As usual, big big thank you to my dear friend and beta NoPondInTheForest - baby, you're the best!
"I hope you are enjoying the view, dear husband," said Queen Elizabeth to the Tenth Doctor. They were both sitting under the marquee in the royal tribune, which had been put up outside the White Tower for the occasion, and the crestfallen Time Lord had not dared look up from the moment he had taken seat.
"Shut up," he muttered, his conscience-stricken eyes fixed on the scaffold right opposite.
"There! Is it not delightful?" she asked sarcastically. "We have not seen each other in decades, my love, still there is no difference between us and a properly married couple!"
"This," said the Doctor, marking that word as he turned to her. "This was your plan from the very beginning, wasn't it?"
"I am afraid I do not understand what you mean, dear husband," she replied coolly.
"Don't play any games with me, Elizabeth," said the Doctor bitterly. "Not anymore."
"Well," said Queen Elizabeth, "if by 'this' you mean 'this which is happening in front of you', my dear, then the answer is, yes! 'This' was all part of my design! But from the very beginning? What do you mean, Doctor? The very beginning of what? Our marriage? Because as far as I can remember, my darling, it is utterly impossible to discern its beginning from its end."
"What about what's just happened in the Tower? Huh?" asked the Doctor, suddenly on the warpath. "You orchestrated it all, didn't you? You somehow knew of the existence of that creature and you set a trap for her. By keeping her captive you'd create the perfect mystery 'cause you knew she would abduct all the prisoners, and how can a place like the Tower of London ever be empty, especially in the Tudor era? And not only are you wicked, Your Majesty, you're also very clever!, 'cause you knew I'd come no matter how many warnings you might have sent against it. In fact, you wanted me to come! You wanted me to be the one who'd set that alien free and send all those people she had almost set free back to their prisons! Now that I've done so, your bloody cycle of torture and death can run its course again. That's what you wanted to do to me, right? Set fire to the shelter those people had found and lead them back to their deaths… 'Cause that's all they are to you, right? Nothing more than collateral damage… You've turned me into a murderer, Your Majesty! Congratulations!" he shouted, blowing a gasket. "And now you've brought me here so that you can rejoice in your success!"
"Do not flatter yourself, Doctor. You were a murderer long before I met you." As she spoke, Queen Elizabeth's features were disfigured by the tension in her facial muscles. "As for that creature, I did know that some rather other-worldly events would sometimes take place in the Tower since the days of the reign of my great uncle King Richard. Unfortunately for you, Doctor, that means that I did not plan any of that! To be completely honest, I was never very interested in the particulars. I knew that it would help find you though, and I also knew that, were the prisoners to reappear in their dungeons, it could only mean one thing – that you had finally come back to my kingdom! But procuring that creature, or the consequences of her actions? I am sorry to disappoint you, my love, but that was never a part of my plan. And now, I must confess I feel quite stupid. I actually wish it had been!"
"What on earth do you mean?" asked the Doctor, narrowing his eyes.
"Revenge, my love," she answered, smiling broadly. "The way you have described it, Doctor… That was perfection, and I so profoundly regret that you should have been the one to come up with all those wonderful ideas and that I was not! Can you imagine? The Doctor, the saver of worlds, turned into a murderer… By his own wife! Oh my goodness! How wonderful that would have been! Maybe the next time? Provided, of course, that I allow you to survive this…"
"Elizabeth, you're sick," said the Doctor with a mixture of sorrow and repulsion.
"I shall not deny that, my love. I may have been all my life, in fact, since I was a little girl! But what if you were sicker than I am? In your mind I have made a mass murderer of you, Doctor, when all the while, old silly me has just had a single murder in mind."
"What are you talking about?" asked the Doctor, suspicious and alarmed.
