You Reap What You Sow (36&37 of 45)
Jul. 2nd, 2008 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amberfocus
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Chapter Thirty-six: Fury of a Tyler Woman
Rose tucked Dare into his crib, her hand cradling against his sleeping form for a moment before she sat down on the bed and hiccupped. Vortex energy left her body and she placed her hands over her abdomen searching for the tiny mind there. She had thought Dare would never calm down and sleep. He had felt Cassi’s regeneration. She was sure of it from the state of his own little mind. Cassi’s she couldn’t feel at all other than an unconscious turmoil and she had to seek hard to feel even that.
Tears fell down her face, had been falling since she’d walked into the TARDIS. Her child had just lost 1/12th of her lifespan in the space of five minutes and she didn’t know who she was madder at. Herself for taking the risk without knowledge, or her husband for failing as usual to give her the information she needed to make the right choices and refusing to ever deviate from what he thought was right. Not even for her.
The Doctor didn’t answer at first, fiddling instead with things that she knew from experience didn’t need to be fiddled with. “Doctor!” Rose said sharply.
“She’s at Torchwood,” he said. “I left her there.”
“You…left her…there,” Rose repeated faintly.
“She won’t be travelling with us anymore, Rose,” he said firmly.
“What?” Rose couldn’t believe her ears. “She was that angry at you for killing her and not being able to bring her back?”
“It was my decision, Rose. It’s my ship! And I don’t want her here!” he snapped.
“Why? She tell you off?” Rose said hitting the mark squarely in its center.
“I decide who travels with me, Rose!” He turned furious eyes on her.
“Just like you decide bloody everything else in our lives!” Rose snapped back. “I guess I’m just really lucky you didn’t decide to leave me behind, too! If I hadn’t been in the TARDIS already to prevent that option maybe you would have. You’re always leaving companions behind. What’s to stop me from being left the next time I step out of line?!” Rose shouted at him.
“You’re my wife!”
“So?” she said stubbornly. “Doesn’t mean you won’t leave me off somewhere in a fit of rage, does it?”
“If that’s what you believe--,” he began before sharply cutting himself off. He would not issue an ultimatum to Rose. She was just angry enough that she might take him up on it, and if there was one thing in this universe he knew without doubt it was that if Rose ever decided to leave him, he would break.
“What? If that’s what I believe then what?” she demanded.
His voice was very quiet and calm when he replied. “Rose, please,” he said, a slight tinge of panic in his voice, “Let’s not argue.”
“Just like that? The Doctor doesn’t want to argue so let’s have Rose be a good little girl and let him have his way? I don’t think so.”
“It’s not good for Cassi. She needs to be in a soothing environment right now. There’s already been enough damage done today--.”
“You mean I’ve already done enough damage to her today, don’t you?” Rose said bitterly.
“No, Rose! I don’t blame you for what you did to her. You didn’t know any better.” He closed his eyes as the words flew out of his mouth, already regretting the way he’d worded what he’d just said.
“What I did to her? You do blame me!” Rose’s eyes were snapping dangerously and he could still see flecks of gold in them.
“I don’t blame you!” he said. “You didn’t know. Honestly, Rose, I don’t.” He kept his voice earnest and under control.
“I didn’t know because you didn’t bother to tell me. And I wouldn’t have had to do it at all if you would have just listened to me when I told you not to kill Donna, that it would go wrong. I knew it would and you wouldn’t even take the time to hear me out. This is as much your fault as it is mine!” she fired at him.
“Rose, stop yelling at me!”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
“I mean it, Rose!” The sound of the TARDIS materializing broke her attention from the argument for a moment. She looked at the viewscreen and was stunned to see where they had landed. She burst into tears.
“You really are. You’re going to put me off the ship, too?” She fled the console room and ran into the heart of the ship. The Doctor walked around the console to see what had made Rose run off like that. He frowned in consternation. It was dark outside but he could still see where they were. The ship had materialized in the back yard of the Tyler mansion in the parallel universe.
Button Epsilon was supposed to take him to a safe place. It was what any one of them could hit in an emergency to take them away from a dangerous situation. This was the second time in its history that the “safe” place it had taken them was to Pete and Jackie’s.
The Doctor sighed. Rose didn’t know he hadn’t put in the coordinates himself. She had assumed he was really going to drop her off. “Thanks, ever so,” he muttered to the TARDIS. She responded with a disapproving hum.
He hunched his shoulders and headed to their bedroom. He checked in on their sleeping son. Dare’s mind touch was still out of sorts but he’d be okay after a good sleep. It wasn’t really his son he was worried about either. He sat down on the bed and stared into space.
This explained so much about Cassi’s temperament on the two occasions he had met his future daughter. Her personality had been altered in the earliest stages of her development, the volatility of regeneration becoming a permanent part of her current incarnation’s psyche. It was possible that when Cassi regenerated as an adult that she would lose some of that volatility after the incarnation settled.
