Part 04 - Everything Changes - Chapter 02 - Separation & Remembrance
I can’t believe I am going to die like this, pointlessly in a horrific version of a game show gone wrong. I can’t believe that the Doctor won’t find me. So many times we have come so close to losing each other. All I can think is that I have to find the Doctor, that he will wake me from this nightmare.
Then suddenly he is there and all I can think of is how he will die if I can’t make him realize how much a danger he is in from the android killing machine running this game. I am running for him, knowing his life depends on his understanding and disabling the robot. Then he’s gone and all I know is darkness.
I wake to a cold floor, unsure what has happened or how I got here, only knowing that once again I am waking someplace far away from something very important to me. As I see the Dalek roll toward me I know that, however I got here, things have just gotten worse in a million different ways and the memories of Utah and Van Staten’s house of horrors floods into my mind. Following hard on the heels of those thoughts are the images of the gutted expression on the face of my gentle Doctor and him facing me with that huge gun in his hands, knowing that these are the creatures that created that level of grief in the man I love more than everything.
I stand in shock as I watch not one but hundreds, maybe thousands, of these monsters rolling and flying around me, and terror wells up within me, a terror mixed with confusion as to why they haven’t killed me. Not that I am ungrateful, but considering how heartless the Dalek we had met in Utah was I have to wonder why. Even as the thought occurs to me an odd looking young woman appears almost directly in front of me babbling about the Doctor and how she has brought their destruction. Before I can even begin to ask her about him I hear the sound I had been dreading since I awoke and watch as yet another is added to the death toll these creatures have amassed. I stand stunned, as I know exactly why it is they have kept me alive and I cringe knowing that I am to be used either as bait or a bargaining tool and steel myself to do what I must to keep my precious Doctor safe, even if it means my own death. Before I can consider this turn of events I see him appear on a viewer and my heart races in relief at seeing him in spite of what I expect to be the outcome of this conversation.
I feel both thrilled and crushed when he says no to their demand that he submit to their desire to stand aside and let them do what they like with the Earth. I know he can’t put me before all of the Earth but I also know that his refusal is my death sentence. I should be happy that I can’t be used against him that way but after him choosing to share with me his name which he said he has given no other in centuries, after what happened on the shopping planet and everything we have been through, there is a part of me that hoped that he would at least fight for my survival a bit instead of so quickly answering in such a cold, heartless, sounding tone as he reiterated my death sentence.
What? My heart fills almost to bursting as I listen to him outline a plan for my rescue and their destruction. I don’t know how, don’t know what he will do to accomplish his words, but I do know that if anyone can it will be him. He is my Doctor, and if he says he can do it he will and my heart soars even in the face of the hoards of Daleks surrounding me.
********************************
I stand in shocked disbelief; he is sending me back to my mum’s, after everything we have been through, he is sending me back. How dare he make this decision for me? How could he send me away? The thought rages around and around in my head as his image appears telling me some canned message about how if I am seeing this message he is either dying or dead. I still can’t believe he has lied to me, how could he really be dying and think I would want to be anywhere than at his side? He's pushed me away when he needs me most, how could he do this? He promised he would never send away, that he wouldn't make me leave. I almost jump when the words of the hologram echo my current thoughts.
"Rose, I’m sure you’re very mad at me right now, thinking I lied to you, but if you are seeing this, it truly is the only way I could think of to ensure that you lived.” He is my life, how can he think sending me away would be something I want? How does he expect me to live without him? “You have become more important to me than my own life, you’re the reason I was able to get up each morning able to face another day and this is the only gift I can give you now.” Do you really think I would want that with out you? “I know I don't really have the right to ask anything more from you,” No you don’t you stupid Time Lord git! “You have given me so much already by just being part of my life, but please know how much I loved you Rose.” How dare you finally tell me you love me now when I can’t tell you how much I love you back! “All I ask is that you do this one last thing for me. Have a fantastic life; it’s all I ever wanted for you.” How can you not understand you are my fantastic life?