The sound of drums unexpectedly filled the cold morning air. Turning his head around, the Doctor saw the crowd that had gathered in front of the scaffold diligently step back to the nearest wall in order to clear the way for a party of people that were slowly marching along the path that had just been opened ahead of them. Four figures soon appeared into view. The first was that of Robert Cecil, striding along as he paved the way for the other three. Following right behind him, two royal guards were grabbing someone by the arms and pushing them along as they escorted them to the scaffold. That someone was wearing a filthy white robe, and a dirty white sack had been placed over their head. As they grimly paraded towards the scaffold, some strands of unkempt fair hair which had turned out to be too long for that bloody sack to hide became visible underneath it.
It must be a woman, the Doctor thought. Soon, however, realisation hit him. Without the shadow of a doubt, that had to be the girl Clara had been locked up with. The girl she had been trying so desperately to find and save.
"On the day that impertinent girl was brought to me," the Queen started to explain when she saw the Doctor's eyes fixed on the captive, "prisoners started to disappear from the Tower. There is an abundance of recorded evidence of that very thing happening several times, and most of it dates back to the last century. In view of that, we gave the matter no more thought. After all, we already knew that the fairy you and your friends have just helped escape would only perpetrate an abduction when someone was being submitted to torture. For that single reason, we made sure that this particular prisoner remained unharmed in her dungeon, and that food and water were regularly provided. She refused to eat though, but in spite of her hunger strike she has stayed strong and lived until today, which is precisely what I wanted her to do all the while!"
"She has survived long enough to find her death on the whim of a mad woman, but why?" the Doctor asked as he watched the poor captive girl being cruelly dragged up the steps that led to the top of the scaffold.
"Because everybody hates powerful women, Doctor!" said Queen Elizabeth clenching her teeth, her eyes crazed. "Because powerful women must die just because others hate them! It happened to my own mother, it happened to my cousin Mary… And would you believe that I personally have lost count of the number of times someone has tried to poison me? Women are not supposed to be powerful, Doctor – they are supposed to be vulnerable! Thus, when others feel threatened by their power and their strength, those compelling women simply have to die!"
This time, the Doctor felt a mixture of sympathy and confusion at the Queen's unexpected declaration of both her haunting fears and her cruel intentions. And all the while, his eyes had been shut. The sight of Robert Cecil dragging the girl to the centre of the scaffold and tying her wrists behind her back turned out to be too much for him to bear.
"But that poor girl is neither your mother nor your cousin, Elizabeth, so why should you feel threatened by her?" he asked, desperate to find out the truth underlying her words. "What has she ever done to you that you should wish her dead?"
"Truth be told, dear husband, nothing!" said the Queen, the Doctor thought, with the innocence and gaiety of a young and naïve modern teenage girl. In a split-second, however, her countenance went back to her previous rage and resentment. "You have, though," she added, nodding repeatedly as she looked down to the scaffold. "She is just going to pay for what you did."
"But why?!" the Doctor shouted as his soul broke inside him with confusion and hopelessness.
"You should not feel sorry for her ordeal in the slightest, my love!" she added, suddenly grinning from ear to ear. "In all honesty, there is no need! Have I not mentioned that we have brought a swordsman from France especially for her execution? How silly of me to forget telling you that! It is a family tradition, Doctor! That is the way us kings and queens show our mercy to important prisoners, by granting them a precise blow and a prompt death!"
"Oh, for crying out loud, Elizabeth!" the Doctor shouted as he jumped out of his seat in a rage. "Who is she?! Why do you want to do this to her?"
"Do you still not know, Doctor?" she asked as she locked eyes with him. "Deep down inside, I think you do. You would not be as clever as you think you are if you did not."
The Doctor kept staring at Queen Elizabeth with a frown, wondering whether the poor girl on the scaffold could actually be connected with him, but his thoughts were interrupted when the girl herself raised her voice to do yet once more something she had unsuccessfully been doing for weeks – demand an explanation.
"Someone tell me what's goin' on 'ere, okay?!"
Gaping, the Doctor turned his head around to look at her again as his body and soul started to shiver. Her voice had, in fact, sounded very much like a certain other voice he had once heard every day.
"It can't be…," he sighed, discarding that stupid thought he had just had as his eyes darted back to Queen Elizabeth I.
"If that is what you have chosen to believe, my love…," Elizabeth replied with a frown.
