The One True Free Life (20/26)
Title: The One True Free Life (20/26)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: Teen
Spoilers: Everything
Disclaimer: It would be a very different, and possibly quite upsetting, world if I owned these characters. For the sake of the world's children, I don't.
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues?
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
As a temp, Donna Mott was excluded from most potentially fun work-related gatherings at Liberty Systems. Staff lunches, birthday parties, invitations to happy hour, all passed by her cubicle in favour of the permanent employees. Boring meetings stuffed in to a conference room too small by half for all of the attendees, however, remained mandatory. People whose faces she recognised but who had never introduced themselves to her were still filing in and taking seats as she unfolded the newspaper she'd picked up on her way to the office but hadn't had a chance to look at yet.
The headline blared over a picture straight from the society pages, and Donna couldn't believe that she hadn't recognised her immediately two nights before, even with a different hair colour.
"VITEX HEIRESS WANTED FOR BRUTAL MURDER"
Below were pictures of Rose Tyler, her alleged accomplice (a very dishevelled and miserable-looking bloke), and a poignantly smiling portrait of the victim with a few lines of lurid explanation: "Rose Tyler, daughter of Vitex CEO and former Torchwood Institute General Director Peter Tyler, wanted in connection with the murder of Dr. Deborah Callahan, whose body was pulled out of the Thames by police divers this morning."
Donna's blood ran cold and the confused noise of the conference room fell away. She'd had a murderer, in her kitchen. She'd given her information, and tea and biscuits. She'd believed Rose Tyler's story enough that she'd begun to surreptitiously sneak peeks at the files that came across her desk on their way to a cabinet or the shredding bins, though had yet to find anything even remotely indicative of nefarious goings on in the upper floors of the building. She supposed she ought to go to the police and let them sort out the (in hindsight ridiculous) story of the abduction of her lover by this frankly very staid, very normal, very deadly boring educational consulting firm.
The microphone on the podium at the front of the room whined to life, and she folded up her newspaper again and prepared to be put to sleep by whatever motivational speaker or management consultant they had lined up for the morning. She was surprised, therefore, when Sophia Park, the founder and CEO of Liberty Systems stepped up on to the riser and adjusted the microphone for her short stature.
"Good morning," she said, in a pert, professional tone. There was a low rumble around the room as various employees muttered "good morning" back in to their coffee cups. "Thank you all for coming in on such short notice."
Like we had a choice, thought Donna.
"It is with great pride and excitement," Sophia Park continued, "that I am able to announce to you--the staff without whom none of this would have been possible--that in one hour's time Secretary Heths will call a press conference to announce an unprecedented partnership between Liberty Systems and the Department of Education to bring our Phoenix Learning Empowerment Process to all British classrooms, beginning with this upcoming term."
There was a fair bit of polite applause, and a smattering of extremely enthusiastic applause, which Donna attributed to the Sales department.
"This is a historic moment for this company, but more importantly it is a historic moment for British children, who will now all have the opportunity to benefit from the most powerful system for increasing educational performance ever devised. Our Phoenix process has been scientifically proven to increase test scores by several percentage points in its first year of implementation alone, as well as improving both the classroom environment and school-wide discipline."
Another round of subdued applause. Donna discreetly opened her newspaper again to the crossword puzzle. She was hopeless at crosswords and she thought idly that perhaps this Phoenix process, whatever it was, could help her in that department.
When she got back to her cubicle on the third floor after the meeting (which had been mercifully short and to-the-point), there was a large stack of files sitting on it waiting for her. Sorting through them--this one for the shredder, this one to be filed, that one to be returned to its original owner--she continued to glance at their contents, even though Rose Tyler's original story was now called in to alarmingly serious question. It was the convergence of three now-familiar names on one paper that caught her eye as she pulled out what at first appeared to be a misfiled bit of rubbish from a totally unrelated accounting file. Deborah Callahan. Phoenix. Vincent Heths. She glanced around to make sure she was not being watched and stuffed the paper in to the pocket of her pantsuit to take in to the ladies to read later.
She found, while perching on the edge of a toilet, that she was in possession of a memo from Dr. Callahan--apparently a Liberty employee--to Secretary Heths, copied to Sophia Park, and dated just two days previous. It outlined the recent "acquisition of an asset found to have significant genetic mutations" allowing them to "address the ongoing issue of long-term retention and storage." Dr. Callahan went on to speculate that the origin of said asset (which, Donna noted with a shiver that went all the way up and down her spine, was referred to throughout by a personal and male pronoun) may be extraterrestrial, or perhaps the product of a "hybridisation or genetic engineering program." The result, the memo continued, allowed this being to "directly interface with, and receive psionic input from subjects through the Phoenix process," and, much more importantly, "hold indefinitely the negative output." Dr. Callahan ended by speculating that "improvements in cloning technology over the next five-to-ten years could lead to a permanent storage and retention asset as part of the lasting structure of Phoenix."
