Sunny is not asking the question (number11) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-11-07 19:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | doctor, door: doctor who, rose tyler |
Who: The Doctor "John" & Rose Tyler
What: Rose Tyler meets someone in front of a familiar box.
Where: The Doctor's Door, Earth, London Circa 2012, Powell Estates
When: Just then.
Warnings/Rating: None!
The Doctor woke up in the TARDIS. This wasn’t a surprise, because he didn’t sleep unless he was in the TARDIS, and the familiar bronze gleam took over his eyes as he brought them open and sat up against the dangling, twisted cords under the circular console. He blinked heavily twice, then glanced down. “Legs.” He lifted a hand to his neck, touched four fingers to his collar. “Tie.” Then he spread five fingers out, eying the length of them to see which one of him that he was (eleven, that was a good one), and then setting the pad of each finger across the side of his face, index finger at his temple and the rest fanning across his cheek. “...And human girl still stuck in there. Oh dear.” He sighed deeply and dropped his hand so quickly that he cut off the energy too soon and his knuckles bounced off the polished floor.
He sat there a moment, languishing in the situation, thinking about the bleakness of it all. A second later he popped up, catching his heels under him and spreading out until he was upright with childish enthusiasm. (He narrowly missed dashing his brains out on the console.) “No help for it now!” he announced to the empty room. “Do what you can when you can, eh, Sunny my dear?” There was, obviously, no audible answer, but the Doctor didn’t care. There was certainly time to look at the screens and get one of those boring, absolute readings that told him just where he was and when, but WHY. Surprises! That was what he needed.
The Doctor burst through the front door so hard that the blue wood banged to echo his entrance onto this new territory, this unclaimed land of enchantment that would soon glory in his arrival!
The Doctor stopped. He staggered a step out of the TARDIS and stared out at the landscape, not even hearing it when the TARDIS door clicked gently behind him. “No,” he said, staring around. “No, I most definitely don’t want to be here. No!” he finished, raising a contorted little fist to the sky and attempting to whirl around and return to whence he came before anyone saw him, blathering all the while. “Definitely don’t want to be here, bad memories and such, can’t have that when you’re getting over a death. I need crisis situations, exploding worlds, perhaps a cuppa with a world leader so I can be cheeky when there are people about to hear me.” The rant tapered off as the Doctor came up so close to the TARDIS door that he could smell the paint. He let his head drop heavy on the column of his spine, and rested it on the unyielding wood. There was a gentle thud. His voice softened. “Why did you bring me here?”
Well, the Void looked an awful lot like London, Rose Tyler realized immediately. Specifically her London. The proper London. No blimps or animated adverts with her father’s face on it. No, this was proper London, on the proper Earth, and yet it was still different. Wasn’t it? It couldn’t be her London. The last thing she remembered was the lever slipping from her grip, finger by bloody finger, and the look of horror on the Doctor’s face. The look of fear on his face still burned underneath her eyelids and haunted her every breath as she stood in the center of Powell Estates.
No, this couldn’t be home, even if the estate looked the same. Even if those same kids she saw growing up still played around her in circles. The Doctor wasn’t here. And, he was never going to be here again. He was stuck in one dimension, and she was...well, wherever. Nothingness, which didn’t quite seem like nothingness. Maybe it was her mind playing tricks on her, just like having a girl in her head was, too. Or maybe it was all just part of being in the Void. Forcing to live life through someone else’s eyes, and when not, forcing to live memories. Memories and fictional lives. That was what she was bound to for the rest of time. Not traveling, not the TARDIS, not the Doctor. Just she and some silly girl.
A familiar noise jolted her out of her reverie, and she looked around the center of the estate wildly. No, it couldn’t be. It was just another trick of the mind. But...
She broke out into a run as the choked out sound continued to bounce off the graffitied walls and concrete below her feet. She knew it couldn’t be true, but she kept going anyway. If he taught her anything, it was to never give up hope. But, as she came to a skidding halt in front of the blue police box that wasn’t quite right, Rose felt her stomach plummet. She stood, and she stared, speechless for once (but with half a mind to shove the man in front of her out of the way) because the man leaning against the door of the TARDIS certainly wasn’t the Doctor. Too young, too pale, too much unlike her Doctor.