"But it can't be!" he exclaimed as tears started to well in his incredulous eyes. "It just can't be!"
It just couldn't be, he kept saying to himself.
But what if it was?
But it couldn't be, for goodness sake! The girl he thought he'd just heard had disappeared from his life a long time ago. The brave young girl he had loved and who had loved him in return… She was gone! He had made sure of that himself! The day she came back transformed into an even braver woman who had crossed universes just to be reunited with him, he sealed her up in a parallel universe with a semi-human version of himself.
Forever.
Momentarily unable to move, the Doctor stood there just staring at the poor scared girl trying to realise something about her, to find some kind of clue or indication that it might actually be her or suddenly see something that he just had not seen before… His eyes searched and searched in vain, and those few seconds felt almost as anxiously long as his nine centuries of existence until, out of the blue, the confirmation he had been looking for took the form of the Eleventh Doctor, who came sprinting out of the White Tower as he waved a certain item of clothing he was holding in his hand.
For a moment, the Tenth Doctor had the feeling that no other incarnation of him had run that fast before, with maybe just one exception, which would have been his own.
His mind was suddenly invaded by the memory of a turbulent night on which he had run that fast, maybe even a little faster. She had been running really fast too. They had been desperately running to each other after years of separation and nothing would prevent them from meeting – not even a Dalek determined to exterminate him.
All at once, he wished he had been holding her dear multi-coloured scarf in his hand on that previous occasion too. He could have wrapped it around her and tied himself to her and never let her go again.
"Stop!" the Eleventh Doctor shouted as he kept running in the direction of the scaffold. "Everybody stop this now!" Then, turning to his past self, the breathless Doctor continued to shout. "Sandshoes! Stop that execution, for god's sake!"
The Tenth Doctor's eyes darted from his future self to the girl on the scaffold the moment Robert Cecil placed himself right behind her and took the sack off her head.
And then, his legs faltered.
"Rose!" he almost whispered. It was just a monosyllable, but his entire being failed him the moment he tried to say it, and so its sound was never audible to ears that were not his own.
That girl on the scaffold was… Rose! Her skin was sickeningly pale and there were terribly dark bags under her eyes, and the Doctor couldn't remember a single time when he had seen her so extremely thin… What had these people done to her?
And how could she even be there at all?
She couldn't have heard him say her name, but he wondered whether she would be able to see him, now that her head was free from that infamous sack and her eyes were wildly wandering around for the first time since she had been taken to the scaffold. Would she in fact be looking for him? Would she be holding her breath until she could finally sigh with relief the moment she saw his face among the crowd?
The Doctor took a moment to study her face. Even from afar, he knew her well enough to be able to tell that the hair in the back of her neck was by now probably standing on end, but still, he also knew that, deep down, she was not afraid. Well, who was he kidding? Of course she had to be afraid, but he of all people knew really well that her astonishment and her curiosity would be much greater than her fear, or wasn't that the way it had always been with her?
"Stop!" he finally managed to shriek loud enough for everyone to hear him. "That woman's done nothing! Stop this now!"
The Doctor then put his hands on the bar right in front of him for support and quickly jumped out of the royal tribune. Unfortunately for him, since all of his senses had been solely focused on Rose from the moment he had seen her face, as soon as his feet landed on the ground, he realised he had not foreseen how difficult it would be to make his way to her through the excited crowd that had gathered again in front of the scaffold. Still, there was nothing else he could do or nowhere else he could turn if he really wanted to get to her.
As it happened, he had never wanted to get to anyone else so badly.
"Rose!" he yelled as he kept pushing blood-thirsty locals in order to make his way through. "Rose! I'm coming!"
"Please, hurry up!" she suddenly screamed. For a split-second, the Doctor's hearts jumped with joy just because she had heard him and talked to him, but his joy turned into dismay the moment he saw her being forced to kneel down facing the crowd.
"I'm coming, Rose!" the Doctor yelled again, pushing more and more people and making his way to her as he witnessed a series of events that made his blood run cold.
