Chapter Text
Rose would be the first to admit that landings in the TARDIS were rarely smooth. But they didn't usually leave you sprawled on the ceiling either.
Just as she was getting her bearings, one last jolt tipped the whole room on its side. Rose slid down the previously horizontal surface, landing square on her bum on what used to be a side wall.
Fortunately, there wasn't too much sitting around loose in the control room. Unfortunately, she was ready to swear that everything that was had hit her at least once in the last few minutes.
Clinging reflexively to the ceiling at her back — and was she in for a nasty fall if the TARDIS decided to right herself after all! — she peered through the smoke set off by that last burst of sparks, trying to spot Jack and the Doctor.
"Rose!"
Well, the Doctor sounded all right at least. Then again, he'd probably been in a lot worse landings in his day, which was not something she really wanted to think about. "I'm all right, just a bit bruised. Where's Jack?" But even as she said it, the room cleared enough for her to spot the usually so-smooth ex-Time Agent wrapped in what had to be an uncomfortable full-body tangle with the coat rack. The Doctor was already moving over to give him a hand, so Rose concentrated on trying not to laugh.
She pulled herself to her feet as she watched the Doctor help Jack to his. They both looked so serious about it she couldn't help but tease. "Need a bit of practice on the landings maybe? Not that it's not a nice ceiling," she patted the surface in question affectionately, "But we seem to have fallen over here."
"This isn't like getting pissed at the local pub and ending up in a ditch one night, Rose." The Doctor said. He ignored her spluttered protest to continue the lecture, navigating awkwardly towards the console, now sticking out of the far wall. "The TARDIS navigates in four dimensions at once and automatically shifts herself to orient to the local gravity conditions. She doesn't 'fall over'. If the floor's that way," he pointed to what was now serving as a wall, "Then that's where she thinks down is." He tried to pull the view screen into a position where he could see it, and ended up muttering something rude under his breath when the motion released a small shower of metal odds and ends on his head.
Jack was making his way over to the console himself, but offered her a bit more of an elaborate explanation as he went. "Something's wrong with the basic stabilizer system, Rose, if not with the central processing." Rose caught the surprised look of grudging admiration the Doctor shot at Jack, before he returned to scowling at what controls he could reach. "And if the ship can't even manage three dimensions at the moment, the Doctor's certainly not going to be trying her in four anytime soon."
"That means no time travel, Rose," the Doctor snapped without looking up.
"I know what it means," she snapped right back. "I'm not stupid, you know!" She thought she caught a wince on his face at that. At least that's what she told herself as she pulled herself up to her feet, trying not to step on any of the light fixtures, just in case.
"And don't go running off anywhere."
She hated when he got like this, all Time-Lord superior and treating her like a child. "Where would I go?" she demanded, toes inches from the opening where she could just make out the words 'Police Public Call Box' printed in reverse. "We're lying on the front door!"
That brought no response at all, and Rose was about ready to say something she'd probably regret before Jack stepped into the uncomfortable silence. "So," he addressed the Doctor, completely serious for once, "What can I do to help?"
The Doctor eyed him. The TARDIS' newest acquisition, an admitted con artist and seducer, had only been with them a few days, and for all Rose had warmed up to him right off, the Doctor still seemed decidedly wary. Apparently realizing he didn't have much of a choice at the moment, he relented. "Well, if you could try to reach the temporal coil on your side, while I get the regulator over here—"
"Do you have it hooked to the green lever, or is it on the switch behind?" Jack asked, focused intently on his side of the console. Rose, with nothing better to do at the moment, watched the Doctor scowl to himself in a way that probably meant Jack actually knew what he was talking about.
"The lever. You'll need to turn it clockwise when I get the internal spatial dampener...." As they trailed off into ever more elaborate technobabble that meant nothing to Rose, she couldn't help admiring how well they worked together. They really were a lot alike, far more than the Doctor cared to admit. And, after a couple of turns around the control room that first night, it was clear that they could both dance as well. She hadn't missed the Doctor's possessive attitude either, for all he probably had thought he was being subtle about warning Jack off.
