The One True Free Life 8/26
Title: The One True Free Life (8/26)
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.
This chapter is as of yet unbeta'd, so read at your own risk.
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
The Doctor was fairly certain that the mirror he sat across from was not for doing his hair. Which was a pity really because it looked a fright, all smashed down on one side and sticking up unartistically on the other. With his hands zip-tied together and his feet attached to the legs of the chair with gaffer tape, it would have been difficult to do anything about that anyway.
He stared in to the depths of the mirror, past his own dishevelled reflection, sending a warning to whomever was doubtless watching there. The unfathomable age that darkened his eyes sat between the perfectly straight lines of his brow and lips, all of it underlined by a set jaw. There was no panic, no fear, just cold anger. Unblinking, he sat and waited, ticking off each minute as it passed.
Each thought he had of the Tylers, of Jackie being manhandled and of Pete having a gun pointed at him, Tony crying and being held at the top of the stairs by Deepa, and Rose, clawing her way through the group of men in black balaclavas, screaming his name as they tossed him in to the back of a van, each of these scenes chilled his blood one more degree.
There was the sound of a door opening behind him, and he saw in the reflection a man enter, dressed very nattily in a three-piece suit, hairline receding, but in a dignified manner. He circled the chair where the Doctor sat, as if he wanted to get a look at him from all angles. The Doctor did not follow him as he moved, but continued to stare in to the mirror. He'd seen enough of the universe to know that powerful men rarely were the ones to get their hands dirty, and men who lacked power liked to dress as if they had it.
"I'm sorry for all this unpleasantness, but I couldn't risk the lives of my men in bringing you in. I'm sure you understand." The man in the suit came to a stop behind the Doctor's right shoulder. "Though perhaps if you would care to tell us what you are, we could dispense with much of the security. Predicated, of course, on your answer."
The Doctor craned his neck upwards, wanting to make eye contact without the intermediary of a reflection in a mirror. "What do you mean 'what am I?' I'm not a what, I'm a who."
The man chuckled, a high, rasping sound. "Right, then, let's start there, shall we? I'll begin. We know you boarded the Vitex Corporation's private zeppelin three days ago in Bergen, Norway. You have been staying since then at the Tyler family estate, where you've developed an intimate relationship with Rose Tyler. You have no identification, there is no record of you in the database, you're clearly not Norwegian, and that doesn't matter at any rate because they've no records of you either. You have no name and even your lover refers to you by the title Doctor." He moved around to face the Doctor directly. "Have I missed anything?"
A steely silence descended on the Doctor and he refrained from answering.
"Unless you have anything to add to that, I think we'll skip the who and go straight to the what." He pulled a small digital audio device out of the inside pocket of his jacket, pressed a button, and the Doctor's own voice from just a few hours earlier echoed around the bare floor and tile walls of the small windowless room.
"All the timelines, all the other dimensions that I should be able to see, they're all behind it, and I can't find a way to get around it. If I'm honest, it's a little aggravating. I know it's all there, I can almost hear the humming of it, behind that wall."
The room fell in to silence when the device was shut off again, and the man appeared to carefully consider the Doctor, looking him up and down, and then directly in the eye. "Care to enlighten us?"
The Doctor kept his face a mask as he considered what to do next, and struggled with the competing impulses to try to talk his way out of this, and to inflict bodily harm on his interrogator. His other self had been right about how dangerous he was, but not entirely correct as to why. Given the amount of security involved in his capture and detention, however, it logically made no sense to try to accomplish anything by force. Though this logic now seemed maddeningly illogical.
"Well, the thing of it is," he began, cocking his head slightly and trying to banish the anger from his eyes, "I don't really know who I am either." The most effective lies always contain 80% truth. "But I'm human, if that's what you're wondering. I'm afraid there's been a bit of a mix-up."
His captor shot a wry look through the mirror. "So, you're going with amnesia, is that it? Bit of a bang to the head, woke up in Norway, find yourself speaking nonsense?"
The Doctor shrugged, as well as he could with his hands tied, and let a dimple pop on his right cheek. "Go on, you're Torchwood, am I right? Aliens and all that? I'm not an alien. Do I look like one?"
The man in the suit laughed, a strangely vulgar "Ha!" for someone who appeared so poised. "Torchwood? No, I'm afraid not, Doctor." He made a beckoning gesture in to the mirror and turned to crouch down in front of the chair. "No indeed. Pete Tyler has far too many friends there to make any of our fail-safe plans effective."
The door behind him opened and shut and the Doctor turned his head to look at who had entered. The last thing he saw was a dark-haired woman in a white lab coat tapping a syringe.
~o0o~
As the overcast grey dawn began to spread through the Tyler home, between gaps in closed curtains and under shut doors, there was silence. In Pete Tyler's wood-panelled office two figures in hastily thrown-on clothing regarded each other over a large desk.
"Please," whispered Rose, sitting in a leather chair with knees drawn up to her chest and her bare feet illuminated in the single shaft of sunlight that crept through the curtains.
