Crossed Wires
by ErtheChilde

'You're trying to say that everything you do is reasonable, and everything I do is inhuman. Well, I'm afraid your judgement's at fault.'

Summary:

When the TARDIS gets caught in a barrier that forces people to rely on their mothertongue, the Doctor and Rose are left unable to communicate. After landing at the location where the barrier originates, the Doctor leaves the TARDIS intending to fix the problem - only to go missing. Rose braves the mysterious moon to find him - and ends up caught up in the movement to overthrow a xenophobic government.

Disclaimer:

This story utilizes characters, situations and premises that are copyright the BBC. No infringement on their respective copyrights is intended by the author in any way, shape or form. This fan oriented story is written solely for the author's own amusement and the entertainment of the readers. It is not for profit. Any resemblance to real organizations, institutions, products or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All fiction, plot and Original Characters with the exception of those introduced in the books and graphic novels, are the sole creation of ErtheChilde and using them without permission is considered rude, in bad-taste and will reflect seriously on your credibility as a writer. There may or may not be a curse in your future as well, so be warned. Remembered all things come in threes, good and bad. Plagiarizing is considered bad.

Warning:

Spoilers : If it existed in any form of Doctor Who canon, whether television, novelization or graphic novel, it's probably going to be mentioned in here. That includes up to and including 12th/13th/Whatever Doctor Adventures.

No Beta : I am beta-less at the mo', so any mistakes are my own. I edit as I go, though, so it shouldn't be too bad.

Canadian-Writing-British:As a Canadian, I'm not all-knowing when it comes to British idioms, sayings or slang. I write what sounds right to my ears and when it doubt, I look things up on the Internet, so I might not always get it right. If I'm way off about something, please drop me a line and I'll correct it.

AN: The first part of this fic sprung from the minor pet-peeve I have with a lot of fics which have Rose having an instant connection with the TARDIS, as though she's instantly more special than every other companion that came before her…and disregard her total shock and disbelief about the TARDIS from the first episode. I love Rose, but part of her allure is that she was completely ordinary until meeting the Doctor – and ordinary people would find a living ship a bit weird. For the TARDIS part, I think she always had a soft-spot for Rose and may have tried to communicate with her, but until Bad Wolf, Rose was probably not aware of it. Anyhow. That's my little rant.

ONE

As the best friend and companion of a time-travelling alien, Rose Tyler had been starting to believe that nothing could ever truly surprise her anymore.

She had seen alien prison systems and mind-control masks, sipped cocoa under purple skies and helped saved a room full of people from invisible aliens. Every day she experienced the amazing and the impossible, and though it was startling and unexpected most days, she was never really surprised any more.

You just sort of expected the unexpected when you lived with the Doctor.

At least, that's what she had told herself until the morning she walked in on him whispering sweet nothings to the glowing green column of the TARDIS console.

The Doctors ears, Rose found out just then, could turn a very fetching shade of pink.

He scrambled to full height from where he'd been crouched over the TARDIS console watching the Time Rotor move up and down and coaxing it with praises like "magnificent", "that's a girl" and "sexy".

'I'm not interrupting anything, am I?' she asked innocently, using all of her control not to burst into laughter as he tucked his hands under his armpits and tried to look casual.

'Just making sure one of the parts I gave her doesn't muck up the translation circuit,' he answered nonchalantly. 'It's not the exact proper part, but seeing as how I can't get those anymore…anyhow, I had to use a substitute. Wouldn't do if she were allergic to it or something.'

'Yeah, figured it was something like that,' Rose nodded. Then, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth, she prompted, 'And the "sexy" part?'

If possible, his ears turned even darker, and he grimaced at her.

'You're not supposed to be lurking about the TARDIS!' he accused, deflecting as usually happened when he was embarrassed. 'If you were to startle me in the middle of some delicate procedure, like soldering the dimensional stabilizers or…or…reversing the polarity of the neutron flow, you might end us up in some kind of pocket dimension filled with nothing but shrimp or – !'

'Keep your shirt on,' Rose interrupted (though the rather immature, still slightly boy-crazy part of her wouldn't be bothered if he didn't). 'I wasn't lurking about – I was just coming in here to say good morning.'

'There's no such thing as "morning" on the TARDIS,' he grumped. 'Or night. Time doesn't exist on the TARDIS. We could be in here for days or even months, and outside only seconds would've passed. Or centuries, depending on the mood she's in.'

'And to keep the ship in a good mood, you call her "sexy",' Rose finished for him and held out a cup of tea for him. It had become a habit of hers to bring him a cup after she had her breakfast. He'd complain about liquids and wiring, but he always accepted it.

He was too busy scowling at her this time to lecture her, but he took the cup all-the-same and heaved himself into the jumpseat.

