Fic: Dead Reckoning (2/3)
Title: Dead Reckoning (2/3)
Author: shinyopals
Rating: PG
Pairing: Rose/Ten II
Summary: Still reeling from the events in Alexandria and the subsequent strain on their relationship, the Doctor and Rose try to head back to Earth yet again. That quickly becomes far more difficult than they expect when the TARDIS unexpectedly breaks down.
Author's notes: Thanks to ginamak for betaing so so well and with the usual crazy efficiency!
Episode 11 of a virtual series at the_altverse, following No Place Like Houm last week.
Virtual Series Masterlist
Part 1
Turning back to the Doctor, Rose could see something like fear in his eyes and found herself hoping it wasn’t too mirrored in her own.
“Seems like a good time for another hug?” she suggested roughly.
He leaned forward a little blankly and wrapped his arms around her. She stroked his back and murmured soothing nonsense into his ear. Despite his cooler body temperature, he felt warm against the chill of space. Shutting the door crossed her mind briefly before she struck it out. The absolute darkness inside would be too much.
“We’ve still got our air bubble,” she pointed out as she drew back. “She’s not dead.”
“No, not dead,” he agreed despondently. “She’s on emergency systems. We’ve got the atmospheric bubble, so we won’t freeze to death.”
“What else?” Rose asked.
“Can you just- I don’t know!” he burst out. “I don’t know how damaged she is, Rose! We might be half an hour from running out of air!”
Rose forced away her own desire to panic and grabbed his hands tightly in her own.
“Can you still hear her in your head?”
He swallowed. “A little.” He paused and shut his eyes. “She’s so quiet.”
That explained some of his sudden panic, then. She had her own connection to the TARDIS these days, but his was something still a little too Time Lord for her to understand. Sometimes, she wondered if it was a little too Time Lord for him to understand. Reacting like this wouldn’t help them and he was normally fine under pressure.
“Check the air,” she said. “We need to know how much we’ve got. If we’ve got half an hour, we need to send out an SOS fast, and... and I need to call my mother, and...” she trailed off helplessly, shutting her eyes and refusing to let herself think about it. “Just check the air.”
He stepped away from the door and around the side of the console room. Rose followed him. If this was the last half hour of their lives, she didn’t want to spend a moment away from him. The Doctor stopped about half way between the door and the corridor to the other rooms and yanked off one of the remaining roundels. He stuck his head in first, then hoisted himself in nearly to his waist.
Rose put her hand lightly on the small of his back. His shirt was a little damp with drying sweat, but it was comforting. He was still alive. So was she. For now.
As he worked the only sound came from the sonic screwdriver. Rose stared out blankly into the console room, illuminated only faintly from the door. The stars were too far away.
She could swear the air was getting warmer. That was what happened when you ran out, wasn’t it? She remembered her Torchwood fire training: running into burning buildings with only a tiny filter that recycled her breath to stop her from inhaling the poisonous smoke. Even if the building was fake, the training had been real. The air had heated up and each breath had been a desperate gasp for oxygen that wasn’t there any more while she’d pressed on with the group. This was now. It was happening right here and right now and they were running out of-
“Brilliant!” shouted the Doctor from inside the roundel. He jumped backwards and grinned at her. “We’ve got air. The filters are working. Nothing to worry about. And it’ll keep the temperature liveable. Chilly, but liveable.” He seemed to take in the way she was looking at him. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I-” She shook her head. “I must be going nuts. I thought I was gonna suffocate.”
He leaned in close, inspecting her eyes with the sonic screwdriver and making her shrink away and blink. After the dark, it was too much.
“The human mind is a lot more powerful than you think,” he said slowly.
“It really felt like...” She trailed off awkwardly and shrugged, embarrassed at her reaction.
“If your brain believes something, you’ll really feel the physical symptoms,” he said. “And this is... not the ideal place.”
Rose pinched her nose. They had air. He’d not specified a time limit, which either meant their air would never run out or that they’d die of dehydration first.
She’d had field training for this sort of thing. If Torchwood agents were stranded anywhere, they were supposed to be able to survive. True, she’d never quite been trained for dealing with floating through space, but it seemed like the same sort of thing.
“Can you check on the water?” she said. “That’s an internal system like the air, isn’t it? And shields and stuff. We might get hit by a lump of rock or something if we’ve lost protection.”
She saw his gaze swoop around the room, no doubt cataloguing how he could check these things.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’m gonna check the kitchen and grab some stuff from the spare parts cupboard,” she said.
He hurried across to the console and stuck his head underneath it. Rose heard the clinking of metal on metal. Before she could say anything, he reappeared. There was a click, and a thin beam of light appeared. Stepping forward, she received the torch with a bit of a smile. She hadn’t even realised he had one, since he seemed to do all of his work with the light of the sonic.
“Get to work, then,” she said, squeezing his hand and heading off. The torch marked out a clear path for her into the corridors and she kicked aside a couple of tools that had shifted in the TARDIS being thrown about.
She was almost out of the room before, “Rose?”
“Yeah?” She stopped and turned. Keeping the torch pointed at the floor spared his eyes, but meant she couldn’t see his face.
“Don’t be long,” he said quietly. She thought he sounded afraid.
Swallowing back a sudden rush of tears that threatened, she nodded, and then realised he might not be able to see her. “I won’t be,” she assured him. Her voice wavered a little.
Then she turned and strode out into the corridor again. There were things that had to be done.
In the kitchen, she made a quick inventory of their food supplies. The fridge and freezer had lost power, she noticed. She jammed the freezer with the books and magazines from the kitchen counter then tossed all the tea towels in the fridge before slamming the doors. That’d keep things cold for an extra few moments, but it didn’t change the fact that their dinner that night was going to be ice cream.
The TARDIS was already starting to cool down. Even with the atmospheric shell in place and their emergency power, the depths of space needed a heater. She took solace in the fact that the Doctor had proclaimed it “liveable”, which at least meant they wouldn’t freeze. All the same, before heading to the spare parts room, she took a quick detour to their bedroom and hauled out a bunch of clothes. Putting on two pairs of socks for herself, she then pulled some tracksuit bottoms over her pyjamas and added a sweatshirt. She propped the torch on the dresser and tied her hair back out of her face before finishing off her outfit with a woollen hat. Next she gathered up layers of clothes for the Doctor, draping them over her arm.
Her final destination before returning to the console room and the Doctor was the cupboard they kept their spare parts and junk in. Usually, whenever she walked in it seemed bigger than the last time. She suspected it wouldn’t stop until it reached the vast proportions of the spare parts room in the old TARDIS - a room she’d never seen the complete depths of.
Today, however, it seemed smaller than before. She hoped that was just her imagination. The thin light from the torch seemed weak as it flittered up and down the height of the narrow room. The walls were the usual assortment of unevenly spaced shelves. They were always taller than her. They were taller, even, than the Doctor, who climbed the very shelves themselves to get at hard-to-reach corners. In the dark, though, they loomed. They seemed to bend over her as they rose up, ignoring physics and gravity as they looked down to where she stood.
