Flipsided p.3
Rose’s eyes were huge, her heart pounded painfully. She reached forward to touch him, to turn him over, but his whole body radiated a cold so hard it crackled the air.
"Blankets!" She jumped up and ran from the console room, dodging the motionless aliens, their presence not registering on her frantic mind.
He must be going into shock, she thought. You were supposed to cover people up when they were in shock, elevate their legs, keep them warm.
But what do you do with an alien that was literally radiating cold?
She’d seen the Doctor in bad shape before. After the Daleks, when he’d first regenerated, he’d lapsed into some kind of coma. When she’d wakened him too soon it had stopped one of his hearts.
What did she know about Time Lord first aid?
She grabbed the cartoon quilt off her bed and snatched the biggest pillow from Jack’s bed on the way back. Jack had way too many pillows.
She wished he was here. He’d know what to do.
"Gasp!" The Doctor grabbed his chest and slumped against the console.
"Doctor! What is it?" Jack jumped forward and caught him. He half carried the limp Time Lord over to the big easy chair in the library corner of the cavernous console room.
The Doctor panted, his freckles standing out starkly as he fell bonelessly into the chair. His breath rasped harshly, his eyes unseeing.
"Come on," Jack gently slapped his cheeks, trying to get him to come around. His skin was even colder than normal.
"Damn it, Doctor. Don’t do this to me. Tell me what’s going on!"
The Doctor gasped, his back arched, color and awareness flooded back into his face. He slumped back in the chair and blinked up at Jack with innocently surprised eyes. "Convergence."
The Doctor stared up at Rose, his face flushed, his hair in disarray, his skin damp and flushed under the quilt.
His eyes were dilated, suffused. "What did you do?" he asked in a hoarse, throaty voice.
Rose cupped his lean cheeks and gave him a smacking kiss. "Thank God! Are you all right?"
He pulled a hand from beneath the quilt and pushed back his hair, he looked at his hand, it was trembling.
She took the trembling hand and rubbed it between hers. He had nice hands, big and sinewy with sensitive fingertips. She rubbed it between hers, busking the life back into it.
The Doctor felt the last erg of golden energy stream into him from her touch, filling and settling him. He felt very relaxed.
Looking up at the eager young woman above him, he pushed back the heavy quilt and sat up. His coat was crumpled, and his cravat was hanging loose, but otherwise he seemed whole. He looked up at the motionless red alien that stood at his feet and his gaze automatically snapped to the time rotor. It was still pumping.
"They haven’t moved," Rose said. "How are you feeling?"
"What happened? What did you do?" He reached up and touched his own face, surprised at how warm he was. The frost from his coma had already melted and evaporated away.
"I just touched you."
He stared at her.
"I know you said not to, but you were so cold. I tried to warm you up with the quilt but it wasn’t working. I just meant to check your temperature." She reached out a hand toward his forehead, unconsciously imitating the motion she’s seen her mother do so often in her life. She stopped short of touching him and let her hand fall back in her lap.
"I’m sorry."
"I’m not. Thank you." He knelt and stretched upward, waking himself up, he felt all tingly. "Whatever you did obviously worked."
She didn’t mention the golden energy that had surrounded her hand when she’d touched him. She’d felt the power pass through her, into him, connecting him, her, and the Tardis.
The Doctor stood up and stretched, flexing his legs, He studied the motionless aliens, dispassionately.
"Who are they, anyway?" Rose asked, flicking her hair at the aliens, still kneeling on the floor by the discarded quilt.
"Zhleyzeen."
Her eyebrows went up. She studied the slim beautiful beings. "They don’t look like Slytheen."
He gave her an odd look. "No, Zhleyzeen, often called Zhaleen, they’re sort of self-appointed Time Police. That glassy looking surface of theirs isn’t just glass, it’s the physical manifestation of a quantum time field. They’re born with it. They’re incredibly sensitive to temporal energies. Especially the different wavelengths of the different timelines."
Rose stood up and approached one of the silver Zhaleen. She studied the transparent surface coating it. She reached a hand forward to touch, then stopped and looked at the Doctor, he just smiled and nodded permission.
The surface was smooth, hard and cold. "It feels like glass."
"It isn’t, not completely, although it is partly a solid insulator."
"So, they’re frozen in time?" she nodded at the pumping time rotor.
"No. they’re not frozen. Just immobile."
"You mean they’re aware of us?" she stepped back from the creature.
