Big big thanks once again to my dear beta NoPondInTheForest and to you guys for reviews and favourites and follows :-)
It was long past midday when Rose finally woke up. She had noticed the crackling sound of wood in the fireplace and the fresh scent of the pillow her head was resting upon long before she opened her eyes. Inhaling deeply, she indulged for a bit longer in the simple pleasure of stretching her back and legs underneath the warmth of the bedcovers. After all, how long had it been since the last time she had slept like this?
And then, the very moment she asked herself that question, the events of the past few weeks and especially those of that very morning came back to her all of a sudden, feeling like a punch in the pit of her stomach, and her eyes blinked open as she gave out a loud sob.
"It's okay," she heard a familiar female voice say. The gentle sound of swift footsteps came next, followed by the sensation of the mattress sinking slightly in under the weight of the body that had just sat right next to hers. "You're safe now, Rose. And you may not be not home yet, but you'll be really soon. I promise."
Turning to the other side of the bed, tears actually started to fall from her eyes when Rose recognised the face of the woman who was sitting next to her.
"Clara!" she exclaimed as she quickly sat up straight and leaned forward to wrap her grateful arms around her one-night cellmate. "Clara, you did it! You came for me!"
"Of course I did," said Clara, wrapping her arms around her as well and letting Rose's head rest on her shoulder. "I promised that I would, didn't I?"
It had been quite a few weeks since the last time Rose had actually been hugged, and even if Clara was still little else than a stranger to her, she happened to be the stranger that had saved her life, so she stayed in that stranger's arms for a brief while, crying tears of joy because, at long last, she was not alone anymore.
"Where am I?" she asked her.
"Whitehall Palace, London 1600," replied Clara, and no sooner had she done so than Rose went completely stiff.
"London 1600?!" she exclaimed releasing her, her eyes and mouth agape.
"Yes," replied Clara. "There's no easy way to tell you this, Rose, even if you've already got every possible hint you might ever have been given, but the thing is, you've come from the future."
"From the future?" asked Rose in astonishment.
"Yes, and so have I," Clara added.
"You're tryin' to pull my leg, right?" said Rose grimacing. "Ya must be. What's this? Reality TV or something?"
"No, it's not," said Clara, shaking her head. "This is the Renaissance. And I mean, the real Renaissance, not a TV or film set. And you and I, Rose, we've time travelled."
"Maybe ya have, or you think ya have, but I know that I haven't," said Rose, frowning.
"Trust me, you have too," Clara told her softly. "You just haven't known until now."
"But it can't be!" she exclaimed.
Clara went silent for a moment. The thought crossed her mind that, had she been in Rose's shoes, her reaction to that particular bit of information would have been exactly the same.
"Listen to me," she said as she put a hand on Rose's shoulder. "You saw what happened this morning, right? You were a prisoner in the Tower of London, and the guards, the scaffold, the swordsman… All of those were real. Even Queen Elizabeth was real. Elizabeth I! Didn't you see her from the top of the scaffold?"
"I did, yeah," Rose answered as her eyes slowly widened.
"And do you still believe that you really haven't time travelled?"
"Okay! Okay!" Rose said, showing the first signs of something that looked a little bit like trust. "For the sake of the argument, let's imagine that I do, right? So, I've time travelled!" And then, with a frown, she asked Clara the most crucial question. "But why would that happen to me?"
"Because Queen Elizabeth wanted you dead," Clara told her, thinking how there were no reasons why she should not tell her the whole truth.
"I got the 'someone must want me dead' part on my visit to the scaffold, but… Elizabeth I?" Rose asked, raising her eyebrows. "Elizabeth I wanted me dead? Blimey! I must've done some terrible things to 'er in a different life or something, 'cause I really can't remember meeting 'er in this one..."
"I know it sounds crazy, Rose," Clara told her, "but take it from me, crazy things happen all the time, more than we can possibly imagine. And most of the time, they turn out to be really wonderful."
"Having Elizabeth I wanting to chop me head off doesn't sound like something wonderful to me," Rose said. "And anyway, why would she?"
"Because…," Clara started, clearing her throat. "Because there's this man called the Doctor..."
