Chapter 21: Truth and Trepidation
She gets in the car, she takes a deep breath and then she's ready.
John is driving separately since they both have their cars here, so they've said their goodbyes, made their promises to phone each other as soon as matters are dealt with, and now she's thinking about what sort of takeaway she wants to share with him for supper later, because certainly everything will be cleared up by then.
His cousin is fine – she's already said so – and the Doctor – well, he can say what he wants, but John is human, plain and simple.
She knows it can't be easy for him, especially if the likeness really is that close, and the irony of it all isn't lost on her. That he should bear such a resemblance to the Time Lord – John, this human man who's shown her the path back to her own humanity – well, she can only imagine how it must look to the Doctor.
It's just one more regret to add to the list, because her every thought of him is tinged with regret. Their failure to make a life together will always be the greatest failure of her life, and that's not something that she'll ever forget about. Their lives will always be linked; she'll always be there for him, looking out for him as best she can.
She should probably explain that to John, come to think of it, because he only has a cursory understanding of the nature of her ties to him.
She steers the car out to the motorway and resolves to have a chat with him when she sees him later.
She passes the time flipping stations on the radio. There's a news story that catches her attention about this year's cabbage crop; it seems that the vegetables are spoiling almost immediately upon harvesting and the cause is a mystery to all involved scientists and she wonders if it might be a matter for Torchwood's attention.
She switches stations and listens to music for the remainder of the drive. When she's about fifteen minutes from home, she's listening to the Police and she's musing over how different they sound in this universe without Andy Summers on guitar. That's when her mobile rings. She switches off the music, glances at the caller ID and she smiles, because it looks like she'll be seeing John sooner than expected.
"Do you feel like Indian or pizza?" she asks playfully into the phone.
"Rose," the urgency of his reply shakes through her like an earthquake and rattles away all her cheerfulness. "Rose, you need to come over here straightaway." There's tension in his voice mixed with confusion and a trace of anger as well, and she doesn't think it's targeted at her, but she's not sure.
"What is it?" She grips the steering wheel and moves into the slow lane.
"It's him – your Doctor. He's here."
The Doctor's words are in her mind again, "Rose, he is me..." and she sighs with impatience and rolls her eyes because she should've anticipated this; he wouldn't have been able to resist investigating. "Put him on the phone," she says.
It's time to end this.
"I can't," John says darkly. "Rose, he's ill."
She blinks and shakes her head. "What?"
"He's unconscious," John elaborates, "and Charley insists we can't call an ambulance – some cockamamie story about aliens – something about a fob watch..." His voice is tight, his syllables stiff with indignation and though the sentence is left incomplete it's a hard edge that teeters on a cliff, rather than fading away quietly. She wonders what the rest of the 'cockamamie story' is, because now that this is finally sinking in, she's getting the distinct impression that there's a lot more going on than she realises.
Stupid, stupid ape.
Her reflexes kick into gear before she allows herself any more self-pity. The Doctor is ill and he needs help. "No," she agrees with Charley. "Not an ambulance – they wouldn't know what to do with him. You need to take him to Torchwood. Can you get him in the car?"
"Yes, Charley and I should be able to manage him."
"OK," she instructs. "I'll call Dr. Marwood to meet you there. I'll be there as soon as I can."
She gives him the address, hangs up the phone and says goodbye to all her plans.
By the time she arrives, they've got him on a gurney and they're wheeling him into one of the Torchwood treatment rooms. Dr. Marwood is there, examining him and barking out questions Charley is answering using words like 'chronotomic' and 'temporal deficit' and everything is white, smells of antiseptic and human frailty and none of it makes any sense.
John is there and she goes to him, takes his hand and they stand side by side in uncomprehending silence as the two women work away. She feels tears burn in her eyes as she watches the Doctor, pale, unconscious and helpless.
She thinks back to how he looked when he came to see her – both times, recently – and now she sees it; she sees that he hasn't been well for some time now. She should've seen it then, only she'd been too wrapped up in her own life and in her denial of him – because despite all her claims of not knowing him, he's still the Doctor. Or at least he's a pale shadow of him, but either way, she'd always thought of him as being invincible.
