tardis_stowaway (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tardis_stowaway) wrote2008-08-26 07:44 pm
tardis_stowaway) wrote2008-08-26 07:44 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: Path of Needles (5/8)
Title: Path of Needles
Author:tardis_stowaway
Characters/Pairings: Chiefly Ten/Rose, but there's also a bit of Nine/Rose (I couldn't resist), and some Ten/Rose/Jack (Jack couldn't resist).
Rating: mild PG-13 for a bit of discussion about sex and one or two instances of salty language.
Spoilers: through season 3, spoiler-free AU after that!
Betas: the amazingwendymr and dark_aegis
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is not mine. I just take it out for play dates with my strange imagination.
Author's Note: The projected chapter count has increased because I realized I wasn't counting the epilogue.
Summary: Once upon a time, she had abided in the world where lives did not begin with ‘once upon a time.’ No more. Rose walks through the woods. Meanwhile, the Doctor deals with an abundance of Bad Wolf references.
Go back to Chapter 4 on LJ or read the story on Teaspoon
Chapter 5: Presences and Voices
Living and dead, present and absent, possible and impossible...sometimes the categories blur. The Doctor receives cryptic advice.
Author:
tardis_stowawayCharacters/Pairings: Chiefly Ten/Rose, but there's also a bit of Nine/Rose (I couldn't resist), and some Ten/Rose/Jack (Jack couldn't resist).
Rating: mild PG-13 for a bit of discussion about sex and one or two instances of salty language.
Spoilers: through season 3, spoiler-free AU after that!
Betas: the amazing
wendymr and dark_aegisDisclaimer: Doctor Who is not mine. I just take it out for play dates with my strange imagination.
Author's Note: The projected chapter count has increased because I realized I wasn't counting the epilogue.
Summary: Once upon a time, she had abided in the world where lives did not begin with ‘once upon a time.’ No more. Rose walks through the woods. Meanwhile, the Doctor deals with an abundance of Bad Wolf references.
Go back to Chapter 4 on LJ or read the story on Teaspoon
Chapter 5: Presences and Voices
Living and dead, present and absent, possible and impossible...sometimes the categories blur. The Doctor receives cryptic advice.
* * * * *
“You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.”
-Neil Gaiman, American Gods
* * *
These are the things she thought about as she exploded:
She wondered if she had left the oven on when she left her flat in the other universe for the last time. She wondered if Jack ever found (would find? is finding? bloody time travel complicating language) the Doctor. She wondered if the Doctor would ever remember their meeting. She wished them both hands to hold, and not in a creepy severed hand sort of way. She wished the hands were hers.
She hadn’t realized it would be this beautiful, exploding. Her feet didn’t hurt anymore.
Rose Tyler thought quite a few more-or-less human things in a very short time. Then she stopped thinking quite like that, but she did not cease to be.
She did not cease.
* * *
The Doctor cautiously came down from the tree. His pursuers seemed to have lost the trail, but it was best never to trust such luck. A few moments looking, listening, and scanning with the sonic screwdriver made him confident enough to abandon his hiding place and go searching for the TARDIS.
Where was the TARDIS? He knew the general direction, but with the many ravines and steep hills in this forest knowing the direction and the way were not synonymous. The Doctor struck off boldly, but two hours later all he had to show for his efforts were mud stains up to his knees and a truly impressive collection of twigs in his hair. He sat down on a log to remove some pebbles that had worked their way into his shoe.
“Lost your way?” said a voice from a thicket.
The Doctor could smell a distinctly animal musk, and the voice was notably deeper than the voices of any of this planet’s humanoids, though it spoke their language. In context, none of that was especially surprising. This planet was going through a stage where numerous species converged on sentience at once. It was a phenomenon that happened surprisingly often on young worlds, giving rise to folk tales of talking animals among many of the galaxy’s sentient species. Usually only one species retained speech over the long term (or, perhaps, usually only one species continued speaking in public).
The humanoids who were chasing him did not appear to be in alliance with any other species, so the Doctor decided to take a chance and tell the truth to this other being.
“Errr, yes. Have you seen a blue box? A bit taller than me, about so wide, sitting beside a stream?” He gestured to show the TARDIS’s dimensions.
“You are more lost than you realize,” rumbled the voice. The speaker stepped into view. It was an enormous wolf, tall enough to look the Doctor in the eye. (Of course, any xenobiologist would tell you that it was not a wolf. Wolves were from Earth and never grew anywhere near this large anyway. This was an alien creature brought to a superficial resemblance to Earth’s wolves through the marvels of convergent evolution. Any human who was not a xenobiologist would tell you instantly that it was a gigantic wolf, never mind the fact that it bled blue-green blood.)
