It takes them a while to make the first call. For Rose, it's because she's afraid that it won't actually work. For the Doctor, it's because he's still jarred by her absence and doesn't want her to notice it in his voice when he speaks to her. It's only been hours for him since Torchwood Tower, since he watched her hurtle toward the void, and there's a limit, even for a Time Lord, to the amount of shock one can take to the system in a short amount of time.
He's piloting his ship back into the time vortex, a few minutes after he pries his hands from the rail in the console room, when a woman appears in the TARDIS in a bridal gown and plunges him into the usual chaos that his life tends to consist of. He finds himself in twenty-first century London, nine months after the disaster of Canary Wharf. Christmas time. There are a hundred little reminders of the empty space at his side, all of which make him itch to dial her number and hear her voice.
But Donna Noble is something special. She's coarse and a bit rude, all things to be expected from a woman whose wedding day has been ruined by robot aliens, spiders of unusual size and lying, plotting fiancés, but she's also incredibly human. She makes him stop when his vengeful fury at the universe nearly gets him killed, and she even stops accusing him of kidnapping when he looks genuinely saddened by the purple cloth she grabs from the railing in the console room.
So he asks her to come with him. Part of it is that things are too quiet aboard the TARDIS, and part of it is that she really is great fun to be around. The Doctor also knows that she would get on great with Rose - not that that matters, of course. Donna is exactly what he needs at this point; someone to tell him to stop. Someone to remind him that the show must go on.
Donna says no. She has people here, at home, and she's wary of the Doctor's lifestyle. He's taken her to see the dawn of planet Earth, and she's still shaken by that. Donna is just about ready to go home, spend Christmas with her family and sleep away the day's events.
The Doctor can't really blame her. They part ways.
But he's still in Rose's home city, and there's something that's been bugging him. So he goes to Canary Wharf.
Standing at the foot of Torchwood Tower - which has since become a commercial building, and he assumes that Torchwood has been dissolved, now having been proved as a danger to the world - he feels small. The skyscraper climbs up into broiling night clouds that now shower snow down on him, up toward that spatial disturbance that it was built to reach, and the Doctor can feel all the timelines that come to a stop here, each one matching a name on the six-foot-tall plaque that stretches across one side of the foot of the building.
It's when he finds three familiar names that he reaches into the pocket of his suit trousers and draws out his mobile. He dials the number and puts the phone to his ear, keeping his eyes trained on where her name is etched in stone. The line is dead silent for a moment, but then it rings. The Doctor can hear, and almost feel the crackle of scarred void particles against the connection.
When Rose hears her phone ringing, on the other side of the void, she is lying awake in a bed in a motel room on the way back from Norway. She needs sleep, but she hasn't been able to find it. Thankfully, it's early in the night yet, but she's still afraid that she won't be able to fall asleep. For her, it's been two days since she last spoke to the Doctor, since she last saw him.
Then her phone rings, where it sits on the bedside table, and Rose rolls over to grab it, before it wakes Mickey, who sleeps on the sofa on the other end of the room. She answers without even looking at the screen, and brings it to her ear. "Hello?" she asks, both eagerly and worriedly.
The Doctor, standing before her death certificate, finds a warm smile on his face. "Hello," he answers easily, as if she's only five minutes away. He hears her exhaling as though a smile is growing on her face, and it makes his own smile widen. "You missed Christmas eve today," he says cheerfully, turning his back to the plaque and tucking his other hand into his trouser pockets.
Rose, sitting up in the bed at the motel, laughs under her breath. "Did I?" she queries, brows rising on her forehead, "Christmas eve on what planet?" she goes on quietly, keeping her voice a whisper so as not to wake Mickey. Her mother and Pete are in the room next door, and the walls are paper-thin, so there's them to consider too. She knows her mother would sleep through the apocalypse, but she doesn't know about Pete.
The Doctor's brow furrows when he recognizes that she's whispering. "Did I call at a bad time?" he asks, blowing a snowflake off the tip of his nose. The tiny scoff she gives in reply pretty much answers his question, but she gives a verbal reply as well.
"Even if you did I wouldn't care," Rose breathes, pulling back the covers of the twin bed in the motel room and dropping her feet to the floor. "No, Mickey's asleep is all," she explains, as she sinks her bare feet into the plush carpet and grabs her coat from the bedpost.