"I would if I could. You know I would. But this isn't Torchwood, I don't know how much help I can be." Pete tapped the closed lid of his laptop, his mind turning even as he professed his uselessness.
"How do you know? Who else would care about him?"
"Those weren't Torchwood tactics. To just burst in to a home waving weapons around, no attempt at a quiet rendition? Unless things have changed more than I thought since we left, it can't be." He sighed and in spite of himself booted up his computer. "And I don't want to believe that that is how they are doing things now." Turning away from the technology, he grabbed a pencil and piece of scrap paper, scrawled a message, and handed it to Rose.
The house is bugged. They will expect us to be concerned and ask questions. Any intel I find I can not say out loud.
She nodded and handed the paper back, and Pete set it in a decorative ceramic dish and touched a lit match to it.
"Your mother's taken something to help her calm down. Why don't you go check on her and Tony, make sure Deepa's getting on alright."
Rose silently left the room, not even making the floorboards creak under the Persian carpet with her footsteps, but Pete did not look up at her departure. He was fumbling with something on the floor under his desk, and it was best that she not see its location or know about its existance.
He lifted up an edge of the rug and removed a hardwood plank, as quietly as he could so as not to alert those listening in that there was anything amiss. Reaching a hand in to the hole left in the floor, he felt around for the keypad, and traced its edges with a finger so he could key in the combination without having to look. With a quiet snick it opened and he removed the lid, then plunged his hand into the aperture up to his elbow, coming out with a metal box about the size of a deck of cards, and a mobile phone.
He paused before continuing, listening to the sounds of Rose and Jackie talking down the hall, Jackie's voice at last low and sleepy-sounding. Opening up the metal box he ran his finger over the dozens of SIM cards that lay neatly arranged within. He counted down from the top and took out the sixteenth card, opened up the back of the mobile phone and inserted it. Making sure the ringer was turned off, he lay the phone off to the side and reversed the procedure to put the box of cards back from where he'd taken them.
His computer was one of the most secured in the entire nation, but if whomever was perpetrating this operation was brazen enough to closely surveil and then enter his home armed to abduct a guest in the middle of the night, he could safely assume that each keystroke was being monitored. To keep up appearances, he banged out a couple of indignant emails to important people that he knew would not be answered, or at least not answered in any meaningful way.
It was after hitting "send" on a particularly turgid-sounding screed to the Torchwood head of security that, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the display of the mobile light up with an SMS message. Just one word: Liberty.
(To Chapter 9)
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.
This chapter is as of yet unbeta'd, so read at your own risk.
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
The Doctor was fairly certain that the mirror he sat across from was not for doing his hair. Which was a pity really because it looked a fright, all smashed down on one side and sticking up unartistically on the other. With his hands zip-tied together and his feet attached to the legs of the chair with gaffer tape, it would have been difficult to do anything about that anyway.
He stared in to the depths of the mirror, past his own dishevelled reflection, sending a warning to whomever was doubtless watching there. The unfathomable age that darkened his eyes sat between the perfectly straight lines of his brow and lips, all of it underlined by a set jaw. There was no panic, no fear, just cold anger. Unblinking, he sat and waited, ticking off each minute as it passed.
Each thought he had of the Tylers, of Jackie being manhandled and of Pete having a gun pointed at him, Tony crying and being held at the top of the stairs by Deepa, and Rose, clawing her way through the group of men in black balaclavas, screaming his name as they tossed him in to the back of a van, each of these scenes chilled his blood one more degree.
There was the sound of a door opening behind him, and he saw in the reflection a man enter, dressed very nattily in a three-piece suit, hairline receding, but in a dignified manner. He circled the chair where the Doctor sat, as if he wanted to get a look at him from all angles. The Doctor did not follow him as he moved, but continued to stare in to the mirror. He'd seen enough of the universe to know that powerful men rarely were the ones to get their hands dirty, and men who lacked power liked to dress as if they had it.
"I'm sorry for all this unpleasantness, but I couldn't risk the lives of my men in bringing you in. I'm sure you understand." The man in the suit came to a stop behind the Doctor's right shoulder. "Though perhaps if you would care to tell us what you are, we could dispense with much of the security. Predicated, of course, on your answer."
The Doctor craned his neck upwards, wanting to make eye contact without the intermediary of a reflection in a mirror. "What do you mean 'what am I?' I'm not a what, I'm a who."
The man chuckled, a high, rasping sound. "Right, then, let's start there, shall we? I'll begin. We know you boarded the Vitex Corporation's private zeppelin three days ago in Bergen, Norway. You have been staying since then at the Tyler family estate, where you've developed an intimate relationship with Rose Tyler. You have no identification, there is no record of you in the database, you're clearly not Norwegian, and that doesn't matter at any rate because they've no records of you either. You have no name and even your lover refers to you by the title Doctor." He moved around to face the Doctor directly. "Have I missed anything?"