“Hello there,” said the Doctor, giving no visible sign of the fight or flight instincts that even advanced Time Lord evolution could not completely eliminate in the face of something so clearly predatory. His hearts sped up, but he smiled at the wolf, lips closed in case it took teeth as a sign of aggression.
“You run from what you should be seeking,” the wolf intoned. Its fur was deep-space black, and its eyes were yellow.
“I take it you don’t mean the fellows with the spears and the torches?” asked the Doctor, hoping this conversation wasn’t going where he thought it was going.
“I mean the Bad Wolf!” insisted the wolf.
The Doctor sighed. There went his hopes. “The Bad Wolf has come and gone for me. This message is just an echo.”
“She is no echo,” said the wolf, its tone so deep the Doctor felt it through the soles of his shoes in addition to his ears. “She is in the air that carries the sound. You cannot see her, Doctor, but she is still here.”
“How do you know my name?”
“My planet is young. We have not learned to make stories false. I know many things that you have forgotten. I know that wolves chase both the moon and the sun across the sky. I know the loveliest flowers grow farthest from the path. I know that the Wolf has ended the Time War not once, as you believe, but twice.”
“What are you talking about?” the Doctor interrupted as a tiny nagging voice reminded him how many of his memories of the destruction of Gallifrey and the Daleks rang false, as if he had created them to cover up the real events. He had never wanted or dared to dig for the truth. If the false memories were so terrible, how dreadful must the truth be? But how could Rose have been involved?
The wolf continued as if it had not heard him. “Sometimes such events come in threes. Perhaps when the Wolf speaks you ought to listen.” The Doctor’s body went very still even as a storm darkened his eyes.
“I’m listening.”
“I meant listen to her. I’m just a harbinger, a voice crying out in the wilderness. She will speak to you more directly soon. Still, I can tell you this: pins might hold a rip closed for a time, but only a threaded needle can mend it. If the beast wishes to become a prince again, he should first plant a rose bush in his garden. Forget what you can do and do what you must.”
“You’re speaking in riddles,” complained the Doctor.
The wolf laughed, and the Doctor could not help stepping back.
“Follow the sound of the water to your blue box. Go. Remember, Doctor: the Bad Wolf isn’t coming. She’s already here.”
Despite its huge size, the wolf vanished into the shadows of the forest as completely as if it had never been.
* * *
Physics teaches a truth that is also spiritual: energy and matter are neither created nor destroyed, merely changed.
Rose Tyler died at the beginning of all things. That is undeniable. Yet she did not cease. The universe was built on the foundation of her bones, jumpstarted with her energy, charged with her spirit. The mentions of the Bad Wolf scattered across time and space that the Doctor found on his own were not stray scatterings from her joining with the TARDIS on the Game Station. They were fresh manifestations of the Bad Wolf, who was part of the DNA of the universe from its conception. Rose and the TARDIS-heart she never fully let go were part of all of it, part of every satellite and bowl of alphabet soup.
There was more than just Rose at the beginning, of course. The garden seethed with innumerable serpents right from the start. The universe was built on Daleks and Cybermen too. (Listen closely to the last gasping breath of a child struck down by disease, the whip-crack of a slaveholder, the clanking engines of hungry industry devouring life. Wherever there is heartless chance or savage cruelty, you will hear the music of the spheres: a choir singing “exterminate!”) Beyond those menaces born within time, there were other things, older things, or at least one beastly Thing. (Of that Thing it is wise to speak no more, lest it find you at a crossroads or the jagged edge of the abyss.)
There were many roads in those woods. That unthinkably dense bundle of everything and nothing at the beginning was mostly substance neither Rose nor Dalek nor Cyberman. But they were there, part of it. The metal men, the angry pepperpots, and the Wolf. Especially the Wolf.
She was there in the bold heart of the aviatrix who dared to soar around the world in a fragile metal shell, crashing into the sea with no regrets, only a faint disappointment that there would be no more horizons after this.
She was there in the barricades in the streets of Paris, the yearning for a better world. (Not long before, in that same land, she had been in the fearless gaze of the aristocrat who stood firm against the clockwork monsters that had stalked her since childhood.)
She rolled with a nomad’s caravan, present in the melancholy and the reckless joy of a life of perpetual motion.
She was there in every laughing gathering of friends and every tender lover’s caress.
She stood and fought on Saint Crispin’s Day.
She was part of every cheek consciously turned to the oppressor’s blow and every hand extended in forgiveness.
She walked around the world, spreading a message of hope with a young woman of dauntless courage and loyalty, and she chanted with the billions of minds that knew they must awake from this nightmare.
She burned in the stars, raged through the plasma storms, and pulled with the black holes. She ate chips and rode the bus with the stupid, mundane, amazing, fantastic throngs of ordinary Londoners.
She slept with the princess in the heart of the thorn-ringed tower.
She was in the wolf’s tender care for pups, its bestial teeth, its lonely howl.