The Doctor pauses for a moment, and gives a kind of reluctant laugh. "Ah," he says, nodding slowly.
Rose groans and rolls her eyes. "On the couch, you div," she elaborates with a tiny smirk, as she cradles the phone to her ear with her shoulder and pushes her arm through the sleeve of her coat. "We're at a motel. Long way back to England, you know."
The Doctor pushes up his brows and pulls a face. "Oh, yeah. I never asked, where did the gap come out?"
Rose scoffs a chuckle, pulling on her jacket and walking over to the door. "Norway," she replies good-naturedly, not really bothered by the distance, or the time, that they've taken to get her to that beach. There's a pause, and Rose doesn't hear the Doctor's voice again until she's out on the balcony in front of the motel room.
Standing in the snow in London, the Doctor gives a cringe and an awkward smile. "Right," he drawls thoughtfully, "Norway," he repeats, mulling this over, and then hears Rose laughing into the other end of the phone, and the sound is like magic in his ear. His smile grows. "Sorry about that."
Rose is still chuckling. "Don't worry. 'Least it wasn't on Mars," she dismisses it, hugging herself as the nighttime air chills her through her coat and her bare feet soak up the icy cold of the metal balcony. "So, Christmas eve, hm?" she asks curiously, interested to hear what she can tell is probably a very good story.
The Doctor reaches up to wipe some melted snow from his brow, smiling happily. "Yep, on planet Earth. In London, actually," he tells her with a grin, as the whistle of wind strips through the phone and takes away some of the volume in his voice. He laughs, quite excited to tell her all about his adventure today. "Literally minutes after we last spoke, I look up and there's this woman, just standing in the console room."
Rose is still laughing, but now she sounds a bit suspicious. For a moment, she wants to make a joke about him replacing her, but she knows it's too soon to joke about that. The time for talking about his being alone now will come, but for now, they can just laugh and talk on the phone. She furrows her brow, partly in response to him and partly against the brain-freeze that she's getting out here. "How's that then? I thought the TARDIS has like, defenses against that sort of thing."
The Doctor nods emphatically. "Exactly! That's why I was so surprised! Anyway, this woman, human woman, in a bride's dress shows up in the TARDIS and tells me to get her to the church, and she's rude- oh, she was rude, Rose, you wouldn't believe how rude she was!" he rants energetically, throwing one hand up in the snow as if this will further get his point across, and Rose's laughter in his ear is almost completely drowning out his words, but neither of them care.
"What'd you mean, in a bride's dress?" she asks with a humored snort, when she's able to stop herself from giggling long enough to get a sentence out, "Like, white and poofy?" she reaches up with one hand and pulls the hood of her coat over her head, warming her ears and shielding her mobile from the wind.
"With a veil and tiara and all," the Doctor confirms, moving back over to the plaque behind him, shifting the phone from one ear to the other and switching hands. "So, anyway, she told me to take her to the church, and me, being the good samartian- Samaritan, sorry, that I am, I did exactly that. Well, I tried. She said the church was in Chiswick - I was only a few miles off. Didn't even get the date wrong, and she went and slapped me," he shakes his head, lamenting.
Rose puts her back to the railing opposite the motel room door, dropping her elbow to it and taking a large yawn of the night air. "How'd she get on the TARDIS, though?" she asks, lowering her voice, slightly worried, "I mean, what did she say about it?"
The Doctor gives a long breath and shrugs. "She had no idea what was going on - far as she could tell, she was walking down the aisle one minute, and then standing in a spaceship the next. Must've been quite disorienting, but still, there was no reason to accuse me of kidnapping," he exhales slowly, before pulling his lip to one side pensively.
Rose gives a barking kind of laugh at this. "She what?" she strains her voice, disbelieving.
The Doctor doesn't answer this, as he approaches the plaque and fixes his eyes on it for a moment. He's about to go on with his tale, when he's transfixed on her name in the stone. It's strange, because these names - on this list - are a list of the dead. Her name doesn't belong there, nor does Mickey's or Jackie's. She's alive. She's not dead. He smiles slightly, turns his back to the words and leans against the plaque, hooking one ankle over the other. "So, Donna wandered off - that was her name, Donna - and ended up in a taxi being driven by a pilot fish robot."
