Chapter Forty-Seven—London, 6 October, 2007

"John, stop!" Rose cried, yanking on his arm again and hoping that in the heat of the moment, he hadn't noticed her slip.

John opened his hand and stepped backwards, never breaking eye contact with Jimmy.

Back still against the wall, Jimmy slumped to the ground. He panted, noisily taking in huge gulps of air, and scrambled away. When he was no longer in reach, he jumped to his feet.

He coughed and rubbed his throat.

A tiny trickle of blood, from the punch John had given him, ran down from Jimmy's mouth to his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his hand. "You can really pick 'em, Rose. This one's a complete nutter. Both of you are." He backed away towards the mouth of the alley, warily looking from John to Rose and back. "You… fucking stay away from me. Both of you, just fucking stay away."

Rose watched as he disappeared out of the alley. Adrenalin still coursing through her body, she took several deep breaths, trying to slow her heart rate.

John looked down at her, his expression unreadable. "Are you all right?"

She raised a hand and tentatively touched the back of her head. She winced. When Jimmy had shoved her against the wall, her body had instinctively stiffened up, and she'd taken the biggest blow to her back. Her head, while sore, hadn't hit hard, but she'd still scraped it against the rough brick. At least she wasn't bleeding, she thought. Her head hurt and her back was sore, but she was otherwise uninjured. She nodded. "You?"

"Let's go," he said, not answering.

They made their way out of the alley, and unlike he usually did, John didn't take her hand. As scared as she'd been when Jimmy had her against the wall, and then during John's one-sided fight with him, this frightened her more.

"Uh, how…how did you know where I was?" she asked nervously.

"Later," he answered without looking at her.

The walk back to the Estate was uncomfortable, the silence between them oppressive. With each step, Rose became more and more terrified that she'd ruined everything.

After John let them into the flat, he gestured at a chair in the living room.

"Sit down," he directed.

Rose sat.

He left the room for a moment and returned with the torch from his tool kit.

"I need to check you for a concussion," he said.

"This, uh, is getting to be a habit," she said with an uncomfortable laugh.

He didn't smile.

After he checked her eyes and where her head had connected with the brick wall, he set the torch down on the table.

"No signs of a concussion. You're lucky. You could have been really hurt," he said quietly. He met her eyes. "What were you thinking, Rose, meeting him like that?"

"If you knew where I was, you must have seen the note…"

He looked at her evenly, waiting for her to continue.

"He said… he said he had something of mine, and The Cat was missing…"

Groaning, he closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

It was the first bit of emotion he'd showed since the alley.

"The Cat has been staying with Gladys and Irene," he told her. "Saw her there today when I was fixing their sink. Looks like she's settled in for the long haul. They all seem happy with the arrangement."

"Oh. That's…that's good. I'm glad she's okay."

After another long uncomfortable pause between them, John broke the silence.

"I wouldn't have hurt him, Rose. Not really. Just wanted to put the fear of God in him," he said quietly. "You didn't trust me."

Rose felt a wave of relief. He was just acting weird because he thought she didn't trust him.

"It's not that. I just… it's just… it happened so fast, and you looked so angry…"

He nodded.

"I understand. Might have done the same thing myself. The thing I don't understand, though, is that in the middle of the fight, when you were trying to pull me off him, I thought you called me Doctor."

She froze.

"I mean, I could be wrong, I might have misheard, or maybe you just said the wrong name in the heat of the moment." He paused a moment, looking at her searchingly. "But I'm not wrong, am I?"

She bit her lip and looked away, unable to come up with an answer that was believable enough that he'd accept.

He stood up and took a step back.

"All this time," he said. "All this time you knew who I was. All this time you've been lying to me!"

"John—"

"I can't believe it. I thought you were different. But you're just another stupid ape on a planet full of 'em!"

"John—"

"Don't call me that, Rose! After all, it's not my name. My name's James McCrimmon. Or is it? Is that a lie too?"

She nodded.

"So what is it, Rose? What is my name?"

"I don't know," she said in a small voice.

"Oh, don't give me that. You were gone a year. Traveling. With me. You trying to tell me in all that time, I never once told you my name?"

