In This Darkness Tumbles Hope (2/?)

[amberfocus]

A/N:  Rose and the Tenth Doctor search desperately for their daughter, Donna and Josz return to the TARDIS and take Dare to join the search, and the Ninth Doctor having just left Rose with Mickey and having not yet gone back to tell her "It also travels in time," arrives on the planet Danzibar.

                                                              Chapter Two: Unexpected Encounter

He had really thought she’d come with him. The girl had been so promising, such a fighter, had had so much spirit. He wasn’t used to people turning him down, could count on one hand how many people had turned down travelling with him across time and space. She’d saved his life, too and that was dead useful in a companion. But no, she’d turned him down. Turned him down for that cowering lump of useless humanity, decided to waste the rest of her life working in a shop and looking after that waste of space.

The boy could have had potential, too, born into a different life, a different set of circumstances, but instead he chose to let his fear rule him, to not stand up. Not like Rose. Rose had been thinking from the minute he saved her life, from the minute they’d entered that elevator and he’d pulled off the plastic arm. He’d really thought he’d found someone he could bump around time and space with, someone worth showing things to. He had wanted so badly to see her reaction to the worlds he could take her to. He’d wanted to see that slow smile light her face up as he gave her things she never could have imagined. He’d wanted--.

The Doctor growled. He really had to stop obsessing over Rose Tyler. It had been two days since he’d left her behind on Earth, two days since she’d told him no like she only half meant it. He’d thought about going back, but it wasn’t something he did, and anyway, if she’d said no again, it would take what was left of his spirit and he needed that to survive. Being alone like this, the last of his kind, he needed one small spark of hope to go on living.

She’d ignited that spark in him to begin with, he was sure he hadn’t had it when he’d landed on Earth, barely regenerated, and not yet quite stable. He’d gone to Earth to die, but the TARDIS hadn’t let him and she’d made him pay attention, notice the signal that the Nestene Consciousness was sending out, and sent him off to the shop where the Autons were congregating. Again, he’d planned to die, but that’s where he’d met her, the girl who had so much potential, the girl whose hand in his had made him feel like not giving up, not letting himself blow up when he blew up Henrik’s. Rose was--. “Stop it!”

The TARDIS indicated they were in close proximity to Danzibar and that she thought the marketplace there might be a good place to look for the Fleurian tubing he needed to upgrade the water filtration system. With a grunt of irritation he agreed and set the coordinates so they’d materialize on the surface of the planet.

It really was just as well Rose hadn’t agreed to come. Danzibar was not a good place to take a young woman ever, let alone her first trip out, and he’d have had to be constantly on his toes, escorting her everywhere just to make sure she’d stay safe. He was pretty sure Rose was the wandering off on her own and exploring type. He shook his head. Why couldn’t he get the girl out of his mind?

He shrugged into his leather jacket and made sure he had both the sonic screwdriver and a handful of millnos and quorzats. Danzibar merchants liked solid cash money or gemstones. They were not partial to barter, considered it an insult in the way most planets thought money was. They’d let you bargain them down on price but that was it. Took half the fun out of it to his way of thinking.

The first thing he noticed after he’d landed was the smell. Marketplaces were like that, the unwashed stench of various creatures, the scents of cooked meets and sweets, and the unique flavor of underlying discomfort most travelers felt on a planet where women and children easily disappeared. It wasn’t quite the scent of fear, but it was close.

As water shot up into the sky out of a nearby fountain a psychic blast hit him right between the eyes. Daddy, where are you? It was a telepathic shout, a child’s voice right inside his head, a voice unused to being heard, unused to being answered. He reeled and had to lean against the side of a stall, his forehead pressed to the cool wood, while he put up his shields.

He got himself together and tried to put the shout of the telepathic child out of his mind. Just a little girl lost in the crowd trying to find her father. She wasn’t in jeopardy, wasn’t hurt, he didn’t need to think about it any further. Wasn’t his business, was it? He found the stall he’d been searching for and purchased the tubing he needed.

He’d made it all the way back to the TARDIS, had just opened the doors when another psychic shout pierced through his head, devastating his shields. Daddy! His hearts began beating frantically. No. No, it was impossible. There was no way. It just couldn’t be. But as the child momentarily latched onto him, he recognized the mind touch of a child with Gallifreyan engrams in her brain. Just as suddenly as it had appeared the touch was gone.