Rose stops short and frowns hard, staring out over the balcony into the parking lot below, lifting one foot and rubbing the bottom against her pajama trousers to warm it up. "Oh, you're kidding me," she says curtly, quite sure that he's messing with her. "As in Sycorax pilot fish?" she asks, though she hasn't yet decided whether or not she believes him.
"I said Christmas eve, didn't I?" the Doctor reminds her sagely.
Rose groans aloud, and her teeth chatter for a moment against one another. "So 'Attack of the Killer Santas' got a sequel, then," she remarks dryly, crossing her free arm over her chest and tucking her hand into her armpit to warm it up. "I bet Donna was pleased."
The Doctor chuckles, kicking at the ground, where the snow has begun to collect into a layer on the streets, on the buildings, on the cars around him. There's a small lump of ice on the toe of his sneaker, and he shakes it off. "Oh, yeah. Chuffed," he agrees sarcastically, "Practically beaming. In any case, I had to pilot the TARDIS like a helicopter up alongside the cab, on the motorway, and persuade her to jump."
"Did she?"
"Eventually," the Doctor replies coolly. "Then she asked me to take her to her wedding reception, since she'd already missed the ceremony. When we got there, the guests were having the reception without her, and she was absolutely livid," he annunciates the words with a husky kind of emphasis, dipping his head and pushing up his brows conspiratorially. "But she patched things up pretty quickly and all was well for a bit. Nice party. Then, after a bit of snooping, found out that the sole proprietor of the company where Donna and her fiancé worked was Torchwood," he exhales, his words smooth and measured. It's not until Rose goes dead silent that he realizes that Torchwood is not something they're talking about right now.
Rose grabs her lower lip between her teeth to keep herself from saying anything too quickly. Heat rises up through her spine and spreads over her shoulders, burns her ears, and her jaw immediately clenches in apprehension. She controls her next breath, so that it comes out shaky, instead of as a grunt. "Yeah?" she spurs him on, trying to keep her tone light.
The Doctor has paused too, at the road bump in the conversation, but he quickly recovers, with a clearing of the throat and an awkward smile. "Mm. So, just when I've got a lead on where to go next, I happen to spot a Santa out the window. Exploding Christmas baubles, Rose," he stresses with an affronted kind of exclaim.
Rose manages a laugh, starting to shiver where she stands on the balcony. Norway isn't exactly known for its palm trees and coconut oil, and while there isn't any snow about, as she imagined there would be, it might be just because it's too damn cold to snow. It's that temperature that turns the ground to rock, that makes people stay indoors throughout January. But she misses her Doctor so badly that she really doesn't care if she gets frostbite or chilblains or the worst brain-freeze in the world. "Blimey," she murmurs to herself.
"I know!" the Doctor replies, as if personally insulted by the use of explosive Christmas decorations, "So anyway, an impressive use of sound systems later, Donna had Lance - her fiancé - give us a lift over to the HC Clements building, the building they worked at, to do a bit of poking around. Took the lift down to the secret basement, found a Torchwood laboratory built under the Thames flood barrier, completely empty save for a few experiments," he pauses, allows his mood to shift toward a serious note for a beat, "I reckon they finally took the hint after Canary Wharf and shut themselves down," he turns his head and lets his eyes roam up the skyscraper.
Rose finally gives up on trying to withstand the cold and launches herself at the door to the motel room, just as the words tear themselves from her mind. "About bloody time," she blurts scathingly, and she hates how bitter she sounds. Part of her expects the Doctor to tell her to ease up on the subject - since the intent of the institute was a good one. He has always said that the road to hell was paved with good intention. And it feels like hell, being here.
"Bit late if you ask me," the Doctor replies, just as coldly, swallowing hard and narrowing his eyes at the climbing building that he leans against, as if the building itself is at fault.
Rose doesn't know why hearing this makes her smile a little bit. She shuts the motel room door behind her and sinks her bare, red toes into the carpet, searching for some warmth. Crossing over to the radiator by the window, she puts her hand to the metal and cringes when she finds that it isn't on.
