amberfocus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
amberfocus) wrote2008-08-12 08:47 pm
amberfocus) wrote2008-08-12 08:47 pm
Entry tags:
You're What?: Chapter Twenty-Seven
A/N: Sorry for the long wait on this chapter. It required a lot of research to get the science parts right and decently explainable for the layperson. Thanks so much to
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thetesh for his help with the gyroscopic compass and the bit at the end with Jack explaining about, well, stuff I don't want to spoil here. That was his idea and he may or may not write a fic about it and how it pertains to certain hugging aversions in the season 4 finale. And thanks to amy067 for the beta work.Round and Round
The Doctor excused himself to check on his wife and immediately Jack turned to the older Rose and said, “I die. You’re sure?” Rose bit her lip and he read her just as easily as he’d learned to read his own younger version of the woman. “No lies, Rose. Me and her are better than that. I’m hoping you and him were, too.”
“No lies,” she told him. “As if I ever could lie to you. The truth is I don’t know for sure. It’s what I believe. I asked him afterwards if we could go back for you and he wouldn’t. He said you were busy rebuilding the Earth and that you didn’t need us anymore and that we had other things to do. There was always an excuse and I came to believe that you had to have died and he just didn’t have a way of telling me so. He knew how much you meant to me, knew how close we were and I don’t think he could bear breaking my heart and telling me you were actually dead, not after he’d changed and I already had so much heartbreak to get over.”
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
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I'm still just sitting here giggling about that! Awesome, awesome work on the whole chapter, though. Wow, I'm so impressed with the gyroscopic compass! And of course, Nine would be the one to have figured it all out! Brilliant work, as always! *applause* ♥♥♥!!!
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You know what is so funny, in my Jack's Path and Time Eternal series, Jack's mother is a redhead! It's where Kaylee's hair color comes from. And now I can just say it's Noble blood. I love it. My husband is brilliant.
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But I think that's the first complaint I've ever had about anything of yours, and it's minor, so I'll let it go...this time. ;-)
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*Hugs*
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One nitpick, though: the explanation about society being too repressed before the 20th century for a Time Agent to accidentally father his own descendants doesn't quite wash. For one, it would only be Western society, and only for a pretty short time in the context of history. The Roman Empire didn't get its reputation for nothing, you know. For another, while on the surface these societies would've been repressed, there's always a lot going on under the surface, and it only takes one encounter for a pregnancy to occur. Finally, an encounter with a pre-20th-century woman would've been doubly dangerous because of the lack of reliable birth control. It'd be a lot simpler to just sterilize all the Time Agents.
That said, I like the idea of Donna being Jack's ancestor.
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Yay for 9 helping Older Rose out.
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Thanks. Nine is wonderful helping the older Rose. But he so would.
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(I still want to know how she knew how to help UNIT make a time machine, even with the TARDIS. Among other things.)
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But wait.... Donna fancies her great great great.... son?
LOL!
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The gyrocompass stuff was wildly fun-You do sciencey-geeky stuff very, very nicely! :)
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Yep, the events of Turn Left happen for Rose except the bit at the end, first. Then the events of this fic, then the bit where she warns Donna about Bad Wolf at the end of Turn Left, and then finally the end of Partners in Crime when we see her, and that's also why she disappears. She looks so sad there because she knows she will yo-yo back before she gets a glimpse of the Doctor, but she knows she's also on the right track because it's Donna there again, she's just too early in the time line still. It's timey whimey but just felt fun rearranging everything to suit this fic. *smiles*
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Also liking the credible explanation for Jack's avoiding hugging Donna :)
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But hey! That would mean that Donna ends up finding someone and marrying him and having at least one kid....I'm going to pretend it's Lee. Don't know how, but that's what I'm pretending. Yup.
Good explanation on the gyroscope. Even if most of it still went over my head, but hey, it's early in the morning, just about everything goes over my head before 7am.
We're going to see Jackie now, yes yes?
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Glad the gyroscope explanation held water and Jackie will be in the next chapter.
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grins :o)
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I...HATE...DISCONTINUITY. I just about had a conniption in the previous fandom I wrote for when tptb suddenly decided for plot purposes to discount two years of prior canon (canon THEY established!) and give a major character an extra former wife.
There's a DW fan who is currently writing up some very insightful episode reviews, and she noted that RTD's stories are rarely as tightly plotted as someone else's (like the Dickens episode). You've explained everything - how canon Rose felt about the Doctor's Jack explanation (it explains the JE reactions); how Donna's DNA in the compass explains why Rose keeps popping up in Donna and the Doctor's time together; why Jack would not physically hug Donna.
The DNA processing for Jack is a brilliant move - one can hardly expect someone to remember every single ancestor for thirty centuries. Loved Jack's cheeky statement that Donna being his ancestor makes him important, lol. Loved the implication that Donna does get to have that marriage and kids and presumably be awesome. (Could that latent Time Lord part of her caused Jack to want to time travel? Or that it passed down and that's why Jack is drawn in to the Doctor and Rose in 1941?)
Loved the gyroscope idea as well. It's very Doctor-ish; he knows the science and adapts what he can for his purposes.
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Perfect timing, as this popped up on my f-list last night when I dragged in from the airport, after 10 days away with no reliable internet, though I'm a bit disappointed that this is the only chapter waiting for me. ::guilts::
I know older Rose is looking for Ten, but I can't help but feel she'd really be thrown by seeing Nine again. There's great angsty potential for an older!Rose POV, torn between so many possibilities — getting his help, interfering, being "noble" and losing again...
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Ah, well, I had a bit of a break from Nine fic while I wrote Sacrifice and then started A Sky Without Zeppelins. My nine muse went on strike. But he seems to be working again, though *glares at Hunger Moon* not quite as effectively as he should be.
Yeah, don't think I haven't thought about an older Rose point of view, maybe an outtake, but right now, oh, there's way too many WiP's for me to think too much on it.
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Well now that makes TOTAL sense. It was totally OOC for Jack not to flirt with Donna and to actually avoid her, or back away from her advances...unheard of. So this make it work.
I think I'm going to send a letter of recommendating to the BBC. This stuff should so be canon!
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