He strode quickly into the TARDIS and set the tubes down in the jump seat. “It can’t be,” he muttered. “It just can’t be.” His people were dead. All dead. And yet…he knew a Gallifreyan mind when it linked into another. Impossible just might be possible and he had to know, had to know if somewhere out there someone else had survived the war, had been hiding everything, even their minds from him. He stood before the keyboard and typed quickly, watching as the scan he wanted came up on the monitor. The swirling clockwork patterns of Gallifreyan script gave way as the ship translated his instructions.

He felt resistance from the ship’s mind. “I know I felt it,” he argued as she tried to stop him from beginning a planetary scan. “It was a child. A girl. She’d lost her father. And she…she felt Gallifreyan!”

The TARDIS finally gave in and did the scan, searching the surrounding city for inhabitants that fit the criteria. His eyes widened in astonishment when the TARDIS came back saying it had recognized two life forms as partially Gallifreyan, one with similar DNA to a Gallifreyan but wasn’t quite, two partially formed minds and one… “Are you sure about this?” he asked her. It had to be someone pretty powerful to have so much shielding he hadn’t sensed them in the universe. It had to be a Time Lord.

She made a rude noise and he looked back down at the monitor again. Somewhere on this planet, there was a Time Lord. A Time Lord with two half blood children and a wife who was pregnant with twins. It was impossible. He’d have felt him before. He’d have known if there was anybody else. How could the man have kept himself hidden? Unless…He thought about the TARDIS’s reluctance to show him the results of the scan. He thought about the child’s mind touch ripping through all his barriers.

“Is that…is that life form me?” he asked suddenly. “That Time Lord? Is he some future version of me?” The ship didn’t answer him, but her silence was more telling than anything else.



When Donna Noble opened the door to the TARDIS, Dare Tyler flung himself down the ramp, wrapping his arms tightly around her stomach and knocking her back into Josz. Josz grumbled good-naturedly, his matter shifting sideways to avoid the majority of the impact before resolidifying his form. “Well, hello to you, too, Dare,” Donna said, her hand automatically going up to ruffle the little boy’s hair.

He backed away from her a bit, scowling, and ran his hands through the strands, returning it to its previous designed messy state. Donna laughed. He was so like his father sometimes. If his hair hadn’t been blond he’d be the Doctor in replica. She glanced around the console room, seeing Cara Mia standing quietly by a coral support strut. “Where’re your parents?” she asked with a smile.

Dare bit his lip and suddenly Donna’s good mood vanished. That was exactly what Rose did when she was upset about something. “They’re out looking for Cassi,” he admitted.

“What happened to Cassi?” Josz asked anxiously.

“Dad lost her. Can you feel her?” he asked his nanny. The blue man’s eyes widened.

“I can try.” He handed the packages he’d been carrying to Donna and closed his eyes. His body lost coherency as he reverted to his natural form and hung free in the air, taking on the appearance of a blob of floating translucent blue silly putty.

As a Sower, Josz had a lot of abilities that many of the more humanoid species did not. It was one reason he was such a good nanny. He had the ability to slide between dimensional walls, move through space or time at will, and focus on one single presence in a throbbing mass of many. He was unmatched in his ability to track another living creature, even amongst his own kind. Cassi could be quite difficult to locate, she kept herself so tightly closed most of the time, but he could usually do it if he reverted.

A moment later he slipped through a crack in the dimensional wall and disappeared, the hole he’d made sealing up behind him. The Cloister bells began to ring as they always did when Josz did something like that inside the ship and Donna strode to the console and hit the emergency override the Doctor had installed after the fifth time Josz had set them off.

She sat down on the jump seat and Dare joined her, curling into her side. Donna slipped her arm around the little boy. “You want to tell me exactly what happened, little space man?” she asked him.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” he said. “I wasn’t there. I just know that Dad came back to the ship without Cassi and Mum…Mum swore.”

“Your mother swore at him?” Donna asked in surprise. “In front of you?”

“Not so much at him, but just… It’s serious, isn’t it, if Mum’s swearing in front of me? If they’re arguing like that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. Donna never lied to Dare. It was something she had promised him over three years ago after he’d caught his grandparents fibbing about something they’d considered unimportant and Dare had considered life altering. Dare was a stickler for telling the truth.

“Do you think she’s going to be okay?”