The Doctor notices that the hiss of wind on her end of the line has ceased, and so he asks, "Have you gone back inside?"
"Yeah, it's freezing out," Rose answers with a shiver, one hand pushing her now tangled hair back, "Mickey's not going to wake up, anyway," she reasons out, glancing over to the sofa where Mickey is sprawled on his back as she moves over to the twin bed and reaches her hand underneath the duvet. She hums happily when she finds that it's still warm. "Go on - you were telling me about your adventure with Donna," she says giddily, as she climbs back into the bed and wraps herself up in the sheets.
The Doctor grins, though he's not really sure why she sounds so happy now. "Right. So anyway, turns out this lab's stocked up with huon particles in test tubes," he begins simply, and he launches into his clarification before Rose can even ask for one, "Huon particles are ancient. And I mean dawn-of-time ancient. And Donna was teeming with them - that's what brought her onto the TARDIS in the first place. The only other place there are huon particles is in the heart of the TARDIS. Donna's huon particles activated, and the two sets of particles magnetized."
Rose takes this in with a slow nod, trying to follow his explanation as she sinks down into the bed and curls up her legs to warm them up. "Got you," she says simply, rolling onto her side.
"Right. Huon particles were destroyed though, by the Time Lords - because they unravel the atomic structure. But this lab was filled with particle extrusion equipment. Whoever took over the HC Clements operation after Torchwood went under was manufacturing huon particles, using the water from the Thames as a flat hydrogen base," the Doctor explains, and Rose has no idea how he's remembered all this. Even if it has happened to him just today, she's quite sure that if it had been her, she would have forgotten most of these details already.
Rose immediately begins to feel tired, for the first time tonight. She smiles to herself. This wouldn't be the first time she's fallen asleep to the Doctor's techno-babble. Not that she plans on falling asleep on him. She really does want to hear his story. "So who was making the particles?" she asks, letting the phone sit on her ear and pulling the duvet tighter around her.
The Doctor pushes away from the plaque and begins to pace while he goes on. "Well, that's the exciting bit. The wall in the lab slid up and there was this hole, in the earth. Deep hole, too. Never-ending. Right down to the core of the planet. Oh, plus there were a bunch of pilot fish standing around with guns, and a com-link voice coming in from the ceiling. Lance high-tailed it when he saw the pilot fish."
"Knight in shining armor, there," Rose comments with a yawn.
The Doctor gives a struggling kind of noise, like he wants to say something, but he stops himself and goes on. "And then the real baddie showed up. Great, big spider lady. Empress of the Racnoss. But the Racnoss are extinct, see - they devoured whole planets, they were holding back the advancement of the universe. The first Empires, way back in the Dark Times, went to war with them and wiped them out," he explains, pausing in his pacing to look at the circle he's worn into the snow at his feet.
Rose furrows her brow slightly. "Except for her?" she asks expectantly, the corners of her mouth going up just as her eyelids fall shut.
"Yep. Somehow she survived," the Doctor exhales slowly, and looks over his shoulder to the plaque at the foot of Torchwood Tower. He gives a mild smile and turns away from the skyscraper, deciding he's stood here for too long. He moves on - leaves the tower behind. It feels somewhat healing. Time to go home, he thinks. "And that, in itself, doesn't make her bad, of course. It wasn't 'til we saw that she'd eaten HC Clements - the company owner - that I really thought, 'Hmm, this is dodgy'."
Rose snorts a laugh, the feeling returning to her fingers and toes. "I'd love to see that in a Conan-Doyle book," she teases bemusedly. Some energy returns to her and she decides to interlude with an interesting snippet. "Actually, tell you what; the Sherlock Holmes books don't exist in this universe. Well, they do, but they're the Arthur Conan-Doyle adventures, written by Sherlock Holmes."
The Doctor exclaims his amused surprise at this, as he walks back toward where the TARDIS is parked. "Really?" he queries interestedly, mulling this over. "Bit of a shame, that. 'Watson and Conan-Doyle' doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same," he laments with a smile.
"Actually, I don't think Watson's in them. Pete's reading them, see? Apparently he doesn't get carsick," Rose yawns again and this time, the phone falls from her ear, round the back of her head and into the pool of her hair at the nape of her neck. She reaches over her shoulder to retrieve it.