A steely silence descended on the Doctor and he refrained from answering.
"Unless you have anything to add to that, I think we'll skip the who and go straight to the what." He pulled a small digital audio device out of the inside pocket of his jacket, pressed a button, and the Doctor's own voice from just a few hours earlier echoed around the bare floor and tile walls of the small windowless room.
"All the timelines, all the other dimensions that I should be able to see, they're all behind it, and I can't find a way to get around it. If I'm honest, it's a little aggravating. I know it's all there, I can almost hear the humming of it, behind that wall."
The room fell in to silence when the device was shut off again, and the man appeared to carefully consider the Doctor, looking him up and down, and then directly in the eye. "Care to enlighten us?"
The Doctor kept his face a mask as he considered what to do next, and struggled with the competing impulses to try to talk his way out of this, and to inflict bodily harm on his interrogator. His other self had been right about how dangerous he was, but not entirely correct as to why. Given the amount of security involved in his capture and detention, however, it logically made no sense to try to accomplish anything by force. Though this logic now seemed maddeningly illogical.
"Well, the thing of it is," he began, cocking his head slightly and trying to banish the anger from his eyes, "I don't really know who I am either." The most effective lies always contain 80% truth. "But I'm human, if that's what you're wondering. I'm afraid there's been a bit of a mix-up."
His captor shot a wry look through the mirror. "So, you're going with amnesia, is that it? Bit of a bang to the head, woke up in Norway, find yourself speaking nonsense?"
The Doctor shrugged, as well as he could with his hands tied, and let a dimple pop on his right cheek. "Go on, you're Torchwood, am I right? Aliens and all that? I'm not an alien. Do I look like one?"
The man in the suit laughed, a strangely vulgar "Ha!" for someone who appeared so poised. "Torchwood? No, I'm afraid not, Doctor." He made a beckoning gesture in to the mirror and turned to crouch down in front of the chair. "No indeed. Pete Tyler has far too many friends there to make any of our fail-safe plans effective."
The door behind him opened and shut and the Doctor turned his head to look at who had entered. The last thing he saw was a dark-haired woman in a white lab coat tapping a syringe.
~o0o~
As the overcast grey dawn began to spread through the Tyler home, between gaps in closed curtains and under shut doors, there was silence. In Pete Tyler's wood-panelled office two figures in hastily thrown-on clothing regarded each other over a large desk.
"Please," whispered Rose, sitting in a leather chair with knees drawn up to her chest and her bare feet illuminated in the single shaft of sunlight that crept through the curtains.
"I would if I could. You know I would. But this isn't Torchwood, I don't know how much help I can be." Pete tapped the closed lid of his laptop, his mind turning even as he professed his uselessness.
"How do you know? Who else would care about him?"
"Those weren't Torchwood tactics. To just burst in to a home waving weapons around, no attempt at a quiet rendition? Unless things have changed more than I thought since we left, it can't be." He sighed and in spite of himself booted up his computer. "And I don't want to believe that that is how they are doing things now." Turning away from the technology, he grabbed a pencil and piece of scrap paper, scrawled a message, and handed it to Rose.
The house is bugged. They will expect us to be concerned and ask questions. Any intel I find I can not say out loud.
She nodded and handed the paper back, and Pete set it in a decorative ceramic dish and touched a lit match to it.
"Your mother's taken something to help her calm down. Why don't you go check on her and Tony, make sure Deepa's getting on alright."
Rose silently left the room, not even making the floorboards creak under the Persian carpet with her footsteps, but Pete did not look up at her departure. He was fumbling with something on the floor under his desk, and it was best that she not see its location or know about its existance.
He lifted up an edge of the rug and removed a hardwood plank, as quietly as he could so as not to alert those listening in that there was anything amiss. Reaching a hand in to the hole left in the floor, he felt around for the keypad, and traced its edges with a finger so he could key in the combination without having to look. With a quiet snick it opened and he removed the lid, then plunged his hand into the aperture up to his elbow, coming out with a metal box about the size of a deck of cards, and a mobile phone.
He paused before continuing, listening to the sounds of Rose and Jackie talking down the hall, Jackie's voice at last low and sleepy-sounding. Opening up the metal box he ran his finger over the dozens of SIM cards that lay neatly arranged within. He counted down from the top and took out the sixteenth card, opened up the back of the mobile phone and inserted it. Making sure the ringer was turned off, he lay the phone off to the side and reversed the procedure to put the box of cards back from where he'd taken them.
His computer was one of the most secured in the entire nation, but if whomever was perpetrating this operation was brazen enough to closely surveil and then enter his home armed to abduct a guest in the middle of the night, he could safely assume that each keystroke was being monitored. To keep up appearances, he banged out a couple of indignant emails to important people that he knew would not be answered, or at least not answered in any meaningful way.
It was after hitting "send" on a particularly turgid-sounding screed to the Torchwood head of security that, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the display of the mobile light up with an SMS message. Just one word: Liberty.
(To Chapter 9)