She folded the paper back up and exited as casually as she could manage to look while her head was swirling with questions and some rather uncomfortable, if not downright horrifying, possibilities. Back at her cubicle, she took out her newspaper again and looked at the pictures. That man Rose Tyler had been so keen to find, if this bloke pictured was him, didn't appear entirely human to Donna, now that she was really looking. If she were to open her mind to the possibility of aliens that look and talk and walk about just like us, she had to admit that there was something about this man that would fit that bill. The look in his eye, perhaps. It was haunted and unsettling, as if he had seen things that no one on this tiny little planet could even imagine.
Knowing that Rose Tyler and her father both had connections with the Torchwood Institute, which would put them in contact with all sorts of strange goings on, she figured it might make some amount of sense that this man would be a friend of theirs. Rose Tyler and he might even be--and Donna bit back a shudder at the thought--intimately acquainted, as she'd insinuated at their meeting.
She thought back to the language of the memo, how they'd used the personal pronoun, called this "asset" not an "it" but a "he," and then went on to speak of him like an inanimate object; a computer, or a cog in some kind of machine, something to be cloned and kept as a prize. That was much more disgusting to her than the possibility of a human woman fraternising with an alien of any sort.
It was her mother's addiction to the tabloids that saved the day in the end. When Rose Tyler had shown up, fully grown and seemingly out of nowhere, along with Jackie Tyler who apparently had returned from the dead, it had been completely irresistible to the national imagination. After the tragedy of the Cybermen, everyone hoped against hope that their own loved ones would similarly reappear, and everyone wanted to be Pete Tyler, even just for the time it took to read a few column inches. And so, Donna Mott was easily able to key the name of a small well-to-do Surrey village in to her sat-nav and leave Whitechapel without even telling her boss that she'd be taking a long lunch. A very long lunch.
~o0o~
"Ah, Dolwyddelan Castle," the Doctor beamed looking across the valley to the ruin on the next hill. "Lovely. Not that it was a picnic living there, mind. One thing they don't really tell you about time travel when you start off: the toilet facilities generally leave a lot to be desired." He pulled a face and Rose had to hide behind the piece of bread she was eating to keep him from seeing her chuckle at his remembrance of filthy loos past.
"You've been here before, then?" she asked once she'd chewed and swallowed.
"Oh, yeah, loads of times! Who do you think it was negotiated the treaty between Llewelyn the Great and King Henry, eh? Yours truly, right here."
"Of course it was," she said indulgently. "You always seem to find all the most important points in history and insinuate yourself in there somewhere."
He puffed himself up a bit and she knew that if he'd been wearing a tie, he'd be straightening it. "Someone's got to," he sniffed. "You lot would have wiped yourselves out ten times over by now if it weren't for me."
She tossed a grape at him. "You'd better watch your mouth now, mister. You're one of us lot, and you'll wind up sounding like my old Granddad Prentice with all his stories of the good old days when a quart of milk cost a sixpence if you keep it up with those pompous Lord of Time lectures."
She'd meant it to be playful but he looked genuinely hurt. "Pompous? Me?"
She gave him a light smack on the shoulder, "The most pompous Time Lord that ever lorded over Time."
It was his turn to nearly fall over with laughter. "Oh, no! No, indeed, there you are quite wrong. The rest of the Time Lords hated me for not being pompous enough. You think the TARDIS runs on the power of the time vortex, but really TARDISes are mainly powered by the extreme sense of self-importance of their inhabitants. It could power a small sun. Me? I'm nothing. Frivolous, even."
Rose wrinkled her nose, which prompted him to kiss it, but they both stopped with their loony smiles and play-slapping when Rose's mobile lit up with a message from Pete. Another set of sat-nav coordinates, which the Doctor scrutinised with a lot of eye-rubbing and beard-stroking before declaring to be Sussex. Rose was just about to take the SIM card out and destroy it when another message came through: "YOU ARE WANTED FOR MURDER."
The Doctor boggled and looked highly offended, but Rose just heaved an exasperated sigh. "You see what they're doing, right? They can't really go to the police and say, right we kidnapped this chap, but he's been so uncooperative as to escape, so why don't you bring him back to us, there's some good lads. So they've fitted us up for murder instead and sold that whole bill of goods to the cops. So they'll really be looking for us now."
"Good thing we've got a new car," the Doctor said optimistically.
Rose held her hand out and the Doctor grabbed it with great enthusiasm.
"Ready to save the world in a Morris Minor?"
