After a couple of days of going places that were fun, Rose and the Doctor wound up at the inaugural ball of the President of Lithan on Quencian. The Lady President herself was speaking to some ambassador. This wasn't the type of scene Rose enjoyed. A bunch of hoity toity people getting together in their finest-or just what they wore on Saturday-made her cringe.
They were trying to stop a woman who'd traveled to that time and was going to try to kill the President's wife. She would start a series of programs that ended a long standing dispute between her people and the neighboring country. Rose couldn't remember all of the details, but she was all for keeping people alive who would bring peace.
"Drink? Sir, Madam?" a teenage girl dressed in the uniform of the wait staff asked. She held a stone tray with four green drinks sitting atop if it.
"Which one is this?" the Doctor asked.
"Jafarr," she replied, naming the drink. The Doctor immediately made a face and declined for both of them.
"What's in it?" Rose asked.
"Pears," he replied, making the cute scrunched up face again. Rose giggled. "Oi! Don't giggle at me. And don't think I've forgotten about the pear incident, either, Rose Tyler," he chided her. "Seven things, just seven, and you broke one of them."
"You'll find that I have no remorse," Rose replied, grinning at the memory as she looked out over the crowd. Then her grin disappeared as she realized something.
"What?" the Doctor asked, picking up on her sudden change in demeanor.
"Wait staff," Rose explained.
"Oh," the Doctor realized. "How did we miss that?"
"We're thick," Rose replied. They'd fallen into the trap of not noticing the people who were wearing uniforms. The supposed teenage girl who'd offered them drinks was the woman they were looking for.
They'd stopped her, just as she was handing a drink to the First Lady. Rose slapped it out of her hand and they both explained what had happened. When the drink was tested, the woman had been imprisoned, and the Doctor and Rose went back to the TARDIS, mission accomplished.
####################
Snuggled together in bed, Rose contemplated how to start this conversation as the Doctor drew circles on the skin of her arm. "What are you writing?" she asked quietly, not wanting to break the intimacy of the moment.
He smirked and responded, "Of course you recognize it as writing. Brilliant, you are. Sometimes I write the story of how we met. Sometimes about how you absorbed time just to keep me safe. But, right now, I'm writing your name and mine together."
"Like the Doctor plus Rose in a little heart?" she giggled.
"No," he whispered. "Not the Doctor. That is the title that I chose. My real name is hidden from the universe, only to be revealed to my wife."
Rose kissed him then, realizing that he was really letting her into those little secret parts of him that he had always kept hidden away from everyone. She desperately didn't want to spoil this moment with an argument, but they had put off the conversation for too long already.
"Doctor, what happened to Jack after the Game Station?" Rose questioned after allowing a few moments of reflection on what he had already revealed to her. He took a sharp breath and she could see him bracing himself for another deflection. "Don't. Don't tell me he was busy rebuilding the Earth or some other rubbish like that. Is he dead?"
He sighed, realizing that he couldn't hide anything from her anymore. "No, Love, he's not dead. The problem is that he was dead. When you came back as the Bad Wolf, Jack had been killed by the Daleks and you brought him back."
"What? How could you have just left him there after that?" she asked accusingly.
"I couldn't help it, Rose. I was dying, knew I'd regenerate soon, you were unconscious, and when you brought him back... He's different now. It would have been even worse for my regeneration if he had been near me," he tried to explain.
"What do you mean? How is he different? What could Jack have done that would have made it worse?" Rose pressed.
"He's a fixed point in time now. He cannot not exist in the universe," he told her.
"You mean, he can't die?" she asked in shock and sat up abruptly.
"Well, he can I suppose, but he would come right back. The universe will refuse to allow him to stay dead. It hurts my time senses to be around him and you saw what a mess I was after my regeneration. I couldn't be near him, so I got us away from there," he admitted, hoping that she would understand that he had been functioning on instinct alone in that moment.
"And I did that to him? He'll just keep dying over and over? Why would I do that?" Rose wondered, tears falling down her cheeks.
