Chapter 4: Sunday

When the Arvadans captured Pete and Mickey and held them hostage on Sunday, she wasn't surprised. It was just that kind of week. She took her sonic screwdriver and played with it and the teleporter in the Ghost Room until she found the frequency she wanted and popped into existence aboard the space ship.

They captured her immediately, of course, but she had been expecting that. What she wasn't expecting was to be stripped to her skivvies and dragged into their presence. She was glad she'd thought to stow the screwdriver out of sight because she didn't have the parts to make another one and wasn't sure she'd be able to get it back.

"Mum says hi," she told Pete, to cover her embarrassment of standing in her pink bra and boxers in the presence of her ex-boyfriend and not-quite father.

Mickey gaped at her stupidly. "Right," she announced, squared her shoulders, and pinned the largest Arvadan with a grin. "What're you thinking of, turning up here?"

"We need a resource only this planet can provide. We will take this world and all the people and you will give us this resource immediately."

"Not a chance," said Rose. "We're human beings, we don't come quietly. What do you want, maybe we can work out a trade?"

"You are not a human being," they told her.

"Right," she agreed, thinking "What the hell?" as Mickey and Pete stared at her. "But they are and I'm telling you, you're better off dealing with me.

"What are you?"

"None of yer damn business, now why don't you talk?"

The largest Arvadan stalked toward her and grabbed her roughly by the shoulder. Rose bent her knees and clapped her hand over the Arvandan appendage. Then she stooped forward, slapped her other hand under his and flung him over her back and into the nearest bulkhead.

He landed with a squishy thud and groaned. The others all raced toward him while Rose stood and dusted her hands off like Han Solo. "How the hell did you do that?" Mickey demanded in a choked whisper.

"Simple really," she said, and spouted forth a brief tirade about relative gravity on Arvadan vessels, weight coefficients, vectors, Venusian akido, and the second law of physics.

"Er… what?" said Pete, scratching his head and looking anywhere but right at her.

She tilted her head, thoroughly confused. "I used him for a fulcrum," she said.

"Oh," Mickey said, and stole their jackets from the unguarded pile off to the left.

"Thanks," she said as she pulled it on and turned to the aliens. "Well?" she demanded. "He'll live, we have things to talk about."

"We will release the hostages," said a small, fussy looking Arvadan who only needed a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles to complete his image as an accountant. "You have conquered our leader."

"But what will we do for the heptoperinamite?" asked one of the others, plaintively.

"You need rag weed?" Rose exclaimed. "Good grief, why didn't you say so? How much?"

"Ten small plants would be enough for us to clone and cultivate our own," the accountant said, checking what looked exactly like a clipboard. "The plague wiped out all the viable plants on our world. We haven't been able to find another plant that produced it anywhere. But all our tests show that your strains will produce twice as much, plus be plague resistant."

"Yeah, it's pretty much like a plant cockroach," she agreed. "Gimme a second, I'll get you some."

She pulled her phone from her coat, ran the sonic screwdriver over it a few seconds until she was marginally satisfied with the results, and dialed. "Sorry about this, Pete," she said while she waited. "I don't think there'll be any roaming charges, but if there are, let me know."

"No problem," he said faintly and he and Mickey went back to whispering.

"Jake," Rose said, "I'm up on the spaceship with Dad and Mickey and I think we've come to an understanding. I just need you to get me some ragweed." She listened as he demanded to know what ragweed had to do with anything. "Just get about twenty plants and all the seed heads you can find." He shouted that she wasn't making any sense, so she called him a stupid ape, told him to follow orders, and hung up.

"Well, that's settled," she told the accountant alien while several of the others bundled her vanquished foe off to medical. "We'll get that stuff up to you within the hour and then I'll ask you to just bugger off or something, ok?"

"We'll be gone once we have it," the accountant alien promised.

"Good," she said and picked up all their clothes from the side table. "Now, just a bit of jiggery pokery…" she muttered, fiddled with the screwdriver for a bit more, and then pointed it at the control panel at the front of the room. "Just need to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow."

