Wolf Moon: Chapter Ten
Feb. 2nd, 2008 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amberfocusA/N: Spoilers for Classic Who Doctor 4: Full Circle, State of Decay, Warrior's Gate if you squint. Logogpolis if you don't squint.
Chapter Ten: Ghost of the Past
“Not…not my universe?” Rose asked. Her voice was actually shaking and her hand crept into the Doctor’s.
“No, Rose.” He squeezed her hand. “We’re not.”
“Then where are we?” The Doctor wasn’t sure whether he heard relief or disappointment in her voice or something else entirely. Her hip pressed even more firmly into his side.
“As far as I know there’s no way back to your universe. The walls between alternate realities are still closed. This is different. It’s not a parallel universe. We’re in a pocket universe. It’s called E-Space. I’ve been here before,” he explained. “Or somewhere very like it.”
“What’s a pocket universe?” Rose asked him.
“It’s a place for the normal space universes to vent excess entropy to delay their eventual heat death. Logopolis was created for this very purpose, using pure mathematics to expand the existing lifespan of N-Space. It was destroyed in my fourth incarnation and then rebuilt by Gallifreyan scientists and hidden outside of spacetime so that it’s existence could never be threatened again, but it quit working after the Time War. The second Logopolis fell with no Time Lord minds to sustain it. It simply ground to a halt.”
“So what’s that mean for normal space, then?” Rose wanted to know.
“It means that it’ll continue on it’s original path and die a natural death trillions of years from now.”
“Ah. So not terribly urgent then,” Rose said dismissively. We’re not outside of spacetime here, are we?” Rose asked.
“No. We’re just in a very small, very limited universe. It should have only two or three galaxies in it. Four at the most. Still, plenty to see while I figure out how we got here and how to get the TARDIS back,” the Doctor said with a shrug.
“You don’t know how we got here?’
“We came through a CVE that shouldn’t exist. Into a pocket universe that shouldn’t be possible. I didn’t bring us here so no, I don’t know how this was achieved. I will find out, though,” the Doctor said determinedly.
“Does she know?” Rose indicated the TARDIS with a wave of her hand at the console. “Maybe you should ask her.”
The Doctor placed a hand on the console. She’d talk to him without it, but direct contact made it harder for her to avoid him if she didn’t want to. “Do you know how we got here?” He asked aloud.
The lights began to flicker and then a concentrated beam shot up out of the floor, expanding and then adjusting to clarity.
Rose gasped. “She looks like a ghost.”
The image sharpened but did not lose it’s ghostlike quality.
“Romana,” the Doctor breathed.
“Hello, Doctor.” The strikingly beautiful little blond woman smiled and Rose found herself smiling back, despite the fact that she knew the image was only a hologram. “If you are receiving this message it means that your disjunction was successful and it’s been a decade since the Time War that destroyed our kind.”
“What do you mean, disjunction?” The Doctor asked. Of course, the hologram didn’t answer him.
“I buried this program within my ship’s emergency protocols. She will not be aware of it until after this program has activated. And this program has activated because you are within the first twenty-four hours of contact with the Bad Wolf and the mating imperative has kicked in.”
She turned and her gaze was focused more directly on the Doctor now. “If I know you, and I do know you my clever Doctor, you’ll have figured out a way to slow the process or try to eliminate it entirely. It cannot be stopped. The activation of the genetic coding in the Bad Wolf will continue to call out to you for the rest of your life. And the rest of hers, which will be considerably longer now.” A rueful expression crossed her face. “I know you will find this most awkward and I’d almost be sorry for you if I hadn’t seen your time line all the way through. The legend was more true than we could have imagined.”
Romana’s head turned to the side as if someone were talking to her and she went quiet. Rose studied the woman’s appearance finally understanding the ship’s proclivity for pink if the torn and dirty yet still determinedly frothy blouse and long skirt the woman was wearing were any indication of the Time Lady’s own liking for the color.
The hologram nodded, turned back, and resumed speaking. “I’m sorry, Doctor. There isn’t much time. The front is advancing and we must put our plan into action. If I have time I’ll place other messages for future reference. Do not try to find them. They will activate at the proper time. And do not fight your attraction to the Bad Wolf. She was created for this very purpose. It is only upon mating that the restrictions on the TARDIS’s return to normal space will be lifted.”
