"Absolutely not," Rose said, looking less than impressed.
The Doctor pulled a face.
"Why not?" he asked, looking up at her expectantly from the driver's seat of their car. "Come on, Rose. Let me drive."
"No way," she said firmly.
"Why not?"
Rose put her hands on her hips.
"I value my life too much."
"Come on, just get in," the Doctor coaxed.
"Doctor. I was inside the TARDIS when you tried to drive it. We ended up everywhere but where we wanted to be, remember?"
"That's not fair. A TARDIS usually takes six people to drive, and I was all by myself. Of course it was a rattle-n-crash job."
"Doctor…"
"Rose, come on. I drive a car better than I drive a TARDIS," the Doctor wheedled.
"Do you even know how to drive a car?" she asked.
"Yes. I'll have you know I had a car once."
"Don't tell me. You used to drive it around the TARDIS when you got tired of walking," Rose said, rolling her eyes.
"Sarcasm will get you nowhere, Mrs. Smith. No, I had one when I was exiled to Earth in my third regeneration."
Rose raised an eyebrow.
"You're full of surprises. You were exiled to Earth?"
"Yep. I worked for UNIT. And I had a car."
"Is that why you hate UNIT so much?" Rose asked.
"What, my car? No, the car was completely innocent in that matter. And I don't hate UNIT, I just… don't like being saluted."
"Are you sure you know how to drive?" Rose asked.
"Yes, dear," the Doctor said with a longsuffering sigh.
Rose looked skeptical, but she climbed into the passenger seat.
"If you kill me, I will never forgive you," she said.
The Doctor grinned.
"Fair enough." He held out his hands for the keys, and Rose handed them to him reluctantly.
"In for a penny, in for a pound," she said with a sigh.
The Doctor put them into the ignition, and turned. The car started. He turned the steering wheel, and stepped a little too hard on the gas, causing the car to lurch. Rose covered her face with her hands.
"Why do I get myself into these things?" she moaned.
"Come on. It was an honest mistake. Everyone's entitled to those," the Doctor replied.
"We're going to kill people," Rose muttered. "We're going to knock someone down, and go to jail."
"Don't be silly. This is fine. It's just that technology has advanced since I drove in the '70s."
"Stop at the lights, Doctor," Rose said, fighting to keep her voice calm. "Stop. Stop!"
The car screeched to a halt.
"That light came out of nowhere," the Doctor complained. He turned the wheel, and the car moved into the lane. It was a busier street than before, and there were other cars all around them.
Rose clutched her seat belt, her knuckles white.
The car jerked again.
"Where's the clutch on this thing?" the Doctor asked.
Rose groaned.
"There is no clutch. It's an automatic."
"Oh. Right." The Doctor seemed to be doing all right going straight. Rose relaxed a little.
"Bessie," the Doctor said suddenly.
"What?" Rose asked.
"My car's name was Bessie."
"You gave your car a name?" Rose asked.
"Sure. Everything has a name. Even I do, as you found out. Maybe we should name this car," he said thoughtfully.
"Maybe you should concentrate on driving," Rose said queasily.
"What about Sally? Sally's a nice name. I knew a girl named Sally. She rescued me from 1969 while she was in 2007. It was a pretty brilliant scheme if I do say so…"
"Doctor!" Rose gasped.
"What?" asked the Doctor, looking a little confused.
"That was a stop sign. Normally you stop at those!"
The Doctor shrugged.
"I totally paused," he said.
There was a moment of silence.
"What about Frances? Frances is a good name for a car."
"Don't talk," Rose said through clenched teeth. "Just drive,"
The Doctor pouted, but he didn't say a word until they pulled into the driveway of Tyler Mansion.
"If I may be permitted to speak? We're here."
"Thank God," Rose breathed.
"Oh, it wasn't that bad," the Doctor agued.
"I thought I was going to die," Rose said.
The Doctor sighed in an exaggerated manner.
"Rose, don't be silly. If I'd wanted to kill you, I would have gone faster," he said in a reasonable tone.
--
"That would work, except, well, it doesn't," the Doctor said, leaning back in his chair.
Max scowled.
"You're not even giving it a chance."
"Come on, Max! There's just no way around the Merovingian paradox. And you can't reverse engineer this kind of stuff."
"How do you think they got the microchip?" Max asked contemptuously.
"Oh come on. You are so not old enough to have invented the microchip," the Doctor scoffed.
