Held In Trust : Chapter 2
Title: Held in Trust (2/?)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Doctor/Rose, Alt!Donna, the Tyler clan, and lots of OC's.
Rating: Teen
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure!
Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine.Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but it would probably help.
The volume on Donna's mobile was still turned up far too loud from the previous night's outing to the pub quiz, and everyone else on the pavement shot her looks as Bach's first cello suite blared from her pocket. She should have never let the Doctor select his own ring tone, but at the time she hadn't been fully apprised of what a truly odd man he was. Charming, intelligent, kind, very exciting to be around, but deeply weird.
"Little early for you," she said by way of greeting, ducking in to a doorway to talk.
"Well, Rose is just off to the office now and...."
"And you're bored is it?" Donna hadn't known the pair for that long, but she quickly had been able to identify them as two people rather unused to the day-to-day life of getting up, going to work and watching telly at tea. Rose seemed to be overwhelmed by the performance of such daily mundanities, huffing breathlessly down the line every time she rang about errands and tasks that most people would take in stride and sort out with a minimum of fuss. The Doctor on the other hand seemed hyper-alert to any escape clause, getting more and more squirrelly until he could find some new adventure or obsession to take him away from it all for a time.
"I was just wondering if you fancied a bit of a trip. I think I've found something in Somerset needs looking in to and I thought, Donna'd be right keen to see this! Eh? Donna?"
"And Rose?"
"At work," he said tentatively.
"And your leg?"
"Oh, that? Well, you'd need to drive. Would you mind too terribly?"
She could almost hear him grinning, turning on the charm.
"The fact that I'm on my way to work figure in to your plans anywhere?"
There was a long silence and the whiff of disappointment was palpable. She hated to let him down, but not everyone could be independently wealthy like he and Rose. She'd love nothing more than to just ride around with the pair of them, meeting new people and having adventures, but that wasn't going to happen in this lifetime. Even Rose it seemed had been unable to completely shrug off her responsibilities.
"I'm sorry," she said, realising that perhaps her refusal had sounded a little embittered. "Maybe at the weekend? We could all go together then, make a day of it."
"No, that's all right," he replied prissily. "Someone seems to be time travelling and I thought you and Rose might want to find out more about it, but apparently not. I'll just....I've got some calculations to do."
"Sorry," Donna said again weakly, but she had a feeling that the Doctor rang off before he had a chance to hear it.
She didn't have time to even close her phone and step back out in to the press of morning commuters before it rang again, this time with the more standard annoying and overplayed pop song.
"Mum, I'm just about to go in to a meeting," she lied.
"This won't take a moment, but honestly Donna, if you wouldn't get in so late and then leave so early maybe we could have a regular conversation like a normal family."
Donna rolled her eyes from the safety of Liverpool Street.
"Your cousin Charlotte rang," her mother ploughed on, "and asked us to come to the seaside this weekend, so I'll need you to pick up dad's prescriptions before we go."
Donna's heart sank. She had given the Doctor a bit of a hard time, but that didn't mean she wasn't fully planning on ringing him back in a few hours to make definite plans for a Saturday trip west. Time travel and Devon cream sounded like a brilliant combination, and she secretly loved being one of the only women in the world who actually had a chance to witness the former whilst enjoying the latter. In any case, it would be sure to beat a dour November weekend at the seaside, even if everything ended up going pear-shaped, there were no dairy products and she landed in hospital again.
"Do I have to go?" she ventured tentatively.
There was a long pause from her mum's end and the disapproval fairly radiated through the handset.
"Charlotte asked after you specifically, but if you want to disappoint an old woman, by all means stay home and go out drinking with your little friends. I'm sure that's much more important than your family."
Taking a deep breath and composing herself, she wondered at her mother's ability to even now make her feel like a ten year old all over again.
"Well, you didn't check if I had plans first, did you? Now I'll have to cancel."
"Plans? You never mentioned any plans to me, how was I supposed to know? But it's too late now, I've already told Charlotte you're coming. You'll have to tell Nerys or whoever that something else has come up."
"Not Nerys." Donna didn't know what was making her keep pushing like this. She could take a bullet in defence of the British Republic, face down three-eyed mutants at the Asda , but not convince her own mother to let her stay home alone for the weekend. Something seemed rather out-of-whack about that arrangement.
"If you're going to say Rose Tyler and that grease monkey she goes around with, then I'm glad you'll have to cancel. And I hope you know that they're only your mates so they can have someone around to feel better than. New money is always like that," she sneered.
