amberfocus | Leap of Faith: Chapter One

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Title: Leap of Faith (1/?)
Author:

amberfocus
Characters/Pairings: John Smith (alt!Nine)/Rose Tyler, Toshiko Sato, Jake Simmonds, Mickey Smith, Ianto Jones, Jackie Tyler/Pete Tyler, Tony Tyler, various original characters
Genre: Romance, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe
Rating: Adult
Betas:

amyo67,

jeprdyfrndly,

thetesh
Summary: Hiding from the Family of Blood, the alt!Ninth Doctor turns himself into John Smith via the chameleon arch and with his companion Toshiko Sato, takes a job at Torchwood. He clashes with everyone he meets and Rose Tyler, the beautiful young director of Torchwood Field Operative Training and the daughter of his boss, is no exception. AU after season 2 and based mostly, but not completely, on my short story Third Time's the Charm: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/319447.html, but it is not necessary to have read that.
A/N: This story is dedicated to

mkejenkins for doing her part in keeping the Ninth Doctor alive for all of us through all her hard work with

storm_and_wolf, and because she is a general all around fantastic person who is incredibly supportive of my own attempts to keep Nine alive. Elisa, this one's for you.

Chapter One: Smith and Sato

Toshiko Sato had only known the Doctor for half a year and she still thought she was daft to have ever agreed to travel with him, but after a huge debacle with UNIT and the alien Slitheen family when she’d first met him, she didn’t have a lot of choice. It was either sign up with the Doctor and get away until things calmed down or face the very real consequences of giving the okay to blow up Downing Street while the injured, unconscious, but still very much alive, President Harriet Jones was still inside. It had been the woman’s last order.

She’d believed the Doctor implicitly when he’d said so, though she wasn’t sure where that blind faith in a stranger had come from. She’d even believed of her own accord that it was completely necessary, despite the fact that she thought they’d both die doing it. She’d believed it enough to use Harriet’s laptop to hack into the emergency defense grid and launch the missile herself. UNIT had taken more than a few weeks to come around to their way of thinking. About the time it had taken for the still very much alive president to awaken from her coma. By then Toshiko had been enjoying her time with the Doctor far more than she’d ever supposed she would.

Things had finally settled down and the last time they’d been on Earth UNIT had offered Tosh her old job back. She’d been incredibly surprised that the first word that had flown out of her mouth upon the invitation from Captain Magambo had been no. She wasn’t sure of it, but she’d thought the Doctor had actually been pleased that she was staying with him. She’d grown, well, not exactly fond of the Doctor, but she certainly appreciated the experiences he gave her. Her new life exploring the stars and having adventures she’d never even dreamed of as a child, when she’d looked towards space as a possible career choice, were worth dealing with the occasional bouts of depression and the persistent mania of her new friend. When he wasn’t being a grouchy old bastard, he was actually a lot of fun.

Friend was maybe even stretching it a bit. Not that she didn’t think they wouldn’t ever be friends, but the man was so tight with his own personal details, where he was from, why he never went back there, what made him so crazy when faced with a battle situation on an alien planet, that she didn’t think it would happen for a long time yet. Share time was not something the man was inclined to participate in. She still didn’t know why he had invited her along. It certainly hadn’t been to protect her from her so-called mistakes at UNIT. There were days where he barely tolerated her presence, yet not once had he asked her to leave.

“Will it hurt?” Toshiko asked the Doctor.

“I imagine there may be a fair bit of fussing and moaning,” the Doctor admitted.

Great, thought Tosh. That was Doctor-speak for ‘it is going to hurt like hell.’ “Tell me again why we have to do this? I’d have thought becoming human would be beneath you.”

“Normally,” he said. “But I need someplace to hide out in the open. Becoming human gives me that ability. You lot just happen to be formed in the same image, more or less, as my far more superior race. I can pass for human on Earth just by looks, but the Family, they’re capable of doing far more than looking. They can smell me, hunt me, and track me down. I don’t want to spend the next year running. It’ll be an interesting experiment, Toshiko. The scientist in you has got to be eager to compare my Time Lord behavior with any human quirks and foibles I may have.”

“Yeah, right eager,” she muttered. “You said this thing, this chameleon arch, makes you a whole different person, yes?”

“Well, I imagine I’ll be quite alike in personality.”