Max's scowl grew
"I didn't mean me. I meant that it was reverse engineered using technology from Torchwood. Which is what we're trying to do now."
"Without thinking about the Merovingian paradox."
"Yes. In spite of your paradox."
"You know, it's called a paradox for a reason," the Doctor replied. "That means it can't be solved."
"It's not like people haven't said that to me before," Max shot back.
Rose hovered at the edge of their shared cubicle.
"Am I interrupting something?" she asked.
The Doctor took his feet off of his desk.
"Rose! We need your opinion on something."
"No, John, we don't. It's impossible. You said so yourself," Max said sulkily.
"Rose does impossible fairly well," the Doctor said. He turned to her. "We need to make the navigation computer on this sub light engine work. It should, but it doesn't. It's coming up against the Merovingian paradox."
"I give up," Rose said. "What's the Merovingian paradox?"
"This navigation system was built to navigate mine ships through asteroid fields. There's a lot of minerals on asteroids, but it's dangerous to get to them. One of those asteroids could pummel a ship to pieces in no time. So they have high tech computers to navigate them. This one was broken, which is why the ship crashed on Earth, but I – " Max cleared his throat and the Doctor shot him an annoyed look. "But we fixed it. We want to use it to. These babies aren't designed to do things against their base code. We want to reverse engineer it to make the world of earth computers better, but first we have to go against its base code. The easy solution is to change its code. But changing the code is something that the computer isn't designed to do. Hence the paradox part. You see the problem?" the Doctor asked.
"You want the computer to do something it's not part of what it's programmed to do, and it can't," Rose summed up.
Max looked impressed.
"How did you do that?" he asked
Rose shrugged.
"Years of practice. Am I right?" she asked the Doctor
"More or less." The Doctor said. "We can't reverse engineer it unless we change the base code, and we can't change the base code cuz that's not what it was supposed to do."
"What was it supposed to do?" Rose asked, looking thoughtful.
"Navigate," Max said.
"Hmmm… so, you need to work within its parameters to get what you want, right?" Rose's tongue appeared between her teeth the way it did when she was thinking, and the Doctor resisted the urge to kiss her. She just looked so cute when she did that! He shook it off. He needed to concentrate.
"It navigates, does it? So you tell it where you want to go, and it takes you. Why don't you just ask it to take you to its base code?" Rose asked.
The Doctor's eyes widened. Why hadn't he thought of that before?
"Rose Tyler… you are… you are just the most brilliant human in the whole universe," he said, awed.
Max shot him a strange look.
Rose smirked.
"That's Rose Smith to you," she replied.
But the Doctor's mind was already speeding ahead at a million miles an hour.
"So, all we need to do is get the computer to navigate us to its base code. Then we can rewrite it so it will do what we want it to, and we totally circumvent the paradox. Rose, I love you,"
Rose grinned.
"Quite right too," she said.
Max looked enviously at the Doctor.
"How'd you manage to score a babe who was hot and smart?" he asked.
Rose patted Max's cheek condescendingly.
"He caught me early, Maxie," she said.
"You know, Rose, on Vorak Three you would be worshipped as a queen?" the Doctor said thoughtfully, tapping the end of his nose with his pen. "Only the queens have intelligence. The others are just drones."
Rose rolled her eyes.
"Maybe you could learn something from them."
"Where's Vorak Three?" Max asked suspiciously.
"Somewhere in… Russia," the Doctor improvised.
Max gave the Doctor another strange look.
"Come on, hotshot. You owe me lunch," Rose said, ending a potentially worrying conversation. She took the Doctor by his tie and pulled gently so that he followed her. He really should be more careful, but he never could watch his tongue, she thought fondly.
The Doctor shrugged over his shoulder at Max.
"Don't make any changes until I come back," he called.
--
As soon as they were out of Torchwood tower, Rose and the Doctor looked at each other.
"Chips?" the Doctor asked Rose.
Rose grinned.
"You read my mind, Martian boy. Chips!"
The Doctor laughed.
"I never could understand your fascination with deep fried potatoes till I became human. It's like suddenly my taste buds decided that they liked fats and salts a lot more than they used to."
"You should be careful bout how you talk about humans in front of Max," Rose said, taking the Doctor's offered hand.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because he's your partner, and you work with each other every day. He hears every one of your human cracks."
"He never thinks anything of it," the Doctor argued.
"Still. Maybe cut down on them?" Rose suggested.
The Doctor shrugged.
"Sure. If you think I should." He pointed to a small corner shop. "We stopping there?"