Robert Cecil, the same man who instants before had hit Rose's legs from behind to make her knees give in forcing her to kneel down, had just proceeded to wrap a blindfold around her head. As Rose would not stay put, he stepped in front of her, and taking her head in his hands, he pushed it down, positioning her neck in the right angle for the swordsman to be able to strike it with just one blow. The executioner eventually unsheathed his sword, and Rose must have heard the noise that had made and guessed what was soon going to happen to her, because she cried out for help once more. She tried to get up, but Cecil stopped her. Then, he made a sign and one of the guards promptly came with a rope in his hand. He crouched down behind her and used the rope to tie up her ankles. Now Rose would not be able to escape at all.
And then, as the swordsman stepped closer to her and got ready to strike the fatal blow, the Eleventh Doctor reached the scaffold and jumped on Robert Cecil's back, forcing him to let go of Rose. No sooner had she been freed from Cecil's grasp than the Tenth Doctor jumped on top of the scaffold right in front of her. In the blink of an eye, he crouched down and took her in his arms. Her feet hardly touched the floor as he ran with the intention of carrying her far away from the scaffold, but the rear edge of the lance one of the guards threw at them hit the Doctor in the back, making him lose his balance, and causing Rose and him to fall hard against the stony ground.
Even if a thousand lances had stabbed his back, the Doctor still would not have let go of Rose. He quickly sat up on the ground, lifting her up as he did. As he briefly looked behind him, he saw the Eleventh Doctor also jump out of the scaffold and quickly take his sonic out of his jacket pocket, and placing himself in front of Rose and him, the older Time Lord turned around and pointed his screwdriver at the guards that had quickly surrounded them. He knew it would not keep them at bay for long, but he certainly hoped it would buy them some time.
In the meanwhile, the Tenth Doctor's hands had flown to Rose's wrists, which he easily freed from the rope that had been binding them together, and once he had done so, he also removed the rope that had been tied around her ankles. There was a nervous smile on his lips as he removed the blindfold from Rose's eyes, but contrary to what he had been expecting, when that infamous piece of cloth finally fell upon the floor, they wouldn't open. Scared stiff, the Doctor stared at her in silence for a moment, but soon he calmed down when he realised he could feel her heart beating.
"I've got you!" he said, his arm curled around her back as the fingertips of his free hand softly caressed her cheek. His voiced was trembling when he spoke again. "Oh, how I've missed you! Look, Rose! It's me!"
Rose's eyelids finally rolled up, and when the Doctor's eyes finally had the chance to really look into hers, he felt so ecstatic that he thought he could just die on the spot.
"Sandshoes, the royal guards are coming," said the Eleventh Doctor, who had just run to them and crouched down behind Rose.
And even if he was right there next to him, the Tenth Doctor had simply not heard him. His mind and all of his senses were still too worried about her.
"Rose!" he called again, tears now falling down his face.
But Rose remained silent. Her eyes had froze the moment they had seen the swordsman, who kept staring at her from the top of the scaffold wielding his sword in his hand.
"That bloke's tried to kill me!" she said in horror.
"Yes he has," said the Doctor, "and he won't be coming anywhere near you again of he knows what's best for him."
Rose's astonished eyes then shifted from the menacing swordsman on the scaffold to the man who was holding her in his arms, and when she eventually saw his face, she did the very thing she had promised herself she would do if she ever laid eyes on him again.
She smacked him with all her might.
The Doctor felt his cheek burning as soon as her hand fell upon her shoulder, but that stinging sensation didn't bother him in the slightest. Come to think of it, he had probably deserved that smack for a really long time… Oh no, that didn't worry him at all! What had made his stomach knot up tight was the look of abhorrence he had seen in her eyes.
"You get away from me!" she screamed in horror. And then, pulling herself together, Rose pushed him away, freeing herself from his arms, only to seek refuge into those of the Eleventh Doctor's. As soon as she did, she looked back at him pointedly, then instantly passed out.