“Oh, joy,” she interrupted. The Doctor glared at her. “Sorry,” she muttered rebelliously, but she wasn’t.

“My remembered life experience will be completely different. The TARDIS will make up most of it, but I’ve set the parameters to include the cover story I’ve come up with for us. I’ll be a doctor, with PH.Ds in archeology, biochemistry, anthropology, and a few other things, who has studied the impact alien visitation has made on this planet. Of course I’ll be an expert on alien artifacts. That should fit me in very well with Torchwood. Plus, it’s the sort of place where most aliens would try to keep their distance from. Makes it the perfect hiding place,” he explained.

“And me?” she asked.

“You’ll be my assistant. We met when I was teaching and you were studying at Oxford.”

“Eight years of special ops training in alien recovery and retrieval and Masters degrees in Biochemistry and Technology and I’m still just an assistant?”

“Not just an assistant. My assistant,” he said as if that should make all the difference in the world.

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “But why for a whole year?”

“What? You got something better to do? Thought you signed up with me because you didn’t,” he said.

Tosh narrowed her eyes. “A year is just a long time. You won’t even be you and I’ve finally gotten the hang of dealing with your particular brand of crazy. But you as a human? For a year?”

“Yeah, unfortunately. Normal members of this species don’t last more than three months. This is a particularly long-lived group. They got a hold of a chronovore way back in their family line when it crashed on their home planet. It extended their lifespan far beyond normal for their progeny, quadrupling how long they can survive. It made them hungry for more. If they get a hold of me and feed on my energy they’ll become immortal. And beings like that cannot be allowed to live forever. They are too ruthless, too dangerous to let loose on the universe. Nature was correct in limiting their time,” he said. His voice darkened. “I should know.”

Before he could drift off into depression as he always did when he said something like that, she decided to distract him by pressing on. “And what happens at the end of the year? Won’t they just procreate and send more creatures off to hunt you?” Toshiko asked.

“No. The drive to leave the home world is limited to a handful of them every five or six hundred generations. The resources they must channel to travel through time and space leaves them incapable of reproduction. This will cause them to be even more desperate to succeed and bring my body back to their planet. Progeny is the only immortality most of them receive. But living forever would displace the need to live on through the offspring.”

“I just don’t know if I can do this,” she said.

“Toshiko, I need you. I can’t do this by myself.” For the first time since she’d known him, he looked vulnerable. The Doctor was so many things. Strong, powerful, sarcastic, a huge pain in the arse, sometimes funny, sometimes cruel, sometimes kind, but he was never, ever vulnerable. “You’re it, Tosh. You’re all I’ve got. My only friend. And I need you to do this for me. Please.”

“All right, but if it all goes to hell, you can’t blame me.”

The Doctor smiled one of his rare, true smiles. “Thank you.”

Tosh sighed and shook her head then strapped him into the chair. The Doctor pulled a strangely wired helmet down over his head and then nodded at Toshiko. Carefully she ran through the routine the Doctor had spent hours making sure she had memorized. The helmet began to glow and then the screaming started. By the time it finally ended, Toshiko was in tears. No one should ever have to suffer through something so horrible. At least as John Smith, he wouldn’t remember the pain of the change.

“Miss Tyler!”

“What?” Rose Tyler barked at the young man calling her name from somewhere behind her in the corridor. She spun on her heel as she answered and watched as the intern braved her bad mood to hand her a manila file at least three inches thick.

“Your father asked me to give this to you,” he said meekly.

“What is it?” she said looking at the file as if it was going to bite her.

Jake appeared suddenly from behind her and came and rested his hand reassuringly on the intern’s shoulder. “It’s all of the paperwork you’ve been avoiding, Rose,” he said. He took the file from the intern and nodded for the man to make good his escape.

“Jake, you know I don’t have time for this,” Rose insisted. “There’s a sighting over in Ealing of strange lights—.”

“Mickey’s on it. He’s taken delta team and they’re on their way,” he said.

“Then I have to talk to Davis in archives—.”

“Also taken care of this morning before you came in. If you did it as you went, it wouldn’t be so daunting a task,” Jake chided, pressing the file firmly into her hands.

