The Best of Times (2/4) Doctor (10), Doctor (10.5), Rose, Donna, Jackie (G) Spoilers to JE
PICTURE: schattenmond
WORDS: 3065
SPOILERS: Up to JE
CHARACTERS: (this chapter) Doctor (10), Doctor (10.5), Donna, Rose, Jackie
RATING: G
No infringement of the BBC's intellectual property is intended or implied.
"This is a time machine, duh-brain. And don’t you dare tell me I can’t drive it. You taught me.”
Jackie Tyler has a problem. Several problems, in fact, but the most pressing is that her daughter is sobbing her heart out and she really needs to phone Pete. They could easily end up on this flipping beach in the dark if she doesn’t organise something.
She’d like to strangle that self-centred bastard for leaving them here like this, and making it seem as if he was being noble. Somehow even when he’s behaving like one of those terribly decent chaps in an old movie, sacrificing his heart’s desire for the greater good, he still manages to come over as the star of the show with everyone else in walk-on roles. And somehow, Donna’s presence made it even worse. Like she’d already gone over to his side and the two of them were standing there handing down judgements like a couple of latter-day gods. What really makes Jackie’s blood boil, though, is that the Doctor knows Rose has had to go through this with him before - the whole thing about regenerating and having to accept him as the same man. It was hard enough for the poor girl when he looked completely different. To expect her to do it when basically he’s grown a double is beyond all reasonable expectations.
He can be as melodramatic as he likes, but he’s not seen what Rose went through after she lost him, and to get back to him. All that and then what does he do? He dumps her, and in the worst way possible - by appealing to exactly the qualities in her that he himself exploited years ago. Her compassion, her loyalty, her love. It’s all put Rose in an impossible position, and she’s not the only one.
Look at this poor young man - Jackie simply can’t get her head around the slight figure in the blue suit being over 900 years old. To her, he’s a newborn baby deprived of everything he needs to thrive. All he’s got left in the world are the clothes he stands up in, a brain that won’t match his body and that’ll make him the focus of all the wrong kinds of attention and the tenuous prospect of eventually being loved by a woman who’s breaking her heart over someone else right now.
And her. Jackie Tyler. Picking up pieces again. Patching together some kind of happy ending from the bones tossed to her by a departing Doctor.
Oh all right. That’s not entirely fair; he gave her Pete. But he seemed to have the idea that a bloke who looked, more or less, like the man she’d loved and lost would make everything all right. Fact was, he still wasn’t Pete. He was formed by different circumstances, different memories. He’d succeeded where her Pete hadn’t, and failed where he’d succeeded. She isn’t unhappy with him, but that’s because she’d made it work in a way, she suspects, Rose would never be able to do. Rose is like her dad - she thinks in absolutes. You can’t just fob her off. God knows, she’s tried.
Jackie looks over to the - oh for God’s sake, she doesn’t know what he is. Who did? He can’t be the Doctor, yet he has to be, if only for the reason that he can’t really be anyone else. She wonders if he’s as confused as the rest of them. Poor chap - he’d tried to give Rose a comforting hug as the TARDIS disappeared (not unreasonable, since she’d just returned his kiss with every appearance of enthusiasm), but she’s brushed him off and stood rooted to the spot, tears of rage starting to roll down her cheeks.
“Go on, run away, ruin your life and everybody else’s again, you stupid prat!” she’s yelled at the space where the TARDIS has been. “I wish I could stop caring about you!”
The new Doctor’s tried to approach her, but she doesn’t want him to touch her. Later, maybe, but not right now. Too many complicated angry feelings are boiling away inside her. It isn’t his fault, but Jackie knows her daughter and none of it surprises her.
She goes up to him. “Just give her some time,” she says. “It’s like when he regenerated before, that Christmas - it took her a while…”
“I know,” he interrupts. “I’m the same man.”
“But there’s two of you,” Jackie protests. “It’s a bit difficult for humans…”
“And I’m human now,” he adds.
“Then how can you be the same man?”
“I have all his memories. Isn’t that what makes me the same man?”
“That makes it worse, not better!” cries Rose. “Every time I look at you, I’ll remember him.”
“Rose, he…” His voice fades away. “We just have to try - we owe it to him, to the sacrifice he made…”
“Oh, shut up!” snaps Jackie. “He couldn’t get away fast enough. Stop making him out to be better than he is.”
