Big big thanks once again to my dear beta NoPondInTheForest - don't know where I'd be without her! Sorry this has taken a bit longer than usual! My only excuse is... It must¡ve been the spring! :-)
The exact same words had been going through the Eleventh Doctor's head from the moment when, after bringing Captain Jack Harkness back from the 1530s, his past self had run away from the site of the scaffold and from the Tower of London, leaving not only him and Clara and Jack and Edward, but also Rose Tyler behind. Now that they had all been accommodated in Whitehall Palace and that he was sitting on an armchair by the bed in which Rose Tyler had been fast sleeping for hours, those words would resonate even more loudly, and the undisputable truth that they stated would seem even more incomprehensible.
Sandshoes was not doing this, he kept thinking. Sandshoes just couldn't be doing this!
And yet, he was! He undeniably was, and that single fact that he was had just posed a whole new set of questions, the first of them all being, why? Why would the other Doctor flee from the Tower of London after being reunited with the woman he had once loved and lost? And as far as that woman was concerned, why would she smack him? The Rose Tyler he had known would only have come back from that other universe out of her deeply-felt love for him. She would never have made such a mentally exhausting and emotionally draining effort just because she was upset he had thrown her into the arms of a different version of himself and abandoned her forever. If the woman who was lying in the bed right opposite was still that Rose Tyler whose memory he had always cherished, it simply made no sense at all.
For the time being, he could only think of one reason which might explain why Rose had rejected him, but even if it seemed a plausible one, he also thought it to be highly unlikely. It went without saying that she obviously couldn't have enjoyed her imprisonment in the Tower, but could that experience really have changed her so much? Could it have radically transformed his brave friend and turned her upside down, up to the point where she would honestly blame him and hate him for it?
Oh, for goodness' sake! There was still something that he just was not being able to see, something that he needed to see so badly! Because, if this was driving him mad, what wouldn't it be doing to the other Doctor?
Oh, his mind said. Oh no, his mind went on. And just like that, in the middle of so much chaos, out of the blue one thing had just become clear.
Where the Tenth Doctor had gone to was no mystery to him anymore.
"We teleported to her dungeon," said Captain Jack Harkness from his place on one edge of the windowsill behind the Doctor's armchair. Turning his head towards sleeping Rose, he raised his eyebrows at her shape. "Only that we got there sixty-four years in advance, when it happened to be Anne Boleyn's dungeon, and since she was still Queen of England back then, it looked much nicer. All her maids were keeping her company, so it was more crowded too. No Zygons in the court of Henry VIII by the way, I can assure you."
The morning was being unusually chilly and foggy for the month of May, but since luckily the unpleasantly cold room that had been procured for Rose happened to have a fireplace, Clara strode to it and crouched down as soon as she saw it, determined to light the fire. When after a while she succeeded, instead of joining the others somewhere nearer the bed, she remained there in front of the fireplace, occasionally adding more logs to the fire as she stoked it, her mind and body caught under the warm spell of the untameable flames.
"So the Queen put Rose in the same dungeon where they'd locked up her mother?" she asked, turning away from the fireplace to look at Captain Jack Harkness with an incredulous frown.
"So it would seem," Jack replied while Edward de Vere kept listening attentively from the other edge of the windowsill. The Earl of Oxford had been numbed from the moment the word 'mommy' escaped through Queen Elizabeth's lips. He had been left awe-struck by their encounter with the alien siren Melusina and the princes in the Tower, but at present he was struggling with the acceptance of the fact that the young lady who had come from the past in the company of the brown-eyed Doctor was actually Queen Elizabeth's mother, the notorious Anne Boleyn, whom history had assumed to have been beheaded by order of her husband King Henry VIII over six decades before. That knowledge was making his own head spin, and it probably still would for days and days. "It was the morning of the day of her execution, 19th May 1536, exactly sixty-four years before the Big Day."