"Yes. They just can’t move." She looked a question at him. "It’s rather like if you were immersed in water and it suddenly froze all around you.
"They’re in a working time field in here. As long as we’re in flight they can’t move."
The console chimed and the rotor stopped with a thunk.
The aliens started moving.
The Doctor jumped forward, green coat flying, spun the time wheel, darted around the console and yanked the reset hand brake on the other side.
The aliens froze again.
Rose let out a whoosh. "Honestly! Sometimes I think she does things like that on purpose!" She glared at the console.
The Doctor laughed.
"Anyway," Rose said. "What are we going to do with Tweedle-Dum, Tweedle-Dee and the Red Ranger here? We can’t very well let them arrest you. And what are you doing here anyway? If you didn’t regenerate then you’ve got to be an old Doctor, because I sure don’t recognize you."
"Nor I you. And I’m only a thousand, that’s hardly old."
"You told me you were 900."
He gave her a measuring look out of the corner of one sleepy eye, pretending to study the controls. "Time is relative, especially in a Tardis, and this one’s console room has obviously been redone," he said, changing the subject. "I like the design, but it’s not my best work." He flicked a hand at some of the jury rigged controls on the console.
"The problem is, they’re partially right. Something is wrong with my timelines. I keep having memories of things that never happened. First I’m traveling with Sam then suddenly I’m with Charley. I have memories of a war I know I haven’t fought, and for some reason I keep thinking I should be living on Earth, but that’s nonsense."
Rose stared at him and bit her lip, hard. A war. If he was in the middle of the Time War....
"It’s really irritating. I seem to be living in several different versions of me."
He looked around at the green-lit, orange-coraled console room. "Still, in all those memories I was never in this console room. Nor had I met a woman named Rose." He turned to look at her, his hands back in his pockets. "I can only assume I’m in my own future somehow."
He grinned a thoroughly charming whimsical grin at her, a grin that was achingly familiar, yet somehow even younger and more innocent than she was used to.
"Hello, Rose," he said, holding out his hand to her to shake. "I’m the Doctor. And I’ll be pleased to meet you."
"What do you mean, Convergence?" Jack said. The question was dead serious, but it still had the inevitable lecherous curiosity in the undertone.
"Jack, please!"
"You only have to ask, Doctor." Jack said coyly, fluttering his lashes at the Time Lord.
"Cut it out."
Jack sighed and rolled his eyes. Sometimes the Doctor had no sense of humor. "So what’s Convergence? It looked pretty intense."
"It is. And it’s not supposed to happen. Somehow I briefly converged with another self. I felt what he did."
"Think it has anything to do with..." Jack waved a finger at the console room they were in.
The Doctor shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. "I shouldn’t think so. We’re temporally disparate. We’re not in the same timestream. Convergence requires parallax propinquity."
"I love it when you talk dirty."
The Doctor glared at him.
Jack had had a good poke around the Tardis when they first arrived, while the Doctor was busy at the console trying to figure out what had happened to bring them here.
Jack approved of this console, it was clean and uncluttered with polished panels and pristine controls, a bit old fashioned, but it suited the Doctor.
It was the rest of the place that looked like a jumble sale. There was a library wall stuffed and stacked with books, a nook for clocks of all kinds (each set to a different time, naturally) another wall of overflowing drawers, and a desk, crammed with old what-nots littering the surface, including a pair of binoculars, and a 500 year diary. He picked the diary up and leafed through it eagerly. Anything that could help him understand the Doctor....
A long fingered hand came round him and slammed the book back down on the desk.
"You can’t take anything. I might need it."
"So, you kept a diary did you?"
"I couldn’t be expected to remember everything."
"Do you still keep a diary? I bet you do. A pretty little pink one with rosebuds," he teased. "I bet you even keep the key on a chain, close to your hearts." He sighed dramatically, clasping his hand to his heart and fluttering his eyelashes with a sigh.
"Why has no one murdered you yet, Jack?"
Jack grinned. "Because of my manifold charms."
The Doctor rolled his eyes. "As Rose would say, ‘You wish!’ Now, if you’ve quite returned from your ego trip, do you think you could give me a hand with this?" he waved at the console.
"Ouch." Jack grinned.
"So how do we get them to not arrest you?" Rose asked, waving a hand at the glass coated aliens.
