AN: As a word of warning I am hitting finals time here in the next few weeks. I am considering holding off any new posting until the week of Christmas, when I have a bit more time to relax and refocus. Sorry you shall be without Rose's response for a whole month, but I promise after finals I shall return. Wish me luck on Tertullian.
Jackie found him in his study the next morning, a cup of coffee in her hand.
"Coffee?" She smiled, handing him a large mug filled with coffee far fresher than the kind he'd reheated the night before. Despite himself, he smiled as he took it.
"Thank you. You didn't have to."
"No bother," she waved a hand at him, settling nervously in one of overstuffed, leather chairs. Pete's study was a mix of comfortable manliness and high tech efficiency, leather seats beside flat screened monitors flashing the latest news, and framed photographs of himself and major world leaders. He caught Jackie eyeing one on the left wall, of him and Harriet Jones at a dinner function together.
"Is that the prime minister? Harriet Jones?"
"President," he corrected her lightly, smiling at her confusion. "We don't have a queen on this side, so she's the President of the Republic of Great Britain. But that's her, yeah. Nice woman, if a bit batty."
"Same in our world. She knew Rose and the Doctor. Seemed alright." She tugged at her track suit jacket, the same one she'd worn the day before. It reminded him she'd come with just the clothes on her back. "So, you haven't got a queen? No king, either?"
"Nope. Got rid of those when the old queen, Victoria, stepped down. Mysterious illness, passed on to her children. Turns out it was an alien virus that mutated the carrier into a werewolf, but the public didn't know that. All they knew was that the queen heroically chose to step down in the face of the coming crises and declared Great Britain a republic." It was the same story that all British school children learned, the passing of the old monarchy into republican democracy.
Jackie looked as if he might as well have told her the moon was made of cheese. "And, so what, there isn't any Prince Charles or Lady Di?"
Not sure who they were, Pete shook his head. "The old aristocrats are still around, still have their titles, but they don't mean much. Most are just honorary anyway, dukes whose family go back for centuries."
"Imagine that," Jackie muttered, clearly having trouble doing just that. "Well, one less thing to gossip on, I suppose. Pity, that young prince, WIlliam, was growing up to be a handsome boy. Would like to see who he settles down with."
Losing the thread of conversation quickly, Pete cleared his throat. "How's Rose?"
Jackie's musings melted into a sad frown of worry as her gaze turned vaguely upward to where Rose must still be sleeping. "Woke a bit, but then cried some more. Still is asleep. I haven't seen her like this, not even when...well, last time she'd had her heart broken." She glowered darkly at the top of Pete's dark, oak desk.
Pete had suspected as much. Jackie's words only confirmed something he'd long wondered about the relationship between the strange alien and the girl who could be his daughter. "So, Rose and the Doctor, they were…"
"Oh, no, not like that!" Jackie waved her hands in denial, but paused, shrugging. "Okay, maybe a bit. I don't think they ever did nothing, at least Rose kept denying that they did, and you know, you would think she'd be honest if she'd actually shagged an alien about what it was like."
Pete couldn't decide if he was more horrified at the idea of the daughter he'd never had sleeping with anyone or that Jackie would be curious about it. "I didn't mean if they were sleeping...together, Jacks, I meant, were they a couple. In love."
"Oh, that." Jackie's face flushed bright underneath the smeared makeup "I know Rose was. I know my daughter, and I knew what she's like when she's head over heels. As for the Doctor…"
She paused, sighing, staring at the picture of Harriet Jones for long moments.
"You know, once, this was this mad incident. Aliens invading Downing Street, big, fat ones who wore people suits. All sorts of insanity. The Doctor was there, in his old face, not the face you met. He'd just brought Rose home after a year away, and I thought she was dead, but she had been out gallivanting across the universe and all of time with him. And no sooner did she turn up on my doorstep again, then they were running off to stop these aliens. That's where they met Harriet Jones. And they go and lock themselves up in some office somewhere to figure it all out, the Doctor, Rose, and Harriet, and I call her on her cell. And they are trying to plan how to stop the aliens with bombs being redirected at Downing Street, and all other madness. And all I could think was that it was my baby girl in there. My Rose. She was all I had left after you….I mean my Pete….died."
She frowned down at her twisted fingers in her lap. "I remember crying, telling him that he couldn't do that, that he had to promise me that Rose would be safe. And I remember him coming up with a way to stop them, one that could kill them all. And he stopped...for half a minute, he stopped. And he almost...almost didn't go through with it. The entire world hanging in the balance, all those lives, and for for one moment he seriously thought about letting them all hang and save Rose."