“I hope so. She’s got the best search team in half the universe out looking for her,” she told him. “Can you feel her?” she asked him gently a moment later.

“I…I could,” he said, “but now I can’t. I’m scared, Auntie Donna.”

“Your parents will find her,” Donna said.

“I don’t know. Maybe…” He trailed off, biting his lip again.

She looked down at him and held him a little bit closer. “Maybe what?” she asked.

“Maybe we should call Uncle Jack,” he suggested.

“I’m not sure that would do us any good. I don’t think your father is going to be willing to leave Danzibar until he locates your sister. He’s no way of getting here,” Donna said.

“He’s got his Vortex Manipulator,” Dare said.

“The Doctor disabled that years ago.”

“I fixed it last time I was over there for a long weekend,” Dare admitted. “I was bored.”

“Tell you what,” said Donna. “If your parents haven’t found her by tonight, we’ll call Jack and ask him to come.” Dare nodded his head in agreement against her side.

A slight crack in reality appeared before them and the blue ooze that was Josz began slipping through it. He flowed from mid-air to the floor like thick, heavy syrup and then reformed into a humanoid shape over the course of ninety seconds.

“Did you find her?” Dare asked hopefully as soon as the transformation was complete.

“No, Dare. She’s still on the planet. I can definitely pick up traces of her presence, but when I tried to find her mind…I don’t know. She’s formed some kind of shielded link with someone else. I couldn’t break into it,” he explained.

“Her captor?” Donna asked.

Josz shrugged. “I don’t know, Donna, but until that shielded link fails, I can’t track her.”

Donna shook her head mutely as she stared up at the blue man. His eyes were frightened and it scared her because she’d never once seen the man show fear in the years she’d known him. And that made her more frightened than she’d been since Phobos when she’d been hunted as a beast by the villagers and nearly died.

“I’m going to go out and search physically,” he said.

“Maybe I should come too,” Donna said. “The more eyes looking for her the better.”

“What about me?” asked Dare.  “I don’t want to stay here alone.”

“You’re not alone. Cara Mia’s here,” Donna said motioning to the ship’s avatar that stood quietly to one side observing the conversation.

“I think,” said Cara Mia, “that Dare needs the comfort of looking for his sister.”

“All right then. Cara Mia, please let the Doctor know when he comes back that we’ve all gone to search,” Donna said.

“I will,” the avatar said.

Donna moved to put away the packages of groceries and then when she was done they made their way out of the ship and into the marketplace. Dare’s hand slid into hers and the three of them set out to search.



Rose was close to tears. The people on this planet were decidedly unhelpful in their search for their daughter. Children disappeared on Danzibar all the time, not just the children of travelers but those of the inhabitants. It wasn’t something that was spoken of. It was something that was accepted and families that lived here simply moved on. It was the primary reason that most family groupings consisted of two or three parents and nine or ten children, so that there would still be plenty of offspring around if one or two suddenly went missing.

“Once we find her, I never want to come back to this planet again!” Rose said angrily. “I hate these people. How can they not fight this? Why do they just let it happen to them? To their children?”

“Shh, love. We’ll find her,” the Doctor said soothingly.

“You don’t know that!” Rose cried out. He reached for her but she pulled away from him, in no mood to be mollified.

“I do.”

“No, you don’t! Look at her time line. Tell me that she’s going to be okay because you know it, not because you’re trying to make me feel better,” she snapped.

“Rose, you know Cassi’s time line has always been convoluted. It’s altered before. When I look into her future I see all of it. It’s not a relatively straight line like Dare’s is. It…it looks like that scribble monster that came after you when we were dealing with the Isolus,” he explained.

“What if they…what if she…what—what—if—.” Rose broke off and tears streamed down her face.

The Doctor pulled her into his arms. “We’ll find her. I promise you, Rose, we’ll find her.”

Rose collapsed against him and she buried her face in his chest as she tried desperately to get herself under control. She was no good to her daughter like this. She knew that. She had to pull herself together so they could continue the search. The Doctor rubbed his hands up and down her back, stroking her lightly and trying to calm her. It took her a few minutes but eventually she got herself under control.

“Just what the hell have you done?” The voice that came from behind Rose sent a powerful wave of recognition straight to her heart. Her stomach felt like it had completely turned itself over and she found herself pulling out of the Doctor’s arms and whirling around to face…the Doctor.

