A.N. Hello! It's been forever and I'm very sorry! Last week was an awful week. Every time I went on Fanfiction to update, the site was down. This happened every. single. time. It was so outrageous. Then I had this whole big thing with my bank and someone trying to use my card and I had to get a new bank and it was awful because I live in China. Then I got horribly sick and had to miss work and the whole week was just crap. But finally! An update. Hopefully it was worth all the hassle. Reviews are beautiful things that would make this week infinitely better than last week & if you had any suggestions of DoctorxRose stories you read when you're having a crap week, I would sincerely appreciate them. =]
"Pete's World?" Rose looked up, squinting again to try and find her current home world in the maze of circles. "It's where the Doctor and I live. It's a parallel universe to this one. One where my dad was wildly successful and I was a dog."
The Doctor let slip a laugh and Rose shot him a filthy look which instantly silenced his mirth.
"Then the Cybermen took over, the world almost ended, but we saved it and I got sealed off there, after well – really, it's a long story. But yeah. That's where I live," Rose finished.
"Cybermen?" Rory asked. "What are they, exactly?"
"They were once people," the Doctor said, still looking at the console screen but sneaking glances at Rose. "Then they upgraded themselves, made themselves nothing but metal and brains, emotions were deemed inferior and therefore removed."
Rose pressed her lips together in a thin line, recalling the Cyberman version of Jackie. She'd never talked to the Doctor about it. He wouldn't have understood. It was enough for him that Pete's World's Jackie wasn't really her mother, that it was a Jackie who wasn't really Rose's Jackie, so it shouldn't really matter what happened to her. But the Doctor had still taken Rose back to see her mom after Pete's Wolrd and they'd spent an unaccountable week there, the longest they ever had. Rose had known it was his way of trying to apologize for what she had seen and it meant the absolute world to her.
Because of that, Rose never told the Doctor just how much the events in Pete's World had scared her. That because Rose was someone who lived so strongly by her emotions, the idea that someone could remove them from you and turn you into nothing more than a high functioning computer was terrifying beyond most of the things they had ever seen.
Of course, later on, she'd had Toby to haunt her nightmares instead of the Cybermen, and after that she'd had ripping white voids, and after that stars going out. It was never ending, really, the things you saw and conquered that could haunt you when the lights were off and the room was quiet.
Though, for the most part, the nightmares had subsided once she and the Doctor began sharing a bed. It was amazing what a pair of arms around you in the night could do to hold back the nightmares, or wipe away your tears if they did come.
"Kind of like the Tin Man minus the charming personality?" Rory was asking, drawing Rose back to the present.
"Yes," the Doctor agreed delightedly. "Except not at all."
Amy rolled her eyes. "Does your Doctor do that?"
Rose noticed the emphasis on yours and understood that this was not an olive branch but a reminder that the Doctor before them belonged to Amy and her family. "No," Rose said. "But he does have this thing where he says sorry and it feels like the worst thing in the world, because you know whatever he's apologizing for, it's going to ruin your life."
The Doctor and River looked over at her; Rose felt a blush creeping up her cheeks and quickly busied herself with fiddling with the hem of her shirt. "What does it say, River?" she asked, wanting to deflect the attention away from herself.
River glanced up at the screen then back at Rose. "Did the Doctor ever mention the Great Intelligence?"
"Other than his own?" Rose teased.
River grinned. "You're quite right, I should have clarified."
"Oi!" The Doctor cried indignantly. "My brilliance has saved both of your lives on more than one occasion, I'll have you remember."
"Couldn't forget it, Sweetie, you never stop reminding us." River patted his shoulder consolingly before motioning Rose and the others over.
While the Doctor was sulking about ungrateful companions, River pointed to various Gallifreyan words and explained the gist of the Doctor's journal entry. "He seems to think that the anomaly with the Wifi has something to do with the Great Intelligence, which is a disembodied –"
"It doesn't have physical form," the Doctor inserted.
"Disembodied," River reiterated with annoyance, "consciousness. No one knows for sure what the Great Intelligence was originally, it doesn't come from our universe, but rather from a parallel one and eventually ended up in ours. The Great Intelligence's goal is always to gain physical form, it has tried to do this by possessing people or things, such as snow, but it has never found a way to maintain its physicality."
"And you have my genius to thank for that," the Doctor boasted, though it didn't have his usual ring of self endorsement. He was looking at the screen again. "However, the Doctor, or rather I, seems to think that Pete's World has a Great Intelligence as well. Actually," he frowned, "apparently, I think that the Great Intelligence in Pete's World is the same one that I faced in our world."
