Beta'd by maven13 and Anjirika, and by Kathryn Shadow, via review ;)
Chapter 2 - Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are
Once the school had been evacuated, Rose's one thought was to get John to the TARDIS. She led him through the woods, just skirting the school grounds, around to the western side. If the road was clear when they got to it, they might be able to run. If not, it would mean they'd have to stick to the woods for the whole three miles to where the TARDIS was hidden. Not too bad for her, but John had left his coat at the dance and she'd already seen him starting to shiver. That, and they'd be dodging body-snatching aliens and living scarecrows all the way.
A regular walk in the park, she thought to herself with a good dose of false cheer.
However, they hadn't even reached the road before Rose heard a sing-song kind of voice calling, "Doctor! Doctor!"
She motioned for John to be quiet and follow her, and they crept to the edge of the tree line. The Family were gathered just outside the school, standing around the TARDIS. "Oh, no," Rose breathed, her last bit of hope threatening to desert her.
The Family were taunting the Doctor, calling out into the night. "Come home! Come and claim your prize," one of them shouted.
Rose closed her eyes, desperately trying to think. She had lost the watch, and now she had lost the TARDIS. What did she have? What could she use? She had left the sonic screwdriver and psychic paper in her room, but it didn't seem like either would be of much use at the moment. She had John...
She glanced over at him and was surprised to see him wide-eyed and pale. He was staring at the TARDIS. "You recognize her, don't you?" she asked softly, hoping, praying that she was right.
He shook his head weakly. "Never seen it in my life," he denied but Rose could see he was lying.
This still might work, Rose thought, her faint hope quickly growing into excitement. If she could break through John Smith, maybe enough of the Doctor would be there to help her figure this out. "That's the TARDIS," Rose said, watching closely for his reaction to the name. "The Doctor's blue box? His magic carpet?" she prompted, mentally hacking away at his facade. "You drew her; you wrote about her in your journal."
"I'm not-" John began, his voice breaking, "I'm John Smith. That's all I want to be," he said, looking pleadingly at Rose. "John Smith, with his life, and his job... and his love." He reached for her hands, and Rose's heart sank at what she was doing to him. If he hadn't been all that stood between her and the Doctor, she would have been first in line to help soothe his conflicted mind. "Why can't I be John Smith?" he asked, as if her permission were all he needed. "Isn't he a good man?"
"Yeah, you are," Rose told him with conviction, "but so's the Doctor."
"Why can't I stay?" he begged.
"'Cause we need him," she answered, firmly. It just wasn't possible for her to give in to his pleas. The world, the universe needed the Doctor. And so did she.
"So what am I, then?" he asked. "Nothing?" He let her hands go and stood back from her before she could reply. "I'm just a story," he said dejectedly, and turned and ran deeper into the woods.
"John!" Rose called as loudly as she dared, and followed after him. Did he really have to make this more difficult than it already was?
John wasn't sure where he would run. He just knew he had to get away from Rose, or rather from whatever it was she was trying to do to him. However, when Timothy Latimer suddenly appeared out of the darkness, he stopped in his tracks, not ten paces from where he had left Rose. "Latimer? What are you doing out here?" he asked. "You should be with the other boys -"
At that moment, Rose ran up beside him. "John, I'm sorry, I -" she began but cut herself off upon seeing Tim. "What's goin' on?"
"You need to follow me, sir," Tim said simply, looking straight at John. "I know where you'll be safe, and I have something for you." Something had changed in the boy's face since John had last seen him in the village.
"What is it?" Rose asked. "What have you got for -"
"Not here. Further from them," Tim said, looking back at the school. Without another word, he turned and headed off through the woods to the north.
John took Rose's hand, almost without thinking, and followed after the boy. Tim set a good pace through the trees and John had no qualms about it. It helped to fight off the evening's chill that was slowly seeping into John's bones. It also kept conversation to a minimum and gave him enough to think about, climbing over fallen logs and through underbrush. Enough that he didn't have to think about the Doctor.
After a few minutes, Tim had led them to a small cottage.
"Whose house is this?" Rose asked, looking over the structure.
