AN: Thanks for the response to this fic! I really appreciate it. So the first three chapters are posted now. I think from here on out I'll be posting every Sunday (though that isn't a strict rule), and the story is going to deviate from the canon even more than it already has! Please enjoy.
It had been three months. Three months, all alone with the TARDIS, floating in the vortex. She couldn't bring herself to leave it, though she conceded to herself that at some point she would have to go back to Earth, if only to sort out things at the estate.
Tears swam in her vision again as she thought of the only home she'd known before meeting the Doctor and coming to call his ship "home". The flat would be empty from then on, dust gathering across the tops of her mum's favourite magazines and the phone left in its cradle for an amount of time it had never experienced before. Jackie Tyler's friends would be wondering where she had gone.
Rose shook her head and slammed the TARDIS manual shut with a resounding thump! It had been three months of full-on study for her, on everything from the care and maintenance of a time-spaceship, to multiverse theories from civilisations that actually understood the subject (twenty first century Earth message boards had steadily become more and more embarrassing to look at), and she had finally drawn a conclusion; the rift between the worlds was going to take time to heal. If she could only find a fracture, she could hopefully reach through it.
Shooting up from her seat and dashing from the library that had essentially become her home over the last few months, Rose sprinted to the console room, having just gone over a few last things in the manual. If she was going to do this, she wanted her memory as fresh as she could get it. Her TARDIS understanding was still painfully inadequate, and she imagined that it would take full years for her to come to a decent understanding of the ship, but for the moment she knew enough. She hoped.
"Out of the vortex," she muttered to herself, dashing around the console with a moderate level of confidence, "Locate a fracture…" And that was surprisingly easy now she knew what she was looking for! She remembered her previous attempt and cringed at herself. Her heartbeat picked up as she finally went looking for a power source, and the TARDIS pitched in her own efforts, taking Rose to a solar system devoid of life, the star in the centre dying.
That was a relief; she would have to burn it up for this to work if the studies she found were to be believed, and the thought that people might have been affected by her actions probably would have stopped her short, however badly she wanted this to work.
"Lets do it."
When the Doctor sensed the familiar call of his TARDIS, four months after his separation from her, his hearts stopped beating in his chest for a moment. His jaw dropped and he stared gormlessly at the wall opposite for a few seconds, before springing into action.
"JACKIE!" he hollered, sprinting from the room he had been given but barely ever slept in. "Jackie! Pete! It's the TARDIS!" He hammered on their bedroom door for a few seconds before bolting down the stairs and into the foyer of their manor.
"What are you banging on about now, Doctor?" came Jackie's very displeased voice as the couple came downstairs after him. "It's three in the morning!" He didn't have it in him to pretend to care.
"I sensed the TARDIS, Jackie, it's - it's here. Somehow." Had Rose done something? Once again the thought of her left alone in the other universe made his stomach drop.
Jackie's eyes had gone wide. "The TARDIS? But that means -"
"Rose."
The two stared at each other for a few seconds, before Pete huffed and asked, "Well what does that mean? Has she come back through? I thought the universes were permanently barred from each other."
He nodded frantically. "They are, but I can - I'm feeling her! At intervals, like she's trying to break through to me. There's a signal, trying to lead me somewhere -"
"To where?" Jackie cried, moving forwards and grabbing his hands in hers, clutching on. "Please, Doctor! Where's my little girl?"
He blinked at her for a few seconds, then said, "I - I think it's - Norway. The TARDIS - the signal's coming from Norway."
They stared at each other for a few seconds more, before Pete sighed and said, "Well we'd better get the Jeep packed up then."
On a beach in Norway was where the signal eventually came through. Waves crashed on the shore, the wind buffeted around her, and she failed to feel a bit of it. The Doctor was there, her mum at his side, and Pete stood by the car metres away. Rose had been right about one thing; she wasn't ready for this.
"How long's it been for you?" she asked.
"Four months," he said. "You?"
"About three, give or take…" Because she really wasn't sure. Time didn't exist in the TARDIS, and she had been nowhere else. "So what now? How do I - do I pull you through, or can I land where you are, somehow?"
His expression grew graver. "No. Physical passage isn't possible. This is as good as we'll get." Behind him, her mum let out a sob.
Her heart dropped like a stone. "Are - are you sure?"