“I don’t think he wanted to go so soon,” the Doctor points out. “But you heard what he said; the gaps between the realities were closing. If he’d hung around, the TARDIS might have been trapped here forever.”
“He’s full of good excuses, isn’t he?” Jackie sighs, bitterly. “And the trouble is, you never know when they are excuses, and when they happen to be true. I mean, he said it was impossible for anyone to get across before, but Rose managed it.”
“I didn’t do it on my own,” Rose argues. “And I didn’t just do it for him.”
The Doctor shoots her a puzzled look. “What was all that about an interdimensional cannon, then?” he asks.
Rose is looking uneasy, but at least she’s not crying any more. “There was some research going on and I admit I pulled a few strings to get in on it,” she confesses. “But I didn’t just go off on my own and do it. I’m not that irresponsible. The gaps were appearing anyway - all we did was try to exploit them.”
“Exploit them?” he demands, an edge of condemnation creeping into his voice. “Have you got any idea what you’re getting into?” Jackie begins to reassess her impression of his frailty. He still assumes authority over everyone else just like the other one did.
“Just because I’ve worked for Torchwood doesn’t mean I approve of everything they do,” Rose says, defensively. “They were still the best opportunity I had for getting-” She stops abruptly.
He pokes at the sand with the toe of his trainer. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t have the right to take the moral high ground any more, do I?”
It probably wasn’t deliberate, but it’s the best thing he could have said to get Rose batting for his team. Her cheeks flush angrily. “You don’t believe all that crap about being dangerous and violent, do you? That’s what got me more than anything. Just calling you the cost of saving creation and buggering off like that - how dare he?”
“Sometimes when we look in the mirror we see ourselves,” he replies; then, as if embarrassed by such a personal remark, he jokes, “Hard to see, the Dark Side is.”
It’s a curiously apt quotation, Jackie thinks. “I don’t know what gets into him sometimes,” she says, wearily. “All the times he’s saved this planet - and plenty of other ones - and he does nothing but wallow in guilt.”
“He has his reasons, Mum,” Rose says. “You didn’t hear what Davros did to him.”
“Me neither,” the Doctor reminds her. “Care to enlighten us?”
“Oh God.” Rose sits down on a rock and, after a moment’s hesitation, the Doctor settles awkwardly beside her. It doesn’t look exactly comfortable, but Jackie doesn’t like to think how long her daughter’s gone without sleeping by now. She wonders how Rose manages to do it.
“He told him, basically, he was a stinking hypocrite. That he loathed violence and never carried a weapon, but he turned his companions into weapons instead.”
Jackie sees the distress on her face and realised how it must have felt to hear the man you loved accused of that. “I hope you put him right!” she exclaims.
“Mum, I had to keep my mouth shut,” Rose says, looking very much older than her twenty-something years. “If Davros had got the slightest idea how much we mean - meant - to one another, he’d’ve had the perfect strategy against him.”
“Sounds like he managed pretty well without your help,” says the Doctor, his face grim.
“You know what the worst thing about all this is?” Rose bursts out. “If he’d left me to make up my own mind, I’d’ve probably ended up here with you anyway. But we never even got to talk.” Her voice trembles with suppressed emotion. “A couple of minutes in his arms, the chance to say hi, long time no see - that was it! And there was so much I wanted to ask him. About Jack, for a start. What the heck’s going on there? Jack’s supposed to be dead.”
The Doctor straightens up awkwardly - not just because his bum’s on a rock at an awkward angle, Jackie suspects, but because he’s trying to face up to something he finds very difficult. To his credit, he seems to succeed.
“I’m here,” he reminds her. “You can ask me. I’m not going anywhere.”
******
“We are so going back!” Donna insists.
This hasn’t gone awfully well, so far - has it?
“Back where?” he asks, playing for time really because, of course, he knows exactly where she means.
“Back to wherever you left her!” she retorts.
She won’t be able to get very far, he consoles himself. He’s done the memory wipe now - they’re back to the Donna who couldn’t change a plug. But, from sheer force of habit, he runs after her gabbling his protests and warnings.
“Donna, hang on a minute! This is an alternative universe we’re talking about. It’s not popping out for a pint of milk, y’know.”
It’s like throwing water at a duck’s back. Donna’s hands are whizzing over the controls and she’s gabbling just like him. “Just call up the Astral Map and the time-flight log, get a quick VB scan…ooh, there it is. And according to the multiversal schematic there’s a way through here…”
“Donna, stop it!” He runs across the room and grabs her arms. “Stop it, now! You’re human. Your mind can’t take that kind of thing!”