Come morning though, everything had been frustratingly back to normal. Jack flirted, but kept a respectful distance. And the Doctor showed no further signs of demonstrating his ability in the 'dating and dancing' arena.
"All right then. One, two—"
"Rose, hold on to something."
She was about to ask just what she was supposed to hold on to when the ship gave a sickening lurch and she found herself flat on her face on yet another stretch of wall.
A loud curse, in a language the TARDIS apparently didn't care to translate, startled her. She looked back at the console, noting the shocked look on Jack's face. Must have been quite the curse then. "I'm fine, thanks!" she offered, getting back to her feet. "And the door's back on the side now."
"Right! Good," The Doctor genuinely smiled at her for a moment, looking guilty. Then he sighed. "But she rolled the wrong way."
It didn't take much to realize what he meant. The screen he had been straining to see was now well out of either man's reach, flashing bright colors onto their new ceiling. "Well at least I can take a peek outside now." Rose picked her way over to the door.
"No!" both men called out in unison. Her reflex to let them both have it that time must have been clear on her face, because Jack quickly clarified. "There's no telling what's out there, Rose. We could be underwater or on some moon with no atmosphere."
"Oi! The TARDIS would just let us drown like that?"
"Of course not," the Doctor countered, before admitting: "Not usually. It's probably fine, Rose—"
"But you can't be sure," she finished.
"Not until I get a good look at that screen," he pointed up. "I think it's actually working now."
"So we roll the TARDIS again?"
"We didn't actually roll, Rose. The TARDIS didn't move at all, it's just her take on gravity that shifted."
She just crossed her arms across her chest and stared at him, knowing he was stalling with his lectures. Her eyes flicked over to Jack.
Jack looked to the Doctor, who shook his head. "It's too hard to reach those controls again like this, and I don't want to go messing about with things any more until I know just what's wrong."
"We might just end up on the door again anyway," Jack pointed out. The Doctor gave him a nasty look, but didn't argue. Jack smiled. "So why don't I give the lovely Rose a boost up so she can see the panel and read it off to you?"
"I can boost her just as well," the Doctor snapped back, only causing Jack's grin to inch wider.
"I'm sure you could. I'd even be more than happy to give you a boost if you'd like." The grin was definitely salacious now. "But I think you'd better have both hands free to make the repairs."
The Doctor clearly wanted to come up with a counter to that, but couldn't. "Fine," he said, moving to unfasten an access panel. Not that he was avoiding looking in their direction.
Jack smiled and held a hand out to Rose.
With a bit of struggle and far more groping than was probably strictly necessary, on both sides, Rose ended up settled on Jack's shoulders. She had thought the Doctor's posturing a bit silly, but she had never realized before what an intimate position this could be. Just to keep upright, her legs were wrapped over his shoulders, tight against his sides. She could feel the heat of his hands on her bum right through her jeans, and she was pressed tight up against the warm back of his neck....
"Not that I'm objecting, mind you," Jack said with a chuckle, startling her out of her thoughts, "But I think you'll do better standing up."
Looking up, she blushed to realize he was right. There was no way to reach the screen from where she sat, she needed another two or three feet at least. She grabbed for the first thing within reach on the console that didn't look like a control of any kind and managed to pull herself up, grateful again for her gymnastics training and ignoring the Doctor's annoyed glare.
"Fine, I've got the screen now," she said, tilting it to a slightly better angle with one hand. "And I see sand. Lots and lots of sand."
"That's it?" The Doctor stared up at her. "Try adjusting the knob on the side— no the other one."
But it made no difference. All the screen showed was sand. Miles of it swept up in dunes, looking like artsy photographs of the Sahara or something.
"That's not good, is it?" she asked anyway.
"For sightseeing, no," the Doctor agreed, his mood seeming to have perked up at getting at least one thing working again. "Sadly it's also no help in determining where we are. Do you see the blue square in the upper-right-... uh, in one of the corners?"