Rose shook her head affectionately.

She was still surprised by the matter-of-fact way he spoke to and about the TARDIS, as if it was alive – in fact, he constantly insisted that it was alive and that "she" liked Rose.

'How d'you figure that?' Rose had asked a few days into their travelling.

'You've seen how big it is in here – ever gotten lost?'

'No.'

'Well, there you are. She likes you. If she didn't, you could have gone in there and not come out for another month. It's happened before.'

'Oh, now you tell me!'

Weird or not, though, it cheered her to think that the ship the Doctor loved so much seemed to like her. It made her feel welcome and gave her the sense that she could share something with him despite his alien nature.

'So she's not allergic, then?' Rose asked now, leaning on the railing.

'Doesn't look like it – trust me, if she were she'd been right quick in letting me know.'

'It's almost as if you expect her to talk back,' she teased.

'Oi! She does talk back,' he retorted defensively.

'What, with words?' Rose cocked her head to one side, a bit surprised at that. She had never heard the TARDIS talk, even if there were occasional moments when she thought the ever-present hum sounded like laughter.

'No, not with words – she's not constructed that way. Exists all across space and time, the TARDIS does. Try getting a living being as vast as that to try to concentrate all her focus on one conversation? She'd likely render an entire solar system brain dead,' he explained. 'It's more abstract – direct telepathic input to the communication centres in the brain, and then only for higher beings. Sometimes low-level telepaths are able to pick up on it, but they wouldn't be able to understand her as well as me.'

'That's so weird…'

'Why's it weird? Don't need words to communicate – what, never seen someone using sign language?'

'Yeah, but that…you know, using hands and stuff,' Rose shrugged, still unable to quite articulate to the Doctor her occasionally uneasiness when it came to telepathy. 'So, what, there's a problem and the ship sort of…beams it into your brain…and you go looking for the TARDIS operators manual or something?'

'Something like that, though I've no need for a manual,' he postulated. 'Brilliant on my own, thanks, and the instruction guide that came with this model was absolute rubbish. Chucked it into a supernova near the Andali Nebula.'

'That explains so much about your driving,' Rose told him, craning her head and nodding at the console. 'S'that what these are for?'

'What "what" are for?'

She reached for one of the countless post-it notes that were stuck on the console and indicated the hastily scribbled Gallifreyan script. 'These here, with the pictures. Are they some sort of schematic or diagram to remind you of where everything goes?'

In an instant, the light-hearted atmosphere of their bantering ebbed, and it felt like the air around her dropped a few degrees. There was a flicker of grief across the Doctor's face, and she realized she had said the wrong thing.

· ΘΣ ·

The Doctor cursed himself for letting his guard down.

For the past weeks, he had made a point of whisking Rose from place to place, keeping her either too occupied with adventure or too tired out to pry into his past. He had managed an admirable job of keeping questions and conversation away from the more painful subjects of the Time War, and only revealed the vaguest details about his people.

Of course, his plan to just stall and act evasively presupposed a companion who left things alone when she was told. Which Rose Tyler was definitely not.

'No,' he said shortly, ignoring the familiar and renewed throb of grief flitting through him.

'Then what are they?' Rose was asking, tentative like she knew she'd accidentally asked something that caused him hurt. ''Cos they're everywhere.'

It was on the tip of his tongue to brush it off, to say they were no more than scribbles produced by a bored mind when he was thinking. But just then, Rose met his gaze with a look of such innocent curiosity, as well as something like an apology for being unintentionally tactless, and he felt that explanation disintegrate.

He hadn't yet had to lie to her about anything, preferring to reveal only basic or vague information to her when she stumbled onto the topic of his past and the myriad circumstances that had brought him to meet her. Anything that related to Gallifrey was obviously hardest, and though he was tempted to ignore those types of inquiries, or lie, he wasn't about to start by reducing his native tongue to a falsehood.

'They're words,' he finally managed.

'Words? Like – oh. From your language.'

'Yes.'

Rose was quiet for several seconds, considering this new piece of information. He waited for her to either look at him with pity or try to delve deeper the way she sometimes did when she thought he might need to talk about something to feel better.

For the briefest moment something flickered in her eyes, but it was gone too soon to be given a name and instead she asked, 'So how comes the TARDIS doesn't translate it? Usually when I see stuff in another language, I see it in English.'

He almost laughed at the way she deftly steered the conversation away from the path that would have required addressing his feelings and into a more academic vein. She knew how much he enjoyed teaching her things and was giving him an out for the conversation she hadn't meant to steer them into.

'No point in translating your own language, is there?' he offered airily, patting the TARDIS console. 'It's one of the only languages she won't.'

'S'ppose that makes sense,' Rose admitted, tracing the swirling, spherical symbols on one of the notes closest to her with an air of fascination. 'What do they say?'