Rose held back a growl. It wasn’t Jake’s fault that nothing in her life was going right at the moment. That nothing right had gone on in her life for the last three years. Well, there was Tony. That was a blessing. And her mum and Pete’s marriage. Those were good things, good things she needed to cling to so she didn’t go mad from longing for a life she would never have again. Or the man. She still had Mickey. And Jake. Jake had been a godsend, always cheering her up when she least expected it. And she was good at her job. Maybe too good. She sighed.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to help?” she asked.

“What’s in it for me?” Jake asked.

“I’ll let you use my parking space two days a week for a month,” she said.

“Motorcycle parking is closer to where I actually work, Rose,” he reminded her. “What else you got?”

“My undying love?” she suggested.

“Already got that,” he snorted.

Rose pretended to think for a moment, but she’d known before she’d asked for help that it would only ever come down to one thing. “I’ll make sure you have IC-5 rights for the rest of the year.”

“Deal,” Jake said lifting the folder from Rose’s fingers and tucking it under his arm. “Let’s go.” He started off down the corridor.

“Jake, my office is this way.”

“I know, but Ianto’s is this way,” Jake said eagerly.

Rose gave a rare smile and followed her friend in search of the Welshman and his magic coffeepot.

“He’s a bit of an arse, isn’t he?” Ianto Jones, head of human resources, said to new Torchwood employee Toshiko Sato as her boss, also a new employee, stormed out of his office. They’d been there for ten work days and already the Doctor, well, Dr. John Smith, was making friends left and right with his massive amounts of sunny charm.

“You don’t know the half of it. He’s brilliant though.”

“Yeah, I’ve read his personnel file. Still, it’s obvious why he moves from place to place so much,” Ianto said. “People must be relieved to see the back of him. How long have you been with him?”

Tosh thought for a minute, focusing on the cover story she'd memorized. “Off and on for ten years,” she lied smoothly. “I met him when I was at Oxford. And I don't know...six, maybe seven months, this time around. Working with him, it’s sort of timeless.”

“Like five minutes feels like a lifetime?” Ianto asked.

Tosh laughed. “Something like that.”

“Still, UNIT though.”

“Not that terribly different from Torchwood as far as I can see. Just more…militant.” Tosh shrugged. “They really don’t like you to color outside of the lines there. Bit more freedom here.”

“Yeah. We encourage creativity. And that’s one thing I can say for your Dr. Smith. He’s shown an amazing level of creativity. His intuition into how alien artifacts work and how we might adapt them to our own use is second to none. He’ll likely make his way through our entire catalogue before the month is up,” he said.

“Then he’ll be bored and start raising havoc,” she said.

“Oh, I think I know someone who can keep him in line if you can’t,” Ianto said. His grin was slightly malicious. “But how about you, Toshiko? You’ve been here two weeks now. How are you settling in? Really? Because you don’t have to work with him if you don’t want to. We have a lot of departments that could use your particular skill set.”

“No,” said Tosh almost sharply. “I’m to work with Dr. Smith. It was a condition of our employment here and I don’t want to be separated from him.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize the two of you were like that,” Ianto said.

“No! We’re not like that. Dr. Smith is just…he needs looking after and I’m the only one…” Tosh ran her hands through her hair. “I’ve got to keep him safe.”

“He’s a grown man, Toshiko. He can take care of himself.”

“One would think. No, I like my work. The Doctor can be difficult, but I know how to handle him…” Toshiko trailed off as Ianto’s eyebrows rose. She turned to see who he was looking at. A young woman wearing dark blue jeans and a purple cashmere sweater and a slightly older man dressed in black jeans and a brown leather jacket stood in the doorway.

“Ah, Rose, Jake, come in. Meet Toshiko Sato, a new recruit to alien artifacts. Tosh, this is Rose Tyler and Jake Simmonds. Rose and Jake are in charge of the field teams. They retrieve a good portion of what you catalog.”

Toshiko stood up and shook hands with the pair. Jake was enthusiastic in greeting her, but Rose was more reserved and her smile didn’t touch her eyes. It wasn’t that she was unfriendly. It was more like something was broken in the woman. She recognized it instantly. She’d seen it often enough on the Doctor’s face, back when he was still just the Doctor and not John Smith. Tosh returned to her chair and sipped at the mug of coffee that Ianto had given her when she and the Doctor had first entered his office. It was pure bliss.

“What can I help you with?” Ianto asked.

“I’m granting Jake IC-5 rights for the rest of the year,” she told him.

