Fic: Girl From Nowhere (Doctor Who/Torchwood - Rose, Gwen)
Title: Girl From Nowhere
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)/Torchwood (sort of)
Characters/Pairings: Rose, Gwen/Rhys
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For the Rose ficathon for cryptile who wanted an older, wiser post-Doomsday Rose, her own attempt at a sonic screwdriver and the Cult of Skaro.
Summary: Gwen learns about stories and how they end.
By the fourth day Gwen had worked through worried, panicked, frantic and was well on her way to Total Nervous Breakdown With Lots of Screaming and Throwing Things. She’d talked to every one of Rhys’s friends. She’d harassed the police (“you were attacked by a what? Oh, yes, and I suppose your boyfriend flew away in its spaceship? Listen, love, some of us have got actual crimes to be dealing with”), rung every hospital in the phone book and spent hours driving around the streets looking at faces. She was giving real thought to calling all the Joneses she knew on the off chance that one of them might be the President’s second cousin, because when you’d done all the sensible things you had to start looking at the silly ones. She hadn’t, in any of this, found time to sleep or eat. She had a vague feeling she ought to have a bit of a cry at some point but that had been shoved down the to-do list.
Somewhere in the pessimistic place at the back of her mind she knew he was dead. The rest of her was running around doing all these useless things to find him, but deep down she was getting ready for the knock on the door, the policeman saying he was so sorry...
Or a plain-clothes policewoman, of course, although she didn’t consider that until she opened the door. Sexist of her. Gwen had applied to the police once herself, but you’d needed a year’s military service in those days. How times changed: the girl at the door was pretty, not that tall, probably only about twenty-five, a bit familiar-looking. You couldn’t picture her charging off to blow people up on the Canadian front.
“Gwen Cooper?”
“That’s me.” She smiled; bravely, she hoped. “I think I know what you’re going to say.”
“Bet you don’t,” the woman muttered, and that was when Rhys swung into view. Unsteady on his feet, grinning foolishly at her -
“The skin wasn’t so bad, it was the extra arms were the problem,” he announced.
- and talking bollocks. “Oh, Rhys,” she said, wrapping her arms around him, and it was only the policewoman or paramedic or whoever she was stepping in to help that saved her from being squashed when he collapsed.
“Can we get him into the bedroom?”
“Through here,” Gwen said, manoeuvring under her boyfriend’s arm. “Excuse the mess, I thought this one here’d been abducted by aliens. Haven’t had a lot of time to tidy up.”
Between them they got Rhys through the living room and onto the bed, where he burrowed into the pillows, mumbling happily to himself.
“Thank you,” Gwen said. “Thank you for bringing him back.”
“That’s okay. He’s been great, my friend Mickey likes him a lot. Um,” she said, “you know what you said about how he was abducted by aliens? I think we’d better have a chat about that.”
**
Her name was Rose, it turned out. No last name, but the first was enough for Gwen to work out where she knew her from. Pete Tyler’s stepdaughter, the one who’d turned up with the missing-presumed-Cybernised Jackie Tyler a couple of years ago. It was a shame Rhys was conked out; he knew much more of this gossip-mag stuff than she did.
Gwen remembered this much: she’d come from nowhere. Just turned up in the edge of the frame in the paparazzi pictures of the Tylers, unnoticed for ages till the press caught on she was living at their house. Live-in home help? Long-lost love child? Nobody knew, and Rose herself didn’t give interviews, kept herself out of the light.
She was doing that now, hovering by the window, looking out over the bay. “Have you been to Cardiff before?” Gwen asked, for want of something else to say; her euphoria at Rhys being delivered safe and alive was fading into ordinary happiness, and that was enough to let an unsettled feeling creep in at the corners. It was just unreal, this, as if she’d finally fallen asleep and made a lovely dream for herself with semi-celebrity guests and happy endings for everyone.
“I was here a while ago,” Rose said. “With a couple of friends.” She went quiet for a second, then turned, smiled. “Now we’re down here all the time with the rift and everything. My… Pete says we should just set up a branch down here, save us the petrol money.”
“Rift?” Gwen said, and then she sat and listened to a story that had to, had to be nonsense or a dream. It was about monsters and cracks in the world - in the worlds, because there was more than one - and clockwork men and trees that walked and spaceships over London. “Always bloody London, isn’t it?” Gwen said. Rose smiled at that.
