Held in Trust: Chapter 6
Title: Held in Trust (6/?)
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 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life
. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Additional A/N: A big thank you to those who submitted suggestions for a name for this universe in Chapter 5. I've always been partial to some variant of the Morris Minor 'Verse and several of you suggested that as well (good taste jaradel , littlebatti , and jesmel ), so that's what I've gone with. The stories in this 'verse are now bundled together on my master list. Thanks everyone for the audience participation!
When the doorbell rang, the Doctor gave Rose a smugly presumptuous look, her reaction to which told her all she needed to know about how she'd fare as a long-term nursemaid. Every time he looked at her, foot propped up, crutches leaning against a far wall, as if to say, "Obviously you'll need to get that," she felt an irrational urge to just sit there and do nothing instead.
A bone-chilling rain had permeated the entire afternoon and evening, and when Donna entered the living room, she was puffing and shivering and complaining loudly to Rose about the weather.
"Can you even imagine, claiming that you care about someone and then demanding they come down to the seaside in November, in this? It's sadistic!"
Rose entered the room as well and Donna handed her a bag that the Doctor hadn't noticed she was holding.
"Hello!" he waved from the sofa, and Donna smiled broadly.
"I see you both came through your little crisis all right."
The Doctor blushed and Rose immediately began to exclaim quite enthusiastically about the bottle of wine that Donna had brought with her.
"Oh, ta very much! Look, Donna's brought us this lovely claret!"
"But we already have plenty of wine," the Doctor replied curiously. "We've a special little fridge for it and everything! Did you know that even the most minute changes in temperature from one hilltop to the next totally change the flavour of the wine? They're called microclimates . Whoever do you think first discovered that? Do you suppose it was just some chap with a bad estate agent who wound up with two hilltops? But really, we've got lots of wine already. Rose says too much, actually."
From the kitchen, amidst the sound of drawers opening and glasses clinking Rose's voice came impatiently. "Donna brought it as a present. That's what we do when we go round other people's houses sometimes. It's polite to bring something for the hostess."
"But Donna's been here loads of times, so you're not really a hostess, are you?" The Doctor heaved himself up to sit straighter, off and running on his quest to understand yet one more human social custom. He'd always thought he'd made a rather good study of humans, knew their slang, spoke several of their languages, had finally really learnt to dress like them (though that project had entailed quite a few swings and misses along the way), but every day brought some new little detail that in the nine previous centuries he'd somehow missed.
"Every time someone comes in to my house, I'm a hostess. It doesn't matter if they've been here a million times before. And you'll have noticed, Donna quite often brings something when she comes over." Rose came back in balancing three full wine glasses in her hands, setting each carefully on the coffee table.
"Does she?"
Donna simply took her glass and, with a smirk that refused to be hidden, sat back to enjoy one of her favourite forms of entertainment: Human versus Alien. How she'd gone through life for so long without being treated to regular performances by these two trying to explain themselves to one another, she'd never know. Certainly it was far more entertaining than anything she'd seen at the cinema recently.
Rose slapped her forehead--literally slapped her forehead like in a cartoon, and Donna nearly let out a hoot of laughter that would have bordered on the unseemly and mocking.
"Yes, of course she does, and I do believe you've never thanked her."
"Well she's never brought wine before, I would have noticed that," the Doctor sniffed, circling his wine in his glass like he'd read in a book to do before taking a sip.
"She has, and you haven't."
"Excuse you both, but I'm right here," Donna finally piped up. She really wasn't feeling particularly offended, but talking about her in the third-person was not something she wanted the Doctor to get in to the habit of. He was like a newborn duckling, imprinting on whatever random tic he got in to the habit of if no one bothered to stop him early in the process. "Cheers," she said, and raised her glass.
The Doctor and Rose both followed suit contritely and there was a brief moment of silence as they all thoughtfully appreciated, or pretended to thoughtfully appreciate, the taste of their beverages.
"So was it really so bad, in Bexhill?" Rose asked Donna, sliding a dish of mixed nuts that the Doctor had been munching on her direction.