With her head tilted severely to the right to compensate for the screen's orientation, he walked her through a series of menus and screens, few of which made much sense to her, no matter how much the TARDIS automatically translated. She was able to read off enough symbols to convey the basic meaning though, even as she saw the Doctor wince at her choice of descriptions for some of the odder shapes. He also muttered something about getting a proper ladder in the next chance he got.
"So," she finally said, when his head remained buried in a control panel and no translation seemed to be coming. She was also trying to ignore the feel of Jack's strong fingers wrapped around her lower legs. "Future or past? What planet? And what's wrong?"
"Rose, time really is relative, you know—" the Doctor began before Jack cut him off.
"134.28apple-x4 would work out to about thirty-eight-hundred years before your time, Rose." Jack looked over to the Doctor for verification, and received a small grunt in response. "Caasi Arual isn't all that far away from Earth, though. That sun out there should be Sirius — well, both of them actually. But we're in a wide enough orbit here that humans can survive. There are a quite a few colonies out this way as I recall."
Rose found herself pondering the great stretches of sand dubiously, before realizing what he'd said. "But if it's 3800 years in the past — Earth's past," she ignored the rude noise from behind the console, "Then how can there be humans here? Nobody had space travel on Earth that long ago, did they?"
"Well, you don't think all those stories about aliens landing on Earth and kidnapping people away in the night for experiments started with your century...?" Jack trailed off at the look of horror on her face, and he let his ever-so-serious mask slide a bit.
"Oi! You're just winding me up!" Rose knocked him on the side of his head with her trainer.
"Ow! Hey, watch it!" Jack protested, shifting under her far more than seemed necessary. "No abusing your ladder!"
"Time travel, Rose." She turned to see the Doctor watching them with an unreadable expression on his face. "As soon as you lot first started working out how to do it, time became the next frontier. Place is a little crowded? Don't like your neighbors? Just get up enough like-minded people and move back to a time and place where you can have a whole world to yourself." He turned back to the handful of wires he was messing with. "Of course you brought all your problems along with you, plus making a right mess of time in the process. Messing with ecosystems thousands of years before they'd fully developed, or just still being around when the local species decided to try evolving themselves." His attention on the wires, he was blindly gesturing with the sonic screwdriver in one hand as he got going. "Took a right lot of work to sort out, that did. And then there were the endless ethical debates. But we got it all sorted out in the end...."
Rose looked over as his sudden silence fell like a lead weight. The Doctor was staring straight ahead, but he wasn't focused on the panel in front of him anymore. His face could have been carved from stone. Neither she nor Jack moved.
After a moment, he took a deep breath and carried on, his voice a little less casual, a little less steady. "Well that's what we did, you see. Time Lords. And eventually there were only a few out-of-the-way places like Caasi Arual, where there was no evidence the newcomers were disturbing anything that was going to happen anyway."
He stepped back from the console then. "Like I said, Rose, time is relative. This planet was colonized 3800 years before you were born by people from a good thousand years in your own future." He smiled at her then. "Now I need you to help me run some diagnostics before poor Captain Jack there collapses under your weight."
Dismissing the automatic protests from both of them, he walked her through what seemed like an endless number of screens. She dutifully relayed back colors and shapes and the general direction of a whole lot of squiggly lines, while the Doctor moved from section to section of the under-floor-that-was-now-wall in response.
Finally his face took on a distinctly worried look and he passed her the screwdriver so that she could access a portion of the flooring he couldn't reach himself. She quickly found the crystal he wanted, but her description of it brought a dark look to his face.
"Red? Are you sure?"
"Red," she confirmed pointing the light from the screwdriver directly at it. "Cardinal, crimson, scarlet, garnet, ruby." If nothing else, working in a clothing shop you learned endless names for the same colours. She frowned, shifting the light again. "Dark red. Wine, maybe. Burgundy, maroon. You could even call it a really dark mauve if you squint—" She broke off then, looking down at the Doctor. "That's bad isn't it?"
He sighed. "Unless one of the words you come up with is 'clear', or even 'yellowish', it's definitely bad."
"Do you want me to try to get it?" She wasn't sure it she could work it free, but she was willing to try.
The Doctor shook his head. "No, I know what it is." He held out his hand. "Drop me the screwdriver and get down from there then."
