kalleah | Voyages of Discovery (Chapter Sixteen)

I love writing the Doctor, Rose, and Jacob together. And I know Jacob has his own fan base, as bizarre as that is ... heh.

No actual beetles were harmed in the writing of this chapter.

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"People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live...[We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."
Albert Einstein

As she and the Doctor walked through the garden, Rose heard the steady snip, snip of Jacob's pruning shears before she spotted the monk, poised on his tiptoes to remove a withered branch from a camellia. She wondered idly how, with his precise attention to the garden, a branch in that condition had ever managed to slip through, but she refrained from comment.

The Doctor left her side and held out his hand to Jacob, who gave up the shears and supervised as the taller man picked up his work. Jacob put a hand in the middle of his back and stretched with a satisfied sound.

"Thank you," he said to the Doctor, who gave him a brief nod in return, and turned to Rose. "How are you, my dear?"

"I'm good," she replied. "Still confused and all, but glad to be here."

"No further ideas about what might have happened?" Jacob cast a glance in the direction of the Doctor, who worked steadily, shears forming the branches into neat, geometric shapes.

"No," said Rose. "Far as I can tell, I just appeared out of nowhere."

"You came though an interdimensional doorway," the Doctor chimed in, continuing to trim. "Not out of nowhere. We just don't know how the doorway works or what caused it."

"Right," said Rose. "I just appeared through a mysterious interdimensional doorway that we can't explain. That's quite a bit different than 'out of nowhere.'" She stuck out her tongue at the Doctor's back, and Jacob grinned in sympathy.

"Do you have to have an explanation?" he asked.

"Well," said Rose.

"Yes," said the Doctor, at the same time. He lowered the shears and turned to face them both. "We need to get a message to Rose's family that she's all right. We also need to find out what happened so we know how to control it."

"Ah," said Jacob, rubbing his bearded chin thoughtfully. "You want to catalogue, define, and control the mystery, so it's just part of everyday life."

"Not quite everyday," the Doctor pointed out. "This is a rather extraordinary occurrence. But yes, I do want to define it. What if —" He broke off and gave Rose a cautious look. "What if it happens again, and Rose ends up back in the other universe?"

"Do you think that is likely to happen?" Jacob, as usual, was serenity itself, and patient enough to wait for an answer.

"I have no idea," said the Doctor with evident frustration. "I don't know what happened yet. It's impossible to predict the future without an adequate understanding of the past."

"Even you have limits to your powers of explanation," observed Jacob. "Could you simply accept this as a miracle?"

Rose looked at the Doctor, who made an abrupt gesture with the shears that probably qualified as quite rude in several cultures. Without saying a word, she held out her hand for the potential projectile and he passed them to her with a vaguely sulky look, then responded to Jacob.

"It's not a miracle," he stated decisively. "It's a fact. It happened. She's here."

"I don't disagree with that premise at all," answered Jacob, giving Rose a kindly smile. "And I'm quite glad of it, too."

The Doctor's hard stare softened at that statement, and he scratched one ear and stared up at the open sky. "It's not a matter of glad or not glad, of course I'm glad. It's just, well, I need to understand."

"That's what drives you," said Jacob. "It's what has always driven you. Doctor, not everything is explainable by science and logic."

"That's giving up entirely too easily. We've hardly even started to look."

Rose interjected. "What else can we look at?"

The Doctor considered her question carefully, ignoring Jacob's expectant silence. "I don't know yet, but I have some reading I want to catch up on, some things I found while —" He paused almost imperceptibly, his eyes lowering. "While I was looking for you. It might give me some more ideas."

"That's fantastic," she said, perhaps a little too cheerfully, caught in the uncomfortable position of peacemaker between her alien lover and the monk. Jacob, for his part, looked entirely too pleased with himself. "Do you want to go and get them from the TARDIS?"

"Could do," he conceded. She raised her eyebrows just slightly and gestured with her eyes in the direction of the ship. He looked blankly back at her.

"I'll wait here," she stated finally, wanting him to take the hint.

He mouthed a silent "oh" of understanding and put on a bright, optimistic face. "Right then, I'll just go and get the books." He looked to her for approval, which she gave, and reached out to squeeze her hand gently before turning and heading off back toward the TARDIS.

"I'm worried," said Rose, when she thought he had moved far enough away. "What if I do suddenly snap back to the other Earth? I don't know if he — I don't want him to go through that."

"Nor do I," agreed Jacob. "Do you really think that will happen?"

"I don't know," she said sadly. "I thought I'd never see him again and then I had this chance, this amazing chance, and I just took it. I need some time. He needs some time. I know in the end, well, I'm not going to be around forever."

Jacob beckoned for her to follow and began to walk slowly in the direction of the stone table. They walked for several paces in silence before he spoke again. "Rose, God works in mysterious ways, as they say. I believe that He has made this miracle possible for a reason. What that reason is, I cannot say, but I have faith that there is a plan, and that we are in the hands of One who knows the endgame."

"But what does that mean? Am I here for good?"