“Hello?” she said finally, still a few feet between the two and with a question at the end of the word. Rose had no idea what to do with the man in front of her, but she knew she had to decide something and quick. Perhaps lure him away from the TARDIS so she could use the key that still hung around her neck to get inside. Even if the Doctor wasn’t around, she couldn’t let his machine just stay there and collect dust. Surely, she could use it to find a way to get back to him.
The Doctor’s spine stiffened. The tweed jacket bunched between his narrow shoulderblades, and as he rose to his full height (accented by at least an inch of very fluffy brown hair) he seemed to become even thinner and more awkward with every stretching limb. Against the TARDIS, the Doctor’s eyes widened in recognition of the sound, and he stood there for a very long five seconds, head down against the taste of the Vortex hovering in the air molecules just on the surface of the wood. Abruptly, he flipped around back to front, shoulders pressed up firmly against the phone box as if he was facing a snarling tiger.
He examined the face of Rose Tyler as it stared at him in obvious confusion. He stared back, small eyes in broad, generous planes of a face that was all childish humor and stubborn chin. His lower lip was ajar, and his expression was one of nervous uncertainty. He twiddled both fingers together in front of his chest, heels together and trousers much too short. There was much of the gawky child about him. “Hello,” he said, flashing her a false smile that was gone almost as soon as it came. Every movement was fast and unpredictable, like flashes of light. He twitched hard and brought his right arm up next to his face, stealing a glance at a watch face hanging on the inside of his right wrist before he yanked it back in to resume the twiddling fingers.
Rose looked exactly as she did at Canary Wharf, in her bright blue jumper and short blond hair and with unyielding faith in her 900 year old alien. Her face was one of exaggerations, with eyes too big and lips too full and hair too blond, just like the Doctor seemed to be when people first met him. A bundle of exaggerations and slight cliches and absolute insanity. She knew they were the perfect duo together, and her heart beat only for him now. Her mum would be happy in the other dimension with Pete Tyler, and so would Mickey, and she was meant to spend the rest of her years traveling all of time and space.
She scrutinized the man, with his too short trousers, tweed jacket, and bowtie, and she felt an inexplicable ache in her heart for the alien left on the other side of the Void with his long coat and messy brown (not ginger) hair. “I know,” she said so suddenly that she almost surprised herself, “that this is all a figment of my imagination, or that this just a side effect of being sucked into the Void.” Her voice still had that improper London pop in her voice, and she looked braver than she felt at the moment, but she still stood her ground. Arms on her hips and hazel eyes narrowed ever so slightly.
He shuffled uncomfortably in his ankle boots, a chaos of overgrown boy crammed into Oxford librarian tweed. When he moved his weight seemed to prefer his heels to his toes, and his long fingers were chapped and abused. He twisted his fingers together, knuckles red against the white skin, and pressed his lips down for a moment before starting to speak, and then continuing. He had a soft, somewhat creaky voice that gained strength as it went. “N--no. No. No, no, this is definitely London. Absolutely. Without a doubt. Definitely.” He chuckled gently to himself, and then gave her a furtive look to see if she chuckled too (of course she didn’t, and then he immediately sobered). “Unless you think of London as a great Void which, of course, it’s not, as it’s full of things... Things. People.” An awkward flick of tongue over his lips. “Very small dogs. Birds. Boats...”
He was taking in her appearance as he spoke. The Doctor’s memory was depthless, and his only problem was accessing it when he was distracted or bored. Rose Tyler’s appearance was a natural distraction, and she wore a great many jumpers in her time with him. He thought he remembered this one very well, however, and all that remained was to be certain she was herself. Without realizing it he came forward off his heels and leaned over his toes, moving closer and closer to her as if he was staring into her pores. He took a sudden loud sniff of air about an inch from her face. Without realizing it his listing had gone on, getting wilder and wilder in the intervening time. “...Lorries. Cider. Fountains. Funny bits of rock...”
Rose knew something was off about this man, whoever he was, with his braces and mop of long brown hair. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, of course, having met quite a number of characters during her times in the TARDIS. The Face of Boe, Daleks, Slitheen, Sycorax, and countless others, but spotting an alien that looked like a proper alien was one thing. Realizing a Time Lord was amongst the masses, or even right in front of you, was quite another. While he babbled, however, her features softened to preach her confusion again until he stepped closer and closer into her personal space.