Like a motif drawing together a story or a thread in a red cloak, the Bad Wolf was stitched throughout the universe.
She was in the glowing heart of the Doctor’s TARDIS.
* * *
Hair a study in chaos, face grease-smudged, and hands singed by small sparks, the Doctor was about as content as he could get lately. The TARDIS purred at his attentions. He had lifted up some of the console room’s floor panels to get at the telepathic interface modules, which had been acting up. Languages still translated, but for some reason the aliens all seemed to him like they had outrageous parody-style French accents. It was very distracting to try negotiating a peace treaty between warring nations when both sides sounded on the verge of declaring “I shall now taunt you a second time!”
Now, the relevant circuits laid out before him, he could see the problem was nothing more than built-up dust and grime. How long since he’d cleaned under here? Decades at least. The meditative work of cleaning produced satisfyingly visible results, something all too scarce in his life.
The Doctor lifted up a bundle of wires and spotted an object underneath that wasn’t part of the TARDIS. He picked it up. It was a biscuit, lodged deep in the circuitry of the TARDIS for goodness knows how long. Strangely enough, its texture was still slightly soft, as if it had only recently cooled from the oven. The Doctor sniffed it, shrugged, and took an experimental bite. It tasted like a perfectly ordinary fresh chocolate biscuit.
When he swallowed, everything changed, though he felt no drugs or other internal alterations to his senses. The light within the TARDIS took on a curious clarity. There was a sound like wind in tree branches. A strange scent like honeysuckle with a hint of blood suffused the air. The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up, and he knew that something else was present.
“Hello,” said an unforgettable voice.
The Doctor’s hearts seemed to transform into two birds in his chest, battering his ribs with the feathered hammer-blows of their strong wings, rising within him and bearing him upwards with an emotion he refused to name (call it the thing with feathers) . He brutally shut that emotion away.
“I don’t know how you got in my TARDIS or what you are, but I warn you: do not taunt me with this particular apparition. You’re playing with fire,” he said coldly, still facing the outer wall.
“I didn’t think it was possible for you to get more melodramatic,” it said. “Now I owe Mickey five quid if I ever see him.” The voice laughed. The Doctor closed his eyes and just for an instant let that laugh be Rose’s laugh in his mind.
“You can’t be her,” the Doctor insisted when his control was back.
“Can’t is such an ugly word. Almost as bad as ‘never ever.’ Do you remember, Doctor? London, 2012, partying in the streets for the opening ceremony of the Olympics. There were fireworks in the sky. I smelled their gunpowder and a bit of ink scent on you from your time in the drawing. You smelled a storm coming. That night we sat up in the TARDIS library, just talking. I fell asleep on the couch with my head in your lap–a very bony pillow, I’d like to point out. When I woke up, you were looking at me with more attention than I ever thought one living person could give another, especially when the subject of the attention has been drooling in her sleep. For a moment I thought you would kiss me, drool and all, but you didn’t.”
And regretted it ever since, he thought. A dam within the Doctor began to crack. “Rose?”
“Yes.”
The Doctor spun around, but a shout made him wrench to a stop before he could see the source of the voice.
“Stop! Don’t turn around!” For the first time, Rose’s voice sounded worried.
“Why not? Would I see that you’re an imposter after all?” asked the Doctor, tone icy again.
“No. It’s like that story, the Greek one that made me cry. Orifice and what’s her face.”
The Doctor took a second to translate. “Orpheus and Eurydice? If I turn around, you vanish?”
“Yeah, them. I won’t precisely vanish, but it’s not easy to gather myself together enough to speak in just my own voice. I don’t know if we’ll have another chance.”
“Rose, how are you here? If you’re here at all, I mean. Is this a transmission? You aren’t blowing up a sun, are you? Because the trick I pulled to say goodbye is not exactly the best thing for the structural integrity of the universe, and without the TARDIS stabilizing…”
“I’m here, Doctor. This universe. Cross my heart.”
“But how? Did one of my other selves rescue you?” The Doctor thought once more of his list of rejected ways to rescue Rose, wondering which one would prove viable after all.
“I should have predicted you’d fancy yourself the huntsman who could slit open the predator’s belly. Did you ever consider that maybe the girl could save herself? Or that she had important business in the belly of the wolf? Still, there may be call for a hero yet. If the wolf huffed and puffed its own walls down, it will need someone with thumbs to help it rebuild.”
“Rose, I’ve had enough riddles lately out of everything from forest animals to Scrabble tiles. How long have you been here?” he asked, hoping a different question would get a straighter answer.
“I’ve always been here.” Rose’s voice sounded slightly dreamy for this last announcement.
“I don’t understand,” protested the Doctor.