She smiled, blinking up at Pete with eyes shining wetly. "You know, when he changed his face, something happened. Something with a space station in the future and those Daleks, and everyone dying. And Rose, she wanted to stay and fight with him, just like usual. And he sent her back. She cried and cried, finally made me help her get back to him. But you know what, he sent her back to me. He'd promised, you know, to always send her back to me, no matter what. And that's why he sent her with us here. He always promised me. And I have to believe he did it because he loved her. He loved her more than anything. I don't know much about him, no one does. Rose says he's old, hundreds of years old, and that all his people are gone. He's all alone. And maybe Rose gave him something to hope for. But I know that he loved her enough to give her up, to know she was alive somewhere. And I don't know for sure if you would call that romance, but it must stand for something, right?"
Pete couldn't follow half of the story as she told it, but one thing was clear. Rose had meant a lot to the Doctor, and he to her, and that upstairs right now was a very, very heartbroken young woman. He could only imagine what the Doctor was like at this very moment.
"You think he's okay, over there?" Jackie sounded so very sad in that moment. Pete could only shake his head.
"I don't know," he admitted, softly. "You think she will be okay?"
"Rose? I hope so. She's my daughter, and I survived your loss." She wiped at her eyes to meet his frankly. "And you survived without me. She may not be your daughter direct, but she's still Pete Tyler's girl. And we are made of stronger stuff."
That they were. The thought made him smile, despite his stinging eyes. "My wife...my Jackie. She and I...we never had kids. Never got around to it. She said she never wanted any. Soon, it got to be too late." He wondered, briefly, if things would have been better between he and his Jackie if had been blessed with a Rose, an intrepid, stubborn, brave young woman who could bring them together.
To his surprise, Jackie laughed lightly, humming as if reminiscing. "I remember being the same way with my Pete."
"Really?" That shocked him. He'd assumed with the existence of Rose that this Jackie had been all for kids.
"Oh, yeah! When I was younger, thought kids were a bother. Screaming, snotting, soiling nappies, couldn't pay me to have one of the little buggers." She laughed airily as Pete recalled all too well those very words coming out of his Jackie's mouth. "And then, of course, I'd had more than a few friends get knocked up. Saw what they turned into. Gaining weight, wearing pajamas all the time, never having time to get dressed, let alone go out. I was horrified."
That all sounded eerily familiar to him. "My Jackie said the same thing. What changed?"
"I got pregnant," she replied with a smile. "We weren't supposed to. We didn't have two pence to rub together, let alone a quid to survive on, and there we were, expecting a baby. When I realized what was going on, I cried and cried the entire day. And you kept telling me it would work out. It always did. And all I could think was that we would need to feed the baby, and clothe her, and put a roof over her head, and we couldn't do that for ourselves. But you seemed to think it would all work out. You were the one who talked me out of giving her up."
Her last words struck him cold. "You didn't want her?"
"Not because I didn't want her, because we couldn't care for her." Jackie flushed uncomfortably, fingers twisting so tightly her knuckles were white. "Rose doesn't know this, and you can't tell her, but I did for half a moment want to find a family to take her in. Maybe a cousin or something. Someone who had their lives more together than we did. And you stood your ground. And you were right. I was hysterical, you made me see reason, and we kept her."
Pete wanted to be bothered by her insistence on "you" rather than "he" and to remind her that it was another Pete Tyler who had had these conversations with her. But in all honesty, if it had been him rather than Rose's father, he'd have said the same thing to her. "And you never regretted it?"
"Not even for a minute," she stated firmly, chin jutting hard. "Especially after….everything that happened."
He knew she was talking about her Pete's death not long after.
"It's so strange," he sighed, scrubbing his face as he tried to wrap his head around the idea that in one world he had fathered a daughter, in another he'd not. "I wonder what was different. I mean...my Jackie and I, we never...at least, she never told me about a time when she might even have suspected."
"I don't know," she replied, thoughtful. "I know Rose was born April, and I always suspected that we made her that one night when…"
She stopped, staring at Pete, her face now the color of a beet. Pete frowned.
"What?"
"Nothing," she murmured, looking away and decidedly embarrassed.
"No, what?"
"It's nothing." She shook her head. Even her neck was turning pink, and she was clearly mortified.
"When, what?" Now he was just curious, wanting to know what she and his counterpart had been up to.