"Simple, we get out of their reach." He swung back over to the console, his velvet coat flairing behind him, his movements a smooth, controlled display of strength. She found herself watching this Doctor who was, in many ways, both more mature, yet more innocent than his older self. This Doctor hadn’t yet been scarred by the Time War, he wasn’t angry, like her first Doctor, nor as childishly gleeful as her present Doctor. He seemed quieter in himself, more sure of himself. And very sexy.
Rose grinned. Here she was, in a space machine, surrounded by motionless aliens, watching another alien diddling with the controls and expounding on about something. And all she could think was how good he looked. Yummy.
She’d watched a program one time, explaining how the sexes were attracted to one another by body language. Yet this Doctor’s body language didn’t match either of his other selves. Her first Doctor was all loose limbed, lanky strength, sauntering around in his bandy legged way, deceptively relaxed. Her current Doctor always jumped around like a flea on a griddle, flicking controls like he was turning on Christmas lights. But this one just strode confidently around the console, fingers working with unconscious grace as he talked. She cocked her head, watching him.
"The Zhaleen are a trans-temporal race, living on the edges and interstices of the timelines. They can’t exist within Time itself, not directly. That’s why they needed to hire Ogrons to bring us to their ship. Their dimensional ships are a lot like the Tardis. The exterior exists in the real universe, but the interior is in another dimension. The Zhaleen exist in the rarified atmosphere above the timelines, able to look down and watch, but unable to enter for fear the pressure would crush them."
His voice was even different than her Doctor’s. Her Doctor’s voice was all quick and hard, sweet, tart, like rock candy. This Doctor’s voice was slow and easy, melting over her like honey.
"You see?"
He looked at her expectantly.
"Huh?"
He gave her a strange look, obviously wondering why she hadn’t been listening.
"We’ve just got to get them back to their ship, then dive back into the timeline before they can catch us," he explained triumphantly, as if that was obvious.
Rose shook her lingering fascination out of her head and frowned at him. "But what use is that if they can just appear in the Tardis at will?”
The Doctor shook his head, dark waves floating around his lean face. “They could only do that because we were on their ship, in their dimensional space.”
“Then, won’t they just follow us through the vortex till they catch us again?”
Another shake. “No, completely different drive systems. They travel through the interstices. We travel through the Vortex.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“No. The Zhaleen travel between alternate timelines - actually between them.” He ran two lean hands parallel. “The Tardis travels through Time, that’s different. You could say they’re sort of alternate Time Lords. And just as boring. All rules and regulations. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Though I suppose it’s only to be expected, as time sensitive as they are. It’s bad enough when someone like me comes crashing through like a bull in a china shop. It’s no doubt worse when you’re the china.”
“All right,” the Doctor said, leaning meditatively on the console, his black-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. He reset one last contact point and rechecked the time vector display. Humanian Era, Earth, 2007. “Turn it on.”
Jack flipped open his arm band and flicked on his vortex Manipulator.
The Tardis went wild.
"Whoa!"
“Doctor,” Rose nervously scooted up close to the lean man where he leaned over the Tardis controls, one hand carefully turning the glass spacial coordinate map sphere, the other slowly running the time vector wheel forward and back as he tried to manually home in on the Zhaleen’s dimensional ship that was apparently tracking them in parallell.
“Hm?”
“He rippled.”
The Doctor’s head jerked up and looked at Rose, then to where she was looking at the red Zhaleen. It’s glassy surface was indeed rippling. He looked behind him at the silver two. They were rippling as well.
“This can’t be good,” the Doctor said. He started manipulating the sensor controls at hyper speed. A wash of Gallifreyan symbols flooded down the monitor, twirling their way across the screen.
“Oh, good grief. We’ve been flipsided!”
“What’s that?” Rose asked, nervously watching the aliens.
“Academy term, it means my alternate and I are somehow occupying contiguous timestreams. He must be trying to get back. Whatever he’s doing is interfering with the time field. You better hold on to something.”
As if on cue the Tardis started shaking. The Doctor held onto the console with one hand and set controls with the other. He grabbed a large round metal casing on one of the console dividers and attempted to turn it. It wouldn’t budge. He hit it with his fist. “Come on, come on.”
The Tardis was starting to sound distinctly sickly and the aliens were rippling like a lake in a stiff breeze.
Rose grabbed the mallet and gave the casing a solid whack! It cracked loose and slipped sideways. The Doctor gave her an affronted, disapproving look and turned it the rest of the way.
The Time rotor turned red, and stopped mid-pump.
The aliens came alive.
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