You Reap What You Sow (44&45 of 45)
Jul. 3rd, 2008 01:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amberfocus
Banner by bmshipper_arts
Chapter Forty-four: Reparations
Rose rang the doorbell of Donna’s house and when the other woman opened the door she said, “Someone’s missed his Auntie Donna.” She handed Dare over to her friend. “Can we come in?”
Donna stood back and gestured for the little family to come into her home. “Have you made your decision yet?” the Doctor asked anxiously.
Donna sat down on the couch and cuddled the baby. “Yes, I have. I’ll come back with you, but you only get one more chance, Doctor. If you leave me off anywhere in a fit of anger, that’s it. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“I need two weeks to put my affairs in order,” she added.
“Two weeks?” the Doctor pouted.
“It’s not like we’ll have to wait,” said Rose. “We’ll just jump ahead.”
“But what do you need two weeks for?” complained the Doctor.
“I have to put in notice at my job and arrange for a house sitter and put all my bills on auto pay from the trust. I won’t be travelling with you and Rose forever. My life needs to be in some sort of order when I come back to it,” Donna explained.
“Why won’t you be travelling with us forever?” the Doctor asked a little petulantly.
“Some day, Doctor, I’m going to want to settle down. I know the whole idea of that is anathema to you, but I want a family of my own and I’m not getting any younger. Sooner or later I’m going to be too old to be having babies.”
“Well,” began the Doctor slowly, “That’s going to be further off than you think.”
“What?”
“When I healed you,” Rose began, “It altered you.”
“You didn’t turn me into a genetic hybrid like you, did you?” Donna asked.
“No. You’re DNA hasn’t been altered. You’re still fully human,” the Doctor said.
“Oh, good heavens you didn’t turn me into Jack, did you?” Donna asked with a sudden sharpness in her tone.
“No, you’re not immortal, Donna. I didn’t use Bad Wolf or Rose Plus to heal you. The thing is, what healed you was a borrowed life from one of Cassi’s regenerations. Your life span will be as long as that. You’ll probably live to be around two hundred years old now,” Rose said softly.
“Two hundred?” gasped Donna.
“You should be able to reproduce until you’re about one hundred fifty,” added the Doctor. “And as long as you don’t pick an idiot to do it with, if you want to raise your family on the TARDIS with me and Rose, you’re more than welcome to it.”
Donna’s eyes got huge. “You’re kidding me!”
“I meant it when I said you’re family, Donna,” the Doctor said.
“We both did,” Rose added.
Donna lifted Dare up, burying her face in his stomach and blowing against the skin loudly to make him laugh, while hiding her own expression. She didn’t want Rose and the Doctor to see how emotional their offer was making her. Dare giggled happily.
“I have missed this little guy,” she said after she’d composed herself. “I’m glad I haven’t lost out on seeing his first two years. Right then, two weeks, Doctor and I expect you to be on time.”
“We will be,” he said, leaping to his feet with a grin. She handed the baby over to him and then with a couple of good-bye hugs, she saw them out.
“That went well,” said Rose as she and the Doctor entered the TARDIS.
“Better than I expected,” he agreed and began typing coordinates into the computer. A few moments later they were materializing for the second time in Donna’s back garden.
“Are you really going to let her raise a family on the TARDIS?” Rose asked.
“If she wants to,” the Doctor said. “I know she probably won’t but the offer stands. I’ll be back in a bit,” he said as he hurried out of the TARDIS. When he returned he was loaded down with several bags and was followed by an equally laden Donna.
“Is that everything?” asked Rose.
Donna nodded. “Yes. Figured we’d be gone for awhile and didn’t want to leave anything behind.”
Rose laughed at the understatement as the Doctor trudged by her to take Donna’s belongings to her room. “It’s good to have you back,” Rose said.
“It’s good to be back.” Rose followed Donna down the corridor to her room.
“I’ll leave you to the unpacking,” the Doctor said. “Anywhere in particular you want to go first?” he asked.
“Can I choose anywhere?” Donna asked.
