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She sighed. “So I can’t be sure, but I believe it, yeah.”
“I died here, too, in a future time line. The Doctor overwrote it by changing a decision he’d made. I died in it and Charlie, that’s what we’re calling the baby, Charlie died, too and it was too…there wasn’t enough left for him to regenerate and…it was a bad time for our future Rose.”
“Where was the Doctor in all this?” she asked him.
“That’s just it. He wasn’t there in the future because of a decision he’d made in the past. A decision not to keep Rose with him but to send her back to her mum and I chose to go with her. He was preparing us for that, teaching us everything we’d need to know for a Gallifreyan birth and Time Lord idiosyncrasies before he abandoned us. We stopped in the future in Cardiff to refuel and he went out and he ran into our future Rose and he found it out and he decided to change the future, to keep Rose with him.”
“And she stayed with him? The bastard was going to leave her behind and changed his mind and she stayed?” Rose was indignant. “Always trying to send me away for my own good and--.”
“Rose, this isn’t about you. It took him a long time to make things up to his Rose. It was really, really bad and everything is still so tender and so new with her forgiving him and they’ve only been married a few days, so please…whatever your Doctor has done to you and whatever this one has done to his Rose, don’t let your emotions cause any damage here. They need each other so much. I’ve never seen such a desperate need between two people as they have for each other,” Jack explained.
“You love them very much,” she said quietly and he nodded.
“With all my heart,” he told her earnestly.
“He loved us, too. And we loved him. We were family. I miss him so much. I miss them both so much.” Jack sood up and came around the table and she rose to her feet and let him gather her tightly into his arms. They held each other for several minutes, only stepping reluctantly apart at a cough from the doorway.
“I could come back later,” the Doctor said with amusement. He’d returned with some equipment and he set it down on the table.
Rose shoved a strand of hair behind her ear and said, “It’s not necessary. How’s Rose?”
“She’s sleeping,” he said softly. “Needs a lot of rest these days, growing a Time Lord baby like this.”
“I never thought it was possible,” Rose said. “Having children together.”
“Conception is very rare without medical intervention, and even so with it. But it is possible. Clearly.” She smiled and got a far off look on her face.
They sat back down at the table and the Doctor asked her to go over everything about the dimension cannon one more time. When she got to the part about Donna Noble, a part she’d not gone in to real detail with before, Jack stopped her.
“That name sounds very familiar to me,” Jack told her. “Noble, Noble. I don’t know. There's something about it.”
“She’s the most important woman in the universe. Her name has rippled across space and time and reality,” Rose said. “Perhaps the repercussions were felt even in the 51st century here.”
“So the gist of the story is that you hit a parallel world where this woman made one decision and because of that decision, your Doctor died instead of living after you were separated,” the Doctor said getting things back on track.
“Yeah. Events played out differently. And I managed to meet with her several times and we found a way for just a brief second to tune her in to the right reality, to send her back to stop herself from making the wrong choice, to turn right instead of turning left.” Rose shudders for a moment. “Because of the trickster beetle that had attached itself to her and altered her reality she was able to slip through back to the right moment in time, the right place, with the help of the dying TARDIS, but we had no coordinates for me to follow her with the cannon.”
Rose looked down. “I don’t even know what the outcome was because I was supposed to follow her but it didn’t work. All I knew was that this version of her was probably going to die as that reality faded out of existence. And she was, oh she was so brave, so amazing. She did all of this on the hope for a better world and a better life for everybody in that world.”
“Well, I think you will still find her. You see with what I’ve worked out, Rose, I can get you to your proper universe, your proper Earth, but it’s going to take a few false starts. Your cannon will end up functioning a bit like a gyroscopic compass,” he told her.
“A what?”
“A gyroscopic compass. A normal gyrocompass finds true north, not magnetic north, by using a very quickly rotating wheel and friction forces in order to use the turn of the Earth in its orienting process. The thing about a gyrocompass is that you can use it differently than that though. You point it at something and spin it and it will continue to point to whatever it was pointing at when you started the spin. Say you orient it on a certain star. The gyrocompass will continue to orient on that star making a full revolution once with each complete rotation of the planet,” the Doctor explained.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Rose asked.
“Well, as simplistically as I can put it, this will work on a similar principle only I’ll use the bits of the time vortex that are coded into your DNA to build an item for this reality gyroscopic compass to orient on. I’ll just need a few scrapings from the inside of your cheek for that. So when the dimension cannon pulls you back to the universe you’ve been living in, you’ll pass through other realities and I’ll program it to find a match point, the place in space where DNA was altered and coded to that emergence point of the time vortex.”
“But the place it happened was a satellite that doesn’t exist in the time I need to go to,” Rose protested. “I’ll end up floating in space without a suit.”
“Well, that’s the thing. You won’t. Where it happened to you was inside the TARDIS, when you changed into Bad Wolf. I can code it to Earth as well so you don’t end up in space. Just take a bit of jiggery pokery. You won’t appear in the TARDIS but you’ll be quite near to it. And I’m building in a feature that will allow you to swing back and forth through time a bit, sort of like a yo-yo until you can take a reading and find the right time period. You won’t be able to stay for long in any one time period, you’ll pop in and out, sometimes for less than a minute, other times for up to fifteen while you orient on the proper moment to find him near the TARDIS.”
