Chapter 3: Fear the Mad
Scenes played before her eyes. Scenes of her life, past, present and possible future. Or was it some body's life. No, blonde hair, Rose, Jackie, Mickey, Doctor... Her life. She lurched sideways suddenly aware that Yol would fire. The shot missed and rendered a hull plate red hot. She was aware of her mouth rattling off a series of letters, numbers and sounds not really in her language, while another jolt ran through the space station courtesy of the overload her knowledge had caused in its computer systems. A massive door slid down and blocked his sight of her.
She saw the Ninth Doctor charging towards her his blue-glowing screwdriver in his hand ready to unlock any door or give him an idea on what was going on. Suddenly she understood it fully. The screwdriver. Why it worked, how it worked and why only the Doctor really could use it properly. She blinked and it was in her hand not in his. Oh, right it was after. He was regenerated into the Tenth, more like the rest than the last one, but still her Doctor. She held the screwdriver against the power grid and concentrated forcing it to obey her trying fumblingly to think the Gallifreyan texts that it needed as commands at its internal sensors.
Suddenly was dancing through a garden full of hundreds upon hundreds of flowers neatly kept in small island of dirt in the soft grass. She had never seen it before, but she felt older of mind yet somehow younger of body. Maybe it was not her. Probably not she decided as she seemed to float a little with each jump. The scene changed again showing her the future, her future she thought. The immediate future that awaited her. It looked confusing. She moved her head to the right just before the bullets from Yol's henchmen's guns whizzed by. She flicked the sonic screwdriver on again and as expected another blast door dropped in place. With a wolfish grin she switched signals on the sonic screwdriver and switched it on again. She heard panicked thumping noises as the corridor full of pirates was flooded with flame retardant foam neatly knocking them out of the battle. A few sparks flew from a nearby panel soon Yol would get to the bridge and manage to reboot the system and get the station's gravity back into alignment.
She saw darkness and terror walking down the corridors towards her. Glistening faces and apparitions haunted her then disappeared. A blind pain thundered through her head, it felt like her nerves were on fire like she was carrying the Time Vortex again. She tried to reason it out was she remembering old pain, new or future but was unable to. For a while she went to her knees and allowed her blood to drip from her nose. She was bleeding internally.
She knew the exact time or had she lost track completely. She pressed herself back on to her feet. There was a goal ahead of her. A place she remembered going or went because she remembered she went there. Yet another predestination paradox, lovingly caused, it seemed by her, when she had been a god for a few moments back on the Game Station. Or maybe she went because Yol's knowledge was also in her head along with everything else and he knew that up ahead was the communications room, where she could send a signal to the TARDIS. Still she had a good way yet to go or rather try to. Suddenly she was impressed that she thought she would be able to get so far while remaining upright. Crawling felt like a better idea.
The TARDIS hurtled through space powering into the Yol's Dominion. He was wondering how he would track down Rose. Unfortunately the difference between human from the 21st Century and humans from the 217th Century wasn't big enough for her to stand out from afar. He also doubted that whoever had used their chance to pick her up, would let her be easily found having probably hidden her away. There was a sinister purpose behind all of this and he was bewildered at what it wanted to do with Rose Tyler. The screen on the TARDIS showed several differently coloured circles changing and crossing. He frowned. How could someone know the Timelord emergency beacon frequency and even more important who even knew to send a correct sequence aside from him.
"It could be a trap of course," he reminded himself, while he jaunted around the console changing the course to home in on the beacon. An old desperation and a hope against hope awakened in his mind. Had he missed someone? Was his telepathic sense of his people off? Maybe he wasn't the last of his people.
He picked up pace until a weak voice echoed in over the communications channel. "Doctor," he recognized Rose's voice, but winced at its tone pained, dry and full of fear. "Doctor, my head is killing me."
He dashed over to the console and flicked a couple of switches getting ready to reply. "I know you'll come. Malk Yol will be waiting in the Hangar bay behind the first row of boxes in front of where you'll land with a gun," she said answering his reply before he could utter it.
"I know because my mind remembers it all again. The Vortex filled my head with the knowledge of everything and you took it away. But it wasn't gone. Get it out! Get it out! Get it out," she screamed then a hoarse whisper came over the radio, "Please Doctor you're the only one who can save me."