The Eleventh Doctor kept holding her tight in his arms as his look darted from her face to the Tenth Doctor's, and he wondered what it really was that his eyes had just seen. The younger Time Lord was still staring at her with confusion and disbelief, his brow furrowed as a tear ran down along his cheek. Could this all be a terrible nightmare? Just the delirious last dream of this dying incarnation of a Time Lord?
The two Doctors were so lost in their own thoughts that none of them noticed when Jack, Edward and Clara appeared right behind them.
"Doctor!" Clara cried out, kneeling down by the Eleventh Doctor. Her eyes widened when she saw the face of the girl he was pressing against his chest. "Doctor, you've found her!"
"Rose!" Jack whispered incredulously as he strode past Clara.
"You know her?" she asked them.
"She's an old friend," answered the Doctor.
"Are you sure?" she asked him in confusion.
The moment he spotted the young blonde lady that the green-eyed Doctor was holding in his arms, Edward crouched down in front of her, took her hand, and wrapped his own around her wrist.
"The lady is still alive, sir," he announced a few seconds later.
"She'd better be or I'll know the reason why," said the Eleventh Doctor as he locked eyes with his past self.
"I shall be the reason why when she is not, my lord," the Queen's unexpected voice suddenly declared. She appeared from among the numerous guards that were now surrounding them, and she came to a halt as soon as she found herself standing in front of the two Time Lords. "Swordsman, come down here now!" she shouted. "You still have a job to do!"
"No!" screamed the Tenth Doctor as he jumped on his feet, stood up, and turned around to face her. He put his hand into his pocket with the intention of taking his sonic to keep the guards at bay, but felt quite ridiculous the moment he realised Jack had produced a massive gun out of his comparatively small sword cloak, and that he was pointing it directly at the Queen.
"Nice weapon, Lord Boeshane," said Queen Elizabeth. "A shame you shall not be using it on me or my men would retaliate," she added as a dozen more of her guards quickly surrounded the time travellers. Turning to the swordsman, she raised her voice again. "Swordsman! I want you down here, monsieur, and I want you down here right now!"
The word 'monsieur' lingered in the Tenth Doctor's head for a moment, until he remembered that, while they had been sitting down in the royal tribune, Queen Elizabeth had mentioned a swordsman from France would be the executioner in this particular beheading. Her words had not caught his attention then, but right now, as said swordsman jumped out of the scaffold, they just wouldn't stop echoing in the Doctor's brain, and he desperately wondered, why? Why would the notion of having a swordsman brought from France all at once sound so terribly familiar?
As the swordsman strode in the direction of his future self and Rose, the Doctor's brain sped up, frantically searching for a way to prevent that sword from getting a single inch closer to Rose's body. He knew he was running out of time and his body tensed from head to toes. As his clenched fists fell on the sides of his legs, he noticed something inside one of his trouser pockets. He unconsciously shoved a hand inside that pocket and his fingers squeezed a paper ball that he could not remember putting in it. When he took it out, he found it was Queen Elizabeth's letter. Not the first she had sent, as Clara and Chinny had told him they had been handed a couple of letters from her on the same day. The letter he was holding in his hand was the one that had set this particular ball rolling. He was about to put it back inside his pocket when he suddenly noticed the date that was written on one of its crumpled edges – 17th May 1600.
17th May. That was the day that Chinny, Clara and him had agreed to arrive in Elizabethan England. They had been early anyway, as they got there a few minutes before midnight, but by the time he made it back to them bringing Captain Jack Harkness with him, that had been the date. And they had been there for over two days now, which meant that the day of Rose's execution, the Big Day, had been scheduled for 19th May.
"May 19th!" the Doctor suddenly exclaimed as his eyes widened in realisation. And all of a sudden, something clicked inside his brain, and the pieces of this whole puzzle started to fall into place. The beheading, the family tradition of having a French swordsman brought to an execution, and the reason why 19th May should be such an important date for Queen Elizabeth I… He suddenly understood it all!
But what seemed to matter the most was the fact that he had suddenly had an idea.
"I've said no," he repeated, self-confidently. He might be about to break the very laws of time he had abided to for so many years, but right now, he didn't give a damn about them if breaking them meant there was still a way to save Rose's life.
