Stowaway - by Sian

Synopsis: The Doctor tells Rose about his first companion.
Characters: Rose, the Doctor (ten), Susan (mentioned)
Episode/Spoilers: Set sometime between Fear Her and Army Of Ghosts
Rating: PG (a little angsty at the end)

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Rose peered out from the old barn where they'd taken shelter from a storm. The rain was still crashing down on the roof and the wind was rattling the doors. "I don't think it's clearing." As she spoke a flash of lightning and rumble of thunder acted to confirm her words.

"We could make a run for it," the Doctor suggested; but, as if guessing his companion's response, he made no effort to move from the hay bails he was sitting leaning against. "Better still though, we could stay here the night, it should have cleared by morning."

Rose walked back to the Doctor. "Budge up," she told him and sat down next him. Grateful that she was wearing a padded winter jacket, she pulled the zip up to the top and snuggled down into the coat's warmth. "It's a bit dark and spooky in here."

"Scared?"

She turned to look at him and gave a mischievous grin. "Are you?"

"Not if I'm with you," he replied with a smile. "I wish we'd brought some food," he complained, "though I suppose we weren't planning to be spending the night."

"We also weren't planning to be in 1796," Rose pointed out. "Did you see the looks people were giving me?"

The Doctor grinned at Rose's indignant tone. "Well, to be fair to the good people of Little Stottington; jeans and a Puffa jacket aren't exactly the normal attire for a young lady in these times."

"You think they'll come back?"

"The angry villagers?" the Doctor asked. "No. Well, not in this weather anyway. I have to say, makes a change it being you that upsets the locals."

"I thought it was on private."

"Unfortunately it wasn't, and Justin Timberlake playing, what was it now? oh yes, Sexyback, did spoil the mood of the service. And the way it echoed around the church, great acoustics in those old medieval buildings." The Doctor was trying to look serious, but the laughter in his eyes was quickly spreading to the rest of his face.

"Shut up. It wasn't funny. They threw things at me." Rose batted him on the arm with the back of her hand, but she couldn't help join in his laughter.

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As the night wore on, the Doctor and Rose found themselves sprawled out across some of the bails of hay the Doctor had laid out. They'd been lazing in a companionable silence for the last ten minutes. Rose suspected that the Doctor, for all his claims about sleep being for cats and the sick, may actually have fallen asleep. She nudged his thigh with her foot and felt him shift position in the darkness.

"It's late, don't you need to sleep?" he asked.

"No." Rose couldn't have slept even if she'd wanted to, and actually she did want to. But the wind was rattling the doors and every sound in the old building spooked her. "Can I ask you something?"

"You know you can ask me anything you want."

"Who was your first companion?"

"Susan," the Doctor replied with a fond smile. "Although I'm not sure she'd have liked being called a companion."

"Was she Human?"

"Thousands of planets in the universe, why would you think she'd be Human?"

"Dunno, Susan's a Human name and you do seem to like Humans. So where was she from?"

"Gallifrey."

That caught Rose's interest. "She was a Time Lord?"

"No, she was too young to be a Time Lord, actually she was younger than you. She came with me when I first left Gallifrey. And when I say she came with me, I mean she stowed away in the TARDIS."

Rose grinned, "You had a stowaway in your TARDIS?"

"Well, technically it wasn't my TARDIS at the time. I'd sort of borrowed it."

"Borrowed and forgot to return?" Rose asked.

"Yes."

"You're a joyrider!"

The Doctor gave an indignant look. "The TARDIS didn't belong to anyone, she was being decommissioned," her objected. "I just put her to a better use."

"Which was?"

"Leaving Gallifrey," he said, like it was the most obvious answer in the world. "I was a little disenchanted with Time Lord rules and society. I mean, what's the point of being able to travel in space and time, if you don't actually travel in space and time? And what's the point of being virtually immortal, if you're not going to do anything with your life, but sit and watch the rest of the universe without actually interacting with them?"

"So you decided to go off on you own."

"I did."

"Wasn't that illegal then, if it was against Time Lord rules?"

The Doctor scratched the back of head. "Yes, but I was captured and tried for my crimes."

"Really?" Rose laughed. "Were you found guilty?"

"Captured, tried and punished for my crimes," the Doctor clarified.

"You're a criminal. I'm traveling through time with a criminal in a stolen spaceship. That would explain why you're not a very ... accurate pilot."

"Were you going to say, not a very good pilot?"

"Yes," Rose agreed.

"Charming! Anyway, that's not me, well not all me; it's the TARDIS. Sometimes she has a mind of her own. Though life is actually more fun that way."

"If you say so," Rose replied. "So, how did you end up with a stowaway?"

"She followed me. Snuck onboard while I was familiarising myself with the systems."

"Hot wiring it?" Rose suggested.

The Doctor just grinned. "I found her in mid-flight, hiding in the arboretum. I could hardly take her home. Mainly because I didn't know how to reverse course and get home," he admitted, "but also because I'd have been arrested. So she stayed with me."