She shook her head.

"I don't believe it."

"It's the truth!"

He shook his head and paced the tiny room. "I loved you! I trusted you! And even now, you're still lying to me!"

"I'm not!" she protested.

"Get out," he said quietly.

"What?" she asked, unable to believe her ears.

He whirled on her. "Get out. Get out!"

"Fine!" she shouted. "Fine!"

She fled to the bedroom. She pulled her rucksack out from under the bed.

He followed her to the doorway. "Before you go, just tell me one thing. Why'd you do it? Why'd you lie to me all this time?"

"What do you care?" she asked as she gathered up her clothes. Hands shaking, she unzipped the bag and began to shove things into it.

"Why… did… you… do… it?" His voice was low, and as cold as she'd ever heard it.

She whirled on him. "Because you asked me to!"

"What?" he demanded. "What do you mean, I asked you to?"

"You wouldn't believe me even if I told you." She glanced around the room. When she didn't see anything else that belonged to her, she zipped up the bag.

"Try me!"

"All right," she said. "You really want to know? You're called the Doctor. Not John Smith, not James McCrimmon. Just 'The Doctor'. And you're a nine hundred-year-old alien who can travel in time. Something was wrong with you and your ship, and your future self left me here to watch over you while he went off to try and fix it."

He stared at her, a horrified expression on his face. "You're completely mental. You should be locked up somewhere."

Frustrated, she glanced around the room. She caught sight of his notebook next to the bed. Although he hadn't drawn in it in weeks, it still sat in its usual spot on his bedside table. She grabbed it and shook it at him.

"The stuff in here? These are your memories coming out in your dreams." She opened the notebook and scanned the pages. She stopped when she found what she was looking for. "I don't know what everything is in here, but this," she turned the notebook so he could see it and pointed to the picture of the police box flying in space, "this is your ship. It's called the TARDIS. It stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space." She turned the page. "This is your control room." She flipped several pages. "And these? These are called Daleks. And this…"

She searched for the page where he'd drawn her hanging by a chain over a large pit. She turned the notebook back to him. "That's me," she said, pointing at the page. "This really happened. You were fighting the Nestene Consciousness, trying to prevent them from taking over the world. That pit is below the London Eye." She flipped the pages again. "The Eye that you drew right there." She tossed the notebook on the bed.

He shook his head. "No. It's not possible."

"Told you you wouldn't believe me."

She hoisted her rucksack over her shoulder. She would not beg to stay, she told herself. She would not beg to stay even though every cell in her body was pleading with her to. Without looking at him, she walked past him out of the bedroom and to the front door. She placed her hand on the handle.

"One last thing," he said.

"What?" she asked, still facing the door. She knew if she looked at him right now, she'd burst into tears. She knew she was going to, but she refused to fall apart in front of him.

"All those times you'd disappear, when you'd leave the garage on your lunch break, were you really going to that alley?"

"Yep."

"Why?"

"Because that's where your ship is," she said over her shoulder. "She's sick and she's lonely and I was keeping her company."

She slipped out of the flat onto the walkway. As she closed the door behind her, the tears that had threatened to fall began to slowly roll down her cheeks. She covered her face in her hands for a moment, then pulled herself together. She wiped her face with her hands. She could do this.

Back at her mum's flat, she pulled out her key and let herself in. She could hear her mother talking to someone over the sound of the television. Inwardly, she groaned. She'd forgot Bev was over.

"Rose?" her mum called from the living room. "Is everything all right?"

"Fine, Mum," she called back, trying to keep a waver out of her voice. "Just… need some stuff from my room."

She gently closed the bedroom door behind her and dropped her rucksack on the floor, then she crossed the short distance to the bed. She lay down and, curled up in a fetal position, finally allowed herself to cry.

~oOo~

John paced the short length of the flat as he tried to figure out how everything had gone to shite so quickly. That morning, he'd told Rose he loved her. He'd asked her to stay with him permanently. And although he'd not mentioned it, hadn't even really formulated the thought in his own mind, he realized he'd been headed to ask her to marry him.

And now she was gone.