"… Absurd," the Doctor is saying, when she gets the phone back to her ear, "Watson's arguably the best character - and how's the great detective supposed to get by without his assistant?" he queries, still smiling.
"Suppose he'll have to do without," Rose says plainly, slowly opening her eyes and staring forward, unable to help but notice the parallels.
The Doctor falls silent, noticing the irony as well. He draws a breath, walking along the nighttime streets of London on Christmas Eve, breathing mist out into the snow, and his smile falls away into a hard line. "He shouldn't have to," he replies tersely, brows coming down as the shape of the TARDIS comes into view, up ahead.
Rose sighs into her pillow and hugs a bulge in the duvet to her chest. "No. He shouldn't," she agrees with a defeated smile. There's another pause, before she lightens the mood. "So, tell us about the spider lady."
The Doctor manages a small smile, and gives a chuckle. "Sure you're not going to fall asleep on me?" he inquires expectantly, having noticed all her yawning on the other end.
Rose grins, shutting her eyes again. "I can't make any promises," she admits groggily, hugging the duvet as if it's a teddy bear, "Haven't had much sleep lately, you know? What with the incessant 'Rose, Rose, come to Norway' going on in my head," she adds in teasingly, and when the Doctor laughs on the other end, she goes on, "Which reminds me - if you got the mobile line working, how come you couldn't just text me to come here?" she asks, half-jokingly.
The Doctor reaches into the pocket of his suit trousers to retrieve his TARDIS key. "Well, I only got it working while we were talking on the beach. The gap I used to project my image to you is the same gap that the phone link goes through. It's not quite closed. It's certainly not big enough for physical dimension hopping, but the audio link just about manages to get through," he explains, sounding slightly chuffed with his own brilliance, as he slips his key into the lock of the police box and steps inside.
Rose opens her mouth to ask exactly what kind of technical stuff he did to get a repeating message into her head, across the void, but she decides she's far too tired to listen to his answer. On the other end of the phone, she hears a familiar kind of echo, and she grins again. "You're in the TARDIS, aren't you?" she hums out giddily. "I can hear her."
The Doctor shuts the door of the TARDIS behind him, and laughs lightly into his mobile. "Yep. Home sweet home," he wanders up the ramp, toward the console, taking off his coat and draping it over one of the coral struts. "I just came from Torchwood Tower," he says, his smile drooping. He'll have to tell her, eventually. It might as well be now. Rose doesn't seem to want to talk about Torchwood, but just the same - he has to tell her. "There's a list of the dead, on a big stone plaque. Your name is on it."
Rose furrows her brow and swallows. "Right," she says slowly, as it dawns on her. Of course. She's been missing from the scene of the Battle of Canary Wharf for months and months. Of course it would seem that she's dead. "And Mum and Mickey, too, yeah?" she asks tightly.
The Doctor seats himself on the jump seat opposite the console. "Mm," he replies with a sigh, "So many people died, and you're missing, so …" he leans back in the seat. "Suppose there's no plaque for people stuck in parallel universes," he adds, with a pensive tilt of the head.
Rose gives a small laugh. "Suppose not. Now, are you gonna tell that story, or what?" she urges him on in humored exasperation.
"Right! Spider lady!" The Doctor sniffs hard, thinking back to where he left off. "Okay, so the Empress set her pilot fish boys to shoot me dead, since they only needed Donna. And that was a bit problematic since, well, I'm quite fond of being alive. So I did something incredibly clever and reversed the polarity of the huon particles in Donna so that the TARDIS materialized around us," he hums happily in his throat, quite pleased.
Rose makes the same noise, somewhat impressed. Okay. So he really is quite flash. Not that she'll ever admit that - not to him, anyway. Well. Not anytime soon.
The Doctor lifts his feet and puts them on the console in front of him. "Go on. Admit it - you're impressed," he drawls exuberantly, his mouth forming a clustered kind of smirk.
"Well, I never saw it - you could be making it up," Rose retorts with a flippant smirk of her own.
The Doctor exclaims his affront at such an implication. "Rose Tyler, are you accusing me of telling fish stories?" he demands, trying to feign seriousness but not really managing it. He gives a high-pitched laugh on accident, and then clears his throat, but Rose has already heard it and explodes in fits of giggles. "I wouldn't tell porkies just to impress you, what'd you take me for?"