“Anywhere,” agreed the Doctor. “Except Calixis,” he added as an afterthought. “Or Raxicoricofallipatorius and Clom.”
“Why not Calixis?” demanded Donna.
“Wouldn’t be safe,” muttered the Doctor.
“You’re making that up,” said Rose. “You just don’t want to go there.”
“It would cause great harm to the structure of my mind to visit Calixis,” insisted the Doctor. “It might take me weeks to recover from the threat to my sanity. Who knows if I even could? You could end up with a babbling idiot for a TARDIS pilot!”
“How would that be any different from normal?” asked Donna pointedly and Rose snorted with laughter.
“I think Donna deserves to go to Calixis. And I wouldn’t actually mind going there myself,” Rose told her husband.
“But you know what that place does to me, Rose. How could you even suggest this?” the Doctor asked melodramatically.
“Oh, suck it up, Doctor,” Rose said with a grin. “You’ll survive. Now go and program the TARDIS to take us to Calixis.”
With the expression of a much put upon man who was walking to his doom the Doctor dragged himself from Donna’s room.
“He’ll be okay, won’t he?” Donna asked. “You don’t think it’s too much asking him to take us there, do you?”
Rose rolled her eyes. “He’s just being a baby,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Besides, he really owes you one. And for that matter, he owes me one, too. And Calixis will not cause him irreparable harm no matter how he makes it out to be.”
Rose spread a blanket on the floor in one corner of Donna’s room and put Dare down on it, then helped her friend unpack her belongings. That done, the two women sat down on the blanket with the baby and played with him for a little while. Finally the sound of the TARDIS materializing filled the room.
They hurried out to the console room. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” the Doctor said. “I can feel my brain starting to atrophy right now.”
“You’ll survive,” said Rose, handing him the baby. “Where’s the credit bar?”
“On the console,” he said with a dramatic sigh. Rose picked it up and gave him a kiss, then dropped one on Dare’s head, too. “See you later,” she said. The Doctor flipped a switch and the TARDIS doors fell open.
Donna and Rose stepped out onto the most beautiful and frightening planet in the universe, the mall planet of Calixis.
Chapter Forty-five: The Last Secret Told
Rose smiled with contentment as she helped Donna carry all of her purchases back to her room. Rose hadn’t bought all that much for herself. A couple of trinkets and a surprise anniversary gift for the Doctor. She was hoping by the time their first wedding anniversary rolled around in four weeks things between them would be back to normal. Having Donna back on board was a start.
She frowned as she made her way through the ship afterwards, heading towards the garden and thinking about everything that had happened in the last few weeks. She had been unnerved by the fight she’d had with the Doctor and though they had seemed to have worked everything out between them, something still niggled at the back of her mind. She poked her head into her bedroom and saw the Doctor asleep in the rocking chair with Dare in his arms. With a slight smile she moved on.
It was as if she was aware of something, but didn’t know she knew what she knew. She sighed as she sat down by the pond to watch the waterfall cascade over the rocks. So much had happened in such a short space of time it all kind of ran together in her mind. Why did she feel like despite the fact that she had gotten her memories back she was still forgetting something important? Something…life changing?
She closed her eyes. So many of the memories in her head were as clear as glass, some had faded with time, and then there was that bulky, yawing mass of information the Doctor had shared with her when their minds had joined together. He’d shown her how to compartmentalize the information, locking it up and away from her everyday conscious thoughts and memories, before it could swallow her up in its seemingly infinite depths.
A tiny blue thread seemed to wiggle just on the edge of those thoughts, an infinitesimal breach with an air of familiarity. Part of her knew she should turn back, that she shouldn’t reach for that thread, that…alternate timeline. If there was something in that mass that needed to be seen, she should talk to the Doctor about it and have him guide her through it. The rush of information had overwhelmed her the last time.
Rose shook herself. That had been because it was all of it coming at her at once. This time she would be following a single thread. She reached out her hand, preparing to take the shining blue strand between her fingers. ‘No, Rose,’ came a familiar and yet unfamiliar voice. She was used to the mind touch but had seldom ever heard words formed. It was the TARDIS. The TARDIS was telling her no.