“Well, you’ll just have to snog it out of me, again, won’t you?” she teases him, wriggling from his grasp.
He makes a mental note never to kiss a woman for therapeutic reasons again. It’s far too imprecise. Apart from the fact that Donna’s not gone mad - if you can define wanting to pilot a TARDIS through into a different universe without any experience sane - he appears to have made things worse, rather than better. She’s remembering all the wrong things, and forgetting the events it’s hardest to explain.
“Don’t you want to know how your mother is?” he asks, clutching at straws. “After all, there was a Dalek invasion of the universe. It’s reasonable to be a bit concerned.”
“I’ll phone her sometime,” Donna said. “Look, the portal’s still stable and we can just go back into the journey record. Piece of cake!”
“Donna, you’re human…”
“So! I’m half the Doctor/Donna and I got the bit with the brains!”
“Oi!” he protests. “That doesn’t mean you can hi-jack my ship! And what about Wilf? He’s been under a lot of stress for his age. Least we can do is look him up, check him over…”
“Later. This is a time machine, duh-brain. And don’t you dare tell me I can’t drive it. You taught me.”
“Donna, you had a quick nip around the last half of the twentieth century. This is different. This requires precise navigation.”
“Oh yeah, and you’re the expert at that aren’t you?”
“I’ll override you!”
“Like to see you try,” she smirks. “The TARDIS likes me. We’re best mates. If she was a person I’d do lunch with her and have a good laugh about all your bad habits.”
He’s starting to feel very alone, and not in a good way.
“Look,” she’s saying. “The breach is open - and there’s a Time Lord on the other side. What more do you need? Why the heck did you leave them on a freezing beach miles from anywhere?”
“Erm…” he begins. “Dramatic effect?”
“That’s just plain rude!” she declares. “I suppose you gave them some excuse about the walls of reality closing again.”
“It’s not an excuse, Donna! It happens to be true…Donna, you have to stop this!”
“Right, that’s enough from you!” she says, and before he can speak again she’s thrown up a force field strong enough to immobilize him against one of the struts. He’s beyond astonished. Such power, such determination! A part of him can’t help admiring it, even when it’s used in his own ship against himself. A second part of him is wondering if he’s going to be able to handle this new Donna on his own.
“That’s better,” she declares. “And if that doesn’t work, there’s always handcuffs.”
*****
Okay, so it’s time for the Jack conversation. He was hoping it wouldn’t be just yet, but he can’t say he’s really surprised.
So he’s taken Rose through it as best he can. Funny thing is, it seems easier now. Strictly speaking, he’s the man who cocked that whole thing up and as culpable as he ever was, but there’s a certain amount of distancing possible. To be blunt, she’s got someone else to be angry with.
It occurs to him that this could turn out to be the pattern of their relationship, if they end up having one at all, an outcome that’s still by no means guaranteed. He doesn’t want to think about the alternatives. He’s betting everything on this, and he didn’t even get to set up the wager or predict the odds. He’s stuck in a parallel world with no TARDIS, no worldly goods and no visible means of support. If he loses Rose now, he’s in trouble.
But he’s determined not to lie to her. He’s deeply angry with his other self for doing that. It’s already hit him that things look very different from the human end of the telescope, and the first thing that goes is the certainty that you’re always right.
And maybe it helps that they’re both angry with the other Doctor. It gives them something in common - rather a negative something, but it’s a start until they get to know each other and something better comes along. It’s not as if the bloke’s suddenly going to show up on the beach again and argue, is it? They can be as angry as they like if it helps.
“If I could see him now,” Rose says, “I wouldn’t like to tell you what I’d do to him. Leaving Jack like that! And all that time I looked up to him. He must have known. Must have been able to feel something!”
“That was the problem,” he explains. “Jack’s a fixed point in time and the Doctor’s kind of allergic to him. Couldn’t bear to have him around, though it’s getting a bit easier now.” He admits, privately, that it’s a bit sneaky to be talking about The Doctor as if he’s a different person, but it’s not entirely dishonest. He already feels very different from the man he used to be. He must, because he’s thinking what a git he was a lot of the time.
“And I’ll never see Jack again,” Rose laments. “I can’t even say I’m sorry.”