He reached out and placed his hand over the top of hers. “When you’ve got the right universe, the right Earth, and you know the time period is almost right, you can press a cancel button to pull you back to the other universe. Then take the gyrocompass and attach it to the dimensional cannon and allow it to program the device. I’ll send you some blueprints that your human scientists should be able to use just fine to do so. Your final try should get you to him when you need to be there to stop the darkness that’s encroaching.”
“And this will really work? You can do this?” she asked barely daring to hope.
He sighed. “I think it’ll work. I think it’s the best chance you’ve got. But it's never been done before. I won’t lie to you, Rose Tyler. It’ll be dangerous and perilous, but it’s your only hope to get back to him and stop whatever it is that’s happening from destroying your reality and making the stars go out there. I just wish I had a bit of your Doctor’s DNA. It would help with the fine tuning. Or Donna’s. It would improve the odds,” he added as an afterthought
“Oh, but I have a bit of Donna’s DNA.”
“You do?” He jumped to his feet in excitement.
“Yeah. I hugged her and a bit of her hair got snagged in the zipper of my jacket. I found it later and haven’t had time to work it out. Will that do?” she asked him.
“Yes! Take off your jacket.”
She wiggled out of it and he picked the fine red hairs out of the zip, holding them under the microscope until he found one with a root end. That’s all he needed. A few minutes later he bathed it in a solution and scraped the inside of Rose's cheek with a cotton swab swirling it with Donna's DNA. Then he injected it into the fluid that needed to go into the center of the gyrocompass.
The Doctor put Jack and Rose to the task of assembling the main housing while he went to work on the little fiddly bits of the programming for the targeting computer and the placement of a bit of TARDIS matrix crystal for its guidance system once it combined with the dimensional cannon. It was a few hours later when a yawning younger Rose stumbled into the kitchen.
Jack and older Rose continued to work while the Doctor looked solicitously at her, got to his feet and fixed something for his wife to eat, adding in enough for everyone else while he was at it. Young Rose helped him with the preparation, the two working in a synchronized series of movements brought on by long familiarity.
The eyes of older Rose and Jack met and they both smiled fondly at the sweetness of the couple. “You and your Doctor, you were never like that?”
“Not exactly,” she said, “but we would have been given a bit more time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry you weren’t given that time.”
She smiled. “But with your help here today, we will be.”
After a quick meal they returned to the assembling process, younger Rose adding in her steady fingers and within another hour the device was completed.
“You’ll likely run into Donna Noble first because it’ll be trying to fine tune orient onto her DNA after it finds the right everything else,” the Doctor told her. "You’ll be drawn to that point in time where the universal divergence was repaired. And maybe you can give her a warning to tell him. If everything works according to plan, you should see her more than once before you hone in on the exact right time. And the Doctor, your Doctor, should be with her then. You’ll have to jump away one last time when you’re sure you’re there and then come back with everything that you need, whatever equipment you can carry for defeating the Daleks.”
Older Rose closed her eyes and then got to her feet. Young Rose whispered, “Good luck. I hope you find him.”
“Thank you.” She hugged Jack and then turned to the Doctor. He hugged her tightly and kissed her on the forehead.
“Rose Tyler, Defender of Reality.”
She smiled at him, picked up the device and the plans, pressed a device in her own pocket and disappeared in a flash of light and the burning scent of ozone.
“Can she really do it?” Rose asked.
“She channeled the time vortex and became the Bad Wolf,” the Doctor said. “She can do anything she sets her mind to. She’s fantastic. After all, she’s you.” He smiled at her tenderly and she grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and snogged him thoroughly.
“I just remembered,” Jack said suddenly, reminding them that they weren’t alone in the room just as Rose’s hand was drifting towards the Doctor’s belt.
They broke the kiss and the Doctor looked over at Jack with a bit of a scowl. “You just remembered what?”
“Why the name Donna Noble sounded so familiar,” he told them.
“Why?”
“When I first started time agent training, one of the things we had to research was our family lineage, back to around the turn of the 20th century.”
“Why only then?” Rose asked curiously.
“Because before then the records were almost impossible to find anymore. Most of the paper records didn't survive and geneology was only something maybe five percent of the population did back then. It was a hobby and not an educational requirement like it became in the 23rd century. It was less likely for a randy time agent to sleep with someone from before then and accidently become his own ancestor and cause a paradox because we were trained against it,” Jack finished. “Usually it was avoided,” he added. “Happened once. Wasn’t pretty. After that they began a DNA encoding process that would make us have an aversion to sexual touching if more than 25 percent of our nucleotide base pairs matched up.”
“So wait a minute,” said Rose. “You’re saying…”
“That Donna Noble is somewhere around my 100 times great grandmother. Guess that means she truly is the most important woman in the universe.”
Ch. 28: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/118335.html ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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