“Oy!” she shouted, too distracted for a moment by his rambling list to realize that he was actually sniffing her air. Rose stepped back, shooting the stranger a bewildered look, and raising her hands in defense. “That would be something you’d say, innit? Convince me that this isn’t all made up in my head, or that we aren’t stuck in between dimensions. Which, sorry to say, we are.” She wished she still had those stupid glasses to see an explosion of Void stuff over everything and prove to him (and herself) that this wasn’t London at all.
It was her. He could smell her age and her soul in the air, and only Rose Tyler, only his Rose Tyler, could ever have that TARDIS taste of the Vortex still lingering around a few intensely personal molecules. Bad Wolf. Oh Rose.
But her existence was confusion, and he was still adding up all the numbers and trying to calculate the impossibility of it all. He twitched a little when she shouted at him, recoiling only slightly and resuming his looming lean immediately after. His lean tipped into movement, erratic movement, and he took a quick step to her elbow, sliding his head right, left, up, down, in abrupt movements to take her in from all angles. “Between dimensions, you say? There’s more than one dimension, is there. That’s impossible, you know. There can’t be that many, except of course the four...” He moved around her, sliding behind her back so close that his shoulder brushed hers as he moved around again. With fingers light as a pixies’ he stole a strand of hair that coiled loose in the fabric and wrapped the thread of gold into his fingers. By the time he presented himself to her again both of his hands were high in his jacket pockets and he was observing her from over his considerable chin.
At least she still had her big mouth, and at least it could still scare the daylights out of some bloke. Good. Rose could at least defend herself in her imaginary, but not so imaginary world. And, she was convinced it was imaginary, despite her psyche’s attempts to sway her otherwise. Yes, the air smelled of the stale city smog of London, and the noises of city life rang clear in her ears, but how could it be real? She had let go of the lever, she had seen the horror on the Doctor’s face. Her big eyes followed the stranger as he approached again, and his shoulder brushed against hers felt so real. Maybe he had been wrong about what the Void entailed. Rose worried her lip and reached up to rub her earlobe nervously as they fell into another staredown. “Who are you?” she asked, face bold but voice full of trepidation. “If you’re trying to convince me you’re real, who are you then?”
And she stepped closer then, but not to the man. No, to the machine under the guise of blue. Her second home, her real home. A hand reached out to touch the wood, which looked so much newer now than when she had last scene it just a few hours prior in Torchwood. How was that possible? She wouldn’t imagine the TARDIS as newer, and her mind couldn’t project things she didn’t know already, right? Her fingers continued to rub up and down the wood even while she eyed the man with narrowed eyes.
He opened his mouth and then closed it; twice. He had a soft mouth, sensitive and easy, but he kept worrying at it with his teeth; and his eyes, which had a certain gentle hazel warmth, as if they should be twinkling, kept darting from side to side. “I’m... I’m...” It was hard to tell her, he couldn’t bear to tell her, he didn’t want to tell her. He put it off. “I’m... John.” The hard gold thread of her hair, human, from the touch of it; he could even tell her age and health as he rubbed it in his fingers, was hard to release, and it tangled for a moment, delaying the reappearance of his hands from his pockets.
He made an abrupt dive for her as she stroked the surface of the TARDIS. He shoved in between her and it, arms spread protectively to either side. “Don’t do that! Don’t want to do that.” His eyes widened. “It’s dangerous. Can’t have you going in there.” He gulped. “You know that it... doesn’t belong here. Just appeared. Police Box. Mad. Doesn’t belong. Nobody in there.” He dropped his arms without warning as if only just realizing she’d said something deathly insulting. “And not real! What makes you think I’m not real!”
“John,” Rose Tyler repeated after him in disbelief. Her dark eyebrows, such a stark contrast to her bleach-blond hair, raised high up to emphasize her skepticism over all of it. “Of course your name is John.” Easiest name to recall, wasn’t it, and clearly one of the most popular. Anyone could be a John. A 900 year old alien, a figment of her warped mind. She was willing to bet, if asked for his last name, he’d say Smith. Ha. She waved his hand away from her hair, but too late, and she cataloged that in her mind as another one of those weird things fabricated in her head.