To see him like this is horrible. He could die. Just like a human.
She turns to John and buries her face in his shoulder. "What happened?" she asks. "What did Charley say?"
His arm tightens around her. "Charley said a lot of things," he replies, tense jaw and narrowed eyes, and now she knows the source of his ire earlier, even if she doesn't understand it.
He's about to continue, but then Charley lets out a gasp from across the room that's emphatic enough to cut off all conversation. "That's it!" she cries. "I think know what to do!" She turns and runs, heading top-speed for the door.
"Wait!" Rose cries after her, turning to follow with John's hand still in hers as she tugs him along.
Together they chase the girl down the stairs and out the door to the city streets. "Charley!" John calls after her. They look to the left and the right until finally they catch a glimpse of her as she disappears round a corner several blocks down.
So they run. They dash after Charley as she leads them down this block, around that corner, across a street, all the while ignoring their cries of her name. Rose's breath is getting short, she feels sweat forming on her brow and a glance over at John shows that he's straining as well.
Then they round another corner and she sees it, and the shock slices into her, cuts open her soul and takes away what breath she has left.
Because it's there.
The blue box.
It's right there in front of her and it's impossible – it ought to be impossible because the Doctor – the real Doctor – left them at Bad Wolf Bay. He left them, he left her and he's gone, and she's never supposed to see him or the TARDIS ever again, but there it is, right there on the street corner, and the sight cuts into her already-straining lungs as she hunches over, gasping for air between suffocating sobs.
She turns her head away from the impossibility and tries to breathe, and that's when she sees John's face.
He's looking at the TARDIS with wide eyes, an open mouth and confused lines across his face. He looks at it like he knows it. He looks at it like it ought to be impossible. "The blue box," he breathes. "It's real."
She grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him like she's trying to shake the delusion from him. "No," she begs, pleading with him as she feels the tears streaming down her face. "You don't know it. You can't know it." He's not part of all this. He's human; he's just a normal human man.
He flinches and she realises she's digging her fingernails into his shoulder. "It's in my dreams," he says softly, his words heavier than the breath they're spoken with. "Nearly every night – the blue box, carrying me to strange, amazing places." He squeezes his eyes closed like he's searching his memory, before opening them to focus on her. "How can it be real?"
She moves her hands to clutch at his sweaty face as she searches him, imploring him with her eyes. Some sort of psychic link, she speculates, tries to explain away.
But the TARDIS is there and it can't be explained away.
The door opens and Charley emerges, holding something in her hand as she breaks into a run back towards Torchwood. "What are you doing?" Rose calls after her, her voice high and quivering and bordering on hysteria.
"I'm trying to save him!" Charley calls back just as she rounds the corner.
Rose turns back to John, her fingers still on his skin, his fast breaths still breezing on her face. She looks at him and he's a complete stranger; he's something she'd treasured, now proven to be counterfeit.
She doesn't know him.
She jerks her hands away, pulls her body away from him, throws him a look of horror and then she turns back and runs after the girl, and this time she welcomes the pounding of her feet on the pavement, the sharp breaths and the stitch in her side because it drowns out the agony in her heart.
The time that follows is a blur of anguish, confusion and anxiety.
She's back at Torchwood, there's the blinding bright light of the corridors, there's a closed door and there are voices from within that she strains to hear but even when she can make out the words, the meaning fails to reach her.
There are footsteps that she thinks might be her own; slow, dragging footsteps that swish back and forth in a rhythmic tempo as she paces, a series of physical jolts stirring up the emotional turmoil within her.
There's breathing behind her that she knows is John's and then his touch is faltering on her shoulder and she reacts on instinct, pushing him away with a flailing arm as if he's diseased.
He stays away after that and she doesn't look at him, but every so often she hears a sharp intake of breath like he's about to speak. Her shoulders tense up, her head turns away as far as possible from him, and he stops before saying anything.
Whoever the hell he is.