"Great big intergalactic show-off?" Rose answers, her giggles dying down.
"Anyway!" the Doctor cuts in quickly, trying to reel the conversation in so that he can finish his story before Rose dozes off, "After that, I took Donna back to the dawn of planet Earth, to find out what it was that the Empress was looking for at the center of the planet, down the big hole. Did you know that the first rock, the biggest asteroid, what-have-you, of your planet is actually a Racnoss ship?"
Rose is immediately confused. "What?" she asks, sure she's heard him wrong. She wouldn't be surprised - there is a faint crackling on the line, and it's only a matter of time before it distorts someone's words.
"It was hiding from the war, with the Empires, see?" the Doctor clarifies reasonably, "Just switched the gravity engines to max, and Bam - instant planet. The perfect disguise, really. Then, the ship powered down completely, and waited the war out."
Rose's brows jump up toward her hairline and she wonders aloud, "Maybe I should let Pete and his lot know. Tell 'em to keep an eye on things around Christmas time. In case the same thing happens in this universe too," she exhales thoughtfully.
The Doctor sounds reluctant, but he concedes, "Wouldn't be a terrible idea." Then, the corners of his mouth going up a bit, he continues, "Maybe you should tell them a bit closer to the time. Tell them you got an anonymous tip - wouldn't want them to think you could tell the future or anything," the Doctor warns lightheartedly.
Rose snorts a laugh, but yawns halfway through it. It's strange, she thinks, how moments ago, she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to fall asleep, and now she's worried that she will fall asleep. The Doctor's never-ending reserve of energy isn't doing much to keep her awake, either. "Go on," she murmurs tiredly.
The Doctor smiles warmly, realizing that she's going to fall asleep long before he finishes the story. "How about I tell you the rest in the morning, after you've had some rest? Sound like you could use it. Or were you planning on using me as a bedtime storyteller?" he arches his brow at nothing in particular, his smile breaking into a grin.
Rose whines indecisively for a beat, and then speaks, sounding obstinate. "No, I'll stay awake."
"Want me to read 'Goodnight Moon'?" he teases with a decidedly unmanly giggle.
Rose would roll her eyes, but they keep falling shut. She simply reminds him, "You know, I could hang up on you."
The Doctor's laughter is like music to her ears. "Fine, fine. Okay, so, then the Empress and her cronies sort of figured out my neat little trick and used the huon particles to bring us back to the underground lab. Luckily, I was able to use the extrapolator to bump the TARDIS a few yards out from where we'd have ended up without it. I figured out that the Empress was using the huon particles - living huon particles - in Donna, to bring the Racnoss at the center of the Earth out of hibernation," he explains, and suddenly notices how comfortable it is to sit down. He doesn't think he's realized before how soft this chair is. No wonder Rose fell asleep on it all those times in the past.
"Mm-hmm," Rose replies after a moment.
The Doctor is already counting down in his head. He'll give her about … oh, a minute? A minute, and then she'll be asleep. And she really is using him as a bedtime storyteller, but he doesn't mind. Maybe she finds the sound of his voice comforting, in which case, he's quite complimented - thrilled, even. Besides. If he helps Rose Tyler fall asleep tonight simply by talking, then he'll talk all night.
So he tells the whole story - all the way through to the part where he and Donna end up standing and looking at a completely drained river Thames and laughing their arses off. But he doesn't tell her that he asked Donna to come with him, because she's dozing off and he thinks that's something they should talk about some other time. He falls silent, listening for a reply from Rose.
Rose exhales a contented snore, and then another. The Doctor sighs through his smile, and listens for a few moments more to the sounds of some obviously much-needed sleep. "Night, Rose," he says warmly, and wishes he could give her a kiss on the forehead, but he doesn't let that bother him. The Doctor takes phone from his ear and hangs up.
It's not much, of course, he thinks, studying the mobile in his hand, but he really is glad that he has This.
A/N: Chapter One! What do you guys think? I don't do much with present tense, so this is kind of different for me, and I've caught myself slipping into past tense a few times already. Let me know if you catch any mistakes. And review! Please review!