"And I have ignored you, dear husband," Queen Elizabeth said to him. "Guards!"
With an almost imperceptible nod, Queen Elizabeth's guards got closer, and soon, Jack, Clara, Edward and the Tenth Doctor himself felt the cold touch of a sword blade against their throats. Meanwhile, the French swordsman had finally come to a halt after reaching the Eleventh Doctor, who just would not let Rose out of his arms even if the sharp edge of the most dangerous sword of them all was being aimed at the space between his eyebrows.
"You!" said the Queen, turning to him. "Let her go now!"
"Never!" the Doctor muttered as defiantly as nothing he had ever muttered before.
"Then the two of you shall die," she sentenced. "Guards! Swordsman! Finish them all right now!"
"I'm so very sorry, Elizabeth," said the Tenth Doctor in an unexpected and incomprehensible playful tone, "but having one of your men slitting my throat with a sword will not kill me. I'm already dead! I'm a dead man walking. Well, I guess what I really am is a dying Time Lord time-travelling, but who cares about that now?" Having said that, the Doctor grabbed the confused guard's forearm with his hand, and by simply lifting it up, he walked free from his menacing sword and sauntered towards Queen Elizabeth. "My point is, I'm dead already. An overdose of radiation did the job for you, Your Majesty, and a time paradox is the only thing that's still keeping me alive."
"Then tell me, my love, if you are already dead, why will you just not stop talking?" she asked him sarcastically.
"Because I have to persuade you to let all these people go before I can rest in peace," he answered.
"We are long past that, my dear husband," she told him. "As far as I am concerned, all of them are as dead as you are."
"Don't underestimate the lengths that a dying Time Lord would go to to protect the ones he loves, Elizabeth," he warned her.
"Sandshoes!" exclaimed the Eleventh Doctor as he sensed his past self's anger. "Sandshoes, what the hell are you doing?"
"This stupid pantomime ends now!" the Queen shouted, and pointing down at Rose, she gave the order again. "Guards! Swordsman! Kill that girl at once!"
The guards that had until then been holding Clara, Jack and Edward hostages suddenly released them and moved in the direction of the Eleventh Doctor and Rose, but no sooner had they done so than the Tenth Doctor quickly turned to his friends and, running in their direction, pushed Captain Jack Harkness against a wall.
"I'll scream with excitement the moment you finally kiss me senseless and tell me that you're in love with me, Doctor," Jack said to him, "but please, tell me this is not that moment."
"Doctor, you stay where you are and do not dare move again!" the Queen shouted.
But the Tenth Doctor didn't answer. He was too flustered and excited anticipating both what he had chosen to do and the consequences of such choice.
The Eleventh Doctor couldn't help but observe as his past self rolled up Jack's sleeve and smiled upon seeing the vortex manipulator wrapped around his friend's wrist.
"Sandshoes!" the Eleventh Doctor exclaimed again.
"Jack, I need you to do something for me," the Tenth Doctor murmured.
"I'd suspected that much, yeah," Jack said, raising his eyebrows as he nodded.
"I might need you to….," the Doctor's tone turned a bit sombre as he went on. "You know. Die again."
"Okay then, the usual stuff! Nothing I can't handle, is it?" Jack added matter-of-factly.
"Doctor, stop!" the crazed Queen shouted. "Guards! Go get him!"
Much to the Eleventh Doctor's relief, the guards turned around from Rose and him and motioned towards the other Time Lord. However, they merely had a few seconds to stalk their new prey, as the Tenth Doctor had already introduced the activation code into Jack's vortex manipulator and put his screwdriver back in his pocket after briefly sonicking it.
"Once and for all, Sandshoes," Future Him called again, "tell me where you're going!"
The Tenth Doctor's forefinger had nearly pressed the last button of Jack's time-travelling wrist device, but upon hearing the Eleventh Doctor calling on him again, he turned around and fixed his resolute eyes on the worried eyes of his future self.
"To find Lady Greensleeves," he simply answered.
And then, the Doctor pressed that crucial last button and he and Jack vanished within a flash of white light.