"Unspeakable. Pork chops you could upholster a chair with, an army of horrid little yipping dogs, and my mum would simply not shut up about my lack of a boyfriend, as if that doesn't smart enough just on its own." She took a very long gulp of wine, almost draining half of her glass in one go. "But honestly, I'd rather just forget about it. I've been waiting all day to hear what you kids have to tell me, so out with it. What went on here while I was away?"
Rose and the Doctor looked at one another, brows furrowing in unison, both of them clearing their throats awkwardly.
"What...what d'you mean? There wasn't anything going on here. Was there? Doctor, was there anything going on here?"
The Doctor's jaw muscles were clenched so tight he could barely get the words out, "No, nothing whatsoever."
Donna looked at him through narrowed eyes, shaking her head. "So, the whole Help me, Rose is gone, whatever will I do? thing counts as nothing now? Good to know I was made to have a massive row with mum and steal her car and drive halfway back to London over nothing. Come on, I know something juicy is going on. What is it? Aliens? Mutants? Mutant aliens?"
"Oh!" The Doctor gasped with relief and Rose buried her nose in her wine glass again, though it looked like her shoulders were shaking with barely suppressed laughter. "Yes, I think it is rather juicy, as you say."
The Doctor gave a brief summary of what they knew thus far, and Rose recounted her short adventure in Somerset, throwing in a few bits of description that he didn't remember her mentioning the first time around--which, admittedly had been whilst sharing a very warm and rather soporific post-coital bath.
"So," Donna said, draining the last of her wine once they'd finished with their debriefings, "sounds like very naughty humans, is it? No problem for the likes of us. What's the plan?" She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, grinning.
"Dunno." The Doctor ran a hand through his hair and kept it sitting atop his head as he spoke. "My experience is that the naughty humans are always the biggest problem, and the most dangerous."
"Well, that lot only managed to come after me with a big stick--and they missed anyway--so I'd say they're not the largest threats the universe has ever seen. But if the Doctor is right and they're involved in time travel, well..." Rose trailed off and attempted to share an intense look with the Doctor, who seemed to be trying to dodge it.
"I am right, and they are doing it. They could bung up the future, or the past, create a paradox. It's really quite dangerous to play with that kind of technology if you don't know what you're doing. It has to be stopped. That kind of thing is not meant to exist on Earth for thousands more years. We have to find what it is, and destroy it."
Rose immediately stood up as he said this and started picking up their three empty glasses. "I'll just get us some more, yeah?" she said a bit too loudly and gruffly.
"What's with her?" Donna mouthed silently as Rose left the room. The Doctor shrugged, utterly unconvincingly, but the exchange was cut short by the hostess entering again with their glasses now refilled.
"So Donna, how's work?" Rose asked, pointedly changing the subject.
"All right I suppose. This assignment's winding up in a week or so--and not a moment too soon, as I'm about to very creatively murder that great bully of a department head--and I haven't another lined up yet. Might take a bit of a holiday, I've got a few quid saved. But how about you? The Doctor's told me all about how much time you've been spending at Vitex and I think it's just fantastic. A modern career woman, having it all, bringing home the bacon and so forth." She lifted her eyebrows hopefully, inviting Rose to let drop whatever it was the Doctor had said that had shaken her up so.
"Well, if having it all means taking care of this one," she jabbed a thumb in the Doctor's direction, "and sitting in boring meetings all day watching bald old men make decisions I don't care about, then I'd like to give some of it back, please and thank you. I brought reading home this weekend but have barely looked at it. I really have no head for this at all, no matter what Pete keeps insisting. It bores me to tears, like I always knew it would."
"It's been a bit stressful for her," the Doctor nodded sympathetically, to which Rose just curled her lip rather unsubtly. "But I should be back to fighting fit in--"
He was interrupted by his mobile nearly vibrating off the coffee table.
"I told the lads I'd be out of commission for a while but they will keep giving my number out to people." He picked his phone up and looked at the screen, his expression immediately changing from mild annoyance to keen interest. He held it out again so that Rose and Donna could lean forward and read that the incoming call was identified quite clearly as "ROSE."