He sat there lost in thought for over an hour. It was a good thing it was the middle of the night or he was sure Jackie would have been outside pounding on the TARDIS doors and demanding to be let in. It was only dumb good luck that had allowed him to arrive when the Tyler clan was sleeping.
Finally he went in search of Rose. He could not allow this fighting between them to continue. It wasn’t safe for Cassi to have this much anger around her tiny little mind as it formed again into who she was. He’d find a way to calm his wife down, move her into the Zero room and hope for the best that their fighting hadn’t already caused permanent scars on this version of Cassi’s brain.
After an hour of fruitless searching he asked the TARDIS for help and she directed him to the wardrobe room. He found Rose asleep on the floor, radiating with Vortex energy and wrapped in the leather jacket from his previous incarnation.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Like Armor Worn Across the Heart
Without pausing to see whether Rose was unconscious or just sleeping, the Doctor bent down and picked her up in his arms. Reflexively, Rose turned into him so he assumed correctly she was merely sleeping deeply. Well, at least her sleeping self wasn’t angry at him. He didn’t particularly like the fact that she was wearing his old coat though. It didn’t happen often, just twice before that he could recall. Or that he’d caught her at it.
He’d found her cuddled up in it after the incident with the Krillitane and Sarah Jane Smith and his almost confessing that he couldn’t bear to watch someone he loved, he'd stopped just short of saying loved, wither and die but that he wouldn’t abandon her the way he had Sarah. Never her! He’d invited Mickey on board to put distance between himself and Rose and Rose had not been happy about it. He’d come across her tucked into one corner of the living room, curled up in a tiny ball in an old arm-chair, the leather wrapped around her like armor. It had been obvious from the state of her face that she’d been crying.
The second time had been after Reinette. Despite everything he’d done to reorder the time lines, to erase having abandoned Rose for two hundred and sixty days, too many of which had been spent with her slowly dying of starvation and carris poisoning on a derelict space ship, and coming back the second time after only five and a half hours with her having no knowledge of what had happened on that ship or of her being rescued by someone else, she had still been uncertain. Because he had still abandoned her that day.
Even after he had told her that she was the most important thing in his life and he had kissed her, she had still not been sure. And when he’d checked in on her later that night, he’d found her asleep in bed with the old leather jacket draped over her. She sought it when she felt abandoned. He had hidden it in the wardrobe after that day wanting her to come to him when she needed to. Of course, she’d come to him at Torchwood and he’d ignored her.
He had no doubt that if things had turned out differently after Canary Wharf, if she hadn’t gotten trapped in the parallel world, she would have been curled up in that jacket again that evening, most likely with the TARDIS retrieving it for her. Because he had sent her away, abandoned her, and the TARDIS had been angry at him. Yes, she’d come right back but he’d still done it. Then done it for real. Sure, he’d come for her as soon as he’d been able but he’d abandoned her twice that day.
No wonder she was afraid he might boot her out of the TARDIS, wife or not. This incarnation had a history of leaving her behind or sending her away. Though even his past self had sent her away the once. Of course, dying for her had kind of made up for that, but still…The pattern was there. And he’d…well, he could admit now if only to himself, he’d been terribly high-handed with Donna.
He sighed and kicked open the door to the Zero room extremely grateful the TARDIS has rebuilt it before Dare's birth and felt the lack of gravity take over, the hum of the TARDIS completely silenced. He let go of Rose and watched her float in mid-air. Gently he straightened her into a comfortable posture and then closed the door behind him as he went to check on Dare.
From the child’s state of mind he could benefit from the room as well. He picked up the sleeping baby and a blanket and returned to the Zero room. He cuddled the child against his chest and floated near his wife, watching as the occasional exhale released the energy from the transformed Cassi. He hoped the lack of stimulus would calm her emerging personality.
He doubted it, though. He’d met her after all. And she’d reminded him so much of his previous self, the self that had regenerated right after the Time War, in violence and the dying of so many lives and the madness of that chaos. No Zero room for him. He hadn’t been in any shape to drag his body there. Not even the maddening human hum of an Earth hospital or even just a place of isolation had been for that incarnation. No it had been crazed. And Cassi had been exposed to that same sort of thing.
He wished that he could wake Rose, smooth things over, apologize for being so awful to her, soothe his guilty conscience and convince her that he honestly didn’t blame her for this terrible accident. But his own selfishness and inability to do what his wife wanted had led them to this place, and to push when it might further injure his daughter just to make himself feel better would make Rose lose even more faith in him than she already had done.
He snuggled Dare tighter to his body, taking comfort from the tiny form when he wanted nothing more than to be holding his wife and seeking forgiveness and reassurance that he hadn’t gone and cocked things up for good.
Donna stared at the spot that the TARDIS had been in with shock. “That prat!” she roared. She got up out of bed feeling amazing and ready to face the world. “Someone want to explain to me just what exactly happened here?”
