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18 Seconds... Chapter 8

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Chapter 8 – Cause and Effect

“At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.” - Joseph Campbell


“What the hell is going on out here?”

Rose stiffened in the Doctor’s embrace, clutching the lapels of his leather jacket as she turned her face towards the voice but making no move to step away from his comforting warmth. Matthew was standing in the doorway to the break room, his hair mussed and clothes rumpled from sleeping on the couch, wearing a bewildered look as he took in the scene before him.

The sound of Matthew’s voice brought Rose back to the present, and she cursed at herself mentally as she became uncomfortably aware of the dozen agents surrounding them, weapons trained in their direction. A part of her rankled at the fact that she was allowing the Doctor to distract her so easily; she had more combat and field experience than all of the agents in the room combined.

“I’m not entirely sure, Matt,” Rose ground out between clenched teeth, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “but I do believe that this is what’s called a mutiny.”

Matthew blinked a few more times, and then turned an icy glare in Bryce’s direction. “Griffith?”

Bryce raised an eyebrow in Matthew’s direction. “Rose Tyler has been declared a hostile alien presence as dictated by the original Torchwood directive. She is to be immediately contained and transported to London for observation, along with her little friend.”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” Matthew exclaimed. “Rose is weird, yeah, but an alien? And hostile? She refuses to carry a gun, for chrissakes!”

“You said it yourself earlier, Matt,” Rose interjected softly, cutting off his tirade before he could fully swing into it. “I’m older than I look. Way older, actually; 113 years, last time I bothered keeping track. 68 of them spent running this office. ‘M not human, haven’t been for a long time.”

Rose felt the Doctor’s posture stiffen under her hands when she stated her age, and knew he had worked out roughly how long she had been living here. She turned an admonishing look on him, knowing he would feel some sort of misplaced guilt for her predicament. “And don’t you dare blame yourself for it,” she chided, poking him in the chest. “We did what we had to, and we saved millions of people’s lives.”

Rose gave the Doctor a bitter smile. “Getting stuck in the wrong part of reality was a small price to pay. And it wasn’t that bad, not really. I still had my family, got to watch my little sister grow up. Loved my job, at least when they weren’t trying to dissect me.” Rose shot a glare at Bryce, and then turned her attention back to the Doctor. “A very long time ago, you asked me to have a fantastic life. And you know what? I did. I really, truly did.”

She finally stepped back out of the Doctor’s embrace, and faced Bryce fully, crossing her arms over her chest in what she hoped looked like a defiant gesture, rather than a defensive one. She noticed that Matthew had moved to his computer while she was speaking, and was hurriedly reviewing the results from the final, global sweep they had initiated to find traces of radiation from the Void.

“It may come as a shock to you, Bry, but I honestly don’t care what you do to me at this point. You really should reconsider playing along with what London wants, though.” She fixed him with a withering glare, which he briefly tried to match. After a moment, he averted his eyes.

“You’re messing with things, with events, that you couldn’t possibly begin to understand, Bryce, and that’s on top of screwing with eighty plus years of interplanetary diplomacy. Time isn’t linear; it loops in on itself constantly. A person can be born in the future and die in the past. You’ve seen it yourself, these past six months, when people get displaced from their timelines by the Rift. The man next to me,” Rose said, tilting her head towards the Doctor, “comes from a point in my personal timeline, long before I lived here. If you take him to London, and keep him from getting back to where he needs to be, the consequences of the paradox you create will be catastrophic. It’ll make that Debronian invasion 15 years ago look like afternoon tea with the President by comparison, assuming you survive long enough to realize what’s happening.”

Bryce said nothing, refusing to meet Rose’s gaze. She could tell by the way he was holding himself, however, that he was looking for excuses to disregard her warning. Matthew cleared his throat to get her attention. “Boss lady?”

Rose looked down to where Matthew was seated in front of his computer, and gave him a wan smile. “What did the scans find, Matt?”

Bryce whipped his head towards Matthew with a snarl. “Don’t answer her, Johnston.”

“With all due respect, Bryce,” Matthew drawled, “until you have Rose in cuffs and a restraint collar, she’s not in custody, and she’s still our boss. Besides,” Matthew gave Bryce a brittle smile, “I outrank you.”