He stood stark and filled with purpose and said more to himself than to her. "I am coming Rose." He pressed a few buttons ignoring the warning messages from the space transfer system as well as the pained shakes of his ship as it hurtled into the hangar bay. He commanded it to keep up its lateral movement. The backside of his blue box more solid than any wood could be slid with hundreds of kilometres an hour into the first row of solid metal boxes and shoved the nearest couple of them hard against the hard metal hangar walls while throwing up sparks.
He walked out of the door ignoring the smudge mark of blood and gore in the background as the last remains of Yol dripped from the walls like a overripe squished fruit crushed as he was between the TARDIS, a few metal boxes and the wall. "Never touch my Rose," he added without looking back as he walked through door after door looking for the communications room or bridge the only places on the vast space station where he suspected Rose could've gone to send her message. He passed a sign and turned that way reading the human dialect with ease.
After a while he reached a corridor. He heard angry voices and the hissing noise of some sort of fuse burning coming from there. "We have to get in there or the boss will skin us and use our hides for upholstery. Why is this taking so long," a gruff voice asked. It sounded like it came from a big man. Not really bothered to try and convince these people about anything and suspected Rose was somewhere beyond the door they were trying to open. He grabbed a cable from over head and pried a good length of it loose before looking around the corner. There was a loud bang as an explosive went off.
"We're through, get your guns ready. Yol wants the bitch dead," the lead guy, a massive hulk of a man, said.
He looked around and nodded, taking good hold of the cable he ran forward not yelling or anything. About a half the way down the corridor he was spotted. "Hey who are you," a smaller guy yelled in surprise.
"The Doctor," he replied and flicked the live wire towards an open box full of standard explosives usually trigged with an electric charge. Thanking his earlier incarnations for their foresight in learning so much about everything in his mind as it connected with the explosives. He turned and jumped into cover flat against the floor. A white hot roar passed over him then left him with the smell of roasted swine and the tinkling of hot metal. He rapidly ran over the hot floor careful to avoid the still sparking but much shorter wire and edged into the room. It was big and slightly smoky from the explosion. Outside a belated effort from the fire defence system started with the application of flame retardant foam. He looked around. He was on a mezzanine inside a large room filled with highly advanced computers and communications gear. This Yol fellow had been rather lavish with his electronics it seemed. He didn't have time to study it closely though focused as he was on looking for Rose. He spotted a foot and walked around fast to find that the clever human had taken a headset and hidden in a corner before calling him up.
He bent over her, a bit of relief washing through his body. He checked her not liking the pale and clammy skin nor the blood shot eyes. She was unresponsive and already had minor twitches which indicated beginning neural damage. She also had tiny wounds in regular intervals around her forehead indicating that someone had recently applied a crown of thorns mindprobe, a precise but highly dangerous and invasive form of technological mindprobe. He touched her mind with his telepathy and nearly fell back with the neural feedback. Rose's mind was literally filled with infinite knowledge. It was eating through the neural tissue of her mind rapidly. This meant he had to do something quickly or she would die.
He thought back through the haze of pain physical and emotional that surrounded his latest regeneration. Rose had been enormously brave and had confronted the Daleks for his sake. He had pulled the Time Vortex and its knowledge out of her and using a fragment of that power while it was in him he had sealed the knowledge away from her. For good he had thought but it seemed that wasn't so. Which meant he had to do it a bit differently. He had to remove it this time. But he had to be delicate about it or he would just wipe out Rose along with it. This was far beyond the minor telepathic abilities of his race if not exactly his skills. But not all hope was lost, first he picked up Rose.
He returned again to the TARDIS this time with the crown of thorns mindprobe and a few spare parts and cables. He hooked the cables into the time reversal circuits of the TARDIS, the cables into the control mechanism of the mindprobe with a technical wizardry, which he also modified slightly and all the while working as fast as possible. He was trying to make the TARDIS circuits reverse the degradation of Rose's mind by reversing time for her brain. If he was lucky this would allow him to gather up the leaked information back into Rose's subconscious from which he could them remove all at once without any further danger to her.
He had to force the process and with sympathetic pain all through out his body, mind and hearts he watched as Rose screamed and thrashed under the influence of the white hot needles of the mindprobe. He had been forced to make a compromise. He could not be sure what was Rose or the exact time to stop the reversal so he had to stop it at the earliest juncture. That meant there was a good chance she would remember and know more than she used to, maybe even a lot. He hoped it was little enough that she could still live with herself and him, but there was no other way to save her and he wanted that more than he wanted to preserve her exact memories.