(To Chapter 21)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: Teen
Spoilers: Everything
Disclaimer: It would be a very different, and possibly quite upsetting, world if I owned these characters. For the sake of the world's children, I don't.
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues?
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
As a temp, Donna Mott was excluded from most potentially fun work-related gatherings at Liberty Systems. Staff lunches, birthday parties, invitations to happy hour, all passed by her cubicle in favour of the permanent employees. Boring meetings stuffed in to a conference room too small by half for all of the attendees, however, remained mandatory. People whose faces she recognised but who had never introduced themselves to her were still filing in and taking seats as she unfolded the newspaper she'd picked up on her way to the office but hadn't had a chance to look at yet.
The headline blared over a picture straight from the society pages, and Donna couldn't believe that she hadn't recognised her immediately two nights before, even with a different hair colour.
"VITEX HEIRESS WANTED FOR BRUTAL MURDER"
Below were pictures of Rose Tyler, her alleged accomplice (a very dishevelled and miserable-looking bloke), and a poignantly smiling portrait of the victim with a few lines of lurid explanation: "Rose Tyler, daughter of Vitex CEO and former Torchwood Institute General Director Peter Tyler, wanted in connection with the murder of Dr. Deborah Callahan, whose body was pulled out of the Thames by police divers this morning."
Donna's blood ran cold and the confused noise of the conference room fell away. She'd had a murderer, in her kitchen. She'd given her information, and tea and biscuits. She'd believed Rose Tyler's story enough that she'd begun to surreptitiously sneak peeks at the files that came across her desk on their way to a cabinet or the shredding bins, though had yet to find anything even remotely indicative of nefarious goings on in the upper floors of the building. She supposed she ought to go to the police and let them sort out the (in hindsight ridiculous) story of the abduction of her lover by this frankly very staid, very normal, very deadly boring educational consulting firm.
The microphone on the podium at the front of the room whined to life, and she folded up her newspaper again and prepared to be put to sleep by whatever motivational speaker or management consultant they had lined up for the morning. She was surprised, therefore, when Sophia Park, the founder and CEO of Liberty Systems stepped up on to the riser and adjusted the microphone for her short stature.
"Good morning," she said, in a pert, professional tone. There was a low rumble around the room as various employees muttered "good morning" back in to their coffee cups. "Thank you all for coming in on such short notice."
Like we had a choice, thought Donna.
"It is with great pride and excitement," Sophia Park continued, "that I am able to announce to you--the staff without whom none of this would have been possible--that in one hour's time Secretary Heths will call a press conference to announce an unprecedented partnership between Liberty Systems and the Department of Education to bring our Phoenix Learning Empowerment Process to all British classrooms, beginning with this upcoming term."
There was a fair bit of polite applause, and a smattering of extremely enthusiastic applause, which Donna attributed to the Sales department.
"This is a historic moment for this company, but more importantly it is a historic moment for British children, who will now all have the opportunity to benefit from the most powerful system for increasing educational performance ever devised. Our Phoenix process has been scientifically proven to increase test scores by several percentage points in its first year of implementation alone, as well as improving both the classroom environment and school-wide discipline."
Another round of subdued applause. Donna discreetly opened her newspaper again to the crossword puzzle. She was hopeless at crosswords and she thought idly that perhaps this Phoenix process, whatever it was, could help her in that department.
When she got back to her cubicle on the third floor after the meeting (which had been mercifully short and to-the-point), there was a large stack of files sitting on it waiting for her. Sorting through them--this one for the shredder, this one to be filed, that one to be returned to its original owner--she continued to glance at their contents, even though Rose Tyler's original story was now called in to alarmingly serious question. It was the convergence of three now-familiar names on one paper that caught her eye as she pulled out what at first appeared to be a misfiled bit of rubbish from a totally unrelated accounting file. Deborah Callahan. Phoenix. Vincent Heths. She glanced around to make sure she was not being watched and stuffed the paper in to the pocket of her pantsuit to take in to the ladies to read later.
She found, while perching on the edge of a toilet, that she was in possession of a memo from Dr. Callahan--apparently a Liberty employee--to Secretary Heths, copied to Sophia Park, and dated just two days previous. It outlined the recent "acquisition of an asset found to have significant genetic mutations" allowing them to "address the ongoing issue of long-term retention and storage." Dr. Callahan went on to speculate that the origin of said asset (which, Donna noted with a shiver that went all the way up and down her spine, was referred to throughout by a personal and male pronoun) may be extraterrestrial, or perhaps the product of a "hybridisation or genetic engineering program." The result, the memo continued, allowed this being to "directly interface with, and receive psionic input from subjects through the Phoenix process," and, much more importantly, "hold indefinitely the negative output." Dr. Callahan ended by speculating that "improvements in cloning technology over the next five-to-ten years could lead to a permanent storage and retention asset as part of the lasting structure of Phoenix."