Grimly, she stared back up at them. She had a job to do, and creepy looking shelving was not going to stop her.
She knew that half a year ago - before they’d started travelling again - several objects had come into the possession of Torchwood. They’d been small (for interstellar objects, anyway): only a couple of feet in length and shaped like a rugby ball. They’d been weighted at one tip so they balanced perfectly. The only thing Torchwood had been able to work out on their own was that they gave off an immensely strong signal. The Doctor had taken one look at them, and said they were buoys used to mark out spacelanes in high traffic areas, and that they must have strayed well off course and fallen into the Earth’s gravity. He’d also proclaimed them boring and wandered off. That hadn’t changed the fact that the team that found them insisted there had been six, whereas the Torchwood warehouse had only ever been able to find five.
She wandered further into the narrow room, grabbing bits and pieces that looked interesting or useful as she hunted for the space buoy, finally locating it behind what looked like a traffic cone. She reached down and nudged it out from the bottom shelf and onto the floor. It stood neatly on its tip, just as she remembered.
She reached down and picked it up and trekked back to the console room.
“Rose, is that-?” He emerged from another roundel and turned to see her, breathing an audible sigh of relief when he did.
“What?” she asked, worried.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said. “It’s just so quiet. I kept thinking I could hear you coming back. Anyway, what on earth have you got there?”
She placed the buoy and spare parts on the floor and beckoned him over. Once he was within grabbing distance, she pulled a bobble hat over his head.
“Wha- Hey!” His hand went up to feel what she’d done. “I’ll get hat hair,” he complained, but didn’t remove it. “Haven’t got any socks, have you? My feet are freezing!” She offered him two pairs and, like her, he put both on, before turning to the rest of her pile. He removed his tie and replaced it with a scarf before layering on another two shirts and a jumper. For his trousers, he merely pulled off his pyjamas and put on one of his usual pair of suit trousers.
“Did you find anything?” Rose asked.
“We should be able to deflect a medium sized asteroid without noticing it,” he said. “I think we’re too deep in space for any of that, but it never hurts to be careful. And we’ve definitely got some water, but I’m not sure how much yet. The system’s closed. If it’s working, it’ll be able to remove some moisture from the air as well as recycle waste-”
“Thank you, but I didn’t want to know,” muttered Rose.
“Squeamish,” he teased, although his heart wasn’t in it. “I need to do some more tests before I can know for sure how long we can go. Just... avoid the showers for now.”
“Or flushing the loo,” muttered Rose, briefly envisioning sticking her arse out the door to the TARDIS and deciding she actually preferred the thought of there being a recycling system in place.
“Anything to report from your investigations, skipper?” he asked, taking her hand and squeezing.
“There’s food for two weeks if we’re careful,” she said. “And tonight we’re having ice cream.”
“What more could I ask for?” he replied. She could hear the note of worry enter his voice again. In the vastness of space, two weeks was no time at all. Their chances of being found did not look good.
Rose reached down and picked up the buoy. The weights made it easy to hold the object in one hand, though it looked like some strange balloon.
“We can change the message and boost the signal, right?” she said. “There’s got to be some sort of space SOS thing you’re supposed to do.”
The Doctor stared at her, then at the buoy, then back at her. And then he grinned. “So we can! You, Rose Tyler, are a genius!”
“And you,” she said, with a grin, “are a thief. Some poor Torchwood intern is probably still looking for this thing.”
“And it’s a good thing too!” he said cheerfully.
He balanced the buoy on the console and pointed the sonic at it. Rose had not, on previous inspection, noticed the groove running around the centre. Neither had anyone at Torchwood. She smiled as it clicked open and he gently removed the top of the shell. Before she could really see anything, he’d taken out one of the components and was bending over it with the sonic.
Rose elbowed him out of the way and leaned in, inspecting the circuits with her torch. The weight at the bottom seemed to be an odd silvery substance that looked almost fluid. She prodded it gingerly to see if it moved, but discovered it was completely solid. It seemed at first glance to just be a counterweight for balance, but she realised some of the wires were feeding into it. Following them back through to their circuit, she realised it was a gravity device. Of course! That made sense. Using the gravity of the surrounding stuff to keep it perfectly positioned used far less power than having an on-board engine.
She left that for the Doctor to fiddle with and instead found the transmitter. It would be connected to the device the Doctor had taken, which she guessed was where the signal was encoded. The Doctor was changing the message, and she could boost the signal. She ducked under the console to grab up the small tools box. She’d seen this sort of thing hundreds of times before.
Her work was so distracting that she nearly jumped out of her skin when the Doctor leaned in again.
“Nice work,” he murmured as he replaced the computer. He sounded so pleased and she beamed with pride. Here she was, working on some alien device she’d only just had a chance to look at, and she was doing it right. She’d never dreamed of this when she was younger.
The Doctor reached into the bottom half of the buoy to start fiddling with the gravity circuits.
“I was worried, you see,” he admitted suddenly. “The TARDIS does have an SOS of her own, of course, but that was burned out. I forgot we had this. The range won’t quite be as good and I don’t know if the TARDIS will translate the message if need be, but it’s more of a chance than I thought we had. Someone out there just might be listening, Rose!”
She smiled, feeling warmed up by his words. Half of the difficulty with any situation was believing there was still hope. She had plenty of reason to know that. But she also completely believed that between them, they could turn any situation around. She just had to keep remembering that in the cold and dark, and keep him remembering it too.
Finally, the Doctor snapped the top half of the shell back in place and sealed it carefully. He patted the top of it with his hand.
“Want to give it a throw?” he asked, grinning. She blinked. “Just chuck it out the door,” he explained. “You don’t need to throw far or hard because the grav-pack will kick in and put it in orbit around us.”
Rose picked up the buoy gingerly. “How far in orbit?” she asked.
“Couple of miles,” said the Doctor. “Out of sight, I’m afraid. It’s tied to the TARDIS, though. Anyone who picks up the signal will come to the buoy, which’ll lead them to the TARDIS.”
By the door she hesitated for a moment, glancing up at the Doctor for confirmation. He nodded and smiled. Rose gripped the buoy like the overly large rugby ball that it was, and threw...
For ten feet or so, the buoy followed the arc she expected, spinning around on its central axis. Then the course veered, bending around under the TARDIS as it spun farther and farther away. Like the Doctor had done earlier, she dropped to the floor and looked out under the door to follow the path for a few seconds until the dark dot on the dark background completely vanished.
That was that, then. Their SOS. It seemed a little anti-climatic. At least a flare could always be seen.
She got to her feet and looked over to her husband. He leaned in to put an arm around her and she leaned back. They would be all right. They had to be.
Eventually he drew back and glanced back to the left hand wall of the console room. “We need to know how much water we’ve got,” he said.