"Yeah, I know," Rose interrupted, "you so keep saying."
"The Doctor is my friend," Clara added, "and I've been told he's your friend too."
"But I've never even met 'im," said Rose, licking her lips.
"You might not have met him yet," said Clara, "but you will. In the future."
"Okay, here we go again!" said Rose, rolling her eyes. "So who is he? Another time traveller?"
"Another time traveller, you said?" asked Clara, smiling broadly before she elaborated on her answer. "He'd be really pissed if he ever heard that… Oh no, he's not. He's the time traveller. You and I, we're just his friends. And from what I've been told," she added, narrowing her eyes as she put a hand on top of Rose's, "you are really very important to him, Rose, or else you would never have been brought here in the first place."
After Clara said those words, there was a short silence during which she could see that Rose was struggling to understand and ultimately to believe her.
"I was just gettin' back 'ome," she finally said, looking down. The thought had suddenly hit her that Clara might help her make sense of what had happened to her if she simply told her everything she knew. "I was almost there really, I had just climbed up the stairs and taken my key from my pocket when I found 'im there again right in front of my door – this drunken bloke in a really long brown coat I had just seen in the street."
That's it, Clara thought. The words 'long brown coat' were all she had needed to hear. Still, Rose kept saying she had never met him before this very day, and when she did, just instants after he saved her from the executioner's sword, the experience had been absolutely terrifying for her. But that man at her door? That had to be the Doctor! Who else could it have been? Unless…
Oh, she suddenly thought.
Unless!
"He was smiling at me, so I smiled back," Rose went on, "but then I thought, how can 'e be here? I'd passed 'im by in the street and gone up three flights of stairs, so how could 'e be standing right at my door? How could 'e have got there before I did? How come I hadn't seen 'im? Then he lifted his hand and there was this thing coming out of it, like blue lightning or something… Whatever it was, it hit me in the face, and the next thing I know, I'm locked up in that dungeon."
"And that man who brought you here," Clara said when it became obvious that Rose had finished her side of the story, "was it the same man who rescued you this morning?"
"Have ya heard a single word I've said?" asked Rose, slightly upset. "Yeah, it was the same man, but I don't think 'e was tryin' to rescue me at all. He must've been tryin' to trick me into some other thing… Blimey, it felt so good when I got to smack him this morning!"
"Well," said Clara, "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Rose, but I think the man you smacked this morning wasn't the same man you found at your door."
"You're joking, right?" said Rose with a frown.
"No, I'm afraid I'm not," Clara told her. "The man that rescued you from the scaffold was the Doctor, your friend."
"That bloke was the Doctor?" asked Rose incredulously. "And you still want me to believe he's my friend? He kidnapped me, Clara!"
"I don't think he did, Rose," Clara added, slightly shaking her head.
"Ya don't think 'e did?" asked Rose, confusion written all over her face. "Well, who did then?"
"I think it must've been a Zygon," said Clara, slightly raising her eyebrows.
"A what?"
"A Zygon," Clara repeated, "an alien creature who looked just like him."
Rose spent a few seconds silently staring at Clara and wondering whether she might just have been a looney all along.
"First you said 'time travel'," she said slowly, marking the last two words, "and now you're talking aliens…"
"Aliens exist, Rose," said Clara, nodding as her eyes widened. "The Doctor himself... He's an alien."
"And you're seriously expecting me to believe that, right?" said Rose, snorting.
"Well, if you can't believe that, then I guess you'll never believe the lengths he's gone to to save your life this morning."
In spite of the reservations that for obvious reasons she still had regarding this Doctor person, who Clara insisted had not been the one to actually kidnap her, Rose couldn't deny that the last words her new friend had just said had unexpectedly filled her up with curiosity. Even if this was just insane from beginning to end, there was one thing she was absolutely sure of in the middle of all that chaos. Someone had most certainly tried to kill her that morning, and whether she liked it or not, it was true that she was still alive because the man in the long brown coat, who by the way had not been wearing that coat anymore, had tried and stopped them.
"What did he do?" she asked.
"Not really sure I should tell you yet," Clara answered.
