One of Mycroft's top agents has apparently fallen to delusions about aliens and time traveling police boxes. He brings in Sherlock to see if he can diagnose the problem. Little did the world's only consulting detective know how Rose Tyler would affect him. Roselock, but no overt romance. Minor spoilers for Season 3. Oneshot.
I realized the other day that I have written, or started writing, way too many Roselock and almost-Roselock stories for it to be healthy. So, naturally, I wrote another one.
This was originally a songfic, but I was informed that it violated this website's guidelines and encouraged to take it down. I'm re-uploading it without the "song" part because I loved it way too much.
Oh yeah, sorry about not posting the second part of Omniscience yet.
Frankly, he blamed Mycroft for the whole thing.
Given his parents' (in his opinion, absurd) predisposition toward musical theater, he and Mycroft were often entreated to join them for a "family night out". Since Mycroft had had to endure Les Miserables, it was now his turn to accompany them to a tortuously boring evening. Thankfully, the production was Sweeney Todd, which at least made somewhat better from murder and more complex musical themes with darker tones and less religion.
Sherlock had never seen Sweeney Todd before and therefore was unprepared from Johanna's song when she first appeared, Green Finch and Linnet Bird. He had been bored in his chair, noting the horrible technique of some of the violinists and the even worse technique of some of the singers. And honestly, the woman playing Johnanna had no means a special voice. But the lyrics...they had been haunting Sherlock for days now. Weeks. Months after he had seen the performance. And all because of a woman.
How is it you sing, Rose Tyler?
She had been held in psychiatric facility, a top secret government one. She seemed perfectly sane, but she talked about aliens and a blue police box and stars and planets and a Doctor, a Doctor with a capital D because she always she always spoke of him with it as a title or a name. No one, not the psychiatrists, not even Mycroft, could understand her. So they called in Sherlock as a last-minute consultation to solve the mystery.
When he had walked into the room, what immediately struck him was her eyes. They were steady and bright and filled with an old intelligence. A sharpness. He shook it off and began his deductions silently. To be polite (because John had often berated him about being polite and he thought he might try it), he told her his name was Sherlock Holmes.
To his surprise, she began laughing uproariously, so much that tears came to her eyes. From her leather spinning chair she clutched her stomach and opened her over-wide lips to reveal white teeth as she smiled in utter delight. Sherlock was dumbfounded and his face must have expressed that confusion.
"You, you're Sherlock Holmes? Oh my God, who would've thought it?" she giggled, with one hand still on her stomach in the aftereffects of mirth.
According to Mycroft, the girl had been held in the facility for three months. She had been one of his top agents until he had caught her talking of aliens and trying to make a device she claimed would send her to another universe.
"She's more useful than ten other agents put together," Mycroft had said. "It would be favorable if she could recover."
"If her apparent obsession with aliens in no way impacted her work, why are you insisting on locking her away?" Sherlock drawled, plucking the strings of his violin. Mycroft did insist on being consistently boring. As if on cue, his brother sniffed somewhat haughtily.
"I insist that none of my staff be delusional, little brother."
The woman sitting in front of him had no indications of being delusional.
After her laughter had finally ceased, she had looked him in the eye and asked, "Did you know that there's a planet called Barcelona where none of the dogs have noses?" Sherlock blinked. The question had edge and no wonderment. It was a calculated statement, a method of measurement. Rose blinked once, slowly. Her brown eyes glinted with sparks like those from a flint on stone, but had all the wild cunning and wisdom of a wolf. Sherlock wondered why he had never heard of her before, why his older brother had kept her from him.
"No, but I'm certain it must have been interesting," he said. She blinked again, this time quicker, from being thrown off her guard.
"You believe me?" she asked, hope bleeding around the edges of her voice. She stood from her chair and moved toward him slightly, though she kept her distance.
"You give no indications of lying," Sherlock said carefully. "I think that's interesting. I know you believe what you say. Whether it is true is to be determined."