She nodded and followed him over again. When he ducked all the way into the roundel all she could do was stand close and slide one of her hands underneath his many layers. His skin was cool against hers and by now she’d mapped every inch of him again and again. Even if at the moment this was the closest she could get to a hug, it was still him. The Doctor. Her husband.
“Talk to me,” she said, when the silence drew on too long.
“About these wires?” he asked dubiously, voice muffled by what he was doing.
“Well, that or a story,” she said, smiling despite herself. “I could listen to you babble all day.”
That got a chuckle. “I’ll quote you on that.”
“I even give you permission to talk non-stop through the next one of Mum’s parties.”
“When did I ever need permission?”
She laughed and relaxed a little, leaning against the wall of the console room. To save the battery, she even clicked off the torch. There was enough light coming in so she could see the console room, after all. And behind her, she could hear the buzz of the screwdriver and the chatter of the Doctor. They’d be all right.
It couldn’t have been much more than fifteen minutes before he eased himself out and stretched, cracking the joints in his neck with relief.
“Remind me to install cushions in those things,” he said, with a grimace.
“Water?” asked Rose hopefully, not wanting to get distracted.
“Well we can flush the loo, but we probably shouldn’t shower,” he said. “It’ll last at least as long as the food will, as long as we don’t do anything daft, like try and make a zero-G swimming pool.” He paused. “Those are actually quite interesting, you know. Remind me to take you to one at some point.”
Rose smiled, feeling relieved. If she just ignored the fact that that meant they had two weeks and then however long it took them to starve, it seemed better. At least they could drink.
“Sounds fun,” she said, trying to keep her tone light.
They decided without needing to say anything to stay in the console room. Rose went along to grab the duvet and some pillows from their bed, and a couple of books. Then they both went to grab more from the spare parts room. The console room was the only place with light, however dim, since even if the Doctor would probably be able to recharge the batteries, the torch barely lit up anything. Rose found a comfortable spot leaning against one of the doors with a book on her lap. The light was just enough to read, now that she was so used to it, but she mostly just stared out into the stars.
The Doctor sat cross-legged and within arm’s reach, fiddling with gadgets and circuits. He turned his phone into a receiver, scanning for long distance communication between ships.
“Problem is, it’s not like scanning for radio signals on Earth,” he admitted. “Out here, you’re far less likely to run into anyone so there’s far less communication going on. I’ve also got to block out all the background noise.”
“Well if there’s a chance, we should do it,” said Rose. “Even a tiny one. Might make all the difference.”
He nodded and got back to work on his next project. This one was connected to the TARDIS console via several cables and components. He didn’t tell her any specifics, merely said he was doing what he could. Half of the reason he was doing it, Rose suspected, was to keep his hands busy.
She fidgeted where she sat, feeling useless. It was all very well knowing a few buttons to press to materialise the TARDIS and being able to do basics like boost signals. Here and now, she was out of her depth. She knew she could rely on the Doctor to save them, but not being able to help made her feel so helpless.
Closing her eyes, she leaned back again. The last time she’d had this little control of her own destiny had been on the voyage to Rome. Before that, it had probably been when they’d been separated. Well, that wasn’t strictly true, of course: there were plenty of times things had gone out of hand. But she could always jump back into things and get on with it. She’d been the one pushing on the Dimension Cannon at every step of the way, risking her job and reputation on a crazy project. She hardly remembered slowing down in those years before she’d found him again, let alone being forced to stop.
Now she was stopped, though. Well and truly stuck-in-the-mud. They were relying on an SOS signal she couldn’t see and whatever the Doctor was doing. More and more the last few hours seemed dreamlike and unreal. She remembered sending out the buoy, but had they really done so? She remembered thinking she was suffocating, too and that hadn’t been real because they were still breathing.
She was here with the Doctor, she reminded herself. They were both alive and well and there was plenty of time for someone to find them. They had air, food and water. The TARDIS - the best ship in the universe - was still keeping them safe from space even if she wasn’t working properly at the moment. They would come out of this, just like they always did.
Idly, she picked up her phone. Full signal, of course. She could phone her mum or her dad or Tony or any one of her colleagues from Torchwood. She could order a pizza, she thought. Order a pizza all the way from who-knew-where. She wondered how much they’d charge for delivery and laughed hysterically, throwing her phone away.
The Doctor looked up suddenly and moved over to take her hands, eyes on hers.
“What would I say?” she asked helplessly, not bothering to explain why she’d laughed.
He held her in his arms and stroked her hair. “You won’t need to tell her anything until we get back there,” he promised. “Then we can all have a good laugh about my rubbish driving. Or you two can, anyway.”
She reached around to hold onto him and leaned into his shirt. Everything about hugging him made her feel better. He stayed where he was, seeming to enjoy the comfort the same way she did. She closed her eyes and tugged the duvet around them and he only cuddled her tighter. It was warm and safe here with him, and she hoped he felt the same about her. Nothing could hurt them if they were together.
~*~
She must have dropped off to sleep because she was woken by the clatter of metal and the angry swearing of the Doctor.
While she’d been sleeping, he’d moved out from under the duvet and continued with his work. It hadn’t gone well, though, whatever it was he was doing. He leaned against the opposite door to her and seemed to sink to the ground, head in his hands.
Rose scrambled out from under the duvet and crawled across it towards him.
She tugged his hands from his face and he stared at her blankly.
“Doctor, what is it?”
“We’re trapped here,” he said. “If we don’t die right here we’re still trapped. If someone finds us and takes us to a planet, that’ll be our home. She’s gone.”
Rose felt a chill creep through her as he spoke, but she pulled him into a hug as he’d done to her before.
“I don’t believe you,” she told him simply.
He stared at her. “It’s not a question of belief, Rose, I can’t-”
“Rubbish,” she interrupted. “You told me she died the first time we landed in this universe. You thought we were stuck in the void forever.” She paused. “Stuck with Mickey.” She thought she saw a smile quickly suppressed, but couldn’t be sure. “And then you told me I’d never see Mickey again. And then you told me I’d never see you again. That was all a bunch of rubbish, too. But apparently travel between parallel worlds was impossible. Bet you thought Time Lord metacrises could never happen before they did, too.”
“Rose, I know you think I can do anything-”
“Keep your ego in check, mister. I think anything you can’t do, I can.”
This time the smile was genuine and definite, although it quickly vanished. “What if we are stuck here?”
She reached forward to tilt his face up to hers. “Doctor, didn’t we have this argument?” she said softly. “Didn’t we have it ages before you’d even thought about spending a year and a half living in London and pretending you didn’t work for Torchwood-”
“I didn’t work for Torchwood,” he argued.
“Nah, ‘course not,” she said. “They just paid you to save the world from aliens.”
“Rose, I know you love the travelling,” he said quietly. “That life... we always had the TARDIS growing. We always knew some day we’d leave. What if we’re stuck forever? No TARDIS and no chance of one.”