“And I thought it was something serious for Rose Tyler to poke her nose down into my office,” Ianto said.

“It’s entirely serious,” Jake said. “I have to work my tail off for it.”

“What’re IC-5 rights?” Tosh asked. “I don’t remember seeing that in the handbook.”

“You actually read the handbook?” Rose asked.

Toshiko nodded. “Bit dry, but yeah.”

“Sorry, that’s classified,” Ianto said, but with great good humor. “Strictly need to know.” Even Rose’s smile almost lit her eyes this time. Ianto looked back at Jake. “Help yourself,” he said nodding over to the coffee machine by the window.

Tosh finished her coffee then rose again. “I should get back to him. Great sense of direction he has, but for some reason or other he seems to get entirely lost here without me.”

“Tell him I’ll see what I can do about his problem, but that for the most part, temper tantrums really don’t help around here in acquiring needed equipment or special dispensation,” Ianto said.

“You really haven’t seen the Doctor throw a temper tantrum yet,” said Tosh. “That was just a warning shot.” She turned and looked over at Jake and Rose to say good-bye. Rose’s face had gone white.

“Who’s throwing a tantrum?” she asked, her voice just a little bit shaky.

“Oh, Dr. Smith. He’s taken over alien artifacts. I’m his assistant,” Tosh explained.

“Ah.” A flash of disappointment, quickly hidden, crossed the younger woman’s face. “Well, it was nice meeting you.”

“You, too.” Everyone said their good-byes and Tosh left to return to her job, bracing herself for the yelling that she was sure was coming the minute she walked into Dr. Smith’s department.

“You all right?” Jake asked softly as Rose completed a page of paperwork and set it in her outbox. It was gradually becoming fuller than her inbox.

“Yeah. It was just…she said ‘the Doctor.’ And I know it can’t be my Doctor, but…I couldn’t stop feeling this tiny little bit of hope inside me when I heard that; that he’s somehow made his way back to me. I believe in him so much. I know he told me it was impossible. It’s been three years. If it was possible he’d never make me wait this long, but for some reason this itty bitty part of me refuses to give up,” Rose said.

“There are lots of doctors that work at Torchwood, Rose,” Jake said. “This can’t be the first time you’ve heard one referred to as the Doctor.”

“No, of course not,” she said hastily. “It was just the way she said it, with so much aggravation…” Rose sighed and pushed her hair back from her face, then cradled her jaw with one hand. “You remember what he was like. How he could get on people’s nerves. The heart wants what the heart wants. Even when it’s impossible.”

“I know.” Jake did. Maybe he was the only person who could understand. He’d spent the last five years becoming close friends with his dead lover’s doppelganger. It was hard being so close to someone who was so like the man you’d once determined to spend your life with, but who was different in the most important of ways. He wasn’t in love with Mickey, but the constant reminder of Rickey sometimes caught him by surprise and it hurt. At least he’d been able to grieve properly. Rickey was dead. He was buried. There was a cemetery he could go to when he needed a quiet moment to visit the grave.

Rose had none of that and she envied Jake his small consolation. Her Doctor wasn’t dead, nor did she want him to be, but in many ways it might have been easier on her heart if he had been. She had grieved, yes, but because he was still out there, somewhere, living with his own broken heart, she’d never been fully able to say good-bye. It wasn’t a clean break. If there was an opposite of a clean break, than this would be it; dirty, cracked, and scarring. It lingered. She did what she could to get on with her life, but the loss had marked her in ways that were prominently visible.

She had only just in the last year even been able to entertain the possibility of dating someone in the future. Not now, of course, but in a safe, hazy, distant sort of future. She thought if she met the right man she could love again. Some day. It was a huge step forward, but days like today, when some tiny little thing would remind her of what she had lost it felt like she’d never made any progress at all.

What she really wanted, no what she really needed, was to be completely swept off her feet in the most unexpected way. Fat chance of that though when she was so damn guarded she couldn’t even let people in; when half the staff of Torchwood was afraid of her and her moods and the other half avoided her on the advice of the first half. If it weren’t for Mickey, Jake, Ianto, and her field team, she’d not be on good terms with anyone. And even amongst them she was pretty sure her new partner Martin was getting ready to bolt.