The Doctor didn't say a word, mostly because he would never admit to such thing in public, but the fact remained that, deep down inside, he felt terribly, terribly stupid. As far as Queen Elizabeth had known all her life, her mother had been beheaded on 19th May 1536, and everything she had done – locking Rose up in the same dungeon, setting the same date for Rose's execution, even having a swordsman brought from France –, she had done it to make Rose's execution look as much as possible as Anne Boleyn's. He was angry at himself because it just had never crossed his mind that the day on which Elizabeth's letter had been dated would turn out to be so relevant to her plans. His younger self, however, had turned out to be a little wiser, and even if he must have understood that there might have been a chance for Elizabeth I to have grown up despising and hating that woman whom others would usually refer to as 'the whore' or 'the traitor', what would prevail in the end, what would save them all, would be the love that a three-year-old child had always felt for the mother she had so tragically lost.
"She was waiting for the guards to go get her and take her to the scaffold when we arrived," Jack added.
"And how did you get her out?" asked Clara.
"That wasn't the first of our problems, Miss Oswald," Jack answered. "The first thing we had to do was explain who we were and what we actually intended to do and make it all sound like we were not taking the mickey out of them."
"Does that all mean you needed to earn their trust, sir?" asked Edward, finally waking up from his reverie.
"Luckily for us," Jack answered, "the fact that the Doc and I materialised out of nothing helped. Her maids were quite scared at first, but as regards Anne Boleyn, he seemed to trust us from the get-go!"
"She must've been terrified and desperate," said Clara, "that must've helped too."
"Whatever her reasons, she did trust us," Jack went on. "And so, when the guards came for her, the Doctor and I welcomed them into the chamber and suggested a toast to Henry VIII."
"You did what?" Clara asked, gaping.
"While the Doctor was busy not letting them talk," he added, "I took a bottle of wine and some glasses from a table in the corner, then we pretty much forced them all to take a sip. What they didn't know was that I'd managed to put a few drops of this thing my team and I had been developing at Torchwood in the wine. Basically, it's a l…"
"What's that?" Clara interrupted with a frown.
"I'm sorry?" Jack asked her.
"You said 'Torchwood'. What is it?" she asked again.
"Don't you know?" an incredulous Jack asked her back.
"Why should I?" she said.
"You've brought your amnesia pills, haven't you?" the Doctor then asked Jack.
"Yes I have," Jack replied, "but that's not what we gave them. What I put into their wine was a hallucinogenic drink which has two amazing effects on people. First, it knocks them out, and then it makes them see a distorted version of reality when they wake up, which means that, although they felt a bit dizzy, they could still see us all before them. What they never noticed was that Anne Boleyn and I had swapped clothes, so after the Doctor teleported back to the year 1600 and brought her with him, the head that the French swordsman actually cut off on the scaffold was mine."
"I beg your pardon, sir?" Edward asked incredulously.
"It's okay, Eddie. Pardoned you are, and pardoned you'll remain as long as you beg for something other than mercy later. The French swordsman did, mon petite Pierre! So skillful with his sword!" Jack added with a smirk.
"You can't have been beheaded instead of Anne Boleyn, Captain," said Clara with a frown. "I mean, look at you!"
"I know," Jack said, his eyes darting to her as he smirked again, "I always look great when I come back, so who'd be able to tell?"
"That's not what I meant, Captain," she said. Standing up from her seat in front of the fire, she sauntered towards him as she continued to talk. "I'd heard about you, you know. Kate Stewart accidentally mentioned your ability to come back from the dead, so I guess you must be some sort of immortal human-like alien. You're not a Time Lord though, or you'd have regenerated, but the thing is, how could you possibly come back after having your head chopped off from the rest of your body? I doubt even a Time Lord could come back after such atrocity…"
The Doctor smiled silently at his friend's clever remark.
"I'm afraid I don't know how I did it," Jack answered. "I only know that I did it. I never really worry about the details… I just might have grown another head! Anyway, I really appreciate your concern, Miss Oswald, but just so you know, I've been through much much worse than decapitation, and as you may have guessed by now, I keep coming back."