His next words though surprise me almost as much his last. “Verity, I am truly sorry. I have tried, I really have. I am sorry to have deceived you as well but I know if you had known I was recording this message you would have figured out by now a way to get back to me in spite of me wanting you safely away from whatever danger that has or will shortly kill me. Please don’t try to return. I have locked the coordinates so you can’t come back to the time and place from which I have just sent you. After all this time we have been together I hope you know how much you meant to me. If there were any other way I would never have made you go. I know you know better than anyone how dangerous you would be in the wrong hands. Because of this, on this control card is the means to execute a permanent shutdown, which will ensure that no one will be able to take advantage of your technology and will ensure also that, once executed, there will be nothing left of use to anyone. I hope that you will never have to… never want to use this program but I couldn’t make you leave and not give you the means to escape that I had myself once taken. Please take care of yourself and Rose and I hope you both can eventually forgive me.”
I can’t help the sob that breaks from my throat as the full import of the Doctor’s words sink in. As they do, I realize that he has just handed Verity a means and permission to commit suicide. I don't know what disturbs me more, that he has offered Verity that course of action or that he has at one other time attempted to end his life. I have known since that first trip he has suffered greatly because of the war, so the news doesn’t particularly surprise me, it just hurts my heart, as it drives home again exactly how bad things had gotten before we met and just how much he needs me with him now.
As it sinks in even more what has occurred, my legs suddenly don’t want to support me and I crumple into the console and slide to the floor, heedless of the metal grid of which it is made. I reach out a hand to Verity’s central control column, knowing instinctively that she will understand my devastation, and I sense a grief deeper than I have ever felt before from the TARDIS. For long minutes I sit there caressing the coral surface until a soft thump announces our arrival at the Powell estates. Moments later Verity opens the door to Mickey and my mum who come rushing in to find me sitting on the floor, unable to find the desire to go to them.
--------------------------
I watch as Theta speaks to me as one already dead and know that if there were anytime he needed me it was surely now. His words of love and his gift, I refuse to think of as his final gift to me, speak more clearly than anything else of his depth of feelings for me and that no price is to big for me to pay to save him.
The pain and sadness that seems to flow from his image is disconcerting but I remind myself that we have survived this far and I refuse to give up. From that first moment we had arrived on the game station all the time lines had vanished from my perceptions and that in itself was enough to terrify me being able to see time streams is as natural for a TARDIS as breathing was for humanoids and the power to isolate me like that I knew had to be incredible. All I could see from my external monitors had been the walls of a white closet like room. I had never felt so blind before and knew that this must be the turning point of which the Guardian had spoken. That being decided, it was time to figure out exactly what it was that I had do and so I had began scanning my memory for anything that might give me a clue as to what to do next. As Theta and Jack had entered the next room a score of timelines had burst into my senses and each passing moment after more and more had appeared and I was horrified at the sheer number of ways in which my Theta could die permanently in the next few hours. Every single path that didn’t lead to his destruction had lead me here, had led Rose and I here.
As Rose's mum gently coaxes her out in the sun, leaving me behind, I finally find that for which I have been searching all this time; I close the door as new memories of my meeting right after the war with the White Guardian surge to the surface of my mind. I now realize I had remembered the first part clearly and the time after he removed his hands from my console but the time in between had been a pleasurable haze that I had, in this intervening time, assumed to be caused by the intense relief coming from his healing the injuries I had sustained in the war and the need for him to make some changes so I would be able to help Theta through the future crisis of which he had spoken. Now I am remembering the rest of our conversation.
**************
Flashback:
****************
“Verity?”
“Yes,” I hum back to him in lazy pleasured relief as he has begun to heal my body.
“Verity you will not remember this till the time is right, and it is very important you do not attempt to remember this part of our conversation till then.”
More curious than concerned I query, “Why?”
“Because you must make a very difficult decision and you need to make it with your mind clear and in full knowledge of the consequences of what you will be agreeing. I will bring you to someone who will be just what you and Doctor both need. Soon I will take you to Alistair as you desired and he will help the Doctor and you get though the initial trauma of the war. It will not be any easy time for any of you but the path to saving the Doctor at this time is a very narrow one.”