"What about her parents? If she was younger than me, weren't they worried about her?"

"Oh, they were a little annoyed when I managed to get a message to them, but they agreed she could stay with me. We stopped in London for a while. She even went to school, although now she was learning algebra and Latin instead of temporal and astral physics, but she seemed happy enough."

"So what happened to her?"

"She met a man in the 22nd century and stayed with him to help him rebuild his city after a war." The Doctor decided not to mention that he'd shut Susan out of the TARDIS, and made a decision for her that she couldn't make for herself.

"She didn't want to go home to Gallifrey then?"

"No, she thought her parents would make her stay on the planet, attend the academy, become a Time Lord - she didn't want that." The Doctor considered that for a moment. "You know, I think maybe I had a little too much influence over her in that respect. She knew I didn't particularly like the Time Lords or like being one if I'm honest. Now I come to think about it, that may have been why her parents didn't like her spending too much time with me, which in itself was the reason she followed me and sneaked on board the TARDIS."

"So you knew her before she stowed away?"

How to answer that, the Doctor wondered. The truth is usually a good place to start, he told himself. "Yes. I knew her and her family well. She'd got into the habit of running away when she couldn't get her own way and spending days at a time at my house."

"You must have known her parents well."

"Oh I should say I did, very well indeed."

When he didn't elaborate further, Rose prompted him, "And you must have been close, they must have trusted you, to let you look after their daughter?"

"We were close at one time, at least me and her father were, until he went to the academy. People changed when they went there. But no, we weren't particularly close by that time. As for trusting me, no I doubt that very much," he replied with a sad smile.

"Yet they let their daughter stay with you?"

The Doctor wanted to tell Rose why Susan stayed with him so often when she was growing up, he really did. He wanted to tell her how Time Lord society was different to her society. How, when Susan was small, he parents were studying and working and he had been more than happy to look after her for them. How, as she'd got older and started to echo his views, her parents had tried to restrict his access. But really there was only one thing he needed to tell her. "They couldn't really stop me seeing my granddaughter."

"Your... what?"

"Granddaughter, she was my son's daughter. I did tell you I was a father once."

Yes, Rose thought, you told me in an almost throwaway line and never mentioned it again. "You never said you had grandchildren."

"Just the one grandchild."

"There really is one hell of an age gap between us," Rose said to more to herself than him. "I can't believe you're a grandfather."

"I'm not anymore. Susan wasn't a Time Lord, it's over nine hundred years since I left her on Earth."

"But it isn't," Rose reasoned. "Well I mean it is, but you have a time machine. You can visit any time you want."

"It's not that easy."

"Of course it is. We went back and saw my dad before he died."

"And look how well that turned out."

"Yeah okay, that was a bad example. But we've been and seen things that happened hundreds of years ago, things that aren't going to happen for thousands of years. So ... I don't understand."

"I know," the Doctor agreed. He sighed and briefly wondered how he'd got into this conversation, but there was no going back now, so he explained as well as he could. "Susan stayed in 22nd century London because she met David, she only met him because he was fighting the Daleks."

Rose was shocked by that news. "The Daleks are going to attack Earth in the 22nd century?"

"No, not anymore. When the time war ended, the Daleks and everything they'd done were wiped from the timeline. The war David was fighting never happened. Susan and I didn't go there, I didn't leave her with him because she never met him, so she can't be there with him now."

"So where is she? Where did you leave her?"

"I don't know," the Doctor admitted. "Possibly nowhere."

"But she still stowed away, she still travelled with you, you remember it; so you must have left her somewhere."

"Not necessarily. She may never have come with me." She may never have existed, he thought. "Her father died in the war," the hurt at his words was evident in the Doctor's tone. "But even if he hadn't, her family were all Time Lords, they don't exist anywhere in time so it's likely neither does she." He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "But the truth is, I really don't know. All I know is that I can't sense her anymore."

Rose didn't know how to reply to that, how to comfort him, how to reassure him that Susan may still be out there somewhere. He was the Time Lord, he could feel all of time in the past, present and future. If he thought Susan didn't exist in any time then he was probably right. "I'm sorry."

"Me too," he agreed, his voice little more than a whisper. "You should get some sleep. It'll be coming light soon."

"Are you alright?"

"Get some sleep."

To Rose that reply said more than the truth would have. Whenever she asked the Doctor if he was alright, his answer was predictably the same; he was always alright.

The Doctor lay in the darkness and closed his eyes. At one time, before the war, he'd been able to see his family in his mind, whenever he'd wanted. Now all he had were faded memories of a dark haired girl and her father. Maybe one day he'd be brave enough to return to the time and place where he'd left Susan, see for himself whether she was there. But not yet. Knowing that she may be dead, but still having the hope that she'd survived, was hard enough. To find out that she was gone, that he'd killed her; no he wasn't that strong yet. He doubted he ever would be.

END