There was also another matter. He hadn't been ready to face it before, but there was no going around it any more. Something was different about Rose. No human could have withstood the mental pressures Rose had just been under and not have their mind scrambled into ever so much jelly. In a way she should have died long ago when she had the Time Vortex in her head. It should have cooked her, but it hadn't. He had waved it off in his mind thinking that his timely intervention had saved her. But his intervention had killed him even after only carrying it for a few moments. He had until now thought that the unsophisticated brain tissue and body of a human had saved his Rose, but now he had to consider that this attitude had been just another application of his rather unseemly Time Lord racial arrogance.
The process of gathering up and removing the Time Vortex knowledge from Rose would take time but while he was tempted to satisfy his curiosity by taking a few samples and head off to Malk Yol's abandoned laboratory he couldn't get himself to move out of sight of his dearest companion.
She was his most precious one to date. She had done and seen almost more than most if not all of his companions. She was loyal and most important of all she learned and understood. She wasn't meek and needy she was competent and a quick learner. While he had decided long ago to not complicate the lives of people time would remove from his life by allowing his relationship with them to progress to the physical level he had found it harder this time. He knew Rose had at times wanted him in that way and so had he many times both before with the ears and now without. He often cursed himself for it but there was no other way. He couldn't live in his entire life with them and that he felt wasn't fair to wonderful people like Rose. Still he also would never part ways with her like he had done the others. Rose was his, he knew no better way of putting it. She was to stay with him until the latest possible moment until she had enough of him not he of her. That was his one egotistical act when dealing with her life. She would have to leave him not him her.
It tore him up looking at the thrashing girl now, but finally the readings indicated that the process was as done as it could be. Quickly and with great relief he flicked the device off and quickly set about removing it from sight not wanting Rose to awaken to the sight of the device that had hurt her and it being in his hands. He moved her to her room, bandaged her remaining wounds then sat down to watch over her only barely noting how she had decorated the room he had set aside for her. He sat there in the comfortable smell of Rose and her perfume to watch her recover. Every once in a while she would moan and thrash a little before he reached over to caress her hair or skin at which she visibly settled down.
It was fantastic he thought to himself. There he was, over nine hundred years old, a proud Time Lord, a true Gallifreyan if very adventurous, a hero to billions, a villain to just about as many and he was basically in love with a regular human girl from the 21th century time reckoning. It was new to him. He had been in love before but never besotted much like this.
He was really starting to wonder about the regular human girl part though. The last reading from the probe had shown that Rose's mind had actually suffered very little damage. That was about as possible and likely as her getting through possessing the time vortex with little more than a headache and a vague memory of singing. He had ignored facts moved on for too long.
"I am sorry," he whispered and got up. He couldn't wait any longer. He had to admit it was his inevitable curiosity rearing its head. He dashed through his beloved ship picking up a few devices before fiddling and connecting them to the TARDIS sensor systems. He rigged together a scanner then dashed back into Rose's room not even half an hour later.
He looked her over, but as he had expected she hadn't awakened from the trauma yet. He ran the scanner over his friend. He started out simple and scanned her internal structure and her DNA. Then he went through several more exotic options especially looking for any signs of the Time Vortex. Satisfied and convinced he had time to work he turned to leave then as an afterthought he set the scanner to its basic setting, pointed it towards Rose and left it there while he headed for the TARDIS console. He'd rather like to keep an eye on her he had decided.
A few minutes later he sat in the set of seats next to the console, his reading glasses in his hands and what he was sure was a shocked look on his face. He had known that something like this was theoretically possible. He had never ever seen it happen especially not by accident. But it was there in his results. Rose's DNA was no longer the DNA of a 21st century human. In fact it was unlike any DNA of any human later on too, mostly because in the future humans would intermingle and change according to their life amongst the rest of the habitants of the universe. She had the body and genetic make-up of a purely theoretical human some millions years in the future even worse it was still changing. And he even knew what had happened. When Rose had taken the vortex into her head it had spread to all of her body and unsettled her cells in time. Not Rose not her body but her very cells and DNA.
That meant Rose had actually evolved all the time right under his nose. She had slowly been going from 21st century human to something biologically unique throughout space and time. Even worse it seemed to have adapted Rose's DNA to her life, which meant she had adapted to time travel, grave danger, telepathic fields and an intense life in general. And he had no idea how to stop it before it changed her into something too different. He knew just knew Rose would hate the idea of something like this happening to her. It would require incredibly complex time science specific research to stop it going on. He wondered how he would wrangle that. Then he realized that there was something even worse. He would have to tell Rose and then it got even darker in his mind as he flashed to the look and feel of Jackie Tyler's hand hammering across her chin. There was worse things to come than telling Rose.
