'What the actual bloody hell?' Rose thought as she looked back once more to see that John and the blue box were both indeed gone. She had hoped to convince John to go with her to the police, or at the very least explain the bizarre things that had happened over the past day and a half, but neither of those goals had been realised. Instead, she stood in Powell Park with mouth agape, not only John-less but with more questions than she had before!
A quick buzz from her jeans interrupted her frustrated musings. 'Hey babe wanna hang?' it was a text from Micky. Annoyed, she almost typed back a rather rude no but then stopped herself. 'If John won't tell me what's going on, maybe the internet can!' she thought excitedly. 'Sure thing babe :*' she typed back before pocketing her cell phone. Micky's internet was way faster than back at her flat. She felt a little bad about kind of using him like this, but this way he got to see her and she got to have her questions answered. Where's the harm in that right?
Mickey's flat was only a minute's walk from hers. She arrived within the half-hour of his text. Entering, Rose was immediately assaulted with the scents of half-done laundry and musty aridness.
"Love," she said, coughing. "Open a window every now and then, will ya."
He rose apologetically. "Of course! Hey, hey there's my woman. Kit off!"
"Shut up!" she said. Micky gave her a peck.
"Coffee?" he asked her.
"Yeah, only if you wash the mug. And I don't mean rinse, I mean wash. Can I use your computer?" she got to her real purpose of coming here.
"Yeah. Any excuse to get in the bedroom. Don't read my emails!" Rose rolled her eyes as she left the living area and entered her boyfriend's room. She held back a gag as she closed the door. The room smelled of an even more pungent odour than the rest of the flat. 'Yeah, he's barmy if he thinks I'm shaggin' in this landfill.'
She logged onto his computer and started her research. She admitted, there wasn't much to go off of, but trying was better than not trying at all. She didn't bother looking up 'John Smith'; there were way too many of those to be successful. First, she tries 'John Smith Living Plastic' which turns up countless results of plastic surgeons with said name. Next, she tries for 'John Smith Blue Box.' This time, nothing but a few eShop results come up. Rose is about to give up when a final thing John said occurred to her. 'Doctor Blue Box' she types. This search garners the fewest results yet, but the top one caught her interest. 'Doctor Who?...do you know this man? Contact Clive here.' She clicked on the link and almost instantly regretted doing so. The main page of the site was a textbook example of a conspiracy website. All over, in uneven placements, were pictures of various men and a few women too. None of them looked like John did. She almost clicked out of the page when her eyes glanced upon one of the smaller pictures in the corner of the site. She clicked on it to enlarge it (it was low high quality) and released a gasp. A man stood in a black leather jacket, like John's, but it was cleaner. The figure's hair was shorter than John's too but...unless the poor quality was fooling her, his face seemed almost identical to John's. 'This must be an old photo of his!' Rose thought excitedly. 'Wait...John said the Doctor had died. Maybe that's a cover identity' she thought.
Giving little thought to the men and women in the other pictures, Rose quickly found the 'Contact Me' tab, clicked it, and dialled the resulting number. She would figure this out. One way or another.
An Hour Later
A few kisses and intimate shenanigans later, she had finally convinced Micky to drive her to the address that Clive had given her in their brief phone call. She had tried to explain her situation to him over the phone but he had cut her off rather abruptly. "Go to this address," he had said. "It'll be safer to talk there" he proceeded to hang up. And now she was here, in a small suburb 20 minutes outside of anywhere she'd been in the last 5 years, with an insane story and no proof to back it up. Micky's grumblings brought her back to reality.
"You're not coming in" she restated for the fifth time. "He's safe. He's got a wife and kids."
"Yeah, who told you that? He did. That's exactly what an internet lunatic murderer would say." she did not admit that he had a point. Finally, he stopped the car. "We're here," he said grumpily.
She exited Micky's yellow VW and started towards the house. It looked normal enough Rose thought. She focused herself to not think of any more implications or uses for a lunatic to have a normal house. With more confidence than she felt, she knocked on Clive's door. Who answered it was a man, axe murderer or not, but a small blonde boy.
"Hello," she began awkwardly, "I've come to see Clive? We had a chat on the phone."
Without a greeting, the boy turned toward the inside "Dad! It's one of your nutters!" he yelled.
An overweight, brown-haired man in a green shirt came to the door "Oh, sorry. Hello. You must be Rose. I'm Clive, obviously." he was jovial and shook her hand enthusiastically when she offered it.
"I'd better tell you now. My boyfriend's waiting in the car, just in case you're going to kill me," she responded, half-jokingly.
