Of the Vortex Born: Chapter Thirty-Six

[amberfocus]

Title: Of the Vortex Born
Author: amberfocus
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, Luke Smith/Jamie Tyler, Mairi Tyler, Landon Tyler, Jake Symmonds, Gwen Cooper/Owen Harper, Mickey Smith, Brigadier-General John Cassidien, Nikolas Onishenko, Viktor Onishenko, Private Daniels, Sharri Moreno Jackie Tyler/Pete Tyler
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, angst, fluff, hurt/comfort, alternate universe, family!fic
Rating: Adult for a couple of chapters, but mostly Teen
Betas: amyo67, draconin
Summary: A slightly different reunion fic. Forty-nine year old single mother Rose Tyler is working for U.N.I.T. and living on the moon in the alternate universe with her three children when a U.F.O. crash lands there. A very familiar U.F.O.

WARNING: Please be warned that this fic contains discussion of a non-graphic, off screen rape and flashbacks of it. If that sort of thing triggers you it might be best not to read this fic. You have been warned.

Previous Chapters: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/537764.html

Chapter Thirty-Six: Requests for Information

“Why?” demanded Jamie. “If something happened to me, I have the right to know what it is.” Her eyes were practically shooting sparks as she confronted her father head on.

“Luke, can you leave us alone for a little while?” the Doctor asked. “I’d like to speak with Jamie alone.”

“Of course,” the boy said rising to his feet. “I’ll go work on the infinity matrix.”

“Don’t tune the chords too tight,” warned the Doctor.

“I remember what you showed me,” said Luke confidently. “I’ll talk to you later, Jamie,” he said.

She nodded, and then once he’d left the room, she crossed her arms over her chest and glared at her father. “Well? Are you going to keep things from me? Or are you going to tell me the truth? I have a right to know.”

“I don’t disagree with you, Jamie,” the Doctor said. “I do believe you have a right to know what happened, but Luke is not the one it needs to come from.”

“Mum doesn’t want me to know,” said Jamie. “I can tell.”

“No, she doesn’t want you to know, but she understands your right to find out the truth. We’ve been waiting for you to heal, waiting to see if the memories will return by themselves. We still have some hope for that.”

“I thought my brain was too badly damaged.”

“Your brain is fine. I’ve told you that. It’s your mind. What you did with the Vortex energy, even what your mother has done in the past, is not something I’ve seen before. People didn’t do that. Too much exposure to raw, unfiltered Vortex energy can kill people. It can also drive you insane.”

“Did I go insane?” she asked.

He laughed gently. “No. You’re perfectly sane. That’s not something you need to worry about.”

“Then what do I need to worry about?” she asked.

The Doctor sighed. “I want to tell you want happened, but I want your mother to be here when I do, okay?”

“How do I know you’re not just saying that to put me off?” she asked.

“Because I am a man of my word. The thing is, Jamie, I haven’t been in your life long enough to know how you react to things,” he tried to explain.

“Yeah, but I’ve regenerated. How I react to things could be completely different,” she pointed out.

“Well, you’re showing a lot of the same impatience you had before,” he said.

“I can’t help it. You don’t know what it’s like to walk around with a gaping, big hole in your head!”

“Actually, I do,” he said. “When I regenerated into my Ninth body it was bad. There’s a lot I don’t remember. And there was a time in my eighth incarnation when I lost a few years.”

“Did you ever get those memories back?” she asked.

“Not all of them, but I had enough of my life still in my head that it was something I could cope with. Honestly, I’d rather have some of my memories gone than live with them,” he told her.

“Well, I don’t have any of them, good or bad!” she said angrily. She sighed and pushed her hand through her hair, her gesture so like Rose’s when frustrated. So like his, too. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m just so…so…I don’t know. It makes me feel helpless and useless.”

“I’ll talk to your mother, but I’d really like to wait a few more days to tell you. I think it’s the best thing for you. Do you think you can tolerate that?” he asked.

“If you promise me you really will tell me,” she said.

“I do. I promise.”

“Okay.” He moved to hug her, but then stopped himself. She opened her arms up to him. “It’s okay,” she said. He gathered her close and held her tight.

“We’ll get through this together,” he told her. Jamie started to squirm and he let her go. “Now let’s get you to the infirmary. I want to run a couple of tests. You shouldn’t be having pain like that in your head.”

“It’s gone now.”

“Better safe than sorry,” he said. “Come on.”



Rose had long since finished her sandwich and had gotten through a good stack of paperwork when an alarm went off on her computer. She glanced at it, leapt to her feet, and hurried into the next room, where Viktor Onishenko stood monitoring a series of screens that showed live footage from the troop carrier that Landon and Jake were on.

“What is it, Viktor?” she asked.

“We’ve got incoming. Or rather the carrier does,” he said.

“Why aren’t the proximity alarms going off?” she asked.

“It’s outside the radius the president set,” he told her. “And they’re not coming in like they did before. Plus…it’s different.”

He typed in a command and one of the screens tapped into a satellite. Rose saw slender, milky-white forms descending, floating gently towards the surface. “What’s the report from the carrier?” she asked.

“They’re holding and waiting for an aggressive move. Jake doesn’t want to fight unless they have to.”

Rose watched as the black creature stopped moving. The white forms landed, burying half their lengths in the ground. They surrounded the other mass in a perfect circle. The small gaps between them slowly blurred until they seemed to form a solid wall. The satellite view showed that they were not covering the top of it.

A brilliant flash of purple exploded over the opening. “What?” she asked.

“Those are the minus,” said Viktor. “Nikolas showed them to me when they were first discovered.”

Rose leaned closer to the viewer and could make out the shapes of wings fluttering. “The Doctor calls them Ritauels. What are they doing?”

