21 Rescued…mostly
Jack enters the console room the next 'morning' with a yawn and cup of coffee in hand to see Rose dancing around the console with a rag, cleaning and singing softly to herself. It sounds a little like…
Close your eyes and I'll kiss you. Tomorrow I'll miss you.
Remember I'll always be true, And then while I'm away
I'll write home every day. And I'll send all my loving to you.
"Good morning, Sunshine. Is that the Beatles?"
"Yup! Morning. Done, sleeping your whole life away?" She grins at him, purposefully teasing him.
"Ha! Yeah, thanks. You're in a really good mood this morning."
"Yup, we're rescuing the Doctor today!" She's spent the past couple of hours cleaning anything she could lay her hands to, just to have something to do. The entire console practically sparkles.
She and the TARDIS have been working on her idea for the Harkness Harmonising Adapter, refining what will be needed for it to work. They're both sure that once she outlines her idea to the Doctor, he'll run with it. And whatever it ends up being, it will probably be able to sonic popcorn or something. They'd been amusing themselves by continuing to guess imaginary functions the Doctor would theoretically find necessary. Both ladies are in excellent moods. The TARDIS feels much better, and Rose has the confidence from Future Jack that everything will work out fine. She doesn't fool herself into thinking there isn't going to be difficulties, she has the memories of the aborted timeline to prove that. But unlike that outcome, she's certain of an eventual positive one. She's just hoping the eventual is more of a today sort of thing.
"So are we doing this before breakfast, or can we eat first?" Jack says this as his stomach growls loud enough Rose can hear it across the console from him.
"Well, before you release the Kraken, I guess we should feed him. Allons-y!"
Throwing her rag aside, she takes Jack's hand, and they skip down the hall to the kitchen for a nice breakfast. They laugh and joke, teasing each other about this and that. Rose has a new appreciation for this younger Jack. She's glad she gets to see this him. Healing from some of the damage he'd experienced in his earlier life, he almost glows with renewed hope and an appreciation of life, and it's only been a couple of days for him. She'll fix him just like she's fixing her Doctor, though without the snogging. Then when she gets him back in the future, she'll do it again. If this is her lot in life, to help fix the people she loves, she'll be a very satisfied Time Lady.
"Whachya thinking on so hard over there, Rosie? I can smell your wheels burning from here."
"Oh, you know, just thinking how nice it is that I've got you here. I'm glad you stayed, is all."
Embarrassed a little at the praise, Jack focuses on his coffee intently for a moment.
"I'm glad you didn't write me off as the same kind of scum as my ex-partner. I didn't enjoy being a Time Agent, but I was good at it. It didn't start that way, though you know. I was the first kid from my settlement to get recruited. I don't know if you know this, but the Boeshane Peninsula is out on the edge of nowhere, so they called me the Face of Boe! I was even on posters," he reminisces with a proud smile.
Rose nearly drowns on her tea when he calls himself the Face of Boe, thinking back to the giant head in a jar on Platform One. She's able to wave Jack off with excuses of just swallowing wrong so he'll continue his story, but now she can't stop looking at him and comparing his handsome features to those of the head in the jar…with tentacles..Tentacles! And that was 5 billion years in the future. Wow.
She catches herself before the next sip as the universal irony of future Jack sitting around with the Doctor's hand in a jar comes to mind.
Cleaning up in the kitchen, they head to the console room. This is where all the action will initially take place. Looking over at Jack, she sees that he's as ready for this adventure as she is.
"So the TARDIS and I have worked out a plan."
"Okay, am I going to like it?" he says with a slightly pained expression.
"Will it matter?" she teases him some more. "I don't know, but it's the best we can come up with and will hopefully cause the least amount of trauma to the Doctor, assuming we get it right and he's still asleep." She's really hoping they get it right this time. Just the thought of him going through any portion of the memories she experienced, makes her feel sick, and she doesn't want the alternate timeline to ever exist.
"Alright, what death defying antics are we about to engage in?"
"You remember that part where we rescued you from your Chula ship before the bomb blew up?"
"Yeah, is that what you're planning? We turn all pirate and board the offending vessel, taking no prisoners, and freeing the captive?"
"Yup, that okay?"
"Fantastic!"
Rose smirks at him, but she's still worried about how many things could go wrong. Taking a deep breath she reaches for the TARDIS.
/Are you ready, Darling?/
~Indeed my Wolf, I am very anxious to make this rendezvous, and successfully retrieve my Thief.~
/Me, too./ Rose thinks with matching anxiety.
Darling surrounds Rose with a warm mental hug filled with love and reassurance. They both get down to the business of Doctor rescuing. Rose goes over the plans for aligning the TARDIS with the interior of the ship, getting as much information about it as possible from Jack. She then shows him how to get them back out and on their way once finished, in case she has her hands full with her Time Lord. When they feel like they're ready, Rose flips the switch that sends them winging towards Mars and the Doctor.
John Hart turned the ship around 3 hours ago, starting the deceleration and reverse burns, flipping the Inertial Dampeners off and on. Even so, he's pretty sure he's going to crash. He's been trying to fix the Dampeners and the Impulse Stabilisers, but with next to no success. The access panels were outside, and they're in space after all. Stepping over his stolen Time Lord every time he needs to head to the loo, get food, or sleep has made him a bit cranky. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Now, he's pretty sure it's the worse idea of his life, which might be made a good deal shorter here in a few more hours.
He's considered removing the Time Lord from the pod and leaving him sedated, strapped to a chair. John's pretty sure he'd survive the crash in the pod. It's rated as a life pod, able to withstand a certain amount of damage. Well, it would if it were new, but the one he'd snatched is a little on the used side. Beggars couldn't be choosers, though. He'd been super lucky to stumble across their storage building when he was headed to the space port. It's the age of it that keeps him strapped to his own seat. He did go get dressed in one of the environmental suits though. At least he won't burn to death while wearing it. Won't do much against being crushed, but it's something, and that makes him feel a little better.
Maybe he should wake the Time Lord. Maybe he could fix something John hasn't noticed. They do have a few more hours before it's really critical. Everything he's read (which isn't much) on the ship's computer says Time Lords are brilliant. Brilliant, arrogant and dangerous, that isn't a good combination inside a small ship that's likely doomed. Wondering if he has anything to restrain an awake and angry Time Lord, John starts searching the ship's inventory. "Oh ho, what have we here?" he calls out to no one.
Half an hour later, he's feeling quite smug that he has these two particular items on board. It's almost as if the universe is smiling on his endeavour. The pod is hovering at hip height, and he's just finished tuning the collar and installing it around the sleeping Time Lord's neck. Now, he affixes the torc's control unit to his own head, where he winces at the small pinch as it embeds it's filaments. Placing the torc over the Time Lord's temples, he pairs the units, and thinks the control phrase clearly. Success is marked by the now glowing purple light and the torc tightening against the unconscious man's skull.
John has just finished this when he feels his ship give an odd shimmy. Turning to look at the control boards, he suddenly hears the engines power off, and somehow he's dead still in space.
"What the fuck?" he says wonderingly.
Nothing should be able to just stop him in space. It violates all the laws of physics. Still looking at all of his instruments, trying to figure out what could've happened, he notices two things. First, his ears pop as the pressure in the ship suddenly changes. Secondly, and much more frightening, is the aggrieved roar that comes from directly behind him. Whipping around he sees two impossible things. There's a door in the hallway leading to the rear of the ship, but this time it contains…another room. A warm brightly lit room with cables and visible struts. It also has two people, both of whom he recognises stepping into his ship, but his brain is having a really hard time making sense of that.
So, instead John focuses on the other impossible thing, which is much, much closer to him, and probably more dangerous. The murderous black eyes of a furious Time Lord. John is positive that he sees lightning in his raging gaze. This, John knew how to deal with. The collar was already turning red, and he could tell it was going straight to constriction. Locking his terrified eyes with those of the irate Time Lord is one of the braver things he's ever done. Putting all of the fear for his life in his thought he tells the torc to put his captive down…now…out cold. Initially nothing happens. Then an incandescent light bursts from the torc, and the Time Lord clutches his head gasping out a strangled scream while clawing at his neck, and falls back into the pod convulsing in a seizure.
In the seconds it takes for the TARDIS to materialise silently within the confines of the ship, Jack has opened the doors, and both of them step through onto the decking. Entering it, they see the Doctor rear up from the bed of the pod, turn toward the other man with an incensed roar, then clutch his skull and throat as he tries to scream again, but falls back in the beginnings of a seizure.
"DOCTOR!" screams Rose, and she is at his side in a heartsbeat. Jack, on the other hand, is across the room and has his "partner" by the throat slammed against a wall.
"Jack, he's seizing what do I do?" Rose cries franticly. She rolls him to his side, and is trying to keep him from slamming his skull into the pod's edge.
Locking his own enraged gaze with that of the man he's holding and tightening his grip, Jack growls at him, "Turn off the torc, John. NOW!" Nodding with eyes wide, John releases the Doctor with a thought. He has no idea what just happened. Maybe the torc and the Time Lord aren't compatible. He says as much out loud to Jack, still shocked at everything that's happening so fast; the impossibility of it all. As the torc releases the Doctor, he falls still; much too still. Placing a hand to his chest, Rose feels his heartsbeat, but they are erratic and much too slow.
Turning to the Doctor's tormentor, Rose's eyes begin to glow, "What have you done?" she asks, her voice becoming hollow as Bad Wolf comes out to protect her mate. John's eyes widen further, and the indignant anger he was feeling instantly turns to pure terror as he wets himself.
"I..I..don't know. I just wanted him to help repair the ship," John stammers. Jack slams his head against the wall again.
"Help? You think you'd just ask instead of trying to kill him. I should throw you out the airlock right now," Jack growls in his face, close enough for spittle to land on John's cheeks.
Rose/Bad Wolf turns back to her Doctor. She's surrounded in her power, a fine golden mist enshrouding her movements. With a touch she blocks the collar's telepathic connection and disengages it, throwing the hateful thing aside. Touching the torc, she overrides its control with her own, and gently removes it from the Doctor's head; she sees the tiny drops of blood on his pale skin from pulling out the filaments before they'd had the chance to withdraw. Crushing the torc in her fist, she smiles at the pained screams coming from the Maniac behind her, as the control unit on his head overloads. The screams cut off abruptly as the man loses consciousness. She drops the mangled torc to the floor. Leaning forward, she pulls her Time Lord from the pod. Cradling him against her, Rose/Bad Wolf turns to Jack, who is still holding the now unconscious John Hart.
"I must care for my Mate. He is yours to deal with." Turning back to the TARDIS, she walks in and disappears down the hallway toward the Infirmary.
Jack looks back at the man in his fist, and feels nothing but disgust. "You had so much promise, but all you could ever be was a piece of shit. I regret ever laying eyes on you John Hart." Jack picks him up and puts him in the cryo-pod. Closing the lid, Jack considers locking it to the floor. He doesn't.
Making his way back to the TARDIS, he does not look back as he closes the doors behind him. Walking to the console, he initiates the dematerialisation sequence that Rose taught him, taking them out of the ship. Re-engaging the little ship's controls, the TARDIS releases it back into it's previous flight plan. When that's complete, Jack puts them into the Vortex, and goes looking for Rose. /Please let the Doctor be alright,/Jack prays to the Universe at large.
Rose/Bad Wolf carries the Doctor all the way to the Infirmary. Depositing him on one of the beds, she climbs up next to him. Rose, no longer needing Bad Wolf, releases her with a caress of gratitude. Bad Wolf is content to let Rose fix this, but she has her own plans. The golden mist breathes its way back into her, and within a moment, Rose is herself, alone next to her Doctor. Laying her hands on his chest, she can still feel the heartsbeat, but they are too slow and uneven for a healing coma; something is wrong. Acting on instinct, Rose places both her palms on either side of the Doctor's head, and dives through his completely failed shields into his mind. Unprepared for the lack of resistance, she falls bodily into his foyer, only to be caught by her first Doctor.
"Doctor?! How?!" She can hardly believe it, but here he is. Part of her realises that he's still the same man she's come to save, but it would never have occurred to her that she could meet this him here, let alone be caught by him out of mid-air….well mid-mind-air? Whatever. Still in his arms, she's looking up into the intense blue of his eyes; instantly lost.
"Rose, my precious girl," he breathes, then he's kissing her like the world's about to end. Rose is surprised for only a moment before she responds with a moan, and just as much intensity, matching him tooth and tongue. She had wanted to kiss him (this him) since he'd asked her twice. The too brief life-saving embrace before he regenerated didn't count because she only remembered it from his perspective. This, though, was a meeting of repressed desire on both their parts, and they took advantage of the timelessness of the space to learn in moments what they hadn't been able to learn of each other in their only year together.
Finally pulling apart, breathing hard, the Doctor looks at Rose setting her down, and says through his wide and very satisfied grin, "Rose Tyler, I've wanted to do that from the moment you swung on that chain and saved me daft life. I won't be able to stay much longer, but I wanted ya to know that I've loved ya since ya took my hand and ran with me through all those adventures. You saved me, saved us, and I wanted to say thank you, cause I never properly got the chance. There, ya can smack me now if you're feelin' like ya must, but I wanted to say it before you wake pretty boy up, and he starts second guessin' hisself again."
Laughing at him through her tears, she reaches up and grabs him by the ears to snog him good and proper once more. Pulling away again, she chuckles at his expression—eyes closed, eyebrows high and thoroughly snogged. Opening his eyes and gazing at her with so much love she gasps, he pulls her into a hug. She can tell she won't have him much longer.
"Better than a smack?" She teases him, grinning with tongue.
"Always better than a smack." He grins his big daft grin at her. "I'm about to go. Not sure how I hung in this long, other than through pure determination; and I was definitely determined."
Nodding his head to the left, Rose finally looks in that direction. She had been so focused on him, that she momentarily forgot why she was here. Seeing the surprised look on her face, the Doctor knows he had her thoroughly focused on wanting nothing but him for a time, and it was worth every stolen second.
Turning now, they're both facing the Pools, and suspended between them is her new, new Doctor. Looking back at the Doctor by her side, she asks confused, "So how are you there and here?"
"Good question. The answer is that he's the dominant consciousness, and when we were overloaded, the Pools saved that consciousness. I showed up earlier though as an abstract construct his mind created to help. He was bein' stupid, as I'm sure ya can imagine," he says with arms crossed and an eye roll.
Oh she had forgotten how gruff and derisive he was. Biting her lips to keep from laughing at him, she reminds him, "He's you, you know."
"Ya, I know. Know it's your fault, too. Ya always liked 'em pretty, and now I'm…pretty. Pffft!" he snorts.
"Okay, so the Pools, what are they doing to save him?" If she doesn't have him long, she needs to know everything she can. Looking at her oddly, tilting his head like he's examining her, he says, "It's so strange hearin' you without the Estate accent. Sounds funny." Rose gives him a look she learned from her mother that should be interpreted as 'ya ya, get on with it or you'll get that smack I mentioned earlier'.
"Right, Pools. Well, Romana installed them to save us from the Moment, knowin' the psychic backlash from using it would'a killed us, too. Which at the time would have been a blessin'. Waking up from that looking like this, on the floor of my smokin' TARDIS—Rose it was devastating. All I wanted to do was die and not be the last of my people." Turning to her with the hollow wounded expression she remembers so well from their early days together, she can't help but pull him against her, and try to hug some love back into him.
Releasing her, he steps back rubbing the tears gruffly from his face. "Sorry, Rose."
Taking a steadying breath and continuing before she can interrupt, he continues, "The Pools stabilise Time in their confines to the point that there isn't any. When they're activated, they suspend me in a space with no time, preservin' me in case of a reset. During the Moment, they protected me from 99% of what was happenin' in that second. That last 1% kept me in a coma for Omega only knows how long. Once the temporal landscape outside had calmed down, the Pools released me, and eventually I woke up. Tha's really all I know. Romana was so much better at building mental architectural constructs than I was. I specialised in astrophysics, temporal mechanics, and thermodynamics." Shrugging, he turns back to Rose. "There's a problem this time. Time Lords aren't supposed to be able to have seizures; our minds don;t have the flaws that allow for it. We were working on the solutions we'd discovered in the collapsed Timeline. You know about that right?" he asks, pausing.
She nods. "Yeah, I also know what you were working on in that Timeline; the partitions and the hormones."
He really wants to ask how, but can feel he doesn't have the time, so he continues, "We were preemptively working on those solutions, but the overload was too much with our systems in flux, even for us. And look, the pools are still; they should've released me by now. Somethin's wrong." Looking back up at himself suspended between the pools, he shudders. Rose can see he's starting to fade. He sees it, too.
"Rose, you have to find me. I'm lost, and I don't know my way back. Get my body out of the Pool's field and find me."
He's almost gone, but before he goes completely Rose calls after him, " Doctor!" Looking up at her, she can still see how blue his eyes are. "I love you."
With a soft smile, he fades from her view, but as she's about to turn back to the Pools she hears faintly, "Fantastic." With tears in her eyes she smiles her goodbye at the space where he'd been. Turning back to her still captive Doctor, she starts trying to figure out how to find him and how to get him down.
A/N: I'm reworking a couple of things to line up better with TDotD, so the next update may be a bit delayed. See you soon! Hope you enjoyed the chapter!