"No, good point. No murders." Clive waved to Micky, who was sulking in his car. He then gestured her inside. The inside of his house was textbook suburban, with no tablecloths, furniture, or colour palates out of place. She glanced into the kitchen and saw that he also had a young daughter and a wife. Clive had the life that she and her mother had always wanted. So why was he mixed up in something like the Doctor and John Smith? He led her outside of the house and into a medium-sized shed in his backyard.
Entering, it was pitch black. But as soon as Clive turned on the lights she could see that the layout of the website was simply a reflection of what the inside of the shed looked like. Files upon files were strewn about, some of them with pictures half-falling out of them. Clive soon got to work organizing them.
"A lot of this stuff's quite sensitive. I couldn't just send it to you. People might intercept it, if you know what I mean. If you dig deep enough and keep a lively mind, this Doctor keeps cropping up all over the place. Political diaries, conspiracy theories, even ghost stories. No first name, no last name, just the Doctor. Always The Doctor. And the title seems to have been passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. It appears to be an inheritance. That's your Doctor there, isn't it?" he pointed to the picture that had caught her eye on the website.
"I'm not sure," she answered honestly.
"What d'ya mean?"
"Well...he looks somewhat like him, but a lot younger. He has some of the same leather jacket but a lot cleaner. The man I met last night called himself John Smith and told me that he was carrying out his mission in memory of the Doctor. He said he...died. But now, I don't know what to think, Maybe it was a lie, he could certainly be this one." she pointed to the photo again.
"That is very curious, Rose. In all my records, I've never heard of one calling himself John Smith or one that looked like you describe. How much older is this John?"
"He looked about mid-seventies," she answered.
"Hmm….no that wouldn't fit the timeline at all for this guy then," he said discarding the photo. "I tracked that one down to the Washington public archive just last year. The online photo's enhanced, but if we look at the original" he extracted another photo from the file he was holding. The man was a crowd overlooking JFK's motorcade." November 22nd, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy. You see?"
"It must be his father," Rose said, but she doubted it herself.
He proceeded to show her more pictures and sketches. Some of the figures looked quite like John. Others, especially the few women, looked nothing like him at all.
"The Doctor is a legend woven throughout history. When disaster comes, they're there. Whichever one, doesn't matter….they bring the storm in their wake and they always have one constant companion."
"Who's that?"
"Death." he said simply. "Regardless of if the Doctor's back, if the man you've seen knows of him, and is doing his work...this John Smith...Rose, one thing's for certain. We're all in danger. If he's singled you out, if he's making house calls, then God help you."
"But who are they? What does being 'the Doctor' mean? Who do you think John Smith is?"
"I think the Doctors are the same person. I think they're immortal. Changing, but immortal. I think they're aliens from another world. As for John Smith, he may be the Doctor, Rose. Or he may be from the same world as the Doctor. Either way...you've got to keep a lookout, Rose."
After shakily smiling and thanking Clive for his time, Rose exited the shed as fast as she could, went through his house, and returned back to Micky's awful yellow car. She couldn't remember the last time she had been this stressed out. At Henrik's when she was cornered by those plastic men? Maybe, but this was still different. This feeling was of dread, uncertainty; it was a feeling that she couldn't shake off as far-fetched and unreasonable. She had seen John do impossible things, say impossible things all with the straight-facedness of someone who did this every day of their life. She had always wanted a little bit more to life than shop work, but this?
As she sat down in Micky's beetle she slammed the door a little hard.
"You were right, he's a nutter. Off his head. Complete online conspiracy freak. You win! What are we going to do tonight? I fancy a pizza." She didn't believe any of this. She hoped saying so would make it true. Right about now she wished nothing more that she had listened to Micky and 'kited off' instead of coming here.
"Pizza! P-p-p-pizza!"
"Or Chinese," she said, hoping that he wasn't mocking her appetite.
"Pizza!" he exclaimed weirdly, before driving off way more aggressively than normal.
'Oh don't you start acting weird too, babe' she thought. He was probably just hungry, Rose figured. She had been in Clive's shed for a fair bit. 'Right now better be rock bottom' the young blonde concluded. 'This couldn't get any worse.'
AN: Hello, readers! My largest and sincerest apologies for the delay in this update. I want to get out of the 'Rose' episode as much as the next person but university has been absolutely kicking my rear these past weeks. I try to make these as interesting, coherent, and lore-friendly (save the AU elements) that I can. I love hearing feedback in the reviews, so if you have anything to say like praise, suggestions, polite criticism, I want to hear it. Thanks for reading and I'll see y'all again next week! (Hopefully)