"And what about the people that attended the execution?" Clara cut in. "You didn't put anything in their drinks, did you? Didn't they notice you weren't Anne Boleyn?"
"They must've thought Henry VIII had some really diverse tastes," said the Eleventh Doctor from his place on the armchair.
Upon hearing his dear voice for the second time after his long and thoughtful silence, Clara turned away from Edward and Captain Jack Harkness and stepped in the direction of the Doctor. Once she found herself by his armchair, she crouched down by his side. Her eyes then fell upon the girl right opposite, who was still in deep sleep and thus completely unaware of their conversation.
"She needs to regain her strength," she told him, having seen the worried expression on his face. "She's a bit dehydrated and a bit undernourished, and I'd say she's terribly exhausted too. Don't think she's been sleeping much while she's been in the Tower. Other than that, she'll be okay soon, Doctor. I promise."
"I know she will," he simply answered as he covered the small hand that Clara had rested on the chair's arm with his bigger and infinitely more restless one.
"I'd say our job here's almost done then," she added, smiling softly.
"I wish it were," the Doctor mumbled, "but I'm afraid it's only just begun."
"What do you mean?" Clara asked him.
"I mean that nothing seems to make any sense, and that we need to find Sandshoes as soon as possible," he told her.
"I would've thought he'd be back by now," she said, furrowing her brow.
"Well, I guess I knew for a fact that he wouldn't," the Doctor told her.
Much to the Doctor's surprise, Clara did not reply to that remark. She had suddenly become busy picking something up from underneath the armchair. His eyes were still at times fixed on Rose Tyler, at times wandering about the room in continuous search for the perfectly obvious explanation that at present was still refusing to present itself, so he never realised what it was that Clara had taken from the carpeted floor until she got up and walked towards the bedside table.
"I guess she'll want it back before we take her home," she said. "You think the rest of her clothes will still be somewhere in that dungeon?"
When the Doctor turned his head to the bedside table, his eyes caught a glimpse of Rose's long colourful woollen scarf just an instant before Clara closed the drawer she had put it in. Surely, the rest of her clothes had to be under the mattress where he had found the scarf, he thought, but soon he lost his train of thought when a certain thought unexpectedly came to his head and stayed there, as it seemed to offer new possibilities to successfully solve the puzzle that the events of the past few days had created.
It only took the Doctor an instant to jump out of the armchair. Turning to the bedside table, he stepped towards Clara, put his hands on both sides of her head and, leaning his head down, he planted a soft kiss on her lips. After he pulled away, both of them looked slightly blushed but none would say a single word, so they just kept staring at each other in silence for a while.
"I gotta go now," he finally whispered. "I need to find him."
"Go. I'll look after her," said Clara. Back on her feet again, she took a hand to her wrist and unfastened the strap of the vortex manipulator she was still wearing. After that, she offered it to the Doctor, who smiled softly as he took it from her and wrapped it around his own wrist.
Finally ready and willing to go, the Doctor turned around and came closer to Captain Jack Harkness and Edward de Vere before he did, with Clara following right behind him.
"Jack, Verie," he told them, "you stay here with Clara and look after Rose. I'll be back in no time at all."
"No need to ask, Doc," Jack told him. "And please, don't let the other Doc come up with any of his overdramatic excuses and bring him with you. He may be the wisest and best travelled being in this universe, but right now, he's acting like a child."
Jack had hit the nail right on the head, the Doctor thought, but he didn't say a word. He just took another look at Clara and gave her a brief smile before he lifted up his sleeve and swiftly pressed all the necessary buttons on the vortex manipulator.
"Back in a mo'," he simply said.
And then, in the blink of an eye, he teleported away from the room.
Once the Doctor had disappeared, Jack slowly stood up from the windowsill and sauntered towards the armchair. Standing behind it, he put his hands on its back and kept silently staring at Rose for a few seconds.
"He better bring him back or I'll go fetch him myself," he finally said, frowning.