~0~0~0~

The Doctor grinned manically at Matthew’s defiance.

“Final scans are showing the same thing as the initial scans,” Matthew said while scrolling through screens of raw data. “The radiation you asked me to screen for is showing up in trace amounts globally. There are slightly stronger concentrations on a beach in Norway, at the Canary Wharf building in London, and in a private cemetery near… the Tyler Estate?”

Both the Doctor and Matthew gave Rose quizzical looks, but her expression remained neutral as she nodded for Matthew to continue. He cleared his throat, turning his gaze back to the screen. The Doctor kept his eyes on Rose, but her mask was well in place, and her expression gave away nothing. “The only place I’ve been able to find that has more than a trace amount of the radiation you asked me to scan for is directly over our heads, on the Plass.”

“Well, Rose?” asked Bryce, obviously desperate to regain control of the situation, “Mind telling all of us simple humans exactly what this means?”

The Doctor saw Rose shoot daggers at Bryce with her eyes, and decided to intervene before she said something that would get both of them shot. “Actually, Rose, I’m rather curious why this is important, meself.”

Rose gave him a considering glance, one eyebrow raised. He could tell she knew he was trying to distract her, and that she wasn’t going to fall for it; she had finally been pushed too far for one day. “You know, Doctor, I’m finally starting to understand why you used to refer to humans as stupid apes when you got frustrated.”

The Doctor chuckled, and the corner of Rose’s mouth twitched up. “The radiation I had Matthew scanning for was from my original medical workup, right after I crossed the Void, before it started becoming obvious that I wasn’t human anymore. Void stuff is rather unique as radiation goes—completely harmless to organisms exposed, but extremely easy to detect. You could see a layer of it covering me and you just by putting on a cheapy pair of 3D movie glasses.”

Rose uncrossed her arms, warming to the subject. “Thanks to the actions of both the Cybermen and Torchwood, there were tiny breaches made in the Void all over the world as the Cybermen moved from this universe to that one towards the end of the Cyberwar. That’s why there are trace readings of Void stuff everywhere here. The slightly stronger readings are in places where there were larger breaches—Darlig Ulv Stranden is where we said goodbye, and Canary Wharf was the site of the original breach between the two universes.”

“What about the cemetery?”

Rose’s expression became shuttered again, and her voice was quieter when she continued. “Void stuff clings to any object it touches, and has an extremely long half life. My mum, this universe’s version of my dad, Mickey, and Jake all passed through the Void during the battle at Canary Wharf. My sister also absorbed trace amounts while Mum was pregnant with her.”

The Doctor watched as Rose slowly crossed over to her desk, her eyes down as she ran her fingers over the coat she had draped on her chair. “That cemetery is where they’re all buried. I keep telling myself I’m going to visit more often, but…” she trailed off with a half-hearted shrug, not wanting to continue.

In that moment, the Doctor saw what Rose had had to go through; giving up everything she wanted, being forced to watch everyone she loved wither away, having to hide in plain sight lest someone figure out what she had become. He watched her pick up her coat and shrug it on, draping her scarf over her neck, and saw the movement for what it was—the donning of armor, emotional if not literal. It was a gesture he performed often enough himself.

When she had finished putting on her coat, she had returned to her previous tone of voice, although the Doctor had to wonder who she was attempting to fool. “The concentration on the Plass could be one of two things. Either the breach the TARDIS just came through has closed and the Void stuff we’re detecting is just what’s clinging to the old girl’s skin, in which case we’re fairly well screwed when it comes to getting you back where you need to be, Doctor, or…”

The Doctor’s eyes widened as he finished her thought. “Or the TARDIS is sitting in the breach, plugging the hole.”

At that moment, the entire Hub shook violently, sending shelving and equipment crashing to the floor, along with most of the Hub’s occupants. The Doctor and Rose remained standing, their stances both shifting to accommodate the movement with practiced ease.
Rose dived towards the Doctor, grabbing his hand and running towards a door he hadn’t been through yet. He followed, listening to the angry shouts of the downed Torchwood agents behind them. “Where are we going?”

“Secondary entrance,” Rose huffed as she led him around a corner. “The tremors have likely knocked the lifts out of service, and if my hunch is right, we need to get back to the TARDIS now!”