"Oh please," she told her. "I wasn't ready for any of this, Clara. Who in their right mind would? Still, I've come to believe the time travelling part. I just… I guess I just wasn't expecting aliens to be a part of this madness too!"
Clara smiled. Oh, Rose was clever. No wonder she'd been travelling with the Doctor at all!
"Well, he went to the past, the Doctor," Clara explained. "I mean, further back in the past, to 1536, and rescued the Queen's mother, Anne Boleyn, from the Tower of London on the morning of her own beheading. You know who Anne Boleyn is, right?"
"Who doesn't?" said Rose frowning.
"My students, for instance," Clara answered.
"Are you a teacher?" Rose asked her.
"Yes, I am."
"Good! I know who she is though," Rose said. And then, realisation finally hit her and she stayed silent for a moment, very deep in thought. Anne Boleyn's had been the name her eyes had seen carved in the stone every single day and night she had spent locked up in the Tower of London, but she would never have imagined that the scaffold that had awaited Anne Boleyn at the end of her life was to be awaiting her as well until she found herself standing on it. "That was why the Queen had me locked me up in Anne Boleyn's dungeon, right? I was meant to have my head chopped off just because that was the only way to save her mother's!"
"Well, not really," Clara answered, "although that was a very good conclusion to come to. Anyway, the reason why you were meant to have your head cut off was that Queen Elizabeth wanted to take revenge on the Doctor."
Once again, silence filled the room, and while it lasted, Rose kept wondering how on earth her connection to an alien, however well-travelled, could really be so strong that Queen Elizabeth I of England nonetheless had actually wanted to kill her just to upset him, whereas Clara kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, she was giving Rose more information than she could handle for the time being.
Rose was finally about to say something when, quite unexpectedly, the door burst open and Queen Elizabeth I entered the room. The two young women literally jumped from their seat as they watched the sovereign stride towards the bed and then stand next to it once she had reached it. She barely spared Clara a single glance. Her sunken dark eyes, which had been reddened by tears, kept staring at Rose, who could tell, as did Clara, that she was breathing with difficulty.
The two twenty-first century women thought that tears would soon start flowing from the monarch's eyes again, but they were wrong. What happened was that Queen Elizabeth's legs gave in and she slowly descended to the floor to end up sitting upon it in such a way that it made them think that, possibly for the first time during her reign, the Queen of England had kneeled down in front of her subjects.
"Lady Rose," she said unexpectedly as her eyes kept staring at hers, "as suggested by my old acquaintance Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, by Lord Boeshane of the Boeshane Peninsula, and by whatever best judgement remains in my head, I have come to offer you my sincerest and most profound apology. It is true, and therefore I have no intention to deny it, that I have spent this last month making preparations for the day of your execution, which should have been a day of celebration. Certain accidental events that were entirely beyond my control have ensured that this day shall remain a day of celebration after all, but for what I intended to do to you, madam, I am deeply sorry. Thus, as of this moment, I give you the title of the Lady Rose Tyler. Please consider yourself to be one of our most dearly loved friends at the English court."
Rose's and Clara's jaws had long dropped to the floor.
"Okay," Rose simply answered.
"Is there anything I can do to make your ladyship's stay at Whitehall Palace more comfortable?" the Queen asked.
"No, thanks. I'm fine," Rose answered. "Oh, hang on… Can I have a bath?"
"A bathtub has already been requested," the Queen answered, "and it is, at present, being brought to this chamber, my lady."
"Thanks," Rose answered.
"Thank you very much, Your Majesty," added Clara, getting up from the bed and helping Queen Elizabeth to get back on her own feet. "That was really thoughtful."
Now that she was standing up again, Queen Elizabeth bowed lightly to both Rose and Clara, and without further ado, she turned around and left the room.
"Blimey," Rose said, looking up at Clara, "this is still not a dream, right? That really was Queen Elizabeth I apologising for trying to kill me…"
"She was, my lady Rose," said Clara as a broad smile appeared on her face.
Immediately afterwards, the door opened again and a bunch of servants came in. They pushed a portable bathtub into the room, which they left in front of the fireplace.
"Thanks, guys," Clara told them as they turned around to leave the room. Walking in the direction of the door, she took the fresh cloths, the bedlinen, and the nightgown they had left on top of a table and put them carefully on the armchair.