The Doctor started wildly clicking his fingers and gesticulating to his laptop, which was propped up against a far wall along with a bunch of cables and wires. Both Rose and Donna jumped up and between the two of them conveyed the whole lot over to the coffee table in front of him, whereupon he started tossing cables here and there until he found one that connected to his mobile on one end and in to the computer with the other.
"I thought they might try to hit redial--just surprised it took them so long." The screen of the laptop sprang to life and the Doctor flipped the phone open.
"Hello?"
The three of them huddled around the computer, looking at a satellite map of Britain, their eyes sweeping over the Southwest, looking for some sort of a blip.
"Hello?" the Doctor said again, giving a knowing look to Rose and putting his hand over the receiver.
"There!" he hissed, trying to keep his voice down. A tiny dot had in fact appeared right where they were expecting it to, a few miles outside of Glastonbury. It pulsed happily as the Doctor engaged with the caller again.
"Who is this?"
"That's not really telling us anything new," Rose whispered to Donna but just then the Doctor nearly jumped out of his skin as the map of its own accord began to zoom out, the little facsimile of the Earth rotating, coming to a stop and then zooming in on an island on the other side of the world. The little blip casually reappeared above a deep green bit of rain forest, where it remained until the line went dead, and the Doctor held the phone out for inspection.
Donna and Rose looked between one another and the computer screen while the Doctor attempted some percussive maintenance on both the phone and the connecting cable.
"Well then, that was...unexpected," he said after jiggling the cable and shaking the phone about to his satisfaction.
"What did that all mean?" Rose asked as the Doctor shut his computer down again and slipped his phone into his pocket.
"Well, it means that either someone's got one hell of a throwing arm, or it's not just time these folks are travelling through. Makes sense, really. Time's the difficult bit to manage--if you can do that, folding space is easy. Glastonbury to Mindanao in a matter of nanoseconds, that's quite a trick."
"Minda-when?" Donna laughed, sitting back in her chair.
"Mindanao. An island in the Philippines. That's where the signal wound up before going dead. And it didn't just travel really quickly, it disappeared here and reappeared there." He sat back in to his pillows as well, seemingly entranced by a corner of the ceiling, his hand getting more and more tangled in his hair as he rubbed his scalp.
"But that's not possible," Donna said pointedly. "Things just don't disappear and reappear. It had to have just travelled...like, light speed, yeah? So fast we didn't see it."
The Doctor didn't shift his gaze and didn't acknowledge Donna's question.
"It's...it is possible," Rose said quietly, keeping one eye on the Doctor. "I know you deep down think the time travelling bit is a bunch of bollocks, and you're just humouring us, but it's all true. All of it."
Rose was not wrong, Donna had always suspected that they were having her on about the time travel. Space travel seemed completely within the realm of possibility (hadn't the British Republic landed on the moon, after all?), and she could even accept that the Doctor was not completely human (not a far stretch for the imagination if you knew him well). But time travel was supposed to be physically impossible. They'd never offered to prove their claims to her, though they liked to tell fantastical stories about genies in ancient Rome or the time they met Queen Victoria, and she wagered it was simply a private joke between them. Perhaps it was a way for them to gauge how far they could go before folks would stop believing their wild tales. The room fell silent as Donna processed Rose's words--as well as the inexpressibly sad look that now moved over her features--and the Doctor continued to work on his thousand yard stare. Outside the rain began to pick up again.
"Right!"
The Doctor's exclamation startled even Rose, who'd been watching for it, and made Donna nearly spill her drink.
He rubbed his hands together gleefully and his face cracked into transcendent grin. "Now then, I think this development demands our complete and undivided attention, don't you? Rose, you'll need to call in some favours at Torchwood. Surely these temporal anomalies haven't escaped their notice. They're thick, but they're not that thick. Give Mister Jake a ring and see what he knows. And Donna, fancy taking that holiday transdimensionally? You've got a week left at your job you say, and I fancy it'll take about that long for us to do a bit of...er...legwork. After that, sky's the limit! Donna Mott, are you ready to see a time machine?"