"Mum, they're not, honestly. You don't know them."
Sylvia Mott barked out a dry, bitter Ha! "No? So how come when you got all mixed up with them it was you that wound up in hospital, and they just swanned off in to the sunset?"
"They visited," Donna mumbled. Really, most of the time she was recovering was a bit of a haze of morphine and cherry gelatin and she'd gotten the impression that the Doctor and Rose had rather bigger fish to fry during that time anyway. There were no hard feelings.
"And did they offer any kind of compensation for all the work you missed because of their recklessness?"
Her mother still steadfastly refused to acknowledge that Donna had wanted to be in that office, had chosen to help them stop the plot to control the emotions of the people of Britain. Not that Sylvia ever actually believed that plan had ever existed--she was convinced that the Doctor and Rose had made the whole thing up as a prank and it had all just gone terribly wrong.
"I'm not having this conversation with you right now, mum. I've got to go."
"Just remember to get dad's pills, and no stopping off anywhere else on your way home. I'm making a roast."
Donna's heart raced as she closed the handset and put it back in to her pocket. All of her capillaries constricted and her extremities tingled with impotent anger. A grey weekend at the seaside with cousin Charlotte and her herd of ill-behaved yorkies, and her mother refusing to believe that her daughter was a grown woman capable of looking after herself. At least her grandfather would be there, and would likely bring his telescope along as well. Now that Donna knew what was really up there, stargazing had gotten to be much more interesting, and oddly soothing.
***
When Rose returned home, she found the Doctor propped up on the sofa, still in his pyjamas and surrounded by scraps of paper, the laptop open on the coffee table and showing the same satellite image as the night before. She off-loaded her bags and papers on to the kitchen counter and enjoyed a private moment with the unsuppressable grin that still broke out on her face upon reuniting with the Doctor, even if they'd only been apart for a few hours. She hoped she never lost that feeling, never lost the inability to hide her joy at being in his presence.
"What's all this then?" she asked as she entered the room and tried not to notice the disaster area it had become in her absence.
"Just doing some calculations regarding our mysterious time travelling friend. Or friends."
Rose looked at the sea of papers he was sitting amongst, which were all covered with the conjoining geometric circles and lines of his native language.
"There are computers for this, you know."
"I beg to differ. For working out the details of time travel, nothing beats a Time Lord with a biro. Or a part Time Lord with a biro. Gallifreyan maths was created to deal with this sort of thing and, no offence, but I'm still amazed that you lot managed to work out as much as you did without me."
Rose rolled her eyes. "I think we did quite well, thank you very much." She picked up the nearest scrap, turning it this way and that, trying to figure out which end was up. The Doctor reached over and took it from her hand, rotated it 90 degrees and handed it back.
"So these are numbers...equations? Its beautiful."
He nodded while adding a few arabesques to the already complicated glyphs on the pad he was holding. "You've said before," he said distractedly.
"You could teach me." She moved a few things out of the way and perched on the edge of the sofa, careful to not jostle his bad leg. "I'd like that, to learn your language."
Lowering his pad and pen, he gave her a sympathetic look. "You can't."
"Oi, what are you trying to say, that I'm not smart enough?"
He reached out to touch her arm and then brushed back a bit of hair from her face. "No I mean you literally can't. It would be lovely if you could, but you can't see it the way I see it."
She furrowed her brow. "You're just using a normal pen and paper. And you're mostly human anyway. You're like me."
"My body is like yours--well, not as squishy and soft and pink as yours, but you get my meaning. But the language of the Time Lords isn't just about what you see on the paper with your eyes. It's four-dimensional."
Rose made an effort to try and gloss over the squishy comment in favour the more intellectually challenging matter at hand. "The fourth dimension is time," she stated, and he nodded. "But how can writing be four-dimensional?"
He brought his pad out and drew two circles--both, she noted with envy, perfectly symmetrical and round--and held them out to her. "What's different about these two pictures?"
She studied them at length for a few moments, expecting to find at least a superficial difference given that he'd drawn them free-hand, but had to admit there really was none. "They look the same," she said finally, nibbling on her pinky nail in thought.
"To me though, they're completely different. That one there," he pointed with a slender index finger, "was drawn ante-clockwise and taking much more time than this one here which was drawn clockwise and quickly. They mean totally different things, and I can see that, but you can't."
Rose didn't want to feel offended, he hadn't meant to make her feel stupid, but she felt a creeping sense of inferiority nonetheless.