She pushes away all thoughts and focuses everything she has on the feel of each footstep, the sound of her heels hitting the floor, the sight of her shoes as they bend and straighten with each step, one, then the other, then back again. The visceral repetition is her limit right now. It keeps the tears at bay. It keeps her from going mad.
Finally there's the creak of a door opening and then Charley's face is in front of her, wide eyes and a worried shrug to her shoulders. "I think we've stopped the haemorrhaging," she says. "Now we just have to wait." She seems to be having trouble looking Rose in the eye.
She hears movement behind her and she sucks in a breath, pulls away from his presence even before John has a chance to touch her. "What did you do for him?" she chokes out.
"The device," Charley replies. "It's a chrono- chronotomic-something," she sputters. "I don't remember what he called it, but it's supposed to stimulate his body's production of neuro-temporal perceptive fluid."
Rose squeezes her eyes shut, rubs her forehead and tries again, reaching for something – anything – that she can wrap her mind around right now. "But how – how did you know what to do?"
Charley sighs. "I've seen it before: Acute Chrono-somatic Conductive Deficiency in a Time Lord," the girl explains slowly, and now she's fixing Rose's gaze with sympathy and it's the last thing Rose wants right now from this girl. "Not this severe, of course," Charley adds, "but I took a guess that the same remedy would apply." She nods behind her in John's direction.
Time Lord.
And that's when she finally sees it; when she recognises this girl for who she is. Because nothing about her has ever really added up. She never quite fit, in the way the tiniest detail would set off her inexplicable emotional triggers, while these shattering events around them now seem positively commonplace.
It's not because she's off, it's because the whole world around her is.
Rose ducks her head and looks at her sideways. She swallows hard. "You're not his cousin, are you?"
Charley presses her lips together and shakes her head.
"Charley!" John's voice speaks up suddenly from behind with an admonishment that makes Rose shudder at the closeness of him. "What is this insanity?" he demands. "Of course you're my cousin. You're Charlotte Pollard, daughter of Richard and Louisa Pollard, who was my father's sister."
Charley ignores his outburst. "I'm from 1930," she continues, speaking to Rose with infuriating patience. "I met the Doctor aboard the airship R101 and he saved me when it crashed. I've been travelling with him ever since." Her eyes move back over Rose's shoulder and in spite of herself, Rose looks back at John, who can't seem to stop shaking his head.
Finally he spins on his heels and turns away in exasperation.
"You saw it," Charley insists to him. "You saw the TARDIS. I know you recognised it."
"Just because some figment of my subconscious is somehow…" he starts to spit out a response.
But Rose cuts him off. "But he's human," she insists to Charley. "He is. And look at him – he doesn't understand anything you're saying."
"He is human," Charley agrees. "He changed himself into a human. The Doctor – he has a device that can rewrite biology." She looks up at the ceiling and draws in a long breath. "There was this creature, sort of like a Gallifreyan mosquito only it bites Time Lords and creates these Time anomalies. Tiny, localised and entirely harmless, except this one wasn't. It kept growing and feeding off him and there was no way to make it stop. He said it would've killed every Time Lord on Gallifrey if he didn't do something. So we drew it away – here – and he changed into a human to starve it out." There are tears of regret in her eyes as she fills in the final piece of the puzzle. "There weren't supposed to be any Time Lords in this universe."
Rose's eyes fall closed. "But there was one," she supplies flatly. "Or half of one, anyway."
"We had no idea..." Charley begs in apology.
"All this time," Rose unleashes the accusation. "You knew all this time. The Doctor could die, and you just watched me – with him – and you didn't say anything."
"I did!" Charley insists vehemently. "I tried to warn you, but if I'd told you the whole truth you wouldn't have listened. You thought I was crazy enough as it was." Her shoulders sag as she looks away. "I had no way of knowing that you knew the Doctor too."
"You should've said," Rose moans as the truth of it all sinks in and spreads through her like a poison. "Oh, god. Oh, my god, it was just him all over again." She leans back on the wall and sinks down, her head in her hands. "Oh, god," she sobs over and over, rocking her body back and forth. "All this time, it was just him again. It was him. It was always him."
tbc