“Well, I might get a job piloting spaceships,” considered Rose. “Or maybe saving the world. I dunno. Depends on the planet, I s’pose. Someone’s gotta bring home the bacon or you’ll have to cut back on hair product.” His hand went to his head, which was still wearing the bobble hat, and then he gave her a look. “Doctor, I don’t want to settle down,” she said. “Neither do you. But if we’re stuck in the future or on another planet, we’ll make the most of it, yeah? I’m ok with anything, as long as I’ve got you.”
He allowed himself to smile properly then, and she traced out the delicate laughter lines on his face, planting soft kisses on them before kissing his mouth. The Doctor then leaned forward to rub noses with her and suddenly chuckled darkly.
“You know,” he said, “it’s just occurred to me that sex would probably be a really irresponsible thing to do with the dwindling water and food supplies and all that.”
Rose couldn’t stop herself from giggling as she shifted to better be able to hold onto him. “Sometimes the universe really sucks,” she said.
He laughed again and soon they were both giggling and holding onto each other as though not having sex was the funniest thing in the universe. And at that moment, it rather seemed like it was.
~*~
Rose kept an eye on the time as the hours passed. It would be too easy to just eat and sleep when they were hungry and tired in the semi-darkness. The Doctor managed to harness some residual energy within the TARDIS’s circuits to give them some limited power. This, they used to crudely cook one of the frozen pizzas from the freezer. It was still quite cold in there, Rose was pleased to note, so they saved the ice cream for another day.
They ate in the console room and she wasn’t half glad to get some warm food inside her, even if it was a slightly odd tasting pizza they’d picked up from an Earth colony a couple of months ago. Having enough food on the TARDIS was always a bit hit-and-miss because of how much time they spent out exploring new worlds. She’d actually been surprised earlier that they’d had enough for two weeks, even if that did include all the assorted tin cans, some of which were missing their labels.
The Doctor toyed with his food absently, staring out of the doors more and more. He seemed to have half forgotten she was there.
“Eat up,” she urged, nudging him with her foot.
He jumped a little and turned back to her. “I’m just... not hungry,” he said. He offered her his plate. “Want some?”
For a second she was very tempted, but then things suddenly became rather clear.
“If you think you’re going to starve yourself while I eat everything, you’ve got another thing coming,” she pointed out.
“I still need less food than you,” he pointed out, a little half-heartedly. “Still part Time Lord, remember?”
“And a bloke, too,” said Rose. “Aren’t men supposed to need more calories than women?”
He seemed to sigh, but forced down another few bites. To his credit (which made her feel guilty for the accusation), he genuinely seemed to not be very hungry. Putting her own empty plate aside, she moved to sit next to him again and tugged off his hat, running her hands through his hair and gently massaging his scalp. That always relaxed him and, despite the situation, this was no exception.
“Rose,” he said bleakly, “I’m sorry.”
“None of this is your fault,” she replied quietly, hoping just for once that he might really believe her.
He leaned back into her arms. It wasn’t long before he drifted off. Grabbing the plate from his lap and pushing it just out of reach, she then reached down for the duvet and her pillow. Wrapping the covers around them both once more made it feel a little more like a bed. She idly wondered, as she settled back down next to him, lightly stroking his hair again, whether moving the mattress from their bedroom would be excessive. The floor of the console room was not the most comfortable surface to sleep on.
Somehow, though, it seemed far better to stay here, barely three feet away from an open door out into space. Even at night, when the dark was welcome, she’d never appreciated just how pitch dark and dead silent the TARDIS could be. With her simulated windows and corridor lights and engines gently humming, she was never like this. Going into the dark and the quiet was only a reminder of how wrong things were. Here by the star light she felt safe.
Slowly, she began to relax again. The Doctor’s even breaths against her cheek and hand on her waist were comforting. Every so often, he murmured something in his sleep, but it was always too quiet and unintelligible for Rose to understand.
“Night,” she muttered against his neck, as her eyes grew heavier.
“Mmm,” he replied, not even seeming to be conscious of it.
Rose shut her eyes, and darkness fell.
~*~
They seemed to fall into a routine of nothingness over the next couple of days.
Rose would wake early, stiff and aching. The floor was not comfortable. All the same, nothing could tempt her to sleep in their bedroom. The Doctor always seemed better rested than her, but didn’t seem to be in a particularly good mood. They reassured each other as best they could, and quietly ate a small breakfast. It never quite felt like enough food.
Then the Doctor would get back to his fiddling. Rose just sat and gazed into space, drifting in and out of sleep and dreams, thinking they were already dead one moment and already rescued the next. Soon, the sounds of the Doctor working felt like the only real thing to her.
Periodically, he’d stop and throw down the sonic and insist that there was nothing to be done. Every time, Rose urged him onwards, hovering over his shoulder and trying to help until she felt so useless she couldn’t do it anymore. Then she sat back down in her spot and stared out into space.
At the end of each day, hours counted out by her watch, they’d have some food and hold each other and eventually slip back into sleep.
“I’ve had more relaxing holidays,” the Doctor murmured one night.
“Mmm,” she agreed. “We should write a letter of complaint.”
“View’s not too bad, though,” he said, gazing out into space. Rose just buried her head in his shoulder and tried to sleep.
On what she knew to be the third day but felt like far longer, she picked up some curved glass and metal tubes from the Doctor’s discarded pile of spare parts. Soon, she had something of a working telescope, balanced uneasily on a spindly little stand. She found a notebook and pen and started mapping out the sky, with a bit of help from an astronomy textbook from the 1960s she found in the bookshelves. Perhaps they were close to Earth, or perhaps there was some constellation that the Doctor would recognise from another angle. She might even be able to use it to work out if the TARDIS was moving at all. It wouldn’t get them rescued, but knowing something could be a comfort.
She didn’t have any astronomy experience aside from vaguely being able to pick out the Great Bear when at home. None of these stars seemed anything like the night sky of Earth, though, so she made up her own names and constellations.
In the top right corner of her field of vision she found the TARDIS - four stars in a rectangular shape with a particularly bright one at the top and in the centre that seemed to flash on and off. She drew the pattern carefully in her book, deciding a small cluster part way down was the “Police Telephone” sign.
To her left, she was sure she could see the words “BAD WOLF” written across the cosmos, and she smiled to herself. She liked to see it as a message to let her know things would be all right. She’d had, so the Doctor had said, all of time and space at her disposal, and she liked to think she’d left herself a few encouraging notes.
She hunted in the stars for some constellation for the Doctor. Tall and thin and right across the universe would do it. Carefully, she adjusted her telescope to point to the uppermost part of the doorframe. That was where to start looking.
There was a crash!
She spun around to see the Doctor folding his arms and scowling at his latest project. It looked like he’d kicked it and she wasn’t even sure where the sonic was. One of these days he was going to throw it out the door and then where would they be?
He caught her gaze and looked away, sheepish.
“It’ll be all right, you know,” she told him, for what felt like the millionth time. She wondered if it would start to sound convincing soon. What else was there to say, though?
“I’ve killed you,” he said blankly. “We’re stuck here. Rose, there’s nothing I can do.”