"Oh, Rose. You didn't mean to. At least, I can't imagine that you meant to. The power inside of you was out of your control. It was too much and it isn't your fault. You wanted Jack alive and you did that, but controlling life and death is too big a responsibility for anyone," he assured her as he rubbed her back soothingly.
"Can we go find him? Now that you're better? I need to know that he's ok. He saved us back there, Doctor. He's saved us so many times. Jack deserves at least an explanation of what did that to him," she insisted. "Even if he hates me for it, I need to see him again."
"I don't know, Rose. It's me he'll probably hate for abandoning him and I couldn't bear it if he blamed you for anything," he replied, rubbing his neck nervously.
"But it's my fault," Rose argued. "He has the right to blame me for it."
"I'd rather he just blamed me for everything," he said and flopped onto his back next to her.
Rose leaned over him to say, "I know you'd take on anything for my sake, but Jack deserves to know and he deserves the chance to talk to us about it. Also, you might be able to help him get those memories back, yeah?"
"I'm not sure. I could try, if he trusts me to be anywhere near him after all of this," he sighed.
"Do you know how to find him?" Rose wondered.
"I can set up a scan in the morning. There can't be too many beings like that out there, but he had his vortex manipulator, remember. He could have gone anywhere in the universe and in time," he responded, hoping she would drop it for tonight.
"There is no morning on the TARDIS, Doctor. You're always saying that. You just want me to go to sleep," she argued.
"For now. It might take a while to find him, Rose, but I promise that we will look. Now, you're tired and I want to hold you for a few hours and just relax, knowing you're safe," he told her with a light kiss to her temple.
"Alright, Doctor. I love you," she acquiesced and snuggled into his side, resting her head on his chest.
"And I love you, my soulmate, my Rose," he whispered to her softly and held her close. Rose hummed a little and he felt her happiness at his words, but she was still a bit angry with him and hurt at the situation.
The Doctor rubbed her back as she slowly calmed down. Not long after she fell asleep, he followed her in what he hoped would be a peaceful slumber.
###################
The next morning, relatively speaking, Rose followed the Doctor to the console room, where he was inputting parameters into the scanner. He hit the last few buttons with a flourish and turned to her. "There, the scanner's working now," he told her.
"I was wondering, couldn't we just go back to right after we left and see if we could catch him there?" Rose asked.
"I did check that. The TARDIS refuses to go too close to those events. The nearest I could even scan the vicinity, he's already gone and I'm not sure where," he told her honestly.
"Alright then, where shall we go while our lovely ship searches for our long-lost friend?" she asked, happy that he was keeping his promise to search without any further prompting from her. Maybe he missed Jack as well.
"I have the perfect place," he replied with a smirk. Flicking a few levers, he piloted them to their destination and Rose felt an odd hum from the TARDIS. She wasn't sure what it was, but thought maybe it had something to do with her search for Jack, so she ignored it.
"Where are we?" she questioned as she threaded her arm through his. He led her down the street toward a marketplace, filled with people and the strong aromas of food. She breathed in deeply, always ready to sample something new.
"This is The Market. The whole planet is a giant bazaar. You can get anything here, well... I say anything. What I mean is anything that's not one of a kind in the Milky Way Galaxy in this time frame, which happens to be the thirty-seventh century," he babbled as he guided his fiancée through the crowds toward his intended destination. He knew the moment she saw it, a sign that read 'Chips' boldly in the distance. She squeezed his arm and bounced happily beside him. Yes, this plan was going to work out perfectly.
He ordered two steaming baskets of what looked like perfectly normal Earth chips and placed them on the table. Rose grabbed the salt and shook a generous amount over her share as he smirked and just watched her.
Rose picked up the treat eagerly and placed one into her mouth, closing her eyes and getting ready to sigh happily, as she always did, but her face suddenly contorted into a disgusted grimace at the taste. "Ugh! What the hell?" she shouted and spit it out into a napkin.
The Doctor burst out laughing. "That, my dear, was for the pear," he teased.
"Oi! You deserved that bloody pear. I've already paid for that one, thank you very much!" she growled at him angrily.
"I don't know what you mean by that. I didn't do anything to warrant such a disgusting punishment," he responded confidently, then grimaced at the memory of the taste.
