed as he was, this was apparently a sign of acceptance and affection on the part of Rose's mother. And as much as he was flailing about and hurling himself away, going on about Jackie controlling herself, it seemed this extremely demonstrative woman was someone he liked a great deal.
Rose, meanwhile, was laughing. "Mum, you're going to traumatise him. He won't put up with that the way Mickey did."
"He'll put up with whatever I make him put up with," replied the woman sharply. "You've been awfully quiet about what you've been doing lately," she added. "Not a word of, 'We were watching giant birds dance around giant purple mushrooms,' or, 'Last week we got thrown in prison. Again.'" She aimed a dark look at the Doctor at that one. Finally she seemed to notice Marit and the Professor. "Who's this then?" she asked.
"Jackie, they're . . . erm . . ." The Doctor trailed off and shot a desperate look at Rose.
The young woman obliged. "We ran into a bit of trouble-"
"What else is different?" snorted 'Jackie'. Marit vaguely wondered if everyone on this world had such short names.
Rose rolled her eyes. "Anyhow, it turns out that there's a . . . sort of a lost colony of the Doctor's people. He didn't know about them at all. When we got there," she continued, heavily editing, "These two sort of adopted him."
"That sounds like a thankless task," Jackie said. "You're nothing but trouble," she told the Doctor. Then she turned to Marit. "I hope you're less trouble than him."
"Mum!" Rose exclaimed. She looked horrified and embarrassed, but Marit thought she caught a hint of evaluation in the woman's eyes.
"He's a great deal of trouble when I leave him alone with my grandchildren," she said. "Honestly, you'd think he was the same age as Galen or Ana, not centuries old."
Jackie chuckled. "You'd certainly think that the way he carries on about Disney films, not to mention the way he got at Christmas."
"Christmas?" Marit asked.
"It's a holiday 'round here," Rose said. "Happens in winter and we exchange gifts and decorate with a lot of tinsel."
The Professor was immediately intrigued. "What does it celebrate?" he asked.
Rose and her mother looked at each other, vaguely uncomfortable, and the Doctor broke in then. "Depends really, on who you ask. There's a religious component to celebrate the birth of one of the primary religious figures within the culture, but the more secular treat it as a celebration of family and friendship."
"I just like putting up the decorations," Rose admitted.
Jackie smiled affectionately at her daughter. "You just like eating the raw dough for all the Christmas baking," she said.
"Anyway," the Doctor declared, "Jackie, Marit and the Professor wanted to get a look-see at Earth, so I'll be taking them on a bit of a tour. Rose, you're staying here to visit with your mum?"
"Yeah," Rose told him. "You just come by when you're all done touristing, yeah?"
"Of course," he told her, then led the way back into the TARDIS and began his manic dance again. "So, what sort of place do you want to see?" he asked. "Museums or pretty scenery? There's some lovely places in the Amazon. Right along the largest river on Earth. We could take a gander at the pyramids a few times. When they're being built and then when they're done. Ooo! Or the seven wonders of the ancient world! The Colossus of Rhodes is definitely worth a look-"
"Or we could look around this city right here," The Professor said. "Rose said you've spent a good deal of time right here and around now."
The TARDIS landed with a thump, and the Doctor said, "But I just finished setting us to go to see the Great Wall . . . of . . ." he trailed off as he opened the door and the TARDIS made a stern mental face at him. Across the street was a much-faded sign that just barely still read, 'I.M. FOREMAN" at the top. The middle was too faded and scraped to be read, and the bottom said, '76 TOTTERS LANE'.
Through the bond, his grief and nostalgia came through, as though he couldn't throttle the feelings the way he did his anger and grief over Old Galfry. "We had to give an address to the school," he said, placing a hand on the old sign. "I'd parked the TARDIS here after the chameleon circuit broke, so it was as good an address as any. I was so young then," he said. "Trying to be grumpy and old the way you do when you're young, and I underestimated the humans. Didn't think they'd see through Susan or me, but Ian and Barbara were worried about a girl living in a scrap yard with a mad old man in a box."
