Chapter Four
Late Saturday morning, Rose drove her tiny, red Mini Cooper into the car park at Torchwood Four with the Doctor sitting in the passenger seat. Rose loved her little Mini Cooper. She strongly suspected the Doctor did not. Like the previous times he had ridden in it, his tall, thin, almost lanky body was folded up uncomfortably in the car. Despite the seat being moved as far back as possible, his knees were pressed against the dashboard and his head almost hit the roof. In fact, since he had taken to wearing his thick, dark brown hair in a style that stood almost straight up, somewhat resembling the quills of a hedgehog, Rose noticed that his hair actually brushed the roof as they drove. God, he has great hair, she thought, no matter how he wears it.
Rose parked the car and they got out to walk the short distance to the main entrance. As they crossed the car park, the Doctor grabbed her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back, grinning at him. He grinned back at her happily and bumped her shoulder with his. The previous night's nightmare forgotten, she bubbled over with laughter, happier than she had been in years.
When they entered the main doors, they stopped, shocked. Dozens of people were queued up, waiting for security to examine their IDs. Beyond them, people were waiting to be scanned with handheld metal detectors. At the end of the lobby, technicians were setting up metal detectors that could be walked through.
"What's going on?" the Doctor asked Rose.
"Dunno," she said, puzzled. "Maybe it has something to do with the fact Lisa escaped a couple of days ago. Don't know why Dad wouldn't have mentioned it, though."
A woman Rose didn't know turned around and faced them. "Where have the two of you been?" she asked disbelievingly. "New law Congress just passed. Those are being installed in all public buildings all over the country. It's been all over the telly."
Rose shrugged apologetically. "We haven't really been watching television for the past few days," she told her.
"Days? They've been talking about it for weeks," the other woman said. "I didn't think there was anyone in the country who didn't know about this. By the way, I'm Anne." She held out her hand. "I work in IT."
"Rose," Rose said, taking her hand and shaking it. "And this is the Doc…"
"John," the Doctor said, interrupting Rose and shaking Anne's hand.
Anne's voice dropped conspiratorially. "And there've been rumors of an alien invasion. All over the country, everyone in the government is on high alert." She scoffed. "Ask me, I think it's all a bunch of hogwash. Whatever it is, I'm guessing it'll all blow over."
The Doctor and Rose exchanged puzzled glances.
After they had gotten through security, they walked hand in hand down the empty corridor, headed towards the dimension cannon lab. Beyond the lobby, the building seemed almost deserted.
"Why didn't Dad tell me about this?" Rose wondered aloud. "I can't imagine he didn't know."
The Doctor shrugged. "I don't know. Something doesn't seem right about any of this. There's no way that anyone outside of Torchwood would know about the Kern." The Kern were a telepathic life form made of pure energy that had managed to insinuate themselves in the power lines. They had killed a number of people as well as possessed Lisa Hallett. The Doctor had managed to capture them only days earlier.
"And the timing's wrong. We only knew about the Kern for about a week," he continued.
"Maybe it's a different alien invasion," Rose suggested. "But I don't know why Dad wouldn't have mentioned this." Rose reached for her phone before she remembered she no longer had it.
"I really need to get a new mobile," she stated in frustration. "I wanted to text Dad to see what was going on, but I forgot I don't have mine anymore. We need to get you one as well."
He made a face but to Rose's surprise didn't argue with her. "We'll do that as soon as we get out of here," he said instead.
By this time, they had arrived at the lab where Rose had spent the better part of two years. "Here we are," she said.
The dimension cannon lab had higher security than anyplace else in any of the Torchwood facilities. In fact, as it was equipped with both fingerprint and retinal scanners, it had higher security than most places on the planet.
Rose placed her right index finger on the fingerprint scanner next to the door, and the door slid to the side with a woosh. She indicated that the Doctor should enter.
"No, after you," he responded, gesturing grandly.
As they passed through the doorway, the overhead lights in the tiny space they had entered lit up automatically, and, with a hiss, the door automatically closed and locked behind them. Ahead of them was another set of doors which led to the lab itself. Taking only a few short steps, Rose crossed to the other door and stood next to a retinal scanner. First reaching behind her head to grab her long, blonde hair, she held it back out of her face as she bent over the sensor. A weak red light shot out and mapped the pattern of blood vessels in her right eye. After a moment, a screen on the wall above it lit up, reading "Welcome Rose Tyler". The door slid open and they entered the lab.
The dimension cannon lab was a small, crowded room overflowing with high tech equipment. Floor to ceiling computer banks lined one wall. Another wall held computer interfaces and monitors. And in the far corner stood a glass enclosed booth which held the dimension cannon itself.
The dimension cannon was actually made of two parts, one that was fixed in the lab, the other a tiny device smaller than a mobile which the traveler, typically Rose, wore on her person. The main part of the dimension cannon was built into the ceiling of the booth. Next to the door there was a small control panel built into the booth which could be used in an emergency, but the main control over the cannon was handled by whichever technician was manning the computer bank. Usually that was Mickey Smith. Rose had long since known that Mickey was a genius with computers, and he was the only one she truly trusted with the controls.
Rose had always felt that the term dimension cannon was a misnomer, or at least mildly misleading. Although the person traveling with it did travel through dimensions, no one was actually fired through the walls of the universes. Instead, the person, usually if not always Rose, would actually "slip" through the cracks already there, rather than create new holes. Compared to many of the other things she had done in her relatively short life, like go toe to toe with Daleks and Cybermen, she didn't consider it all that dangerous.
The Doctor disagreed, as he would later tell her. He thought the technology was similar to a vortex manipulator crossed with a particle accelerator, with an emphasis on the worst aspects of both, and had all the safety of sitting on an atom bomb as a method to achieve flight. He considered it a miracle that Rose had even survived after using it, let alone survived essentially unharmed after so many trips.
For not only had she survived, but she had survived physically, even genetically, unscathed.
"So, where do we start?" Rose asked him.
He raised his eyebrows incredulously. "You're asking me? This was your project."
Her mouth quirked into a small smile. "Was just tryin' to be polite. I figured you'd want to show off your new sonic."
The Doctor grinned widely and pulled it out of his pocket. "Now, it doesn't have all the features the old one had," he warned. "Still need to find a few additional parts and of course I'll need to spend some time programming it, but it should do for this."
After checking to make certain the dimension cannon equipment was truly disconnected from both Torchwood's computer system and power supply, he walked up to the glass enclosed booth and aimed his new sonic screwdriver at the control panel outside the door. As the sonic began to whir, sparks suddenly shot out of the tip, the glass of the booth shattered, the control panel started on fire, and the sprinkler system turned on, spraying the entire room with water.
"Ahhh," Rose exclaimed in protest as the icy cold water began to dampen her clothes. She raised her arms to cover her head as she ran to turn off the water.
The Doctor just stood there, examining the end of his sonic as he got soaked. "Seems to need some adjustment," he said thoughtfully.
"Ya think?" she said sarcastically. After the sprinkler system was off, she grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall and sprayed the control panel, covering it with flame retardant foam. She then squeezed the water out of her dripping hair and wrung out the bottom of her t-shirt.
Not noticing, or possibly ignoring her tone, he nodded. "Yep," he said. "Shouldn't put out sparks like that. Needs a better focusing agent. Earth just doesn't have all the parts I need." He shook his head vigorously, spraying water everywhere. He ended up splashing Rose, who then wiped the water out of her face.
She opened her mouth to complain until she saw a fleeting expression of disappointment cross his face. He tried to hide it but she knew him too well; he was really upset about this setback. Her momentary irritation at him for getting her wet gone due to the problems with the sonic, she looked at him in concern. "What do you need?" she asked.
"Well, I've got an adequate power supply," he said, his brow furrowed. "It's a miniature fuel cell for a hyperwarp drive. Normally they are used to power Class Nine shuttlecrafts from the 63rd century. Contains enough energy to power ten thousand sonics. I found that in the Torchwood archives."
"You found it?" Rose asked. "You mean you nicked it." She bit her lip, trying to hide her amusement. That was so typically him.
He ignored her and continued his own train of thought.
"Unfortunately, for some reason it doesn't want to work properly with the computer chips I cannibalized from the earpods." He ran a hand through his hair in irritation and sighed loudly. "I'll have to work on that. And I need a better way of focusing the sound waves, and of course I need to do a lot more programming. This," he said as he shook his finger at the broken glass and still smoking control panel, "shouldn't have happened."
"Well, as soon as the fire is completely out, we'll have to do this the old fashioned way," Rose replied as she crossed over to a built-in cupboard on the other side of the room.
The Doctor looked at her questioningly.
Pulling out a toolbox, she removed a couple of screwdrivers and handed one to him. "Time to go low tech," she said. He made a face.
~oOo~
Several hours later, the shattered glass was cleaned up and the dimension cannon was largely in pieces all over the floor. The Doctor and Rose sat cross-legged on the floor of the lab, still unscrewing screws, loosening nuts and bolts, destroying computer panels, and essentially dismantling several years of Rose's life. Ever since she had left the University with an advanced degree in theoretical physics and the beginnings of a dissertation on dimensional theory she had begun even before planning on attending Cambridge, every waking hour had been spent on the dimension cannon.
When the stars had started going out, when the sky lost its brightness and became dark, Torchwood had built the dimension cannon using a bit of alien technology in its core. At first it had not worked. The dimension cannon had to use existing cracks in the fabric of space-time, and although the stars had started going out, there just weren't enough cracks for the dimension cannon to break through. It wasn't until the loss of the stars had begun to accelerate that using it to get back to the Doctor was even a possibility. They calculated that the probability of finding the correct universe, and finding him in it, was next to nothing, but it was not zero so Rose had worked on. And on. And on.
But she had had a secret weapon built into the cannon, something that no one other than Pete and Mickey even knew about. And as she sat there, dismantling the small retrieval device she wore, she unscrewed a tiny panel and removed a bit of alien technology that had acted as a homing mechanism to aid her in finding her way. It was unassuming, ordinary looking, yet so advanced that no one else had the clearance to know about it.
It was a key. A key that she had worn around her neck every day for years, a key given to her in another universe by the man she loved, a key to an impossible place. A key to the TARDIS.
Rose held the key in her hand for a moment. It was cold. Truth be told, it had been cold ever since she had been trapped in this universe. But once upon a time, the TARDIS key had been a comforting warmth that she had worn around her neck.
She remembered when the Doctor had first given it to her. They had just begun traveling together and had returned to the Powell Estate so she could see her mother. After accidentally returning home a year late which resulted in her mum slapping him, she had been worried that he would leave her. He had given her this key as a promise that he would return. And he had. That time.
Her hand tightened around the key. For a moment, she thought of the other Doctor, the full Time Lord Doctor in the other universe, and her heart squeezed painfully. She knew the man sitting across from her was the same man, he had told her so and she truly believed him, but the other Doctor, she knew he was never coming back. And that still hurt.
She glanced up and saw the Doctor watching her, a look of concern on his face. She smiled brightly, a cover for the melancholy that threatened to overtake her, and opened her hand, holding the key out to him.
He took it from her and held it for a moment. He didn't remember it ever being this cold in his hand before, not even on the extremely rare occasions over the centuries when he and the TARDIS had been separated and on different planets. Even though he had known his connection with the TARDIS had been broken, had been broken both by the metacrisis and by his presence in this universe, the coldness of the key in his hand still disturbed him on levels he didn't want to think about.
"Is that how you aimed the cannon?" he asked, trying not to think about how much he missed the TARDIS and his old life.
She took a deep breath and nodded. "We used it to zone in on where you were, where the TARDIS was. At first, even the key didn't help. We ended up in so many parallel universes before we would hit the right one, but the timing would be off or the location would be off and then we'd have to try again. I can't tell you how many near misses we had, when I missed you by… only minutes sometimes. I even saw Donna once, before I realized she was traveling with you and before I realized the timelines were all converging on her. I came so close sometimes…."
There was something, something in her face, something in her tone of voice, which worried him. He was reminded of the nightmares she had been having, and he thought about the fact that she had not yet told him all of what she went through to find him. Putting the pieces he had been working on down onto the floor, he reached over and pulled her into his lap. Wrapping his arms around her, he rested his chin on her shoulder.
"And you did it," he said. "You incredibly brilliant person, you. You found me. Against all odds and from a universe away you found me. And you helped save us all."
"You did, too. You stopped the Daleks. You stopped Davros. You saved Donna and the TARDIS. We wouldn't have survived without you either." She leaned back into his chest, resting her head on his shoulder, and smiled a small, tight smile. She crossed her arms and rested them on top of his.
He was gratified by what she said. She meant him specifically, not his other self. He had spent so much time wondering about her feelings for him, most of this life in fact. Granted, this body had been created less than two weeks earlier, so it wasn't a whole lot of time, but as a percentage of the time this version of him had been around, it was an extraordinary portion of his life.