“I think he forgave you a long time ago. We’ve talked about it, you know. Even I couldn’t wriggle out of that one.” He’s disconcerted to discover how emotional he’s feeling as he remembers that weird conversation in the radiation room. And that’s not all. He’s thinking about the Year That Never Was - a story Rose doesn’t even know yet - and the tower of strength Jack was to him. Realising he never even thanked him. He just took away his Vortex Manipulator as if Jack was a kid up to no good. He really doesn’t like himself very much right now.
He’s no stranger to guilt, but it’s usually the big things he feels he could have handled better. Maybe this attention to detail is a human thing. But it’s weird - he has a Time Lord’s brain so he can’t understand whey things look so different to him now. Which bit of the human consciousness does all this stuff come from?
“You know,” he adds, feeling a bit choked if he’s honest about it, “I’m going to miss Jack, too. We’ll never see him again. That hurts.”
“The Doctor took far too much away from us without asking if we minded,” Rose agreed. “When did we get to say our goodbyes? And how are you supposed to manage without a TARDIS? It freaked you out just thinking about it that time on Sanctuary Base, didn’t it?”
He’s uneasily silent about that. If he’s honest, the answer’s yes. Okay, she made it clear she loved him for himself and she offered to stand by him, but he was still scared stiff at the prospect of life without the TARDIS. In fact, he can’t imagine it. It’s all wrong - the script at this point says he should be happy because he’s got Rose instead. But his other self wouldn’t be happy in his place.
What a horrible mess, he thinks miserably.
*******
“Listen,” Donna orders, as he watches her from across the control room, marvelling at her skill with the controls. “What’s he supposed to do with himself over there? He’s got nothing. No TARDIS. No sonic screwdriver. No identity. No job…”
“It’s not that bad,” he protests. “He’s got Rose. She’s worth giving up everything for.”
“Still nice to be asked,” Donna says, crisply. “Anyway, if you really believed that you’d have given him everything else and kept her yourself.”
“She’s not a package to be handed over!”
“Rose, or the TARDIS?” she asks.
“The - oh, Rose, of course,” he blusters. He knows he’s lost the battle. Donna was an unstoppable force even before a quirk of fate downloaded all the best bits of himself into her brain. An awful thought suddenly occurs to him. Is he as impossible as this to argue with?
And, as if all that isn’t bad enough, the old girl’s flying like a dream. When they land, there’s hardly a bump. Donna reels off the co-ordinates, temporal and spatial. Yep, the three of them are still there on the beach. No hostile life forms, unless you count Jackie Tyler. She’d probably like a word with him, Donna reminds him. The mobile phone signal in this part of Norway’s crap.
She releases him from the force field and pushes him through the door. “You first,” she announces. He staggers out, blinking in the sunlight. Immediately, his eyes are drawn to Rose and he wonders how long she’s been standing there. He can see she’s been crying and it feels as if someone has grabbed one of his hearts and squeezed it until he can’t breathe. He can’t think what to say. Everything he’d planned out, all the sensible and obvious solutions he’d kept to himself, crumbles when he sees her and becomes aware of the hurt he’s inflicted on her.
She came back to him. At enormous personal risk. She helped save the universe. Not just one or two universes, but all of them. Yet he sent her away. And he knows from the fear clawing inside him that he had to do it. Had to, but that doesn’t make right.
“You came back,” she says, her voice hesitant and bewildered.
“Changed your mind, then?” his double asks. “So, the gaps weren’t quite closed after all?”
“I had help,” he manages to say. He still hasn’t touched Rose or moved a step towards her. He can’t imagine what might happen if he did.
Jackie marches over and greets him with a slap. “You are stinking of booze!” she says in disgust. “You’re a danger to everybody, driving that thing!”
“He’s not been doing the driving. I have.” Donna pops her head out with a smile. “And he’s stinking of booze because I threw a gin and tonic in his face.”
“You just left him here!” cries Jackie. “Poor young man. No arrangements - nothing!”
The Doctor in blue quirks an eyebrow at her. “Oh, I’m very well trained,” he assures her. “Had my shots, been wormed, everything. Put me in a basket in a warm corner and I’ll be no bother at all.”
For some reason, that makes Rose’s face crumple a little and she lays a comforting cheek on his shoulder. The first Doctor realises - in principle, at least - how unreasonable of him it is to mind that.
“So is that why you’re back?” Rose asks. “To make arrangements?”
“I forgot to offer you a lift home,” he says awkwardly, knowing she won’t believe him for a minute.
