Leap of Faith: Chapter Thirteen

[amberfocus]

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Title:  Leap of Faith (13/?)
Author:  amberfocus
Characters/Pairings:  John Smith (alt!Nine)/Rose Tyler, Toshiko Sato, Jake Simmonds, Mickey Smith, Ianto Jones, Jackie Tyler/Pete Tyler, Tony Tyler, various original characters
Genre:  Romance, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe
Rating:  Adult
Betas:  amyo67, jeprdyfrndly
Summary:  Hiding from the Family of Blood, the alt!Ninth Doctor turns himself into John Smith via the chameleon arch and with his companion Toshiko Sato, takes a job at Torchwood.  He clashes with everyone he meets and Rose Tyler, the beautiful young director of Torchwood Field Operative Training and the daughter of his boss, is no exception.  AU after season 2 and based mostly, but not completely, on my short story Third Time's the Charm:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/319447.html, but it is not necessary to have read that.

Previous Chapters:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/327895.html

Chapter Thirteen: Retrieving Memories

When Rose entered Mickey’s office he held up both hands. “Whatever it is, Rose, I’m busy. I don’t have time to keep you from being bored because you have nothing to do. You should have taken the week off.”

“What it is is this,” she said quietly pulling the superphone out of her pocket and placing it on his desk in front of him.

He picked it up, frowning at it. “Where’d you find this?”

“Down in A&R. Tosh was examining it. It was in the bins from Cybus. How could you be so careless, Mickey?” Rose asked.

“You weren’t here for the cleanup, Rose!” Mickey snapped, Rose's words obviously touching a nerve. “You and the Doctor swanned off like you always did. It was hell. Things got lost. We were fighting with and rounding up insane Cybermen for three years before they started breaking through to the other Earth. Some of them had managed to upgrade themselves before the signal to cancel their inhibitor chips went out. It was enough to keep them around. I had a bit more to think about than where I’d left your precious mobile.”

“I gave you that so you’d have something to remember me by,” she said unable to keep the hurt out of her voice. “There were pictures in there from back home. You were supposed to take care of it!”

“Rose, I will never need a picture to remember you by. You should bloody well know that. Yeah, it would have been nice, but I’d never have forgotten you,” he said. “In our relationship, I’m never the one who forgot!”

Rose winced. “Mickey.”

“No, Rose. Don’t point fingers at me, because there are just as many pointing back at you,” he said.

“Well, you still should have taken more care. You know how brilliant Tosh is. Or John for that matter. If they’d got it working…” Rose shook her head. “Tosh has a theory that it comes from an alternate reality. Probably because Samsung, not to mention Korea, doesn’t even exist here!”

“Don’t think they could start it without the charger.”

“Oh, please,” Rose said. “The Doctor rigged this thing to charge from anything. He could zap it with the sonic screwdriver if need be. All they’d have to do is set it on a likely power source long enough and it’d eventually absorb a charge. It might take longer than the charger it came with, but it’d work. It wouldn’t have taken either one of them long to find that out.”

“Well, but it’s not like there’s anything on there that would be a problem. Just photos of you and me and the Doctor. Keepsakes, you said.”

“Yeah, photos. Of me and him and Harriet Jones. Mickey, how would I explain a photo of me and the president of the People’s Republic of Great Britain to anybody? I don’t know her here. How would I explain that I have her on my speed dial?” she asked. “It’s the same number. There’s all kinds of trouble this could have caused.”

“Enough, Rose. If it was that big of a deal you should never have given me it. I didn’t lose it on purpose and you have it back now. All’s well that ends well. You can destroy it and all of your secrets will be safe again,” he said. “You should like that, keeping secrets.”

“I hate it,” Rose snapped. “And your logic would be valid, except for the fact that Tosh will be expecting it back,” Rose said. “I had to tell her something to make her give it to me, so I told her you could probably figure out a way to get it working. She’ll want to know when you do.”

“So I’ll tell her I blew it up by accident if she asks. It’ll be fine,” Mickey insisted.

“More lies on top of more lies. We’ve worked so hard to keep where we come from a secret, Mickey. To forge tamperproof identities in this universe so we wouldn’t have to keep telling lies. Why does it never end?” she wailed.

“I don’t know,” Mickey said softening in the face of her frustration and misery.

