Notes: Will Rose manages to convince her Mum that she's telling the truth. Dr Malcolm Davies thinks he knows what's going on.

Chapter 5

Jackie pulled up outside a Victorian town house in Northumberland Place that Rose claimed she and her husband owned. Rose just sat there, staring out of the window with tears in her eyes.

"I have to go in Mum. I have to try and find out what's goin' on."

"Alright Love, I'll wait here. If you find anythin', come an' get me."

Rose leaned over and gave Jackie a kiss on the cheek. "Thanks Mum."

She got out of the car and walked up the steps to the front door.

"Donna?" she said hesitantly, hoping that the house computer would open the door for her. That would mean that at least some of her world was still 'normal'. There was no response so Rose pressed the doorbell.

She heard footsteps approaching and the door was opened by a young woman.

"Hello, can I help you," she asked, as she swept a strand of her curly black hair behind an ear.

"Oh, er, hello. Er, yeah, I wonder if you could," Rose said hesitantly. "This is goin' to sound a bit strange, but I used to live here."

The woman's face lit up with a smile. "Oh really? When was that?"

"Well, that's the strange bit, but can I ask you how long you've lived here?"

"It's been about two years now…. Excuse me for asking, but aren't you Rose Tyler, the Vitex heiress?"

Rose wanted to tell her it was Smith, but thought better of it for now. "Yeah, that's me."

"Would you like to come in? The girls down the gym are going to be so jealous that I've met you."

For once, Rose was really glad that she was a celebrity. It had gotten her an invite into her own house.

"Would you like a cup of tea or coffee? The kettle has just boiled."

"A cup of tea would be lovely thank you. My Mum is in the car, do you mind if she joins us?" Rose asked.

"What?! Jackie Tyler, the wife of one of the richest men in Britain? Oh please bring her in. I'll be dining out for months on this story."

Even though she was feeling so awful, Rose couldn't help but smile at the woman's enthusiasm for celebrity. Rose put her fingers in her lips and whistled her Mum, and signalled for her to come in. The woman looked bemused that the Vitex heiress could whistle like that.

"Is everythin' alright Sweetheart?" Jackie asked as she came up the steps.

"Yeah. This kind lady has invited us in for a cup of tea. I'm sorry, I don't even know your name."

The lady of the house held out her hand. "Sarah Hall. Very pleased to meet you Mrs. Tyler. Please come in."

"Thank you Love, but call me Jackie."

"This way Mum, the Living Room is in here, and the study is through there, and the kitchen is through there." Through the kitchen door, Rose could see the bespoke Bulthaup kitchen/dining room where they had prepared so many meals together.

Jackie saw her daughter trying to keep it together. She reached out and held her hand.

"Come on Love. Come and sit down."

They went into the Sitting Room and sat on the sofa. All the furniture and the decor were different. They heard the tinkling of cups and saucers as Sarah brought the drinks through on a tray and placed them on a low table.

"Now Rose, you said you used to live here? Why would you want to sell, it's lovely here."

Rose looked at her Mum and then back to Sarah. "It's a bit complicated. But before I go into that, can I just tell my Mum a few things about the house."

"Yes, of course," Sarah said.

"Well, kitchen/dining room has a decked garden beyond. I saw that you kept the the Bulthaup kitchen, we love cooking together. The first floor has a master suite and two double bedrooms and a study, which is my office…. was my office," she corrected herself.

"The ground floor study used to be John's office. There are three spacious storage vaults at the front of the house, one of which John converted into his laboratory and is where we kept the TARDIS."

"To be fair sweetheart, you could have got that information off the internet or somethin'," Jackie whispered.

Rose nodded. Okay, that was a fair comment. If she needs more, then she'll get it.

"Your next door neighbours on this side are Anthony and Melissa. They have a two year old daughter called Abby. Anthony is a loss adjuster for an insurance company and Melissa is an interior designer."

"Is she an interior designer? I had no idea," Sarah said.

Rose continued. "On the other side you've got Brendan and Justin. They work in the fashion industry and are a right laugh."

"That's right, their parties are legendary," Sarah laughed.

Rose took a sip of her tea and raised an eyebrow at her Mum. "Well?"

"How did you know all that then?" Jackie asked suspiciously.

"That's what I'm sayin' Mum. How could I know if I didn't live here."

"And when was that Miss Tyler? You haven't said yet," Sarah said.