And it was his fault. After all, he'd told her to go. Ordered it. Shouted in her face to get out.

He tried to convince himself he'd been justified. After all, she'd betrayed him. She'd been lying to him for months. But if he were in the right, why did it hurt so much?

How could he have misjudged her so badly? He'd thought himself to be a better judge of character.

But, he reminded himself, she'd expressed concern about their relationship more than once—the first time they'd made love and that very morning when he'd asked her to stay—trying to convince him he didn't know what he was doing, trying to convince him he didn't know his own mind. And he'd known she was hiding things from him, if for no other reason she disappeared for hours at a time with no explanation (not even an acknowledgement she was doing it).

Evidently to hang out in an empty alley.

All bets were off when someone was mad. It was odd, though. In her rant at him she'd sounded like she was telling the truth, or at least that she believed what she was saying was true. She was either an incredible liar or she was seriously delusional. Certifiable.

Probably the weirdest thing about all this (and that was saying something because everything about this was weird) was the business of his dream notebook. She'd had an explanation for many of the images in it. But her explanations made no sense. They were ludicrous. Him a time-traveling alien that flew around the universe in a Police Box? It would be laughable if it weren't so crazy.

No, what was truly ludicrous was the fact that he was giving any of it any credence at all.

John retrieved his notebook from the bedroom. He sat down on the sofa and stared at the cover for a moment before opening it. As he looked through the pages, he told himself the drawings were just evidence of an overactive imagination, nothing more.

But if that were true, why was he so drawn to them? Because he was, particularly the ones she'd said were of his ship.

He slammed the notebook closed. There was one way of resolving all of this, one way of proving to himself that none of it was true. He was as mad as she was to even consider doing what he was about to do.

He had to go back to that alley.

~oOo~

Rose lay on her back and stared at the bedroom ceiling. She'd screwed up. She'd had one job, and she'd screwed it up.

But if she were to be brutally honest with herself, she'd mucked everything up long before this evening. She never should have slept with him. Never should have moved in with him. What had she been thinking?

Now she'd ruined everything. Not only had she ruined her relationship with John, she'd probably ruined the friendship she had with the Doctor. Both of them. She might even have ruined her own past. If John… no, when John turned back into the Doctor, he might not want to go back for her.

Then she had a horrifying thought. What if she'd created a paradox again?

Stomach churning, needing some sort of answer, she got off the bed and rummaged through her rucksack. After a moment, her hand closed around the instruction cube the Doctor had given her.

She sat back down on the bed. With a flick of her thumb, the cube turned on, and for the first time in months she saw the image of her Doctor, her proper Doctor in her proper time stream.

Had she managed to screw things up so badly that he wouldn't even remember she'd traveled with him?

As his hologram spoke, pacing back and forth on the top of the cube, she sniffed, trying not to cry again.

God, she missed him.

She returned her attention to what he was saying.

"… it's essential that you give him as little information as possible so that he doesn't begin to suspect he isn't who he thinks he is because if he does begin to suspect he isn't who he thinks he is, he could have a crisis of identity which could make this whole bad situation a hundred times worse. Is that clear?"

She froze the image. "Yes," she told him. "And it is. A thousand times worse."

She turned the cube back on and listened to his instructions again.

"…mustn't let slip anything about our future together…"

"…maintain the timelines at all cost…"

"…don't let him hurt anyone…"

She groaned. "Is there anything I did right?"

"…If you encounter a situation you think you don't know how to handle, just use your best judgment. I know you'll do what's best. You always do. There's no one in the universe I believe in, no one I trust, more than you. See you soon."

The image froze.

"But I don't always do what's best," she told the hologram. "And you don't trust me anymore. And to tell the truth, I don't blame you."

~oOo~

John stood at the mouth of the alley. Night had fallen hours earlier and the light provided by the street lights on Davies didn't fall far into the passageway. He pulled his torch out of the pocket of his leather jacket and turned it on, grateful he'd thought to bring it with him.

As he made his way down the alley, he felt an overpowering sense of déjà vu. And not from being there earlier that evening. There was something distinctly familiar about the place: the asphalt, the wheelie bins, the brick wall.