"What happened?" Marit asked when the TARDIS poked her. She hadn't wanted to invade his moment of nostalgia, but the TARDIS had taken control to her own ends, and Marit was curious after all.
The Doctor turned with a wry smile. "They bulled their way aboard and then I kidnapped them. Susan was very unhappy with me. She'd been enjoying her time at Coal Hill School. I don't think she ever quite forgave me that." He chuckled. "But I didn't know what to do and I didn't want to be a nine days' wonder. And ever since then I've almost always had someone with me. Mostly humans, although a few others here and there." He gave one final affectionate pat to the sign. "But this is where it all really began." He shook his head. "Despite what I may have told Tegan when I ran away from Flavia's insistence that I take the presidency."
"Kidnapped?" Marit listened to the story underneath the one he was telling, the feelings of nostalgia and loss, remembered joy and excitement that were a powerful undercurrent to everything he did.
"Kidnapped," he said. He shook his head. "I was so bloody useless. We wound up back in the Paleolithic era as they call it around here. One hundred and fifty-seven thousand Earth years back." Marit felt the Professor's surge of interest at the notion of being able to observe history in person. "I went off to collect samples and we all wound up being taken captive by a local tribe involved in some sort of internal struggle over whether and how to use fire."
The Professor frowned. "Use fire? For what?"
"As in they were so primitive," the Doctor explained, "They had only recently discovered how to create fire and were still in the process of determining its use and whether or not it was safe or wise to use it."
With some prompting, they were soon wandering the streets of London, the Doctor pointing out places he'd halted alien invasions, had arguments with former travelling companions and even a building where he once worked as a scientific advisor to some military programme when his people on Old Galfry had exiled, imprisoned and to an extent executed him for stopping some appallingly amoral experiments.
The more time he talked about his past, the more Marit began to see the complexity that underlay his often childish exterior. The more time she spent learning, the more mental notes she made to tell Torana. Interspersed through his stories of adventure were tales of Rose. Story after story, many of them not adventures, just things that happened with Rose.
As if it weren't strange enough to be under a sky of an oddly pale yet deep blue, with the water reflecting that back, with the green grass and exotic architectural styles, she saw an incredible amount of physical contact on the street. It felt shockingly exhibitionistic there. Couples draped all over each other as they walked down the street, squealing teenaged girls flinging themselves into enthusiastic hugs, young men involved in complicated hand gestures that led up to brief embraces, these humans touched constantly. And where a casual bump on the street would have been a cause for embarrassment and profuse apologies on New Galfry, on Earth it was, at best, worthy of a quick, "Sorry," before both moved on.
It put Rose's insistence that nothing the Doctor did truly meant anything into a new light. Marit was certain it meant something to him, but she got the feeling he'd missed the mixed signals he was sending the girl. Someone needed to give him a talking-to.
When Rose called, saying her mother was inviting them for tea, and the Doctor explained it was a quaint regional ritual to have tea and little sandwiches and little desserts and things at about midafternoon (along with a lengthy ramble about how much he liked little sandwiches), they agreed and rejoined Rose and her mother and the small flat.
"So, where'd you go?" Rose asked curiously. "You overthrow any alien dictators without me?"
Jackie made a disgusted noise, but didn't say anything more. Marit found herself retreating to a clinical mentality as she saw Rose's mother touching both Rose and the Doctor almost constantly. A hand on the shoulder, a brief hug. From what she'd seen thus far, touch like that was limited to close friends and family, but it just meant that Jackie saw the Doctor as one or both.
They sniped at each other in a strange sort of amicable rivalry, her telling him to get his feet off the furniture, Marit wholeheartedly agreed with that, him claiming she was an awful hostess while he stuffed her little treats and things into his mouth, her hitting him in retaliation.
After tea, the Professor insisted on looking at a bookstore they'd seen while travelling the city and the Doctor handed them both a large wad of local legal tender. Rose asking why, if he had money, she always had to pay for the chips. They agreed to come back in a few hours and they set out to explore the alien city and its alien literature. Maybe even take in a film, a form of entertainment that had, oddly enough now that she thought of it, never caught on, on New Galfry, even though they had television and plays both.
They left the Doctor, Jackie and Rose to their own devices.