"Yeah sure. The chips are great there, we had them last week."
The shop was almost empty. Rose smiled at the woman behind the counter wearing a greasy apron.
"Two packets of chips, please," she said.
"Four quid and it's going to be a few minutes," she said, taking Rose's money.
Rose shrugged.
"Sure," she seated herself beside the Doctor, who had already sat down at one of the booths beside a large window.
He was idly watching passerbys, his head propped up on one hand.
"Elbows off the table," Rose teased.
"What are you, my mum?" the Doctor asked, not moving his elbow.
Rose knocked his hand, so that his elbow skidded across the table, and his head jerked forward from its lack of support.
"Oi!" he complained.
"You have no manners," Rose replied.
"And you're mean," the Doctor jokingly complained.
"Get used to it. You're stuck with me."
The Doctor made a face.
"Aren't I a lucky man?"
"Hey miss," the girl at the counter called. "You want some veg with those?"
Rose got up to go to the counter.
Restlessly, the Doctor got up.
"I'm going to wait outside!" he called to Rose over his shoulder.
Rose rolled her eyes, and turned back to the girl at the counter.
"Got your hands full with that one, haven't you?" the girl asked, casting an appreciative eye at the Doctor's retreating back.
"You have no idea. Can't sit still for longer than a minute."
"I know the type. Hard to keep em, isn't it?" the girl said.
Rose shrugged.
"He's just used to doing things all the time. You have no idea what it took for me to convince him to become domestic."
"Lucky," the girl said enviously. "Nobody really notices you when you work in a shop. Well, not blokes as fit as him, anyways."
"I used to work in a shop," Rose said.
The girl took in Rose's business clothes, and tasteful jewelry.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I was an ordinary shop girl, and boom! He comes into my life," Rose shook her head. "It's never been the same since."
The girl beamed.
"That gives me some hope," she said.
"Me too," Rose answered.
Behind the girl, a timer went off.
"Those are your chips," she said. She shoveled them into boxes, and carefully wrapped them in newspaper before handing the bag to Rose.
"Cheers," Rose said, walking out of the shop to find the Doctor.
The girl smiled.
--
The Doctor leaned against the side of the building. Sometimes, he hated being inside. It was a lifetime of never being in the same place twice, he supposed, that caused him to be restless sometimes. He tried to hide it, for Rose's sake, but sometimes the urge to be outside in the air was almost overpowering. He rubbed the back of his neck and sighed.
The people streamed past him. This was a fairly busy corner, and people watching had always distracted him in the past. He watched as they walked past, seemingly consumed with their lives. It was interesting to think that unbeknownst to them, a whole universe of things were going on just above their heads. They had no idea what was going on. Humans. Sometimes their utter disregard for the goings on of the rest of the universe was relaxing to the Doctor. It meant that now that he was one of them, he didn't really have to worry about it either. Rose was right though, life was full of surprises. Just when he thought he had humans figured, they went and produced someone as amazing as Rose.
A woman with a high, blond pony tail walked past him. Her face was a blur, but the Doctor smiled. He remembered a time when he had studied the face of every blond woman, irrationally hoping that it would be Rose. He didn't have to do that any more, but it had become something of a habit to note the blonds who walked past him.
This one stopped in her tracks a few steps away from him. She turned slowly, a look of shock on her face.
The Doctor's eyes widened. That face! That face that he thought he would never see again!
She took a few steps forward.
"It's you!" she said. "It's really you!"
"Jenny?" the Doctor whispered.
Author's Note: Serious writer's block ensued when I sat down to write this chapter. I mean, I know where I want this story to go, but it just wasn't going. Anyone who writes will understand what I'm trying to say. But I got inspired by reading my list of suggestions that people had given me. Thanks to whoever suggested driving – it was just the scene I needed for an opening :-)
I have to admit to an embarrassing mistake. When someone pointed it out to me, I was mortified! Last chapter, I said that the Treaty of Versailles ended World War Two. Of course, I meant World War One! I am deeply embarrassed, because I knew it was WWI, but for some reason, but WWII. Thank you to the person who pointed that out, and I changed it right away. I blame this all on the WWII course I took last semester. I got so used to writing WWII that I wrote it instead of WWI in this case.
Can anyone give me the names of all the companions the Doctor has had? Or a place where I can find them? I've been looking everywhere, and I can't seem to find a complete list. My reasons will become clear in later chapters (don't say anything, AsanteSanaSquashBanana!)