"Then I'll just have to convince you," she said with a grin. She glanced out the window and her smile slipped somewhat. It was raining. Sherlock knew from his deductions, and perhaps just from being human, that she didn't really like rain but at the moment preferences had given way to longing, longing for the outside and freedom; as such a skilled agent she was kept under heavy security and was mostly confined to a single room. Rose Tyler was a prisoner. And wolves never survived in cages for long.
"So, why are you doing this? You're not a psychiatrist." It was a few days after Sherlock's initial visit. They were still in the psychiatric facility, and Rose was watching Sherlock work. The curly-haired detective had brought a basic set of lab equipment and a microscope from 221B. He was examining the metal of a key Rose wore around her neck which she claimed was alien material, attempting to verify her story (or not, more likely).
"No, but according to my brother, you are one of his top agents. And you are a puzzle. I live for puzzles." Sherlock had meant to sound matter-of-fact, but some excitement leaked into his voice. He was finding some extremely interesting things on the microscope. Sensing it, Rose leaned toward him, though she obviously couldn't look through the lense.
"Find something?" she asked cheekily. Sherlock tore his eyes away from the sample to look at her. Rose's lower lip was being worried by her teeth, but she had a slight smile on her face.
"I don't know," he said honestly, but kept his tone neutral. Sherlock could not help turning his face back to the microscope to avoid her eyes. The unnervingly discerning brown orbs continued to stare at him; he could feel it. He could not bear them, her old, emotional eyes, so different were they from the rest of her childlike expression. Power emanated from them, from her when he dared to look; he could not fathom from what experience she had gained such majesty.
Sherlock shook his head to clear it. Rose Tyler stirred something primal within him, and he couldn't afford to let it affect him.
"I need to examine this in greater detail with my equipment at home," he said, for multiple reasons. He did not meet her eyes as he gathered his materials and left the room.
She laughed, a lot, even when it seemed like nothing was funny. Her laugh had a thousand different connotations, and if she didn't feel like explaining, Rose simply waved her hand at the detective. It had the effect of making her all the more mysterious, especially because she loved to talk, and not always with words. The blonde woman was constantly communicating a wealth of information freely, and mostly intentionally. It was a revelation for Sherlock, knowing that someone knew of his deductive skills and chose to move so openly anyway.
The next time Sherlock Holmes visited Rose Tyler, he was somewhat disturbed to open the door to her room and see his brother. They were deep in conversation and barely looked up when Sherlock entered, possibly because they heard him coming.
"It's not good enough to just bring me this problems and ask for advice, Mycroft," Rose bit out with a growl. "You can't just keep me here forever."
"Miss Tyler-" Mycroft began, sounding irritated.
"No!" she suddenly shouted, standing and placing her fingertips to her temples. "You refuse to believe me, but you refuse to let me be! I filled out the appropriate forms for resignation and instead you keep me here locked up with your highest security possible as if I were a criminal, and honestly Mycroft this should be being used on criminals instead of me right now."
"Rose-" Mycroft tried again. Sherlock smirked when he saw Rose's expression turn thunderous.
"You don't get to call me that," she snarled lowly and with enough force to make Mycroft blink. "Get out," she said, staring him in the eyes. Sherlock's normally stoic older brother leaned back slightly from her gaze. "Get out," she screamed, shoving Mycroft's file on whatever it was he wanted her opinion on to his chest. The slight widening of his brother's eyes told Sherlock everything as he managed to extricate himself from his chair and leave with a semblance of dignity.
Rose Tyler scared Mycroft Holmes. Well, that was interesting.
In the meantime, Rose had placed her palms to the cold reinforced windowpanes in her room. Her fists balled against the unforgiving glass and her head bent in a gesture of helplessness. Sherlock didn't dare say anything. Finally, Rose turned to him. Her eyes seemed to have dimmed somewhat, but there were no trace of tears in her eyes. She was angry, and bordering on being depressed. She had been in this facility so long, she was beginning to lose hope. Sherlock could not stay there, could not look at her sad, accusatory eyes, so he merely placed the results of the key's examination on her desk and left.