“No, you don’t,” Rose said, “though that’s your own fault. You were careless tinkering with your memory so soon after a regeneration. You needed to forget me, of course, but with your brain still so unbalanced from the brand new neurochemistry, plus the War of course, you lost some knowledge that would have helped you understand now, important knowledge about the end of the Time War and the nature of the universe.”
“Help me remember,” he said, even though a part of him shied away from remembering anything to do about the War, even for Rose’s sake. (But what about the War could possibly explain Rose speaking in his TARDIS now?)
“You were wrong when you told me about the Void, back at Canary Wharf. You didn’t mean to lie to me, but you’d forgotten so much you didn’t understand it yourself. It’s not hell, not emptiness. More or less the opposite, in fact. It’s everything. There’s no time as you understand it in the Void because it’s before time.”
“There’s no such thing as before time,” the Doctor replied automatically.
“That’s what you told the Beast. You were wrong then too–I ran into him in the Void, in fact–but don’t feel bad about it. You only have this false belief ‘cause of your overenthusiastic attempt to forget where we first met.”
Why did I try to forget Henrick’s basement? , the Doctor thought. Luckily for his dignity as a genius, he realized she meant some other meeting before asking aloud.
Rose continued: “People look at the matter around them and think it’s solid, but it’s really a few eensy-weensy particles zooming around through a lot of empty space. You think that before the universe everything was packed together infinitely densely, but if you look at it from within there’s plenty of space. Space enough for woods. Space enough to tell a story. Maybe a story about an immortal hero. Maybe a story about a war. Certainly a story about a girl…or a wolf.”
“The Void is between and before. I had forgotten,” the Doctor said, his blood running cold. Other knowledge lay in the shadows just past the edges of his consciousness. “You must have got into it from Pete’s World.”
“Once upon a time, there was a girl. A girl, and a wolf, and a quest. You know this story. You’re part of it, but even before that it was a part of you. The true stories are a part of everyone. Do you understand?”
“You made it home via the void, existing here but not intact. You’re in pieces across the universe.” The Doctor tried to feel Rose’s touch in the brush of circulating air against the back of his hand, wishing for her fingers. “That’s what all those Bad Wolf references have been trying to tell me all along.”
“Give the man a medal! A very small medal, because it took you an awfully long time.” He could imagine Rose’s tongue peeking between her teeth as she spoke. She seemed slip strangely back and forth between young London shopgirl and some enigmatic oracle mode. He supposed he couldn’t blame her, considering.
“Oh, Rose. I am so, so sorry. You should have stayed with your family, living a human life.”
“I couldn’t stay. I made my choice and got caught in the plot of this story long ago. I don’t regret a moment of it. Besides, you must have an awfully low opinion of the universe to think that becoming one with it is such a horrible thing. Has doing without me really damaged your faith so much?”
“I…” the Doctor began, but trailed off. Perhaps she was right. Nevertheless, he didn’t want some mystic Rose scattered throughout the universe. He wanted her fingers interlacing with his, warm, solid, and oh so human.
“I know,” said Rose, sadly. “It’s not what I set off looking for either. But Doctor, every story looks like a tragedy if you stop telling it at the wrong time.”
“There’s nothing I can do for you.” The Doctor’s hands clenched into fists.
“It’s never been about what can be. Listen, Doctor. Once there was a princess named Briar Rose. She loved beautiful things and longed to create them with spindles and needles and looms. Her family tried to keep her from all such things, because they knew the prophecy that if she ever pricked her finger on a spindle she would die. But Briar Rose followed her destiny. She pricked her finger and seemed to die. Thorns grew up all around the tower where she lay. But she wasn’t dead, was she Doctor? She was sleeping, her consciousness stuck amongst the thorns.”
“That’s just a fairy tale,” the Doctor reminded her gently.
“Just a fairy tale? Pete Tyler was just an ordinary man, but when he didn’t meet his fate it was enough to destroy the world. Now, pay attention,” Rose insisted. “Real boys do not as a rule come from puppets, but a wish upon a star might create exceptions. A block of stone is not a woman, not even when it’s carved into a statue of one, unless, that is, the sculptor loves it enough.”
“Just a few moments ago you couldn’t remember the names of Orpheus and Eurydice, but all of a sudden you’re full of literary allusions. You were never this cryptic before,” the Doctor protested.
“I was never attempting to pull myself together from within the time vortex, the atoms of the universe, and the collective unconscious before,” Rose shot back. “As I start losing coherency, knowledge from outside seeps in. It’s not easy being an archetype.”
“No, I imagine not.” The Doctor ran his hand through his hair, thinking hard. There was meaning here, if he knew how to interpret. He didn’t, and there was no time. “So, does that outside knowledge give you any idea what we do next?”
“If I told you everything, it would make a pretty lousy story, wouldn’t it? Now, close your eyes.” Rose’s voice was light and teasing, but it never occurred to him to disobey. He closed his eyes.