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Jack and the Doctor argued in low tones over possible ways to fix the ship. When she heard "Well, it doesn't look like we have a choice, unless this whole time you've been hiding a bloody huge diamond up your arse!", Rose decided to take a look outside. Opening the lower door resulted in a kind of ramp she could crawl over, while the upper half swung over her like a cat flap. It wasn't the most dignified exit she'd ever made, but it worked, and within moments she was standing on sand. Looking at sand. Squinting her eyes against the glare and wiping sand out of the corners of her mouth when the wind kicked up a bit. It wasn't much, but at least it was different from the TARDIS, which for the first time had actually started to feel a bit closed in.
Of course, the sun was going to be turning her cardinal, scarlet, and crimson pretty soon, so she needed a bit of shade. Since the sun was right in her face, the far side of the TARDIS — which certainly looked like it was tipped over on its side to her — should do. Moving through deep, loose sand took more concentration and looking at your feet then she had realized. So it was only as she flopped down in the tiny patch of shade, leaned back against the familiar painted wood, and looked up that she saw it.
Within moments she was crawling back inside the cat flap again. "It's not sand!" she announced, only then realizing how out of breath she was and feeling the dryness in her throat. It took a second for her eyes to adjust to the light level so she could see the Doctor and Jack looking at her in disbelief, long enough for her to realize what she'd said. "It's not all sand. Come look!"
They followed her out, faces lighting up just like hers when they looked past the TARDIS towards patchy scrub, building to actual trees and plants as the landscape ran up against a large rocky mountain.
"Her sensors were stuck in just the one direction," the Doctor said, patting his listing ship affectionately. "Fantastic!"
Rose shaded her eyes with her hands. "Is it?" It certainly wasn't as bleak as it had looked before, but she wasn't sure she'd go that far. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jack looking slightly dubious himself.
"Yes, it is. It's bloody marvelous!" That face-splitting grin was definitely infectious, even if she didn't know why it was on his face. "I thought we were stranded somewhere out in the middle of the Northern Desert. Covers more then three-quarters of the largest continent on Caasi Arual. Nothing but sand for thousands on thousands of miles, but here we are, right at the edge!" He pointed ahead. "Because of that raging great mountain there, all the traders and travelers have to pass through this little strip right here on their way to the sea. And if we can get to the sea—"
"—we can find someone with a workable crystal!" Jack finished for him.
To Rose's surprise, the Doctor just responded with an arm over Jack's shoulder, the grin never dimming. In fact it practically sparkled when he turned Jack slightly to the left and stretched out his arm. "And I believe we have a caravan approaching in the distance."
Having slung his arm around the Doctor in return, Jack squeezed. Rose frowned and tried to tell herself that that little stab she felt wasn't jealousy. After all, the Doctor would hug anyone, right? And Jack himself probably took that policy even more to heart. It wasn't even a proper hug or anything, just two mates celebrating.
Besides, she couldn't figure out who she was actually jealous of.
She wanted the Doctor, had almost from the start. And there'd been a connection, a definite one. He hadn't made any move, but then neither had she — too worried about not only mucking up whatever it was that they had, but also her ticket to see the universe. He'd seemed taken with Jabe the tree, but that obviously hadn't had a chance to go anywhere. She'd had hope when, even after Mickey had helped save the world, the Doctor still refused to let him on board. She wouldn't mind him being a little jealous. But then he'd seemed to have no problem with helping her look so impressive showing Adam around Satellite Five.
Then again, Adam wasn't really all that worth impressing, and the Doctor had probably sussed that out long before she had. Which would have put paid to any chance she had of making him jealous there. But for all that, she'd started to figure — for all the obvious pull between them — that the Doctor's fascination with humans sadly just didn't extend to shagging them.
And then Jack had shown up. Champagne and dancing on an invisible spaceship in the middle of the Blitz with a gorgeous bloke. Now who could resist that? He'd been on the pull, of course — she'd certainly had enough blokes try to get into her knickers to see that right off. But she hadn't exactly been adverse to the idea, only distracted when the subject had changed to the con he was trying to sell.