Martha and Owen were having difficulty meeting her eyes. Gwen looked as confused as she felt and there was no sign of Tosh or Ianto. Her eyes focused directly on Jack. “Well?” she asked. “Come on, Mr. Sweet Talker. Start talking.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Jack asked after a moment’s hesitation.
“We were on this planet with some really, really stupid caste system and oh!” Donna’s eyes widened. “They were hunting people! Me! Oh!”
“It was more than that, Donna,” Jack said softly. “They were harvesting organs from their young people so that their old people could live longer.” He quickly related everything else that the Doctor had told him about Phobos while Donna became more and more horrified.
“So how’d I end up here, then?”
“Well, the Doctor came in on them. They had you in the surgery and had taken out one kidney and were starting on the other one. Doc put a stop to it and made them put back in the one they’d taken out and transplanted. He did have to remove it later because it died. See when the aliens transplanted it they used a…well for them it was a symbiont, for you it was a parasite. Normally it would make a foreign organ be accepted by the new host. But in your case, well, you were the original host and it couldn’t do its job so it migrated through the bloodstream looking for an organ it could work with.”
Jack sighed. “Of course it couldn’t find anything so it lodged in the most powerful organ, the heart, and it was slowly constricting the heart, the beats feeding it somehow. It would have killed you within the day. Owen and Martha discovered that the combination of stopping your heart and electricity would kill it, so…well, we told the Doctor and he agreed.”
Jack looked down. “Rose didn’t. Turns out she was right, but no one, especially not the Doctor was listening to her. So when we killed you and couldn’t get you back, well, Rose found a way to get you back. She healed you. You know everything else.”
“The Doctor and I fight all the time,” Donna said. “He’s never left me behind before unless I asked to be.”
“I think it’s more about his own actions than anything you said to him, Donna,” Gwen said. “The new baby, what happened to her, that’s got to be bothering him.”
“Yeah, but if I’m not there on that ship he’s likely to put his foot in it with Rose. Badly.”
“Rose can handle him,” Jack said.
“I really need to check you over, Donna. It’s not been that long since you had the kidney surgery. You shouldn’t really be up,” Owen said.
“I feel fine.”
“Just let Martha and I do our jobs and make sure it’s safe for you to be out of bed.”
“Last time Martha and you did your jobs I ended up dead, thank you very much,” Donna snapped at him. Her hands went to her back and she said, “Besides, I don’t feel any incisions or anything.”
“Let me look,” said Martha and finally Donna gave in. As she pulled clothes out of the way an expanse of unbroken skin came into sight. “Maybe they removed it from the front?” She sounded puzzled. Donna flipped her shirt up just enough for Martha to see that wasn’t true.
“Rose must have healed me completely when she brought me back to life.”
“You don’t think…” It was Gwen, looking back and forth between Jack and Donna.
“I don’t think what?” asked Jack.
“Well, you don’t think Rose made Donna like you?” she asked.
“What? A randy immortal desperate to find his next shag?” Donna snarked.
“No,” said Gwen. “Just immortal.”
Donna looked down at herself. “Don’t feel immortal,” said Donna. “Not really wanting to get shot in the head right now as a test, either.”
“Well, it could explain why the Doctor left you behind,” said Martha. “That’s what he did to Jack first time he saw him. Jack was a fact in time. What if you are, too?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Oh, I’m going to kill him!” Donna said. “The last thing I want is to be kicking around eternity with Jack and little…well, not so little Jack, in charge all the time.”
“Hey! Contrary to your misconceptions, Donna, I am not ruled by the contents of my trousers.”
“When did you ever get the chance to know what size--?” Martha began but Donna silenced her with a look.
“Not on purpose. Now, this immortal thing. Jack? How do you tell?” Donna asked.
“You keep waking up not dead when you should be.”
“Well, that’s dead useful right now,” Donna said.
“We could try killing you again,” snarked Owen. “And if you don’t wake up we’ll know we were wrong.”
“Git,” said Donna.
“Guess we’ll just have to wait around until he comes back and he can tell us what’s going on,” said Jack.
“Not bloody likely. I’ve got a life to get back to. If his Time Lordship deigns to return, well, I don’t know. I’m so mad at the man I’m not even sure I want to see him again at this point. Just find out for me if I’m still mortal and call me.” Donna headed for the stairs.
“Donna,” said Jack.
She turned back to him with thinly disguised irritation. “What?”
“I’m sorry.” His voice was gentle.
She nodded and gave him a single nod. “I know,” she said softly.
“Shall I have Ianto arrange transport for you?” he asked. “No matter how you feel, you shouldn’t be driving yet.”
“Fine. Whatever. Just get me home.”
Ch. 38&39: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/94553.html
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-03 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 04:05 pm (UTC)if Donna has become immortal, why would the Doctor leave her behind? Why did the Doctor leave Jack behind when it happened? I never really wondered that until now.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-03 04:17 am (UTC)