Suddenly, without a sound of feet or the brush of air stirred by movement, he felt lips against his. They were warm, soft, slightly moist, and they felt exactly like Rose’s lips as he remembered from when Cassandra had used Rose’s body to kiss him, though this kiss was feather-light and quite chaste. They didn’t taste like Rose, though. Nothing so human. The lips that pressed so gently against his tasted of stardust, honeysuckle, and blood.
The unseen lips broke the kiss, but the Doctor felt the weight of a forehead leaned against his.
“I love you,” declared Rose.
“I…” the Doctor started, hoping he could manage what he could not on the beach, but Rose placed a finger against his lips.
“Shh,” she whispered. “Tell it to my face.”
The Doctor opened his eyes. No sign of Rose. The light and sounds of the TARDIS returned to normal.
He knew what to do.
* * *
Onwards to Chapter 6
“You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.”
-Neil Gaiman, American Gods
* * *
These are the things she thought about as she exploded:
She wondered if she had left the oven on when she left her flat in the other universe for the last time. She wondered if Jack ever found (would find? is finding? bloody time travel complicating language) the Doctor. She wondered if the Doctor would ever remember their meeting. She wished them both hands to hold, and not in a creepy severed hand sort of way. She wished the hands were hers.
She hadn’t realized it would be this beautiful, exploding. Her feet didn’t hurt anymore.
Rose Tyler thought quite a few more-or-less human things in a very short time. Then she stopped thinking quite like that, but she did not cease to be.
She did not cease.
* * *
The Doctor cautiously came down from the tree. His pursuers seemed to have lost the trail, but it was best never to trust such luck. A few moments looking, listening, and scanning with the sonic screwdriver made him confident enough to abandon his hiding place and go searching for the TARDIS.
Where was the TARDIS? He knew the general direction, but with the many ravines and steep hills in this forest knowing the direction and the way were not synonymous. The Doctor struck off boldly, but two hours later all he had to show for his efforts were mud stains up to his knees and a truly impressive collection of twigs in his hair. He sat down on a log to remove some pebbles that had worked their way into his shoe.
“Lost your way?” said a voice from a thicket.
The Doctor could smell a distinctly animal musk, and the voice was notably deeper than the voices of any of this planet’s humanoids, though it spoke their language. In context, none of that was especially surprising. This planet was going through a stage where numerous species converged on sentience at once. It was a phenomenon that happened surprisingly often on young worlds, giving rise to folk tales of talking animals among many of the galaxy’s sentient species. Usually only one species retained speech over the long term (or, perhaps, usually only one species continued speaking in public).
The humanoids who were chasing him did not appear to be in alliance with any other species, so the Doctor decided to take a chance and tell the truth to this other being.
“Errr, yes. Have you seen a blue box? A bit taller than me, about so wide, sitting beside a stream?” He gestured to show the TARDIS’s dimensions.
“You are more lost than you realize,” rumbled the voice. The speaker stepped into view. It was an enormous wolf, tall enough to look the Doctor in the eye. (Of course, any xenobiologist would tell you that it was not a wolf. Wolves were from Earth and never grew anywhere near this large anyway. This was an alien creature brought to a superficial resemblance to Earth’s wolves through the marvels of convergent evolution. Any human who was not a xenobiologist would tell you instantly that it was a gigantic wolf, never mind the fact that it bled blue-green blood.)
“Hello there,” said the Doctor, giving no visible sign of the fight or flight instincts that even advanced Time Lord evolution could not completely eliminate in the face of something so clearly predatory. His hearts sped up, but he smiled at the wolf, lips closed in case it took teeth as a sign of aggression.
“You run from what you should be seeking,” the wolf intoned. Its fur was deep-space black, and its eyes were yellow.
“I take it you don’t mean the fellows with the spears and the torches?” asked the Doctor, hoping this conversation wasn’t going where he thought it was going.
“I mean the Bad Wolf!” insisted the wolf.
The Doctor sighed. There went his hopes. “The Bad Wolf has come and gone for me. This message is just an echo.”
“She is no echo,” said the wolf, its tone so deep the Doctor felt it through the soles of his shoes in addition to his ears. “She is in the air that carries the sound. You cannot see her, Doctor, but she is still here.”
“How do you know my name?”
“My planet is young. We have not learned to make stories false. I know many things that you have forgotten. I know that wolves chase both the moon and the sun across the sky. I know the loveliest flowers grow farthest from the path. I know that the Wolf has ended the Time War not once, as you believe, but twice.”
“What are you talking about?” the Doctor interrupted as a tiny nagging voice reminded him how many of his memories of the destruction of Gallifrey and the Daleks rang false, as if he had created them to cover up the real events. He had never wanted or dared to dig for the truth. If the false memories were so terrible, how dreadful must the truth be? But how could Rose have been involved?
