A/N: Just a quick note: I'm going out of town for the weekend, so review replies will be slightly delayed. I hope to have lots of reviews to answer, though. Hint hint. ;)
Glad so many of you seem to be enjoying it thus far. One thousand hits in less than two weeks is quite a feat for such a short story!
She had been thirteen when she'd found him. There was something in the way he observed his surroundings, in the heavy lilt of his voice, in the way his ears stuck out and made him look slightly daft. "What do you do?" she'd asked him.
"I'm a doctor," he'd said, and from then on, they'd been coffee shop friends. He made snarky comments about patients and coworkers who were idiots, and she'd told him about Torchwood, the secret company dedicated to protecting the earth from aliens, without hesitation. For two years, it was an easy companionship, neither bothering to address the odder circumstances surrounding their relationship.
And then, one day, Jackie saw him and pitched a fit to level the neighborhood. She'd slapped him and Tardis had laughed at the look on his face. He had been confused by what Jackie was accusing him of, finally yelling right back, "Jackie Tyler, you bloody domestic, don't you start in on me. I've never even touched your daughter!" To which Jackie swelled up and Tardis shoved herself in-between the two, introducing him proper civilly to her mother as Doctor John Smith, who was not the same as Rose's Doctor, and could she please not kill him, as she quite liked his company?
This incident had thrown their easy friendship so out of balance that she didn't see him for nearly six months, until one day, Pete came home with the news that they'd hired a new researcher who had more promise than the rest of the Torchwood teams put together. He'd then turned to Tardis, who was piecing together a replicator as if she'd seen one before, and asked how it came to be that this new recruit, this John Smith, had been so intimately familiar with Torchwood's inner workings. She'd grinned and showed him how to work the replicator.
The next day, she skived off of school and showed John the ropes. He dumped three months' work in the bin with a few well-chosen words, and everyone finally began to really wonder about the Tyler family.
She was seventeen when she'd known for sure what he was. Something was going on down in Cardiff, and as John pointed out, it unfortunately looked as if it was connected to several other occurrences previously thought to be separate. She mentioned Bad Wolf under her breath, and before Mickey could chuckle at her reference, the doctor had gone rigid and snapped at her for joking about the situation. Angry to have the enjoyment of her sister's memory cut short, she snapped back, and they'd begun yelling at each other until Mickey had tried to get them to stop by waving a hand in the other man's face and shouting, "Oi, Big Ears!"
John didn't look angry anymore. He looked exasperated. "Look, Rickey the Idiot, if you hadn't opened the TARDIS, we wouldn't be in this mess. Now shove off!"
She sliced her hand on an alien artifact before anyone had time to react to his outburst (conveniently picking up yet another alien virus that turned the area purple and shrank the big toe on her left foot). It was the first slip-up of many, and they were only lucky enough to have a small audience for the next week. Before anyone started asking questions, Tardis told Pete that she had a project that she needed John's expertise on, and she needed it exclusively. As always, Pete let her have what she needed, and John didn't ask questions.
She passed her other projects on to the more creative of the R&D teams, had some vaguely interrelated extraterrestrial devices moved into the wing that had been sectioned years ago and dubbed the 'Ghost Wing.' By the end of the week, they'd spread their gadgetry all throughout the room at the end of the wing, and were working away dutifully.
Then, Tardis began her own experiments. Years later, John asked her how the hell she'd managed to work it out.
And she explained her Regeneration Theory.
For several weeks, she found that his memories could only be accessed by accident, and so she left him without the knowledge of their true project for the time being. The Ghost Room never seemed to bother him, except that the mascara smudge left on the back wall seemed to unnerve him, and so Tardis knew that his memories would never stretch past Satellite Five, but that his instincts were still enough to help him recognize signs of his own disastrous touch.
Because Rose had told her all that she knew about the Doctor by the time she was four, Tardis had recognized John immediately. Call it luck or instinct that the combination of eyes, nose, ears, northern accent, and doctor had caught her attention that day at the coffee shop, but once she'd actually struck up a friendship with him, she'd easily spotted the characteristics that had so defined him to his companion all those years ago.
He didn't remember anything of it, understandably. When he'd woken up, he had set out to find his own identity. He hadn't found it, of course, because he'd never existed before. He had no family, no job, no home… not even a credit line. But then, as a sort of echo of the Doctor, John Smith didn't allow his lack of existence to deter him. Tardis met him fifteen years after he'd first appeared, and the dreams had begun not long after that.
It took a while to piece his memories together. Having none of the previous regenerations to start with, it was completely blind that she'd begun prodding his memory. The best bits came when he was fired up about something, but she could only provide as many scientific mysteries for him to triumph over and pick so many fights. Mostly, she set something in front of him that would absorb his attention, and then asked him things that John Smith did not know. In two weeks, she could not count the amount of times that he'd begun to say "my friend Jack" or "my granddaughter Susan" and then trailed off. He could ramble about an alien race or a sonic cheese grater or bananas until he turned blue, but when he began to mention an old friend, his mind came off of his project to properly remember them… and found that he couldn't. "Hm," he'd say. "I dreamed about that once."
He dreamed about a lot of things, she found, and he'd dreamt about them for years. It wasn't until she'd brought in a picture of Rose that he thought anything about those dreams. Four years of similarly themed dreams, after all, began to lose their significance.
That picture, though… "Rose Tyler," he'd said before Tardis could tell him who she was, and he said it with such conviction and admiration, that neither of them could ignore the coincidences anymore. So, months after they'd begun their 'project,' Tardis finally explained what it actually was, including his memories.
Memory is not inscribed in cells, after all. It might leave the vague imprint, proving that it's been there, but it is not truly there – an echo, in itself. John was rebuilding the memories, she thought, and that was why it was taking so long and remained so elusive. All he needed, really, was a catalyst, and that, Tardis was now sure, was Rose.
He stared at the picture more than he thought she knew. And it was not long before he remembered it all.