“Home?” she repeats. “Where’s that?”
WORDS: 3065
SPOILERS: Up to JE
CHARACTERS: (this chapter) Doctor (10), Doctor (10.5), Donna, Rose, Jackie
RATING: G
No infringement of the BBC's intellectual property is intended or implied.
"This is a time machine, duh-brain. And don’t you dare tell me I can’t drive it. You taught me.”
Jackie Tyler has a problem. Several problems, in fact, but the most pressing is that her daughter is sobbing her heart out and she really needs to phone Pete. They could easily end up on this flipping beach in the dark if she doesn’t organise something.
She’d like to strangle that self-centred bastard for leaving them here like this, and making it seem as if he was being noble. Somehow even when he’s behaving like one of those terribly decent chaps in an old movie, sacrificing his heart’s desire for the greater good, he still manages to come over as the star of the show with everyone else in walk-on roles. And somehow, Donna’s presence made it even worse. Like she’d already gone over to his side and the two of them were standing there handing down judgements like a couple of latter-day gods. What really makes Jackie’s blood boil, though, is that the Doctor knows Rose has had to go through this with him before - the whole thing about regenerating and having to accept him as the same man. It was hard enough for the poor girl when he looked completely different. To expect her to do it when basically he’s grown a double is beyond all reasonable expectations.
He can be as melodramatic as he likes, but he’s not seen what Rose went through after she lost him, and to get back to him. All that and then what does he do? He dumps her, and in the worst way possible - by appealing to exactly the qualities in her that he himself exploited years ago. Her compassion, her loyalty, her love. It’s all put Rose in an impossible position, and she’s not the only one.
Look at this poor young man - Jackie simply can’t get her head around the slight figure in the blue suit being over 900 years old. To her, he’s a newborn baby deprived of everything he needs to thrive. All he’s got left in the world are the clothes he stands up in, a brain that won’t match his body and that’ll make him the focus of all the wrong kinds of attention and the tenuous prospect of eventually being loved by a woman who’s breaking her heart over someone else right now.
And her. Jackie Tyler. Picking up pieces again. Patching together some kind of happy ending from the bones tossed to her by a departing Doctor.
Oh all right. That’s not entirely fair; he gave her Pete. But he seemed to have the idea that a bloke who looked, more or less, like the man she’d loved and lost would make everything all right. Fact was, he still wasn’t Pete. He was formed by different circumstances, different memories. He’d succeeded where her Pete hadn’t, and failed where he’d succeeded. She isn’t unhappy with him, but that’s because she’d made it work in a way, she suspects, Rose would never be able to do. Rose is like her dad - she thinks in absolutes. You can’t just fob her off. God knows, she’s tried.
Jackie looks over to the - oh for God’s sake, she doesn’t know what he is. Who did? He can’t be the Doctor, yet he has to be, if only for the reason that he can’t really be anyone else. She wonders if he’s as confused as the rest of them. Poor chap - he’d tried to give Rose a comforting hug as the TARDIS disappeared (not unreasonable, since she’d just returned his kiss with every appearance of enthusiasm), but she’s brushed him off and stood rooted to the spot, tears of rage starting to roll down her cheeks.
“Go on, run away, ruin your life and everybody else’s again, you stupid prat!” she’s yelled at the space where the TARDIS has been. “I wish I could stop caring about you!”
The new Doctor’s tried to approach her, but she doesn’t want him to touch her. Later, maybe, but not right now. Too many complicated angry feelings are boiling away inside her. It isn’t his fault, but Jackie knows her daughter and none of it surprises her.
She goes up to him. “Just give her some time,” she says. “It’s like when he regenerated before, that Christmas - it took her a while…”
“I know,” he interrupts. “I’m the same man.”
“But there’s two of you,” Jackie protests. “It’s a bit difficult for humans…”
“And I’m human now,” he adds.
“Then how can you be the same man?”
“I have all his memories. Isn’t that what makes me the same man?”
“That makes it worse, not better!” cries Rose. “Every time I look at you, I’ll remember him.”
“Rose, he…” His voice fades away. “We just have to try - we owe it to him, to the sacrifice he made…”
“Oh, shut up!” snaps Jackie. “He couldn’t get away fast enough. Stop making him out to be better than he is.”
“I don’t think he wanted to go so soon,” the Doctor points out. “But you heard what he said; the gaps between the realities were closing. If he’d hung around, the TARDIS might have been trapped here forever.”