I take in that information and am concerned at how serious the Guardian sounds and the way he is speaking about it as if Theta's survival will strictly depended on my actions. I am no stranger to getting my Theta out of trouble but always before there have been so many other paths connected to his life that it never has occurred to me that it could come down to only my actions… No that’s not true I had seen how as each day had passed these last few years it has seemed he has had less and less options. I have watched in horror as the paths of his life in the last days of the war have dwindled to only to a very few patterns. The sheer numbers of the paths that lead to his permanent death have well and truly scared me. But there were a few, enough to give me hope, but all of them in which he survived had led to his regeneration and in none of has he been able to avoid regeneration so I had resigned myself somewhat to the fact that he would be changing again in one way or another. The thing that terrified me more was that all of those paths where he survived lead to him being the almost complete destroyer of three species. All other paths had lead to the Daleks winning and that was something neither of us would allow and so I had refused to look at those lines too closely. I had focused on working to make sure, those variables I could influence were tipped toward those paths where he could at least survive in some form. Though in these last few months the paths for the other time lords and my own people have eventually gotten to the point where I couldn’t bear to look at them at all. Lost in my own thoughts I almost missed his next words.
“In a few months time you will intercept a signal from an alien that will destroy Earth if they are not stopped. It will be up to you and the Doctor to stop them. As you seek to locate and eliminate that threat to Earth you and the Doctor will meet a young human who will be the key his survival. There will come a time when the only way to save his life will be for you to join forces with this human, for he will have taken actions to protect you both that only through working together will you be able to get past. It is important that this companion come along, I will trust you to take what actions you need to so to ensure that they join you.”
“As this companion travels with you, you will need to get to know them because for the Doctor to survive it will be necessary for you and this young human to merge to become one, being neither TARDIS nor human…”
At this I nearly baulk; I am the last of my kind how can he ask me to do that?
“…But a powerful synergy of both. You must know this companion well enough to make the decision as to whether you will be willing to spend all the rest of your days joined with this being without the undue influence of knowing this going into the situation. For once the action is taken, they will forever be a part of you and even I will be unable to change that decision or undo that joining. You must prepare yourself to be partially human to be able to understand what it means to be human enough that you will be able to merge your consciousness with theirs. I am making changes to your structure, your circuits and memory and I am upgrading your base abilities to that of a TARDIS type 102.”
You're doing what? That isn’t possible is it? Even as he is speaking though I can feel things changing.
“From this day forward you will be able to do the things that you saw Compassion was capable of doing. All of these things will be needed if you are to successfully join with this human and save the Doctor. When that time comes they must want this joining as much as you do or the merging will fail and all of you will be lost.”
**************
End flashback
**************
I remember now his final words; “Verity as you are now remembering this conversation the time we spoke of has now come. If she returns to you it will be because she has decided that she cannot continue the life she had before she met you and the Doctor. You must test her determination to see him saved because in that action she will show you how to accomplish the joining and so you cannot let her have the access she seeks immediately. If and when you feel in her a resolve that nothing will stop her from returning to him, then and only then tell her of what must happen. By then she will have shown you the way to implement your joining. Explain to her the consequences, for they will be many, not just for you but for her as well. She will no longer be the least bit physically human and the sole base to her humanity will be in how she thinks. If she still agrees then implement her plan. Be aware, the forces you release to her disposal will destroy her human body and you will need to immediately work together to build her consciousness a suitable home. Even though your minds will begin merging, it will be imperative you rebuild for her a body for this to work. It will have to be Gallifreyan as even a new human body would be quickly consumed by the constant strain your joined mind will put on both of your physical forms. I have placed in your data banks all of the genetic information you will need to create this new body the two of you will share.”
I clearly remember now protesting that I didn’t have that kind of power, and the mischievous smile he gave me that made me think of the elfin king Oberon in an earth story Theta had showed me once as he replied.
“At that time you will have all the power you need to make it happen.” I shiver again at the thought of the kind of power it would take to make something like that happen and at his final warning, “Remember though, from that point forward your three fates will rest with the decisions you and she make together that day and only together will you be able to circumvent the blocks the Doctor will put in place to prevent your return. Now sleep Verity, rest, he will need you very much when you awake.”