He drew a few bisecting lines and some more interlinking circles, again completely identical in both glyphs and pointed to them. "You see, they look the same, but they're--"
"No, I get it," Rose snapped, but the surprised and wounded look on his face immediately made her pull back again. "I mean, I understand what you mean. I'm sorry you don't have anyone else around you can share that with."
The edge of his mouth quirked up in to a little half smile. "Well, I haven't had for quite some time. I'm over it."
"So, have you made any discoveries with all this? Our 'mysterious time travelling friend or friends?'"
His face lit up as he began to collect the scraps of paper and riffle through them, his smile growing broader as he did so.
"What I showed you last night was not the first time. Same location, same amount of Hawking radiation, last week, and also the week before. There's no real regular pattern to the timing, though. It's not automated as far as I can tell."
"So it's a person and not a machine?"
"Well, can't really say definitively, but it's not just something that happens at regular intervals, which means there's a higher likelihood that it's an intelligent being making decisions based on his or her own agenda." He took his glasses of and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Rose could see the marks left there by a day spent bespectacled, bent over computers and notebooks.
"Do you think more than one person, or....creature?"
"Whatever is being used to affect the travel, it's small in size, so unless it's very tiny people I'd say probably not much more than one."
Rose resisted the temptation to feel for the chain that was hidden under the collar of her smart blouse and jacket. "The TARDIS was small too, on the outside."
"But dimensionally transcendent, and for one thing that's Time Lord technology and there are no Time Lords in this universe, and for another my calculations show that there is no dimensional warping. Whatever this device is, it's not bigger on the inside. What you see is what you get."
"I would like to see it," Rose said quietly.
The Doctor's smile broke in to a full-fledged ear-to-ear grin and he leaned forward to embrace her the best he could without disturbing the balance of his foot on a stack of pillows.
"I knew you'd come 'round," he said in to her shoulder as he squeezed her like a vice grip.
"I was never not 'round. It's just, I have to do Vitex stuff too and I need a little warning before we go running off. For a bit longer at least. A few more months, and then I'll be able to take a back seat again." She kissed the top of his head and extricated herself from his enfolding limbs. "But I'm not sure how we'll manage with you like this. If there's one thing I know about time travel, it seems to involve an awful lot of running."
(To Chapter 3: Not from around here)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Doctor/Rose, Alt!Donna, the Tyler clan, and lots of OC's.
Rating: Teen
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure!
Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine.Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but it would probably help.
The volume on Donna's mobile was still turned up far too loud from the previous night's outing to the pub quiz, and everyone else on the pavement shot her looks as Bach's first cello suite blared from her pocket. She should have never let the Doctor select his own ring tone, but at the time she hadn't been fully apprised of what a truly odd man he was. Charming, intelligent, kind, very exciting to be around, but deeply weird.
"Little early for you," she said by way of greeting, ducking in to a doorway to talk.
"Well, Rose is just off to the office now and...."
"And you're bored is it?" Donna hadn't known the pair for that long, but she quickly had been able to identify them as two people rather unused to the day-to-day life of getting up, going to work and watching telly at tea. Rose seemed to be overwhelmed by the performance of such daily mundanities, huffing breathlessly down the line every time she rang about errands and tasks that most people would take in stride and sort out with a minimum of fuss. The Doctor on the other hand seemed hyper-alert to any escape clause, getting more and more squirrelly until he could find some new adventure or obsession to take him away from it all for a time.
"I was just wondering if you fancied a bit of a trip. I think I've found something in Somerset needs looking in to and I thought, Donna'd be right keen to see this! Eh? Donna?"
"And Rose?"
"At work," he said tentatively.
"And your leg?"
"Oh, that? Well, you'd need to drive. Would you mind too terribly?"
She could almost hear him grinning, turning on the charm.
"The fact that I'm on my way to work figure in to your plans anywhere?"
There was a long silence and the whiff of disappointment was palpable. She hated to let him down, but not everyone could be independently wealthy like he and Rose. She'd love nothing more than to just ride around with the pair of them, meeting new people and having adventures, but that wasn't going to happen in this lifetime. Even Rose it seemed had been unable to completely shrug off her responsibilities.
"I'm sorry," she said, realising that perhaps her refusal had sounded a little embittered. "Maybe at the weekend? We could all go together then, make a day of it."
"No, that's all right," he replied prissily. "Someone seems to be time travelling and I thought you and Rose might want to find out more about it, but apparently not. I'll just....I've got some calculations to do."
"Sorry," Donna said again weakly, but she had a feeling that the Doctor rang off before he had a chance to hear it.
She didn't have time to even close her phone and step back out in to the press of morning commuters before it rang again, this time with the more standard annoying and overplayed pop song.
"Mum, I'm just about to go in to a meeting," she lied.
"This won't take a moment, but honestly Donna, if you wouldn't get in so late and then leave so early maybe we could have a regular conversation like a normal family."
Donna rolled her eyes from the safety of Liverpool Street.
"Your cousin Charlotte rang," her mother ploughed on, "and asked us to come to the seaside this weekend, so I'll need you to pick up dad's prescriptions before we go."
Donna's heart sank. She had given the Doctor a bit of a hard time, but that didn't mean she wasn't fully planning on ringing him back in a few hours to make definite plans for a Saturday trip west. Time travel and Devon cream sounded like a brilliant combination, and she secretly loved being one of the only women in the world who actually had a chance to witness the former whilst enjoying the latter. In any case, it would be sure to beat a dour November weekend at the seaside, even if everything ended up going pear-shaped, there were no dairy products and she landed in hospital again.
"Do I have to go?" she ventured tentatively.
There was a long pause from her mum's end and the disapproval fairly radiated through the handset.
"Charlotte asked after you specifically, but if you want to disappoint an old woman, by all means stay home and go out drinking with your little friends. I'm sure that's much more important than your family."
Taking a deep breath and composing herself, she wondered at her mother's ability to even now make her feel like a ten year old all over again.
"Well, you didn't check if I had plans first, did you? Now I'll have to cancel."
"Plans? You never mentioned any plans to me, how was I supposed to know? But it's too late now, I've already told Charlotte you're coming. You'll have to tell Nerys or whoever that something else has come up."
"Not Nerys." Donna didn't know what was making her keep pushing like this. She could take a bullet in defence of the British Republic, face down three-eyed mutants at the Asda , but not convince her own mother to let her stay home alone for the weekend. Something seemed rather out-of-whack about that arrangement.
"If you're going to say Rose Tyler and that grease monkey she goes around with, then I'm glad you'll have to cancel. And I hope you know that they're only your mates so they can have someone around to feel better than. New money is always like that," she sneered.
"Mum, they're not, honestly. You don't know them."
Sylvia Mott barked out a dry, bitter Ha! "No? So how come when you got all mixed up with them it was you that wound up in hospital, and they just swanned off in to the sunset?"
"They visited," Donna mumbled. Really, most of the time she was recovering was a bit of a haze of morphine and cherry gelatin and she'd gotten the impression that the Doctor and Rose had rather bigger fish to fry during that time anyway. There were no hard feelings.
"And did they offer any kind of compensation for all the work you missed because of their recklessness?"
Her mother still steadfastly refused to acknowledge that Donna had wanted to be in that office, had chosen to help them stop the plot to control the emotions of the people of Britain. Not that Sylvia ever actually believed that plan had ever existed--she was convinced that the Doctor and Rose had made the whole thing up as a prank and it had all just gone terribly wrong.
"I'm not having this conversation with you right now, mum. I've got to go."
"Just remember to get dad's pills, and no stopping off anywhere else on your way home. I'm making a roast."
Donna's heart raced as she closed the handset and put it back in to her pocket. All of her capillaries constricted and her extremities tingled with impotent anger. A grey weekend at the seaside with cousin Charlotte and her herd of ill-behaved yorkies, and her mother refusing to believe that her daughter was a grown woman capable of looking after herself. At least her grandfather would be there, and would likely bring his telescope along as well. Now that Donna knew what was really up there, stargazing had gotten to be much more interesting, and oddly soothing.
***
When Rose returned home, she found the Doctor propped up on the sofa, still in his pyjamas and surrounded by scraps of paper, the laptop open on the coffee table and showing the same satellite image as the night before. She off-loaded her bags and papers on to the kitchen counter and enjoyed a private moment with the unsuppressable grin that still broke out on her face upon reuniting with the Doctor, even if they'd only been apart for a few hours. She hoped she never lost that feeling, never lost the inability to hide her joy at being in his presence.
"What's all this then?" she asked as she entered the room and tried not to notice the disaster area it had become in her absence.
"Just doing some calculations regarding our mysterious time travelling friend. Or friends."
Rose looked at the sea of papers he was sitting amongst, which were all covered with the conjoining geometric circles and lines of his native language.
"There are computers for this, you know."
"I beg to differ. For working out the details of time travel, nothing beats a Time Lord with a biro. Or a part Time Lord with a biro. Gallifreyan maths was created to deal with this sort of thing and, no offence, but I'm still amazed that you lot managed to work out as much as you did without me."
Rose rolled her eyes. "I think we did quite well, thank you very much." She picked up the nearest scrap, turning it this way and that, trying to figure out which end was up. The Doctor reached over and took it from her hand, rotated it 90 degrees and handed it back.
"So these are numbers...equations? Its beautiful."
He nodded while adding a few arabesques to the already complicated glyphs on the pad he was holding. "You've said before," he said distractedly.
"You could teach me." She moved a few things out of the way and perched on the edge of the sofa, careful to not jostle his bad leg. "I'd like that, to learn your language."
Lowering his pad and pen, he gave her a sympathetic look. "You can't."
"Oi, what are you trying to say, that I'm not smart enough?"
He reached out to touch her arm and then brushed back a bit of hair from her face. "No I mean you literally can't. It would be lovely if you could, but you can't see it the way I see it."
She furrowed her brow. "You're just using a normal pen and paper. And you're mostly human anyway. You're like me."
"My body is like yours--well, not as squishy and soft and pink as yours, but you get my meaning. But the language of the Time Lords isn't just about what you see on the paper with your eyes. It's four-dimensional."
Rose made an effort to try and gloss over the squishy comment in favour the more intellectually challenging matter at hand. "The fourth dimension is time," she stated, and he nodded. "But how can writing be four-dimensional?"
He brought his pad out and drew two circles--both, she noted with envy, perfectly symmetrical and round--and held them out to her. "What's different about these two pictures?"
She studied them at length for a few moments, expecting to find at least a superficial difference given that he'd drawn them free-hand, but had to admit there really was none. "They look the same," she said finally, nibbling on her pinky nail in thought.
"To me though, they're completely different. That one there," he pointed with a slender index finger, "was drawn ante-clockwise and taking much more time than this one here which was drawn clockwise and quickly. They mean totally different things, and I can see that, but you can't."
Rose didn't want to feel offended, he hadn't meant to make her feel stupid, but she felt a creeping sense of inferiority nonetheless.
He drew a few bisecting lines and some more interlinking circles, again completely identical in both glyphs and pointed to them. "You see, they look the same, but they're--"
"No, I get it," Rose snapped, but the surprised and wounded look on his face immediately made her pull back again. "I mean, I understand what you mean. I'm sorry you don't have anyone else around you can share that with."
The edge of his mouth quirked up in to a little half smile. "Well, I haven't had for quite some time. I'm over it."
"So, have you made any discoveries with all this? Our 'mysterious time travelling friend or friends?'"
His face lit up as he began to collect the scraps of paper and riffle through them, his smile growing broader as he did so.
"What I showed you last night was not the first time. Same location, same amount of Hawking radiation, last week, and also the week before. There's no real regular pattern to the timing, though. It's not automated as far as I can tell."
"So it's a person and not a machine?"
"Well, can't really say definitively, but it's not just something that happens at regular intervals, which means there's a higher likelihood that it's an intelligent being making decisions based on his or her own agenda." He took his glasses of and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Rose could see the marks left there by a day spent bespectacled, bent over computers and notebooks.
"Do you think more than one person, or....creature?"
"Whatever is being used to affect the travel, it's small in size, so unless it's very tiny people I'd say probably not much more than one."
Rose resisted the temptation to feel for the chain that was hidden under the collar of her smart blouse and jacket. "The TARDIS was small too, on the outside."
"But dimensionally transcendent, and for one thing that's Time Lord technology and there are no Time Lords in this universe, and for another my calculations show that there is no dimensional warping. Whatever this device is, it's not bigger on the inside. What you see is what you get."
"I would like to see it," Rose said quietly.
The Doctor's smile broke in to a full-fledged ear-to-ear grin and he leaned forward to embrace her the best he could without disturbing the balance of his foot on a stack of pillows.
"I knew you'd come 'round," he said in to her shoulder as he squeezed her like a vice grip.
"I was never not 'round. It's just, I have to do Vitex stuff too and I need a little warning before we go running off. For a bit longer at least. A few more months, and then I'll be able to take a back seat again." She kissed the top of his head and extricated herself from his enfolding limbs. "But I'm not sure how we'll manage with you like this. If there's one thing I know about time travel, it seems to involve an awful lot of running."
(To Chapter 3: Not from around here)