Romana laughed. “I know you will eventually mate with her. It will drive you both mad if you don’t. I know it can’t be in your personality to cooperate fully, even in a plan you helped devise yourself. I did have to wipe most of it from your memories. But you did agree to this. It’s the only way you’d do it. Having a way to restore us after the destruction. I fulfilled my end of the bargain, a way to save our race. Now it‘s your turn.”
She sighed. “I am so sorry that you had to do this. And that you had to be the one without her there after the disjunction, that she couldn’t be there to help heal you, but it was the only way. She’s there now. And I think you’ll find it will have been harder on the other one, losing her.”
A tear slid down Romana’s cheek. “I will miss it all, but it gives me strength to know that you will not.” She turned her head to look directly at Rose. “Welcome, aboard my ship, Rose Tyler. And know that it is okay to love him. He is the same man.”
The image flickered out. “No, come back!” The Doctor said. “Romana!” But there was no response. The TARDIS shuddered and Rose felt a painful keening in the back of her mind. She pulled away from the Doctor and went to put her arms around one of the coral support struts, pressing her body into it and stroking it with her hands.
“It’s all right, dear one. It’s going to be all right.” The Doctor watched Rose comfort the ship with a grim look on his face. Seeing Romana must have been devastating to the TARDIS. It was hard enough for him but they’d not been life-bonded. He swallowed down harsh memories of losing his own TARDIS and moved to the strut Rose was hugging. From the opposite side of it he mimicked her, his arms going around the strut to meet with hers. He pressed his forehead against the cool coral and offered his support for the ship’s grief.
They remained like that, locked together around the strut for several hours, hands running soothingly up and down the surface. Slowly the TARDIS’s grief ran down and she was able to hold her emotions at bay again. Rose pressed her lips lightly against the coral and then pulled away.
The Doctor stayed in place. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” Rose said softly and then slipped from the console room.
Rose was lying on her bed reading a book she had found in the library when the Doctor appeared in the doorway. Immediately she slipped in one of the bookmarks she had also liberated from the library and put the book to one side. She sat up and scooted back against the head board.
“Are you all right?” She asked him.
“I…can I come in?” He asked uncertainly.
“It’s your ship,” she said.
“She’s her own ship,” he said. “And it’s your room.” Rose smiled and patted the bed next to her. Her old version of him wouldn’t have asked. He’d have barged in as if he owned the place. Well, he had owned the place. Not that she’d minded, either. At least not after the first few weeks.
He came into the room and lowered himself onto her bed, one knee on it, the other leg dangling off the side, facing her. “She’s hurting,” he said, failing to answer her question. “But she‘s better. Seeing Romana again…she wasn’t expecting that. She didn’t know the program was there.”
He reached out and took her hand, his thumb stroking the web of skin between her thumb and index finger, leaving little trails of gold in it’s wake. “What you did for her…you knew just what she needed. I think she loves you.” He blew out an expansive breath. “The TARDIS and I are never going to be bonded the way we should be. It’s not really possible. But you’ve made things better, Rose.”
Rose smiled at him tenderly. “I’m glad.” Then she abruptly changed the subject. “What’s a disjunction?”
“What?”
“Something she said, your Romana. She said the disjunction had been successful. So what’s a disjunction?”
“Could be any of a number of things. The simplest definition is the act of breaking a connection. The separation or disunion of something. Or it can mean a compound idea that is true only if one and only one of a number of alternatives is true. Then there’s the separation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis,” he said off handedly.
“Homologous chromosomes during whatsis?” Rose asked.
“Meiosis. That’s the process where sexually reproducing organisms reduce the number of their chromosomes from diploid to haploid.”
“I think I liked vague better. I’ll probably be sorry I asked this but what’s a diploid and what’s a haploid?” She wanted to know.
“Diploid means double and haploid means half.”
“You couldn’t just say that?” She asked.
“I did. Meiosis is two consecutive divisions of the nucleus that leads to the production of reproductive cells. Meiosis starts when the duplicated chromosomes bunch up along the center of the nucleus and pairs of homologous chromosomes sort of cross over.”