“He’s full of good excuses, isn’t he?” Jackie sighs, bitterly. “And the trouble is, you never know when they are excuses, and when they happen to be true. I mean, he said it was impossible for anyone to get across before, but Rose managed it.”
“I didn’t do it on my own,” Rose argues. “And I didn’t just do it for him.”
The Doctor shoots her a puzzled look. “What was all that about an interdimensional cannon, then?” he asks.
Rose is looking uneasy, but at least she’s not crying any more. “There was some research going on and I admit I pulled a few strings to get in on it,” she confesses. “But I didn’t just go off on my own and do it. I’m not that irresponsible. The gaps were appearing anyway - all we did was try to exploit them.”
“Exploit them?” he demands, an edge of condemnation creeping into his voice. “Have you got any idea what you’re getting into?” Jackie begins to reassess her impression of his frailty. He still assumes authority over everyone else just like the other one did.
“Just because I’ve worked for Torchwood doesn’t mean I approve of everything they do,” Rose says, defensively. “They were still the best opportunity I had for getting-” She stops abruptly.
He pokes at the sand with the toe of his trainer. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t have the right to take the moral high ground any more, do I?”
It probably wasn’t deliberate, but it’s the best thing he could have said to get Rose batting for his team. Her cheeks flush angrily. “You don’t believe all that crap about being dangerous and violent, do you? That’s what got me more than anything. Just calling you the cost of saving creation and buggering off like that - how dare he?”
“Sometimes when we look in the mirror we see ourselves,” he replies; then, as if embarrassed by such a personal remark, he jokes, “Hard to see, the Dark Side is.”
It’s a curiously apt quotation, Jackie thinks. “I don’t know what gets into him sometimes,” she says, wearily. “All the times he’s saved this planet - and plenty of other ones - and he does nothing but wallow in guilt.”
“He has his reasons, Mum,” Rose says. “You didn’t hear what Davros did to him.”
“Me neither,” the Doctor reminds her. “Care to enlighten us?”
“Oh God.” Rose sits down on a rock and, after a moment’s hesitation, the Doctor settles awkwardly beside her. It doesn’t look exactly comfortable, but Jackie doesn’t like to think how long her daughter’s gone without sleeping by now. She wonders how Rose manages to do it.
“He told him, basically, he was a stinking hypocrite. That he loathed violence and never carried a weapon, but he turned his companions into weapons instead.”
Jackie sees the distress on her face and realised how it must have felt to hear the man you loved accused of that. “I hope you put him right!” she exclaims.
“Mum, I had to keep my mouth shut,” Rose says, looking very much older than her twenty-something years. “If Davros had got the slightest idea how much we mean - meant - to one another, he’d’ve had the perfect strategy against him.”
“Sounds like he managed pretty well without your help,” says the Doctor, his face grim.
“You know what the worst thing about all this is?” Rose bursts out. “If he’d left me to make up my own mind, I’d’ve probably ended up here with you anyway. But we never even got to talk.” Her voice trembles with suppressed emotion. “A couple of minutes in his arms, the chance to say hi, long time no see - that was it! And there was so much I wanted to ask him. About Jack, for a start. What the heck’s going on there? Jack’s supposed to be dead.”
The Doctor straightens up awkwardly - not just because his bum’s on a rock at an awkward angle, Jackie suspects, but because he’s trying to face up to something he finds very difficult. To his credit, he seems to succeed.
“I’m here,” he reminds her. “You can ask me. I’m not going anywhere.”
******
“We are so going back!” Donna insists.
This hasn’t gone awfully well, so far - has it?
“Back where?” he asks, playing for time really because, of course, he knows exactly where she means.
“Back to wherever you left her!” she retorts.
She won’t be able to get very far, he consoles himself. He’s done the memory wipe now - they’re back to the Donna who couldn’t change a plug. But, from sheer force of habit, he runs after her gabbling his protests and warnings.
“Donna, hang on a minute! This is an alternative universe we’re talking about. It’s not popping out for a pint of milk, y’know.”
It’s like throwing water at a duck’s back. Donna’s hands are whizzing over the controls and she’s gabbling just like him. “Just call up the Astral Map and the time-flight log, get a quick VB scan…ooh, there it is. And according to the multiversal schematic there’s a way through here…”
“Donna, stop it!” He runs across the room and grabs her arms. “Stop it, now! You’re human. Your mind can’t take that kind of thing!”