“Why not?” she said aloud. The ceiling in the garden turned from daylight to the night stars and the TARDIS hummed urgently. “I want to know.”
‘No, you don’t.’ Again the mind touch brought words with it.
“Yes,” said Rose stubbornly, “I do.” Rose closed her fingers around the blue string in her mind and pulled. A violent cascade of memories shot through her.
The cloister bells ringing woke the Doctor with a start. Dare began crying at the noise and sudden movement. ‘Doctor. Garden. Rose,’ spoke the TARDIS in his mind. Donna was suddenly at the door.
“What’s going on, Doctor?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She held out her hands for Dare and he transferred the baby to her arms. “Go find out,” she said and watched as he dashed off down the hall towards the garden.
When the Doctor burst through the doors to the garden he knew unerringly where to go. He followed the path to the waterfall and saw Rose sitting there on a rock, as still as a statue. “Rose?” he asked, an intense sense of dread filling his mind at her utter stillness.
She raised a tear-stained face and met his eyes with her own shattered ones. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” she asked him brokenly.
“Tell you what?” he asked softly.
“The truth,” she whispered.
“The truth about what, love?” he asked her.
"The truth about what happened when you were in Versailles and I nearly died on the S.S. Madame de Pompadour when I was left behind for two hundred days. About what happened to Mickey. And Cassi. And the truth about Jack,” Rose whispered.
The Doctor’s eyes closed, the air sucked right out of his lungs. When he opened them he met her eyes evenly. “It’s an alternate timeline, Rose. That’s all it is. I came back after five and a half hours, remember?” he said gently.
“You rewrote history,” she accused softly.
“I corrected history,” he told her. “To the way it was supposed to have gone. That’s all.”
“But Jack,” she said. “I loved him. I was going to stay with him.”
“Rose, no.”
“I can see your memory of it, Doctor. Plain as day,” she said. “I chose him and then the Reaper came.”
“The Reaper came because what happened that day was wrong. It would have destroyed the proper timeline.”
“But…”
“I fixed it, Rose, because I had to. You can see my memories but look deeper into the morass,” he said. “Find yours.”
“My memories aren’t in yours,” she said.
“This isn’t just my memory. You’re reading a timeline, Rose. Now read it all the way through,” he instructed.
“How?”
“Just reach for it again,” he said, taking her hand. Slowly her mental fingers reached out and grabbed hold of the alternate timeline.
Images, sounds, tastes, textures and smells flashed before her mind. And then she was there, at that critical moment, her realization overwhelming her, the reason she had chosen Jack over the Doctor. A reason that had been made without full knowledge of the truth. A reason that was wrong, that had rippled down reality, altering the future in a way that would have destroyed everything she had today.
With a gasp of horror she pulled herself out of the timeline. “I chose him because I thought Cassi was his,” she said. “Not because I loved him more than you. I thought, no, I didn’t think we could have children. Incompatible species. When she came I thought she’d be wiped out if I didn’t go with Jack… My child. Oh…oh, Doctor,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I broke your heart.”
“No less than I deserved for what I’d done to you,” he said.
“Did you know?” she asked him. “Did you know why I chose Jack and not you?”
“No,” he said, tears coming into his eyes. “I’ve never known.”
“And you’ve lived with that all these years?” she asked him.
“I…yes, Rose. I have.”
“And you never said? You never let it stop you? You still loved me?” Rose asked.
“That’s the thing, Rose. I could never have stopped. Not then. Not now. Not ever. My love for you is eternal. It just is,” he told her.
She went to him then, wrapping her arms around him and holding him tightly. “I love you,” she said. “Please don’t ever doubt it. You are first in my heart. You always have been. Since the day I made my choice to leave everything behind and travel with you. You are my heart, Doctor.”
“I love you, Rose,” he said. She raised her face to his and he kissed away her tears and then his lips settled on her mouth, gently and hesitantly at first, but when she yielded immediately to him, with a growing passion. He pulled her body up flush against him, his hardness pushing into her belly. He lowered her to the ground and they quickly disposed of their clothing.