"It would have taken more than the TARDIS key to find me," he said, returning to the previous subject.
"Well, the dimension cannon had a way of determining if we were in the right universe based on the energy signature. Each universe we visited had a slightly different wavelength shift. Sometimes they were only different by nanometers, sometimes even less. Control could tell within minutes of doing a reading whether we were in the right universe. But it didn't usually take me that long."
"How do you mean?" he asked.
Slipping off his lap, Rose faced him directly and met his eyes. She took a deep breath, trying to figure out a way of explaining it to him.
"After a while, when I did a jump," she said slowly, "I could get a sense immediately if the universe I was in was the wrong one. I don't know how. It was just a feeling in my skin, no, kinda in my whole body, that told me whether or not I had made it. I don't know how it worked, or how I knew, but I was always right. I always knew when we were off."
"That's incredible," he said with a shake to his head. "I've never heard of anything like that." Even he hadn't noticed when they had first crossed into the parallel world with Mickey, he remembered.
"It was real," she insisted. "I'm not making it up."
"I believe you, Rose," the Doctor responded. "I don't understand it, but I believe you." He paused before he continued. "Did other people doubt you?"
She nodded. "Even Mickey and Dad didn't believe me at first. It wasn't until I was proved right time and again that they had to believe me."
There was something else that had been bothering him, and now seemed like a good time to ask. "How long were you looking for me?"
"We did an average of ten to fifteen jumps a week. At the beginning, less, toward the end, a lot more. Linear time, maybe a year. Personal time, it was a bit longer."
"How much longer?" he asked.
"For me, perhaps as much as double that, with all the jumps I did. I'm not really sure. It was easy to lose track of time. It was kinda like traveling in the TARDIS in that respect," she said. "They'd think I was gone a matter of minutes or hours, when often in reality it was more than that. Sometimes a day or two. A few times it was a week. And then when I was with UNIT and Donna, it was at least a month." She smiled, almost sadly. "Makes up for that year I missed when we were first traveling."
The Doctor was reminded of earlier in the week when she had been examined by Torchwood Three's doctor, Owen Harper. Owen had been concerned about her weight loss and exhaustion. The situation was worse than he had realized. Given the fact that she had spent almost a year working on the dimension cannon before they even started doing jumps, she had been pushing herself for close to three years. Longer when her years of going to the Uni while working full time at Torchwood Three were factored in.
"So when you told me it had been almost seven years that you've been here…."
"I didn't say it had been almost seven years for me personally," she corrected. "I said Tony was almost six, and between Mum's pregnancy and the fact she didn't fall pregnant immediately, we've been here about seven years. But with all of my traveling with the dimension cannon, it was more for me. I'm just not sure how much more."
Possibly as much as double what it had been for him. "I had no idea," he said. "You are absolutely incredible. I don't know how you did it, how you kept it up year after year."
"I had to. We had to," she told him. "We really didn't have any choice. Someone had to warn you about the stars going out. We tried so many different things, tried sending messages to you wherever you were before the cannon even started working."
"But that was everyone," he said. "Did everyone do the jumps, spend years at this?"
She shook her head. "No. I was on the original team. Some people had to leave, others, like Mickey, were brought in later. And except for a few preliminary jumps to test it, I did the jumps. Everyone on my team, Mickey in particular, knew how important it was to find you, and we knew I was the one who had the best chance. Plus," her mouth twisted into a small smile, "I may have been a tiny bit more motivated."
"And why is that?" he asked, hoping he already knew the answer but needing to hear the words.
"I promised you forever and I meant it, Doctor," she said simply and he grinned at her.
Later, they finished up on the cannon, only stopping when they were left with unrecognizable pieces that could be individually melted down. They even dismantled the computers that controlled the cannon, just to make certain it couldn't be built again.
"The plans don't exist anymore," Rose told him as she pulled out the motherboard of one. "I destroyed them once we were finished building it. Other people only worked on individual parts. The whole plans for it, how the parts worked together to make the cannon, only exist in my head now. No one will ever be able to rebuild it."
"Are you sorry about that, Rose?" he asked quietly. "Never going back?"
Never seeing him again was left unspoken between them.
She turned to face him, and his heart was warmed when he heard her answer.
"I don't need to go back," she said seriously, looking deeply into his eyes. "You're here with me."