"You want me to help you?" she asked Rose.
"It's okay, I'll be fine," Rose answered. Clara had assumed she would get up from the bed immediately, but she didn't. Instead, she turned her face in Clara's direction, and looking at her intently, she asked her a new question. "Can you tell me more about 'im?"
"About the Doctor?" asked Clara.
"Yeah," said Rose.
"Sure!" answered Clara. "Although, trust me, he's a very tricky subject to talk about. Where do you want me to start anyway?"
"At the beginning I guess," Rose told her. "I mean, who is 'e? Really?"
"It's a long story," said Clara, feeling suddenly relieved by the fact that she knew how to answer Rose's question. Well, sort of at least. "He comes from a planet called Gallifrey."
"Never heard of it…," said Rose.
"No wonder…," Clara answered. "Neither had I."
"Guess you met 'im on planet Earth anyway, right?" asked Rose jokingly.
"Yes, I did," answered Clara, "but since the day I met him, he's been taking me to all these other planets and galaxies... It's been incredible!"
Rose's eyes brightened up as they kept staring at Clara's.
"Really?"
"Really," said Clara softly. "And of course, we've travelled in time too."
"And what's it like, travelling with 'im?" Rose asked then.
"Travelling with him?" said Clara. This time, her eyes were the ones that started to sparkle. She knew the answer to this question too, but for the time being, she could find no easy way to put everything she wanted to say into words. Still, he had to try. "Well, travelling with him is… Unlike any other thing you may have done before." She went silent for a moment to try and pick her next words as carefully as she possibly could, but as the right words failed her once again, she worded her feelings towards what it was like to travel with the Doctor as simply and as clearly as she thought she could. "It's everything, Rose. Travelling with him is everything to me."
Everyone at court would have expected Queen Elizabeth to be comfortably seated on her majestic throne in the Privy Chamber during her audience with that couple of men who, strangely enough, called themselves 'the Doctor'. The Privy Chamber was the room where Elizabeth I had always granted audience to and entertained every ambassador, prince, or king that had ever been invited to court during her reign. This time, however, the sovereign had shocked each of her courtiers and servants when she dismissed all her ladies-in-waiting and then, without uttering single word to explain, she strode past the Privy Chamber and rushed into her bedchamber, followed not only by those two strange-looking men, but also by a lady dressed up in Lord Boeshane's clothes that she had brought with her from the Tower. To make matters even worse, as soon as the party walked into the royal bedchamber, Queen Elizabeth turned around and locked the door.
Rumourmongers soon started to do their job, of course. After enamouring the Queen, Lord Boeshane had disappeared, and Queen Elizabeth had gone out searching for him only to return to Whitehall Palace, bringing with her a pretty young woman who incidentally happened to be wearing Lord Boeshane's outfit. What could that possibly mean if not just one thing? Lord Boeshane had seduced that young lady as well but unfortunately for him, Queen Elizabeth had found out, and she was now either going to make the lady confess her sin or ask the Doctors to testify as witnesses before her guards escorted the two lovers to the Tower! After all, that was exactly what she had done about twenty years before, when she had learned of the affair that one of her suitors was having with one of her ladies-in-waiting. There was only one loose end, the most observant courtiers and servants claimed. If the Queen was planning to send Lord Boeshane and that young lady to the Tower, wouldn't it just have been easier if she had left them there? Or could there be any reason why she had decided to take them to Whitehall Palace with her first? She might have been planning on publically ridiculing Lord Boeshane, but what about the lady? Nobody at court seemed to know who she was!
Such rumours would keep spreading at court for the rest of the morning, but the Doctors and the two women keeping them company in the Queen's bedchamber were completely unaware of them.
"Had you not closed the door of you spaceship so hastily, Doctor," Elizabeth told the Tenth Doctor, "the arrow that got stuck on it would have killed you on your previous visit to my kingdom."
"Judging from what you've tried to do today," said the Tenth Doctor, "I have absolutely no doubt that it would've."