The Queen's guards froze in place after bearing witnesses to the wondrous power of a vortex manipulator for the first time in their lives. Even the crowd had been rendered speechless by the impressive glow of the white light, which was all they had been able to see now that all the action was taking place on the ground behind the scaffold. Queen Elizabeth I seemed to be the only one that had not been impressed by what had just happened in the slightest.
"My dear husband!" she sighed. "Why do you always have to go when things are just about to get interesting?"
Her eyes then turned to the Eleventh Doctor, who was still holding the woman she wanted dead so badly close against his chest. For a moment, the Doctor felt scared. Jack and Sandshoes were now gone, there were dozens of guards surrounding them, and Rose was still unconscious. Maybe if he managed to get hold of Clara's vortex manipulator he might stand a chance to take them all out of there safely, but he could hardly move with Rose's body in his arms, and the swordsman was still too close. He knew only too well what that man would do to her if he ventured leaving her unattended for one single second, so what was he supposed to do? And still, he refused to believe that there was nothing he could do at all!
Fortunately for him, soon there was another flash of white light and there they were again, the Tenth Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness. Jack was desperately clinging to the Doctor with his back turned to the rest of them. The Doctor himself had one protective arm wrapped around him, and his chin was resting on his head. He was trembling so violently that his sword cloak would not stop shaking. Why, they all thought? What could have happened to him that he suddenly was so terribly scared? His right arm was hooked to the Time Lord's neck, and his left hand was holding the vortex manipulator with white-knuckle grip. It was the Doctor who was now wearing it instead of him.
It didn't make any sense, Clara thought. Suddenly, she and all the others noticed how Captain Jack Harkness now seemed to be a few inches shorter than he had been before, and things started to make even less sense to her, if such a thing was even possible.
The Tenth Doctor gradually opened his terrified eyes, and the moment he saw his friends' faces as well as Queen Elizabeth's, they brightened up with hope. Slowly, the Doctor softened his grip on Jack, and looking down at him, he smiled as he put his hands on his friend's still shaking shoulders.
"It's okay," he whispered, "you're safe now". Then, he let go of Jack's shoulders and briefly stared behind him, his eyes dancing, just to let him know that, at long last, it was finally safe for him to turn around.
Then, Captain Jack Harkness slowly raised a hand to his head and took his hat off. Under the gaze of the Queen's guards, the time travellers, the Queen herself and Sir Robert Cecil, long strands of black hair immediately fell on his shoulders. Holding the hat in his hand, he then turned around, and what the others saw was the teary-eyed and terrified face of a beautiful young woman who was undeniably wearing Captain Jack's Renaissance outfit.
Not knowing what was actually happening, Clara and Edward looked at each other, and then at the Eleventh Doctor. Much to their astonishment, the green-eyed Time Lord's face beamed with joy, probably because he knew who that young woman was. Clara watched as his eyes darted from her to Queen Elizabeth herself, and the wonderment she saw in them made her turn her own eyes to the sovereign.
Good Queen Bess had not said a single word since she had seen the newcomer's face. She stood staring at her in silence, first narrowing her eyes, then gaping, and eventually with her unbelieving eyes wide open as she put her delicate hands over her mouth. She stayed put for a long time, doing nothing but intently look at that young woman, and all the while, neither she nor any of the people surrounding her dared say a single word.
"Robert," she finally said to Lord Cecil, her tone serious and commanding. "Take everyone away from here and leave me alone with the Doctor and his friends."
"But Your Majesty," Cecil replied, "who is that woman? Are you certain that this is the right thing to…?"
"I do not wish to know whatever it is you are going to say, Lord Cecil," Queen Elizabeth back talked. "I just wish that you and every person who is not associated with the Doctor would leave us alone now."