The wolf continued as if it had not heard him. “Sometimes such events come in threes. Perhaps when the Wolf speaks you ought to listen.” The Doctor’s body went very still even as a storm darkened his eyes.
“I’m listening.”
“I meant listen to her. I’m just a harbinger, a voice crying out in the wilderness. She will speak to you more directly soon. Still, I can tell you this: pins might hold a rip closed for a time, but only a threaded needle can mend it. If the beast wishes to become a prince again, he should first plant a rose bush in his garden. Forget what you can do and do what you must.”
“You’re speaking in riddles,” complained the Doctor.
The wolf laughed, and the Doctor could not help stepping back.
“Follow the sound of the water to your blue box. Go. Remember, Doctor: the Bad Wolf isn’t coming. She’s already here.”
Despite its huge size, the wolf vanished into the shadows of the forest as completely as if it had never been.
* * *
Physics teaches a truth that is also spiritual: energy and matter are neither created nor destroyed, merely changed.
Rose Tyler died at the beginning of all things. That is undeniable. Yet she did not cease. The universe was built on the foundation of her bones, jumpstarted with her energy, charged with her spirit. The mentions of the Bad Wolf scattered across time and space that the Doctor found on his own were not stray scatterings from her joining with the TARDIS on the Game Station. They were fresh manifestations of the Bad Wolf, who was part of the DNA of the universe from its conception. Rose and the TARDIS-heart she never fully let go were part of all of it, part of every satellite and bowl of alphabet soup.
There was more than just Rose at the beginning, of course. The garden seethed with innumerable serpents right from the start. The universe was built on Daleks and Cybermen too. (Listen closely to the last gasping breath of a child struck down by disease, the whip-crack of a slaveholder, the clanking engines of hungry industry devouring life. Wherever there is heartless chance or savage cruelty, you will hear the music of the spheres: a choir singing “exterminate!”) Beyond those menaces born within time, there were other things, older things, or at least one beastly Thing. (Of that Thing it is wise to speak no more, lest it find you at a crossroads or the jagged edge of the abyss.)
There were many roads in those woods. That unthinkably dense bundle of everything and nothing at the beginning was mostly substance neither Rose nor Dalek nor Cyberman. But they were there, part of it. The metal men, the angry pepperpots, and the Wolf. Especially the Wolf.
She was there in the bold heart of the aviatrix who dared to soar around the world in a fragile metal shell, crashing into the sea with no regrets, only a faint disappointment that there would be no more horizons after this.
She was there in the barricades in the streets of Paris, the yearning for a better world. (Not long before, in that same land, she had been in the fearless gaze of the aristocrat who stood firm against the clockwork monsters that had stalked her since childhood.)
She rolled with a nomad’s caravan, present in the melancholy and the reckless joy of a life of perpetual motion.
She was there in every laughing gathering of friends and every tender lover’s caress.
She stood and fought on Saint Crispin’s Day.
She was part of every cheek consciously turned to the oppressor’s blow and every hand extended in forgiveness.
She walked around the world, spreading a message of hope with a young woman of dauntless courage and loyalty, and she chanted with the billions of minds that knew they must awake from this nightmare.
She burned in the stars, raged through the plasma storms, and pulled with the black holes. She ate chips and rode the bus with the stupid, mundane, amazing, fantastic throngs of ordinary Londoners.
She slept with the princess in the heart of the thorn-ringed tower.
She was in the wolf’s tender care for pups, its bestial teeth, its lonely howl.
Like a motif drawing together a story or a thread in a red cloak, the Bad Wolf was stitched throughout the universe.
She was in the glowing heart of the Doctor’s TARDIS.
* * *
Hair a study in chaos, face grease-smudged, and hands singed by small sparks, the Doctor was about as content as he could get lately. The TARDIS purred at his attentions. He had lifted up some of the console room’s floor panels to get at the telepathic interface modules, which had been acting up. Languages still translated, but for some reason the aliens all seemed to him like they had outrageous parody-style French accents. It was very distracting to try negotiating a peace treaty between warring nations when both sides sounded on the verge of declaring “I shall now taunt you a second time!”
Now, the relevant circuits laid out before him, he could see the problem was nothing more than built-up dust and grime. How long since he’d cleaned under here? Decades at least. The meditative work of cleaning produced satisfyingly visible results, something all too scarce in his life.
The Doctor lifted up a bundle of wires and spotted an object underneath that wasn’t part of the TARDIS. He picked it up. It was a biscuit, lodged deep in the circuitry of the TARDIS for goodness knows how long. Strangely enough, its texture was still slightly soft, as if it had only recently cooled from the oven. The Doctor sniffed it, shrugged, and took an experimental bite. It tasted like a perfectly ordinary fresh chocolate biscuit.