"How is that possible?" Rose asked.
"What do you mean, you seem to think?" Amy asked.
"He means the half him, I think," Rory said.
"How can you be half of anything?" Amy burst out, her arms thrown up in the air before she sunk back on the jump seat. "Can we just take one second out of all of this insanity to have that explained, Doctor?"
He whirled around to face her, completely surprised by her outburst. Well, not completely, Amy had a tendency of shouting when she got frustrated. Just like her face took on that odd little pinched look with huge eyes when she was concentrating very hard.
"He's half human," the Doctor said simply.
Rose sighed. "God, you're just rotten at explaining things in all incarnations, yeah?" Turning to the others she offered a head shake of apology on behalf of the Doctor. "The Doctor, this Doctor," she pointed to him, "got struck by a Dalek and started to regenerate, we, our friends and I, got him back onto the TARDIS where he directed his regeneration energy into . . . well, into a hand in a jar, which quite honestly, is just as weird and gross as it sounds."
"Hey! That was all Jack! He'd somehow found the hand and pickled it to track me," the Doctor huffed, not wanting to take all the blame for things Rose found weird or gross.
"Er, whose hand was it exactly?" Rory asked sounding exceptionally iffy on the topic.
"My hand," the Doctor said, brandishing his right hand at them. "Got it lobbed off in a sword fight with a Sycorax."
"So you just regrow body parts like a lizard?" Amy asked, highly interested if not a little grossed out.
"No! Of course not."
Rose hopped onto the console, ignoring the dirty look this received from the Doctor and the questioning one from River. This was her TARDIS and she knew where she could sit without budging any of the important buttons and the rest of them could just sod off. "It was within the first fifteen hours of regeneration so . . . I guess body parts that get lobbed off just grow right back."
"Ew," Rory and Amy chorused.
Rose nodded empathetically. "I mean, it was great because he wasn't handless, but just a little on the wiggy side too, you know?"
"I can well imagine," Rory said with a shudder.
"Aren't we getting a bit off topic," the Doctor groused, not enjoying being talked about like a science experiment. "I'm an alien, or did you all forget the two hearts and regenerating?"
"Right." Amy straightened up. "So how did you become half alien?"
"Well, when the regeneration energy went into the hand, the Doctor stayed the Doctor that he was, having used up just enough to heal himself. Then Donna, his companion at the time, perfectly normal earth girl with gorgeous red hair, like yours Amy," Rose added as an aside, "she got trapped in the TARDIS and she touched the jar with the hand. Her DNA activated something and out popped my Doctor, half human from Donna, half alien from the whole Time Lordness."
"Easy Bake Oven, Time Lord style," Rory mused.
Rose was glancing at the Doctor, and he knew from her look that she had purposefully left out the rest of Donna's story and for that he was grateful. "Right then," the Doctor clapped his hands together, "now that the mystery of my half self has been resolved – "
"You still haven't explained how the Great Intelligence could be in Pete's World," Rose interrupted.
The Doctor faltered. He turned to River who shook her head. "I honestly don't know, Rose. The Great Intelligence has done it before, on more than one occasion, I believe. It seems probably that he did again. Slipped into your universe and began manipulating the wifi."
Rory asked, "Why Wifi?"
"I don't know that either. We'll be able to ask when we find your Doctor."
"Why would he land here, though?" Rose asked.
"I – er – don't think he exactly landed, Rose," the Doctor said carefully.
She frowned, stepping closer to him. "What do you mean?"
"It seems more likely that he crashed," River said gently. "The Doctor had a look at the logs while you and I were searching the woods and the TARDIS didn't record landing, she recorded crashing."
Rose's heart leapt into her throat. Crashed? The Doctor had crashed here after running off on a mission he'd never even spoken to her about, in all likelihood searching for this Great Intelligence which he had never told her about either? What was going on?
Exhaustion rolled over her. It had been such a long day and she was still so far from finding the Doctor. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to remain strong. The Doctor was out there somewhere and she needed to find him.
"It's already night on Savoh. They have a disproportionate amount of daylight to night hours," the Doctor said abruptly. "The native population of Savoh is far deadlier in the night since they become near impossible to spot. It would be best if we go out in the morning, launch a search party as it were."
River didn't miss that his glance slid to Rose as he said this. In fact, River hadn't missed any of the glances flying back and forth between them since she'd entered the console room.
