Write Your Letters (In the Sand) -- A Doctor Who Fanfic
The phone had been useless since she had first arrived in Pete’s World. Jackie and Pete had suggested to her many times that she should get rid of it - it wasn’t as though Virgin Mobile had any reception towers in her new dimension, and even if it did, who would she call? They never said that last part, but they didn’t have to do. Everyone she loved in Pete’s World lived under her roof. But the phone was one of only two things aside from her clothes that she had with her when she fell away from -- into another world. It was always easier for her if she thought of herself as falling into something good as opposed to being torn away from something even better. She had her shirt, trousers, shoes, TARDIS key and her phone. And she clung to those few things like a life line.
The battery life lasted her months, both because of the Doctor’s top-up and also because she only turned it on to quickly glance at the pictures. Whenever she worried that her mental pictures of Keisha’s smile or Shireen’s crazy club hair or the exact shade of the Doctor’s large, brown eyes were starting to fade from her memory, she would open up her phone and look at physical images of them. As the months went on, it bothered her that she *was* beginning to lose those tiny details - no matter how hard she strained to hold on to them, the little quirks faded away. And the more she recited to herself the exactness of each image - the overbearing, insignificant details - the more they felt like facts she had memorised and less like people she had really known.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Eventually, the battery died and she only had her flawed, ever fading memories. They weren’t perfect, but she figured the important stuff she was unlikely to truly forget. And that would have to be enough. Regardless, she carried around the phone when she went out of town. When she was in London, it stayed in the office in her desk drawer. It was something she fiddled with when she was thinking, mindlessly sliding it open and shut as her mind wandered, as though the sound could centre her somehow. When she went in the field, the phone went with her, safely ensconced in her back trouser pocket; its use was unexpected, but its weight was familiar. Mickey and Jake often joked about its presence and termed it her security blanket (they knew any jokes about the also omnipresent TARDIS key were out of bounds); they weren’t wrong. When she had been traveling through space and time, Jackie had been a tether to her human life. Now that she was stuck living the normal life, day after day, the phone was her link to time. And to the alien who had given it to her.
Still, no one was more surprised than Rose when the phone gained power and the start-up tone started ringing. Mickey, Jake, Toshiko and Rose had been taking energy readings in Cardiff on some of Tosh’s equipment. Over the previous three months, there had been an increase in rift activity and a growing number of rifts that were both inexplicable and worrisome. The fact that Tosh - Torchwood’s resident science genius - was the most worried of anyone Rose knew didn’t help soothe her own troubles. Whatever was going wrong, it was BAD (with an extra suitcase full of bad, as the Doctor would have added.) And then in the weeks following, some objects - mainly penguins, and really, who took penguins, Rose wondered - started disappearing, and other non-native objects started APPEARING. England suddenly had a much larger bee population than it had ever had before, and less of a sheep population. But despite all the data and all the readings, Rose was cognisant of none of it at that moment. All she knew was that her phone was working. She was investigating a rift and HER PHONE.WAS.WORKING.
Rose took her phone out of her pocket and stared at the tiny screen. She could faintly hear Tosh and Mickey and Jake discussing (probably quite loudly) the possible reasons for the aberration. The most logical explanation, some distant part of Rose’s mind heard Tosh explain, was that the rift energy must be connected to the original universe of the item in question and the current caused the phone to charge, giving it the power to start up. Rose found herself less concerned with the whys and more concerned with its potential to make phone calls.
She didn’t waste another minute. She turned to her contacts and found TARDIS filed away on speed dial #2 (her mum had always been #1 when she was traveling. Rose made a mental note to change that if the phone stayed charged.) Before she could talk herself out of it, she pressed the button. She forced herself to breathe as she waited through the ring. She knew she needed to brace herself for the undeniable fact that the Doctor may not answer. He was, after all, fairly busy with saving planets and the universe on a fairly constant basis. If he didn’t answer, she decided she’d take a chance and leave him a voicemail. And then she would just keep finding rifts and leaving him messages until one day he got the message and answered the damn phone. Because he at least owed her a conversation, and she wouldn’t mind hearing the end of that sentence he had started two years previous either. And damn it, she wanted to hear his voice. She realised at that moment that she had forgotten certain things about it, and she hated herself for it. She had promised herself she would never forget one timbre of it and she HAD and how could she have done that? She was horrible and ungrateful and what kind of friend was she to claim she loved him as she did and then forget such a huge part of him? How could she -
“Hello?” came a questioning voice at the other end. The pitch went up at the end of the word, the Doctor’s usual sound of confusion. Rose forgot how to breathe. For all her stressing over wanting him to answer the phone, she knew in that second that she had never honestly expected that he would do so. “Hello? Who are you and how did you get this number?”