"He'll bring him back, Captain, I'm sure," said Clara. "And when he does, the two of them will have to explain why Queen Elizabeth was convinced she'd outdone herself when she locked an innocent girl up in the Tower."
"What?" Jack asked, turning to her in astonishment. "Your lover boy in purple hasn't told you about her yet?"
Clara shook her head slightly, and when she did, Jack gaped.
"Okay! Fair enough!" he exclaimed. "What was I thinking anyway? Of course he hasn't told you yet… He's the Doctor! But you know what? Eddie here knows. I've told him! Good thing the first wife is sleeping and didn't see a thing when he snogged you or he'd never hear the end of it, but why does he never…?"
"Hang on, Captain! What did you just say?" Clara asked, narrowing her eyes. "And just so you know, he didn't snog me! He just… He didn't snog me!"
"If you say so," said Jack with yet another smirk.
The short silence that followed was broken a few seconds later, when Edward decided to ask Lord Jack a question he had been wanting to ask from the moment Lady Clara brought that subject up.
"Are you really immortal, my lord?"
Jack turned towards him, smiling sweetly.
"To be completely honest, Eddie, I don't really know," Jack answered, turning to him. "What I know is, since this thing happened to me over a hundred years ago, no one's been able to kill me, and take it from me, baby, some have tried really hard!"
"So you weren't born like this," Clara muttered, furrowing her brow.
"No I wasn't," Jack told her. "I used to be an ordinary human being, Miss Oswald, same as you."
"Then what happened?" Clara asked him.
Jack didn't say anything at first. What he did was turn around once more to stare at Rose Tyler again. Slowly, he took his hands off the back of the armchair, stepped to its front, and sat down.
And then, when nobody was there to see the small smile that had curled up his lips, he finally answered.
"The Doctor and Rose, Clara. They happened."
A brief silence followed, and while it lasted, Clara understood there was nothing else she could do except the very thing she had not wanted to do for as long as the Doctor had been the one sitting on that armchair. Now that the unasked question was starting to burn her throat and the Doctor was not there to prevent her from asking it, she walked towards Captain Jack Harkness, crouched down right by his side, and putting her hand on his, she asked him that question which, for some unknown reason, she very much suspected the Doctor would never answer.
"Who is she, Captain?"
From the moment he had turned away from Rose and all the others and left them in the site of the scaffold, a voice in the Tenth Doctor's head had been repeating the same sentence up to the point when it had become some sort of mantra. He would occasionally shut his eyes down and keep repeating it while he ran outside the Tower, then out of the city, and finally along the countryside and into the wood.
Run, Doctor, run. Run as fast as you can and don't look back.
It had been a cold and misty morning, but when the fog finally seemed to be starting to dissipate, it didn't take him long to find the exact spot where he and Chinny had hidden the very thing he had come looking for – home.
Run, Doctor. Just run.
The Doctor had been very pleased upon finding his beloved spaceship countless times before, but none of them as much as this one, even if he had decided to do what he had decided to do.
Don't look back anymore, Doctor!
He sprinted for the TARDIS and slapped his fingers as he approached it. The door opened softly and he rushed in, but instead of coming to a halt when he entered, he kept running. He ran along the runaway and past the console, stopping only when he found himself standing right in front of the other TARDIS – his TARDIS. He blinked and took a deep sigh, then shoved his hand inside his trouser pocket and produced the key. Slowly, he introduced it into the lock, turned it around, and putting his extended palm in the blue wood, he pushed. Once the TARDIS door had opened completely, he seemed to need a moment to take a deep breath and make himself ready for whatever it might be that was awaiting him inside. Eventually, he languidly went in and pushed the door closed by leaning against it.
Shutting his eyes down once more, he took a heavy breath as he fought the tears that had just started to sparkle in his eyes. Teary as they would remain, the Doctor opened them again and let them scurry around. It was dark and scorching hot in the console room, and it still smelled of smoke. As he gazed down, the Doctor noticed there were still small flames scattered all over underneath the floor plate. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, they were waiting for the moment when his regeneration would start over again to grow high and swallow everything around them, and for a moment, the thought crossed his mind that he had not really entered his spaceship, but his own private hell, which ironically was what he had wanted to do from the instant he ran away from the Tower.