Chapter 03 - Choices
Moving Forward Index 1
Then suddenly he is there and all I can think of is how he will die if I can’t make him realize how much a danger he is in from the android killing machine running this game. I am running for him, knowing his life depends on his understanding and disabling the robot. Then he’s gone and all I know is darkness.
I wake to a cold floor, unsure what has happened or how I got here, only knowing that once again I am waking someplace far away from something very important to me. As I see the Dalek roll toward me I know that, however I got here, things have just gotten worse in a million different ways and the memories of Utah and Van Staten’s house of horrors floods into my mind. Following hard on the heels of those thoughts are the images of the gutted expression on the face of my gentle Doctor and him facing me with that huge gun in his hands, knowing that these are the creatures that created that level of grief in the man I love more than everything.
I stand in shock as I watch not one but hundreds, maybe thousands, of these monsters rolling and flying around me, and terror wells up within me, a terror mixed with confusion as to why they haven’t killed me. Not that I am ungrateful, but considering how heartless the Dalek we had met in Utah was I have to wonder why. Even as the thought occurs to me an odd looking young woman appears almost directly in front of me babbling about the Doctor and how she has brought their destruction. Before I can even begin to ask her about him I hear the sound I had been dreading since I awoke and watch as yet another is added to the death toll these creatures have amassed. I stand stunned, as I know exactly why it is they have kept me alive and I cringe knowing that I am to be used either as bait or a bargaining tool and steel myself to do what I must to keep my precious Doctor safe, even if it means my own death. Before I can consider this turn of events I see him appear on a viewer and my heart races in relief at seeing him in spite of what I expect to be the outcome of this conversation.
I feel both thrilled and crushed when he says no to their demand that he submit to their desire to stand aside and let them do what they like with the Earth. I know he can’t put me before all of the Earth but I also know that his refusal is my death sentence. I should be happy that I can’t be used against him that way but after him choosing to share with me his name which he said he has given no other in centuries, after what happened on the shopping planet and everything we have been through, there is a part of me that hoped that he would at least fight for my survival a bit instead of so quickly answering in such a cold, heartless, sounding tone as he reiterated my death sentence.
What? My heart fills almost to bursting as I listen to him outline a plan for my rescue and their destruction. I don’t know how, don’t know what he will do to accomplish his words, but I do know that if anyone can it will be him. He is my Doctor, and if he says he can do it he will and my heart soars even in the face of the hoards of Daleks surrounding me.
********************************
I stand in shocked disbelief; he is sending me back to my mum’s, after everything we have been through, he is sending me back. How dare he make this decision for me? How could he send me away? The thought rages around and around in my head as his image appears telling me some canned message about how if I am seeing this message he is either dying or dead. I still can’t believe he has lied to me, how could he really be dying and think I would want to be anywhere than at his side? He's pushed me away when he needs me most, how could he do this? He promised he would never send away, that he wouldn't make me leave. I almost jump when the words of the hologram echo my current thoughts.
"Rose, I’m sure you’re very mad at me right now, thinking I lied to you, but if you are seeing this, it truly is the only way I could think of to ensure that you lived.” He is my life, how can he think sending me away would be something I want? How does he expect me to live without him? “You have become more important to me than my own life, you’re the reason I was able to get up each morning able to face another day and this is the only gift I can give you now.” Do you really think I would want that with out you? “I know I don't really have the right to ask anything more from you,” No you don’t you stupid Time Lord git! “You have given me so much already by just being part of my life, but please know how much I loved you Rose.” How dare you finally tell me you love me now when I can’t tell you how much I love you back! “All I ask is that you do this one last thing for me. Have a fantastic life; it’s all I ever wanted for you.” How can you not understand you are my fantastic life?