“Well, you’ll just have to snog it out of me, again, won’t you?” she teases him, wriggling from his grasp.
He makes a mental note never to kiss a woman for therapeutic reasons again. It’s far too imprecise. Apart from the fact that Donna’s not gone mad - if you can define wanting to pilot a TARDIS through into a different universe without any experience sane - he appears to have made things worse, rather than better. She’s remembering all the wrong things, and forgetting the events it’s hardest to explain.
“Don’t you want to know how your mother is?” he asks, clutching at straws. “After all, there was a Dalek invasion of the universe. It’s reasonable to be a bit concerned.”
“I’ll phone her sometime,” Donna said. “Look, the portal’s still stable and we can just go back into the journey record. Piece of cake!”
“Donna, you’re human…”
“So! I’m half the Doctor/Donna and I got the bit with the brains!”
“Oi!” he protests. “That doesn’t mean you can hi-jack my ship! And what about Wilf? He’s been under a lot of stress for his age. Least we can do is look him up, check him over…”
“Later. This is a time machine, duh-brain. And don’t you dare tell me I can’t drive it. You taught me.”
“Donna, you had a quick nip around the last half of the twentieth century. This is different. This requires precise navigation.”
“Oh yeah, and you’re the expert at that aren’t you?”
“I’ll override you!”
“Like to see you try,” she smirks. “The TARDIS likes me. We’re best mates. If she was a person I’d do lunch with her and have a good laugh about all your bad habits.”
He’s starting to feel very alone, and not in a good way.
“Look,” she’s saying. “The breach is open - and there’s a Time Lord on the other side. What more do you need? Why the heck did you leave them on a freezing beach miles from anywhere?”
“Erm…” he begins. “Dramatic effect?”
“That’s just plain rude!” she declares. “I suppose you gave them some excuse about the walls of reality closing again.”
“It’s not an excuse, Donna! It happens to be true…Donna, you have to stop this!”
“Right, that’s enough from you!” she says, and before he can speak again she’s thrown up a force field strong enough to immobilize him against one of the struts. He’s beyond astonished. Such power, such determination! A part of him can’t help admiring it, even when it’s used in his own ship against himself. A second part of him is wondering if he’s going to be able to handle this new Donna on his own.
“That’s better,” she declares. “And if that doesn’t work, there’s always handcuffs.”
*****
Okay, so it’s time for the Jack conversation. He was hoping it wouldn’t be just yet, but he can’t say he’s really surprised.
So he’s taken Rose through it as best he can. Funny thing is, it seems easier now. Strictly speaking, he’s the man who cocked that whole thing up and as culpable as he ever was, but there’s a certain amount of distancing possible. To be blunt, she’s got someone else to be angry with.
It occurs to him that this could turn out to be the pattern of their relationship, if they end up having one at all, an outcome that’s still by no means guaranteed. He doesn’t want to think about the alternatives. He’s betting everything on this, and he didn’t even get to set up the wager or predict the odds. He’s stuck in a parallel world with no TARDIS, no worldly goods and no visible means of support. If he loses Rose now, he’s in trouble.
But he’s determined not to lie to her. He’s deeply angry with his other self for doing that. It’s already hit him that things look very different from the human end of the telescope, and the first thing that goes is the certainty that you’re always right.
And maybe it helps that they’re both angry with the other Doctor. It gives them something in common - rather a negative something, but it’s a start until they get to know each other and something better comes along. It’s not as if the bloke’s suddenly going to show up on the beach again and argue, is it? They can be as angry as they like if it helps.
“If I could see him now,” Rose says, “I wouldn’t like to tell you what I’d do to him. Leaving Jack like that! And all that time I looked up to him. He must have known. Must have been able to feel something!”
“That was the problem,” he explains. “Jack’s a fixed point in time and the Doctor’s kind of allergic to him. Couldn’t bear to have him around, though it’s getting a bit easier now.” He admits, privately, that it’s a bit sneaky to be talking about The Doctor as if he’s a different person, but it’s not entirely dishonest. He already feels very different from the man he used to be. He must, because he’s thinking what a git he was a lot of the time.
“And I’ll never see Jack again,” Rose laments. “I can’t even say I’m sorry.”