"You likely didn't even have that time with your wife in this world," she shot back, burying her face into her hands. "There was...me and Pete, we had this fight, okay. My Pete. I don't even remember what it was about, shoes on the floor, perfume from another woman on his shirt, I don't recall. I just remember screaming at him, and he screamed back, and he stormed out. And I began crying on the couch."
"I'd called you a word that rhymes with 'punt', didn't I?" Oh, he remembered that argument, all right. He remembered it all to well. Pete's heart began to race as he swallowed hard. His head spun as moments came back to him, little shifts, and in a blink of an eye, he saw the divergence of his life, clear as day. It was as if he had been granted the ability to see his experiences in all of their glory, and saw the one point when he'd reached the road not taken.
"I'd called you that, and you threw a shoe at me."
"Yeah," Jackie breathed, uncovering her face with a startled expression. "I'd screamed at you I wanted a divorce."
"And I said if you thought you could do better by yourself, then you were more than welcome to try. And I grabbed my jacket and left."
"And I screamed you could go to your whore of a girlfriend. And then I curled up on the couch crying." Jackie was nearly smiling at the memory. "You remember?"
"Happened in my world, too," he replied, breathless with the weight of what he just realized. "Tell me, Jacks. In your world, when did I come back?"
She laughed, her face pinking up again. "Oh, about an hour or so later, enough to have a cig and a walk around the block, clear the head. Then you came back, all contrite, and then we...well…" She stopped, clearing her throat and looking anywhere but at Pete. "You know...there on the couch, we…"
"Yeah." He cut her off mercifully as she became suddenly very interested in the fuzz on her track suit. "Yeah, in my world, that didn't happen."
"It didn't?" That caught her attention. She looked disappointed. "Pity. It was amazing!"
Pete tried to hold back the sliver of manly pride and gloating grin that threatened. He wanted to ask how good it was, but refrained as he recalled the events in his world. "I stormed out, yeah. And I walked around the block. And when I was ready to come back, that's when a woman, Yvonne Hartman, stopped me."
Jackie knew that name well enough. "That woman that tried to kill me?"
"Different world, Jackie, not the same woman."
"Did she like me any better in this?"
That part hadn't changed across worlds. "Honestly, no. But it was different here. She recruited me to work for Torchwood that night. Offered to help me get the rights to Vitex and make it my own. In exchange, I'd become a spy for Torchwood, their mole in the corporate world. I'd make sure that their technologies weren't abused, I'd ensure no one was doing something they shouldn't. I could get all my dreams. Create the company I always wanted. Provide for you and make you happy. I thought it was the answer to everything."
He fell silent as he stared at the picture on the far wall of he and Harriet Jones. All the wealth and power in the world, and what had it gotten him?
"Didn't turn out that way, did it?" Jackie was never bright, but she had her perceptive moments. She glanced back at her, a sad smile tugging at his mouth.
"No. I mean, I got rich, yeah. Jacks and I could afford to move out, to a new place, get nice things, all the stuff I always wanted to do for her. But money isn't everything."
"Don't I know it," she sniffed. "My cousin, Mo, you may not have her on this side, but she won the lottery, enough to get a place in the Lake District. Climbing mountains or something. Anyway, miserable as the day out there, no one to talk to. All that money, and no one to share it with." Jackie sniffed, glancing around the room. "No offense, but your flat is posh, but doesn't look very friendly like."
He wanted to laugh at her. His Jackie would have wrinkled her nose at the decor, or complained that she hadn't used the designer she'd sent over. This Jackie thought the room was too pretty, too cold. There were differences after all.
"Something to be said, I guess, about getting everything you thought you want," Pete replied. "You could get the greatest gift in the world, and then find out it's not everything you thought it was cracked up to be. We got money, but that's what came between us in the marriage. Ironic. That was what was always between us in the marriage."
She gave him a sympathetic smile. "If she was anything like me, Pete, she was young. And like as not an idiot. And had her head turned by all that money and whatever. I mean, remember, in my world, I'd been made a mother and then widowed. Tends to change a person. Bet if my Pete had gotten famous before all that happened, I'd have turned into one of those Hilton sisters or something."
Pete had no idea what who the Hilton sisters were, but he glossed over that easily as he temporized. "Maybe. Still, just strange. I got what I wanted and found out that in the end what I wanted was something else."
A wife who adored him. A daughter to spoil and protect. A family.
Viciously, he pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind as he cleared his throat roughly. "But, none of that answers the problem we have at hand. You, Jackie Tyler, are now in my world. So what do you plan to do for yourself?"