"What does 'for good' mean to you? For the rest of your life? Perhaps. For the rest of the Doctor's?" His kindly, wrinkled face relaxed into quiet sadness. "He will endure. You know he will. He has a place in the pattern that is greater than either of us. I believe that I am here to help him find that place, as you are."

"You mean, I was meant to be his companion?"

"Companion is an excellent word. Yes, his partner and his companion. You help keep him honest, and sane, and full of compassion and empathy that he occasionally loses when he sees so much of the big picture. That is why he finds himself so often in the company of humans, I think."

They reached the stone table and Jacob retired briefly to the small outbuilding to put away the shears. Rose took a seat. He returned with a box under his arm and folded it and its contents out on top of the table.

"Draughts?" she said, surprised.

"Can I challenge you to a game?" She nodded and they began to arrange their pieces on the board, with Rose playing red, Jacob playing black. He indicated for her to go first and she carefully reviewed her options and slid a piece into place.

Jacob removed a pipe from his pocket and chewed pensively as he considered his response to her opening move. "It's good to play with someone human for a change," he said.

"You play with the Doctor?"

"He's a terrible cheat," said Jacob with a chuckle. "He says he plays with two hands tied behind his back but he always wins, unless he's intentionally throwing the game."

"That's even worse," Rose giggled.

"Exactly," said Jacob sagely, and took his turn. They played for a while without speaking further, a few pieces stacking up on each side of the board.

The clatter of plastic and metal behind them indicated the arrival of the Doctor, hopelessly burdened down with books and gadgets of all sorts. He juggled everything around and managed to spread out on the ground a small distance from the table, arranging everything in neat, concentric circles for easy access.

"He cheats," he warned Rose, putting his glasses on and opening a thick volume somewhere in the middle. Jacob's eyes crinkled and Rose stifled a laugh. The Doctor, already immersed in his reading, paid no attention to either one of them.

Rose and Jacob played through the afternoon until Jacob had to go to prayers before the evening meal. She put up the board for him and came over to where the Doctor sat on the ground, frowning in consternation alternately at a reading on some scanner and then at a book propped open on his knee.

"What have you found?" she asked, settling down next to him and rearranging some of his supplies.

"A lot of things I already knew, some that I didn't but aren't useful, and a beetle from Ernin Six," he told her, putting down the book and showing her the desiccated, perfectly flat corpse of the insect in question.

She made a face. "You ought to clean more."

"That's assuming the beetle wasn't preserved there intentionally," he chided, adjusting his glasses.

"In a book on interdimensional travel?"

"It was handy at the time," he said, "but I admit I completely forgot the beetle was there. A fascinating specimen. Look at the way the light plays off the scales and the small mandible —"

"Doctor," she said sharply, resisting the impulse to snap her fingers at him. "Focus."

"I am focusing," he retorted, wounded. "You asked me what I found. Never mind. In the end, it all amounts to the same thing." He threw up his hands in frustration. "Travel between parallel universes is quite impossible without certain criteria being met, and they can't be anymore."

She thought hard. "How did the breach between the universes happen in the first place?"

"Daleks," he said, with a shiver of coldness in his voice. "Let's just say I'm not keen on finding one to see if we can repeat what they did." She shuddered in agreement. "When they poked a hole in the universe to hide in the Void, there was, well, how I can explain it?" He gestured expansively, flinging the forgotten beetle out somewhere into the grass. "Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, right?"

"Newton," said Rose confidently.

"Yes. So imagine that all the universes are pressed up against one another, with the Void between them, like a big clump of soap bubbles. The universes are the air, and the Void is the soapy film around them, just a whole lot less pleasant." Rose nodded and he continued. "When you distort the shape of one bubble, what happens to the ones around it?"

She tried to visualize it in her mind and realized where he was going. "They're distorted, too."

"Precisely. So, when we fell through the Void into the parallel universe the first time, when Mickey was with us, that was an effect of the Void ship piercing our universe. I just didn't know that at the time. With the breach closed, those effects have been corrected. Now, the bubbles are, as you might say, back to their original shapes."

"You're sure?"

"You wound me with your doubt. Yes, I'm damned sure of it. It's like when a bone is broken. When it heals, it sets up harder and tighter than it had been. No going through that way."

"Is it like a bubble or a bone?" she asked.

He frowned and waved his hand in the air. "Both. Forgive me for mixing my metaphors. This is complicated stuff."

Rose thought about his explanation and tried to come back to what she considered to be the essential part of his research. "We just need a tiny connection, just enough to send a message through. Like what you did with the supernova."

"That's not quite as tiny as you think it is," he said quietly.

"That was dangerous?" she asked, already knowing the answer. For him, for her, for the two universes in the balance, it had been a gamble. She didn't want him to quantify what he had risked for those few, precious moments on the beach.

He shuffled forward and kissed her. Her hands came up and cupped both sides of his face as he whispered against her mouth and rubbed his nose against hers. She couldn't hear what he was saying, so she leaned to one side and directed all her attention on his words, repeated like a mantra, over and over again.

"You're here," he was saying. "You're here."

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Crowded House, "There Goes God"