"I think it's no one's," Tim said, opening the unlocked front door. He led the way inside. "Hello?" Tim called, but there was no response from within the darkened house. "We should be safe here," he told them, leading them into the small kitchen.
"Latimer," John said, tired of the boy's secrecy and hints, "who lives here? How do you know we'll be safe?" He was glad to be out of the night air, but he still wanted answers.
"It's the Cartwrights' house, sir," he answered, a little sadly, John thought. "That little girl at the hall, she's Lucy Cartwright. I guessed that if she came home, and if her parents tried to stop her, then they'd be vanished like Mr. Greebe at the dance."
John looked around at the room. The table was set for tea but the meal was untouched, hours old.
"You said you had somethin' for Mr. Smith," Rose said a little impatiently to Tim. "What is it?"
Tim reached into his pocket and pulled out John's watch. John instinctively stepped towards it but then drew back, tripping against and falling into one of the kitchen chairs. There was a sort of pull from the watch now and it made him feel like a marionette.
"You had it?" Rose asked Tim, accusingly. "Why'd you take it?"
"I didn't mean to, not really," Tim told her. "But it wanted to be hidden. I think it knew that the Family were coming. They were looking all over the school." He looked at John. "You saw Jeremy Baines was one of them, sir. I think he has been for a few days. I had to hide the watch or he'd have found it in your rooms."
"I don't want it," John told him, but he couldn't take his eyes off of it. That watch... something was alive and calling to him.
Everything was true, John realized mournfully. And not just the fantastical adventures he'd shared with Rose. If the Family were real then so were other evils ten times worse. He had seen the blue box, the Doctor's only means of escape from the destruction he left behind him, seen it with his own eyes. And here was the watch, the Doctor himself, ready to annihilate the life of John Smith, simple human.
"I wish you'd had this at the dance," Rose lamented to Tim. "Or did you? You were there, weren't you? Did you have it then?"
John's disappointment only increased. Even Rose, his light and his hope, could only think about how to change him into the Doctor.
"It was waiting," Tim answered her. "And... " he looked apologetically at John, "I was scared of the Doctor."
"You should be," John said quietly. Rose looked sharply at him, but he kept his eyes focused on the watch.
"I've seen him," Tim said. "He's... like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun."
Tim's words merged with snippets of John's dreams and a voice that seemed to come from the watch. It was too much for John. "Stop it," he told Tim, his voice barely above a whisper.
But Tim went on. "He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and he can see the turn of the universe."
John could see it, could feel it, worlds and stars dying and being born in a constant but ever changing cycle. "Stop!" he ordered, climbing to his feet and backing away further. He didn't want it. He didn't want it to be true. "I said stop it," he said, his throat constricting.
"And he's wonderful," Tim added, sounding awed.
John finally looked up at that, surprised to see no hint of condemnation in the boy's face. How could he see the Doctor and not despise him?
John then looked at Rose and caught his breath at the look of deep admiration and obvious love she had for him.
No, he corrected himself sadly, only for the Doctor.
Tim took a step closer to John. "It told me to find you," Tim said, holding the watch out to him. "It wants to be held."
John took yet another step back. He fisted his hands at his sides, resolute.
"Hold it, John," Rose coaxed.
He shook his head. "I won't."
"Please, just hold it," she begged. John thought she was trying to sound sympathetic, but he couldn't miss the eagerness in her face.
Just then the house shook. Rose moved to the window and pulled back the curtains. Through the window, John could see glimpses of something like meteors, or green fire, falling from the sky. Dishes rattled on the table and on the kitchen shelves with each of the nearer impacts. "They're attackin' the village," Rose reported, biting her lip as she stared out the window.
John looked back to the watch in Tim's hand. Almost without John's permission, his legs moved him closer and his hand hovered above the watch.
"Closer," it seemed to call to him. "Closer."
"Can you hear it?" Tim asked, looking to John.
John felt as though he were in a dream. "I think he's asleep," he answered. "Waiting to awaken." No, he wasn't in a dream, he was the dream.
"Why did he speak to me?" Tim asked, as John's fingers closed around the watch.
"Oh, low-level telepathic field," John answered, dismissively. "You were born with it. Just an extra synaptic engram causing -" John gasped, holding the watch in both hands. That wasn't him, that had to be the Doctor. He looked to Rose. "Is that how he talks?" he asked.