“I don’t want it ever to come to light again that travel between realities was once possible, because someone will try for it again. You know they will. And you know what it’ll mean if they do,” she said. “The Doctor was very clear on that.”

“No one’s going to find that out, Rose. Our identities are airtight now. We’ll be fine,” he said.

“And if we’re not?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” he said. “Here, give it to me and I’ll destroy it.” He reached for the mobile.

Rose snatched it up. “No. I want to get the photos off it. They’re all I have of home. There’re pictures of Keisha and Shireen and the old flat and the Doctor. I want to take them off. The rest we can destroy, but not those.”

“Rose, it’s evidence of where we come from.”

“I don’t care! I lost everything, Mickey. Everything. You made a choice to stay in this world, but I never did. I got trapped here. And I thought I had nothing to remember it by. I need these photos. Then I’ll destroy the phone for good,” Rose said.

“Rose, you’ve come so far. Don’t you think if you have these, if you look at them, it will just set you back? You’re just getting better. I don’t want to see you going backwards,” Mickey said.

“I won’t. I’ve got…I’m looking forward to the future again. Because…well, I am.

“It’s not a secret, Rose. I know what you’re thinking and who it is you’re thinking about. So let’s face this. What if John Smith sees them? You’re getting closer to him every day and don’t think I don’t know where it’s headed.” There was disapproval in Mickey’s tone that Rose chose to ignore.

“We’re only friends and anyway, I’ve told John that he looks like my dead lover,” Rose said.

“Dead? The Doctor isn’t dead.”

“What did you want me to say, Mick?” Rose asked. “That version of him did die. He regenerated. It was the most truthful lie I could tell,” she said. “I can’t…if I tell him the full truth I’ll have to tell him everything and you know we can’t let people know where we really come from, any of us.”

“You weren’t lovers with the version of him that died, though,” Mickey said. Rose didn’t meet his eyes. “You weren’t, were you?” he asked in horror. “Rose, you and I were still—.”

“You were seeing Tricia Delaney,” Rose said flatly. “You told me that. You were dating her. Sleeping with her.”

“What did you expect me to do? Wait forever?” he asked. “You were always off with the Doctor. You didn’t care anymore.”

“I never stopped caring.”

“But you loved him!”

“Why’d you even come to Cardiff, Mickey? If that’s what you thought? Why’d you even come?” Rose asked. They should have had this out long ago. It had built up for far too long. Now all of it came tumbling out.

“Because you asked me to. That’s all it ever took back then. You asked, I came running,” he said. “I didn’t know then that it was a losing fight. It would always be a losing fight to your Doctor. Even when you got stuck here with me, I still kept on losing to him. The memory of him. It took me until then to realize there would never be an us again.”

“I’m sorry, Mickey. But you were with another girl. You ask what you were supposed to do. What was I supposed to do after you told me that?” she asked. “So yeah, after Blon, after Cardiff, yeah…I went to him. He wanted me, Mickey, and you didn’t. We had two weeks. Two weeks before we ran out of time, but yes, I was with him in that body.”

Mickey swallowed hard. “Guess I deserved that,” he said.

“It wasn’t about you, Mickey, or what you deserved.  It wasn't about hurting you or getting back at you, either. It never was. It felt like you gave up on us and so I let myself love him. Then he regenerated and pushed me away and you and I were trying to make it work again and we couldn’t because I did still love him despite the change. If it makes you feel any better that Doctor and I didn’t again until after you came here,” she said.

“Yeah, but we never…not since Cardiff. Because of him.”

“Because of him, because of Tricia, because of you, because of me. There's a hundred excuses, Mickey, but it always comes down to the fact that I loved him. I loved him. You know that. Why do you even care now? You got over me a long time ago,” she said.

“No,” he said softly. “Not that long ago, Rose. I’m not still carrying a torch…but not that long ago. It still hurts that you ran away with him. Because you weren’t just running to him, you were running from me. You were running from us,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I was. I just didn’t know it then.”

“You’re running now, Rose. I see you doing it. Running to him while you run away from your past. You’re gonna get into something with John Smith, aren’t you?” he asked.

“He’s not the Doctor and I’m not running. I’m facing my life head on now, because I have to. John and I are barely friends. Just becoming that. You know what he’s like,” Rose said.