“Doctor.”
She could barely work the name out. It felt like her lungs were compressing and her throat was shoving the air back down into her lungs, and how could she talk, laugh and cry deliriously all at one time? She needed to do all three and she couldn’t do any of them. There were so many things she wanted to say - “Finish that sentence,” “I really do love you,” “Please tell me you’re not alone,” “Don’t put jam on the TARDIS helmic regulator. The old girl hates it when you do that.” And she couldn’t say any of them. Even saying his name felt like it had been a feat.
“Rose.”
He didn’t say her name as much as breathe it. And it didn’t sound like her name so much as it did a prayer, a benediction.
“How are you doing this? It’s impossible.”
“You know what they say, Doctor. Six impossible things before breakfast. Impossible things just haven’t been tried yet; I wasn’t sure this would work until you answered the phone. And even I’m not sure how long I can keep this connection.”
“Six impossible…” the Doctor let his sentence trail. “Rose Tyler. You don’t know the meaning of impossible, do you?” Rose knew that tone in his voice very well, and could practically see that large school-boy smile of his stretching across his face in pride at her achievements.
Rose heard the phone beep, and her heart stopped and then plummeted. Less than a minute and she was already running out of time. The universe was a bitch, and Rose wanted to slap her.
“My phone is dying, which means the energy is running out. Doctor, we need your help. There are too many rifts and things are going missing. They’re probably missing from your world too -“
“Rose, are you there? You’re breaking up. Rose! Rose!”
She heard the Doctor’s continued manic shouts from his end of the line and realised that the connection had already passed the point of him hearing her words. A tear started to roll down her cheek against her bidding. The most important part of the message and he couldn’t even hear her.
In a last ditch effort, she decided to use something other than words. She wasn’t sure he would be able to hear this particular message either, but it wouldn’t be anything lost to her if he didn’t. She had to at least try. So she began to quickly tap out Torchwood-taught Morse code on the pad of her phone, hoping the Doctor would eventually work out the tonalities of the message. She kept typing it out in short and long dashes until the shut-down tone began and her last contact with her original universe was once again gone.
Tosh, Mickey and Jake stared at her, giving her appraising glances as though they thought she might need to physically lean on them at any moment. Rose instead merely took a deep breath and then put her business face back on.
“Tosh, you said these rifts have energy from their original universe and that’s how we’re getting debris from these worlds and losing other things to them, right?”
“Well, it’s a rudimentary theory. I haven’t tested the hypothesis at all, but I believe the logic is at least sound. Why?”
“Well, the Doctor said when I got stuck here that the walls were sealed between dimensions. And I’ve avoided looking for a way back because I saw what messing with those walls can do. But if the walls are falling on their own and things are moving between my old world and this one, then maybe we can navigate them.”
“I don’t know, babe. That sounds risky.” Mickey moved closer to her, as though he could protect her from her goals if he was physically close enough.
“I’m not planning on jumping through one right now, Micks,” she promised. “But we need to start researching. If things keep falling through to here and disappearing from home base at the rate that they have done, then we may need the Doctor’s help. It’s best that we have some way of searching for him if it comes to that.”
Toshiko nodded, and Mickey shook his head slightly but said nothing more.
“I’ll start looking into it. There may be some technology from that Slitheen invasion six years ago that we can salvage from the locked labs.”
Rose looked down at her phone. It was strange how something so small could give her such hope. She had heard the Doctor’s voice again when he had said it was impossible. Rose decided then that she didn’t care how “impossible” it was; she would hear the Doctor’s voice again, and next time she did, he was going to finish that damn sentence.
<0>
Sadly, the message Rose had typed in Morse code took longer to get through the Void before it reached the TARDIS. When the Paradox Machine received the message during The Year that Never Was, it didn’t know what to make of the translation. When the Doctor reset time, the message was deleted from the data banks and the Doctor never saw it. If he had, he would have known how dire the situation was in Pete’s World, and how troubled things would soon become for him.
For the message carried only two words.
BAD. WOLF.