"That's him!" She answered, spinning towards him, delighted. "All you have to do is open it and he's back," she told him, encouragingly.
"And I die," John told her and her face fell. "Was that your job all along?" he asked, dropping his hands back to his sides. "Just to keep me alive until the time came to execute me?"
"No, I -" she began but John cut her off.
"Did you think it was all some kind of joke?" he demanded angrily. "How funny that John Smith thinks he's in love." His voice broke even as he said the words. He imagined her laughing at him behind his back, patronizingly entertaining his advances, knowing all the while that he was nothing more than a place-holder. An invention. "What a fool you must have -"
"Stop it!" Rose shouted and he realized she was crying.
They stood, staring at each other for a long moment. He didn't want to believe what he'd said about her but how could she have been genuine? If she knew all along that he was just a story, that he would become the Doctor again when his time was up... of course, she had never actually said that she returned his feelings.
"It wasn't a joke," Rose calmly told him. "You aren't a joke. The Doctor said John Smith was gonna be just a simple fiction and maybe that's most of what you know. But I've seen so much more in you."
She stepped forward hesitantly and reached for the hand that wasn't holding the watch. John let her take it.
"If you were just a story," she went on with a hint of a smile, "you'd be just this stuffy history teacher and you never would've looked twice at a maid."
Rose brushed her free hand over the fingers John had clenched around the watch.
John was nearly overcome by the images that suddenly flooded his mind. His feelings, hopes, and dreams of Rose were extrapolated through time, through a lifetime with her. But there was a simmering, warring force, the Doctor's own dreams, all of her and all making John's feeble wishes pale in comparison.
John struggled to bring himself back to the present, forcing the images away.
Rose seemed to be completely unaffected as she went on. "Everythin' that made you step outside of convention... that fallin' piano... remember what you said about 'run'?" she asked. "That all came from the Doctor."
She lifted up his hand with the watch between them and John fought to remain focused on her.
"I don't think the Doctor's really in the watch," she said, looking him in the eyes with conviction. "I think he's you. The soul, or the mind, or whatever makes a person a person, that's in you," she told him. "But it's like you're drugged, or you've got amnesia and you just can't remember the truth." She smiled. "You open that watch and you won't die," she insisted. "You'll just be more yourself."
John thought about how he had felt before he had touched the watch. How alive he had felt that afternoon in the village when he had saved a mother and baby using only a cricket ball. How right it had felt to run away with Rose, hand in hand. How perfect life had seemed to be when he had held her and kissed her, like he was finally awakening from a lifelong dream, or maybe touching a dream.
But Rose couldn't realize what nightmares awaited if he let the sleeping Doctor awaken.
The house rocked with more explosions. "It's getting closer," Tim said from the window, turning to John with a worried expression.
John was surprised to realize the boy was still there. He looked past Rose and Tim, watching the green lightning through the window. Rose wasn't the only one who wanted the Doctor. The Family... the Family...
"They don't want me," John whispered. He took half a step away from Rose. "I should have thought of it before: I can give them this!" He held up the watch, triumphant in his discovery. "Just the watch, then they can leave and I can stay as I am!" He wouldn't have to die. He could rid himself of the Family and the Doctor in one simple move.
"You can't!" Rose argued, obviously horrified at the idea.
But John was convinced it would work. It had to. "If they want the Doctor, they can have him," he told her.
"I won't let you," Rose told him, fiercely, and John dropped the watch back to his side.
His heart sank as her bravery showed up his cowardice. But his plan did make sense, he told himself. He tried, weakly, to explain. "If they get what they want, then - then -" It must have come from the watch, John thought, but he could suddenly see the Family, breeding and conquering, living forever.
"Then it all ends in destruction," Tim finished for him. "I've seen that, too. War across the stars."
Rose felt tears threatening again as she watched the broken man before her slump back into his chair. She could just take the watch from John and open it herself but something held her back. Somehow it just didn't seem right. What she had said about seeing the Doctor in him was true. She wanted him to choose to be the Doctor. She wasn't about to let him go and give the watch away, but still...
