Back To Our Reality - Chapter 5
Title: Back to Our Reality Rating: Teen Pairing: Ten/Rose Characters: Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jackie Tyler, Pete Tyler (Pete’s World) Warnings: Angst Summary: What would happen if the Doctor, in the spur of the moment, decided to pull out the dimension jump disc from his pocket and press the button after Pete comes back to save Rose before the Void closed? How would he cope living in a parallel universe, without his TARDIS, bound to the slow path for the foreseeable future?
...
It took them nearly four months from the day they arrived to finally be told that they could find employment at Torchwood.
It had certainly been a tough few months to say the least. Without the ability to find a new adventure with each new day that came and went, to Rose it as though she and the Doctor were drifting further apart. At times she barely saw the Time Lord; only the occasional glimpse of pinstripe (she had only seen him in the clothes he had bought here a handful of times) as the Doctor came and went from the mansion. Rose was used to having to deal with Doctor’s moods, but never to this extent. Sure, back when they had the TARDIS, it wasn’t unheard of for her not to see the Doctor one some days. But those days had become much less frequent, even before he had regenerated, and, even when one of those days would arrive, he was usually alright the following day. However, now his low mood had become a continuous thing and, while she would see glimpses of the man she had gotten to know, Rose was out of ideas.
So when Pete told her that he was to finally take over at Torchwood and would be able to get herself and the Doctor on the payroll, Rose thought she could just make out the light at the end of very long, very dark tunnel.
And it was.
Sort of.
While both of them loved the jobs they had been given, they had been put in completely different areas. It was no surprise that, while Rose was given a job with the Field Agents, the Doctor had been given the position of Senior Scientific Advisor; specifically anything that was of alien origin. She couldn’t really complain much, however; her job meant that she could spend more time with Mickey which she was glad about. It was nice to spend time with him as a friend and she had finally been properly introduced to Mickey’s girlfriend Marcia, who had moved from South Africa only a year ago. Rose was happy to say that she had Marcia had got on from the moment they met and had become fast friends, much to Mickey’s relief.
The only downside, of course, was that she didn’t get to see the Doctor nearly as much as she would’ve liked.
Occasionally, they would get the chance to meet up if they took their lunch breaks at the same time. But those times were few and far between mainly because their days consisted of different things: if she wasn’t running half way round London, then he was in the laboratory busy doing whatever the hell it was he did. She had seen that little of him.
And on the rare occasions that they did get the chance to meet up properly, Rose always felt as though something was bothering the Doctor. Something other than their less-than-ideal situation. And, to Rose, it felt as though it affected him more when he was around her.
And no matter how hard she tried to brush the thoughts away, Rose couldn’t help but wonder if the Doctor no longer wanted her around.
She didn’t quite realise that it was the opposite.
….
Christmas was fast approaching and to say that the Doctor wasn’t exactly in the Christmas spirit was somewhat an understatement. About a week ago, the entire mansion, from top to bottom, had been covered in every kind of Christmas decoration that you could imagine. They ranged from candles to lights to the twelve-foot Christmas tree sitting in the biggest sitting room in the entire building.
However, despite having been roped in to helping with the putting up of decorations, and watching as Rose grew more and more excited about the prospect of Christmas while he felt more and more like an outsider, he just couldn’t seem to shake the non-Christmassy feeling from his mood. It annoyed him and made him feel worse as he dwelled on the fact that he couldn’t feel the spirit of Christmas in the way that he wanted to. Having spent many years on Earth, it had been a tradition that he had become particularly fond of.
He was just thankful, that, being on a parallel world, hadn’t meant that the whole idea of Christmas was something completely different to what he grown to know.
So anyway, while everyone he knew was slowly hyping themselves up for the Big Day, the Doctor had decided to stay behind at Torchwood in his lab, playing with the endless scientific equipment that he had been given when he had started working here.
And by ‘playing’, what that really meant was pointing his sonic screwdriver at whatever happened to be in front of him as he wandered around, praying to no God in particular, that he didn’t blow up the building, himself with it. That would certainly not go down well; especially with Rose who was already pissed off with him as he had decided to stay behind for no reason at all. The Doctor distinctively remembered her saying something about how she hadn’t had much chance to see him lately; that there wasn’t yet any signs of an alien invasion that might threaten the planet over the festive period and that it was three days until Christmas.
Oh, and she also said something about how she missed him, but the Doctor was purposely trying to ignore that. It brought up too many complications about feelings and that was not something the Doctor had the time or energy to think about right now. He had other things on his mind…he just didn’t know what those other things were.
Actually no…scrap that. There was nothing else on his mind other than that. He was just trying to pretend that there was so he could think of anything but.