He shined his torch around the area, then turned and looked back out at the street.

Yes. He'd been here before. He was sure of it. And he knew exactly when. By some strange coincidence, this was the alley he'd woken up in on New Year's Day.

He continued to the point where he'd had the fight with Jimmy. There was nothing there. There was nothing in the alley at all, other than the bins and the rubbish people had left behind. He hadn't really expected there would be. Still he found he was slightly disappointed. Deep down he'd hoped there would be something that could make sense of all of this.

But there wasn't. Rose had been lying all along.

He turned to go, but as the light from the torch struck some wooden crates at the end of the alley, he caught a glimpse of blue. Curious, he walked towards them.

There was definitely something back there.

He frowned. The crates stretched from one side of the alley to the other and had been stacked high enough that he couldn't reach the top of them. There didn't seem to be a way around them, not without dismantling the makeshift wall. Then he spotted a narrow walkway between the crates and the alley wall. He cautiously walked through it.

And stopped.

His heart pounded.

In front of him was an ancient Police Public Call Box. Just like the one he'd drawn in his notebook.

"No," he whispered, shaking his head. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "No, it's not possible."

He must have seen it when he'd been here on New Year's, he reckoned after a moment's thought. Somehow it must have got stuck in his subconscious. That's all it was. That's all it could be.

There was a small wooden box about half the size of one of the crates shoved up against the side of the Police Box. It occurred to him that it was the perfect place to sit, particularly if you were spending hours here. Maybe Rose really had been coming here, had sat right here for hours on end.

Didn't prove anything though. Just because she'd been coming here didn't make anything else she'd said be true.

He walked towards the tall blue box, suddenly conscious of a hum right on the edge of his hearing. It seemed to be emanating from the box. He crossed the rest of the distance and rested a hand on its wooden side. The surface was warm and seemed to vibrate slightly under his palm.

Odd. Really odd.

He backed away and tilted his head, staring at the Police Box curiously. Then he walked all the way around the box. Whatever it was, it certainly was far too small to be a space ship. That was simply ridiculous. Rose was delusional, that's all.

He pulled on the door's handle. It wouldn't open. The door was stuck. Or locked, he thought.

Frowning again, he shined the torch at the lock in the door. It looked like a standard Yale lock. He'd seen a Yale key recently. Where?

And then he remembered Rose's key, the one she wore around her neck all the time. It had been a Yale key.

"No, that's ridiculous," he said aloud. "Doesn't mean anything. Just because she comes here all the time and has a key that looks like it would fit you."

He puzzled over the mystery. "What did she call it again? The name of the ship? It was an acronym of something, something to do with time and space." It came back in a rush. "That's it. Time and Relative Dimension in Space, she'd said. TARDIS." He shook his head. TARDIS. The name sounded so familiar.

"Wait, wasn't Tardis the name on the messages on Rose's mobile?"

As if in response, the light on top of the Police Box flashed. Startled, he jumped backwards, bumping into the wall of crates behind him. They swayed a bit, and for a moment he thought that they were going to fall on top of him.

He fought the urge to turn tail and run.

"No. It's just a coincidence," he said, staring at the tall blue box again. "All of it. Every bit of it is a coincidence. It has to be." He swallowed nervously. "It has to be."

~oOo~

Still staring at the image of the Doctor standing on the information cube, Rose heard her mother talking to Bev outside her room. Then she heard the front door open and close.

There was a knock on her door.

"Rose, are you all right?"

As the door handle turned, her mother evidently not waiting for a response, Rose turned off the cube and shoved it under her pillow.

"I'm fine, Mum."

Jackie entered the room. "No, you're not. It doesn't take hours to find something in your room." She glanced at the floor and frowned. Rose followed her line of sight. The rucksack, still open, sat on the floor at the foot of the bed. "And when you come over, you usually don't bring all your things with you."

She sat down next to Rose on the bed.

"What happened, sweetheart?"

Tears welled up in Rose's eyes.

"John found out he's the Doctor, and he realized I've been lying to him. Then he said some nasty things and threw me out."