"Oh really? Do you happen to recall, with that big Time Lord brain of yours, exactly what the topic of conversation was when I gave you that pear?" Rose asked pointedly.
"What has that got to do with... Oh," he stopped himself as he recalled the particular details of that conversation. "You're not still upset over what happened then, are you? I came back, Rose, you wouldn't have been abandoned, the TARDIS would have taken you home if I hadn't returned," he assured her.
"That wasn't the point, Doctor. Yes, I was upset about you leaving me behind, but that was never what really bothered me about all that. It was about her," Rose informed him and nearly started to tear up at the very thought of him running off with the woman he seemed to so admire, even as a human. "There you were, gushing about a woman who was trained to seduce a king and who had called me a child! You were her 'lonely angel,' she was almost a queen, and I was just some stupid kid."
"Oh, Rose, I never knew you were upset about that. I thought it was because I left and didn't think I'd be able to come back," he told her.
"She thought you were hers. And you went off dancing with her and having banana daiquiris while they thought I was compatible and just about cut my brain out," she argued, needing to get it all out for once.
"Rose, I swear to you, I didn't stay away all that time. I was trying to find where they had taken you and when I did, I had to come up with some way of stopping them. That anti-oil stuff wasn't just lying around, you know. If she had died before history said she did, the paradox would have ripped a hole in the universe. More holes than the ship did, and worse ones. I have a responsibility," he insisted.
"So, take me with you. I know you said you couldn't take the TARDIS and we can't change our past, but next time, let me be stranded with you," she ordered.
"All I could think of was getting back to you, you know. Stuck there, staring out at the stars, and thinking about how I'd failed you again. She saw that and sent me home to you," he told her.
"So why were you so anxious to bring her along after?" Rose asked, not sure she really wanted to know the answer.
"Because I did admire her," he admitted and Rose scoffed, trying to pull her hands out of his, but he gripped them tighter. "Hear me out. I admired her because she was a brilliant and accomplished woman and she thought to move the fireplace from her childhood home, making it possible for me to get back sooner. I thought she would have enjoyed one trip before being placed back exactly where she belonged in history. If I had taken her from there permanently, it would have been just as dangerous as if she had died. I barely knew her, I certainly didn't care more about her than you, love."
"It didn't feel that way," she sniffled.
"I'm sorry. I should have realized at the time what was upsetting you, but our connection then was much weaker than now and depended on touch and you avoided me for weeks after that. I swear I thought it was because I had abandoned you there," he apologized and kissed her hands. He grimaced a bit as he tasted the chips he had bought earlier on her fingers and felt guilty about having made such a fuss over the pear incident now.
"Saying something sooner might have stopped this from happening," Rose chastised herself.
"Oh, that's disgusting," he groused, tasting one of the chips directly in an effort to change the topic to anything but his shortcomings. "Let's get some real ones."
"Nah, I think I'm off chips for the day," Rose denied, shaking her head.
"Milkshakes?" he suggested, raising his eyebrows hopefully. "They've got lovely banana ones just up the road and chocolate too. Your favourite."
"Alright, Doctor," she sighed and took his hand as they left to enjoy something sweet instead.
########################
Later, when they returned to the TARDIS, the Doctor's pockets were loaded down with items he'd picked up from The Market. He went to the scanner to see if any results had shown up yet in an effort to make things up to Rose, but there was nothing on the immortal Captain. There were other interesting results, though.
"That's odd," the Doctor murmured. Rose came up behind him, looking at the scanner, even though it was all in swirling Gallifreyan.
"What's odd?" Rose asked.
"Temporal disturbances on Earth. Close to your time, too. It's late two thousand seven." He hit some keys and brought up more information on the center of the disturbances. "Ohhh," he enthused.
"Ooh, what?" Rose wondered.
"Would you like to investigate a haunted mansion?" he asked.
"Sounds right up our alley," she said with a smile.
"Well, my dear Daphne, let's go solve a mystery," he joked.
"You remind me more of Shaggy than Fred, but I refuse to be the dog, thanks," she replied, they bumped shoulders playfully and walked out of the TARDIS that had just landed.