The look of absolute shock on her face at seeing the Doctor in his earlier form was nothing compared to the look on his. “Rose Tyler?” he asked in astonishment. She flung herself against him putting a stranglehold around his chest. After a moment’s hesitation his arms came up and he held her tightly in a hug.

At a cough from her husband she released the earlier incarnation and stepped back. “It’s so good to see you.” Her husband made an annoyed sound. She turned to look at him and said, “Don’t you dare even think about getting jealous of yourself.”

Her first Doctor held the sonic screwdriver in his hand and pointed it at her running it up and down her body. “But…you’re alien,” he said.

Rose smiled and tears came into her eyes again, but these were happy ones. “That all right?” she asked, echoing words that had been said long ago for her, but from the look on his face hadn’t been that long ago for him.

“What,” he cleared his throat, “what are you doing here?” he asked.

“Oh, you know,” said her husband. “Needed a part for the TARDIS.

“No, I mean…Rose, you said no. You never came with me. You stayed on Earth to be with Mickey.” The displeasure and hurt in his voice as he said the name almost made Rose smile.

“But I didn’t though. You came back. You told me, ‘It also travels in time,’ and I came running and I never looked back.” She nodded her head at the pin-striped Doctor. “Saw you through a regeneration,” she said. Then she smacked his arm. “You should have told me!”

He rubbed his arm, wincing but not taking offense. “Looks like you did more than see me through a regeneration.” He indicated her slightly swollen belly. “Those are…those are mine?” he asked.

“They’re mine, yes,” spoke up her husband. He put a possessive hand on Rose’s shoulder.

The leather-clad man ignored himself. “You and me, we’re…I mean…” He gestured helplessly, his ears turning pink. “How did this happen?” he asked.

“Sex,” said her husband. “It happened through lots and lots of sex.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes at himself. “I meant, she’s not human and…and she was. I know she was.”

“It’s a long story, Doctor, and one we really don’t have time to tell and you’d have to forget about it anyway.” She turned to her husband. “Right?”

“Right.”

“The important thing is--.”

“That your daughter’s gone missing and you can’t find her,” the other Doctor answered.

“How do you know that?” Rose asked.

“I heard her cry out. She nearly blasted my mind with the force of her cry. She was calling for her Daddy and the link hit me,” he said.

“You heard her? You heard Cassi use telepathy?” her husband asked. She could tell from his face that he was struggling between jealousy and relief.

“’Course I did. Didn’t you?”

“No,” said the Doctor. “We’ve never been able to hear Cassi. Only Dare can.”

“Dare?”

“Our son,” said Rose. “Vandarian. He goes by Dare.”

“How many children do we have?” he asked her.

“Two born, two conceived, and two yet to be,” said the newest version of the two men. “That we know of. Plus at least four grandchildren and one great grandchild. Could be more, but those are the ones we’ve met.”

“What? Are you crazy? You’re going to create a paradox! Do you want to bring down Reapers?” snapped the blue-eyed man.

“We’re careful,” said Rose. “I learned that lesson the hard way. Besides, we’ve got a Sower on board the TARDIS. It helps with the timey whimey stuff.”

“And I know what I’m doing,” said the brown-eyed Doctor.

Rose stepped between them and turned back to her Northern Doctor. “Can you help us?” she asked. “Can you help us find Cassiopeia?”

“I really go back for you? You really come with me?” he asked.

The other Doctor answered instead. “Best decision of our lives.” He paused then continued on. “Please,” he said. “We really could use your help.”

The Doctor looked at the two of them and then turned his gaze only onto Rose. “When did you fall in love with me?” he asked.

“When you came back for me,” she answered without hesitation.

“And when did I fall in love with you?” he asked her.

“You already know that,” her husband said. “Don’t you?”

The man in the leather jacket looked at himself and then back at the woman who would one day be his wife. “Yeah, I do. I’ll help. I’ll do anything I can.” He held out his hand to Rose and she took it. “Let’s go and find our daughter.”

“My daughter,” said her husband. He grabbed Rose’s free hand and tugged her away from himself. “My wife.”

Rose would have laughed at his jealousy if she wasn’t so worried about her daughter. The other Doctor rolled his eyes, again. “This way,” he said. He strode off ahead, his boots making heavy footprints in the dust. They followed him.

Ch. 3:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/207630.html