Held in Trust: 29/29 + Epilogue
Title: Held in Trust: Chapter 29 + Epilogue
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Teen
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: A Ten II action/adventure fic, with sci-fi, a bit of romance, and alt!Donna. The Doctor, Rose and Donna investigate an apocalyptic death cult, with a whole boatload of unforeseen consequences, including time travel, a mysterious planet with burnt-orange sky, and a human empire gone horribly wrong.
A/N: OMG COMPLETE! Thanks to everyone who stuck with this, even though I let it sit around for a whole year, like a jerk; and thanks to the folks who encouraged me to complete it. I hope my cheesiness proves enjoyable :)
Previous Chapters: Prologue | 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 | Chapter 27| Chapter 28
Silence.
Donna could hear her old wristwatch, ticking away on the ground, for the first time in months.
She loosened her grip on Dr. Chaudhry's lab coat, and Laxmi Chaudhry herself backed down off of the low barrier she was climbing over in a failed attempt to reach...
Rose Tyler.
Standing stock still next to the time lock unit that she'd smashed to bits with an upended lab stool, Rose waited, watched, dared.
The moment seemed crystallised. Donna couldn't be sure if it was simply the effect of a very normal sort of shock at all the running, jumping and smashing, or if there was something more technical afoot, having to do with the destruction of the time lock.
It felt like much longer, but it could only have been a few seconds before a hot wind wound through the room, making the plastic windows of the temporary building groan and puff outwards. Paul Wilshire recited a few lines from the Book of Common Prayer under his breath.
"What have you done?" Dr. Chaudhry said, gripping the low railing set around the incongruous patch of dirt floor-the last remaining evidence of the humble cinderblock shed where everything had begun.
"Oh, pipe down," Donna snapped. She stood next to Rose, took her hand, and squeezed.
Rose squeezed back.
The heat began to dissipate and, briefly, Donna couldn't be sure if she was really seeing something gathering, forming before her eyes, or just hoping that she was. Hope is powerful, she'd learnt since meeting Rose and the Doctor. It was sometimes the only thing that got her through another stultifying, oppressively English workday, behind another 3-foot cubicle wall, in another tan-carpeted office block.
The object materialising in front of her now, however, was definitely comprised of more than hope. It was something large and black, about the size and shape of a coffin, standing upright.
Rose beamed. The entering Torchwood security team, somewhat accustomed to seeing strange things, nonetheless gaped and stood crowded by the door, unwilling to enter further. Donna could make out a bay of computers and their blinking LEDs through the semi-transparent shape, until all of a sudden, she couldn't. All of a sudden, it was as solid as anything else in the room. Someone's two-way crackled faintly, but it went unanswered.
Rose rushed forward, infectiously giddy and tugging Donna's hand behind her.
"I really hate to say I told you so," she laughed as she passed Dr. Chaudhry. "No, wait, actually I don't. I love it."
But when they arrived at the front of the pod, it remained still, lifeless, not even a hiss of hydraulics or snap of a lock turning. Rose chewed on her bottom lip, her brows knitting and her wide smile fading.
"No," she whispered, mostly to herself. "Doctor! Doctor, can you hear me?"
Donna ran her eyes up and down the capsule, trying to determine how, and where it opened. She could hear, off to the side, the jangle of all the kit the security team wore, moving towards them.
"Stand back, miss," one of them said, and Donna frowned. Miss? They bloody well knew her name, for god's sake. Each and every one of them had, at some point, tried to pull her.
But there was no time for a snappy come-back. "Help me get it open," she said to Rose, ignoring everyone and everything else.
"On it," Rose said, already running hands up and down the sides, searching for any sort of button or switch. "Doctor?" she called again, a note of panic concealed in the slight quaver of her voice. "Doctor, are you in there?"
They worked together, quickly. If the Doctor was inside, and was unable to get out, then something was wrong. Either he was trapped, or... Donna didn't want to think too deeply about the other alternatives. Her hands shook and she almost missed a slight indentation that felt unlike the rest of the surface.