Run, Doctor, run.
"Sorry to disappoint you, Sandshoes," said a voice from behind the console, "but that won't work. Your regeneration won't be set into motion again until I decide to pull up anchors and your TARDIS is freed from mine."
Those words literally felt not so much like another smack on his cheek, but rather like a blow to the gut.
"I've used the sonic to trace the signal from the time rotor," he explained, though no explanations had been requested by the version of him that was still hidden behind the blacked-out console. "To save time, I've made a beeline, and I've pretty much slogged my guts out to be here as soon as I could, so please tell me, Chinny, how on earth could you get here before I did?"
"I took a shortcut", said the Eleventh Doctor, stepping aside so as to make himself visible to his past self. Then, lifting one arm up, he rolled up his sleeve and showed the other Time Lord the vortex manipulator that Clara had given to him.
"I'd have wanted to do that too," said the Tenth Doctor, "but Jack literally ripped his vortex manipulator off my wrist when I returned to 1536 to bring him back to 1600. Now go away and leave me alone!"
"So… Anne Boleyn nonetheless!" said the Eleventh Doctor, deliberately ignoring his past self's latest remark. "When I said you should've broken some rule sometime I meant something like… I don't know! Maybe taking Vincent Van Gogh to an exhibition of his own paintings in the twenty-first century, but not preventing the execution of the first Queen of England ever to be executed. You've excelled yourself, Sandshoes! Well done!"
"I said, out of my way, Chinny! Didn't you hear me?" he snarled.
The Eleventh Doctor crossed his arms over his chest. He had known that pinstriped him wouldn't be very pleased to see him this time, but he also knew what pinstriped him would inevitably try to do if he wasn't there to stop him.
"I'm not leaving yet, Sandshoes," he finally told him. "I've come here for you."
"Then you shouldn't have bothered!" said the Tenth Doctor furiously as he strode in his direction. "Nice meeting you and Clara, Mr Bow Tie, but now, if you'll excuse me, I really gotta go!"
"Oh my gosh!" exclaimed the Eleventh Doctor in a sarcastic tone. "Have I really heard what I think I've heard? At at long last, Number Ten wants to go! Never thought I'd live till the day I'd hear that!"
"She hates me, Chinny!" the Tenth Doctor snapped, then stopped to gasp for air. "Are you happy now? You were right back there in the tunnels… She hates me! She hates me 'cause I abandoned her and I will never forgive myself for that!"
"She doesn't hate you, Sandshoes," the Eleventh Doctor told him after a brief silence. "She's just scared of you."
"And she's got good reasons to be, doesn't she?" murmured the Tenth Doctor, his suddenly terrified eyes teary as they stared into space. "They nearly kill her this time, Chinny, and it's all my fault, so who knows what I'll be doing to her the next time!"
"I don't think there'll be a next time, Sandshoes," said the older Time Lord. "This time, however, you might just do your best."
"What does it even mean?" sobbed the Tenth Doctor.
The tormented Time Lord had been trying to hold back the tears of hopelessness that had been building up in his eyes, but the pain in his very soul suddenly became unspeakably unbearable, and eventually, tears flowed, silent, bitter, and regretful. He put both his hands on the console, and leaning forward, he remained face down for a while, attempting to regain his composure – and failing.
The Eleventh Doctor's eyes had also wetted, but he hadn't even noticed. He felt truly and deeply sorry for that past version of himself, and unable to fight the uncontrollable urge to soothe him, he put a hand on his shoulder before he finally answered his question.
"It means that is not the reason why she's scared of you."
"Then why is she?" the Tenth Doctor muttered.
"There's something you need to see," bow-tied him told him.
"Please, Chinny, just let me go," he begged him. "There's no way you can fix this. I should've fixed it myself while I had the chance and I didn't. Now it's just too late."