“I think he forgave you a long time ago. We’ve talked about it, you know. Even I couldn’t wriggle out of that one.” He’s disconcerted to discover how emotional he’s feeling as he remembers that weird conversation in the radiation room. And that’s not all. He’s thinking about the Year That Never Was - a story Rose doesn’t even know yet - and the tower of strength Jack was to him. Realising he never even thanked him. He just took away his Vortex Manipulator as if Jack was a kid up to no good. He really doesn’t like himself very much right now.
He’s no stranger to guilt, but it’s usually the big things he feels he could have handled better. Maybe this attention to detail is a human thing. But it’s weird - he has a Time Lord’s brain so he can’t understand whey things look so different to him now. Which bit of the human consciousness does all this stuff come from?
“You know,” he adds, feeling a bit choked if he’s honest about it, “I’m going to miss Jack, too. We’ll never see him again. That hurts.”
“The Doctor took far too much away from us without asking if we minded,” Rose agreed. “When did we get to say our goodbyes? And how are you supposed to manage without a TARDIS? It freaked you out just thinking about it that time on Sanctuary Base, didn’t it?”
He’s uneasily silent about that. If he’s honest, the answer’s yes. Okay, she made it clear she loved him for himself and she offered to stand by him, but he was still scared stiff at the prospect of life without the TARDIS. In fact, he can’t imagine it. It’s all wrong - the script at this point says he should be happy because he’s got Rose instead. But his other self wouldn’t be happy in his place.
What a horrible mess, he thinks miserably.
*******
“Listen,” Donna orders, as he watches her from across the control room, marvelling at her skill with the controls. “What’s he supposed to do with himself over there? He’s got nothing. No TARDIS. No sonic screwdriver. No identity. No job…”
“It’s not that bad,” he protests. “He’s got Rose. She’s worth giving up everything for.”
“Still nice to be asked,” Donna says, crisply. “Anyway, if you really believed that you’d have given him everything else and kept her yourself.”
“She’s not a package to be handed over!”
“Rose, or the TARDIS?” she asks.
“The - oh, Rose, of course,” he blusters. He knows he’s lost the battle. Donna was an unstoppable force even before a quirk of fate downloaded all the best bits of himself into her brain. An awful thought suddenly occurs to him. Is he as impossible as this to argue with?
And, as if all that isn’t bad enough, the old girl’s flying like a dream. When they land, there’s hardly a bump. Donna reels off the co-ordinates, temporal and spatial. Yep, the three of them are still there on the beach. No hostile life forms, unless you count Jackie Tyler. She’d probably like a word with him, Donna reminds him. The mobile phone signal in this part of Norway’s crap.
She releases him from the force field and pushes him through the door. “You first,” she announces. He staggers out, blinking in the sunlight. Immediately, his eyes are drawn to Rose and he wonders how long she’s been standing there. He can see she’s been crying and it feels as if someone has grabbed one of his hearts and squeezed it until he can’t breathe. He can’t think what to say. Everything he’d planned out, all the sensible and obvious solutions he’d kept to himself, crumbles when he sees her and becomes aware of the hurt he’s inflicted on her.
She came back to him. At enormous personal risk. She helped save the universe. Not just one or two universes, but all of them. Yet he sent her away. And he knows from the fear clawing inside him that he had to do it. Had to, but that doesn’t make right.
“You came back,” she says, her voice hesitant and bewildered.
“Changed your mind, then?” his double asks. “So, the gaps weren’t quite closed after all?”
“I had help,” he manages to say. He still hasn’t touched Rose or moved a step towards her. He can’t imagine what might happen if he did.
Jackie marches over and greets him with a slap. “You are stinking of booze!” she says in disgust. “You’re a danger to everybody, driving that thing!”
“He’s not been doing the driving. I have.” Donna pops her head out with a smile. “And he’s stinking of booze because I threw a gin and tonic in his face.”
“You just left him here!” cries Jackie. “Poor young man. No arrangements - nothing!”
The Doctor in blue quirks an eyebrow at her. “Oh, I’m very well trained,” he assures her. “Had my shots, been wormed, everything. Put me in a basket in a warm corner and I’ll be no bother at all.”
For some reason, that makes Rose’s face crumple a little and she lays a comforting cheek on his shoulder. The first Doctor realises - in principle, at least - how unreasonable of him it is to mind that.
“So is that why you’re back?” Rose asks. “To make arrangements?”
“I forgot to offer you a lift home,” he says awkwardly, knowing she won’t believe him for a minute.
“Home?” she repeats. “Where’s that?”