When he swallowed, everything changed, though he felt no drugs or other internal alterations to his senses. The light within the TARDIS took on a curious clarity. There was a sound like wind in tree branches. A strange scent like honeysuckle with a hint of blood suffused the air. The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up, and he knew that something else was present.
“Hello,” said an unforgettable voice.
The Doctor’s hearts seemed to transform into two birds in his chest, battering his ribs with the feathered hammer-blows of their strong wings, rising within him and bearing him upwards with an emotion he refused to name (call it the thing with feathers) . He brutally shut that emotion away.
“I don’t know how you got in my TARDIS or what you are, but I warn you: do not taunt me with this particular apparition. You’re playing with fire,” he said coldly, still facing the outer wall.
“I didn’t think it was possible for you to get more melodramatic,” it said. “Now I owe Mickey five quid if I ever see him.” The voice laughed. The Doctor closed his eyes and just for an instant let that laugh be Rose’s laugh in his mind.
“You can’t be her,” the Doctor insisted when his control was back.
“Can’t is such an ugly word. Almost as bad as ‘never ever.’ Do you remember, Doctor? London, 2012, partying in the streets for the opening ceremony of the Olympics. There were fireworks in the sky. I smelled their gunpowder and a bit of ink scent on you from your time in the drawing. You smelled a storm coming. That night we sat up in the TARDIS library, just talking. I fell asleep on the couch with my head in your lap–a very bony pillow, I’d like to point out. When I woke up, you were looking at me with more attention than I ever thought one living person could give another, especially when the subject of the attention has been drooling in her sleep. For a moment I thought you would kiss me, drool and all, but you didn’t.”
And regretted it ever since, he thought. A dam within the Doctor began to crack. “Rose?”
“Yes.”
The Doctor spun around, but a shout made him wrench to a stop before he could see the source of the voice.
“Stop! Don’t turn around!” For the first time, Rose’s voice sounded worried.
“Why not? Would I see that you’re an imposter after all?” asked the Doctor, tone icy again.
“No. It’s like that story, the Greek one that made me cry. Orifice and what’s her face.”
The Doctor took a second to translate. “Orpheus and Eurydice? If I turn around, you vanish?”
“Yeah, them. I won’t precisely vanish, but it’s not easy to gather myself together enough to speak in just my own voice. I don’t know if we’ll have another chance.”
“Rose, how are you here? If you’re here at all, I mean. Is this a transmission? You aren’t blowing up a sun, are you? Because the trick I pulled to say goodbye is not exactly the best thing for the structural integrity of the universe, and without the TARDIS stabilizing…”
“I’m here, Doctor. This universe. Cross my heart.”
“But how? Did one of my other selves rescue you?” The Doctor thought once more of his list of rejected ways to rescue Rose, wondering which one would prove viable after all.
“I should have predicted you’d fancy yourself the huntsman who could slit open the predator’s belly. Did you ever consider that maybe the girl could save herself? Or that she had important business in the belly of the wolf? Still, there may be call for a hero yet. If the wolf huffed and puffed its own walls down, it will need someone with thumbs to help it rebuild.”
“Rose, I’ve had enough riddles lately out of everything from forest animals to Scrabble tiles. How long have you been here?” he asked, hoping a different question would get a straighter answer.
“I’ve always been here.” Rose’s voice sounded slightly dreamy for this last announcement.
“I don’t understand,” protested the Doctor.
“No, you don’t,” Rose said, “though that’s your own fault. You were careless tinkering with your memory so soon after a regeneration. You needed to forget me, of course, but with your brain still so unbalanced from the brand new neurochemistry, plus the War of course, you lost some knowledge that would have helped you understand now, important knowledge about the end of the Time War and the nature of the universe.”
“Help me remember,” he said, even though a part of him shied away from remembering anything to do about the War, even for Rose’s sake. (But what about the War could possibly explain Rose speaking in his TARDIS now?)
“You were wrong when you told me about the Void, back at Canary Wharf. You didn’t mean to lie to me, but you’d forgotten so much you didn’t understand it yourself. It’s not hell, not emptiness. More or less the opposite, in fact. It’s everything. There’s no time as you understand it in the Void because it’s before time.”
“There’s no such thing as before time,” the Doctor replied automatically.
“That’s what you told the Beast. You were wrong then too–I ran into him in the Void, in fact–but don’t feel bad about it. You only have this false belief ‘cause of your overenthusiastic attempt to forget where we first met.”
Why did I try to forget Henrick’s basement? , the Doctor thought. Luckily for his dignity as a genius, he realized she meant some other meeting before asking aloud.
Rose continued: “People look at the matter around them and think it’s solid, but it’s really a few eensy-weensy particles zooming around through a lot of empty space. You think that before the universe everything was packed together infinitely densely, but if you look at it from within there’s plenty of space. Space enough for woods. Space enough to tell a story. Maybe a story about an immortal hero. Maybe a story about a war. Certainly a story about a girl…or a wolf.”