Part 3
Author: shinyopals
Rating: PG
Pairing: Rose/Ten II
Summary: Still reeling from the events in Alexandria and the subsequent strain on their relationship, the Doctor and Rose try to head back to Earth yet again. That quickly becomes far more difficult than they expect when the TARDIS unexpectedly breaks down.
Author's notes: Thanks to ginamak for betaing so so well and with the usual crazy efficiency!
Episode 11 of a virtual series at the_altverse, following No Place Like Houm last week.
Virtual Series Masterlist
Part 1
Turning back to the Doctor, Rose could see something like fear in his eyes and found herself hoping it wasn’t too mirrored in her own.
“Seems like a good time for another hug?” she suggested roughly.
He leaned forward a little blankly and wrapped his arms around her. She stroked his back and murmured soothing nonsense into his ear. Despite his cooler body temperature, he felt warm against the chill of space. Shutting the door crossed her mind briefly before she struck it out. The absolute darkness inside would be too much.
“We’ve still got our air bubble,” she pointed out as she drew back. “She’s not dead.”
“No, not dead,” he agreed despondently. “She’s on emergency systems. We’ve got the atmospheric bubble, so we won’t freeze to death.”
“What else?” Rose asked.
“Can you just- I don’t know!” he burst out. “I don’t know how damaged she is, Rose! We might be half an hour from running out of air!”
Rose forced away her own desire to panic and grabbed his hands tightly in her own.
“Can you still hear her in your head?”
He swallowed. “A little.” He paused and shut his eyes. “She’s so quiet.”
That explained some of his sudden panic, then. She had her own connection to the TARDIS these days, but his was something still a little too Time Lord for her to understand. Sometimes, she wondered if it was a little too Time Lord for him to understand. Reacting like this wouldn’t help them and he was normally fine under pressure.
“Check the air,” she said. “We need to know how much we’ve got. If we’ve got half an hour, we need to send out an SOS fast, and... and I need to call my mother, and...” she trailed off helplessly, shutting her eyes and refusing to let herself think about it. “Just check the air.”
He stepped away from the door and around the side of the console room. Rose followed him. If this was the last half hour of their lives, she didn’t want to spend a moment away from him. The Doctor stopped about half way between the door and the corridor to the other rooms and yanked off one of the remaining roundels. He stuck his head in first, then hoisted himself in nearly to his waist.
Rose put her hand lightly on the small of his back. His shirt was a little damp with drying sweat, but it was comforting. He was still alive. So was she. For now.
As he worked the only sound came from the sonic screwdriver. Rose stared out blankly into the console room, illuminated only faintly from the door. The stars were too far away.
She could swear the air was getting warmer. That was what happened when you ran out, wasn’t it? She remembered her Torchwood fire training: running into burning buildings with only a tiny filter that recycled her breath to stop her from inhaling the poisonous smoke. Even if the building was fake, the training had been real. The air had heated up and each breath had been a desperate gasp for oxygen that wasn’t there any more while she’d pressed on with the group. This was now. It was happening right here and right now and they were running out of-
“Brilliant!” shouted the Doctor from inside the roundel. He jumped backwards and grinned at her. “We’ve got air. The filters are working. Nothing to worry about. And it’ll keep the temperature liveable. Chilly, but liveable.” He seemed to take in the way she was looking at him. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I-” She shook her head. “I must be going nuts. I thought I was gonna suffocate.”
He leaned in close, inspecting her eyes with the sonic screwdriver and making her shrink away and blink. After the dark, it was too much.
“The human mind is a lot more powerful than you think,” he said slowly.
“It really felt like...” She trailed off awkwardly and shrugged, embarrassed at her reaction.
“If your brain believes something, you’ll really feel the physical symptoms,” he said. “And this is... not the ideal place.”
Rose pinched her nose. They had air. He’d not specified a time limit, which either meant their air would never run out or that they’d die of dehydration first.
She’d had field training for this sort of thing. If Torchwood agents were stranded anywhere, they were supposed to be able to survive. True, she’d never quite been trained for dealing with floating through space, but it seemed like the same sort of thing.
“Can you check on the water?” she said. “That’s an internal system like the air, isn’t it? And shields and stuff. We might get hit by a lump of rock or something if we’ve lost protection.”
She saw his gaze swoop around the room, no doubt cataloguing how he could check these things.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’m gonna check the kitchen and grab some stuff from the spare parts cupboard,” she said.
He hurried across to the console and stuck his head underneath it. Rose heard the clinking of metal on metal. Before she could say anything, he reappeared. There was a click, and a thin beam of light appeared. Stepping forward, she received the torch with a bit of a smile. She hadn’t even realised he had one, since he seemed to do all of his work with the light of the sonic.
“Get to work, then,” she said, squeezing his hand and heading off. The torch marked out a clear path for her into the corridors and she kicked aside a couple of tools that had shifted in the TARDIS being thrown about.
She was almost out of the room before, “Rose?”
“Yeah?” She stopped and turned. Keeping the torch pointed at the floor spared his eyes, but meant she couldn’t see his face.
“Don’t be long,” he said quietly. She thought he sounded afraid.
Swallowing back a sudden rush of tears that threatened, she nodded, and then realised he might not be able to see her. “I won’t be,” she assured him. Her voice wavered a little.
Then she turned and strode out into the corridor again. There were things that had to be done.
In the kitchen, she made a quick inventory of their food supplies. The fridge and freezer had lost power, she noticed. She jammed the freezer with the books and magazines from the kitchen counter then tossed all the tea towels in the fridge before slamming the doors. That’d keep things cold for an extra few moments, but it didn’t change the fact that their dinner that night was going to be ice cream.
The TARDIS was already starting to cool down. Even with the atmospheric shell in place and their emergency power, the depths of space needed a heater. She took solace in the fact that the Doctor had proclaimed it “liveable”, which at least meant they wouldn’t freeze. All the same, before heading to the spare parts room, she took a quick detour to their bedroom and hauled out a bunch of clothes. Putting on two pairs of socks for herself, she then pulled some tracksuit bottoms over her pyjamas and added a sweatshirt. She propped the torch on the dresser and tied her hair back out of her face before finishing off her outfit with a woollen hat. Next she gathered up layers of clothes for the Doctor, draping them over her arm.
Her final destination before returning to the console room and the Doctor was the cupboard they kept their spare parts and junk in. Usually, whenever she walked in it seemed bigger than the last time. She suspected it wouldn’t stop until it reached the vast proportions of the spare parts room in the old TARDIS - a room she’d never seen the complete depths of.
Today, however, it seemed smaller than before. She hoped that was just her imagination. The thin light from the torch seemed weak as it flittered up and down the height of the narrow room. The walls were the usual assortment of unevenly spaced shelves. They were always taller than her. They were taller, even, than the Doctor, who climbed the very shelves themselves to get at hard-to-reach corners. In the dark, though, they loomed. They seemed to bend over her as they rose up, ignoring physics and gravity as they looked down to where she stood.