Rose invaded his mind palace in the usual manner of a mystery, and he had only ever encountered two people before who were living mysteries-both of those had ended in disappointment, and this would likely end just as such, if Irene Adler and Jim Moriarty were anything to go by. But Sherlock had the strangest feeling that Rose Tyler was different. A woman, with an ordinary name and a supposedly ordinary mind, was now labeled Extraordinary; an unconventional beauty with a mind more labyrinthine than it first appeared was far too much for him to resist.
The results on the metal on her necklace had proved inconclusive, officially. To Sherlock, the results had been undeniable: the material was most definitely alien. And if that was the case, it had only made Rose Tyler that much more interesting.
He sat on his couch in 221B, staring out the window at the blank sky, which was a wonderful way to gather his thoughts. Blank surfaces to stare at were always the best for facilitating thought when he didn't wish to use his mind palace. It was nearly three thirty in the morning, a normal time for him to be up. There were no stars to trace patterns in his eyes, which was ironic considering who he was thinking about.
She talked about the stars. Everything she had said about aliens and a traveling police box were recorded in the file Sherlock now held in his hands, though he had memorized it. He wondered why, with her remarkable skill set and clear disregard for most forms of bureaucracy and authority, she had chosen to work for Mycroft in the first place. He was so incredibly dull. Perhaps it was for the money?
No, no. She was far too independent and adventurous for that. The only explanation for her remaining in that facility was an inability to escape.
When it was morning, Sherlock came back to himself and abruptly shut the file with a audible slap of paper against paper. He knew what he had to do.
That night, with alarm bells and sirens going off behind them, Rose Tyler ran with Sherlock Holmes. As they ran hand in hand through the woods in which the facility was located, the lyrics of Johanna's song came again to mind, as they had been for months. He thought about Rose's ordeal, how she had been so close to depression and giving up. He knew he would have, had he not been able to escape. Though according to Mycroft, Rose had most certainly tried a number of times.
"Where will you go?" he finally asked her, standing outside the subway station. It was late and almost no one was there, save for a few homeless youth. The woman before him shrugged, hands in pockets and her hood over her head.
"I could go anywhere, probably. Maybe I'll even go back to working in a shop!" She laughed, so Sherlock knew it was a joke, but it was clearly a personal one with a meaning he was not supposed to grasp. Despite himself, he smiled. Rose gazed up at the stars with a somewhat oxymoronic look of simultaneous satisfaction and frustration.
"Will you go back to the stars?" He could not help himself from asking. She sighed.
"No, that would be impossible, I'm afraid," she said. "For better or worse, I'm here now. I might as well make the most of it." To his surprise, she smiled. "Back to Torchwood, then. I was only supposed to work for Mycroft for a short amount of time anyway before I reported back. I had hoped he would simply let me go after I started talking about the aliens and the Doctor, but-"
"Wait," the detective said, reeling from the new information. "Then, this was all a hoax?"
"Of course not!" Rose laughed. "The stuff about the aliens and everything was completely true. And about me not being able to escape. Nobody knew where I was. I am completely in your debt." Sherlock stuttered as she wrapped her arms around him and kissed his cheek, but then smiled in defeat as he felt the handcuffs lock around his wrist.
"Back to another top secret organization, then?" he asked, smirking.
"You know I can't tell you that," Rose winked. "Until the next time, Sherlock Holmes." She disappeared into the night, leaving a trailing smell of jasmine and citrus behind her. The detective chuckled. He had a feeling that his adventures with Rose Tyler were only just beginning.
Rose Tyler had not only taught him how to sing, but she had taught him how to fly. All the way to the stars.
All right! This is finally done, with my customary somewhat abrupt ending because I'm terrible at endings. Because TheWheelWeaves won't be posting again for a while, I regard it as my duty to supply all of you lovely Roselockian readers with some oneshots. I know this one really wasn't romance, but I still think of it as Roselock fic personally. Please feel free to leave me a review on what you thought and any criticisms you might have. Thanks for reading!
I'm more than a little irritated the lyrics couldn't be kept in, but I think it works okay without them. Enjoy!