And the Doctor had not been pleased at all. For all his cock-up with the nanogenes had been a disaster, Jack clearly hadn't meant it that way. And he'd been willing to die to repair the damage he'd done. As if the Doctor's own plan with the Gelth hadn't gone all pear-shaped itself, just to start with. Not to mention the whole mess with her father—
But the Doctor hadn't been happy with Jack making moves on her at all. It figured: She finally finds a bloke who might really be worth the effort, and the Doctor chooses that moment to go all territorial with her. There'd been no mistaking his jealousy when he'd practically pulled her out of Jack's arms rather than let them dance.
Or had it been? By morning he was happily back to being just mates again. Did he see her as some kid, as if Jack were too smooth and sophisticated for her? Or—
Ever since he'd laughed at her surprise and explained Jack's 'flexible' approach to 'dancing', the thought had been hiding in the back of her mind. Now it had popped right to the front. Maybe it wasn't that the Doctor didn't fancy humans, just that he didn't fancy girls? She watched the Doctor pat Jack on the back before heading back around to the door. They'd apparently come to an understanding sometime after she'd fallen into bed, completely knackered, that night. Should she be jealous? After all, she'd seen many things weirder in the past few months than a queer Time Lord.
Now the thought wouldn't go away as she followed behind them. They certainly hadn't done anything obvious, except in the way Jack had happily flirted with them both. It might make some of the Doctor's sudden mood swings make sense....
Meanwhile it was going to drive her barking mad.
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It took more climbing than was usually necessary, but they managed to get to the wardrobe without incident. Having a better idea of what he was looking for, the Doctor turned up an outfit for Jack — breezy loose white trousers and a matching tunic, very Lawrence of Arabia — and even, to her amazement, a white jumper for himself.
When he turned around to find her looking at him expectantly, he had what she privately referred to as his "I'm in charge here!" face on, and Rose knew she wasn't going to like what he said next.
"Rose, you stay in the TARDIS. There's plenty of food, flicks to watch. Everything should still function all right. We'll be back before you know it, and you'll be perfectly safe here."
She stared at him as if he'd suddenly grown an extra head. "Oi!" She was gratified to see him wince at her tone. "Since when do I get left behind because things aren't perfectly safe?"
"That's not what I meant, Rose—"
"What about Jack? You don't seem to have any trouble taking your new best mate out with you when there's danger!" That hadn't come out quite the way she meant it, and if that was a smirk on Jack's face she was going to slap it right off!
"As I remember," Jack broke in, obviously trying to head off an all-out fight, "The attitude towards women around here tends to be the 'sit down and shut up' philosophy."
Rose glared at him for a moment. "So dress me up like a bloke."
Now it was Jack's turn to look disbelieving. "In this get up?" he asked, waving the flimsy fabric of his outfit. "No one would ever buy it, Rose."
That was sort of flattering, actually. And, much as she hated to admit it, he was probably right. But if—
"And the penalty for a woman trying to pass as a man around here?" The Doctor's voice was deadly serious. "She'd be put to death on the spot."
Rose felt herself blanch a bit at that. O.K., no cross-dressing then. "So why can't I go as a woman? Or don't they have women here?" she demanded, refusing to back down.
"Because you'll have to behave like a proper submissive little bint and you won't have any fun."
He was probably right, she'd be better off lounging about in the TARDIS until they returned. But she wasn't going to let the Doctor just swan off without her, especially not with 'flexible' Jack Harkness in tow.
"I mean it, Rose. They could beat you or worse if you misbehave, and outnumbered like that, there might be sod all Jack or I could do about it."
He really looked worried for her safety, which gave her a lovely warm feeling inside, and she almost gave in. But no. "I'll behave, I promise." She caught his eyes long enough to make it clear she was serious. "Besides, just because I can't do anything on this planet doesn't mean I can't at least get a look at it!"
When the Doctor finally relented and pulled out what seemed like miles of dingy brown cloth from the wardrobe, she realized she might not even be able to do that.
"You are not serious!"
The Doctor just raised an eye in challenge.
She took the dress.