She understood what those glances meant, that the Doctor and Rose were speaking a language the others weren't privy to. One with past hurts that required tiptoeing around to ensure the other wouldn't' be reminded. They were looking out for each other as if the two hundred years separating them had never happened.
Two hundred years since he'd last seen her and he still knew which memories would hurt her. Secretly, River hoped that in any of her future time she never bumped into Rose and the Doctor together, before they were separated. It was bad enough now with two centuries separating them, she couldn't bring herself to imagine what they had been like before that.
Still, the Doctor did have an infallible point. The Savoh were much more dangerous at night and honestly, she could do with a reprieve from all of this for at least a few hours. "In the morning, we can meet here again, if that's alright with you, Rose?"
The blonde nodded, leaning against the metal walls of the TARDIS, her attention fixed on the doors, as if trying to will the other Doctor into appearing.
Amy and Rory followed River's lead, heading for the doors to go back to their TARDIS. The sudden movement stirred Rose back to life. "Thank you!" They stopped to look back at her. "You don't have to do this and I really truly appreciate it. I know you don't know me and I probably seem like a complete annoyance, especially with ruining your Rio plans, so I just want to say thanks."
The trio smiled. "It's what we do, right?" Rory asked. "Help people with alien problems?"
"And your problem definitely qualifies as that." Amy smirked.
"Yeah," Rose smiled back, "yeah, I guess it does."
"Good night then." Amy waved and the other two disappeared through the door after her, into the darkness of the Savoh night to trek the few feet over to the other TARDIS.
The Doctor was still at the console, messing with random bits now and very clearly hovering. "Doctor?" Rose asked, skipping up beside him to lean on the console. "Got your own TARDIS to mess around with, remember? Looks a lot like this one, but with a bit more glass."
"Maybe I've decided I don't like the change." He prodded one of the knobs and the lights in the console room flickered.
"I'm serious though. You mess something up, the Doctor's going to be livid with you."
"Rose, I am not going to mess it up." He sighed deeply aggrieved.
She rolled her eyes, hopping back up onto the console. "Don't say I didn't warn you."
"You really shouldn't sit up there, Rose, especially not when you're lecturing me about messing things up. You know right now you are sitting on four different sets of buttons that really oughnt to be touched under any circum-"
She had pressed her finger to his lips, ceasing the flow of his words. "This is my TARDIS, which means you don't get to tell me what I can and can't do. It also means that I know you're making all of that up because this panel I've been sitting on for months now and nothing has ever happened because of it. Almost as if the TARDIS knew just how much I liked sitting on the console and made it special for me."
The Doctor's jaw worked, rubbing his lips against her finger, but no words came out, and Rose, deciding that motion was really a bit too distracting and not in a particularly good way, hastily removed her hand, tucking it safely beneath her thigh. "Now, get on back to your TARDIS so your companions can barrage you with question about that weird girl with gold eyes and what on earth you are doing with halfsy walking around in a parallel universe."
He dropped his eyes back to the knob he had prodded. "Do you want me to leave?"
The urge to grab his lapels and snog the life out of him burned brightly for a moment then fizzled away. He was driving her insane. She'd missed the life out of him and it was beyond wonderful to be together again and she loved him just as much as she always had, but things had never been that way between them and they certainly weren't that way now.
Of all the things she wanted to say at the moment, what came out instead was, "You've changed."
His face jerked up, surprised. "Yes, pretty sure we've already established that, Rose."
"No," Rose said slowly. "You have changed. You've rebooted the universe, you escaped your own death, you've reset time."
"I don't see your point." The Doctor braced his hands on the console, his neck bent down as he stared hard at all the buttons this TARDIS had that his didn't, recalling what each did and why the new TARDIS didn't have them.
"I think you do. Or, at least, I hope you do." Rose tilted her head to the side, trying to gauge his face even though it was directed away from her.
"I was saving the universe, Rose, that's what I've always done."
"You've reset time before?" she asked skeptically.
"Ask Martha Jones about the year that didn't happen," he replied tersely, pushing off the console and walking around to the other side.
Rose remained where she was, lips pressed together as she thought this over. "Except you weren't really resetting time, were you, Doctor? The Master had created an impossible paradox, sustaining it through the barbarization of the TARDIS, by creating the year that didn't happen, you didn't reset time so much as put it back on track."
His hazel eyes flickered to her in wonder then drifted back to the console. "I told you . . .?"
"We don't have secrets," Rose said quietly. "So tell me, who is the Time Lord Victorious?"