She pressed it and four latches that had been flush with the front of the pod raised up. Rose immediately went to work unfastening them, giving a triumphant gasp as she flipped each in turn. At the unfastening of the fourth, a crack appeared along the edge.
Donna watched Rose wrenching the capsule open.
And she watched as the Doctor's body fell forward, out of the pod and into a heap on the ground, his forehead making a sickening thud as it struck the packed-earth floor.
Donna felt like all of the air had been sucked from her lungs. Her ears rang and buzzed. Of all the things that she had been expecting, it was never this. A tearful reunion, perhaps; gloating to Dr. Chaudhry that they'd been right all along; maybe a bit of gentle piss-taking, but not this. Not the Doctor's limp, crumpled body or his moddish blue suit covered in dust. Or Rose kneeling over him, crying silently, struggling to roll him over, find his pulse, and calling for a medic.
A fat tear rolled down Rose's face and fell onto the Doctor's cheek, washing a clean trail through the grime he was covered in.
Someone with a medical bag skittered to a halt next to the Doctor's body. Donna recognised the back of his ginger head: Danny, a former combat medic who had attempted to buy her many a pint in the previous weeks (each accompanied by another prospective name for the multitude of red-headed children they'd undoubtedly have together).
Medical equipment was unpacked everywhere, horribly clinical and sterile.
Danny gave directions in a low, tense voice.
Hypoxia... hypothermia... BVM mask... external rewarming...
Donna felt frozen to the spot, feeling quite criminally useless. There wasn't anyone to yell at or point fingers toward, no alien to cut off at the pass or corridor to run down. She'd never seen anything like this happen in real life, and it wasn't at all like on Casualty.
Rose's face was pallid, but otherwise set into a hard, blank expression. Was this what being a long-term acquaintance of the Doctor made a person into? Well-acquainted with fifty-three startlingly distinct forms of heart-break, and able to count off squeezes of a resuscitation mask while being careful not to shed tears on the patient?
Would it happen to her, too?
"If any of you have a hot water bottle at your workstation, fill it and bring it as soon as possible please," Danny said in a calm, business-like tone. "Do we have an ETA on the ambulance?"
When the trio of paramedics arrived, they brought with them yet more equipment and monitors and terms Donna didn't understand. As they lifted the Doctor onto a stretcher, his arm twitched and his hand fell open. Something small and hard hit the floor, but no one else noticed.
As Rose was bundled out of the lab in the wake of the paramedics, she looked back to Donna, just once.
There wasn't anything said in that look. What would there be to say? They were two scared humans trying to cope with an unexpected crisis the best they could. Two proper mates, at the end of it all.
Danny sat on his haunches, cleaning up the detritus of his medical kit. His freckled face was drawn-he looked exhausted, though it could only have been 15 minutes that he'd been at work on the Doctor.
"Is he going to be all right?" Donna asked, and just putting the question into words felt awful, like a betrayal. Like she didn't really believe that he'd always be all right. She told herself not to cry, but then she told herself to sod off; she'd cry if she wanted to.
"I'm sure he'll be okay," Danny said, not entirely convincingly. "He looks like a fighter."
"A flyweight maybe," Donna said through an unexpected hiccup-like sob.
Danny zipped up his bag and gave her a sympathetic look that managed to not be patronising at the same time. "His core body temperature had suddenly dropped for some reason, but the good news is he had a weak pulse. And he was breathing-not terribly well, mind, which is why I bagged him."
"Breathing's good."
"Can I give you a lift? To the hospital, I mean."
"Yeah." She reached down and picked up the small rock that the Doctor had let slip from his hand. "That'd be good, thanks." Maybe later she'd think about a stiff drink-and one for Rose too.
***
Rose was absently thumbing through a cooking magazine when she saw the Doctor's eyes begin to open.
