Byzantine Pyrrhichios: Comparisons

"Oh, look," Mickey said flatly, pretending disdain for his old friend. "The bad penny."

"Fuzz-head," Jack shot back as he closed the front door, then swaggered over to the table, bussing Martha on his way past and hooking the fourth chair out. "Oh, don't worry, I'm at the same spot in the story she is," he explained as he sprawled on the chair, forestalling any queries about whether he knew what was going on.

"How did you find me?" Rose asked glumly.

Jack hooked a sardonic eyebrow at her and tapped the time jumper on his own wrist. "Where else would you have disappeared to? I didn't know the time, or the exact location, but I knew the date. And since I got here, about two hours ago, I've been tracking your jumper with mine. Figures you'd end up here. Did you grow up in the same place?"

"No," she told him, grimacing. "I'm not even sure where this is. I don't know how I ended up here – coincidence, I guess."

"No such thing," he replied, not bothering to explain, but she picked up on it anyway.

"So this is where... she lived then?"

"Yup," Mickey put in. "The building across the way there."

Rose sighed. "She must be something really special, huh?" Her glum voice made it obvious she didn't extend that opinion to herself.

Mickey drew breath to agree with the spoken sentiment (ignoring Martha's involuntary flinch), when Jack overrode him. "Not really," he said nonchalantly, netting himself startled looks from the Smiths. "Just an ordinary shop girl. Never even got her A-levels. The most common, everyday person in the world." Pausing for emphasis, he looked straight into Rose's puzzled eyes. "But you know what she did that made a difference? What she always does?"

Rose shook her head, miserable but curious.

"She stepped up." A pause for emphasis. "Whenever there was a situation – danger, injustice.. big or small... she stepped up and did what she could, whatever it took, to try to set the situation right. Might not have been much, what she could do... maybe something as simple as speaking up and saying 'no', or... pushing a button under fire, or... standing up to somebody she cared about when they were about to do something wrong." He paused, remembering, then shot her another grin. "First time I ever laid eyes on her, you know where she was? In mid-air, over London, in the middle of an air raid – World War II," he said aside to Martha, not knowing if this Rose had the same wars in her history. "Just dangling in mid-air, hanging onto a rope underneath a giant barrage balloon, floating through the dive bombers and anti-aircraft bullets. You know how she got there? She'd grabbed the rope to climb up a building, to try to save a young boy who was about to fall off it. That's it. She saw a situation and just stepped up, doing what she could to help. That's Rose. That's what made her special – what still makes her special."

Rose had been listening, to the subtext, as well. "I guess you're saying that's what I need to do, too."

Jack nodded, kindly. "If you want to get home again. I can't do this by myself. I need your help."

"But what can I do? What can I – possibly – do?"

"Just step up. Could be something as simple as... standing in the right place, at the right moment, in front of the right people... and saying 'no'." He leaned over and took her hand, speaking earnestly. "Look... I'm not expecting you to work a miracle. That's not what this is about. That's not what's needed – not what you or I would think is a miracle. But the effect of what we're going to do together... that's going to be miraculous, to the people watching, and they're going to turn it into a miracle in the stories they'll build around it in the centuries between then and now." He stopped again, smiling almost to himself. "Let me tell you something, sweetheart. Every story you've ever heard about a 'miracle'," his voice made air quotes, "had at its heart some ordinary person, who did some ordinary thing, that was made into something extraordinary by the circumstances and the storytellers who came after to tell about it."

Silence fell over the table for a long moment, as Rose struggled before their eyes to believe in herself.

"I jumped worlds once," Mickey put in, gathering their eyes and diverting them. "Same world Rose is now in, before I came back. But there was another version of me in that world. Rickey, he was called, instead of Mickey. And he was brave, too – braver than I was at the time. He stepped up. And he taught me to do it, by example. I became like him. Because I wanted people to believe in me like they believed in him."

"Did it work?" Jack asked, not teasing for once.

Mickey raised his eyebrows, then silently turned the question to Martha.

She smiled. "I didn't know you before, but now... you're one of the bravest men I've ever known. I wouldn't have married you otherwise."

He reflected the smile back to his wife, then it softened as he turned back to Rose. "You're basically the same person as our Rose, underneath, just as much as I was the same as Rickey. I know you've got it in you – the same spunk she's got. I know you can do it. There's no doubt in my mind."

Rose looked down at the table for a moment, then made herself take a deep breath and square her shoulders. "All right," she said softly. She looked back at Jack. "I'll try."

"That's all there is to it," was his approving reply.