“Homologous. That’s the same alleles, the same genes in the same order of arrangement right?” She asked. It had been five years since she’d completed university and her mind was trying desperately to fill in the gaps from her science courses. Though what she really needed was a good search engine.
“Right,” the Doctor agreed. “The pairs of chromosomes will move into opposite sides of the cell and then that cell divides, then divides again, producing four cells that contain half the number of chromosomes as the first cell did. Some or all of the cells may become functional as gametes.”
“So we’re talking about genetics. This has been all about genetics from the start. At least with me it has been. What if it has with you as well?” Rose began to reason through it.
“Perhaps. If we’re destined to mate and create children then it would be necessary for me to be able to create reproductive cells like gametes for that to happen. That function had been bred out of my species. We reproduced through genetic engineering in my time,” he said.
But Rose’s mind was racing further and further ahead. “I think it’s more than that,” she said slowly.
He stared at her shrewdly. “What are you thinking?”
“The other Doctor told me there were no other Time Lords, that they only existed once and they were taken out of time with the Time War. It left only him. He said there couldn’t be alternates of him.”
“Yet here I am,” he said gesturing at his body.
“Large as life and twice as sexy,” Rose said before she thought. She closed her eyes. “I said that out loud, didn’t I?”
The Doctor chuckled and she risked a glance up at him. “Anyway,” she said forging past her embarrassment, “Is that true for you, too?” She asked.
“Yes. I don’t understand how he exists but he does.”
“What if this disjunction was a division into two separate but identical versions of you?” Rose asked.
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“But Romana said it herself. She said it was okay to love you because you were the same man. Not an alternate version of the same man, but the same man. What if your entire body did this meiosis? Before the last salvo of the Time War you were one man. And at the final moment, as that stroke came down and you regenerated into this form, you became two. One awakening in a different universe in Romana’s TARDIS and the other awakening in his own in the other one.”
And suddenly the memory exploded into the Doctor’s head, rushing in with the violence of being cleaved into two separate but identical beings and the loss of his entire species. The pain washed over him and his body went rigid before finding blessed relief in darkness as he lost consciousness, tumbling forward onto Rose’s bed.
Ch. 11: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/8399.html
Chapter Ten: Ghost of the Past
“Not…not my universe?” Rose asked. Her voice was actually shaking and her hand crept into the Doctor’s.
“No, Rose.” He squeezed her hand. “We’re not.”
“Then where are we?” The Doctor wasn’t sure whether he heard relief or disappointment in her voice or something else entirely. Her hip pressed even more firmly into his side.
“As far as I know there’s no way back to your universe. The walls between alternate realities are still closed. This is different. It’s not a parallel universe. We’re in a pocket universe. It’s called E-Space. I’ve been here before,” he explained. “Or somewhere very like it.”
“What’s a pocket universe?” Rose asked him.
“It’s a place for the normal space universes to vent excess entropy to delay their eventual heat death. Logopolis was created for this very purpose, using pure mathematics to expand the existing lifespan of N-Space. It was destroyed in my fourth incarnation and then rebuilt by Gallifreyan scientists and hidden outside of spacetime so that it’s existence could never be threatened again, but it quit working after the Time War. The second Logopolis fell with no Time Lord minds to sustain it. It simply ground to a halt.”
“So what’s that mean for normal space, then?” Rose wanted to know.
“It means that it’ll continue on it’s original path and die a natural death trillions of years from now.”
“Ah. So not terribly urgent then,” Rose said dismissively. We’re not outside of spacetime here, are we?” Rose asked.
“No. We’re just in a very small, very limited universe. It should have only two or three galaxies in it. Four at the most. Still, plenty to see while I figure out how we got here and how to get the TARDIS back,” the Doctor said with a shrug.
“You don’t know how we got here?’
“We came through a CVE that shouldn’t exist. Into a pocket universe that shouldn’t be possible. I didn’t bring us here so no, I don’t know how this was achieved. I will find out, though,” the Doctor said determinedly.
“Does she know?” Rose indicated the TARDIS with a wave of her hand at the console. “Maybe you should ask her.”