Grimly, she stared back up at them. She had a job to do, and creepy looking shelving was not going to stop her.
She knew that half a year ago - before they’d started travelling again - several objects had come into the possession of Torchwood. They’d been small (for interstellar objects, anyway): only a couple of feet in length and shaped like a rugby ball. They’d been weighted at one tip so they balanced perfectly. The only thing Torchwood had been able to work out on their own was that they gave off an immensely strong signal. The Doctor had taken one look at them, and said they were buoys used to mark out spacelanes in high traffic areas, and that they must have strayed well off course and fallen into the Earth’s gravity. He’d also proclaimed them boring and wandered off. That hadn’t changed the fact that the team that found them insisted there had been six, whereas the Torchwood warehouse had only ever been able to find five.
She wandered further into the narrow room, grabbing bits and pieces that looked interesting or useful as she hunted for the space buoy, finally locating it behind what looked like a traffic cone. She reached down and nudged it out from the bottom shelf and onto the floor. It stood neatly on its tip, just as she remembered.
She reached down and picked it up and trekked back to the console room.
“Rose, is that-?” He emerged from another roundel and turned to see her, breathing an audible sigh of relief when he did.
“What?” she asked, worried.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said. “It’s just so quiet. I kept thinking I could hear you coming back. Anyway, what on earth have you got there?”
She placed the buoy and spare parts on the floor and beckoned him over. Once he was within grabbing distance, she pulled a bobble hat over his head.
“Wha- Hey!” His hand went up to feel what she’d done. “I’ll get hat hair,” he complained, but didn’t remove it. “Haven’t got any socks, have you? My feet are freezing!” She offered him two pairs and, like her, he put both on, before turning to the rest of her pile. He removed his tie and replaced it with a scarf before layering on another two shirts and a jumper. For his trousers, he merely pulled off his pyjamas and put on one of his usual pair of suit trousers.
“Did you find anything?” Rose asked.
“We should be able to deflect a medium sized asteroid without noticing it,” he said. “I think we’re too deep in space for any of that, but it never hurts to be careful. And we’ve definitely got some water, but I’m not sure how much yet. The system’s closed. If it’s working, it’ll be able to remove some moisture from the air as well as recycle waste-”
“Thank you, but I didn’t want to know,” muttered Rose.
“Squeamish,” he teased, although his heart wasn’t in it. “I need to do some more tests before I can know for sure how long we can go. Just... avoid the showers for now.”
“Or flushing the loo,” muttered Rose, briefly envisioning sticking her arse out the door to the TARDIS and deciding she actually preferred the thought of there being a recycling system in place.
“Anything to report from your investigations, skipper?” he asked, taking her hand and squeezing.
“There’s food for two weeks if we’re careful,” she said. “And tonight we’re having ice cream.”
“What more could I ask for?” he replied. She could hear the note of worry enter his voice again. In the vastness of space, two weeks was no time at all. Their chances of being found did not look good.
Rose reached down and picked up the buoy. The weights made it easy to hold the object in one hand, though it looked like some strange balloon.
“We can change the message and boost the signal, right?” she said. “There’s got to be some sort of space SOS thing you’re supposed to do.”
The Doctor stared at her, then at the buoy, then back at her. And then he grinned. “So we can! You, Rose Tyler, are a genius!”
“And you,” she said, with a grin, “are a thief. Some poor Torchwood intern is probably still looking for this thing.”
“And it’s a good thing too!” he said cheerfully.
He balanced the buoy on the console and pointed the sonic at it. Rose had not, on previous inspection, noticed the groove running around the centre. Neither had anyone at Torchwood. She smiled as it clicked open and he gently removed the top of the shell. Before she could really see anything, he’d taken out one of the components and was bending over it with the sonic.
Rose elbowed him out of the way and leaned in, inspecting the circuits with her torch. The weight at the bottom seemed to be an odd silvery substance that looked almost fluid. She prodded it gingerly to see if it moved, but discovered it was completely solid. It seemed at first glance to just be a counterweight for balance, but she realised some of the wires were feeding into it. Following them back through to their circuit, she realised it was a gravity device. Of course! That made sense. Using the gravity of the surrounding stuff to keep it perfectly positioned used far less power than having an on-board engine.
She left that for the Doctor to fiddle with and instead found the transmitter. It would be connected to the device the Doctor had taken, which she guessed was where the signal was encoded. The Doctor was changing the message, and she could boost the signal. She ducked under the console to grab up the small tools box. She’d seen this sort of thing hundreds of times before.
Her work was so distracting that she nearly jumped out of her skin when the Doctor leaned in again.
“Nice work,” he murmured as he replaced the computer. He sounded so pleased and she beamed with pride. Here she was, working on some alien device she’d only just had a chance to look at, and she was doing it right. She’d never dreamed of this when she was younger.
The Doctor reached into the bottom half of the buoy to start fiddling with the gravity circuits.
“I was worried, you see,” he admitted suddenly. “The TARDIS does have an SOS of her own, of course, but that was burned out. I forgot we had this. The range won’t quite be as good and I don’t know if the TARDIS will translate the message if need be, but it’s more of a chance than I thought we had. Someone out there just might be listening, Rose!”
She smiled, feeling warmed up by his words. Half of the difficulty with any situation was believing there was still hope. She had plenty of reason to know that. But she also completely believed that between them, they could turn any situation around. She just had to keep remembering that in the cold and dark, and keep him remembering it too.
Finally, the Doctor snapped the top half of the shell back in place and sealed it carefully. He patted the top of it with his hand.
“Want to give it a throw?” he asked, grinning. She blinked. “Just chuck it out the door,” he explained. “You don’t need to throw far or hard because the grav-pack will kick in and put it in orbit around us.”
Rose picked up the buoy gingerly. “How far in orbit?” she asked.
“Couple of miles,” said the Doctor. “Out of sight, I’m afraid. It’s tied to the TARDIS, though. Anyone who picks up the signal will come to the buoy, which’ll lead them to the TARDIS.”
By the door she hesitated for a moment, glancing up at the Doctor for confirmation. He nodded and smiled. Rose gripped the buoy like the overly large rugby ball that it was, and threw...
For ten feet or so, the buoy followed the arc she expected, spinning around on its central axis. Then the course veered, bending around under the TARDIS as it spun farther and farther away. Like the Doctor had done earlier, she dropped to the floor and looked out under the door to follow the path for a few seconds until the dark dot on the dark background completely vanished.
That was that, then. Their SOS. It seemed a little anti-climatic. At least a flare could always be seen.
She got to her feet and looked over to her husband. He leaned in to put an arm around her and she leaned back. They would be all right. They had to be.
Eventually he drew back and glanced back to the left hand wall of the console room. “We need to know how much water we’ve got,” he said.
She nodded and followed him over again. When he ducked all the way into the roundel all she could do was stand close and slide one of her hands underneath his many layers. His skin was cool against hers and by now she’d mapped every inch of him again and again. Even if at the moment this was the closest she could get to a hug, it was still him. The Doctor. Her husband.