Since arriving here, the Doctor had been finding it increasingly difficult to keep his feelings for Rose to himself. Being around her just made him yearn to tell her how he felt, but he knew he couldn’t. There were so many reasons as to why confessing his feelings would be a bad idea. For one, the reoccurring fact that he would outlive her. He still had two regenerations left so who knew how long it would be until he used them up. There didn’t exactly appear to be very much danger in this universe and so the Doctor doubted that getting shot by a Dalek or something or other was going to be a problem he needed to be worrying about. Therefore, the likelihood of him using one of remaining regenerations before Rose died was very slim indeed.
He sighed and shook his head, clearing the never ending thoughts from his head as best as he could, before continuing to prod things with the sonic.
Eventually, he could take it no longer and decided that he would go back to the mansion after all.
He checked the clock on the wall: it was ten o’clock. If he was lucky, by the time he got back to the mansion the rest of the household would have already turned in for the night, allowing him to slip inside his room completely unnoticed.
…
Christmas came and went and, soon enough, Rose had begun to have enough of the Doctor’s mood. It wasn’t his fault, so to speak, she was fully aware of that and didn’t blame him at all. But she was tired of never knowing whether he would be in the mood to talk to her. She may have had her family around her, but Rose had never felt more alone. With her mum having settled into this new life straight away and Mickey having been living here much longer than she had, Rose almost felt like an outsider. The only other outsider was the Doctor, but although he was always somewhere nearby, she had never felt so far away from him.
…
Three days before New Year, Rose sat in one of the offices with her dad, Mickey and a bunch of the Science Team, discussing their new project. Rose had had it in mind, always wondering if such a thing were possible, for a few months now; pretty much as soon as she had found out that she would land up getting a job at the institution, she had begun thinking about this.
Before gaining her job, Rose had already spoken to Pete about the possibility of a dimension jump; something that wouldn’t tear apart the two universes. Pete wasn’t surprised to hear his parallel daughter discussing the topic of trying to get back her original universe. He had always known that it had been a struggle for her to fit in and adjust the life she was now leading and he had wanted to say there and then that, yes, such a thing could be possible – but of course, he couldn’t. The chances of ever building something like that were almost none, and that was what he had told her. However, he had been careful enough not to give her an outright ‘no’. Rose needed some kind of hope in her life and if this was what it was going to be, then Pete wasn’t about to deny her that. She may be the child of a dead man, but Pete had taken quickly to Rose, almost surprising himself since the realisation of how this had come to be was a rather confusing one, and so didn’t want to be the one to cause her even more pain.
It was back then that the prospect of bringing the Doctor involved had arisen. However, with his current mood, Rose knew that he would be no help. He was likely to just tell them that there wasn’t even the slightest chance of getting something like that to work and that there was no point in wasting time on something that would, in the end, be futile.
Therefore, Rose had formed a team of the best scientists in the building, along with Pete and Mickey to help with the designing and construction of what soon become known as the ‘Dimension Cannon’.
Many designs had been done before the Christmas period, but none of them seemed to be plausible.
However, a few days before Christmas, the team had finally decided upon a design that, if it worked, would allow for travel through the dimensions without causing too much damage.
It had to be said, it wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing machine in the entire universe and, during her travels in the TARDIS, Rose had certainly seen technology that outdid this by a long shot. It was a rather bulking-looking piece of tech which did in fact almost look like a cannon. There were switches and buttons all over the body and, with it, were what Rose assumed were wearable discs; much like the ones that this version of Torchwood had developed before the walls had closed completely. It really wasn’t something to look at, but looks weren’t the be-all or end-all of everything and Rose was more than happy just to see something on paper that might actually work.
So again, here they were, three days before New Year, discussing their project. It wasn’t going well and some of the team were starting to lose hope that it would ever be at a stage where doing what it was designed to do was a possibility.
“Rose, I really think we should get the Doctor involved with this. He’ll know where we’re going wrong and what we can do to get it working.” Nathan said. He was short man of only twenty-six and was one of the best minds Torchwood had ever come across.
“No, we can’t.” Rose told him. “All he’ll say is that what we’re doing is impossible and tell us that there’s no point in even trying to go any further because it won’t work.” She sighed. “And besides, for once in my life, I’d like to be able to achieve something without needing his help and, if this does work – and believe me, we are going to make it work, regardless of how long it takes – it’ll be a nice way to surprise him.”
No one said anything else on the subject after that, though they all still wondered if, by getting the Doctor involved, they might just be able to achieve their goal.
Even Rose often wondered if her saying they should keep the Doctor away from the project was the right thing to do.
But, like she had said, if everything worked, then it would be a nice surprise for him. He was bound to start getting suspicious at any moment but if Rose could keep this from him just long enough to know if their project would work, then she would feel as though she had truly accomplished something without the Doctor’s guidance and she would be able to give him the best gift she could possibly think of.
A trip home.