She folded the paper back up and exited as casually as she could manage to look while her head was swirling with questions and some rather uncomfortable, if not downright horrifying, possibilities. Back at her cubicle, she took out her newspaper again and looked at the pictures. That man Rose Tyler had been so keen to find, if this bloke pictured was him, didn't appear entirely human to Donna, now that she was really looking. If she were to open her mind to the possibility of aliens that look and talk and walk about just like us, she had to admit that there was something about this man that would fit that bill. The look in his eye, perhaps. It was haunted and unsettling, as if he had seen things that no one on this tiny little planet could even imagine.
Knowing that Rose Tyler and her father both had connections with the Torchwood Institute, which would put them in contact with all sorts of strange goings on, she figured it might make some amount of sense that this man would be a friend of theirs. Rose Tyler and he might even be--and Donna bit back a shudder at the thought--intimately acquainted, as she'd insinuated at their meeting.
She thought back to the language of the memo, how they'd used the personal pronoun, called this "asset" not an "it" but a "he," and then went on to speak of him like an inanimate object; a computer, or a cog in some kind of machine, something to be cloned and kept as a prize. That was much more disgusting to her than the possibility of a human woman fraternising with an alien of any sort.
It was her mother's addiction to the tabloids that saved the day in the end. When Rose Tyler had shown up, fully grown and seemingly out of nowhere, along with Jackie Tyler who apparently had returned from the dead, it had been completely irresistible to the national imagination. After the tragedy of the Cybermen, everyone hoped against hope that their own loved ones would similarly reappear, and everyone wanted to be Pete Tyler, even just for the time it took to read a few column inches. And so, Donna Mott was easily able to key the name of a small well-to-do Surrey village in to her sat-nav and leave Whitechapel without even telling her boss that she'd be taking a long lunch. A very long lunch.
~o0o~
"Ah, Dolwyddelan Castle," the Doctor beamed looking across the valley to the ruin on the next hill. "Lovely. Not that it was a picnic living there, mind. One thing they don't really tell you about time travel when you start off: the toilet facilities generally leave a lot to be desired." He pulled a face and Rose had to hide behind the piece of bread she was eating to keep him from seeing her chuckle at his remembrance of filthy loos past.
"You've been here before, then?" she asked once she'd chewed and swallowed.
"Oh, yeah, loads of times! Who do you think it was negotiated the treaty between Llewelyn the Great and King Henry, eh? Yours truly, right here."
"Of course it was," she said indulgently. "You always seem to find all the most important points in history and insinuate yourself in there somewhere."
He puffed himself up a bit and she knew that if he'd been wearing a tie, he'd be straightening it. "Someone's got to," he sniffed. "You lot would have wiped yourselves out ten times over by now if it weren't for me."
She tossed a grape at him. "You'd better watch your mouth now, mister. You're one of us lot, and you'll wind up sounding like my old Granddad Prentice with all his stories of the good old days when a quart of milk cost a sixpence if you keep it up with those pompous Lord of Time lectures."
She'd meant it to be playful but he looked genuinely hurt. "Pompous? Me?"
She gave him a light smack on the shoulder, "The most pompous Time Lord that ever lorded over Time."
It was his turn to nearly fall over with laughter. "Oh, no! No, indeed, there you are quite wrong. The rest of the Time Lords hated me for not being pompous enough. You think the TARDIS runs on the power of the time vortex, but really TARDISes are mainly powered by the extreme sense of self-importance of their inhabitants. It could power a small sun. Me? I'm nothing. Frivolous, even."
Rose wrinkled her nose, which prompted him to kiss it, but they both stopped with their loony smiles and play-slapping when Rose's mobile lit up with a message from Pete. Another set of sat-nav coordinates, which the Doctor scrutinised with a lot of eye-rubbing and beard-stroking before declaring to be Sussex. Rose was just about to take the SIM card out and destroy it when another message came through: "YOU ARE WANTED FOR MURDER."
The Doctor boggled and looked highly offended, but Rose just heaved an exasperated sigh. "You see what they're doing, right? They can't really go to the police and say, right we kidnapped this chap, but he's been so uncooperative as to escape, so why don't you bring him back to us, there's some good lads. So they've fitted us up for murder instead and sold that whole bill of goods to the cops. So they'll really be looking for us now."
"Good thing we've got a new car," the Doctor said optimistically.
Rose held her hand out and the Doctor grabbed it with great enthusiasm.
"Ready to save the world in a Morris Minor?"
(To Chapter 21)