“Talk to me,” she said, when the silence drew on too long.
“About these wires?” he asked dubiously, voice muffled by what he was doing.
“Well, that or a story,” she said, smiling despite herself. “I could listen to you babble all day.”
That got a chuckle. “I’ll quote you on that.”
“I even give you permission to talk non-stop through the next one of Mum’s parties.”
“When did I ever need permission?”
She laughed and relaxed a little, leaning against the wall of the console room. To save the battery, she even clicked off the torch. There was enough light coming in so she could see the console room, after all. And behind her, she could hear the buzz of the screwdriver and the chatter of the Doctor. They’d be all right.
It couldn’t have been much more than fifteen minutes before he eased himself out and stretched, cracking the joints in his neck with relief.
“Remind me to install cushions in those things,” he said, with a grimace.
“Water?” asked Rose hopefully, not wanting to get distracted.
“Well we can flush the loo, but we probably shouldn’t shower,” he said. “It’ll last at least as long as the food will, as long as we don’t do anything daft, like try and make a zero-G swimming pool.” He paused. “Those are actually quite interesting, you know. Remind me to take you to one at some point.”
Rose smiled, feeling relieved. If she just ignored the fact that that meant they had two weeks and then however long it took them to starve, it seemed better. At least they could drink.
“Sounds fun,” she said, trying to keep her tone light.
They decided without needing to say anything to stay in the console room. Rose went along to grab the duvet and some pillows from their bed, and a couple of books. Then they both went to grab more from the spare parts room. The console room was the only place with light, however dim, since even if the Doctor would probably be able to recharge the batteries, the torch barely lit up anything. Rose found a comfortable spot leaning against one of the doors with a book on her lap. The light was just enough to read, now that she was so used to it, but she mostly just stared out into the stars.
The Doctor sat cross-legged and within arm’s reach, fiddling with gadgets and circuits. He turned his phone into a receiver, scanning for long distance communication between ships.
“Problem is, it’s not like scanning for radio signals on Earth,” he admitted. “Out here, you’re far less likely to run into anyone so there’s far less communication going on. I’ve also got to block out all the background noise.”
“Well if there’s a chance, we should do it,” said Rose. “Even a tiny one. Might make all the difference.”
He nodded and got back to work on his next project. This one was connected to the TARDIS console via several cables and components. He didn’t tell her any specifics, merely said he was doing what he could. Half of the reason he was doing it, Rose suspected, was to keep his hands busy.
She fidgeted where she sat, feeling useless. It was all very well knowing a few buttons to press to materialise the TARDIS and being able to do basics like boost signals. Here and now, she was out of her depth. She knew she could rely on the Doctor to save them, but not being able to help made her feel so helpless.
Closing her eyes, she leaned back again. The last time she’d had this little control of her own destiny had been on the voyage to Rome. Before that, it had probably been when they’d been separated. Well, that wasn’t strictly true, of course: there were plenty of times things had gone out of hand. But she could always jump back into things and get on with it. She’d been the one pushing on the Dimension Cannon at every step of the way, risking her job and reputation on a crazy project. She hardly remembered slowing down in those years before she’d found him again, let alone being forced to stop.
Now she was stopped, though. Well and truly stuck-in-the-mud. They were relying on an SOS signal she couldn’t see and whatever the Doctor was doing. More and more the last few hours seemed dreamlike and unreal. She remembered sending out the buoy, but had they really done so? She remembered thinking she was suffocating, too and that hadn’t been real because they were still breathing.
She was here with the Doctor, she reminded herself. They were both alive and well and there was plenty of time for someone to find them. They had air, food and water. The TARDIS - the best ship in the universe - was still keeping them safe from space even if she wasn’t working properly at the moment. They would come out of this, just like they always did.
Idly, she picked up her phone. Full signal, of course. She could phone her mum or her dad or Tony or any one of her colleagues from Torchwood. She could order a pizza, she thought. Order a pizza all the way from who-knew-where. She wondered how much they’d charge for delivery and laughed hysterically, throwing her phone away.
The Doctor looked up suddenly and moved over to take her hands, eyes on hers.
“What would I say?” she asked helplessly, not bothering to explain why she’d laughed.
He held her in his arms and stroked her hair. “You won’t need to tell her anything until we get back there,” he promised. “Then we can all have a good laugh about my rubbish driving. Or you two can, anyway.”
She reached around to hold onto him and leaned into his shirt. Everything about hugging him made her feel better. He stayed where he was, seeming to enjoy the comfort the same way she did. She closed her eyes and tugged the duvet around them and he only cuddled her tighter. It was warm and safe here with him, and she hoped he felt the same about her. Nothing could hurt them if they were together.
~*~
She must have dropped off to sleep because she was woken by the clatter of metal and the angry swearing of the Doctor.
While she’d been sleeping, he’d moved out from under the duvet and continued with his work. It hadn’t gone well, though, whatever it was he was doing. He leaned against the opposite door to her and seemed to sink to the ground, head in his hands.
Rose scrambled out from under the duvet and crawled across it towards him.
She tugged his hands from his face and he stared at her blankly.
“Doctor, what is it?”
“We’re trapped here,” he said. “If we don’t die right here we’re still trapped. If someone finds us and takes us to a planet, that’ll be our home. She’s gone.”
Rose felt a chill creep through her as he spoke, but she pulled him into a hug as he’d done to her before.
“I don’t believe you,” she told him simply.
He stared at her. “It’s not a question of belief, Rose, I can’t-”
“Rubbish,” she interrupted. “You told me she died the first time we landed in this universe. You thought we were stuck in the void forever.” She paused. “Stuck with Mickey.” She thought she saw a smile quickly suppressed, but couldn’t be sure. “And then you told me I’d never see Mickey again. And then you told me I’d never see you again. That was all a bunch of rubbish, too. But apparently travel between parallel worlds was impossible. Bet you thought Time Lord metacrises could never happen before they did, too.”
“Rose, I know you think I can do anything-”
“Keep your ego in check, mister. I think anything you can’t do, I can.”
This time the smile was genuine and definite, although it quickly vanished. “What if we are stuck here?”
She reached forward to tilt his face up to hers. “Doctor, didn’t we have this argument?” she said softly. “Didn’t we have it ages before you’d even thought about spending a year and a half living in London and pretending you didn’t work for Torchwood-”
“I didn’t work for Torchwood,” he argued.
“Nah, ‘course not,” she said. “They just paid you to save the world from aliens.”
“Rose, I know you love the travelling,” he said quietly. “That life... we always had the TARDIS growing. We always knew some day we’d leave. What if we’re stuck forever? No TARDIS and no chance of one.”
