Chapter Six
This time they met in a deserted car park near a different underground station at 3 am. Due to the lateness of the hour, he hadn't been able to take the tube. He parked a distance away, in the parking garage of a nearby hotel. As he walked, he looked around himself nervously. He wanted to avoid being caught on CCTV, but he wasn't exactly sure where the cameras were. He was also concerned about muggers and drug dealers, but he saw no one. Probably they were all at home, asleep in bed. Where he should have been, he told himself, but there hadn't been any other option.
The bag he carried was heavy, and as the weight got to be too much for one hand he'd shift it to the other. Eventually he placed the strap of the bag over his head to rest on his shoulder so the weight of the contents would be distributed somewhat.
This time he had rung up the other, something he hardly, if ever, did. They each had dedicated mobiles to be used only in contacting one another, and the other's phone had voice altering software built in for extra security. He had been nervous about the other's reaction to him ringing, but he knew the contents of the bag were too vital to put off delivering any longer than necessary.
For a moment in the car park he was disoriented. The car he was expecting to see wasn't there. In fact, there wasn't a single sedan there, which was an oddity in and of itself. After searching for several minutes, he finally found the car he was looking for. It was a small hatchback, a foreign model dirty enough to not only disguise the car's number plates but its color as well. The only reason he knew it was the right car was because there was someone in it.
As usual, the car had been parked in the shadows, a distance away from all the lights of the car park. This time it was parked next to a large van as well, which further blocked the car from view. Pulling the bag off his shoulder, he approached the hatchback from the left and slipped in through the passenger side door. He placed the bag on his lap.
"Is that…" the other asked immediately.
"Lisa Hallett's computer," he finished, nodding. "Computers, actually. She had two."
"Did she? Interesting," the other said, a note of excitement creeping into his voice.
"And her files were still intact," he said, handing over the bag. "All of them."
The other looked up sharply. "Really. That is good news. Were you able to access them?"
"Yes. I am not entirely without skills in that department." He tried to keep irritation out of his tone. "I saw the Torchwood Three file. It was very… thorough. Her suspicions about Smith were correct. He's not human, well, not entirely. According to the report, his body seems to have human elements in it, but much of his DNA is unidentifiable, at least according to Owen Harper."
"Owen Harper is…"
"Torchwood Three's doctor and the person who wrote the report. According to Hallett's notes, he had done a good job of trying to destroy the file, but she is by all reports a genius who is particularly gifted with computers and she was able to recover it."
"All of it?"
"We think so."
The other paused thoughtfully. "So Smith isn't entirely human. Now that is interesting."
"And there's more," he said. "Although there are no records of Torchwood being involved in the explosion at the beacon, the next morning Pete Tyler's Aston Martin was taken to a body shop. There were reports of extensive surface damage to it: the top was ripped, the boot was caved in and the entire surface was pitted as though it had been pelleted by rocks or other debris. Almost as if it had been near an explosion."
"Pete Tyler caused the explosion?" the other said in disbelief.
He shook his head. "Not possible. He was at Torchwood when the beacon blew up. However, his daughter and Smith were not. The beacon exploding was clearly an act of sabotage and undoubtedly caused by Rose Tyler and John Smith."
"Which means they not only knew about the beacon, but also what it contained."
He nodded. "What's more, normally an explosion of this kind is exactly what Torchwood would investigate, but Pete Tyler has completely shut down any type of inquiry into it."
"Almost as if he had something to hide."
"Yes. And one last thing…." He passed over an envelope. The other opened it and pulled out a photograph. "I don't know what this is, but it seems to be important for some reason. All I really know about it I've heard from the rumor mill, which says that Smith gave it to Tyler for safekeeping. Do you know what it is?"
"Hmm. I'm not certain. But if it is important to Smith, I think we need it. And we need to find out what they know. Take care of it."