She turned to Tim. "Could you give us a minute?" she asked. "Alone?"
Tim nodded and left the room.
Rose pulled up a chair beside John and sat, smoothing his hair, trying to give him some measure of consolation. "I'm really sorry," she told him. "I can't imagine what this is like for you."
"I can see," he said quietly, looking at the watch he now held in his lap. "I can see it all. Everything we lose if I change."
We, he said. Everything we lose. Everything we could share. And that was what probably hurt Rose the most. He wanted a life with her. A kind of life she would never have with the Doctor. "Can I see?" she asked, just as quietly. She wasn't exactly sure she wanted to. She worked so hard at telling herself she didn't want anything like that with the Doctor. It might be easier not to know...
John held the watch out to her and she cautiously reached out a hand towards it. Relief filled her when she touched the watch and couldn't see anything. "Guess it doesn't work for me," she said.
But then John covered her hand with his own.
There was a wedding, their wedding, surrounded by dozens of smiling people in a small chapel. Everyone was cheering them, oblivious to the truck rumbling down the street filled with soldiers on their way to war.
Children came. John supported them, Rose took care of them at home. The world moved on around their growing family but they couldn't be bothered by it. John never read the newspaper, hardly watched the television when it came along. As long as they stayed apart from all that, the children would be safe. Rose would be safe.
On and on it went, a happy life filled with love and family, but oblivious to the pain and suffering in the world around it. Even on his deathbed, John's one thought was, "They're all safe, aren't they?"
It was full, but at the same time, empty. It was just what Rose had told her Mum she couldn't do anymore. A normal life. The Doctor had shown her something so much better and it didn't have to be in a TARDIS. If somewhere in his vision John had opened his eyes and tried to help, if life had been about more than keeping their family safe, if John and Rose and their children could have gone out into the world and learned and shared and met people and taken risks and changed things for the better... maybe that life would have been tempting.
Even as she thought these things, a new vision filled her mind. Another wedding, but on another world. No, "Until death do us part," but whispers of "Forever."
Children came; children that amazed them by their very existence. They raised them together, amidst the wonders of the universe.
The pain and darkness sometimes touched their lives, as it always had, but they pressed forward together, never giving in to it.
Realization hit Rose with a shock and she jerked her hand away from the watch. Those couldn't be John's dreams she was looking at any longer. Embarrassment filled her at the thought that her own dreams of life with the Doctor must somehow have bled through. She had never given them such detail but that must be the watch at work. Rose looked back at John, wondering if he had seen it, praying the Doctor wouldn't remember if he had.
But John didn't mention it. He looked at her with tears in his eyes and said, "If I become the Doctor, I lose you."
Rose shook her head. "No, you won't," she insisted, reaching for his hands but careful not to touch the watch again. "I promised the Doctor forever -"
"But I will," John told her, his voice full of conviction. "You're human. You can only give him so long. But the Doctor lives forever."
Rose sat back slightly, a lump forming in her throat as John confronted her with the emptiness of her own words and with her own - and perhaps the Doctor's - fears.
"If I change," he went on, "maybe I could save the world, but I'll still lose you."
Rose's heart skipped a beat and she was suddenly back in the cabinet room at Ten Downing Street. The Doctor had said almost those exact words to her then but she never imagined it went deep enough to stay with him now, when he was a regeneration apart, not to mention a different species.
She leaned forward, and kissed him. He cradled her head, returning the kiss desperately.
Rose eventually put a hand to his chest and gently broke the kiss. "But you've gotta do it," she said at last, echoing her own conviction from that long-ago adventure. "It's your decision, but people are dyin' and they need help. They need the Doctor. But if you're not gonna do anything about the Family, then I will." She didn't know what she'd do but she couldn't do nothing. She just wasn't that kind of person anymore.
He stared at her then looked back down at the watch. Rose wished she could know what he was thinking, what else she could say to convince him. After a long moment of silence punctuated only by the continuing bombardment outside, he pulled her back to himself, kissing her hair. "I love you," he murmured. Words stuck in Rose's throat as she clung to him, pondering her reply. It would be so true and yet such a lie to say the same to him.
He opened the watch and screamed.
To be continued.