They made love with a quiet desperation, a reaffirmation of their love and hopes and dreams. There were no more secrets between them, nothing hidden, as mind met mind in full honesty, as raw and open as the joining of their two bodies. Silver wrapped itself around gold and merged into one ecstatic swirling mass within their minds. Now and forever, in mind, soul, and body, unto time eternal they belonged. Together.
“I need two weeks to put my affairs in order,” she added.
“Two weeks?” the Doctor pouted.
“It’s not like we’ll have to wait,” said Rose. “We’ll just jump ahead.”
“But what do you need two weeks for?” complained the Doctor.
“I have to put in notice at my job and arrange for a house sitter and put all my bills on auto pay from the trust. I won’t be travelling with you and Rose forever. My life needs to be in some sort of order when I come back to it,” Donna explained.
“Why won’t you be travelling with us forever?” the Doctor asked a little petulantly.
“Some day, Doctor, I’m going to want to settle down. I know the whole idea of that is anathema to you, but I want a family of my own and I’m not getting any younger. Sooner or later I’m going to be too old to be having babies.”
“Well,” began the Doctor slowly, “That’s going to be further off than you think.”
“What?”
“When I healed you,” Rose began, “It altered you.”
“You didn’t turn me into a genetic hybrid like you, did you?” Donna asked.
“No. You’re DNA hasn’t been altered. You’re still fully human,” the Doctor said.
“Oh, good heavens you didn’t turn me into Jack, did you?” Donna asked with a sudden sharpness in her tone.
“No, you’re not immortal, Donna. I didn’t use Bad Wolf or Rose Plus to heal you. The thing is, what healed you was a borrowed life from one of Cassi’s regenerations. Your life span will be as long as that. You’ll probably live to be around two hundred years old now,” Rose said softly.
“Two hundred?” gasped Donna.
“You should be able to reproduce until you’re about one hundred fifty,” added the Doctor. “And as long as you don’t pick an idiot to do it with, if you want to raise your family on the TARDIS with me and Rose, you’re more than welcome to it.”
Donna’s eyes got huge. “You’re kidding me!”
“I meant it when I said you’re family, Donna,” the Doctor said.
“We both did,” Rose added.
Donna lifted Dare up, burying her face in his stomach and blowing against the skin loudly to make him laugh, while hiding her own expression. She didn’t want Rose and the Doctor to see how emotional their offer was making her. Dare giggled happily.
“I have missed this little guy,” she said after she’d composed herself. “I’m glad I haven’t lost out on seeing his first two years. Right then, two weeks, Doctor and I expect you to be on time.”
“We will be,” he said, leaping to his feet with a grin. She handed the baby over to him and then with a couple of good-bye hugs, she saw them out.
“That went well,” said Rose as she and the Doctor entered the TARDIS.
“Better than I expected,” he agreed and began typing coordinates into the computer. A few moments later they were materializing for the second time in Donna’s back garden.
“Are you really going to let her raise a family on the TARDIS?” Rose asked.
“If she wants to,” the Doctor said. “I know she probably won’t but the offer stands. I’ll be back in a bit,” he said as he hurried out of the TARDIS. When he returned he was loaded down with several bags and was followed by an equally laden Donna.
“Is that everything?” asked Rose.
Donna nodded. “Yes. Figured we’d be gone for awhile and didn’t want to leave anything behind.”
Rose laughed at the understatement as the Doctor trudged by her to take Donna’s belongings to her room. “It’s good to have you back,” Rose said.
“It’s good to be back.” Rose followed Donna down the corridor to her room.
“I’ll leave you to the unpacking,” the Doctor said. “Anywhere in particular you want to go first?” he asked.
“Can I choose anywhere?” Donna asked.
“Anywhere,” agreed the Doctor. “Except Calixis,” he added as an afterthought. “Or Raxicoricofallipatorius and Clom.”
“Why not Calixis?” demanded Donna.
“Wouldn’t be safe,” muttered the Doctor.
“You’re making that up,” said Rose. “You just don’t want to go there.”
“It would cause great harm to the structure of my mind to visit Calixis,” insisted the Doctor. “It might take me weeks to recover from the threat to my sanity. Who knows if I even could? You could end up with a babbling idiot for a TARDIS pilot!”
“How would that be any different from normal?” asked Donna pointedly and Rose snorted with laughter.
“I think Donna deserves to go to Calixis. And I wouldn’t actually mind going there myself,” Rose told her husband.
“But you know what that place does to me, Rose. How could you even suggest this?” the Doctor asked melodramatically.
“Oh, suck it up, Doctor,” Rose said with a grin. “You’ll survive. Now go and program the TARDIS to take us to Calixis.”
With the expression of a much put upon man who was walking to his doom the Doctor dragged himself from Donna’s room.
“He’ll be okay, won’t he?” Donna asked. “You don’t think it’s too much asking him to take us there, do you?”
Rose rolled her eyes. “He’s just being a baby,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Besides, he really owes you one. And for that matter, he owes me one, too. And Calixis will not cause him irreparable harm no matter how he makes it out to be.”
Rose spread a blanket on the floor in one corner of Donna’s room and put Dare down on it, then helped her friend unpack her belongings. That done, the two women sat down on the blanket with the baby and played with him for a little while. Finally the sound of the TARDIS materializing filled the room.
They hurried out to the console room. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” the Doctor said. “I can feel my brain starting to atrophy right now.”
“You’ll survive,” said Rose, handing him the baby. “Where’s the credit bar?”
“On the console,” he said with a dramatic sigh. Rose picked it up and gave him a kiss, then dropped one on Dare’s head, too. “See you later,” she said. The Doctor flipped a switch and the TARDIS doors fell open.
Donna and Rose stepped out onto the most beautiful and frightening planet in the universe, the mall planet of Calixis.
Chapter Forty-five: The Last Secret Told
Rose smiled with contentment as she helped Donna carry all of her purchases back to her room. Rose hadn’t bought all that much for herself. A couple of trinkets and a surprise anniversary gift for the Doctor. She was hoping by the time their first wedding anniversary rolled around in four weeks things between them would be back to normal. Having Donna back on board was a start.
She frowned as she made her way through the ship afterwards, heading towards the garden and thinking about everything that had happened in the last few weeks. She had been unnerved by the fight she’d had with the Doctor and though they had seemed to have worked everything out between them, something still niggled at the back of her mind. She poked her head into her bedroom and saw the Doctor asleep in the rocking chair with Dare in his arms. With a slight smile she moved on.
It was as if she was aware of something, but didn’t know she knew what she knew. She sighed as she sat down by the pond to watch the waterfall cascade over the rocks. So much had happened in such a short space of time it all kind of ran together in her mind. Why did she feel like despite the fact that she had gotten her memories back she was still forgetting something important? Something…life changing?
She closed her eyes. So many of the memories in her head were as clear as glass, some had faded with time, and then there was that bulky, yawing mass of information the Doctor had shared with her when their minds had joined together. He’d shown her how to compartmentalize the information, locking it up and away from her everyday conscious thoughts and memories, before it could swallow her up in its seemingly infinite depths.
A tiny blue thread seemed to wiggle just on the edge of those thoughts, an infinitesimal breach with an air of familiarity. Part of her knew she should turn back, that she shouldn’t reach for that thread, that…alternate timeline. If there was something in that mass that needed to be seen, she should talk to the Doctor about it and have him guide her through it. The rush of information had overwhelmed her the last time.
Rose shook herself. That had been because it was all of it coming at her at once. This time she would be following a single thread. She reached out her hand, preparing to take the shining blue strand between her fingers. ‘No, Rose,’ came a familiar and yet unfamiliar voice. She was used to the mind touch but had seldom ever heard words formed. It was the TARDIS. The TARDIS was telling her no.
“Why not?” she said aloud. The ceiling in the garden turned from daylight to the night stars and the TARDIS hummed urgently. “I want to know.”
‘No, you don’t.’ Again the mind touch brought words with it.
“Yes,” said Rose stubbornly, “I do.” Rose closed her fingers around the blue string in her mind and pulled. A violent cascade of memories shot through her.