The Doctor placed a hand on the console. She’d talk to him without it, but direct contact made it harder for her to avoid him if she didn’t want to. “Do you know how we got here?” He asked aloud.
The lights began to flicker and then a concentrated beam shot up out of the floor, expanding and then adjusting to clarity.
Rose gasped. “She looks like a ghost.”
The image sharpened but did not lose it’s ghostlike quality.
“Romana,” the Doctor breathed.
“Hello, Doctor.” The strikingly beautiful little blond woman smiled and Rose found herself smiling back, despite the fact that she knew the image was only a hologram. “If you are receiving this message it means that your disjunction was successful and it’s been a decade since the Time War that destroyed our kind.”
“What do you mean, disjunction?” The Doctor asked. Of course, the hologram didn’t answer him.
“I buried this program within my ship’s emergency protocols. She will not be aware of it until after this program has activated. And this program has activated because you are within the first twenty-four hours of contact with the Bad Wolf and the mating imperative has kicked in.”
She turned and her gaze was focused more directly on the Doctor now. “If I know you, and I do know you my clever Doctor, you’ll have figured out a way to slow the process or try to eliminate it entirely. It cannot be stopped. The activation of the genetic coding in the Bad Wolf will continue to call out to you for the rest of your life. And the rest of hers, which will be considerably longer now.” A rueful expression crossed her face. “I know you will find this most awkward and I’d almost be sorry for you if I hadn’t seen your time line all the way through. The legend was more true than we could have imagined.”
Romana’s head turned to the side as if someone were talking to her and she went quiet. Rose studied the woman’s appearance finally understanding the ship’s proclivity for pink if the torn and dirty yet still determinedly frothy blouse and long skirt the woman was wearing were any indication of the Time Lady’s own liking for the color.
The hologram nodded, turned back, and resumed speaking. “I’m sorry, Doctor. There isn’t much time. The front is advancing and we must put our plan into action. If I have time I’ll place other messages for future reference. Do not try to find them. They will activate at the proper time. And do not fight your attraction to the Bad Wolf. She was created for this very purpose. It is only upon mating that the restrictions on the TARDIS’s return to normal space will be lifted.”
Romana laughed. “I know you will eventually mate with her. It will drive you both mad if you don’t. I know it can’t be in your personality to cooperate fully, even in a plan you helped devise yourself. I did have to wipe most of it from your memories. But you did agree to this. It’s the only way you’d do it. Having a way to restore us after the destruction. I fulfilled my end of the bargain, a way to save our race. Now it‘s your turn.”
She sighed. “I am so sorry that you had to do this. And that you had to be the one without her there after the disjunction, that she couldn’t be there to help heal you, but it was the only way. She’s there now. And I think you’ll find it will have been harder on the other one, losing her.”
A tear slid down Romana’s cheek. “I will miss it all, but it gives me strength to know that you will not.” She turned her head to look directly at Rose. “Welcome, aboard my ship, Rose Tyler. And know that it is okay to love him. He is the same man.”
The image flickered out. “No, come back!” The Doctor said. “Romana!” But there was no response. The TARDIS shuddered and Rose felt a painful keening in the back of her mind. She pulled away from the Doctor and went to put her arms around one of the coral support struts, pressing her body into it and stroking it with her hands.
“It’s all right, dear one. It’s going to be all right.” The Doctor watched Rose comfort the ship with a grim look on his face. Seeing Romana must have been devastating to the TARDIS. It was hard enough for him but they’d not been life-bonded. He swallowed down harsh memories of losing his own TARDIS and moved to the strut Rose was hugging. From the opposite side of it he mimicked her, his arms going around the strut to meet with hers. He pressed his forehead against the cool coral and offered his support for the ship’s grief.
They remained like that, locked together around the strut for several hours, hands running soothingly up and down the surface. Slowly the TARDIS’s grief ran down and she was able to hold her emotions at bay again. Rose pressed her lips lightly against the coral and then pulled away.
The Doctor stayed in place. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” Rose said softly and then slipped from the console room.
Rose was lying on her bed reading a book she had found in the library when the Doctor appeared in the doorway. Immediately she slipped in one of the bookmarks she had also liberated from the library and put the book to one side. She sat up and scooted back against the head board.