“Well, I might get a job piloting spaceships,” considered Rose. “Or maybe saving the world. I dunno. Depends on the planet, I s’pose. Someone’s gotta bring home the bacon or you’ll have to cut back on hair product.” His hand went to his head, which was still wearing the bobble hat, and then he gave her a look. “Doctor, I don’t want to settle down,” she said. “Neither do you. But if we’re stuck in the future or on another planet, we’ll make the most of it, yeah? I’m ok with anything, as long as I’ve got you.”
He allowed himself to smile properly then, and she traced out the delicate laughter lines on his face, planting soft kisses on them before kissing his mouth. The Doctor then leaned forward to rub noses with her and suddenly chuckled darkly.
“You know,” he said, “it’s just occurred to me that sex would probably be a really irresponsible thing to do with the dwindling water and food supplies and all that.”
Rose couldn’t stop herself from giggling as she shifted to better be able to hold onto him. “Sometimes the universe really sucks,” she said.
He laughed again and soon they were both giggling and holding onto each other as though not having sex was the funniest thing in the universe. And at that moment, it rather seemed like it was.
~*~
Rose kept an eye on the time as the hours passed. It would be too easy to just eat and sleep when they were hungry and tired in the semi-darkness. The Doctor managed to harness some residual energy within the TARDIS’s circuits to give them some limited power. This, they used to crudely cook one of the frozen pizzas from the freezer. It was still quite cold in there, Rose was pleased to note, so they saved the ice cream for another day.
They ate in the console room and she wasn’t half glad to get some warm food inside her, even if it was a slightly odd tasting pizza they’d picked up from an Earth colony a couple of months ago. Having enough food on the TARDIS was always a bit hit-and-miss because of how much time they spent out exploring new worlds. She’d actually been surprised earlier that they’d had enough for two weeks, even if that did include all the assorted tin cans, some of which were missing their labels.
The Doctor toyed with his food absently, staring out of the doors more and more. He seemed to have half forgotten she was there.
“Eat up,” she urged, nudging him with her foot.
He jumped a little and turned back to her. “I’m just... not hungry,” he said. He offered her his plate. “Want some?”
For a second she was very tempted, but then things suddenly became rather clear.
“If you think you’re going to starve yourself while I eat everything, you’ve got another thing coming,” she pointed out.
“I still need less food than you,” he pointed out, a little half-heartedly. “Still part Time Lord, remember?”
“And a bloke, too,” said Rose. “Aren’t men supposed to need more calories than women?”
He seemed to sigh, but forced down another few bites. To his credit (which made her feel guilty for the accusation), he genuinely seemed to not be very hungry. Putting her own empty plate aside, she moved to sit next to him again and tugged off his hat, running her hands through his hair and gently massaging his scalp. That always relaxed him and, despite the situation, this was no exception.
“Rose,” he said bleakly, “I’m sorry.”
“None of this is your fault,” she replied quietly, hoping just for once that he might really believe her.
He leaned back into her arms. It wasn’t long before he drifted off. Grabbing the plate from his lap and pushing it just out of reach, she then reached down for the duvet and her pillow. Wrapping the covers around them both once more made it feel a little more like a bed. She idly wondered, as she settled back down next to him, lightly stroking his hair again, whether moving the mattress from their bedroom would be excessive. The floor of the console room was not the most comfortable surface to sleep on.
Somehow, though, it seemed far better to stay here, barely three feet away from an open door out into space. Even at night, when the dark was welcome, she’d never appreciated just how pitch dark and dead silent the TARDIS could be. With her simulated windows and corridor lights and engines gently humming, she was never like this. Going into the dark and the quiet was only a reminder of how wrong things were. Here by the star light she felt safe.
Slowly, she began to relax again. The Doctor’s even breaths against her cheek and hand on her waist were comforting. Every so often, he murmured something in his sleep, but it was always too quiet and unintelligible for Rose to understand.
“Night,” she muttered against his neck, as her eyes grew heavier.
“Mmm,” he replied, not even seeming to be conscious of it.
Rose shut her eyes, and darkness fell.
~*~
They seemed to fall into a routine of nothingness over the next couple of days.
Rose would wake early, stiff and aching. The floor was not comfortable. All the same, nothing could tempt her to sleep in their bedroom. The Doctor always seemed better rested than her, but didn’t seem to be in a particularly good mood. They reassured each other as best they could, and quietly ate a small breakfast. It never quite felt like enough food.
Then the Doctor would get back to his fiddling. Rose just sat and gazed into space, drifting in and out of sleep and dreams, thinking they were already dead one moment and already rescued the next. Soon, the sounds of the Doctor working felt like the only real thing to her.
Periodically, he’d stop and throw down the sonic and insist that there was nothing to be done. Every time, Rose urged him onwards, hovering over his shoulder and trying to help until she felt so useless she couldn’t do it anymore. Then she sat back down in her spot and stared out into space.
At the end of each day, hours counted out by her watch, they’d have some food and hold each other and eventually slip back into sleep.
“I’ve had more relaxing holidays,” the Doctor murmured one night.
“Mmm,” she agreed. “We should write a letter of complaint.”
“View’s not too bad, though,” he said, gazing out into space. Rose just buried her head in his shoulder and tried to sleep.
On what she knew to be the third day but felt like far longer, she picked up some curved glass and metal tubes from the Doctor’s discarded pile of spare parts. Soon, she had something of a working telescope, balanced uneasily on a spindly little stand. She found a notebook and pen and started mapping out the sky, with a bit of help from an astronomy textbook from the 1960s she found in the bookshelves. Perhaps they were close to Earth, or perhaps there was some constellation that the Doctor would recognise from another angle. She might even be able to use it to work out if the TARDIS was moving at all. It wouldn’t get them rescued, but knowing something could be a comfort.
She didn’t have any astronomy experience aside from vaguely being able to pick out the Great Bear when at home. None of these stars seemed anything like the night sky of Earth, though, so she made up her own names and constellations.
In the top right corner of her field of vision she found the TARDIS - four stars in a rectangular shape with a particularly bright one at the top and in the centre that seemed to flash on and off. She drew the pattern carefully in her book, deciding a small cluster part way down was the “Police Telephone” sign.
To her left, she was sure she could see the words “BAD WOLF” written across the cosmos, and she smiled to herself. She liked to see it as a message to let her know things would be all right. She’d had, so the Doctor had said, all of time and space at her disposal, and she liked to think she’d left herself a few encouraging notes.
She hunted in the stars for some constellation for the Doctor. Tall and thin and right across the universe would do it. Carefully, she adjusted her telescope to point to the uppermost part of the doorframe. That was where to start looking.
There was a crash!
She spun around to see the Doctor folding his arms and scowling at his latest project. It looked like he’d kicked it and she wasn’t even sure where the sonic was. One of these days he was going to throw it out the door and then where would they be?
He caught her gaze and looked away, sheepish.
“It’ll be all right, you know,” she told him, for what felt like the millionth time. She wondered if it would start to sound convincing soon. What else was there to say, though?
“I’ve killed you,” he said blankly. “We’re stuck here. Rose, there’s nothing I can do.”
Part 3