'Nothing important. Just reminders. "Turn three quarters clockwise", "pull up", "don't take that left at Albuquerque"…'

She considered the circular glyphs with the same earnest thoughtfulness that usually graced her features when he offered up these little parts of himself. 'Can you teach me?'

'No.'

The immediacy and finality in his tone obviously jarred her, because she straightened up and gaped at him.

'Why not?'

'Because you can't read it.'

Hurt replaced confusion. ''Right. Since I'm just an ape and I couldn't possibly do something that an almighty Time Lord can do.'

'You said it, not me.'

'Oi!'

'S'not an insult, it's just fact. You can't read it.'

'Cos you won't teach me!'

'No, cos you literally can't,' he'd told her flatly. 'Not unless you can read in five dimensions.'

'Five dimensions? How's a language got five dimensions?'

'It doesn't. But a script can have when the species that created it has more than five senses,' he'd told her airily. 'Oh, sure, I could teach you all the characters, and if you studied a few years you'd even be able to recognize some of 'em. But you'd never understand the meanings, because there're different nuances based on anything from rotation of individual characters, order in which a character was drawn and even spatial.' He'd forced a grin. 'Be easier for a dog to calculate pi to the trillionth place.'

Her anger deflated as quickly as it had come, tempered by the logical explanation. Apparently now that it had nothing to do with her intelligence but the biological make-up that she couldn't help, she could be satisfied with that explanation.

Deciding it was high time to change the subject, the Doctor straightened up and offered her a tense smile. 'So, where d'you want to go today?

She didn't reply right away, instead continued to stare at the Gallifreyan script as though if she tried hard enough she might be able to decipher it.

He had had other companions interested in his language before, but mostly it was out of detached curiosity that was quickly dispelled with longwinded explanations and a deconstruction of the language's rather dry system of tenses and cases. With Rose, though, he could see that it was yet another one of her attempts to learn about his past and to better understand him.

This too was not new, companions wanting to understand him better. He had always managed to ignore such attempts, maintaining a distance and secure knowledge that no one could ever know him, even before he was the last of his kind left. Sometimes, though, when Rose got that thoughtful look on her face, he felt a brief spark of terror and excitement that if she put her mind to it, she might just manage it.

After an unnerving amount of silence, Rose finally tore her eyes away from the post-its on the console and returned his smile.

'Designated driver's choice?' she suggested lightly.

He wasn't sure that was a good idea.

His latest choice had landed them on a planet had nearly gotten them both trapped in a hive-mind interface – all because he'd wanted to show her what High Tea was like on the other side of the galaxy.

The whole business had put him in a bit of a mood.

Instead of taking an hour to sleep last night, he'd been up and awake, his thoughts dark.

It seemed no matter where he wandered, he was always to be faced with a reminder of his home world.

He was no stranger to so-called "benevolent" leaders trying to prolong their life and influence at the expense of everything and everyone around them. Still, his encounter with the unit known as Makassar had reminded him more of Rassilon than he was comfortable.

One of the Doctor's own greatest fears was that one day he would become like that – someone so convinced that his life was so vital he needed to avoid death at the cost of someone else. At the cost of millions of someone-elses. There was more reason for it now, after all.

He was the last survivor, the only remnant of Gallifrey. Exactly what might he do in order to keep its memory alive just a little longer?

His gaze settled on the hook-up for the chameleon arch.

Maybe it would be better just to forget, then. He could probably find a way to block the memories, even if it meant sacrificing certain parts of himself. Or all of him. He'd be operating at less than full capacity and it would be dangerous, but it might be the best option.

'Doctor?' Rose encouraged, and he realized he hadn't answered her suggestion.

He pasted a smile on. 'Mentioned the Andali Nebula, didn't I? We should visit the planet Bob.'

'There's a planet named Bob?' Rose guffawed. 'Oh, yeah, this I have to –'

There was a sudden minor explosion from beneath one of the system towers. Sparks and smoke began to hiss at him, and the Doctor swore, hurrying to contain the damage.

It looked like the TARDIS was allergic to the part after all.

Rose was asking questions, but he wasn't listening as he quickly opened one of the gratings and used the sonic to douse the flame. Then he began looking for any loose wires or connections which might account for the problem – because he really didn't want to have to track down another one of these things, it'd been a right pain the first time –!

Little puffs of smoke having cleared, he looked around the time rotor and caught sight of Rose hovering there. He opened his mouth to tell her everything was alright, and felt his hearts constrict as the familiar, lyrical language of his people filled the air.

It was the first time since the war since he'd managed more than a habitual curse.

Rose's head whipped up and she looked up at him with wide eyes.

'Epdups?' she whispered. 'Xbt uibu zpv?'

Oh, this could not be good.