“That’s not what I asked you,” he said, his dark eyes drilling into hers. “You’re clearly attracted to him.”

“It’s not real.”

“It is real,” Mickey contradicted, “Or you’d be avoiding him like everybody else does, not becoming his friend and definitely not getting your photos splashed across The Sun with him.”

“Not you, too,” she said. “I got enough grief over that from my mother,” Rose said.

“How’d Jackie take it?”

“About like you’d expect. She thought he was the Doctor come back. I disabused her of that notion pretty quick. Because he’s not the Doctor. He’s nothing like him. He never will be,” Rose said. “You and my mum, you both need to know that.”

“And yet you aren’t saying no, Rose. I’m hearing a half a dozen excuses, but not once have you said you aren’t going to have a relationship with this man,” Mickey pressed.

“Because I don’t know!” Rose burst out. “I don’t know what I want, Mickey. I don’t even know if he wants me.”

“He wants you,” Mickey said. “His attraction is as clear as yours.”

“I mean wants me,” she said. “Not my body, but me. Until I know that he does, nothing is going to happen.” Mickey nodded, clearly against his better judgment, and Rose slipped the phone back into her pocket. “I’m a big girl, Mick, I can take care of myself.”

“That’s the thing about you, Rose. You always could. You don’t need anyone,” Mickey said.

“We all need someone, Mickey. It’s part of being human,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s time you found someone, too?” she asked.

Mickey frowned at her and she watched as he closed himself down. “I don’t have time for love,” he said. “I don’t have time for this, either. I’ve got a lot to do before five, Rose. I need to get back to it.” Rose didn’t like leaving things so unsettled between her and Mickey, but she knew it wasn’t something they were going to be able to talk out any further at work. If they ever could.

“All right, but I think you need to make the time, Mickey. I’m not the only one whose life has been on hold for the last few years.” With that she left him to his thoughts and returned to her office where Ianto was waiting to discuss with her the new recruitment drive they’d be able to start working on. Pete had finally decided after Rose was injured and Daniel had died to pony up the money for one. At least it gave her something to do for the rest of the day. Something other than thinking about Mickey’s painful words and her possible future.



When Rose arrived home that night she immediately put the phone against the all purpose power source she’d filched from Torchwood a year ago. No one else had recognized it for what it was, but she’d seen them before when she and the Doctor had visited the Colhina System and they’d had to make use of one to charge the sonic screwdriver. It was simple enough. It was a glass plate that drew energy out of the air. It just needed to be laid flat and the phone put on it. It would take about 20 minutes to charge.

She waited until the little phone had enough juice to light up and say it was charging and then she took a shower and washed and dried her hair. Normally she didn’t spend much time on her appearance beyond making sure she was clean and had a bit of eye makeup on and that wasn’t going to change just because John might be tagging along with Tosh. She wasn’t a kid anymore and didn’t feel the need to make herself up to draw attention like she had when she was younger. Blending in was far safer camouflage in her line of work.

She pulled on her most comfortable worn out jeans and a light blue t-shirt and once again a pair of clashing slipper socks, these ones bright orange with yellow polka dots. She ordered an extra large pizza with the works and a couple big bottles of fizzy drinks to be delivered at seven and checked through her stack of DVD’s and board games. She and Tosh hadn’t made much of a plan for what they were going to do tonight after Tosh cancelled dancing, but she figured she had it covered.

Once she was sure everything was ready she opened her laptop and lifted the phone off the charging plate. With shaking hands she opened it and told it to retrieve her photographs. She almost burst into tears when the first one that showed was of her with Keisha and Shireen. Sometimes she ached with how much she missed her oldest friends. It took her a minute to get herself under control again and focus on what she needed to do.

The transfer was going to be simple enough. One of the modifications the Doctor had made allowed her to simply beam information from her phone to any computer. It had been, really, how the Cybermen had been defeated. She created a file to transfer the information to and then with a strangled sound that was half fear and half anticipation she hit the star key three times. It took less time to send it then it had to hit the star key and with a gulp she opened the file.

“Doctor,” she said, heartbreak in her voice. She’d been prepared to see the photos of the Doctor in the body and face that looked like John. It was sad but she’d been prepared for it. His close cropped hair, the leather jacket, the same angles and lines of his face that she’d been looking at for the past four months were so familiar.