"When you never returned after our wedding, at first I thought you had died," she went on, sitting on the edge of her bed with her swollen eyes staring into space. The two Time Lords stood right opposite while Anne Boleyn kept pacing the floor restlessly behind them. "I spent weeks and weeks believing myself to have instantly become a widow, until one night a Zygon told me everything about you – the Doctor, the saver of worlds, the Time Lord from Gallifrey. That was when I knew you would never come back."
"It was all a very big mistake, Elizabeth," said the Tenth Doctor apologetically. "We should never have got married."
"Our getting married was not the problem, Doctor," the Queen replied. "The problem was that you dared coming back!"
"That's precisely what I meant," the Doctor interrupted. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth, but the truth is I never loved you. I just happened to stick around for a while 'cause I was looking for Zygons and they turned out to be at the British court, but that was it, and although it's true that I asked you to marry me, it was just a trick 'cause I thought you were one of them. I've forgotten what happened next, but… The fact remains that I agreed to marry you, and it was really foolish of me to do so. I had no right to play any games with your feelings, and I apologise for that."
Surprisingly enough, Queen Elizabeth snorted after she heard the Tenth Doctor's words.
"Play games with my feelings, sir?" she asked him, amusement written all over her face. "And how exactly did you do that?"
"Well," said the Doctor, frowning in sudden confusion, "you had feelings for me… And I abandoned you…"
Queen Elizabeth snorted again. She stared silently at the Tenth Doctor for a second until, suddenly taking her hands to her mouth, she started to laugh, and laugh and laugh and laugh she did until she cried and her side ached, all in front of the stunned gazes of the two Time Lords.
"I am afraid it is I who must apologise this time, my dear man, but this is just so good to be true!" she said as she regained some of her composure. Indeed, she seemed to be having the time of her life, the Doctors thought. "I am extremely sorry to disappoint you, Doctor, but I never had feelings for you. Did you seriously believe that I had fallen in love with you? If that be the case, I regret to inform you that I did not! The only reason why I made eyes at you and married you in such haste was the fact that I was trying to avoid another diplomatic conflict with my cousin Mary."
Neither husband nor wife had realised, but the Eleventh Doctor certainly had, that with every word Queen Elizabeth said, her mother seemed to be becoming more and more restless.
"Your cousin Mary?" asked the Tenth Doctor, frowning. "As in Mary Queen of Scots?"
"Mary Stuart and I always had a troubled relationship," she started to explain as she crossed her arms over her chest.
"Oh yeah, you tell her about that," the Tenth Doctor cut in.
"There was a time, however, when I believed we could let bygones be bygones if she were to marry an English nobleman, someone in whom I had the utmost confidence, so I tried to make my dear friend Lord Robert Dudley accept her hand in marriage. That way, England and Scotland would have been able to call a truce at long last! My dear Robert," she added as her delicate fingertips started to draw circles on her arms. "He was the only man who ever really loved me, Doctor! I loved him too, so very dearly! Unfortunately for both of us, the conflicts started by our ancestors proved to be much more powerful than our will to get married."
"That's true!" the Eleventh Doctor shouted excitedly and unexpectedly as he pointed a finger at her. "I saw it on a film!"
"Chinny," said the Tenth Doctor, "this is hardly the right time to talk about films, don't you think?"
"I remember this day I went to pick Clara up but she had a cold," the Eleventh Doctor explained, "so I stayed over and we watched a couple of films and… Well, I remember you and Robert Dudley looking all lovey-dovey in one of them, Your Majesty."
"Let me see if I got this right," interrupted the Tenth Doctor, elbowing his future self in the arm in an unsubtle attempt to persuade him to stop talking. "Just because you couldn't marry Robert Dudley, you decided he'd be better off if he married your cousin?"
"It would have been convenient," she answered, marking that last word. "But dear Robert just would hear none of it, and my cousin refused to marry him as well. She thought I had gone insane! That was when I decided that, in order to set an example and quell all the rumours, I would have to get married first."
The Doctors opened their mouths with the intention of saying something, but no sound would come out of them at all, so they just gawked for a brief while.
Eventually, the Tenth Doctor asked the question that had been burning inside his throat almost since the very beginning of Queen Elizabeth's tale.