"Is it?" asked him the Eleventh Doctor. "Is it really too late? When Rose Tyler is sleeping in a bed in this very universe a mere five miles away from this place, do you seriously believe there's nothing you can do to fix this? Would you rather just regenerate and forget that this ever happened?"
"Wouldn't it be better for everyone else if I just did?" the Tenth Doctor asked him, disheartened, as he lifted his head and turned it in the direction of the other Doctor.
"No, Sandshoes, it wouldn't!" exclaimed the Eleventh Doctor decidedly.
"Oh, I think it would," said his younger self standing up straight as he took his hands out of the console. "She doesn't know you're me, Chinny, so you make something up and take her home or wherever it is that she's safe, and then y…"
"Oh, for goodness' sake, Sandshoes, stop talking nonsense!" snapped the older Time Lord, who came even closer to his past self before he furiously went on. "Don't you understand? This really is your last chance to make things right with Rose Tyler, Doctor, and you are so taking it!"
Immediately after saying those words, the Eleventh Doctor turned around and took a few quick steps towards the jump seat behind him. Leaning down slightly, he took something that had been lying on top of that seat, then turned around again.
After everything that had happened within the last few hours, the Tenth Doctor was still finding it extremely difficult to calm down and think straight, but the moment his eyes travelled from Future Him to the neatly folded pile of clothes that him had just put on the console right before him, all at once, he grew still. He immediately recognised them, but even if he did, he still needed a moment not only to try to understand their significance, but also to start to believe that things might have been completely different from the way he had imagined them to be.
All at once, his mind became reconciled to the fact that, fortunately, he had been completely wrong.
"I made a stopover at the Tower before I teleported here," explained the Eleventh Doctor, "and I found these in the same place where I'd found her scarf."
The Tenth Doctor had by now started to caress each and every single one of the garments in that pile with his long, thin, and now shaky fingers. Then, he took a few minutes to, one at a time, examine them all.
First of all, he took a soft purple woollen hat that had been resting on top of the pile, and he spent an instant musing over a long golden hair that had got stuck inside it. After a while, he gently put the hat back on the console, then laid his hands on a pair of blue jeans. Unfolding them, he saw they were the sort of blue bootcut jeans he had often seen Rose wear during the blissful time they'd spent travelling in space and time together.
His lips curled into a soft smile, but he didn't even notice.
Soon his eyes were taking in the last of the items of clothing that had been resting on the console. This was probably the sort he had most frequently seen Rose wear back during those days. A hoodie. He suddenly remembered how many she had actually worn and how they had been red, or pink, or grey, or purple… She seemed to have owned one in every possible colour! The one he was holding in his hands right now was her usual pink, although the cuffs, the waistband and the lining were light blue.
Trembling all over, the Doctor took the hoodie in his hands and brought it close to his face so as to feel its softness and smell its scent – that scent he had missed so much for merely a couple of years which had felt like a couple of centuries, and then, all of a sudden, his mind seemed to start to quiet down.
Things were, at long last, starting not to seem so unfortunate.
"She hasn't met you yet," unexpectedly said the Eleventh Doctor, waking him up from this new reverie of his. "At least, not properly. That's why she was so scared of you."
Of course, thought the Tenth Doctor. The clothes he had been holding in his hands were the clothes Rose Tyler had been wearing the last time he had seen her, right after midnight outside her estate on 1st January 2005, when she had thought him to be nothing more than a drunkard while he had been dying even a little faster at not really being able to say goodbye the way he would have wanted to.
Rose would have been the last person that incarnation of him would ever have seen had it not been for the fact that the next Doctor and Clara Oswald had interrupted his regeneration just a few minutes later.
"But how on earth did she end up here?" the Tenth Doctor asked as he pressed Rose's hoodie tight against his chest.
"Well," said the Eleventh Doctor, "I'm afraid I'm not quite sure yet. I have a theory though. In fact, I was on my way to ask Queen Elizabeth I what she made of it when I decided to take a detour and come here. So what do you say now, Sandshoes? You wanna come with me?"