(To Chapter 7: A beautiful machine)
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 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life
. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Additional A/N: A big thank you to those who submitted suggestions for a name for this universe in Chapter 5. I've always been partial to some variant of the Morris Minor 'Verse and several of you suggested that as well (good taste jaradel , littlebatti , and jesmel ), so that's what I've gone with. The stories in this 'verse are now bundled together on my master list. Thanks everyone for the audience participation!
When the doorbell rang, the Doctor gave Rose a smugly presumptuous look, her reaction to which told her all she needed to know about how she'd fare as a long-term nursemaid. Every time he looked at her, foot propped up, crutches leaning against a far wall, as if to say, "Obviously you'll need to get that," she felt an irrational urge to just sit there and do nothing instead.
A bone-chilling rain had permeated the entire afternoon and evening, and when Donna entered the living room, she was puffing and shivering and complaining loudly to Rose about the weather.
"Can you even imagine, claiming that you care about someone and then demanding they come down to the seaside in November, in this? It's sadistic!"
Rose entered the room as well and Donna handed her a bag that the Doctor hadn't noticed she was holding.
"Hello!" he waved from the sofa, and Donna smiled broadly.
"I see you both came through your little crisis all right."
The Doctor blushed and Rose immediately began to exclaim quite enthusiastically about the bottle of wine that Donna had brought with her.
"Oh, ta very much! Look, Donna's brought us this lovely claret!"
"But we already have plenty of wine," the Doctor replied curiously. "We've a special little fridge for it and everything! Did you know that even the most minute changes in temperature from one hilltop to the next totally change the flavour of the wine? They're called microclimates . Whoever do you think first discovered that? Do you suppose it was just some chap with a bad estate agent who wound up with two hilltops? But really, we've got lots of wine already. Rose says too much, actually."
From the kitchen, amidst the sound of drawers opening and glasses clinking Rose's voice came impatiently. "Donna brought it as a present. That's what we do when we go round other people's houses sometimes. It's polite to bring something for the hostess."
"But Donna's been here loads of times, so you're not really a hostess, are you?" The Doctor heaved himself up to sit straighter, off and running on his quest to understand yet one more human social custom. He'd always thought he'd made a rather good study of humans, knew their slang, spoke several of their languages, had finally really learnt to dress like them (though that project had entailed quite a few swings and misses along the way), but every day brought some new little detail that in the nine previous centuries he'd somehow missed.
"Every time someone comes in to my house, I'm a hostess. It doesn't matter if they've been here a million times before. And you'll have noticed, Donna quite often brings something when she comes over." Rose came back in balancing three full wine glasses in her hands, setting each carefully on the coffee table.
"Does she?"
Donna simply took her glass and, with a smirk that refused to be hidden, sat back to enjoy one of her favourite forms of entertainment: Human versus Alien. How she'd gone through life for so long without being treated to regular performances by these two trying to explain themselves to one another, she'd never know. Certainly it was far more entertaining than anything she'd seen at the cinema recently.
Rose slapped her forehead--literally slapped her forehead like in a cartoon, and Donna nearly let out a hoot of laughter that would have bordered on the unseemly and mocking.
"Yes, of course she does, and I do believe you've never thanked her."
"Well she's never brought wine before, I would have noticed that," the Doctor sniffed, circling his wine in his glass like he'd read in a book to do before taking a sip.
"She has, and you haven't."
"Excuse you both, but I'm right here," Donna finally piped up. She really wasn't feeling particularly offended, but talking about her in the third-person was not something she wanted the Doctor to get in to the habit of. He was like a newborn duckling, imprinting on whatever random tic he got in to the habit of if no one bothered to stop him early in the process. "Cheers," she said, and raised her glass.
The Doctor and Rose both followed suit contritely and there was a brief moment of silence as they all thoughtfully appreciated, or pretended to thoughtfully appreciate, the taste of their beverages.
"So was it really so bad, in Bexhill?" Rose asked Donna, sliding a dish of mixed nuts that the Doctor had been munching on her direction.