His next words though surprise me almost as much his last. “Verity, I am truly sorry. I have tried, I really have. I am sorry to have deceived you as well but I know if you had known I was recording this message you would have figured out by now a way to get back to me in spite of me wanting you safely away from whatever danger that has or will shortly kill me. Please don’t try to return. I have locked the coordinates so you can’t come back to the time and place from which I have just sent you. After all this time we have been together I hope you know how much you meant to me. If there were any other way I would never have made you go. I know you know better than anyone how dangerous you would be in the wrong hands. Because of this, on this control card is the means to execute a permanent shutdown, which will ensure that no one will be able to take advantage of your technology and will ensure also that, once executed, there will be nothing left of use to anyone. I hope that you will never have to… never want to use this program but I couldn’t make you leave and not give you the means to escape that I had myself once taken. Please take care of yourself and Rose and I hope you both can eventually forgive me.”
I can’t help the sob that breaks from my throat as the full import of the Doctor’s words sink in. As they do, I realize that he has just handed Verity a means and permission to commit suicide. I don't know what disturbs me more, that he has offered Verity that course of action or that he has at one other time attempted to end his life. I have known since that first trip he has suffered greatly because of the war, so the news doesn’t particularly surprise me, it just hurts my heart, as it drives home again exactly how bad things had gotten before we met and just how much he needs me with him now.
As it sinks in even more what has occurred, my legs suddenly don’t want to support me and I crumple into the console and slide to the floor, heedless of the metal grid of which it is made. I reach out a hand to Verity’s central control column, knowing instinctively that she will understand my devastation, and I sense a grief deeper than I have ever felt before from the TARDIS. For long minutes I sit there caressing the coral surface until a soft thump announces our arrival at the Powell estates. Moments later Verity opens the door to Mickey and my mum who come rushing in to find me sitting on the floor, unable to find the desire to go to them.
--------------------------
I watch as Theta speaks to me as one already dead and know that if there were anytime he needed me it was surely now. His words of love and his gift, I refuse to think of as his final gift to me, speak more clearly than anything else of his depth of feelings for me and that no price is to big for me to pay to save him.
The pain and sadness that seems to flow from his image is disconcerting but I remind myself that we have survived this far and I refuse to give up. From that first moment we had arrived on the game station all the time lines had vanished from my perceptions and that in itself was enough to terrify me being able to see time streams is as natural for a TARDIS as breathing was for humanoids and the power to isolate me like that I knew had to be incredible. All I could see from my external monitors had been the walls of a white closet like room. I had never felt so blind before and knew that this must be the turning point of which the Guardian had spoken. That being decided, it was time to figure out exactly what it was that I had do and so I had began scanning my memory for anything that might give me a clue as to what to do next. As Theta and Jack had entered the next room a score of timelines had burst into my senses and each passing moment after more and more had appeared and I was horrified at the sheer number of ways in which my Theta could die permanently in the next few hours. Every single path that didn’t lead to his destruction had lead me here, had led Rose and I here.
As Rose's mum gently coaxes her out in the sun, leaving me behind, I finally find that for which I have been searching all this time; I close the door as new memories of my meeting right after the war with the White Guardian surge to the surface of my mind. I now realize I had remembered the first part clearly and the time after he removed his hands from my console but the time in between had been a pleasurable haze that I had, in this intervening time, assumed to be caused by the intense relief coming from his healing the injuries I had sustained in the war and the need for him to make some changes so I would be able to help Theta through the future crisis of which he had spoken. Now I am remembering the rest of our conversation.
**************
Flashback:
****************
“Verity?”
“Yes,” I hum back to him in lazy pleasured relief as he has begun to heal my body.
“Verity you will not remember this till the time is right, and it is very important you do not attempt to remember this part of our conversation till then.”
More curious than concerned I query, “Why?”
“Because you must make a very difficult decision and you need to make it with your mind clear and in full knowledge of the consequences of what you will be agreeing. I will bring you to someone who will be just what you and Doctor both need. Soon I will take you to Alistair as you desired and he will help the Doctor and you get though the initial trauma of the war. It will not be any easy time for any of you but the path to saving the Doctor at this time is a very narrow one.”
