Of the Vortex Born: Chapter Thirty-three

[amberfocus]

Chapter Thirty-three:  Recovery Time

Luke Smith fought for consciousness, his mind swimming through a swirling morass of confusion. It took him several minutes to come to full coherence in his own mind, several minutes longer to convince his brain to tell his eyes to open. Finally he regained control of his motor skills and his eyes blinked open, focusing on the pretty face of Mairi Tyler. Mairi? Jamie!

“Jamie?” he asked insistently.

Mairi turned towards him completely. “Luke! How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Jamie?” he insisted.

“She’s alive,” Mairi said rising to her feet. She came over to him and laid a soothing hand across his brow. He pushed it off irritably. “She regenerated. Whatever you did saved her life.”

Relief crossed his face. “Now what about you?” Mairi asked him gently. She put her hand on his head again and this time he let her.

“I’m sore,” he said, “but I think I’m all right.” He started to sit up.

“Slowly,” Mairi cautioned him. “What you experienced was enough to scramble your cell structure briefly. Dad’s managed to sort you out, but the residual effect is like a bad sunburn. You’ll hurt for a few days, but it’ll fade and you’ll be okay.”

Luke sat up slowly. “Can I see her?” he asked.

“She’s sleeping,” Mairi said.

“I don’t care.”

“And she doesn’t look the same. You know about regeneration, right? About what it does? Dad explained it to you?”

“I don’t care what Jamie looks like. That never mattered to me. I like who she is,” he told her.

“You liked who she was. Jamie doesn’t remember that girl,” Mairi said.

“I still want to see her. Please? I won’t stay long if she doesn’t want company. Just long enough to look in on her,” he said.

“I’ll take him, Mairi,” said Landon from across the room.

Mairi sighed and turned back to the Ritauels. The bright purple birds eyed her intelligently but did not deign to give up their secrets. “Yeah, okay,” she said.

Landon walked an unsteady Luke down the corridor to Jamie’s room. He knocked lightly on Jamie’s door just in case she was awake. She was. “Yeah? What?”

Landon cracked the door open. “Hi, Jamie,” he said. “I’m your brother Landon. And I’ve brought Luke round to see you, too.”

Jamie sat up on her bed and eyed them warily. “You look like Dad,” she said. Landon rubbed his hand across the back of his neck.

“I suppose I do a bit.”

Her eyes moved to Luke and they softened. “Luke? Who are you then, to me?” she asked him.

He hobbled in and sat down in a chair next to her bed. “We like each other,” he said simply.

“Oh.” Her eyes glanced back at her brother.

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I have to go and pilot the shuttle for the return to the Moon, but I’ll be back later, okay?” he said.

“Okay,” she said. Landon left and she returned her gaze to Luke.

“You’re my boyfriend?” she asked him.

“Sort of. I guess,” he told her.

“Sort of? You either are or you’re not,” she said huffily.

“We’ve kissed,” he said, “a few times. But we’re not officially anything. Not yet. We just like each other. Or I don’t know. Guess for you it might be past tense.”

“You’re cute,” she said bluntly.

“Thank you. I like your new hair. It was pretty before, but it’s pretty now, too. Different. You’re different, but they said you’d still be you underneath it all,” he said. “If it worked. If I pulled you through. When you found your memories again.”

“You pulled me through?” she asked.

“You were dying. You…I don’t know…pulled me into your mind, I guess. And I found you and I asked you to fight for life and then you were and next thing I know I’m waking up in the infirmary,” Luke told her.

“What do you want from me?” she asked him warily.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just want to sit here for a while if that’s okay.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “Want to play Parcheesi?”

“Yeah, all right.” She got up off the bed and retrieved a game from a shelf piled high with them. “Do you remember how to play?”

“I don’t remember much,” she said, “about who I am or the people in my life, but I still have all my skills. And I remember how to play this. I want to be the tigers, if you don’t mind.”

“I’ll be the water buffalos,” he said amiably. It wasn’t much, Luke knew, but it was a start.



Rose looked in on her daughter and Luke from time to time. They had moved on from Parcheesi, to chess, to Monopoly as the day progressed. They had the easy camaraderie of two teenagers stuck at a family reunion with nothing better to do. Luke had been telling Jamie stories of his life in the other universe, his mum, his friends Maria and Clyde, and what travelling with her Dad this summer had been like.

He told her about their time together, about being trapped in the life pod and being captured by the Ganyites and Torchwood. He did not tell her about the rape or the first time she turned into the Storm Wolf. He did tell her about when she kissed him for the first time and how nervous he’d been when it had been his turn to initiate a kiss. Jamie had blushed deeply but hadn’t tried to change the subject.