"Unspeakable. Pork chops you could upholster a chair with, an army of horrid little yipping dogs, and my mum would simply not shut up about my lack of a boyfriend, as if that doesn't smart enough just on its own." She took a very long gulp of wine, almost draining half of her glass in one go. "But honestly, I'd rather just forget about it. I've been waiting all day to hear what you kids have to tell me, so out with it. What went on here while I was away?"
Rose and the Doctor looked at one another, brows furrowing in unison, both of them clearing their throats awkwardly.
"What...what d'you mean? There wasn't anything going on here. Was there? Doctor, was there anything going on here?"
The Doctor's jaw muscles were clenched so tight he could barely get the words out, "No, nothing whatsoever."
Donna looked at him through narrowed eyes, shaking her head. "So, the whole Help me, Rose is gone, whatever will I do? thing counts as nothing now? Good to know I was made to have a massive row with mum and steal her car and drive halfway back to London over nothing. Come on, I know something juicy is going on. What is it? Aliens? Mutants? Mutant aliens?"
"Oh!" The Doctor gasped with relief and Rose buried her nose in her wine glass again, though it looked like her shoulders were shaking with barely suppressed laughter. "Yes, I think it is rather juicy, as you say."
The Doctor gave a brief summary of what they knew thus far, and Rose recounted her short adventure in Somerset, throwing in a few bits of description that he didn't remember her mentioning the first time around--which, admittedly had been whilst sharing a very warm and rather soporific post-coital bath.
"So," Donna said, draining the last of her wine once they'd finished with their debriefings, "sounds like very naughty humans, is it? No problem for the likes of us. What's the plan?" She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, grinning.
"Dunno." The Doctor ran a hand through his hair and kept it sitting atop his head as he spoke. "My experience is that the naughty humans are always the biggest problem, and the most dangerous."
"Well, that lot only managed to come after me with a big stick--and they missed anyway--so I'd say they're not the largest threats the universe has ever seen. But if the Doctor is right and they're involved in time travel, well..." Rose trailed off and attempted to share an intense look with the Doctor, who seemed to be trying to dodge it.
"I am right, and they are doing it. They could bung up the future, or the past, create a paradox. It's really quite dangerous to play with that kind of technology if you don't know what you're doing. It has to be stopped. That kind of thing is not meant to exist on Earth for thousands more years. We have to find what it is, and destroy it."
Rose immediately stood up as he said this and started picking up their three empty glasses. "I'll just get us some more, yeah?" she said a bit too loudly and gruffly.
"What's with her?" Donna mouthed silently as Rose left the room. The Doctor shrugged, utterly unconvincingly, but the exchange was cut short by the hostess entering again with their glasses now refilled.
"So Donna, how's work?" Rose asked, pointedly changing the subject.
"All right I suppose. This assignment's winding up in a week or so--and not a moment too soon, as I'm about to very creatively murder that great bully of a department head--and I haven't another lined up yet. Might take a bit of a holiday, I've got a few quid saved. But how about you? The Doctor's told me all about how much time you've been spending at Vitex and I think it's just fantastic. A modern career woman, having it all, bringing home the bacon and so forth." She lifted her eyebrows hopefully, inviting Rose to let drop whatever it was the Doctor had said that had shaken her up so.
"Well, if having it all means taking care of this one," she jabbed a thumb in the Doctor's direction, "and sitting in boring meetings all day watching bald old men make decisions I don't care about, then I'd like to give some of it back, please and thank you. I brought reading home this weekend but have barely looked at it. I really have no head for this at all, no matter what Pete keeps insisting. It bores me to tears, like I always knew it would."
"It's been a bit stressful for her," the Doctor nodded sympathetically, to which Rose just curled her lip rather unsubtly. "But I should be back to fighting fit in--"
He was interrupted by his mobile nearly vibrating off the coffee table.
"I told the lads I'd be out of commission for a while but they will keep giving my number out to people." He picked his phone up and looked at the screen, his expression immediately changing from mild annoyance to keen interest. He held it out again so that Rose and Donna could lean forward and read that the incoming call was identified quite clearly as "ROSE."
The Doctor started wildly clicking his fingers and gesticulating to his laptop, which was propped up against a far wall along with a bunch of cables and wires. Both Rose and Donna jumped up and between the two of them conveyed the whole lot over to the coffee table in front of him, whereupon he started tossing cables here and there until he found one that connected to his mobile on one end and in to the computer with the other.
"I thought they might try to hit redial--just surprised it took them so long." The screen of the laptop sprang to life and the Doctor flipped the phone open.
"Hello?"
The three of them huddled around the computer, looking at a satellite map of Britain, their eyes sweeping over the Southwest, looking for some sort of a blip.
"Hello?" the Doctor said again, giving a knowing look to Rose and putting his hand over the receiver.
"There!" he hissed, trying to keep his voice down. A tiny dot had in fact appeared right where they were expecting it to, a few miles outside of Glastonbury. It pulsed happily as the Doctor engaged with the caller again.
"Who is this?"
"That's not really telling us anything new," Rose whispered to Donna but just then the Doctor nearly jumped out of his skin as the map of its own accord began to zoom out, the little facsimile of the Earth rotating, coming to a stop and then zooming in on an island on the other side of the world. The little blip casually reappeared above a deep green bit of rain forest, where it remained until the line went dead, and the Doctor held the phone out for inspection.
Donna and Rose looked between one another and the computer screen while the Doctor attempted some percussive maintenance on both the phone and the connecting cable.
"Well then, that was...unexpected," he said after jiggling the cable and shaking the phone about to his satisfaction.
"What did that all mean?" Rose asked as the Doctor shut his computer down again and slipped his phone into his pocket.
"Well, it means that either someone's got one hell of a throwing arm, or it's not just time these folks are travelling through. Makes sense, really. Time's the difficult bit to manage--if you can do that, folding space is easy. Glastonbury to Mindanao in a matter of nanoseconds, that's quite a trick."
"Minda-when?" Donna laughed, sitting back in her chair.
"Mindanao. An island in the Philippines. That's where the signal wound up before going dead. And it didn't just travel really quickly, it disappeared here and reappeared there." He sat back in to his pillows as well, seemingly entranced by a corner of the ceiling, his hand getting more and more tangled in his hair as he rubbed his scalp.
"But that's not possible," Donna said pointedly. "Things just don't disappear and reappear. It had to have just travelled...like, light speed, yeah? So fast we didn't see it."
The Doctor didn't shift his gaze and didn't acknowledge Donna's question.
"It's...it is possible," Rose said quietly, keeping one eye on the Doctor. "I know you deep down think the time travelling bit is a bunch of bollocks, and you're just humouring us, but it's all true. All of it."
Rose was not wrong, Donna had always suspected that they were having her on about the time travel. Space travel seemed completely within the realm of possibility (hadn't the British Republic landed on the moon, after all?), and she could even accept that the Doctor was not completely human (not a far stretch for the imagination if you knew him well). But time travel was supposed to be physically impossible. They'd never offered to prove their claims to her, though they liked to tell fantastical stories about genies in ancient Rome or the time they met Queen Victoria, and she wagered it was simply a private joke between them. Perhaps it was a way for them to gauge how far they could go before folks would stop believing their wild tales. The room fell silent as Donna processed Rose's words--as well as the inexpressibly sad look that now moved over her features--and the Doctor continued to work on his thousand yard stare. Outside the rain began to pick up again.
"Right!"
The Doctor's exclamation startled even Rose, who'd been watching for it, and made Donna nearly spill her drink.
He rubbed his hands together gleefully and his face cracked into transcendent grin. "Now then, I think this development demands our complete and undivided attention, don't you? Rose, you'll need to call in some favours at Torchwood. Surely these temporal anomalies haven't escaped their notice. They're thick, but they're not that thick. Give Mister Jake a ring and see what he knows. And Donna, fancy taking that holiday transdimensionally? You've got a week left at your job you say, and I fancy it'll take about that long for us to do a bit of...er...legwork. After that, sky's the limit! Donna Mott, are you ready to see a time machine?"
(To Chapter 7: A beautiful machine)