~oOo~
For Rose, the next week seemed to almost fly by. Thursday morning saw her finishing the last of the packing she needed to do. She had not intended to stay in this universe so she had been slowly divesting herself of her belongings over the course of the previous year, but she still seemed to have plenty of her own stuff to pack. Over the years, she had managed to accumulate books, clothes and mementos of her years spent in Pete's World. And although some things had never been taken out of their packing boxes when she had moved back to London from Cardiff, other things had been left behind the first time she had moved to Wales. Packing it all still took a great deal of time.
She was also packing the Doctor's belongings since he was spending so much time at Torchwood with her stepdad. He had a lot less stuff than she had, having only brought the clothes on his back and the contents of his pockets into Pete's world, but there were all the clothes that they had purchased for him, and packing those took some time as well. She was determined that they would leave for Cardiff the morning after the Vitex party, and she didn't want to put anything off until the last minute.
She had also been busy because Jackie had decided to enlist Rose in handling the last minute details of the party. Of course Jackie hadn't planned nor made the arrangements for the party herself, a party planner hired by Vitex had done that, but all of a sudden Jackie had decided Rose needed to confirm that everything, from the catering to the music to the flowers, was taken care of.
Although Jackie insisted that it was necessary, Rose strongly suspected it was make-work, something Jackie was having Rose do to keep her in London as long as possible. Her mother knew she and the Doctor wanted to head out to Cardiff as soon as possible, preferably even before the party, and Rose was convinced that her mum was trying to do everything within her power to prevent it.
And to the Doctor it almost seemed as if Pete was trying to keep them in London as well. He kept on coming up with projects that the Doctor could do for the London branch of Torchwood before he and Rose left.
All week, when he wasn't busy at Torchwood, he spent his time in Pete's workshop working on his sonic screwdriver, and Thursday was no different. Building a new sonic wasn't going as well as he had hoped it would. Since the War, he had always had to scavenge for parts for the TARDIS in the unlikeliest places, and he knew he could do it for his sonic as well, but it was slow going. He really needed a new way to focus the sound waves. He had exactly the right item to use, it had been in his pockets when he had arrived, but he had planned to use it for something else and was disappointed he'd have to use it for this.
Returning to his room, he immediately crossed to the wardrobe. The blue pinstriped suit he had put on in the TARDIS the day that his body had been created had had to go to the cleaners, so he had taken out the contents of his pockets and had put them back on the shelf above his clothes. Shoved back in one corner were three small velvet bags. He reached back to grab one and instead pulled out a USB drive. It was the one Owen Harper had given him, the one that contained both his and Rose's medical records from their testing in Cardiff almost two weeks earlier. He really needed to go through them again, he thought. Analyzing his own physiology wasn't that urgent, but he needed to figure out what was going on with Rose. And soon. Her increased neural activity combined with her unnatural ability to heal seemed like a blessing, but it was worrisome since he didn't know what was causing it. But the analysis could wait until after he built his new screwdriver, he told himself. After pocketing the little flash drive, he grabbed one of the velvet bags, checked to see if it was the one he needed, and returned to the workshop.
Early that afternoon, needing a break from doing all the things her mother wanted her to do, and frankly needing a break from her mother, Rose went in search of the Doctor. She had hardly seen him all week. She had seen so little of him in fact that if she didn't know better, she'd almost have said he was avoiding her. He hadn't gone to Torchwood with her stepdad that morning, so she knew he was around the mansion somewhere, but she wasn't sure where. On a hunch, she decided to check in the workshop.
He was sitting on one of the stools at the workbench working on his sonic, glasses on, brow furrowed, tongue sticking slightly out in a look of intense concentration. He was looking through a large magnifying glass on a stand and using long, narrow tweezers to place miniaturized electronics into the sonic's handle. A smile appeared on his face as he heard her entering the room.
"Hello," he said without looking up.
"Hello," she automatically responded, grinning. The grin was her typical response to seeing him, particularly when he was wearing those glasses. "Making any progress?"