“The Void is between and before. I had forgotten,” the Doctor said, his blood running cold. Other knowledge lay in the shadows just past the edges of his consciousness. “You must have got into it from Pete’s World.”
“Once upon a time, there was a girl. A girl, and a wolf, and a quest. You know this story. You’re part of it, but even before that it was a part of you. The true stories are a part of everyone. Do you understand?”
“You made it home via the void, existing here but not intact. You’re in pieces across the universe.” The Doctor tried to feel Rose’s touch in the brush of circulating air against the back of his hand, wishing for her fingers. “That’s what all those Bad Wolf references have been trying to tell me all along.”
“Give the man a medal! A very small medal, because it took you an awfully long time.” He could imagine Rose’s tongue peeking between her teeth as she spoke. She seemed slip strangely back and forth between young London shopgirl and some enigmatic oracle mode. He supposed he couldn’t blame her, considering.
“Oh, Rose. I am so, so sorry. You should have stayed with your family, living a human life.”
“I couldn’t stay. I made my choice and got caught in the plot of this story long ago. I don’t regret a moment of it. Besides, you must have an awfully low opinion of the universe to think that becoming one with it is such a horrible thing. Has doing without me really damaged your faith so much?”
“I…” the Doctor began, but trailed off. Perhaps she was right. Nevertheless, he didn’t want some mystic Rose scattered throughout the universe. He wanted her fingers interlacing with his, warm, solid, and oh so human.
“I know,” said Rose, sadly. “It’s not what I set off looking for either. But Doctor, every story looks like a tragedy if you stop telling it at the wrong time.”
“There’s nothing I can do for you.” The Doctor’s hands clenched into fists.
“It’s never been about what can be. Listen, Doctor. Once there was a princess named Briar Rose. She loved beautiful things and longed to create them with spindles and needles and looms. Her family tried to keep her from all such things, because they knew the prophecy that if she ever pricked her finger on a spindle she would die. But Briar Rose followed her destiny. She pricked her finger and seemed to die. Thorns grew up all around the tower where she lay. But she wasn’t dead, was she Doctor? She was sleeping, her consciousness stuck amongst the thorns.”
“That’s just a fairy tale,” the Doctor reminded her gently.
“Just a fairy tale? Pete Tyler was just an ordinary man, but when he didn’t meet his fate it was enough to destroy the world. Now, pay attention,” Rose insisted. “Real boys do not as a rule come from puppets, but a wish upon a star might create exceptions. A block of stone is not a woman, not even when it’s carved into a statue of one, unless, that is, the sculptor loves it enough.”
“Just a few moments ago you couldn’t remember the names of Orpheus and Eurydice, but all of a sudden you’re full of literary allusions. You were never this cryptic before,” the Doctor protested.
“I was never attempting to pull myself together from within the time vortex, the atoms of the universe, and the collective unconscious before,” Rose shot back. “As I start losing coherency, knowledge from outside seeps in. It’s not easy being an archetype.”
“No, I imagine not.” The Doctor ran his hand through his hair, thinking hard. There was meaning here, if he knew how to interpret. He didn’t, and there was no time. “So, does that outside knowledge give you any idea what we do next?”
“If I told you everything, it would make a pretty lousy story, wouldn’t it? Now, close your eyes.” Rose’s voice was light and teasing, but it never occurred to him to disobey. He closed his eyes.
Suddenly, without a sound of feet or the brush of air stirred by movement, he felt lips against his. They were warm, soft, slightly moist, and they felt exactly like Rose’s lips as he remembered from when Cassandra had used Rose’s body to kiss him, though this kiss was feather-light and quite chaste. They didn’t taste like Rose, though. Nothing so human. The lips that pressed so gently against his tasted of stardust, honeysuckle, and blood.
The unseen lips broke the kiss, but the Doctor felt the weight of a forehead leaned against his.
“I love you,” declared Rose.
“I…” the Doctor started, hoping he could manage what he could not on the beach, but Rose placed a finger against his lips.
“Shh,” she whispered. “Tell it to my face.”
The Doctor opened his eyes. No sign of Rose. The light and sounds of the TARDIS returned to normal.
He knew what to do.
* * *
Onwards to Chapter 6
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Also, at this:
It was very distracting to try negotiating a peace treaty between warring nations when both sides sounded on the verge of declaring “I shall now taunt you a second time!”
I scared the bejesus out of my cat with my laughter.
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This is wonderful. Please I need more.
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I can't wait for the next part!
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I love this story, so beautiful.
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That's just awe-inspiring. This is such an incredible story, told with so much love and attention to detail. Finish it quickly, 'cause I've got to rec the ever-living heck out of it.
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And I guess that this is proof at last, the universe itself really does love the Doctor!