I take in that information and am concerned at how serious the Guardian sounds and the way he is speaking about it as if Theta's survival will strictly depended on my actions. I am no stranger to getting my Theta out of trouble but always before there have been so many other paths connected to his life that it never has occurred to me that it could come down to only my actions… No that’s not true I had seen how as each day had passed these last few years it has seemed he has had less and less options. I have watched in horror as the paths of his life in the last days of the war have dwindled to only to a very few patterns. The sheer numbers of the paths that lead to his permanent death have well and truly scared me. But there were a few, enough to give me hope, but all of them in which he survived had led to his regeneration and in none of has he been able to avoid regeneration so I had resigned myself somewhat to the fact that he would be changing again in one way or another. The thing that terrified me more was that all of those paths where he survived lead to him being the almost complete destroyer of three species. All other paths had lead to the Daleks winning and that was something neither of us would allow and so I had refused to look at those lines too closely. I had focused on working to make sure, those variables I could influence were tipped toward those paths where he could at least survive in some form. Though in these last few months the paths for the other time lords and my own people have eventually gotten to the point where I couldn’t bear to look at them at all. Lost in my own thoughts I almost missed his next words.
“In a few months time you will intercept a signal from an alien that will destroy Earth if they are not stopped. It will be up to you and the Doctor to stop them. As you seek to locate and eliminate that threat to Earth you and the Doctor will meet a young human who will be the key his survival. There will come a time when the only way to save his life will be for you to join forces with this human, for he will have taken actions to protect you both that only through working together will you be able to get past. It is important that this companion come along, I will trust you to take what actions you need to so to ensure that they join you.”
“As this companion travels with you, you will need to get to know them because for the Doctor to survive it will be necessary for you and this young human to merge to become one, being neither TARDIS nor human…”
At this I nearly baulk; I am the last of my kind how can he ask me to do that?
“…But a powerful synergy of both. You must know this companion well enough to make the decision as to whether you will be willing to spend all the rest of your days joined with this being without the undue influence of knowing this going into the situation. For once the action is taken, they will forever be a part of you and even I will be unable to change that decision or undo that joining. You must prepare yourself to be partially human to be able to understand what it means to be human enough that you will be able to merge your consciousness with theirs. I am making changes to your structure, your circuits and memory and I am upgrading your base abilities to that of a TARDIS type 102.”
You're doing what? That isn’t possible is it? Even as he is speaking though I can feel things changing.
“From this day forward you will be able to do the things that you saw Compassion was capable of doing. All of these things will be needed if you are to successfully join with this human and save the Doctor. When that time comes they must want this joining as much as you do or the merging will fail and all of you will be lost.”
**************
End flashback
**************
I remember now his final words; “Verity as you are now remembering this conversation the time we spoke of has now come. If she returns to you it will be because she has decided that she cannot continue the life she had before she met you and the Doctor. You must test her determination to see him saved because in that action she will show you how to accomplish the joining and so you cannot let her have the access she seeks immediately. If and when you feel in her a resolve that nothing will stop her from returning to him, then and only then tell her of what must happen. By then she will have shown you the way to implement your joining. Explain to her the consequences, for they will be many, not just for you but for her as well. She will no longer be the least bit physically human and the sole base to her humanity will be in how she thinks. If she still agrees then implement her plan. Be aware, the forces you release to her disposal will destroy her human body and you will need to immediately work together to build her consciousness a suitable home. Even though your minds will begin merging, it will be imperative you rebuild for her a body for this to work. It will have to be Gallifreyan as even a new human body would be quickly consumed by the constant strain your joined mind will put on both of your physical forms. I have placed in your data banks all of the genetic information you will need to create this new body the two of you will share.”
I clearly remember now protesting that I didn’t have that kind of power, and the mischievous smile he gave me that made me think of the elfin king Oberon in an earth story Theta had showed me once as he replied.
“At that time you will have all the power you need to make it happen.” I shiver again at the thought of the kind of power it would take to make something like that happen and at his final warning, “Remember though, from that point forward your three fates will rest with the decisions you and she make together that day and only together will you be able to circumvent the blocks the Doctor will put in place to prevent your return. Now sleep Verity, rest, he will need you very much when you awake.”
Chapter 03 - Choices
Moving Forward Index 1