“Why are you telling me all this?” Gwen asked, when Rose had run out of story and turned quiet.
“Don’t know, really. Because I knew a girl who looked just like you. Hundred years ago and in another universe, but she died saving the world and you’ve got nearly the same name. Because the aliens never took any notice of this world till I showed up and the Cult of bloody Skaro started poking holes in the universe trying to get to me.”
“I’m sure it’s not your fault,” Gwen said automatically.
“It is, though.”
The certainty in that rattled her. “Well. All right. But even so.”
“And I’m telling you,” Rose said, “because you saw what happened to Rhys.” A small, sympathetic smile, as if to say that they’d all seen nasty things, that this couldn’t be helped.
The thing, the alien, had had wings: she’d thought it was a huge bird, an albatross or something, till it got closer, and then it was too late to run.
“It screamed at him,” she said. “It opened its mouth - opened it all the way like its head was folding into nothing - and it screamed at Rhys. At me, really, but he pushed me down out of the way.”
“He saved your life.” Rose moved the phone books and street maps off the sofa and sat beside her. “This type of alien sort of locks on to one person’s DNA, right? So if you’d got the full blast it would’ve killed you, but with Rhys it just…”
“Carried him off to its nest?”
“Actually, it just sent him a bit strange. The alien flew away, we caught it later that night. And Rhys was easy to pick up, we just monitored the police radio.”
Gwen rubbed her eyes. “Just a wild stab in the dark,” she said, “but was he stark bollock naked and singing a dirty rugby song? In Welsh? On top of the Empire Stadium, oh, that’d be just like him.”
“Might have been,” she said cheerfully. “I wasn’t there, but Mickey showed me the pictures.”
“I knew I should have looked there first,” she said - tried to say, the last word tailing into a yawn. The tiredness she’d been putting off for days was creeping up on her now and she wanted to crawl into bed with Rhys and stay there until the Martians landed.
“I’ll go,” Rose said. “Pete’ll be nagging me for taking too long anyway. Says I get that from my mum.”
Gwen rested her head against the back of the sofa and looked at her, sleepily wondering how many of her stories could possibly be true. “This is your job, is it? This is what you do every day.”
“What else would I do? Work in a shop?” She smiled. “Gwen, there’s something I need you to do for me.”
“Name it. So long as it doesn’t involve hunting aliens.”
“Nothing like that.” And all of a sudden she sounded a little bit sad. “Just look at this for me.”
She looked. It was a silver rod, about six inches long, like a doctor’s instrument. “You going to look at my eyes?”
“Ears. It all works on sound waves.” But Gwen had to really focus to hear her now, as if she was speaking from inside a wind tunnel. “The lab can knock this up in a week, but ask them to make one that’s a screwdriver as well and they just look at you… that’s it, just close your eyes and listen to my voice. Rhys has been away for a couple of days, he’s been sick, but he’s home now. He’s back with you.”
**
Gwen woke up with the sun streaming in the windows and a pain in her neck that made moving a hateful prospect. She moved anyway, shuffling into the bedroom and finding a space around Rhys’ starfish sprawl.
“And where’ve you been?” he mumbled against her hair.
“Fell asleep on the sofa. I can’t even remember what I was watching.” There was a sudden twist in her gut, a need to make sure he was all right, and she sat straight up in the bed. Rhys blinked up at her. Then she fell back, laughing at herself: he’d only had his appendix out, for god’s sake. It wasn’t as if he’d been in the wars. “That nurse on your ward was a right dragon,” she murmured.
“A champion with the sponge-baths, though… ow!”
“Sorry! Sorry. Did I get your scar?”
He pulled up his t-shirt - falling asleep in his clothes? That wasn’t like Rhys, but probably the anaesthetic would take a while to wear off - and they both examined his stomach.
“I know modern medicine’s amazing and everything,” Gwen said, “but that scar looks years old.”
“It is.” He sounded troubled. “I got my appendix out when I was nine…”
**
“Dad? It’s me. We’re finished in Cardiff.” The black Torchwood jeep pulled up at the kerb. Rose climbed in the passenger side, flashing Mickey a smile. “No, it was fine. She won’t remember anything.” No rift, no aliens; just a boyfriend and a normal life. Some stories had a happy ending. And if you didn’t exactly choose yours; well. That was just life.
“Back to London?” Mickey said.
“Yeah,” she said, turning the radio on and up. “Let’s go.”
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)/Torchwood (sort of)
Characters/Pairings: Rose, Gwen/Rhys
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For the Rose ficathon for cryptile who wanted an older, wiser post-Doomsday Rose, her own attempt at a sonic screwdriver and the Cult of Skaro.
Summary: Gwen learns about stories and how they end.
By the fourth day Gwen had worked through worried, panicked, frantic and was well on her way to Total Nervous Breakdown With Lots of Screaming and Throwing Things. She’d talked to every one of Rhys’s friends. She’d harassed the police (“you were attacked by a what? Oh, yes, and I suppose your boyfriend flew away in its spaceship? Listen, love, some of us have got actual crimes to be dealing with”), rung every hospital in the phone book and spent hours driving around the streets looking at faces. She was giving real thought to calling all the Joneses she knew on the off chance that one of them might be the President’s second cousin, because when you’d done all the sensible things you had to start looking at the silly ones. She hadn’t, in any of this, found time to sleep or eat. She had a vague feeling she ought to have a bit of a cry at some point but that had been shoved down the to-do list.
Somewhere in the pessimistic place at the back of her mind she knew he was dead. The rest of her was running around doing all these useless things to find him, but deep down she was getting ready for the knock on the door, the policeman saying he was so sorry...
Or a plain-clothes policewoman, of course, although she didn’t consider that until she opened the door. Sexist of her. Gwen had applied to the police once herself, but you’d needed a year’s military service in those days. How times changed: the girl at the door was pretty, not that tall, probably only about twenty-five, a bit familiar-looking. You couldn’t picture her charging off to blow people up on the Canadian front.
“Gwen Cooper?”
“That’s me.” She smiled; bravely, she hoped. “I think I know what you’re going to say.”
“Bet you don’t,” the woman muttered, and that was when Rhys swung into view. Unsteady on his feet, grinning foolishly at her -
“The skin wasn’t so bad, it was the extra arms were the problem,” he announced.
- and talking bollocks. “Oh, Rhys,” she said, wrapping her arms around him, and it was only the policewoman or paramedic or whoever she was stepping in to help that saved her from being squashed when he collapsed.
“Can we get him into the bedroom?”
“Through here,” Gwen said, manoeuvring under her boyfriend’s arm. “Excuse the mess, I thought this one here’d been abducted by aliens. Haven’t had a lot of time to tidy up.”
Between them they got Rhys through the living room and onto the bed, where he burrowed into the pillows, mumbling happily to himself.
“Thank you,” Gwen said. “Thank you for bringing him back.”
“That’s okay. He’s been great, my friend Mickey likes him a lot. Um,” she said, “you know what you said about how he was abducted by aliens? I think we’d better have a chat about that.”
**
Her name was Rose, it turned out. No last name, but the first was enough for Gwen to work out where she knew her from. Pete Tyler’s stepdaughter, the one who’d turned up with the missing-presumed-Cybernised Jackie Tyler a couple of years ago. It was a shame Rhys was conked out; he knew much more of this gossip-mag stuff than she did.
Gwen remembered this much: she’d come from nowhere. Just turned up in the edge of the frame in the paparazzi pictures of the Tylers, unnoticed for ages till the press caught on she was living at their house. Live-in home help? Long-lost love child? Nobody knew, and Rose herself didn’t give interviews, kept herself out of the light.
She was doing that now, hovering by the window, looking out over the bay. “Have you been to Cardiff before?” Gwen asked, for want of something else to say; her euphoria at Rhys being delivered safe and alive was fading into ordinary happiness, and that was enough to let an unsettled feeling creep in at the corners. It was just unreal, this, as if she’d finally fallen asleep and made a lovely dream for herself with semi-celebrity guests and happy endings for everyone.
“I was here a while ago,” Rose said. “With a couple of friends.” She went quiet for a second, then turned, smiled. “Now we’re down here all the time with the rift and everything. My… Pete says we should just set up a branch down here, save us the petrol money.”
“Rift?” Gwen said, and then she sat and listened to a story that had to, had to be nonsense or a dream. It was about monsters and cracks in the world - in the worlds, because there was more than one - and clockwork men and trees that walked and spaceships over London. “Always bloody London, isn’t it?” Gwen said. Rose smiled at that.
“Why are you telling me all this?” Gwen asked, when Rose had run out of story and turned quiet.
“Don’t know, really. Because I knew a girl who looked just like you. Hundred years ago and in another universe, but she died saving the world and you’ve got nearly the same name. Because the aliens never took any notice of this world till I showed up and the Cult of bloody Skaro started poking holes in the universe trying to get to me.”
“I’m sure it’s not your fault,” Gwen said automatically.
“It is, though.”
The certainty in that rattled her. “Well. All right. But even so.”
“And I’m telling you,” Rose said, “because you saw what happened to Rhys.” A small, sympathetic smile, as if to say that they’d all seen nasty things, that this couldn’t be helped.
The thing, the alien, had had wings: she’d thought it was a huge bird, an albatross or something, till it got closer, and then it was too late to run.
“It screamed at him,” she said. “It opened its mouth - opened it all the way like its head was folding into nothing - and it screamed at Rhys. At me, really, but he pushed me down out of the way.”
“He saved your life.” Rose moved the phone books and street maps off the sofa and sat beside her. “This type of alien sort of locks on to one person’s DNA, right? So if you’d got the full blast it would’ve killed you, but with Rhys it just…”
“Carried him off to its nest?”
“Actually, it just sent him a bit strange. The alien flew away, we caught it later that night. And Rhys was easy to pick up, we just monitored the police radio.”
Gwen rubbed her eyes. “Just a wild stab in the dark,” she said, “but was he stark bollock naked and singing a dirty rugby song? In Welsh? On top of the Empire Stadium, oh, that’d be just like him.”
“Might have been,” she said cheerfully. “I wasn’t there, but Mickey showed me the pictures.”
“I knew I should have looked there first,” she said - tried to say, the last word tailing into a yawn. The tiredness she’d been putting off for days was creeping up on her now and she wanted to crawl into bed with Rhys and stay there until the Martians landed.
“I’ll go,” Rose said. “Pete’ll be nagging me for taking too long anyway. Says I get that from my mum.”
Gwen rested her head against the back of the sofa and looked at her, sleepily wondering how many of her stories could possibly be true. “This is your job, is it? This is what you do every day.”
“What else would I do? Work in a shop?” She smiled. “Gwen, there’s something I need you to do for me.”
“Name it. So long as it doesn’t involve hunting aliens.”
“Nothing like that.” And all of a sudden she sounded a little bit sad. “Just look at this for me.”
She looked. It was a silver rod, about six inches long, like a doctor’s instrument. “You going to look at my eyes?”
“Ears. It all works on sound waves.” But Gwen had to really focus to hear her now, as if she was speaking from inside a wind tunnel. “The lab can knock this up in a week, but ask them to make one that’s a screwdriver as well and they just look at you… that’s it, just close your eyes and listen to my voice. Rhys has been away for a couple of days, he’s been sick, but he’s home now. He’s back with you.”
**
Gwen woke up with the sun streaming in the windows and a pain in her neck that made moving a hateful prospect. She moved anyway, shuffling into the bedroom and finding a space around Rhys’ starfish sprawl.
“And where’ve you been?” he mumbled against her hair.
“Fell asleep on the sofa. I can’t even remember what I was watching.” There was a sudden twist in her gut, a need to make sure he was all right, and she sat straight up in the bed. Rhys blinked up at her. Then she fell back, laughing at herself: he’d only had his appendix out, for god’s sake. It wasn’t as if he’d been in the wars. “That nurse on your ward was a right dragon,” she murmured.
“A champion with the sponge-baths, though… ow!”
“Sorry! Sorry. Did I get your scar?”
He pulled up his t-shirt - falling asleep in his clothes? That wasn’t like Rhys, but probably the anaesthetic would take a while to wear off - and they both examined his stomach.
“I know modern medicine’s amazing and everything,” Gwen said, “but that scar looks years old.”
“It is.” He sounded troubled. “I got my appendix out when I was nine…”
**
“Dad? It’s me. We’re finished in Cardiff.” The black Torchwood jeep pulled up at the kerb. Rose climbed in the passenger side, flashing Mickey a smile. “No, it was fine. She won’t remember anything.” No rift, no aliens; just a boyfriend and a normal life. Some stories had a happy ending. And if you didn’t exactly choose yours; well. That was just life.
“Back to London?” Mickey said.
“Yeah,” she said, turning the radio on and up. “Let’s go.”