Abruptly, the teleport beam swept over the three of them and they were back on planet Earth. Rose had just enough presence of mind to ask Mickey to make sure Jake did exactly as she asked. He nodded, and took her hand, and the world went buzzy and black.

As she slept, she dreamed. As she dreamed, she remembered. She was standing next to the TARDIS console. Mickey and her mum were outside, working to help her break into the Heart of the TARDIS. As soon as it opened, she knew what she had to do. The Heart would grant wishes, she knew that. So she had to wish that she could save the Doctor, wish that she could save him so that she could keep her promise and be with him forever. But the ship was being so stubborn. He wanted her, the Time Ship, to stay behind, keep Rose there, die. So that was what the TARDIS was going to do. Neither could give up without a fight. Then, all at once, it had worked. The console had flown open and she…

"I create myself," she murmured. "I take the words and I scatter them…" And throughout time and space, two words flowed.

"I want you safe. My Doctor…" And she loved him so much in that instant that any half-formed possibilities without him in them collapsed.

"You are tiny… every atom of your existence, and I divide them…" And the Daleks and all they represented crumbled to dust.

"I bring life…" And somewhere, a very special dead man breathed – forever.

"My head… it's killing me…"

Then there was his voice. Tender, loving, brilliant, Northern (lots of planets have a North)… "I think you need a Doctor."

Then, there were more voices, and many changes, and so many things went wrong.

"You burned like the sun…" a werewolf, a mad host.

"No, not you…" the Doctor, again, his new voice so strained, so cold. "You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can't spend the rest of my life with you." Alone, alone, alone, alone…

"The valiant child who will die in battle, so very soon…" a demon, source and soul of darkness.

"A storm's coming…" words practically torn from him, reluctant, yet merciless.

Her voice again. "You're stuck with me…" Only, he wasn't, after all.

"I looked into the TARDIS, and the TARDIS looked into me…"

"It was like she was channeling him, or something."

Mickey's panicky, angry voice was the first thing she became aware of as she woke. She stayed quiet, and kept her eyes closed, because they never talked about the Doctor in front of her, if they could help it.

"Nothing on the scan, though?" Pete asked.

"Just shows exposure to some sort of harmless radiation. Nothing to worry about, no signs at all that she's anything but human."

"We won't have the blood work back until Wednesday," said Pete with an exasperated sigh.

"What did that mad alien do to my baby?" demanded Jackie Tyler. If anger had been any sort of motive force, Rose would have opened her eyes to find the Doctor there, because her mum's fury would have summoned him there in order to strangle him.

"He didn't do anything to me," she said, softly. "I did it to myself."

"What?" demanded Mickey.

It was gone now, whatever it was, and she couldn't understand what she had been thinking. "I… I don't know." She took a quick inventory and found herself in a bed in the Torchwood Infirmary. "What happened?"

"You fell down, Sweetheart," Jackie said, kindly. "Are you feeling all right?"

"My head hurts," she replied.

Jackie handed her a cup from the bedside table with two aspirin in it. "Better not," she said. "Got any Tylenol?"

Jackie offered her two from her purse, so she took them with a cup of water Mickey poured for her. "What else have they given me?" she demanded once she'd done this.

"Nothing," Mickey assured her. "I wouldn't let them. The aliens said that you weren't human, so I didn't know…"

"Not human?" she demanded. "That's ridiculous." She laid back on the pillows and sighed. "It's been two hours, are they gone?"

"How'd you know that?" Pete asked her. "There isn't a clock in this room anywhere."

She frowned. "They are gone, aren't they, Mickey?"

"Yes," he promised. "Gone as they can be."

On Sunday night, Pete Tyler, President of Torchwood, had a plaque reading "Defender of the Earth" nailed to her door just below her name plate.
Also on Sunday night, Rose slept in her own bed again, and dreamed of light and music and words in a language she knew but couldn't remember.