Jackie wrapped her arms around her as she buried her face in her mother's shoulder and began to cry again. "Oh, Rose, it'll be all right. I promise. Because if I know one thing, it's that that man loves you and he's not going to throw away your whole relationship over this."

"Oh, but you didn't see him, Mum. He was so angry. I'd forgot how bad his temper could get."

"Just give him a little while to cool down, and you'll see. He'll be back here lookin' for you before you know it. In the meantime, we'll eat ice cream and watch something stupid on TV."

That was the last thing she wanted to do, Rose thought, preferring the idea of going to sleep so she wouldn't have to think about any of this for at least a little while. Then she remembered her mother's break up with Stuart. Maybe they both needed the company.

She nodded. "I'll be right there. Just need to splash a little water on my face."

While her mum went to the kitchen to put the kettle on, Rose headed to the bathroom.

She pulled a face when she saw her reflection in the mirror. She looked a fright. Her eyes were red and puffy and her mascara had run, leaving long black tracks down her face.

She scrubbed her face clean of makeup, wondering if things would ever be all right again.

~oOo~

It was late when John arrived back at the courtyard of the Powell Estate. The whole place was deserted, the corner shop and the youth club and the Chinese takeaway all long since closed.

After he'd left the alley, he'd walked aimlessly for hours, lost in thought. What Rose had told him was clearly impossible, he'd told himself over and over. Aliens? Time travel? Ships no larger than a phone booth? It was clear on its face to be ridiculous.

But something was going on. A Police Box in a deserted alley that hummed and flashed its light? And he couldn't get over the fact that it had been that alley, that very alley, that he'd woken up in on New Year's. He'd never told Rose which alley it was. He hadn't even known himself. For that to be the same alley Rose had been visiting for months had to be more than coincidence.

Before he entered Lambert House, he turned and looked at the building opposite his. It was clear he needed answers, and there was only one place to get them.

He crossed the courtyard to Bucknall House and climbed the cement steps, his footfalls echoing in the empty stairwell, headed to Jackie's place, uncertain what he was going to say to Rose when he got there.

When he reached her front door, he hesitated for a moment, not wanting to disturb Rose and Jackie if they were asleep. Then he heard the sound of the television. That decided it. Despite the lateness of the hour, they were still up.

John knocked. He could hear movement in the flat, followed by Jackie's voice telling Rose to stay put.

"Can I talk to Rose?" he asked when the door opened.

And then he felt a searing pain as Jackie's palm connected with his face. The force of the slap caused him to stagger backwards.

"Ow!" he cried, cradling his cheek with his hand.

"That's for throwing my daughter out!"

"Mum!" Rose cried from the other end of the hall. "What are you doing?"

"Oh, don't sound so surprised. You knew he had it coming."

Still rubbing his face, John said, "Jackie, can you give us a minute?"

"Rose, is that all right with you? Because I have no problem throwing him out."

"No, it's fine, Mum."

"All right then, but I'll be right here if his nibs needs another slap."

Jackie disappeared into the living room.

"If you don't mind, can we go out to the walkway?" John asked, still wincing from the blow. "Don't want to risk getting slapped again."

Rose nodded. She ducked into her room, returning with her jeans jacket. She slipped it on before following him outside.

She closed the door behind them.

"So…" they said at the same time.

"Me first," John said. "I'm sorry for yelling at you. I'm not saying I believe you, mind, but something very odd is going on and I'm willing to listen."

But Rose wasn't listening to him. Instead she was staring off into space, brow furrowed, as if she were concentrating on something.

"Can you hear that?" she asked.

"Hear what?"

Instead of answering, she took off down the walkway. She disappeared into the stairwell.

"Rose?" John called.

He began to follow her, but then he heard it too, an indescribable metal-on-metal wheezing and groaning. It sounded like nothing he'd ever heard before, and at the same time was as familiar as the beat of his own heart.

He looked down over the edge of the balcony into the courtyard, trying to find the source of the sound.

And then he could see a tall blue box begin to appear out of nothing. The light on the top flashed as it grew more and more solid.

"It's all true," he breathed, staring at the incredible sight. "It's all true."