She had to stop alienating people. She needed to find her way back to the person she used to be. Happy and hopeful and charming and full of life. And she needed to find herself a girlfriend. She still desperately missed her friends from back home. Jake and Mickey were wonderful, reliable, dependable mates, but it wasn’t the same as a female confidante. She’d actually met the Shireen and Keisha of this universe shortly after she’d arrived, searching for something familiar, but they were strangers; not just to Rose but to each other. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but whatever it was had never materialized. She’d managed to scare off anyone at work, first with the pain she had radiated, and then with her attitude when that pain had turned to bitterness and cold anger at life.

Well, that needed to change. She had to stop being so withdrawn. She could start with Toshiko, the new woman working in alien artifacts. She had no way of knowing Rose’s reputation. She’d been nice and curious and could obviously handle a difficult man, something Rose had lots of experience in. They’d have that and working at Torchwood in common and maybe it was enough to build on and go from there.

Rose scooted her chair over to the computer and entered her password, quickly scanning through the files of the recent new hires and looked up Toshiko Sato’s. She found herself reading it in detail. Toshiko seemed brilliant in her own right. Rose wondered why she’d only been hired on as an assistant to Dr. Smith when it was clear that she could have run a department here on her own based on her years of experience at UNIT and her education.

She delved deeper into the file, trying to find out why the woman had left that place of employment. She’d had an exemplary record up until seven months ago. She tried to think of any big alien events that had happened around that time. There had been that incident on Downing Street that ended with it being blown to smithereens. Could Tosh have been involved in it in some way? Rose knew there had been Raxicoricofallipatorians involved in that. It had followed a bit too closely with her own experience with the Slitheen family in her home universe. She’d kept her nose out of that, afraid it would bring up old memories. That was the day, after all, that she’d first realized how deeply the Doctor’s feelings had run for her and understood that her own for him were starting to grow past the stage of only being friends.

Now, though, she was curious. She wondered if Toshiko and her Dr. Smith had anything to do with it. Perhaps a bit of snooping there would lead her to discover if they’d been involved in that. And she could just reassure herself that any crazy idea she might have had on hearing the Doctor’s name had nothing to do with the man who was here. She scrolled through the list of new hires again and clicked on the one she wanted.

Smith, John Seamus

The words blinked at her, taunting her with their very commonness. He was 43, had a January birth date, and had worked sporadically with UNIT prior to working with Torchwood. His employment, like Toshiko’s had been abruptly severed the week of the attack on Downing Street. She read on, looking for more clues as to who he was. He had several doctorates and had taught for a time at Oxford. If she remembered correctly, Toshiko had been at Oxford as a student. She wondered if they’d known each other even then.

She read on finding that there were large, unexplained gaps in his employment history. He lived in Torchwood Housing in a unit next door to Toshiko’s. The various odds and ends of his life tried to fill her mind with the useless bits of information she was gleaning to convince herself that it was enough to be sure he couldn’t be the Doctor.

The stated age would be too old for the man she remembered to pass himself off as. Her Doctor had looked to be in his early to mid-thirties and Time Lords aged slowly. He’d never look 43. The height was off an inch. The weight, well, it was impossible that he could weigh that much. Her Doctor has been so skinny a strong enough wind could have blown him over. His medical said…definitely only one heart. The Doctor was clever though. He could fake the scans, maybe fiddle with something or replace an x-ray result. But why would he? This was stupid. She needed to stop.

Her eyes dropped to the rest of his identifying features. Sandy brown hair. Blue eyes. So it couldn’t be him. Not her brown-haired, brown-eyed, scatterbrained Doctor with a gob that never quit. It was a relief, really. She was sure he’d gotten on with his life because he would have had to just to survive. This had been a stupid, fanciful notion anyway.

He’d said there was no way and after three years she’d had no choice but to believe it out of sheer self-preservation. So it was decided. It wasn’t him. She had to be satisfied with that. There were only two things left to do. She could leave well enough alone and close the file right now or she could click on the attachment that would bring up his personnel photograph.

Rose swallowed hard. It was ridiculous to even think he was here. The first thing he would have done is come and find her. Torchwood, she’d told him when they had stood on the beach on that cold and desolate day, was where she worked. He’d called her defender of the Earth. He knew where she’d be. He’d never make her wait. She didn’t need to look because she knew the truth. She closed the file without clicking on the attachment that would display the photo and returned to her paperwork, burying her pain under the unending pile.

Ch. 2: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/327513.html