Perspectives

Outside Pete's office in the old warehouse, Jackie pulled Rose over to an alcove of boxes and crates nearby, Jared drifting along behind. Mother and daughter sat huddled silently together, Rose's head on her Mum's shoulder, absorbing the scene they'd just witnessed and its revelations.

"Kinda puts things in perspective, doesn't it?" whispered Rose at one point.

Jackie twisted her head to look at her daughter, and raised an eyebrow. "I told you that Stones was bad news."

Rose stared, then spluttered, halfway between laughter and tears, Jackie joining her a beat later.

A short distance away, Jared sat staring at his hands. Unable to sit still for very long, though, he investigated the hard lump in a pocket, rediscovering Mickey's transport disk. It still showed no signal from home base in Pete's World, but he began fiddling with it, buzzing the sonic to discover its secrets. An idea slowly snuck in sideways, and he stared around the massive space, seeing intriguing bits and pieces laying around everywhere – and suddenly he was moving, searching out and gathering up an impressive array of junk and bringing it back to their alcove.

Rose was content to simply sit and watch him work, the first opportunity she'd had to indulge in her former favorite non-activity since they'd arrived in this world. Was this the man she'd searched so desperately for, launching herself from world to world and fixing timelines? Was he the answer to her dreams? Or would the fact that the Doctor (the one, the only, the original and the best) was still out there in his time ship prove to be the insurmountable obstacle to her happiness with this... copy? Jared was so inescapably much like the Doctor – sitting here, if she didn't know any better... Yet, he was different; he was part human, part Donna, with all her redheaded brassiness – different in ways she had only begun to explore, and suspected he himself had only the faintest inkling of. Had he changed too much? Too much for her to love as wholeheartedly and unreservedly as she had the Doctor? Or for that matter, would the fact that he was available, hers for the taking, and not the unattainable, uncapturable alien she'd fallen in love with mean she would lose interest and fall out of the enchantment?

She didn't know the answers. All she knew was she was both desperately afraid of them, and equally desperately afraid of losing him, of losing the last link she had to the life and man she loved so much, of pushing him away, of discovering the truth too late – whichever truth it might be.

She knew she had changed, as well. She wasn't quite the bubbly, giddy, fearless adventuress she had been during her travels with the Doctor. She'd seen too much, done too much, traveled much too far afield. She was tougher, smarter, and used to being in charge. Had she changed too much for him?

And what the hell are we going to do with ourselves, once we make it back to Pete's World? Without the TARDIS... Visions of boring jobs, credit cards and mortgages trudged drearily before her eyes.

"Jackie?" Pete's gruff voice came unexpectedly from his office door, breaking into all their separate thoughts. "Would you..." he gestured back inside. At her unspoken question, he nodded. "Yeah, I've explained the whole thing. She understands you're not... that you're from a parallel world. Though understanding and believing..." He shrugged helplessly.

Jackie took a deep, steadying breath and nodded, then rose and walked uncertainly through the door, Pete closing it again behind them. His Rose was huddled on one of the many crates being used everywhere as chairs, watching her approach with a stunned, almost fearful expression.

Jackie stopped a step away, and bit her lip. "I can't offer you your mother's forgiveness," she finally said. "But I can offer you a mother's love."

Rose's face twisted, stifling sobs with her knuckles. She couldn't move. Jackie reached out, then, and this other, tragic version of her own daughter slipped at last into her arms, the river of tears beginning anew for all three, as Pete wrapped both of them up in his arms, too. A very, very long time later, when the river finally slowed once more, something had subtly changed inside each one. The awful wounds would never heal, the crushing guilt and stabbing pain would never go away, but maybe... they were just that tiniest bit less lethally sharp.

^..^

Rose stared at the door closing behind her Mum, knowing that things would be different for all of them once it opened again – for the better, she sincerely hoped. She thought it would. She sighed heavily, for the wounds her twin had suffered, and would continue to suffer, long after she and Mum had (hopefully) left.

Turning back, she caught Jared's eyes and gave him an unexpectedly shy smile, hoping her previous tortured thoughts weren't showing on her face. When he smiled back after a beat, she shook her head of all of them, and seized on a change of subject. "What are you working on?"

He shook his head, disgusted. "Something I should have done last week. I'm getting thick!" He went back to his puttering, but before she could draw breath to continue, he asked her, apparently out of nowhere, "What was the name of that character on TV – I think it was from this time period – who could supposedly make a bomb out of chewing gum and a paperclip?"

Diverted, bemused, she thought hard for a moment. "MacGyver?"