She didn't want to get too excited. He'd almost come to several times in the previous few hours, but on each occasion his red-rimmed eyes closed gently again. She put her magazine down and went to shut the blinds, in case the bright noontime sun would be too much for him.
When she approached his bedside again, his eyes were glassy but he was looking purposefully around the room, like he was searching for something.
His chapped, swollen lips parted slightly. "Oh."
It wasn't a moan but a statement. A statement of... what? Disappointment?
"Welcome back, stranger." She cringed inwardly at the thoroughly unconvincing nonchalance.
"Hello." His voice was hoarse and scratchy. She offered water and he took a few tentative sips.
"How do you feel?"
He brought a hand up to touch is forehead, and Rose noticed that it was trembling slightly. "Like I've been through the vortex with no life support." He surveyed his IV line and blood gas monitor, then started fumbling with his bed, trying to sit up.
Entirely too much like a mother hen, in retrospect, Rose tutted. "Easy, there. I'll call the doctor in."
"The Doctor is already in," he said, with a weak smile. Or at least, she thought it might be a smile, but there was something else playing around the edges of his mouth.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I tried to get them to turn the time lock off sooner-"
"The what?"
"It's how we kept that thing from destroying the planet. I used the TARDIS key. But I guess it interfered with the time ship, or whatever that was. I knew you were coming back, but no one believed me."
He gave a single, ironic little snort. The attending physician had told Rose that he might be a bit out-of-sorts when he came around, and that, while his prognosis was excellent, his body had been through quite a bit of trauma. She shouldn't take anything he might say too seriously-there was a good chance he wouldn't even remember his first few hours awake. Still though, that dark, cynical laugh was just wrong.
"Everyone else thought you were dead." Rose soldiered on, fibbing ever-so-slightly about her own wobbling (for his own sake, she told herself). "But I knew you'd be back, just as soon as you'd sorted it all."
"Dead?"
"Vaporised."
"Sounds painful."
A joke! Sort of. "Me and Donna kept the faith. She helped me, so much. I think I might be needing to nick her from you."
A light of realisation crossed his features. "How long has it been, for you?"
"Ten weeks. And... four days." She didn't have to hide how much she pined for him when he was gone. Not any more, not with this Doctor-though she sometimes forgot.
"Oh." There was that note of disappointment again.
"Why? How long's it been for you?"
"Couple days, maybe not even."
"That's nice for you, then." She meant it to be a gentle ribbing, but it came out a hair this side of bitter. "I missed you."
"Sorry." The dark circles under his eyes, the hollowness of his cheeks, the tremor of his hand when he touched her arm, all made his apology seem absolutely miserable. What did he have to apologise for, really? She was the one who'd let her belief in him slip-he was just doing what he always did, saving the Earth, no matter what the cost. "I'm so sorry."
"Not your fault," she said, with a bright, slightly forced smile. "And I'm sorry I wasn't able to bring you back sooner-and with fewer medical emergencies. Still, you're back now, only slightly the worse for wear."
"Stupid kids." He closed his eyes, looking like he might sleep for a while longer. "Brilliant, but stupid."
"Pardon?"
"It's not your fault. I didn't turn the life support system back on. Needed the power routed through the temporal dilator. They didn't notice before they pushed me in." He was slipping off again, slurring his words, and not making a tremendous amount of sense.
"Pushed you-"
"I'm tired." His chest rose and fell with a long, deep breath, and he was sleeping again.
***
Three weeks later...
As pubs go, The Water Poet was quiet. It wasn't a match day and the weather was fine. Except for a couple drunks of the solemn, solitary variety, it was mostly empty.
"And when are you going to tell Rose all of this?" Donna pulled one knee up to her chest, sitting sideways in the booth. "Notice I did not say if."
The Doctor took a long gulp and finished off his second pint of bitter. "I'm not sure if I should."
"You're unbelievable!" And she reached across the table and smacked him. Hard! He rubbed his jaw, feeling abashed and self-righteous in confusingly equal parts.
"Blimey, you really did bond."
She ignored his pained expression. "And I can't believe you told me before you told her!"
This is what he got, he thought, for telling anyone. The old him, he could have taken this secret across the stars, never breathing a word to anyone. This new life, though, this new humanity-lying to the people he loved just hurt, and worrying about Cassiel and what was happening in the future, without being able to share that, was keeping him from sleeping. Rose was beginning to notice and the fatigue was getting to him. He thought that maybe if he told one person, that would create some sort of vessel into which he could dump all of it, then seal it up again.
He spun his empty glass around and around, thinking. "I couldn't hurt Rose like that."
"You mean you don't want to take your lumps."
"Oi!" He started playing with the vinegar bottle indignantly, avoiding eye-contact. "By which I mean, you're probably right. But what am I supposed to say? 'I love you, but I wasn't planning on coming back.'"
"That would be a start, yeah."
"Ugh," the Doctor grunted.
"Love doesn't exist in a vacuum, mate." She reached into her pocket, handing something over the table in a tightly closed fist.
When the Doctor looked into his palm, she'd left him with a marble-sized rock, grey with purple veins.
"You dropped that," she said, "when you came back."
He turned it over and over, this last relic of a home that wasn't home any more.
"Would you go back, if you could?" she asked, settling back into the booth again.
The Doctor didn't even need to think about it, which startled him. "Yeah."
"And your friends, those brilliant kids, don't you trust them?"
"What?" The Doctor was taken aback.
"Seems to me like if you really believed in them, then you'd know they could fight for themselves, without your skinny arse around mucking everything up."
She had a point. As usual.
***
At the Hotel London on Malta, the beach was lovely, but the service left a lot to be desired.
"I ordered that lemonade a half an hour ago!" Rose huffed, flipping over in order to tan evenly.
The Doctor sat under an umbrella, inspecting a large bottle of suncream. "Twenty-three minutes," he murmured. "You know, this SPF business doesn't mean anything, really. Total scam."
"Just goes to show, no point in even bothering. Might as well just give in and get a tan."
"Yeah... I don't tan. I think we've already established this."
Rose laughed. "Then a beach holiday was sort of a poor choice, don't you think?"
"I thought you'd like it," he said, and something just clicked into place. Something almost tangible, at the edge of his senses. "Because I have something to tell you."
Rose rolled to her side, her bikini top sliding around distractingly. "I know."
"You... what?"
"Nothing," she said, brightly. "Go on. I'm all ears."
"Oh. Well..." He reached into their beach bag and fished about until his hand came upon the small box he'd been carrying around with him for their entire trip. "I wanted to give you something."
He pulled it out and handed it over, too scared of what was to come to give it all much preamble.
Her mouth fell into a sceptical, sly sort of half-smile. He realised with alarm that small boxes given on holidays tend to signify something quite specific for human women. It was too late now, though, she was opening it, sitting up on the side of her lounge chair.
"It's... it's a rock." She tilted her head at him.
"It's... from where I was; when I disappeared. And you know how I told you about the people I met, and how terrible their lives were, and how much they helped me..." He ran out of words, which was a strange sensation for him. "Blimey."
Rose waited patiently for him to continue, inspecting the rock in its box.
"I... didn't want to leave them... to their plight. I-"
"You weren't going to." Rose said.
The Doctor's speechlessness did not improve. He started a few sentences, but all of them seemed to end after the first syllable. Did Donna tell her? After he asked her not to and promised to do it himself, in his own time. He tried to work up some sort of anger at that possibility, but he knew it couldn't be true, that Donna would never betray him like that.
"I'm not an idiot, Doctor. You said you'd disabled the life support systems of the time ship-"
All his capillaries constricted in surprise. "I did?"
"When you were in hospital. And you wouldn't do that if you were actually planning on, you know, using it and remaining alive. You said someone had pushed you in. After you told me about those people, how they were no better than slaves, I put two and two together."
"You did?" He was beginning to sound like a right knob, but he found he couldn't help it. No other phrases were available to him.
"Two plus two equals Doctor. You're wonderful, and not half mad, but not so mysterious as you like to think." She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. "If you weren't the sort of man who would give up everything in order to make the world better, you wouldn't be the Doctor any longer."
"But you said..." He knew he was taking a risk by pointing out the flaw in her rationalisation of his behaviour, but he couldn't help it. "You said you trusted me to come back."
"Well, that's just sort of short-hand. I trusted you to do the right thing. Before I knew the whole story, the right thing would have been to come back. But if the right thing would have been to stay, I'd trust you to do that." She looked off over the smooth surface of the Mediterranean. "As much as it might hurt. And it would. It did."
"It hurt for me, too. So much," he admitted. "And there's something else."
She must have seen the pain in his eyes. She moved off her lounge chair and sat next to him on his beach towel, moving their discarded shoes and novels and sunglasses out of the way to make room.
"Tell me."
"That planet, that they called Cassiel... it was Gallifrey. This universe's version-no Time Lords. Just me."
"You said it was gone, your planet."
"Gallifrey existed in all universes, all at once, until... until the war. But with the Time Lords gone, in all other universes but the original, the planet remains, like it was never anything but just another rock out there, spinning around a binary star." Just a rock, lifeless, useless except for minerals to be exploited. It made his bile rise, just thinking of it.
"Was it like you remembered?" she asked, taking the rock out of the box and holding it up to the sun to inspect it better.
"Exactly."
"Tell me about it."
She took the purple-veined stone in her palm and placed her hand in his. Between them, it grew warm, like it would have been under Cassiel's-or Gallifrey's-two suns.
Epilogue
At the setting of Cassiel's second sun, the bunk house was quiet, expectant, and a bit redolent of a feigned disinterest. Various indentures involved themselves in tasks that took little concentration and made no noise. Stones were picked out of grain rations, shoes were resoled with tubes of adhesive, mattresses were picked clean of scurrying black beetles.
The gloom of the short night-time came on suddenly, and the people who'd been pretending to work stopped even trying.
The whole work unit waited, listening.
And then it began.
Far away, but distinct, a song rose. The voice was not perfect, the notes not entirely pure, but the melody was strong and haunting. It echoed off the walls of the mountain that the unit was situated directly under. No one had been able to tell which direction it came from, but every night, for the past three weeks this single voice rose in song, serenading indenture, sixer and guard alike. Everyone had a strange feeling that it was just for them, somehow. The guards were loathe to work too hard to try and find the source-they enjoyed it too much themselves. The sixers started to slow down the progress of their shift-change, so that everyone was outside the mine when the song began.
And tonight there was something new.
A second voice, a harmony, coming from somewhere inside the compound.
The indentures in their bunk house looked around. Why hadn't it occurred to any of them to sing along? It suddenly seemed absurd that they all had remained in awed silence every single night.
Danede was the first indenture to take up the tune herself, in a reedy, high voice. Her friend, Rallah was next to join, and everywhere in the unit others were emptying into the central courtyard in order to hear better, and sing themselves.
No one noticed when the voice that began the song dropped out of the great harmony. Likewise, no one noticed when three figures-two tall and thin, one petite and covered in feathers-walked through the front gates of the compound unimpeded.
They split up upon reaching the courtyard, each of them taking the hand of a complete stranger. Those people then, in turn, reflexively took the hand of another singer.
The younger of the two tall humans leaned down and whispered into the ear of the feathered Campheline. "You sure this is going to work?"
With her free hand, she smoothed the feathers on top of her head. "Trust me."
And then she started walking, tugging the hand she held behind her. She walked through the gate and towards the great mountains, the snow now illuminated by one of Cassiel's pink-hued moons. Behind her, the population of Work Unit 87 sang as they walked away from what had unhappily passed for their home for so long.
They did not know what they walked towards.
In another universe, in a time locked away forever, these mountains had been called Dark Reprisal. For the new people of Cassiel, they would be Enduring Hope.
~END~