"I'm afraid so." He sounded almost defeated but she didn't know whether he looked it too, because she had hung her head, frustration almost bubbling over. In her months of research she had struggled to understand what seemed like the most basic concepts, but she had at least worked this out. Or she thought she had.
"I -" Her jaw flapped uselessly for a few seconds and she was unable to speak due to the strain not breaking down in tears was putting on her throat. "I'm so sorry," she managed to get out.
"Oh, no, it wasn't your fault." He looked like he wanted to reach out and hold her; his hands twitched at his sides.
She swallowed against the lump in her throat. "Bloody Torchwood."
He smiled sadly and nodded. "Bloody Torchwood."
"Oh, sweetheart, please look after yourself," Jackie cried, finally stumbling right up to her image. "You look exhausted, please tell me you're sleeping."
She hadn't been, that much. "I will mum. Am. The TARDIS doesn't let me skip out on that sort of stuff." Not that much, anyway. "I love you."
"I love you too, baby," Jackie sniffled, and if Rose's heart hadn't broken enough over the last few months, it completely shattered in that moment. "So much. I'm -" Then came the blow Rose wasn't expecting. "I'm pregnant, actually."
"You're what?" And even as her heart broke further, she forced a smile to her face and said, "That's great! Took you long enough to give me a sibling." As Jackie let out her own watery laugh, Rose glanced past her at Pete, who stood off in the distance, and sighed minutely. Hopefully this kid would grow up with both parents.
"The connection won't last much longer," the Doctor interjected, voice gentle. "I couldn't tell you how much time we have, but seeing as this is it…"
"End of the road," Rose said, bottom lip trembling. "I - I love you."
He nodded, smiling at her. "Quite right too. And I suppose…" He took in a deep, bracing breath. "If it's my last chance to say it…" She held her own. "Rose Tyler -"
The image vanished, and Rose was alone, in the TARDIS, with the hum of time and space her only consolation. A broken sob wrenched itself from her throat and she fell against the console where she stayed until she had cried herself dry again.
That was it. All that work, all that research, and she had failed.
Looking up and shaking all over, her eyes grazed the brown coat, which she had returned to its place over the coral strut a few days ago, and -
And then over the figure of the golden, glowing bride, standing on the other side of the console. Her jaw dropped. She thought it was just a figure of speech to say a bride was glowing.
"What?"
The bride turned around, the glow fading away. Her jaw dropped. "What?" Rose shook her head, again without answers. "What the hell is this? What is this place?"
"I - I don't -"
"Where the hell am I? I'm supposed to be walking down the aisle! Oh, this has Nerys written all over it, that evil little witch! I'll kill her!" The ginger woman was advancing on Rose rapidly, so she skittered back and away from her, head spinning madly. "What's going on? Answer me! Ya year me, blondie? What's going on?"
"Wow, you - you say a lot of words, don't you," she said, catching herself just as she was about to say something monumentally rude.
"What's that supposed to mean?" the woman asked.
"Nothing - sorry, I - just, how did you get in here?" It was impossible. Point blank impossible. If her time with the Doctor hadn't taught her that, her studies of the TARDIS manual had only reinforced the point.
"How did I get here? You kidnapped me, junkie!" she screeched, and Rose's jaw dropped further still.
"Junkie?" Christ, she hadn't let herself go that badly had she?
"Get me to the church!"
"Fine!" she snapped, rearing up. "You want the church, I'll give you the bloody church!" She stormed around the console to the monitor and asked, "What's the address?"
It didn't make sense. It was too weird, even for her. Something had to have happened to bring Donna into the TARDIS, though.
"Can I ask - did anything… I dunno, weird happen in the runup to today?"
Donna screwed her nose up. "Nah, unless you count mum complimenting me this morning, or grandad catching influenza. My fault, of course, if mum's word is law."
At the word "mum", Rose's heart had clenched, but at Donna's elaboration she narrowed her eyes. "Sounds lovely, your mum."
"Oh, don't get me started, I've been flying around all day." The woman marched off and Rose gaped some more before running to catch her.
"Where are you going? Come back to the TARDIS!"
"I'm going to get a taxi, blondie, or don't you remember? It's my wedding day, and you've already failed to get me back once!"
