Doubt (4/6)

[amberfocus]

A/N:  Okay, this has morphed into six parts from four.  Sorry.  Otherwise this chapter would be nearly 6000 words long and that's just too many.  But it is finished and I'll post a chapter a day until it's all up.

                                                                Chapter Four: Reflection

Rose turns back to the sprawled form of the Doctor and he looks up at her with his Oncoming Puppy Dog Eyes and Rose sighs and offers him her hand. He grabs it and he’s up on his feet in a heartbeat and Rose just shakes her head at his wounded expression before she pulls her hand away. He follows her into the kitchen. “What do you mean you didn’t think of that? You wouldn’t have hit me, Rose, would you?” He’s got that little boy note in his voice that is sometimes endearing and sometimes irritating. Right now she’s not sure which.

She shakes her head. “No. Meant I didn’t think to warn you that Mum might. She’s rather upset with you. I—I called her when I was, when I thought you wanted…” She swallows hard and so does he. “Now go and sit down in the other room. I’ll just be a moment.”

“With her?”

“You afraid of my mum?” she asks.

“No,” he says in a voice that means yes. Some things have stayed the same after all and she finds that oddly reassuring.

“Don’t be silly. She won’t hit you again. The worst is over. With her anyway. Can’t say what might happen with Mickey if she told him what she thought she knew. Now go on. She won’t bite.” Begrudgingly he does what she says, clearly not believing Jackie has done her worst.

Rose is not so unsympathetic to his plight that she’ll leave him alone long with her mum. She goes to the freezer and looks for something he can put on his aching jaw. She also puts the kettle on for tea. By the time she returns to the living room he is ensconced on the couch looking warily at Jackie and acting as if he might bolt from the room at any moment. She hands the Doctor the bag of peas and says, “Put that on your face before you bruise.” She sits down on the far end of the couch from him.

“I should have knocked you into next week after what you put my Rose through,” Jackie grumbles.

“Time travel doesn’t work like that,” he smarts off. Rose gives him a quelling look and he stops.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” she tells her mother gently. “We both got it awfully wrong.” Slowly Rose explains to Jackie what happened and Jackie groans.

“Don’t the two of you ever talk?” she asks.

“We talk all the time,” says the Doctor.

“Doesn’t mean we actually say anything,” Rose adds.

“I’m not sorry I hit you. Thinking Rose would ever cheat on you. Don’t you know that she lo--?”

“Mum,” Rose says warningly.

Jackie changes gears. “You’re an idiot,” she says to the Doctor instead.

“Oi!” he protests.

“And honestly, Rose, you’re not much better than he is.”

“Hey!”

“I mean it. Do you have any idea what you put me through?” Jackie demands.

“What we put you through?” Rose asks. “Mum, this isn’t about you at all.”

“Oh, isn’t it? I almost lost my grandbaby because the two of you don’t talk!” Jackie snaps.

“Not like you would want an alien grandchild anyway,” the Doctor mutters.

Jackie rises from her chair and hovers over him arm raised as if to slap him. “Now you get this straight, you great, thick, bloody Time Lord, or I’ll thump you another one. Any child of Rose’s will be loved by me, no matter who the father is! My love for my daughter is unconditional and so will my love be for this child and any other child you produce with her!”

The Doctor doesn’t exactly cringe away from her anger but the couch does magically move back several inches, seemingly of its own accord. The kettle whistles and Jackie sighs. “I’ll get that. Earl gray?” she asks.

“Dunno,” says Rose. “Is caffeine bad for a Time Lord fetus?”

“Nope,” he says. “Even at this early a stage the babe will just metabolize it.” Jackie heads out to the kitchen and he turns to Rose. “Gallifreyan,” he offers shyly.

“What?”

“Not a Time Lord fetus. The baby is Gallifreyan. Time Lord is…a title. A rank, if you will. Where I’m from, my planet…it was…it was called Gallifrey.” There is so much pain in his voice as he almost whispers the name that tears come into her eyes.

“Thank you,” she says quietly.

“For what?” He is startled.

“For telling me. For trusting me enough. You’ve never…” She can’t finish but she doesn’t have to. He understands and he reaches out, holding his hand towards her. She hesitates for just a moment and then places hers gingerly against his palm. His fingers wrap around hers and he tugs her closer to him. She moves over enough that their hands are not stretched across the sofa, but not close enough that their bodies are touching. She doesn’t thread their fingers together the way one of them usually does, but she does hold tight to his.

Jackie returns with her tea service on a tray and sets it down on the coffee table. Her eyes take note of their changed positions and clutched hands. She sighs. “Now what are we going to do about the two of you?”

“Mum, butt out.”

“You brought me into this, Rose. And there’s far more at stake here then the two of you seem to think.”

“Mum!”

“Let her talk, Rose,” the Doctor says quietly. “Maybe…it’ll help?” Rose gives a single nod of her head and looks over at her mother.

“I know how the two of you feel about each other. It’s been there from the day you brought Rose back to me one year late.” The Doctor starts to bristle but Jackie fixes him with a stern look. “We’ll not talk about that just now,” she says. “But it was obvious to me even then the two of you were crazy about each other. I knew then it was only a matter of time. Even Mickey knew, you know. Oh, he tried to hold on to the hope, but once the Doctor entered our lives that relationship was doomed and we all knew it.”

Jackie sighs. “When the two of you became lovers--.”

“Jackie,” the Doctor says warningly not liking the ground Jackie is walking over. It’s too private. Rose squeezes his hand and her fingers thread through his. He settles back but his body remains tense.

“Hush you,” Jackie says. “When the two of you became lovers I worried so much. A nine hundred year old alien taking up with my teenage daughter. That’s one hell of an age gap. But it worked. The two of you worked, better than most couples I’ve ever known. You always put each other first and the emotion between you was palpable. Any fool could look at you and see how you felt about each other.”

“Mum.” Her mother is treading on dangerous territory.

“I’m not done. When you sent my Rose back to me, when you put her safety above everything else and sent her home, I knew what a sacrifice you were making and I knew why. It told me everything I needed to know about you Doctor. And Rose, she was so desperate to get back to you, to save you, to put you before everything else…I knew then just how matched a pair the two of you are. It’s why I helped her. That and the baby. A baby needs his father, this baby especially. Rose didn’t get that, didn’t get to grow up with her daddy, but I was going to be damned if I didn’t secure that future for her child.”

“You helped her?” the Doctor asks.

“She got me the truck we used to open the console,” Rose confirms.

“I wanted her safe,” he says a little darkly.

“I wanted her happy,” replies Jackie. “And she wasn’t ever gonna be again. Not without you. So get over it. Now, the two of you have some major trust issues to get through. And it’s not going to be easy but let me lay them out for you so you don’t go and hide from them again. Doctor, you lost faith in Rose. For you to even think that she would cheat on you is horrifying. She was so scared when she thought you were dying. She didn’t care then that you had a different face. She just wanted you to live. ‘I’d give anything,’ she said to me, ‘so long as he makes it through this.’ And I think that’s still true, buried underneath all this hurt. She knew even then it was you. She was just hurt you didn’t tell her this could happen.”

“It’s true,” Rose whispers when the Doctor turns to look at her. “Part of me believed the truth from the time you said hopping for our lives.” A small half smile graces her face at the memory of that conversation.

“And Rose, you lost your faith in the Doctor, too. You’ve always been the sort to double check the facts and then triple check them, make sure you had everything right. What happened to that? How could you believe the Doctor would order you to have an abortion?”

“You believed it, too!” Rose bursts out.

“I didn’t have all the facts at hand, only what you told me, which was really that he didn’t want the baby and you were going to have an abortion. I also didn’t have the Doctor right there in front of me to talk to. If you’d have told me he’d actually ordered you I’d have said to go back to him and make sure he had it straight, because it didn’t sound like him at all. And honestly I was so mad from what you did say I wasn’t thinking straight. If I had been I would have known he’d never do that to you. Never. He’d order you to stay away from Mickey sure. In a heartbeat he would. But this? No. I can’t believe it of him,” Jackie says.

“Thank you,” saysthe Doctor with quiet dignity.

“I didn’t want to believe it!” Rose wails. “I was in shock and hurting. You don’t know how he talked to me, the things he said! The baby was the only secret I had. How was I ever to know he meant something that it had never even crossed my mind to do?”

“You should have believed in me,” the Doctor says.

“You didn’t believe in me,” she shoots back.

They sit on the couch staring at each other and breathing hard trying to put a check on too painful emotions.

“You two are going to have to make the effort to believe in each other again, to have a faith so strong in the other person that something like this happening again will be unthinkable. You need to build this thing between you back up again with such a foundation that nothing can shake it. Because you’ve got a child on the way. One that you both want. And that little girl or boy is going to need you, both of you. And anyway, you’re so much stronger together than apart.”

“I think we can do this, Rose. I really do. If we try, we can fix this,” the Doctor says urgently. “And I…I want to try. Not just for the baby, but for us.”

“Me, too.” Her voice is very soft. “No more secrets?” she asks him.

“No more secrets,” he agrees. “Just you and me against the world.”

“The Doctor and Rose Tyler in the TARDIS,” she says with a watery smile.

“As it should be,” he says giving her a tender look.

It seems like such a moment should be sealed with a kiss but it’s too soon for that. Still, Jackie excuses herself to the kitchen for a while and when she comes back Rose is tucked into the Doctor’s side and his arm is about her shoulders. She smiles. It’s a start.

Ch. 5:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/173011.html