What she wasn’t prepared for, what she’d forgotten about, were the images of Jack that were also stored in the phone. Her fingers reached out and traced his face. He’d been in their lives for such a short time, but the impact he’d made would be one Rose could never forget. He’d died on the game station. She was sure of it despite the Doctor’s words that he was rebuilding the Earth, because she knew that there was no way the Doctor would ever leave Jack behind. He’d already become too important to both of them. The only way he would was if Jack was dead. “I’m so sorry, Jack. We couldn’t save you.”

She opened another photo and saw her and Mickey on the night she’d turned twenty lifting a couple of pints in a toast. There was one of her mum in the kitchen of their old flat. And there was the photo of her and the Doctor and Harriet Jones after the Slitheen attack. Harriet Jones whom the next time they’d met had been prime minister of the U.K. She couldn’t bear to just delete it. It was one of the few she had of the Doctor in that body. Instead she opened her photo editing software and took Harriet out of the photo then destroyed the original. Then she deleted all of the photos off her phone.

She knew she should stop now. She’d covered the tracks that needed covering. Her secret would be safe from this quarter. Still, she couldn’t stop herself from going on, from finding the Doctor after he’d turned into the skinny, pinstriped, brown-eyed man with the really great hair. It was like being punched in the gut and having her heart torn out again all at the same time. She had loved him with everything she’d had in her. Tears escaped her eyes and rolled down her face. “I miss you,” she said. “I miss you so much.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d cried over the Doctor recently. She had cried the day she’d met John Smith. She had locked herself in the bathroom and taken a shower and stayed under the water for a long time and she had cried for everything she’d lost. She had thought it would be the last time, that she’d gotten herself together, that she was moving on. But this…this was like putting the final nail in the coffin. Seeing his face and knowing it, really and truly knowing it…

She gave herself another minute to look and to pull herself together and then closed the file, carefully hiding it in a blind directory with an encrypted password. She wasn’t going to look at it again. It made her hurt. It made her weak. But she just couldn’t just get rid of it. It didn’t matter if she was ready to move on or not. He would always be a part of her and she had to accept that. So would anyone she moved on with.

Rose picked up the phone and stared down at it, and began deleting the stored names and numbers it held. When she got to the word TARDIS she didn’t know what possessed her to do it, but something did. She hit the enter key and it quickly dialed the long string of digits that had once upon a time connected her to the ship. The Doctor said she was the only person he’d ever given the number to and it would only be accessible by this phone. She was shocked when it began to ring. It rang for a long, long time, but it was never answered. Of course it wouldn’t be. Of course it wouldn’t. Rose hung up, deleted that last number and closed the phone. Her old life was over. Forever.




Once a week Tosh checked on the TARDIS. It had become a ritual that she fit in on Fridays between work and going out with Rose. This Friday was no different. She unlocked the spare room and walked over to the wardrobe. With a small, silver key she unlocked the door and stepped inside to a completely different world. The first time she’d come into the ship she’d been somewhat prepared for it. The Doctor had told her that it was bigger on the inside and it was like nothing she ever could have imagined. She’d been able to keep from making a fool of herself at her astonishment, but that hadn’t meant she wasn’t awed.

Even now when the ship was powered so far down that the aliens they were hiding from couldn’t detect her, the TARDIS was impressive. Her emergency backup lights glowed faintly, casting everything into a strange blue and silver color scheme. Everything about it at first glance said functionality and performance, sterility and coldness, but the ship wasn’t like that at all. There had been life pulsing through her and a warmth that very slowly suffused the room the longer she stayed in it. Without the Doctor inside her, without the life Tosh knew was there visibly pulsing through the glass tubing and reflecting off the shiny metal surfaces, she could still see beneath the surface to the warmth bundled tightly beneath; to the life there.

Her eyes moved upward to the high, arching ceiling. It reminded her of the inside of a cathedral, but instead of stained glass windows or intricate friezes it was carved into designs that looked like clockwork. The Doctor said it was thousands of words in his own ancient language, but he had always refused to tell her what language that was. Also depicted in the centermost section above the console was a binary solar system. She assumed this was where he’d come from, but she’d always been far too much into self-preservation to ask after the first few times. Anytime she ventured a question about his origins it would change his personality for hours. She had decided for her own sake it wasn’t worth it.