Clearly, she hadn't worked it out that far yet. Blankly she began picking at the cuffs of her jacket, brows knitting in unhappy worry. "Well, I don't know. I mean, we don't have things here. No jobs, no identities, nowhere to live." Her dark eyebrows flew to her peroxide blonde hair. "Oh, God, no money. What in the world are we supposed to do?"
Before the air of panic quickly swirling around Jackie could settle, Pete tried to intervene. "You don't have to worry about money."
"What do you mean, not worry?" Her eyes narrowed, dangerously.
"I have money, Jackie, if you and Rose need anything…"
"Oh, no." Immediately she jumped up, face flushing for a different reason, hands flying to her hips in the classic, Jackie battle pose. "I'm not taking someone else's money. I'm not a kept woman, never have been, never will be. I took care of Rose for nineteen years just fine, I can do it again."
"Kept woman?" How did this conversation jump off track already? "Jackie, I was just offering help."
"And I ain't no charity case. Sure, I've not had a straight job in years, but I took in hair, I made out alright. Bet I could do it again, yeah. Make a decent living."
"Jackie!" He sighed, feeling the hint of a headache already forming. How in the hell could he break this to her? "Jackie, it's not as simple as you and Rose moving out there and making a go of it."
"And why couldn't we? Made it okay without you around, didn't we?"
"Yes," he acceded, figuring it was better to agree than to point out he wasn't her dead husband. "But the problem is that you are Jackie Tyler."
"And what's that got to do with anything?"
"My wife...Jackie Tyler."
"I'm not your wife. We never met till yesterday!"
"Do you think the rest of the world knows that?"
And then the penny dropped.
"They all think I'm her!"
Her gasp left a cold pit in Pete's stomach where his cup of coffee churned uncomfortably. "Yeah...I mean we both know you're not, but the public won't know."
Desperation mixed with confusion as she began to stammer. "Why do they have to know? Why do they have to hear anything? I can be just a nobody, just going about my business…"
"My wife was a very well known personality," Pete sighed, not for the first time regretting his Jackie's public persona. "Like your Hilton sisters, I guess, always in the papers, even was going to get her own show when she...died."
She had mentioned that to him in passing that horrible day so long ago. He'd been frustrated then. Now, he could see the very idea of it terrifying this new Jackie Tyler, who'd never so much as stepped foot out of the Powell Estates.
"So, I can dye my hair. Maybe go black, or perhaps even ginger. Been thinking of trying that, you know, something different after all these years...anyway, I could change it up. Take up a new name. Whatever it takes!"
"Jackie," he sighed, trying to stem the tide of the hysterics.
"Or maybe I could get some plastic surgery, change my nose...maybe take off a few pounds, you know, and no would know I was the same person."
"Jacks…"
"Maybe move to America. You still have an America here, right? I could live in LA with Rose, and maybe do makeup for movies or something. Living somewhere where it's warm all year…"
"Jacqueline!"
Her full name startled her into quiescence quickly enough. He growled, scrubbing his stubbly head with the palm of one hand, wondering how in the hell they had gotten into this predicament.
"What will you do for money?"
"I…" She paused, snapping her mouth shut. It quirked into a twisted, hard line.
"Yeah, my point." He glared at her across his desk. "You have no money for any of this, no identification, no past. And this world operates on those things just as much as yours did. All you have is a face. And the minute you walk out of that front door and onto the streets of London, people will recognize it and think you are my long, dead wife."
Jackie stared at him for long moments, before wilting and crumbling in resignation back into one of his office chairs. "But I'm not your wife. I'm not that person. I've never been to charity events or had shows on the telly. I'm just...not…"
She faltered, helpless. Pete felt his heart breaking for her.
"I know," he murmured, sympathetic despite it all. How would he have felt had the situation been reversed? If he'd been trapped in her world, having to step into the shoes of a man long dead.
"What should I do, Pete?" Her plea was so sorrowful, he wanted to throw himself around the desk, take her in his arms, and reassure her that it would all be okay, just like he used to back in the old days. Instead, he sighed heavily, reaching for his tablet with Miles' encoded file on it.
"I've had my team working overnight on something. I wanted to run it by you first, before presenting it to Rose."
"Why?" Jackie eyed the tablet in suspicion.
"Because...I don't know how she will take it." He had to be honest, it was a good plan, if all parties agreed to it. That was the tricky part. "You are easy enough to fit into this world. You can take up the identity of Jackie Tyler, wife of Pete Tyler."
"But you said she was dead!"