Rose huffed. "You wanna get a taxi? Fine! What money will you pay for one with?"
Donna ground her teeth and balled her fists. "It's my wedding day!" she bellowed, and the thin crowds scattered around her. "You think they'd turn down a distressed woman in a wedding dress?"
"I think we're in the wrong part of the country to rely on the kindness of strangers!" she exclaimed. "This is London!"
"Christ, my family must be going spare!" Donna cried.
"So call them!" Rose exclaimed. "Here, I've got a phone." And in her haste to get it to the woman she almost chucked it at her head.
Donna caught it with a half malevolent glare and got dialing. "Oh, they must be so worried."
They weren't so worried, as it turned out. When they finally got where they were going - the reception venue, by that point, they were very noticeably not worried.
"Everything was already paid for, and you just up and vanished," said the woman Donna's man Lance had been dancing with a minute ago.
"Yes, thank you Nerys," Donna hissed.
Rose, feeling a surge of protectiveness wash over her, raised her eyebrows, looked the other blonde over and said, "Oh, that's Nerys," in a tone that could only suggest to the woman that she had been a topic of discussion.
The woman gaped at her. "What does that -"
"Shut up Nerys," Lance said, and Rose looked at him approvingly, until she remembered that until their arrival he had been singing and dancing and having a grand old time, not searching for his missing bride like any real man would do, and she decided she didn't like Lance.
As Donna showed off her acting chops to the gathered crowd and the party reignited, Rose trudged off to the corner and without anything else to do, she looked up HC Clements. From what she had whittled out of Donna on their way to the reception hall, the company were locksmiths. Nothing interesting about them. Nothing, nothing, nothing, no-
No.
Not them.
"Torchwood," she hissed through her teeth, clenching her fist before slamming her hand palm down on the bar. "Torchwood."
When everything went to hell minutes later and infuriatingly familiar robotic Santas ambushed the reception hall, Rose was forced back into action.
"We have to get everyone out!" she exclaimed, looking around for an answer and startling when no one answered her rallying cry - because he wasn't there anymore.
She dashed to the doorway and reached to pull the fire alarm - until she saw the approaching Santas and realised they were boxed in. What would the Doctor do? Something very clever and ultimately beyond her, she thought, and probably involving the sonic screwdriver, which she didn't have. She looked back to the fire alarm again, then to the ceiling, and wondered whether the Santas could be short circuited by water…
If you were a big evil secret agency and you were doing evil things in the middle of one of Earth's busiest cities, how would you go about your business undetected? Whatever it was, she was close. Physically, at least. Mentally she worried that she was about as far away as she could be.
She looked at her two companions as she stood in the HC Clements building, and sighed. Donna wasn't too bad, but she really didn't like Lance. Didn't Donna say he'd proposed after six months?
Privately, she thought six months sounded a teensy bit shotgun, but she knew a girl on the estate who'd gone on holiday to Vegas and come back married to a bull herder from Texas who called himself Rex McClean, so she'd said nothing.
"Right, you two, you've worked here long enough. Has anything ever gone on behind the scenes that your employers would have kept you from finding out about?"
"How are we supposed to know, Sherlock?" Lance sniped. "If they were doing stuff in secret, why would we know?"
"Oh, leave her alone, Lance," Donna said. "She's at least trying."
She looked at Lance for a long moment, then asked, "What did you say you do here?"
"I didn't," he said, beginning to glare.
"Works in personnel," Donna said, shrugging.
He shot her an affronted look. "Donna!"
"What?" the woman snapped. "At least she's trying to do something about this! What have you done?"
"Apart from go on the piss when your bride-to-be vanished," Rose muttered and then Donna was glaring at her again.
"Leave him alone!"
For God's sake. "Okay, well whatever's going on, it's probably going on from here, right?"
She was talking more to herself than to them, but Donna still said, "Yeah, sure. So what?" at the same time as Lance asked, "What makes you think that?"
She addressed his question first in an outburst of frustration. "Because I don't know where else to start, Lance! There's probably nothing I can do, but I can at least try. Where Torchwood goes, disaster follows, and I'll follow that. It's all Torchwood, all the time." She almost snarled that last bit and forced herself to calm down before she turned back to Donna. "If it's all happening from here, then somewhere in this building, I'd guess we'll find the people responsible for making you disappear. I'd say you want a word with them, right?"