She moved to the pentagonal console, and ran her hands over the smooth glass panel that covered one of the five distinct sections. It lit beneath her fingers, a tiny query light coming up ready for her to bring the entire ship to life at a moment’s notice should it become necessary. She ran her hands over each of the remaining segments. They were all different. One looked Victorian and one looked modern, like the controls one would find in a zeppelin. A flashy, expensive looking, futuristic laptop was in the fourth segment and was capable of hooking into any planet’s computer network that they’d run across so far, including Earth’s. The fifth segment she moved to at last, her hands coming out to deftly turn a few knobs and turn on the onboard recording mechanism.

“This is Toshiko Sato and this is the end of week 18. There’s been a bit of an unexpected development. John Smith has saved the life of Rose Tyler and as unlikely as it seems, a friendship is developing between them. The Doctor said I had to protect John at all costs, but I’m not exactly sure what to do if he goes about risking his own life like this again. This identity, much like the Doctor himself, is strong-willed and doesn’t exactly listen. We were supposed to be safe, stuck down in A&R and not going out in the field, but it looks like that may no longer be an option.”

Tosh sighed. “Also of significance is that this friendship between John and Rose has drawn the eye of a local tabloid. If their interest shifts from Rose to John and someone starts investigating his past I’m not sure how well it’s going to hold up. He was at Oxford for two years, but that’s not nearly as many as he claims. If someone good starts digging, the truth might come out and then the Doctor will be in danger from the family. Common sense tells me I should interfere in this relationship, prevent it from happening.”

She paused and took a deep breath before continuing. “He said I’d have to make judgment calls so I’m making one. I’m staying out of it. He’s happier now than I have ever seen him. What right have I got to interfere with that?” Toshiko entered the recording into the TARDIS’s databanks and turned off the equipment. She stroked the panel softly again. “Same time next week?” she queried. As usual there was no response from the ship. Not that she’d expected there to be. She’d only filed two other reports in all the time they’d been there and the ship was as quiet and unresponsive then as she was now.

Tosh turned to leave when the phone wired into the console by the laptop began to ring. That was impossible. It was only wired to send calls out, not to receive them. The Doctor had been very clear about that. She could make calls out to her family, but they could not contact her. He didn’t want anyone to have a way of contacting him willy-nilly. He refused to be at any planet’s or any person’s beck and call. That phone should not be ringing. There was no possible way. Startled she moved around to look at it. Caller Unknown flashed across the little screen. Tosh reached out to answer it, but a sudden intense feeling of foreboding washed over her and she yanked her hand back as if it had been burned.

The desire to get out of the TARDIS immediately overwhelmed her and she practically ran from the ship, taking only the time she needed to lock it before she vacated the room it was in and locked it, too. Only when she was on the other side of the door did the panic begin to leave her system. Who would be calling the Doctor on the TARDIS? And why? But even as she thought it she knew instinctively that right now it was better for her not to know.

Shaking, she moved away to get ready for her evening in with Rose and John. It wasn’t like her to get so frightened of something for no reason. She wondered if the feelings that had taken her over had come from the TARDIS. The Doctor had said, when he’d talk about it at all, that the TARDIS could get into her head if it needed to badly enough. The ship did it to translate alien language, but she’d never felt a presence with it. And this hadn’t even felt like a presence. It had simply been basic emotions sending her running. She hated that she couldn’t ask the Doctor. As forthcoming as he usually wasn’t, he’d at least have told her not to be stupid if she was wrong about it.

Tosh was really glad that the evening wasn’t going to be spent in her own flat tonight. Even though she felt calmer, and even though she loved the TARDIS under the usual circumstances and would be eager to get back to her, it felt better, safer somehow to put distance between them. Some days this new life of hers was more disturbing than the one she’d chosen to have with the Doctor exploring alien planets and time and space. Well, no matter what was going on and what was about to happen, there were only 34 more weeks to get through. She could do this. She could live a lie for eight more months.

The phone started ringing and she jumped. It took her a moment to realize it was her own mobile phone and not the one from the TARDIS. She picked it up and looked at the display screen. Her mother? Why was her mother calling? She answered it quickly. “Hello, Mother, what’s up?”  Toshiko sat down hard at her mother's response.

Ch. 14: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/336834.html