Chapter Four – Finding Rose
All he could do was stare at the photographs—one of Jackie and Pete Tyler on their wedding day, the familiar date engraved below; the other of Rose Tyler and Jack Harkness, likewise with a date cut into the lower edge of the gold frame: 14 June, 2015.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Nine years after Canary Wharf. Nine years after she'd vanished from his life, after he'd lost her to another universe, Rose had somehow had her picture taken with Jack. It seemed unlikely, but the photograph looked genuine. Rose and Jack, together in front of a white rose arbour. Jack as dashing as ever in a dark suit and tie, Rose beautiful in a silk dress the colour of pearls, with rosebuds tucked into her hair. Jack grinning and Rose smiling, but with a shadow of loss behind her older eyes.
Impossible, his mind said. Impossible! But his heart told him the truth. Against all odds, nine years after he'd said goodbye to Rose Tyler, she'd been here, in this universe, with Jack. Not only with him, but from all appearances, had gotten herself married to the man.
"Good photo of her, don't you think?"
The Doctor nearly dropped the framed picture at Jack's voice somewhere behind him.
"Careful! That's the only picture she has of her folks' wedding," Jack said sharply.
With nerveless fingers, the Doctor replaced the frame on the mantle beside the other photographs. Only then did he feel composed enough to turn around. He forced a smile and held his hand out. "Captain! Good to see you, as always."
Jack snorted in reply and pulled the Doctor into a hug. He held onto him a bit longer than strictly necessary, but if he hadn't, the Doctor would never have believed it was really his old friend. Likewise with the hand that shifted just a bit lower than conventional to his backside. The Doctor cleared his throat politely and stepped back, only to find himself on the receiving end of a frankly appraising gaze.
"You look the same as always," Jack said with a wry grin.
"As do you. How old are you now, two hundred and forty . . . forty-five? And barely a grey hair."
Jack ran a vain hand through his hair. "Thank God, right?"
"God isn't the one you should be thanking for that."
"Maybe not. But I didn't tell her that it was her fault. I couldn't bear to see the guilt in her eyes, so I said it must've been something the Time Agency did during those two years they wiped from my memory. An experiment or something."
The Doctor let out a breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and the ache in his chest eased just a little. "She's here, then. Rose is here."
Jack nodded, but twisted his lips thoughtfully. "You're late, y'know. For a Time Lord, you're rubbish at schedules. But hey—at least you got here. I was starting to think you wouldn't. At least, not in time to do any good." He shook his head. "She never gave up, though—insisted that you'd come for her. She ran those advertisements in every newspaper in the Commonwealth. Over the years, I've thought about cancelling the ad, but then I remembered what a Tyler female is like when she's enraged . . . and I decided that I like my balls where they are, thanks."
A ghost of a smile crossed the Doctor's face. "You'll never believe where I found the ad: in a museum, of all places, behind a plate of glass. A thousand-year-old relic, and I almost missed it." He glanced back at the photograph. "So. Married? Really?"
Jack shoved his hands into his pockets in unconscious imitation of the Doctor's pose. "That's right. Took her a long time to say yes, just so you know. It's not like she hopped over and plunged right into a life with me. In the end, it was a simple matter of neither of us wanting to be alone. You always came first—I always knew that I'd lose her the day you finally found her ad."
"Jack, I'm not here to . . . I didn't know that you. . . ."
Instead of replying, Jack nodded toward the row of pictures on the mantle. "See the two boys?"
The Doctor shifted his gaze to the photo in question. Once again he felt an invisible fist in his stomach. How could he have missed the resemblance to Rose? "You had children," he murmured.
"Look at the picture on the end," Jack instructed.
Numbly, the Doctor obeyed. He recognized the two boys, only they'd grown into adults and looked even more like Jack. Beside each of them stood a woman, their wives apparently, and lined up in front of them were five young children. The three boys shared a blend of features, none of which stood out as exceptional. However, one of the girls happened to have blue eyes and ginger hair, just like Pete's, while the other looked like a miniature Rose with blonde hair and wide brown eyes.
Unaware that his mouth gaped just a bit, the Doctor stared. Grandchildren?
"Now have a look at the picture beside that one, the other group shot."
The Doctor picked up the indicated photo. Staring back at him were older versions of all five grandchildren, three with spouses of their own. The oldest had a red-headed toddler sitting on his lap; the one who looked so much like Rose held a newborn baby in her arms, her body still rounded from pregnancy. "Great-grandchildren?"
"Like I said, you're a bit late."
His hearts began to beat out of synch, and as the strains of Madama Butterfly reached a crescendo, the Doctor felt blackness encroaching on the fringes of his vision. The photograph fell from his fingers, only to be caught by Jack in mid-air—but he didn't notice. All he could hear was the doorman's voice in his head: "Too bad you didn't come a couple of weeks ago—they celebrated her eighty-fourth birthday like I've never seen. She was too ill to attend, but they gave gifts to all the staff."
Vaguely he heard Jack calling his name, and he forced himself to breathe. In and out—steadying his heart until the darkness receded, for the moment. It took another few moments for him to remember how to force air past his vocal cords and when he finally spoke, he didn't recognize his own voice.
"Where is she?"
-.-.-.-.-.-.-
At first the Doctor didn't recognize Rose. The figure lying in the bed barely looked human, an old woman who clung to life by a thread of spider's silk. So pale, so fragile. . . . But then she stirred in her sleep and he saw her, really saw her, for the first time in almost forty years. Despite lines creasing her face and wisps of white hair, she looked the same. He could not deny that this was Rose—his Rose, but old . . . so very old.
So much older than a woman of eighty-four.
Even as he stared in numb dismay, he found himself calculating, gauging the time differential between universes. It ran faster over there, he knew that. Some distant part of his mind came up with a tentative answer, based on the ratio and amount of time he assumed she'd spent in Pete's World before finding a way home—and how did a shop girl from London manage what a Time Lord found impossible?
The Doctor stumbled out of the room without saying a word.
Jack followed him through the flat, out the front door, down flight after flight of stairs, and out onto the rain-soaked lawn in front of the building. There, the Doctor fell onto his knees.
As the rain fell on them both, Jack stood beside the devastated Time Lord, a silent witness to his agony. Even though he had a limited telepathic ability, he could almost hear the Doctor's thoughts as he rocked back and forth on the wet grass. Why? Why couldn't I have got here sooner? Why's she leaving me? Why'd I come all this way only to watch her die? Why do I have to be alone again? Why? Oh, Rassilon,why
"No," the Doctor said suddenly. He lurched to his feet. Droplets of water descended down his face, raindrops mixed with tears. "No! I'm not letting this happen."
"There's nothing you can do," Jack said softly.
"Don't you say that! Don't you dare say that." The Doctor stared at him, eyes darkened with pain and rage. "I'm a Time Lord. There is no higher authority in this universe! I can do as I please. And right now, all I want is to save Rose."
"And you think you can do that? You think you can go back and change history, find Rose when she first crossed over from the other universe?" Jack crossed his arms. "Suppose you do. Suppose you find her and take her with you. What happens then? You're the Time Lord, you tell me! What happens if you save Rose?"
The Doctor glanced away. "She would come with me, we'd go on exploring the whole of Time and Space, just like we used to. Only we'd be together. And maybe, somewhere in the future, on some advanced world, I could find a way to extend her life. She wouldn't have to die like this. Not for a very long time."
"And what about the timeline?"
"What about it? She's one person, Jack! One woman who means nothing to anyone in this universe, except you and me."
"An ordinary person—the most important thing in creation," Jack said quietly. "That's what you said once, isn't it? When Rose tried to save her father from being killed, you told her, 'The whole world's different because he's alive.'"
The Doctor's face twisted in torment. His own words rang in his ears and he remembered the chaos brought on by a single man living when he should have died. He didn't want to listen, he didn't want to think about it, but Jack had been a Time Agent, after all. The man knew a little bit about paradoxes and timelines.
Letting out a deep breath, the Doctor stretched out his sense of Time. In his mind, he saw the vibrant gold life-strands of everyone in the city; they flickered and changed as decisions were considered and choices made. A tiny thread appeared out of nowhere, as somewhere nearby a sperm fused with an oocyte and conception occurred. Another snapped and vanished as someone died a violent death. Jack's life did not glisten or pulse like the others, but remained a solid cord, stretching into the vast future. A slender bit of silver—that would be Rose, weak and dying. A web of shimmering life-strands connected Rose and Jack: their children and grandchildren.
Cautiously, the Doctor tested the timeline. Supposing he snatched Rose away, sixty years in the past? The mesh of family strands faded into nothing. Nine lives, gone. Perhaps many more, as Rose's great-grandchildren would eventually have children, and their children would have children. What else? He followed Rose's life back, and watched as hundreds of other threads disappeared one by one. Not just her descendants, then. As a part of this world, Rose Tyler had left an impression. Her presence here had touched others, and their lives had touched others, moving ever outward in a ripple effect. Take away just one strand and the entire web disintegrated.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives depended on Rose Tyler being present at a certain time and place, in order to make a difference. Not even a Time Lord could extract her from the timeline without causing a great deal of damage. In the best scenario, many citizens of Cardiff would die. In the worst, Reapers would appear to fix the damage in their own impartial way.
Grieved, the Doctor turned away. Nothing he could do would restore Rose to him. She couldn't come with him. With all of his power, he couldn't fix this. He doubled over on himself as the tragedy assaulted him. He'd failed her. Now he could do nothing but hold her hand as she died. A single groan escaped his throat, but then he forced himself upright. "No. No! This was my mistake and damned if I'm going to stand here and watch her die because I got here too late."
Jack said nothing as the Doctor began walking toward the pavement. Halfway there, he spun around and pointed at Jack with a violent stab of his finger. "Didn't it occur to you that I'd use the date on the newspaper to know when to arrive? Or didn't your stupid little primate brain think of that? If you'd stopped the advertisement, I could have found her a few weeks after she got here, instead of half a century too late. I could have done something before the timeline was written."
"Or, you might never have found the advertisement at all, and Rose would have died without ever seeing you again. Is that what you'd prefer? Are you such a coward that you're gonna walk out of here and leave her to die alone?"
"She isn't alone. She has you."
Jack stepped toward the Doctor. "I'm not the one she wants."
But the Doctor shook his head. "You can't ask me this. You can't . . . I can't . . . No."
"Doctor, for the past sixty years I have lived with Rose, fifty-five of those as her husband. No, you listen to me!" he insisted, when the Doctor tried to turn away. "During all that time, you were the most important thing to her. Even after we married, after we had our sons, and after our sons had children of their own, she still brought your name up every single day. Every day she wondered, 'Is this the day the Doctor will come for me?' And every night, she went to bed disappointed that you hadn't shown up. She thought that I didn't notice, but I did. I did notice. And yes, it hurt that my wife longed for another man, but not as badly as you'd think, because I knew exactly how she felt."
"Don't make this about you, Jack," he protested, his voice cracking with emotion.
"My point is that there's a woman up there," and he gestured up to the upper windows of the flats, "who loves you, who never stopped loving you. She's dying, Doctor. Don't wait until it's too late to tell her that you love her, too."
The Doctor closed his eyes in pain, but Jack continued, his voice quiet but firm. "Don't wait until it's too late to say goodbye. Because you'll regret it until the day you die—and for you, that's a very long time."
And the rain continued to pour down on them both.
(To Be Continued. . . .)