“We could, if you want,” she said softly.

“What?” he asked.

“Kiss. If you want, you could kiss me now.”

“No,” he said. “I mean, I always want to kiss you, Jamie, but…you don’t remember me. You don’t remember your feelings for me. And I don’t want to kiss you until you do. I want it to mean something, because you mean something to me.”

“Okay,” she said with a shrug. “Thought it might bring back some memories.”

“It doesn’t work that way. Your brain needs time to reboot. When it does, I’ll kiss you as much as you want for as long as you want,” he told her.

“Is that a promise, Luke Smith?” she asked him with a bit of a flirty grin. She could definitely see what she must have seen in him before.

“Count on it,” he told her.



“They’re getting on like gangbusters,” Rose told the Doctor. “Every time I poke my head in they’re smiling and talking and laughing. Jamie’s always been really social.”

“Luke’s always been a bit reticent,” said the Doctor. “He’s come out of his shell a lot since meeting Jamie. She’s been good for him.”

“He’s been good for her. I hope that…I hope he can help to fix her.”

“She doesn’t need fixing, Rose. She just needs time,” he said, “and maybe some tea.” He set down his sonic screwdriver and put the panel back into place on the console. “Her brain needs time to finish healing. It hasn’t quite been 24 hours.”

“And what if it doesn’t? What if she never remembers who she is?” Rose wanted to know.

“The possibility exists. I won’t lie to you, love. But there are things we can do, things we can try.”

“Like what?” Rose wanted to know.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard the analogy of how a computer is like a brain. Well, if the human brain is like a regular desktop computer, a Time Lord brain is like a mega computer. There are multiple backups and fail safes that keep full dysfunctionality from being achieved. That’s why Jamie can talk and eat and play board games and do math and read. Her primary backups and fail safes all kicked in after regenerating,” the Doctor explained.

“What didn’t kick in was her core personality, the essence of who she is; her personal memories, because it was like she was starting up again in safe mode. In human terms it’s like she’s all id and superego, but the ego has gone into hiding as a defense mechanism against the power that was channeled through her body and brain. She’s dissociative.”

“So basically all we have to do is discover where she hid her ego?” Rose asked.

“Or help her reform it. It’ll take all of us. You, me, Mairi, and Landon. A bit like when we linked together to try to find Jamie when she was on Torchwood Station. She shut us out of her mind then, but she won’t be strong enough to do that now. Not without the power of the Storm Wolf building up and not without an underlying foundation of who she is to keep her strong and guide her,” the Doctor said. “The four of us together should be able to force her brain to…well, if we follow the computer analogy, reboot itself and restart her personality without safe mode being on.”

“If you knew this than why didn’t we do it immediately?” Rose demanded.

“Rose, she needs to be given time to try to recover on her own. It hasn’t even been 24 hours yet. Wait until we get settled in Moon Colony Two and then if she hasn’t healed herself yet, we’ll try the other method.”

“And it’ll work?” Rose asked.

“There’s an 83.759 percent chance of success.”

“That’s a possible failure rate of 16.241 percent,” Rose said heavily.

“It’s better odds than we had of ever seeing each other again,” he told her softly. “We beat those ones. We’ll beat these.”

“I just want my little girl back,” Rose said. “I don’t care what she looks like. I don’t even care if her personality changes like yours did, like mine even has a bit. But I don’t want to be forgotten. I want her to remember how much I love her, how much we all do. And I want her to remember how much she loves us.”

“If she doesn’t, she’ll learn to again,” the Doctor said gently.

“But she’s fourteen years old. She shouldn’t have to.”

“Children were never meant to regenerate,” he said. “What she did was extremely foolish and was an enormous risk to her mental stability. But it was her choice, Rose. She chose to save our lives and I can’t be sorry that she did, because I wasn’t ready to end my time with you. I’m sorry it was at the expense of one of her lives and perhaps who she is. But I’m not sorry she did it.”

Rose bit her lip and then nodded her head. “I can’t be sorry for that, either. But I want her back. I want my little girl’s mind back.”

“We’ll succeed. There’s no one alive who can out stubborn the Doctor and Rose,” he said.

“Have you met your children?” she asked him with a half smile.

“But we’ll have two of them on our side,” he said. “Jamie’s ego won’t stand a chance.” He pulled Rose into his arms and held her tightly. “We’ll get her back. I promise you, Rose. We’ll get her back.”

Ch. 34: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/179548.html