"Well, perhaps we were mistaken," Pete shrugged with a hint of a smile. "Perhaps Jackie was thought to be dead, but in reality she was somewhere else, her memory temporarily missing due to the trauma she suffered. She was taken care of in a lovely place by caring people, who didn't recognize her right away. And it is only recently that she's returned to herself and felt ready to face the world that she's been struggling to remember for the last three years."
Jackie blinked mildly. "Sounds like an episode of a soap. What, I come back from the dead, and everyone is okay with it?"
"Why not? It's far more believable than you are a Jackie Tyler from another universe, isn't it?"
Clearly she hadn't thought of that. "Alright, so saying I do agree to this madness. I can just say I didn't die, had amnesia, didn't remember who I was. What about everything your wife did? Who were her friends? I don't know them. What if one of them comes up to me and wants to reconnect, and I don't know who they bloomin' are?"
"Easy enough. Your memory has been touchy." It was as neat of an explanation as Pete could think of. "You don't remember many people. And your personality has changed, your focused shifted. You are now more interested in other things. Which explains why it is that you aren't throwing yourself at the press anymore."
It was a perfect explanation...well, nearly so.
"You got one more problem," she murmured knowingly, crossing her arms and glaring from the depths of the chair she lounged in.
"What's that?" He'd been feeling rather proud of himself. Well, himself and Miles, he had to admit.
"Rose," she replied simply.
That was the stickier one. "We didn't forget her. She's just more...problematic."
"She didn't exist in this world. How you going to explain away a daughter you and your wife never had?"
Even Miles had hit a dead end. He'd suggested a long lost niece, or a girl from the home where Jackie was at who had become like a daughter to her. And somehow Pete wasn't sure that either Jackie or Rose would go for that sort of solution. It wasn't as if he and Jackie had a lot of of extended kin they could claim Rose belonged to.
And that was when the idea clicked.
"You said in your world you didn't want Rose at first, right?"
"I said I panicked and got hysterical when I was pregnant, not that I didn't want her."
"Still, you said you told your husband you wanted to find a family member to take her in."
"Yeah, at least to give her a better life."
"What if you and your Pete had?"
Jackie only stared at him, confused.
Pete grinned at her, a wonderful planning spinning out of his head. "What if you and your Pete had. You'd given Rose to a relative to raise, because you didn't think you'd ever give her a life like she needed. Let's say your cousin Mo, in the Lake District."
"Is Mo even alive here?"
"I'm not sure, she and Jackie stopped talking years ago. The point is that Rose was raised by others. Once I got wealthy, she was already happy in her new home, and not wishing to disrupt it, we chose to leave things as they were, seeing quietly to her education and her well being. And she never knew the truth of her family, not until you started getting your memories back."
"And then, what, I decide I wanted to find my long, lost daughter?"
"Yeah...that's the gist of it." Pete grimaced. Now, as he thought of it, it did sound rather like a trashy, soap opera plot. All they needed was for a long lost, evil twin to appear.
Jackie mulled this over for long moments, picking at her fingernails in worry. She narrowed her eyes as she spoke again and regarded him. "So...if I'm faking being your wife. You don't expect that…"
"No!" Pete interjected, perhaps a bit more forcefully than he intended, earning a slightly hurt look from Jackie. "No, no, it's not that, just...well, I am not going to make you do something you don't want...to."
He cleared his throat roughly, and wishing for the moment that this woman wasn't the copy of the one he had wanted and missed so badly for so long.
"Besides, me and my Jackie, we'd not...we'd been separated for a few months by the time everything happened. Had filed papers, just hadn't made it all official yet."
He stared down at his half drunk coffee, and realized how incredibly awkward all of this was. "Look, I more just want to take care of you and Rose. I am the one who pulled you into this. And Rose, she'd be my daughter if things were different. If I know your Pete, and I think I'm a pretty good judge on him and what he'd want, he'd do the same thing in my shoes."
That at least earned a smile from Jackie. She grinned, nodding firmly. "That he would. And you're a good man, both of you."
Even as she said that, she paused, clapping a hand to her mouth. She laughed, shaking her head. "This is madness, this is, all of it."
"Yeah, it is. But at least we've got each other, Jackie Prentiss."
Her face softened as she nodded. "Yeah, we do."
God, he loved it when she got all gooey eyed like that, he caught himself thinking, almost without realizing it. He wanted to be stern with himself, and found he was failing, miserably.
"But now, we got a different problem," she pointed out.
"And what's that."
"Convincing your soon to be daughter of all of this."
Rose...oh yes.
"Think she will go for it?"
Jackie could only offer a shrug by way of comfort.