"That's the one. I am, Rose Tyler," he always did love saying her name like that, "MacGyvering you a disguise." He gestured vaguely towards her darkened hair. "A better one than that. Gotta keep you safe until we get out of here." He put down the sonic, looking around the warehouse again as he thought aloud. "Now... I need a crystal... and something small, like a piece of jewelry." His eyes fell on Rose, sliding down to her hands – she'd pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. He nearly pounced, "Your watch! It's got a crystal, doesn't it? Perfect – toss it over here!"

He reached out to catch it, then stopped short, startled, when she didn't immediately move to take it off, but merely raised a severe eyebrow at him.

"Will I get it back?"

"Of course!"

"In one piece? Working? I'm fond of this watch; it was a birthday present. From Pete."

He put on his most earnest expression, pulling that hand back and placing it over his single heart. "I give you my solemn vow, Miss Tyler, that I will not so much as sunder a single tick from its tock."

Spluttering, she unclasped the watch and tossed it to him. He grinned and caught it, adding it to his contraption. "Now," he said again, looking at her with an apologetic air this time. "I also need a strand of your hair. With the root, unfortunately."

She'd forgotten how utterly random and unpredictable he could be. But adorable, with those big brown puppy-dog eyes. She reached up and separated out a single strand of hair, yanked it out and reached it to him without a word. He took it carefully, as if made of the most precious substance in the universe, and wrapped it around one finger to secure it. "Now... someone else..." Looking around at the half-dozen other Resistance members in sight, he zeroed in on an attractive, middle-aged Indian woman monitoring a radio. Bemused, Rose watched him walk over and plead his case, coming back a minute later with his trophy hair and a wary, bewildered look for his trouble.

He went back to his jiggery-pokery, bending low over his crate-turned-workbench to wind both hairs around a tiny screw, and then add that to a few other miniscule bits prized from a broken mobile phone and glue it all sonically to the back of the watch. As he went back to work on the companion contraption, putting it together from the – unbroken! – transport disk and some other unlikely components, Rose's thoughts returned again to their former pathways. She found herself once more trying to make sense of, and figure out her reactions to, the mind-bending events surrounding the Crucible and after, when she was suddenly abandoned by the man she'd chased so far and so long. Abandoned with, and to, this imperfect duplicate, who had been struggling ever since to find himself, she knew. She was torn, every minute, between attraction to his so-familiar face and personality, wanting so much to help him, be with him – and the devastating pain of his twin's betrayal, making her want to run away from those familiar eyes as much as she wanted to sit and gaze into them forever.

He suddenly glanced up at her again, catching her unguarded expression before she had time to smooth a mask over it. He slowly put down the sonic and stood, stepping to her crate to straddle the end beyond her feet and sit, all without breaking eye contact. Are you reading my mind? she thought at him, but he didn't react in any way, so she took it for a no. She'd never had been sure of how far his telepathic abilities went.

Say something! he was yelling at himself. Trouble was, he had no idea what. So much for the idea that there was always the perfect thing to say, and he could find it. Finally, he settled on whispering, "I'm here."

Maybe that was the right thing, after all. Her face softened, and she nodded. "I think... I think we both need some time, to adjust to all this, and figure things out."

That actually scared him. "You don't mean... time away from each other?"

She snorted softly, then smiled tenderly. "No. That's not what I mean."

"Whew!" He wilted in relief. Then, a thought: "Do you... do you live at the mansion? With Pete and Jackie?"

"When I'm there," she answered, reminding him obliquely of her recent constant world-hopping. "Why?"

"Well... I was just thinking..." He stopped, and she encouraged him with a lift of her eyebrows. "I was thinking, it'd be nice to take some time off, and be alone with each other. Just the two of us. Away."

"Yeah?" she said softly, her eyes shining. "This is new..."

"Is it?" His mouth quirked, reminding her of all the times he'd been so eager to leave London, and the flat.

She rolled her eyes, and nodded. "No, I guess it isn't, at that." Then she smiled again, letting him off the hook. "Don't worry... I got it covered. The time off, I mean."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." Her smile turned mysterious, and she refused to say more.

He grinned, and let it go. "Okay, boss. I trust you." He leaned closer, asking for a kiss, and she gave it to him, gladly. Then he stood and returned to his fiddling, and she let him go, smiling as the recognition of this new development sunk in: a small, casual kiss, symbolic of a new level of comfort with their changing, romantic relationship. She hugged her knees to her chest again, basking in a tiny new warmth.

Maybe we can work this out, after all.