The Doctor bit his tongue, resisting the urge to question her as he heard the sounds of pursuit behind them. Rose crashed through a door and started sprinting up a stairwell, with the Doctor hard at her heels. On the fourth turning, he heard the door open below them, and Bryce’s voice yelling, “Halt!”

The order to stop only seemed to spur Rose on, though, and the Doctor heard her laugh breathlessly ahead of him as she picked up speed. As she burst through the final door into daylight, she turned to face him wearing a brilliant, heartfelt smile. “Just like old times!”

The jubilant expression fell from her face, though, when confronted with the scene playing out on the Plass. The smoking wreckage of a large cargo trailer-truck, its cab bearing the Torchwood logo, lay on its side near the entrance to the alleyway they stood in. Half a dozen people in varying degrees of business dress (possibly agents, possibly innocent bystanders, impossible to tell without searching through their pockets) had been thrown across the ground like matchsticks, limbs and necks twisted at angles that made it unlikely they were merely unconscious from the blast. More people were running away from the scene, panicked and crying.

The TARDIS had been blown across the Plass, although she remained upright. There were deep gouges and scars in the paving where she had skidded across the ground. In the spot where the TARDIS had stood, a brightly glowing fissure in reality wavered and shone. With another crack and tremor, it widened, the breach’s boundary coming to rest on the ground as it expanded wide enough to fit five men through, shoulder to shoulder.

The Doctor put his hands up automatically in a posture of surrender as he heard the shouts of Bryce and the other agents behind him. Glancing over at Rose, he saw that her face had paled in the first stages of shock, her eyes glued to the growing fissure in reality ahead of them. She did not react to the men behind them. He looked over his shoulder, and down the barrel of Bryce’s pistol.

“When I tell you to stop, you bloody stop!” Bryce's breathing was ragged. His grip on the pistol was shaking, and slackened completely when he saw the devastation out of the alley mouth. The firearm dropped to the ground with a clatter.

The Doctor addressed Bryce with a growl. “Did you order them to try and move the TARDIS?” At Bryce's nod, the Doctor lost his temper. “You idiot! The TARDIS was the only thing holding that breach stable!”

Bryce puffed up his chest, attempting to defend his actions. “Your box needed to be taken in for study! You don't expect me to leave an alien artifact like that out in the open, do you?”

“People DIED to serve your misguided hatred of anything different!” The Doctor roared. “You can't honestly tell me that their deaths are justified!”

A terrible screeching sound, metal on metal, interrupted the Doctor's tirade. The clanging of hundreds of metal boots echoed from the breach, along with wheezing artificial voices. The Doctor turned his head to look at the breach again, and he felt the bottom drop out of his stomach, a heavy sense of dread pooling in his gut. Shadowy figures appeared in the ever-widening tear, finally emerging into reality. Cybermen poured out of the breach in file, weapons poised as they chanted, “DELETE!” in terrible unity. Daleks flew from the breach above them, the cry of, “EXTERMINATE!” echoing through the sky. Both sides began locking on to anything that moved, fire from their weapons sizzling the air to strike at each other, with the humans who hadn't been quick enough to leave the Plass caught in the crossfire. Screams filled the air, along with the scent of scorched flesh and seared iron.

"Congratulations, Bryce," Rose said, her voice oddly devoid of emotion in spite of the tear that had escaped to roll down her face. "You just restarted the Cyberwar."
Title: 18 Seconds to Make Old Things New Again - Chapter 8: Cause and Effect
Fandom: Doctor Who
Character/Pairing: Nine/Rose, OC
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Swearing, implied violence
Disclaimer: I own nothing, and I make no money from this.
Spoilers: TPoTW and a dash of Doomsday
Summary:He'd just left Rose Tyler behind in an alley. So what was she doing nearly a hundred years in her relative future? And what's with all the Zeppelins?

AU, missing scene from Rose and post-DD. Nine/Rose fluffy bits.

I'm not dead! I must have re-written this chapter 4 or 5 times... but I feel the massive delay was worth it. I wasn't gonna fob off something half-assed on you people, and I'm finally happy with how it turned out.
© 2007 - 2024 amberwind
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Eozspike's avatar
When are you going to get the next chapter up? I... need... to... know... what... happens!