She jumped back as if he were on fire when he pushed between she and the TARDIS. “No, it doesn’t belong here,” Rose said forcefully, trying to wiggle her way around the weird bloke and to the door. The key around her neck was clearly visible and easily identified by someone else who owned it. “You wanna know why you aren’t real? Because I fell into bloody nothingness! I let go of that lever at Canary Wharf, and next thing I know I was here!” Though the angry young girl might not seem like the same Rose at first, it all boiled down to that same fierce faith and dedication she had for her Doctor. The endless fight bubbling within her because he awoke it within her.
He was silent after this outburst. It was strange to watch him watching her, because he simply wasn’t the kind of man that stood and said nothing. He was not quiet, even when he was not speaking, and under the bands of elastic and the stripes of his ludicrous shirt, his chest heaved in his thin form and there was too much in his eyes for him to be still. His gaze rolled to the side and then above her head after only a few moments of this, unable to stare into the star’s fire of her anger for too long, and his eyes watered from the glare. In the end he stared at his toes.
He made a decision. It was a foolish, mad decision, and she might hate him later, but the Doctor, oh the Doctor, he was always in the now. He stepped forward and curled an arm around her shoulders without so much of a ‘by your leave.’ “Alright. The Void. You are in the Void. This is it. Not empty, but so full of empty that your mind, your head--” he tapped his temple so hard his hair trembled, “--it fills it on up. So here we are. Your home, yes? Your home. And... and home.” He reached out with his other hand and patted the blue paint. “And then you’ve got me.” He smiled, lips thin and mouth very wide. His eyes glowed down at her. “Guide to the Void. John.” He relished the name. “So what would you like to do? It’s all yours. I can help you. Something fried. Chips? Run down to the shops?”
His twitchiness would have unnerved her had she not spent a year in the TARDIS with her Doctor who was more hyperactive puppy than Time Lord with the weight of his race’s death on his shoulders. She still eyed him warily, though, especially when his eyes rolled upward as if trying to escape her gaze. No, he wouldn’t escape it, and when he finally looked at her again, the fire hadn’t broken. She was angry, furious, livid about what happened. Separated from the love of her life and from her family, too. Lost for all time between dimensions and without a hope in the world. Worlds. Universe.
Rose didn’t shake John’s arm off of her shoulder, too lost in her own thought to be angry at him, even as he toyed with her mind. She scoffed, however, at his self-appointed title. “Void guide.” She seemed amused by the idea, and perhaps tired enough to avoid the argument. “You sound like something for the telly. Like one of those things that you can set to record your serials.” Her large lips curled into the ghost of a smile, something particularly hard given how much she dreaded the idea of this being her eternity. She reached out again and ran her hand down the bright blue paint despite his probable protests. “Home, yeah.” Her gaze faltered finally from the police box in front of her towards John, and she smiled. “Chips, yeah, okay. That will always solve problems for a little.”
His arm tightened around her shoulders. He was full of wiry strength, probably where he got all that energy, and while he didn’t twist around to pick her up in his arms the way he wanted to, he took what he could from that one-armed hug, and it had all the markings of an embrace, brief as it was. He looked at her hand as she touched the box, his box, his mad, amazing, marvelous blue box. His expression briefly quivered, as if the pain underneath it was too much for him, but he wiped it away as fast as her eyes could move.
Stepping away from her as if it didn’t matter, he rubbed his chapped hands together effusively. “Chips. Brilliant! Of course.” He turned about, nearly in full circle before stopping short and unwinding the other direction, spinning so quickly his coat tails whipped about. Get to know him this way, and it would be better for her, have a friend, at least be a friend, before she found out what he was, who he was, and... and what she had lost. “Which... way are there chips?” He asked cluelessly. “It’s your neighborhood, isn’t it? I’m just a guide here, you know, I don’t know everything, get on with it.” He ushered her a little way from the box, the way a farmer’s wife gently ushers chickens in a yard. “I am impressive, but I don’t keep track of things like chips.”
Rose shook her head, lips pursed in amusement, as she watched John trapeze around the tiny concrete jungle known as Powell Estates. The children’s laughter echoed from the other side of the estate to where they stood -- or where she stood and he spun -- and while she couldn’t forget the anger or frustration of being stuck there, she could forgo the immediate fury. He would be a bit of a distraction, at least, and she saw a little of her Doctor in him with the rushed sentences and flurry of movements. So, she had no problem with the laugh that slipped out when he pushed her away from the wonderful blue box. “Oy,” she said anyway, swatting away his hands that waved her away. She looked over her shoulder to flash him a grin, all playful and good natured Rose Tyler laced within it. “Chips should always be the priority, especially when you’re in good ol’ Londontown. C’mon, it’s this way.” She walked out of the little corner the TARDIS had landed in and turned into the main center of the estate. There were shops just down the way, and her favorite chip shop was just a hop and a skip down from where they were.
“So, all of this, it’s just created by memory?” she asked, curiosity overwhelming her doubt and irritation. “Why do you look like that then? You’re not just part of my memory, clearly.”
“Well it’s not just you in here. Look at you, Rose Tyler, time traveler. Don’t you know there’s never, ever, just you. It’s the Void. Lot of things in the...” His throat worked, and he glanced around the perfectly normal circa 2012 London. “...emptiness. Right. But this one is mostly you. Bit of me. Not that I’m real.” He glanced hesitatingly at her to make sure she knew that as they left the blue box behind. “I’m John, remember. Don’t forget. John, here to help!” He spun around in a circle again, happily, not quite able to follow just behind her even after he’d explicitly told her to lead. He bounded forward like a puppy with his very long strides and then fell back until she caught up. When they reached the door of the fish and chips shop he stared in at it with obvious distaste in his mobile features. “What, this is it?” His nose wrinkled. “Smells... greasy. And normal. So normal.” He looked at her, and a smile broke out on his broad face. “Look at you, all smiling still. Impossible.”
She rolled her eyes, something almost painful and hard and very teenager even though she wasn’t a teenager at all anymore. At twenty, she had lived more in the year and change spent traveling time and space than most people could live in twenty million lifetimes. She knew that, and she knew to always expect the unexpected in her own life at this point. She shot him a pointed look when he reassured him he wasn’t real. “Right, completely not real.” She couldn’t do anything but agree. Why would he be real? Why would any of this be real? “And absolutely here to help.” That she could argue as he bounced forward and in front of her with childlike eagerness she knew all too well. That was how she reacted over different planets and time and space. Rose, however, frowned at his reaction to the shop and glared at him through the corner of her eyes. “You’re supposed to agree with me. Or is this not my Void space, and you’re my Void guide. You’ve got somewhere else to suggest?” Rose smiled again when he glanced over at her. “Not impossible. Just like, really improbable.”
“Well yes. No. Nowhere else but here. In your Void. Jolly old London.” Yet he looked displeased with the hard plastic seats and the yellow paper and the clear windows. He certainly didn’t look like he belonged, with his twisting fingers and his bow tie. But every time he looked away from the place and into her face he smiled, and the smile seemed very real for an imaginary man. (The Doctor had been imaginary before, and he was quite good at it by now.) “We could stay here. Eat chips. But there are better places to go, aren’t there?” he asked, clearly worried that the soul-eating normality of this place would suck them both in and destroy the fun out of life itself. “In your... Void London. That we could get to. In the next...” he flicked his arm up to peer at the watch on the inside of his arm before twisting his fingers again, “twenty-three hours and thirty-eight minutes?”
Rose thought John’s displeased look mirrored one of a fussy toddler who wasn’t quite getting his way, or perhaps a wet kitten. Angry but still somehow adorable. This stranger of a man, this John, he reminded her plenty of things she knew by now she had lost for good, and she had the strange urge to be the leader and not the companion for once in a blue moon. (Not that she didn’t feel like a partner with the Doctor, of course.) “Of course there are other places. This is London, John. A world of possibilities at our fingertips.” Because this John reminded her of the Doctor she knew so well, she had no qualm reaching out to catch his fingertips, tugging him in a different direction, and because she couldn’t resist, she said with a grin, “Run.”