"Some," he replied. Rose saw him pick up something else, something blue, off the workbench with the tweezers and attempt to put it in his screwdriver. He seemed to be having a difficult time placing it exactly where he wanted it.
"What are you doing?"
"This stone has the rare ability to focus not only light but sound waves. I'm hoping that it will solve some of my problems with the sonic."
Rose sat down on a stool opposite him and watched as the Doctor continued to struggle with the blue crystal. Glancing at the workbench, she saw one of the velvet drawstring bags that had been in one of his pockets when they had arrived on Pete's World. Crystals in a variety of colors and sizes had spilled out of it and were cluttering the space between them. And then her eyes widened in shock.
"Bloody hell," she said under her breath as she picked up a large stone that she now recognized as a diamond. Glancing back at the workbench, she realized the rest of what she had thought were mere crystals were actually fine gemstones.
Without moving his head, the Doctor looked over his glasses at her.
"I told you that I didn't come empty handed," he told her. He looked back down to return to work on his sonic.
"You weren't kidding," she said as she examined the jewel. "I thought… Well, I don't know what I thought. But the idea you had these… Why did you have these? And how? And why did I have to pay for chips so often?"
"In reverse order, one, these aren't widely accepted as currency on any planet except Jujandran, and there they are considered the equivalent of about twenty quid. And the chips there are horrible. Two, these litter the ground on some of the places I've been, not many but some, and it's just a matter of picking them up if I remember to. And four, no, three? Anyway, I had them in case the TARDIS broke down and I got stranded somewhere. Wouldn't have worked on Krop Tor because I didn't have access to the TARDIS, but occasionally it happens and I've had to cash in one or two until I could get it fixed. Happened a lot during the War, actually, although I started stocking these up in the TARDIS much earlier than that. Sometime during my third life, after I realized I had nothing to live on when I was stranded on Earth. Carried gold, too, but that was to fight Cybermen back then… When they were first created in our universe, their respiratory systems were sensitive to gold dust; it essentially suffocated them."
Rose couldn't follow all his ramble, but she did manage to get the general point that he kept them in the TARDIS in case he got stranded somewhere.
Like he was stranded here, she thought.
And since he had had them in his pocket when he had gotten here, that meant that he had to have put them there before they got here.
"So you did know," she said quietly.
"Know what?" he asked. He was still trying to fit the jewel into his sonic so he didn't look up.
"You knew he was leaving you here. You knew enough in advance to pack those."
He stilled as he wondered where she was going with this. He was silent for a moment. "Yes," he said finally.
His answer didn't come as a surprise. She had guessed that he knew he was being left behind. He hadn't seemed surprised at being dropped off on the beach in Norway. But she didn't know the answer to her next question, and all of a sudden it seemed vital to find out.
"Did you choose to stay, or did he decide for you, too?" she asked.
He didn't respond. Instead, he continued to work on his sonic and didn't look at her. To Rose his silence spoke volumes.
"So you didn't really want to be here, did you?"
The Doctor looked sharply up at her, accidentally dropping the gemstone from his tweezers. It bounced several times before rolling across the workbench. Rose caught it just before it fell on the floor.
"Rose, look at me," he said. When she looked up, he continued. "I may not have had the choice to be on this planet, in this universe, but being with you, wherever you were, I wanted that. I've always wanted that, ever since I met you."
They stared at each other for a moment. She had wanted this, wanted to be with him for so long, that sometimes it still didn't seem real that he was here. And now that he was here, things had changed between them so quickly that it was a bit overwhelming.
Rose looked away first. Glancing down, she noticed she was still holding the blue gem in her hand. She stretched out her hand to give it back to him. After taking it from her and setting it down in front of him, he grabbed her hand before she could pull it away.
"Sometimes all you need is a hand to hold, Rose Tyler," he reminded her. "And the hand I want to hold is yours."