Lord Cecil had been Queen Elizabeth's confidant for over a decade, as his father had been before him, and not once in all those years had he felt as undermined by Her Majesty's words as he was feeling right now, especially since they had been spoken in the presence of the man she had for a long time claimed to be her sworn enemy, the same man she had been plotting against for months with the help of Robert Cecil himself. He feared he might get poisoned if he swallowed all the words he would just not say to his beloved monarch, but upon considering what the consequences might be, he soon understood that it would definitely be wiser to obey. Thus, following Cecil's lead, all the guards and the swordsman walked away from them. Cecil walked up the steps leading to the top of the scaffold, and once he had reached it, he addressed the people who had gathered outside the White Tower to witness the Big Day's execution.
"Good people of London!" Cecil shouted. "By order of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth I, we must leave this place at once! Celebrations for the Big Day shall go on outside the Tower!"
Had the Queen not been present, the good people of London would most certainly have stayed to demand blood. After all, they had come to the Tower expecting to see an execution just to be disappointed and see none. However, no one would dare raise their voice if the Queen herself had ordered that they left, so without further ado, leave they did in the most absolute silence.
Once Cecil and the guards were gone, Elizabeth promptly took a look around to make sure that they were far enough not to come back. When she did, she nervously raised her hands almost to the level of her chin, and with the index and the thumb of her right hand, she carefully opened the cover of her beautiful locket ring, one with her initial encrusted in diamonds that she had been wearing for decades. Once open, her eyes studied the ring's interior. Nobody else in her kingdom had ever seen or even knew what was inside it, just her. She loved that idea, of course! It had always made her feel that she was not really a queen, but a woman with a secret. Inside her locket ring, there were two miniature portraits, one of Elizabeth herself, and the other of her mother, the notorious Queen Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth stared at her mother's portrait in silence for a moment, then turned her eyes to the woman the Doctor had brought with him. Gaping incredulously, she looked back to the portrait, then back at the woman, and for a while, she kept taking turns to look first at one and then at the other, until her eyes found no difference between them and her heart felt about to explode inside her chest.
Queen Elizabeth started to step slowly in the direction of the woman.
"You still remember her, don't you?" softly said the Tenth Doctor. "The truth is you could never forget her and you could never stop loving her."
After hearing the Doctor's words, the young woman looked intently at the old lady before her, her black eyes still reddened by her tears and confusion written all over her face.
"I'm giving you your mother, Elizabeth," said the Doctor. "Just let Rose go. Let all my friends go. If you do, she stays."
"Mommy!" Queen Elizabeth finally cried out, tears falling down her own cheeks as she reached out for her. She buried her body in hers and wrapped her arms around her neck, crying bitterly over her shoulder.
The Tenth Doctor's eyes glanced at the two queens for a moment. Knowing that Rose was now safe, he finally sighed with relief. Immediately afterwards, he pressed another button of his vortex manipulator and disappeared in another flash of white light, only to reappear a few seconds later with a hand wrapped around Captain Jack Harness's wrist.
With each passing moment, there were more and more questions floating in the air.
Anne Boleyn, former Queen of England, sighed with relief at the sight of the two men that had come out of the blue and saved her life on the very morning of her execution. For that, she was truly grateful, but why they should have brought her before that old lady who was now crying in her arms and kept calling her 'mommy', she certainly did not understand.
Edward de Vere kept looking at the brown-eyed Doctor in amazement, stunned by the knowledge of the identity of the woman he had brought with him from the past. He had guessed that the reason why Queen Anne Boleyn was wearing Lord Jack Boeshane's outfit had to be the same reason why Lord Jack was wearing a lady's grey dress that had turned out to be too short considering his long strong legs, but how swapping outfits with a stranger from the future had exactly helped her escape her probably imminent execution was something he still could not quite understand.
As far as Clara was concerned, she was wondering why the Doctor could have referred to the unconscious girl he was holding in his arms as 'an old friend' when that girl had told her she had never met the man that Clara had called 'the Doctor'.
And yet, the one who was most puzzled of them all was the Doctor himself, who just would never understand why, once upon a time, when he had been younger and thinner and his eyes had been darker, and he had worn sandshoes and a pinstriped suit, right after saving Rose Tyler from the sword of her executioner and from the wrath of the woman who had long wanted her dead, he would simply just turn around and desperately run away from her.