She awoke to strangeness beyond the last things she remembered. She rested in her room safely back on the TARDIS. The time ship she had been kidnapped in front off and moved far away from. Stars flashed before her eyes showing her the TARDIS floating in space then speeding off back to the Great houses floating in the sky then she slammed back just as quickly into her room within the relative space of her current home.
"What happened?" She said then grasped her head head in surprise but not pain. She suddenly knew what had gone on. Somehow she actually knew stuff. She remembered things. Things she had been barely conscious for. Things she hadn't. Things she had forgotten long ago. Never before had her head been able to recall more than remotely what her French teacher had tried to tell her about verbs. She still didn't understand but somehow now she remembered. There was other things too. Memories and knowledge even about things like the fact that the text on the wall in Gallifreyan was a long poem about time and space. This was not something she should have ever been able to read. Learning Gallifreyan through torture wasn't what she had expected.
"Rose," the Doctor's voice called out to her while knocking on her door.
"Come in," she replied. He entered like a guilty man slinking in for his trial. He clearly felt guilty about something and she was realizing it had to do with her from the look in his eyes.
"Something's wrong... with me," she said before he could open his mouth to speak.
"Rose, I'm sorry," he said but his eyes wasn't the eyes of someone preparing to give her the death sentence.
"Just tell me, it's about the stuff I remembered there was something left from when I had the Time Vortex in me" she intoned feeling a slight headache coming on.
"Oh, Rose... It is more complicated than that. I have removed that now to avoid it killing you. However there is more left than that. I should really have checked you out properly after I regenerated," he explained.
She felt tense and a bit afraid. She still couldn't regret saving the Doctor, ending the Time War or any of it before and since. She had long ago prepared herself for the sacrifice involved in living on the TARDIS. It had always since the very first moment been life threateningly dangerous. Now she might be paying a price.
The Doctor reached out and held her hands. "Rose, when you had the Time Vortex it made your body start to change. You're a time traveller that affects you even to begin with but nothing really happens because of that to neither humans or Time Lords, however with the Time Vortex running freely throughout your body it started something. It accelerated time in you. But not by ageing you in the regular sense. You're changing from the DNA upwards, you're walking forward through human evolution now. Little changes have accumulated quickly and in fact you're now closer to a human from the year 6th billion except that you're pure human stock with no alien DNA in you so you're unique nothing like the humans of the future in fact. Worse this process it's accelerating," he explained almost rambling like he was talking to himself.
She felt an ice cold knot in her stomach. She thought back, the feelings of deja-vu she had been developing had been the knowledge of the Vortex bleeding into her mind. However there had been other tiny hints of something. The Wolf hunting Queen Victoria had mentioned it. She had burned like the Sun. Now those minutes of burning was taking their toll. There had been her overhearing of the telepathic communication a few months ago. Lots of little things. "Can you stop it?" she asked and immediately realized the answer from the Doctor's expression. This one was much easier to read than her first one. He was unsure and afraid.
"I could probably do something. Remove the effect on you, but it would be dangerous, risky and could end up destroying you. However Rose I have to try, because sooner or later this process could damage you or change you beyond what you'd recognize as human or just yourself," he explained.
She considered it, she wanted him to try and while change was good, the actual chance of her own body changing into something possible inhuman scared her. "Go for it," she suggested and called for her bravery inside to carry her through. She refused to bow to fear, because there was no point to that.
The Doctor nodded, "It is a little bit complicated. I have to figure out a solution first. Rose, how about I drop you off for a very short visit in a safe place, while I pick up a few things and think it all through."
"You're gonna have me miss the actual research period, yeah," she asked.
He nodded, "it could be a few years and you might not have that long. Besides why waste your time? I have lots more of it."
She didn't like the idea, but she liked the idea of losing her hair or growing a sixth finger much less. "Fine, where are you putting me down," she asked.
"I thought a short shopping trip on Epsilon Eridani might be nice," he offered. She smiled remembering that they had never really gotten to explore the massive space port, she didn't mind much although there was something that had to be said.
"You have to swear. You won't go swanning off without me, you won't leave me," she said knowing her Doctor well enough to realize sometimes he needed a little word. He just replied with a look.
A few days of rest and healing later she stepped out of the TARDIS and watched money in hand as her beloved home disappeared into the timestream.