“Are you all right?” She asked him.
“I…can I come in?” He asked uncertainly.
“It’s your ship,” she said.
“She’s her own ship,” he said. “And it’s your room.” Rose smiled and patted the bed next to her. Her old version of him wouldn’t have asked. He’d have barged in as if he owned the place. Well, he had owned the place. Not that she’d minded, either. At least not after the first few weeks.
He came into the room and lowered himself onto her bed, one knee on it, the other leg dangling off the side, facing her. “She’s hurting,” he said, failing to answer her question. “But she‘s better. Seeing Romana again…she wasn’t expecting that. She didn’t know the program was there.”
He reached out and took her hand, his thumb stroking the web of skin between her thumb and index finger, leaving little trails of gold in it’s wake. “What you did for her…you knew just what she needed. I think she loves you.” He blew out an expansive breath. “The TARDIS and I are never going to be bonded the way we should be. It’s not really possible. But you’ve made things better, Rose.”
Rose smiled at him tenderly. “I’m glad.” Then she abruptly changed the subject. “What’s a disjunction?”
“What?”
“Something she said, your Romana. She said the disjunction had been successful. So what’s a disjunction?”
“Could be any of a number of things. The simplest definition is the act of breaking a connection. The separation or disunion of something. Or it can mean a compound idea that is true only if one and only one of a number of alternatives is true. Then there’s the separation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis,” he said off handedly.
“Homologous chromosomes during whatsis?” Rose asked.
“Meiosis. That’s the process where sexually reproducing organisms reduce the number of their chromosomes from diploid to haploid.”
“I think I liked vague better. I’ll probably be sorry I asked this but what’s a diploid and what’s a haploid?” She wanted to know.
“Diploid means double and haploid means half.”
“You couldn’t just say that?” She asked.
“I did. Meiosis is two consecutive divisions of the nucleus that leads to the production of reproductive cells. Meiosis starts when the duplicated chromosomes bunch up along the center of the nucleus and pairs of homologous chromosomes sort of cross over.”
“Homologous. That’s the same alleles, the same genes in the same order of arrangement right?” She asked. It had been five years since she’d completed university and her mind was trying desperately to fill in the gaps from her science courses. Though what she really needed was a good search engine.
“Right,” the Doctor agreed. “The pairs of chromosomes will move into opposite sides of the cell and then that cell divides, then divides again, producing four cells that contain half the number of chromosomes as the first cell did. Some or all of the cells may become functional as gametes.”
“So we’re talking about genetics. This has been all about genetics from the start. At least with me it has been. What if it has with you as well?” Rose began to reason through it.
“Perhaps. If we’re destined to mate and create children then it would be necessary for me to be able to create reproductive cells like gametes for that to happen. That function had been bred out of my species. We reproduced through genetic engineering in my time,” he said.
But Rose’s mind was racing further and further ahead. “I think it’s more than that,” she said slowly.
He stared at her shrewdly. “What are you thinking?”
“The other Doctor told me there were no other Time Lords, that they only existed once and they were taken out of time with the Time War. It left only him. He said there couldn’t be alternates of him.”
“Yet here I am,” he said gesturing at his body.
“Large as life and twice as sexy,” Rose said before she thought. She closed her eyes. “I said that out loud, didn’t I?”
The Doctor chuckled and she risked a glance up at him. “Anyway,” she said forging past her embarrassment, “Is that true for you, too?” She asked.
“Yes. I don’t understand how he exists but he does.”
“What if this disjunction was a division into two separate but identical versions of you?” Rose asked.
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“But Romana said it herself. She said it was okay to love you because you were the same man. Not an alternate version of the same man, but the same man. What if your entire body did this meiosis? Before the last salvo of the Time War you were one man. And at the final moment, as that stroke came down and you regenerated into this form, you became two. One awakening in a different universe in Romana’s TARDIS and the other awakening in his own in the other one.”
And suddenly the memory exploded into the Doctor’s head, rushing in with the violence of being cleaved into two separate but identical beings and the loss of his entire species. The pain washed over him and his body went rigid before finding blessed relief in darkness as he lost consciousness, tumbling forward onto Rose’s bed.
Ch. 11: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/8399.html