The cloister bells ringing woke the Doctor with a start. Dare began crying at the noise and sudden movement. ‘Doctor. Garden. Rose,’ spoke the TARDIS in his mind. Donna was suddenly at the door.
“What’s going on, Doctor?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She held out her hands for Dare and he transferred the baby to her arms. “Go find out,” she said and watched as he dashed off down the hall towards the garden.
When the Doctor burst through the doors to the garden he knew unerringly where to go. He followed the path to the waterfall and saw Rose sitting there on a rock, as still as a statue. “Rose?” he asked, an intense sense of dread filling his mind at her utter stillness.
She raised a tear-stained face and met his eyes with her own shattered ones. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” she asked him brokenly.
“Tell you what?” he asked softly.
“The truth,” she whispered.
“The truth about what, love?” he asked her.
"The truth about what happened when you were in Versailles and I nearly died on the S.S. Madame de Pompadour when I was left behind for two hundred days. About what happened to Mickey. And Cassi. And the truth about Jack,” Rose whispered.
The Doctor’s eyes closed, the air sucked right out of his lungs. When he opened them he met her eyes evenly. “It’s an alternate timeline, Rose. That’s all it is. I came back after five and a half hours, remember?” he said gently.
“You rewrote history,” she accused softly.
“I corrected history,” he told her. “To the way it was supposed to have gone. That’s all.”
“But Jack,” she said. “I loved him. I was going to stay with him.”
“Rose, no.”
“I can see your memory of it, Doctor. Plain as day,” she said. “I chose him and then the Reaper came.”
“The Reaper came because what happened that day was wrong. It would have destroyed the proper timeline.”
“But…”
“I fixed it, Rose, because I had to. You can see my memories but look deeper into the morass,” he said. “Find yours.”
“My memories aren’t in yours,” she said.
“This isn’t just my memory. You’re reading a timeline, Rose. Now read it all the way through,” he instructed.
“How?”
“Just reach for it again,” he said, taking her hand. Slowly her mental fingers reached out and grabbed hold of the alternate timeline.
Images, sounds, tastes, textures and smells flashed before her mind. And then she was there, at that critical moment, her realization overwhelming her, the reason she had chosen Jack over the Doctor. A reason that had been made without full knowledge of the truth. A reason that was wrong, that had rippled down reality, altering the future in a way that would have destroyed everything she had today.
With a gasp of horror she pulled herself out of the timeline. “I chose him because I thought Cassi was his,” she said. “Not because I loved him more than you. I thought, no, I didn’t think we could have children. Incompatible species. When she came I thought she’d be wiped out if I didn’t go with Jack… My child. Oh…oh, Doctor,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I broke your heart.”
“No less than I deserved for what I’d done to you,” he said.
“Did you know?” she asked him. “Did you know why I chose Jack and not you?”
“No,” he said, tears coming into his eyes. “I’ve never known.”
“And you’ve lived with that all these years?” she asked him.
“I…yes, Rose. I have.”
“And you never said? You never let it stop you? You still loved me?” Rose asked.
“That’s the thing, Rose. I could never have stopped. Not then. Not now. Not ever. My love for you is eternal. It just is,” he told her.
She went to him then, wrapping her arms around him and holding him tightly. “I love you,” she said. “Please don’t ever doubt it. You are first in my heart. You always have been. Since the day I made my choice to leave everything behind and travel with you. You are my heart, Doctor.”
“I love you, Rose,” he said. She raised her face to his and he kissed away her tears and then his lips settled on her mouth, gently and hesitantly at first, but when she yielded immediately to him, with a growing passion. He pulled her body up flush against him, his hardness pushing into her belly. He lowered her to the ground and they quickly disposed of their clothing.
They made love with a quiet desperation, a reaffirmation of their love and hopes and dreams. There were no more secrets between them, nothing hidden, as mind met mind in full honesty, as raw and open as the joining of their two bodies. Silver wrapped itself around gold and merged into one ecstatic swirling mass within their minds. Now and forever, in mind, soul, and body, unto time eternal they belonged. Together.