She asked the question to the couple and as Donna listed off the many choice words she would like to have with the people responsible for her "kidnapping", Rose watched as Lance shifted remained silent for about two seconds. Donna was so wrapped up in her own indignance (which Rose couldn't blame her for) that she never noticed Lance's hesitation. Rose did though. She had seen enough of the man to decide that he was involved somehow.
"Right, lets look see where we can get," she sighed, heading over to the nearest computer in sight and turning it on. "Can I have your ID info?" she asked, tapping her fingernails against the side of the monitor. "Lance's, preferably," she added as an afterthought.
"Why mine?"
"His user ID's 4433204," Donna reeled off promptly, and even as Rose typed the numbers in her eyebrows shot up. Ignoring her fiance's indignant spluttering, she continued, "Password's WestHam55440192. Capital W capital H. Why Lance's?"
"He's higher up the food chain than you are," she explained. "Wider access to files." And if he was as involved as she suspected he may be, it would make sense for information about HC Clement's secret Torchwood link to be there.
With a key to the building's secret basement level procured by Rose from the office of Mr Clements himself, they were off, and she knew they were onto a winner. She'd seen the keys to a few alien ships in her time, and the key in Clement's office could be nothing but alien. If she'd had the sonic it would have made her life far easier, and she thought for a moment about going looking for one of the Doctor's old ones when she was back on the TARDIS.
"Wonder why Clements wasn't in his office," Donna said on the way to the lift. "He doesn't normally take breaks at this time of day."
"It's Christmas," Lance said irritably, stalking after them. "He's probably at home, like we should be. Come on Donna, lets just forget all this and go home."
"Go home?" she asked, sounding aghast. "We're supposed to be on our way to the airport for our honeymoon! Like hell I'm going home. I want answers."
The ride down to their destination was spent in a stiff silence as Rose and Lance alternated between shooting distrustworthy looks at each other and staring straight ahead. She could barely wait for the day to be over. This was the most activity she had taken part in for… possibly weeks.
In the secret basement they found a mysterious lab - because of course they did. Inside, and appearing rather prominent, was a strange device that Rose picked up and examined with interest.
"We shouldn't be here," Lance said. "Lets go."
"Shut up," she and Donna said in tandem, and Rose twisted the knob on the top of the device in one single, swift movement. A beaker full of water began to shimmer immediately and glow golden, bubbling away even as Rose's senses seemed to dim -
"Turn it off!" came Donna's horrified shriek, and she span around to see the woman glowing as she had when she first arrived on the TARDIS. Jaw dropping, Rose turned the device stopped, and the glow went away. "What the hell was that?"
"I -"
"Why were we glowing?"
"Well you - we?" Rose's heart seemed to stop beating. "What do you mean 'we'?"
"I mean we as in both of us, missy!" Donna shouted. "You, and me, glowing gold!"
"What?"
She had glowed too? With golden particles like the ones from the TARDIS? Then, when a disembodied voice began taunting them from above and Lance scarpered, Rose's alarm only worsened.
Screwing up her courage and hoping for a much better success rate with this alien than she had had when confronting the Sycorax, she called out, "Where are you? I - I demand that you show yourself!"
The raspy voice chuckled. "Oh, such false pretence. Who dares to speak to me in such a manner?"
"R-Rose Tyler," she said, barely stammering and trying to sound as commanding as possible. "A defender of the planet Earth. If you want it, you have to answer to me." The Doctor was far better than she at all this tone-of-authority business.
She had no time to linger on this thought, however, because then, in a flash of blinding light, a creature teleported into the room, and -
"What - is that?" Donna gasped, mouth gaping with horror.
Rose shook her head dumbly. "No idea." She had never seen anything like it before. It was - it was a giant spider.
The creature hissed, seemingly offended. "I am the Empress of the Racnoss, ignorant child." Racnoss. She didn't think she'd ever heard the Doctor mention the race before.
"An Empress?" Rose asked. "Where's your army then?" She looked surreptitiously around the space, eyes narrowed at the shadows as if she would be able to spot tiny spiders crawling all over the place, like with Aragog in the Chamber of Secrets. "Waiting - wherever you just came from? Where've you been hiding? Where are you from?"
"So many questions," the Empress chuckled, front legs waving around as she expressed her amusement. Rose's skin crawled and she had to force herself not to step back; aliens she could handle, but anything along the lines of giant spider was a no-no. "Where am I from, child? I'm from here."
"What?" Donna gasped. "What does she mean, Rose? How's she from here? Does she mean Earth?" Rose could only shake her head, aghast, but the Racnoss answered for her.
"I have been waiting for this day for many a millenia, in hibernation beneath the Earth's crust." Maybe that explained the gigantic hole in the ground. She must have dug her way up. But how did Torchwood come to be involved? Unless…
"Was your hibernation interrupted?" she asked. "Did Torchwood's drilling wake you up?" Her responding sneer was answer enough, and Rose huffed. Fucking Torchwood.
"Silly human," she hissed. "I have been here from the very beginning. My homeworld was lost to war, and I fled to the edge of the universe."
"So you've been hiding at the centre of Earth for thousands of years," she said. "Doesn't that - doesn't that go against the laws of the… Shadow Proclamation?" God, she hoped it did.
The Empress cackled. "The Shadow Proclamation," the creature sneered, and then spat on the floor to show Rose just what she thought of the threat. "What rule do they have over me, when I have been here since before the beginning?" What did that mean?
"How can you have been here since before the beginning of Earth?" Rose's head was spinning with possibilities, and she tried to reason it out. The only thing she could think of was that the Empress had been there since before the Earth had even formed, and then - what? Burrowed her way to the centre? Or had the planet formed around her? "That would mean you'd been hibernating for - billions of years!"
"Indeed, child," the Empress said. "And now I am awake."
"And what about me?" Donna demanded, stepping forwards, and Rose almost jumped, having momentarily forgotten she was there. Somehow. "What did you do to me? How did you make me glow? Oi, look at me, lady! I'm talking to you. Where do I fit into all this?"
"The bride is so feisty," crowed the Empress mockingly. Behind the spider, Rose saw Lance appear, an axe in his hands, and she froze.
Donna seemed not to have noticed. "Yeah, I am, and I don't know what you are, but a spider's just a spider, and an axe is an axe! Now," she shouted to Lance, who was swinging back, "do it!" So she had noticed him. Donna was a good actress.
Rose held her breath as the man seemed to follow through with the instruction, before both he and spider froze in place - then began to laugh in tandem. Rose then sighed as Donna's head whipped back and forth between the two of them, confusion marring her features, and moved into a more protective stance in front of the woman.
"That was a good one," Lance laughed. "Your face!"
"Lance is funny," the Empress agreed.
"What?" Donna's gusto had fled from her voice, and she just looked lost. Rose felt anger start to bubble in her veins and she balled her fists up, glaring at the laughing duo. "What? Lance, don't be stupid. Get her!"
"God, she's thick," Lance groaned, looking for all the world like he was the victim in the situation. "Months, I've had to put up with her. Months. A woman who can't even point to Germany on a map."
Rose's brain had raced as the confrontation continued, trying to think of a way to get herself and Donna out alive. Think, think, think!
"You were poisoning me? But we were getting married," Donna said, sounding truly and utterly heartbroken, and any other time, Rose would have been acting as the woman's support, but in the moment she was far too busy…
The particles from the TARDIS were what caused Donna to be pulled inside, yeah? She didn't know for certain, but she would bet money on it.
"All we need is you, Donna."
The strange device she had found in the basement had made those cells reactivate, hadn't it? And if what Donna said was anything to go by, some of them lingered in Rose as well. They were still there, and they still had pull. So what if they could work in reverse?
"Kill the blonde!"
"No! No, I won't let you!" Donna had thrown herself in front of Rose, who looked around rapidly before coming to a decision.
"Don't worry, Donna," she said, fingering the device which sat in her coat pocket and then drawing it out. "They missed something."
"At arms!" the Empress cried, not paying Rose any attention, so worked up in vigour was she. "Take aim!"
Without waiting for another word out of the Empress' mouth, she grit her teeth and twisted the knob on the device in the opposite direction - and breathed an immense sigh of relief as the TARDIS materialised around she and Donna.
"Thank God that worked," she said, feeling breathless despite her lack of physical activity. "Imagine getting killed by Aragog's bitchy aunt."
"But what did you do?" Donna asked, sounding breathless herself.
"Well those golden particles that brought you into the TARDIS were activated by this thing in the lab earlier," she explained, holding up the device. "I took a chance and hoped that if we used it in reverse, it'd bring the TARDIS to us, which it did." She took a moment to lean against the console and breathe. The ship hummed at her in what she interpreted as a positive manner, and outside the Empress raged.
Then she stood straight again and sighed deeply, and Donna watched as she walked around to look at the monitor in lieu of something more effective to do. She had succeeded in getting Donna out, but there was still a gigantic spider creature outside that needed to be dealt with somehow.
"That puts the wedding in perspective," Donna sighed. "Lance was right; we are nothing."
There was a five second pause as she took Donna's words in, then she said, "Right, from now on, lets not start any sentences with the words 'Lance was right'," because she may not have been best mates with the woman, but the bastard had betrayed her trust in one of the worst ways possible, and Rose had, to her own surprise, become rather attached to her.
As long as she didn't call her a junkie again.
"Besides," she continued, "it's things like weddings that make life worth living! Never mind alien spiders hibernating at the centre of the Earth for millions of years, give me a good celebration of love any day."
"Celebration of love," Donna snorted, crossing her arms. Rose's heart twisted. It had been doing that a lot lately. "I still don't understand that golden stuff though. I'm chock full of it, but what's it for?"
Rose swallowed. The Doctor would have known. "I don't know." She stared at the blank screen of the monitor and begged for answers from above. Those particles had made up the heart of the TARDIS, but they were dangerous, so what did the Racnoss want with them? "I… think they need them for something. It's in this ship too, and it's really powerful and inside you - and me, a little bit. So if Lance was poisoning you with them it means they need them in a host, to use them to - Donna?" She was being awfully quiet -
Rose looked up, and Donna was nowhere in sight.
"Damn it!"
Donna could do nothing more than watch in horror as the Empress lost her patience with Lance and severed his ties, and the man who had manipulated her, lied to her, poisoned her - who she had loved, once, fell into the depths of the endless hole below.
"Lance!"
"Harvest the humans!" The Empress continued to boom out her commands as Donna struggled to free span her head around, only to lock eyes on Rose, who was - climbing across to her over the webbing? What?
"Gymnast. Stronger than I look," Rose panted, coming to rest at Donna's side where she dug her feet into the webbing, clung on with one hand, and began to hack at her restraints with a knife. "When I'm done, swing to safety with this." She freed one of Donna's arms and cut loose a long strand of web just in front of them.
Donna grappled for it and clung on for dear life. "I'll fall," she whimpered.
"Of course you won't," Rose said, privately agreeing that that may indeed be the end result. She had to try though. She had to. When most of Donna's body was free and beginning to sag down from the ceiling, she asked, "Ready?"
"NO!"
"Good. Off you go!" And making sure that Donna was holding on properly to the web-rope, she eased her body away from the ceiling completely, and Donna was swinging off, over the hole -
Where she crashed full body into the wall opposite and dropped to the floor. Rose winced and, feeling the webbing holding her straining body up starting to give, dug herself in deeper as the Empress raged at being deceived, and cut herself a strand loose.
"No time like the present," she muttered to herself as her arms and legs began to shake violently. She wrapped the strand around her free wrist three times, then with one great, deep breath let herself go.
Her stomach dropped and she screamed as she cleared the Racnoss hole herself, letting go once she was over the ground again so as to avoid the same fate as Donna, who looked like she couldn't decide whether to be glad to be alive or angry at Rose's method of rescue. Well, it worked.
The next couple of minutes passed in a blur, as Rose implored the Empress to stand down, to leave Earth alone and was promptly turned down. She revealed further the details of her adventure before going to rescue Donna, about finding the control to the robots - who now worked for her - and finally withdrew a few of the deadly decorations that had been planted to attack Donna's reception.
With a grim sigh, she detonated them and revealed to Donna, "While we were back on the TARDIS I did a scan of the area, and guess what? Right below the Thames barrier."
Ultimately, had Donna not been there, Rose might not have made it out of that cavern alive. The older woman had latched onto her and dragged her outside, and they came out onto the Thames barrier just in time to see a ship that could have only been the Racnoss' get shot down from the sky.