"If you never really loved me," he said, his voice full of anger and incredulity, "why then hurt someone I love? Why that desperate need to have a young innocent girl killed so that you could take your revenge on me?"
The sound of Anne Boleyn's incessant footsteps right behind him had just made the Eleventh Doctor suspect that there might be something wrong with her, and when he turned his head around to look at her, the look of pure terror on her face made him realise that his suspicions had not been unjustified at all.
Queen Elizabeth's eyes suddenly went astonishingly wide, as if she had just become aware of the folly and the horror of the words she was about to say.
"When you reappeared last year,Doctor," she said, "I felt I was being greatly insulted. Did you seriously think that you could simply return to my kingdom after marrying me and disappearing nearly forty years before, and that nothing would happen? Did you actually believe that you would be treated with total impunity? No, Doctor! No man had ever laughed at me and not been punished for doing so. I simply did what I had to do."
"And what was it, exactly?" asked her the Eleventh Doctor, turning his head from the mother to the daughter once more.
"Forty years ago, you both came and took the Zygons' only means to travel in time," she said, and no longer had she finished that sentence that the Doctors realised she was referring to that spherical crystal-like device that the Zygons had used to translate themselves into those Gallifreyan 3D paintings. "However, after four decades of research, by the time you came back last year, Doctor, when that arrow failed to kill you, they had finally managed to develop new time travelling technology, so I sent a Zygon after you when you left, and I gave it clear instructions that it should hunt down and bring me back whatever it was that you loved most. I had been expecting it to come back with your spaceship, Doctor. Imagine my surprise when he came back with a woman!"
There was another long silence in the room, but once again, as he sauntered towards the Queen, it was the Tenth Doctor who broke it.
"Not all Zygons are clever," he said, "but you definitely sent a clever one after me." Probably the cleverest of them all, he thought, since it had been able to understand what the brief instant he had spent on the Powell Estate the night of January 1st 2005 had meant to him. "So there he was all the time, possibly on my own ship, am I right? Lurking in the shadows and waiting to find out which of all the wonderful things in the universe would be most precious to me. And when he did, he stole it."
"I am afraid I do not know the particulars, Doctor, but I understand the Zygon had to take your own form at some point in order for his mission to be successfully accomplished," Queen Elizabeth added.
The Tenth Doctor stood silently just for one second, which was the time it took anxiety to rapidly build up in his stomach and quickly spread all over his chest. At last, he understood, and while he still could not be brought to thinking that this had not been his fault, at least he seemed to be coming to terms with the fact that maybe he was not entirely to blame.
And at long last, he knew really well what he had to do and would not run away from it again.
"I need to see her," he said unruly as he turned to the Eleventh Doctor. "I have to go, Chinny. I need to see her now!"
"What are you waiting for then?" the Eleventh Doctor asked him.
"You," answered the Tenth Doctor.
"I'm not going with you, Sandshoes," the Eleventh Doctor told him.
"What?" asked a truly surprised Tenth Doctor. "But Chinny, I need you with me!"
"And I'm with you, Sandshoes," the Eleventh Doctor told him. "I'm with you all the way and I always will be. I'm just not going with you. This is something you need to do without me, and you know it. Besides, looks like someone else in this room might be in need of some comfort."
As he said those words, the Eleventh Doctor quickly turned his head around to look at Anne Boleyn, whose back was turned on them as she silently looked out of the window.
"Where is she?" asked the Tenth Doctor.
"Right upstairs," his future self answered.
"Right upstairs?!" exclaimed the Tenth Doctor as tears started to well in his eyes. "Why didn't you say that before?"
"'Cause I wanted to make sure you wouldn't run away from her again when you found out," the Eleventh Doctor answered as a smile curled up his lips.
"I shall take you to her, Doctor," Queen Elizabeth told him, nimbly getting up from her bed. "I suppose it is the least I can do."
"Go to her, Sandshoes," the Eleventh Doctor told him. "I'll catch you later."
"You'd better," the Tenth Doctor told him as his eyes were taken over by the most emotional gaze his future self had ever seen.
And then, ignoring Queen Elizabeth's kind offer, the Tenth Doctor turned around and rushed out of the room.