Tears started to sting her eyes as she thought about it.

"Up until a couple of days ago, I used to live here with my husband John and my son Eyulf. They have gone missing and I'm tryin' to find them."

"But I've lived here for two years," Sarah said, looking confused.

"I said it was complicated," Rose replied.

Sarah took out her phone and started to tap the screen. "Here, look. These are photos taken in this room at Christmas when we had a party. There's Brendan and Justin look with their party hats on."

Rose's jaw dropped and her eyes went wide. "Oh my God Mum. Where's my phone?"

"It's in your backpack sweetheart in the car."

Rose leapt up off the sofa. "I need your keys Mum, quick."

Jackie took her keys out of her coat pocket and handed them over. Rose ran out of the room and out of the front door. Jackie looked at Sarah and gave an embarrassed smile.

"Sorry about this Love," she said sheepishly.

They heard Rose come running back into the house and she burst into the Living Room. She was hurriedly flicking the screen on her smart phone. She stopped suddenly, frozen to the spot. Tears started to run down her cheeks, and the haunted look of loss on her face was heartbreaking.

She looked at Jackie and Jackie's heart nearly stopped at the expression on Rose's face. Silently, Rose held out her phone with a trembling hand.

Jackie took the offered phone and looked at the screen.

She gasped, before whispering. "Oh my God Rose."

The photo was of her and Pete proudly holding a small baby and smiling at the camera. She flicked the image, and there was another photo of her stood in front of the very fireplace she was sitting opposite now, holding the same baby.

Tears started to sting her eyes as she looked up at Rose.

"Is…. is this our grandson?" she asked with a breaking voice.

Rose nodded her head, making her tears drop onto her vest top.

"Are you two alright?" Sarah asked with concern.

Jackie flicked another photo. "Ohhhh, Rose. I'm so sorry." She looked at Sarah and shook her head. "No Love. We are definitely NOT alright."

The screen of Rose's phone showed that daft alien with sticky up hair, side by side with her daughter, and her grandson being held between them. The look of love and pride on their faces was unmistakable and undeniable.

Jackie reached over and hugged her hurting daughter, as both of them broke down and started to sob. How the hell were they going to fix this? Sarah hesitantly stood and left the room to do what Brits did at times like this, she went to make another pot of tea.


Pete was in his office sorting through Rose's file, logging information from the last few years. Such as moving out of the Mansion and buying her own flat by the Thames. He would find some of the photos of Christmas, where she had stayed with them. There was the video as well of Tony opening her present, he had been so excited.

He was also pulling her mission reports with her Operations partner Mickey. The Dimension Cannon Project was a big one, but how would that affect her fugue? She had started so full of hope and enthusiasm, she had even met a woman who travelled with the Doctor and corrected her timeline so that the he survived some disaster or other.

He swallowed hard as the imagined grey, frozen, suffocated face of Rose flashed in his mind. That had been a close call, too close. It was to be her final jump to find the Doctor, and they had said their tearful goodbyes. She was an instant from pressing the button and 'jumping' to the other universe when they called for an abort.

The Earth had disappeared and they had lost the lock on it. If Rose had jumped, she would have been in the vacuum of space with no chance of return for 30 minutes. He shuddered as a cold chill ran down his spine.

They had tried to re-establish the lock of course. They still had the artron energy signal of the TARDIS, and Rose was shouting at them to get a fix inside it. But the TARDIS, being the TARDIS wouldn't let them and then it disappeared, along with Rose's hopes of ever seeing him again.

Pete was putting all the information into one folder that Rose could access on her own when she felt ready, when through his glass fronted office, he saw her and her mother approaching.

'Am I in trouble?' he thought to himself, because by the look on Jackie's face, he was in the kind of trouble that even a big bouquet of flowers wouldn't fix.

She marched into his office and closed the door behind her when Rose had entered.

"Jackie, Love. Rose, Sweetheart. What's up?"

Jackie nodded to Rose and she took out her phone, opened the picture viewer and handed it to her Dad.

"You'd better sit down before ya fall down," Jackie advised him, and they all took seats while Pete flicked through the images on the phone. Pete stared at the phone looking puzzled. He would look up at Jackie and Rose and then back at the phone.

"What's going on?" he asked them. "It isn't what I think it is, is it?"

"That depends on what ya think it is," Jackie said. "Them's photos of our daughter with her husband and son, and the others are of us and our grandson."

Oh God! The Doctor's World of Weirdness strikes again.

"How...? When...? What...?" Pete couldn't form a sentence because his brain couldn't take in the information.

"You'd better get that phone down to whoever it is who checks them sorta things and see that the photos are real. An' when they prove that they are, you're gonna put a team together to sort it."

"What...? How...?" It was fair to say that Pete was in shock.

Jackie rolled her eyes at him. "I've just been to their house Pete. Rose knew everythin' about it. She knew all about the neighbours, even more than the woman who lives there now," she told him.

She paused to catch her breath and compose her thoughts. "Now we have a son-in-law that is lost. Okay, I know me and that barmy alien don't always see eye to eye, but we also have a grandson that's missin', an' I definitely want him back."

Pete took them down to Technical Support so that Chrissie could examine the phone. The first thing she did was back up all the data so that Rose would always have the pictures no matter what. She then started to examine and scrutinise the data. Pete took Jackie and Rose next door to the Standby Room to have a cup of tea.

They sat on the comfy sofas drinking their tea and looking at the news channel, without really watching it. They were all too deep in their own thoughts to enter into a casual conversation. There was nothing casual about a man and his son being wiped from existence.

20 minutes later, Chrissie came to find them with her tablet PC in her hand and sat next to Rose.

"Right then, the photos on the phone were taken between the 15th and 21st of July, 2015," she told them. "A cute kid by the way, who is he?"

They looked at each other awkwardly. "Let's just say we're related," Pete said.

"Okay," Chrissie said, raising a questioning eyebrow. "I also found this video. It's the foxy guy in the photo with the great hair."

She played the video on her tablet and they could see John in a loin cloth, lying in a hammock, on the veranda of a tree house. He had EJ on his lap playing pat-a-cake and making him laugh.

"Oh my God, it's him. It's the Doctor," Pete said.

"Well, sort of," Rose said mysteriously.

"Do you have a timestamp on this Chrissie?" Pete asked her.

"April 27th, 2016."

"Oh Rose, that was your birthday," Jackie said. "Where was it taken?"

Rose wiped a tear from her eye with her fingers. "Beta Pegasi 2, we call it Paradise. John gave me a planet for my birthday Mum. He even built a luxury tree house, how thoughtful was that?"

"Hang on Rose," Chrissie said. "We went out clubbing with you on your birthday. Me, Alice, Gwen, Julia and Sarah. how could that video have been taken?"

"Was there anything else on the phone?" Pete asked before anyone could answer.

"There was a voicemail message dated two weeks ago." She played the message.

'Hi Rose, it's me. I'm in traffic at Tower Hill; they've got temporary lights at the road works so I might be a bit late. See you soon. Love you,' the voice said. Pete and Jackie looked at each other; they had recognised the Doctor's voice.

Rose had held it together for as long as she could, but the video and the message had been the final straw. When Pete and Jackie looked at her she was in floods of tears, with Chrissie hugging her and patting her back.

Pete had a thought about the message. "Chrissie, do you have the number of the phone that the message was sent from? Can we call him back?"

"Oh Pete, that's brilliant," Jackie said, squeezing his hand.

"I already looked into that. The number was even stored in the address book under 'John'. It came back as unregistered, it doesn't exist."

Rose wailed at the mention of him not existing, it was another proverbial nail in his proverbial coffin. Except there wouldn't be a coffin, because there wasn't a body to put in it.

"Right, I've heard enough," Pete said. "I'm calling a briefing. I want you Chrissie, Alice, Andy, Jack, Mickey, Jake, and I want Doctors Taylor and Stansfield there as well." He stood up and headed for the door, turning to look at them before he went through.

"Rose, I promise you that I will move Heaven and Earth to fix this." He turned back and walked out of the door.


In the Executive Meeting Room, Pete initiated the briefing.

"I've called you all together because we have some people missing and we need to get them back."

"Who?" Andy asked, already preparing himself for a search and rescue mission.

"That will become apparent as the briefing progresses. I'll ask Rose to give her recollection of events leading up to the disappearances." He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "Are you okay with this Sweetheart?"

She looked up and nodded at him before standing and addressing the meeting. She cleared her throat and made a hesitant start.

"Er, this is going to sound a bit odd, but it's all true," she started. She clicked the media remote and the picture of her, John and EJ appeared on the screen.

"This man is my husband, John Smith. He's sort of related to the man some of you know as the Doctor. He's a kind of twin."

"Rose?" Alice started to enquire, but Pete raised a hand to let Rose continue.

"The baby is our son, Eyulf Jackson Smith." She smiled at Jack Harkness. "His middle name is after you Jack." She then looked at Alice and clicked up another photo, the one of Pete and Jackie holding EJ.

"No, I'm not hallucinating or makin' it up. This is Mum and Dad holding their grandson the day after he was born. Somethin' has changed the timeline, but for some reason, it didn't change it for me. The only thing I can think of, is that the green light that surrounded me in the pyramid must have isolated me from the timeline."

"Fascinating," Dr. Malcolm Taylor said. "Do you know when your timeline changed to cause your family to disappear?"

"I've been thinkin' about that, and I've read some of the mission logs that Dad found for me. I think it's related to the Dimension Cannon Project that failed."

"Really?" Dr. Roger Stansfield said. He'd been one of the key scientists in the development of the cannon.

Rose proceeded to tell the meeting her version of events when the stars started going out. How the project team had managed to keep the lock on the Earth and send her to the Doctor. She gave her report of the events on the Dalek Crucible and the creation of the Human Biological Metacrisis.

Jack leaned forward to give his recollection of the Dalek Crucible.

"You, Jackie and Mickey weren't there Rose. There was the Doctor, Donna, Martha and me. Oh and the Metacrisis Doctor as well. He had the sense to destroy the Daleks after Donna had disabled them."

Mickey then gave his tilt on things from his perspective. "You were devastated when the cannon failed Babe. I didn't see you for a week."

"Don't you remember that I came to stay with you Rose," Alice asked. "I was really concerned that you'd given up on everything, that you'd lost hope."

"No I don't. That's the point, it never happened for me. I came back to this universe with John and started a new life."

"If I may interject," Malcolm said. "It appears that we have a similar situation to that of Donna Noble when she had the 'time beetle' on her back. Rose was able to influence Donna's alternate timeline and prevent the Doctor from being killed. This returned the timeline back to its original course."

"Do you think you can fix my timeline Dr. Taylor?" Rose asked.

"Well, last time we used the temporal shift between the two universes as a way of travelling through time to influence the events leading up to the Donna Noble paradox."

"Is that a yes or a no?" Pete asked.

"Unfortunately it's a no. The Dimension Cannon required a weakness in the walls of reality between the universes to 'fire' through. That weakness repaired itself when the other universe destroyed the Crucible."

"Wait!" Rose said. "We scanned the planet from orbit in the TARDIS. John detected harmonic resonances that 'wobbled' gravity and 'wobbled' reality. He said it turned the walls to jelly so that somethin' could come through. What if we could use the cannon before the walls harden again?"

"You know Malcolm," Roger said. "We never looked beyond the Earth when the pyramids started vibrating the tectonic plates. We just assumed it was a terrorist group trying to destabilize the Western World."

"Good point Roger. If a team could jump to the other universe and set up a Dimension Cannon in that Lever Room, they could jump back into our past and advise us to send Rose before the Earth moves. Let's reactivate the Dimension Cannon Project and see what we can do."

"Malcolm, Roger. It would be a great personal favour to me if you would burn the midnight oil on this," Pete told them. "If you need anything or anyone, let me know. I'll even go and fetch them myself if I have to."

"Well actually Director, we already have everything we need from the old project. We just need to bring it out of storage and have a few technicians to help us put it all back together," Malcolm said.

Chrissie ended a call on her mobile. "Count me in. I've just called hubby and told him I'm going to be working late."

"I'd like to help as well if I can," Jack volunteered.

"Me too," Mickey chipped in.

Rose went all tearful again. "Oh you guys are SO wonderful. How will I ever repay you?"

Alice came over and gave her a long hug. "By putting that smile back on your face, you know…. the one in the photo. I'm so sorry I didn't believe you Rose. What must you think of me? What kind of friend am I?"

"You're my best friend Alice. And I know you're the kind of friend that doesn't jump to conclusions about people. You came to the only logical conclusion that the evidence allowed."

"Roger, Chrissie and myself can take care of this Director. I suggest everyone else goes home and gets some sleep. If it's anything like the old project, you are going to need all the rest you can get."