“That’s the question,” said Viktor, “and I don’t have an answer to that any more than I do as to what the other aliens are up to.”

Rose sighed. “I guess we wait and see.” Rose hated waiting and seeing.



“Mairi, they’re gone again!” Nikolas said, rushing in from the next lab where he’d been working with the minus.

“Where did they go?” she asked, looking up from the communications station. “Can you pick them up on any view screens?”

Mairi quickly scanned through the colony viewers but saw no glimpse of the purple birds anywhere. “No, they’re not in the domes, at least not on camera.”

The communicator buzzed and Mairi hurried back to it. “This is Mairi, over.”

“Mairi, it’s Mum. Can you fetch Nikolas and step into my office? Over.”

“Is it important? We’re trying to track down the minus again. Over.”

“Yeah, I think we’ve found them. And ask Nikolas to bring any data on them that you’ve collected, including that analysis we ran on the corrosive substance we were planning to use against the Ganyites on their ship,” her mother said. “Over.”

“Will do. Out.” She turned back to Nikolas. “Can you go grab the stuff we’ve been working on? And ask…who’s left in the lab?”

“Terrence, Samantha, and Alan,” he said promptly.

“Can you go ask Sam to come man the com?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Mairi began bringing up her own data in her personal file reader. A moment later Nikolas returned with Samantha, a university intern, who took a position by the com, a thick book on biochemistry in front of her. “You know what to do, Sam?” Mairi asked.

Samantha nodded. “Looks the same as in our dome,” she said with a yawn.

“Send down for stimulants if you need them,” Mairi said.

“Oh,” said Sam, pulling a small tube out of her pocket. With a rueful smile she pulled the lid off the ‘fresher and gulped down the fizzy substance. “I forgot to take it.” She looked noticeably improved as the caffeine and capsaisin hit her system.

“Keep alert,” said Nikolas. “We don’t know when we’ll be back. If you need to leave the com for any reason, have Terrence or Alan take over for you.”

“I will.”

He turned to Mairi. “Do you have everything?” she asked.

“Everything that wasn’t destroyed in the dome cracks or the moonquake,” he said.

“It’ll have to do. Let’s go.” She opened the door and they began the ten minute walk to Rose’s temporary headquarters.

“What do you suppose those birds are up to?” Nikolas asked.

“I don’t have any idea,” Mairi admitted. “Clearly they have some kind of relationship with the Ganyites. I was suspecting parasitic because of their corrosive body oils, but now I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t more to it.”

“Maybe it’s partially parasitic, but partially symbiotic,” mused Nikolas. “Their behavior isn’t normal for most avian species that I’ve observed.”

“Have you observed a lot? I mean we don’t have much here on the Moon.”

“Well, I did an internship at Weltvogelpark Walsrode in Germany while you were in track 18,” he said. “And I spent six weeks of leave time at Jurong Bird Park in Singapore, helping with their breeding program last year.”

Mairi nodded as he named the two largest aviaries on Earth. “I wish I could have visited those places, but it’s never been safe for me down on the planet. That’s one of the reasons why I want to go travelling with Dad. That Earth doesn’t know about us. I could see so many of the things I’ve only studied.”

Nikolas looked glum like he always did when Mairi mentioned leaving. “I suppose,” he said.

“Do you think they’ll stop the import of the new bird species developed for lower gravity now that the main small animal park dome has been destroyed?” Mairi asked.

“Your grandfather is putting the funding in place to rebuild one of the smaller park domes here into an aviary. It may be next June before we see anything new come up. And he said he’d try to make room in the poultry dome for what was salvaged.”

“With the food animals?” she asked in surprise.

“They have the space. If nothing else he’ll put them in with the bovines. He knows that most of them won’t do well in cages for long,” Nikolas said.

“So how did a soldier become so involved in animal studies?” she asked him.

“I was recruited as a scientist who was good at building communications equipment. I sort of fell into working for UNIT. I wouldn’t really consider myself a soldier. Not like Viktor. I mean, I’m more a liaison like you. I don’t have a military rank, you know,” he told her. “But I fill in when they need me to.”

“So then are you attached to UNIT?”

“Well…I’m not on contract anymore. I’ve stayed on because I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s kind of unofficial at this point. Originally, I didn’t want to re-up in case I got offered a full time position at one of the Earth aviaries,” he said. “Jurong has expressed an interest. And…” He gave her a look she didn’t know what to do with. “I guess there won’t be any reason for me to stay anymore.”

“Nik,” she began, but she couldn’t continue.

“Mairi, have dinner with me tonight,” he said.

“We may not get it off. There’s another crisis going on, if you’d forgotten.” She gave him a droll smile.

“We’ve been on for ten hours. They’ll make us go for down time at twelve. And we have to eat,” Nikolas cajoled.

“Do you really think starting something now is a good idea?” she asked him.

“I have to take the chance, Mairi. I’ve spent the last year trying to work up the courage to…do anything. If I do nothing now, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”

She sighed. She knew what he was saying was true. If she did nothing, she’d walk away with her heart unscathed, but she’d always wonder what if. And she hated what ifs. “I don’t want to fall for you, Nikolas,” she told him. “I don’t want to get my hearts broken.”

He reached out, took her hand, and stopped her in her tracks. He pulled her into a little alcove. He kissed her and as before, she felt her hearts begin to race. The emotion she’d been trying to hold back filled every part of her. She’d always liked him, always thought he was a good man, and when he kissed her she could not help but respond to him. It wasn’t fair for him to be expressing this interest now when she was about to leave. But her hormones didn’t care about fair.

When he broke the kiss and looked into her eyes she knew she’d give him the chance he wanted. “That’s not fair.” It was barely a protest.

“Is that a yes?”

She nodded. “But no more ambushes.”

Nikolas smiled, but he made no such agreement.

Ch. 37: