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Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5
Chapter 6. Gifting Memory
Thirty minutes later, Jack was still distressingly sober. The Doctor, on the other hand, was feeling the effects of three glasses of nectar. He was currently eying up the remnants of the pastry Rose had ordered.
‘You finished with that, Rose?’ he asked hopefully. Rose nodded. Before her head had stilled the Doctor had pounced, greedily wolfing down the gooey pastry and licking the sticky syrup from each of his digits in turn with a long, wet tongue.
‘You’re disgusting, Doc,’ Jack commented.
His gazed locked with the Doctor’s for a moment as each silently acknowledged that it would normally have been Rose who called him on his appalling table manners. Rose remained oblivious, fingers lacing through her napkin heedlessly, staring without focus at some indeterminate point in the middle distance. Both men sighed. Jack nudged the Doctor beneath the table with his foot. Taking the hint, the Doctor rummaged in his pocket and brought forth a brightly wrapped box.
‘Uh, Rose?’ he muttered, pulling slightly at his collar with his free hand. Jack cast a long-suffering glance towards the heavens.
‘Rosie!’ He prodded her in the ribs, ‘Doc wants ya!’ Never had a truer word been spoken.
Rose started and turned to the Doctor. Looking for all the world like a geeky teenager the Doctor shoved the box across the table towards his companion.
‘I got you something,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s a present,’ he added, redundantly.
Rose’s subdued expression brightened. ‘Really? Oh, what is it?’
The Doctor smiled broadly. ‘Open it and find out,’ he replied. Jack smirked as the Doctor preened, delighted that his gesture had elicited the response coming to the planet itself had so monumentally failed to achieve.
Rose hurriedly ripped the coloured paper asunder, revealing a small black cube. Its surface was iridescent, like oil on water. She turned it tentatively in her hands, looking at each side in turn. It was entirely featureless. Biting her lip she looked quizzically at the Doctor.
‘What is it, exactly?’ she asked.
The Doctor bounced in his seat excitedly, grabbing the cube from her little fingers. ‘Brilliant, this is. It’s a memory cube. Works on telepathic energy. You think a memory to it and it stores it for future access.’ He looked at her, his brown eyes strangely vulnerable and Jack could have sworn the Doctor was blushing as the Time Lord continued, ‘I’ve put one of my memories on there for you already, to get you started. The rest of it is yours to fill.’
Rose was silent as she took back the cube. Her head was bowed slightly as she studied it, her hair falling forward to obscure her face.
‘It’s dual purpose,’ the Doctor went on smugly, ‘It’s a present and a helpful tool for exercising your telepathy.’
Still Rose said nothing. The Doctor frowned. ‘Rose?’ Finally she looked up. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
‘Those are happy tears, right?’ The Doctor asked with alarm.
Rose sniffed and managed a watery smile, ‘It’s a lovely gift, thank you, Doctor.’
The Doctor subsided into his chair with relief and began to regale Rose with the fascinating inner workings of the cube’s telepathic circuitry and the precise aspects of her new ability it would help her practice, apparently entirely convinced by her response. Jack, however, looked at Rose sceptically.
Rose held the Doctor’s hand as they headed back to the TARDIS and Jack did not miss the resultant extra spring in the Time Lord’s step. He also did not miss that Rose relinquished the hold as soon as they were on board and absented herself from their company immediately. As the Doctor disappeared beneath a grill in the console room to tend to some repairs, content that whatever had been the matter with Rose had been cured by his wonderfully clever little gift, Jack headed after the blonde with a nagging suspicion that, if anything, things had just gotten a whole lot worse.
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Rose placed the Doctor’s gift on her bedside table. It looked so innocuous yet it seemed to dominate the room. Memories. The one thing, she was coming to realise, that she had been so carefully avoiding. Now, that had been what she had been focused on ever since she’d made it back to the Doctor. Not the future, not the past, but the here and now. The future scared her but, she acknowledged, the past terrified her. The past was loss.
She wondered, briefly, if finally she was coming to understand a fragment of what the Doctor experienced. She’d lost her roots, her home. She’d told the Doctor that the TARDIS was home, but that had been easy to say when her home for nineteen years was still there, still within reach. She’d said she couldn’t imagine life without the Doctor, and that was true, but she had never actually imagined life without her mum and what that might mean. Now she was living it and it was far far harder than she could ever have conceived. There was no superphone, no route back.
This was so very very different from before. She’d left home when the Doctor had taken her hand and told her to run, but she had never lost home completely. Even on Kroptor there had been the promise of escape. She felt herself begin to shatter, the wall she had not even been aware of building around her emotions crumbling in the face of a small black cube and all it represented.
‘Rose?’
She hurled herself at the sound, flinging herself into Jack’s arms and letting loose a wail that sounded eerily like a howl.
Jack held her as she unravelled. Months of pent up emotion, unspent tears, repressed grief, erupted as she sobbed, uncontrollably, against his chest. Lifting her, he moved to her bed and sat down, holding her in his lap, rocking her tenderly in his arms. After a while he found himself humming her a lullaby vaguely recalled from childhood until her sobs diminished to hiccupping sighs and, exhausted, she fell to sleep cradled against his chest.
‘Oh, Rosie,’ he sighed, as he gently laid her on her bed, removing her shoes and tucking a blanket around her small form, ‘Why won’t you tell us what’s wrong?’ Pressing a chaste kiss to her forehead he retreated from the room.
Chapter 7
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Excellent start.
‘Rosie!’ He prodded her in the ribs, ‘Doc wants ya!’ Never had a truer word been spoken.
made of win
Oh, Rosie,’ he sighed...‘Why won’t you tell us what’s wrong?’ Pressing a chaste kiss to her forehead he retreated from the room.
Aww, yes why wont she? Not talking isn't making things any better.
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