In A Cracked Mirror

By TwinEnigma

Warnings: Post-Journey's End, spoilers for The Big Bang; minor references/spoilers for New Earth, The Unquiet Dead, Family of Blood, Impossible Planet, Tooth and Claw, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, Vampires In Venice

Pairing: Rose Tyler/Ten Too (Ten 2, II, Metacrisis Tenth, what have you)

Rose Tyler wonders if she is going mad.

She wakes one day and knows things are wrong.

She does not know how she knows this, but it is nonetheless true. Oh, she knows how things are and knows that they are not as they should be. It's not a 'should be' like in her dreams and desires. It's a memory or a frightening gap in her memories that says 'this is not right.'

It's as if her life is unraveling in reverse.

Pete is her father, but he hasn't always been.

Jackie is her mother, but she wasn't always here.

Tony is her little brother, but he is technically impossible.

This world is her home, but she's not really from here.

Rose knows she's traveled, was a traveler, been to strange places and seen strange and wondrous things. She remembers meeting Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria. She remembers cat people and an impossible planet. She knows she is from another world and this world became her home by necessity and, later, affection. But she doesn't remember how all this is possible.

There is a gap in her memories, one that appears to absorb all the missing words and circumstances. It's a whitewashed hole, sometimes large enough to encompass rooms and sometimes no bigger than a man. The shape is blurred and smeared around the edges in her memories and yet, she knows that there should be something or someone there. It is that missing element that is vital to her very presence here, but there are no words to describe what should be there.

It's maddening.

She turns to her lover and shakes him.

He opens brown, surprisingly empty eyes, and stares up at her. His brown hair sticks up strangely, semi-translucent in the morning light. She can almost see the veins and bones beneath his skin. He seems to blur and fade at the edges, as if he happened to be a washed-out photograph.

"Who are you?" she asks.

He blinks, slowly, and then seems to sharpen, his hair becoming a little reddish, his eyes warming. "Iason," he answers, flickering again, and now there are more freckles on his face. "Iason Noble. Donna's brother. You know that."

Some part of her brain screams and claws at her: that is not real, just a cover story, we made it up and he can't be that because it's impossible because he is...

The word escapes her, a blank so echoing and complete that she wants to scream and cry out because it's something vitally important and she has to remember, but the words she needs and the memories she so desperately wants are just not there!

"Are you all right?" he asks.

"Where are you from?" she asks and wants to add, 'from here or there or somewhere else entirely?' The words refuse to form, as if this universe fights their very utterance with every ounce of its being in fear they might destroy something it is protecting.

Inexplicably and suddenly, she knows he is tied to those words so utterly that it is possible he never was at all, that all he is are words and ideas as fleeting as a dream. Yet there he is and he must be, because she knows that he should be.

...Just, not like this.

He is something so tenuous that the very fabric of reality is warping in a desperate attempt to save him by defining him and it is changing him from what he should be.

"From _," he replies at last, the word a noise without form and shape that she thinks she should know.

"Is that in Ireland?" she manages, even though she knows it's not.

His expression is strange and she hopes madly that he now knows something is wrong – everything is wrong.

'There's someone missing, someone important, someone so, so important,' a faint whisper calls out.

Rose turns her head sharply and comes face to face with her reflection in the hotel mirror.

'I remember you,' the whisper calls again, still faint. It fades in and out, like a radio out of tune. 'The brand new ancient blue box... oh clever, very clever...'

The mirror is cracked.

'Something old, something new... Something borrowed, something blue,' the whisper continues, growing louder.

The crack is glowing.

'It's the Doctor!' another voice calls out and the crack explodes with light as the universe pulls like a rubber band, stretching further and further until it snaps.

Rose blinks at her reflection in the unmarred mirror.

Behind her, her Doctor sits up: "Rose?"

She turns, staring at him, and wonders how in one insane moment she could ever have believed he was someone else. Yet, the next instant, she practically flings her arms around him, relieved by how solid he is when her arms close around his skinny frame and the steady beat of his single heart.

It's completely mad.

"What's all this about, Rose Tyler?" he asks, jokingly.

"Your hair is brown," she says, raising her hands and threading them through his hair. "And it's all sticky-uppy."

He quirks an eyebrow at her. "You know, I got this hair from Casanova. Well, the face, too. And the teeth."

She laughs, pulling back and gives him a light punch on the arm. "Stop it! You're joking!"

"I'm serious!" he says, leaning in closer. His eyes are dark, ancient, mischievous and utterly entrancing. "I owe him a chicken. Or the other me does. Was there a Casanova in this universe?"

Rose can't help smiling as she leans in to kiss him. "You're daft."

"And rude," he reminds her eagerly.

"And definitely not ginger," she finishes, nose-to-nose with him.

Rose Tyler knows some things are not as she dreamed or wanted. But, she has her Doctor, lives in a parallel universe with her mum, dad and little brother, and she knows things are exactly as they should be. She doesn't quite know how she knows this, but she knows nonetheless that it's true.

She also knows, quite inexplicably, that she's very, very fond of ponds.

AN: This... I've had this percolating in my head for a while following the Big Bang. The Doctor never existed, but things were the same, which means things still happened, but it's like it was being bounced off a blank spot and everything just "adjusts" around that blank spot. It's also hinted that travelling outside time confers a sort of "awareness," meaning that it's likely the Doctor's former companions all were somehow aware that something was fundamentally off about the dying universe and possibly the rebooted universe as well.

Hence Rose's horrifying awareness of something absent, despite being unable to remember precisely what. Everything still happens to her, it's just... there's a hole where the Doctor and the TARDIS should be.

Then there's the shaping nature of words and the way the universe "compensates" in this. Words have the power to shape and define - a fundamental aspect of magic and the basis of the Carrionite magic in The Shakespeare Code. When he gives his chosen pseudonym to Rose in this, a barely-existing Metacrisis Tenth gives himself a definition - namely, what they'd come up with as his cover story - and while it helps "stabilize" him, it also begins to alter him, because Donna still exists, even if the Doctor doesn't, and in defining himself as her brother, he effectly becomes such until the universe snaps back.

Bleh, I think it makes sense, anyway.

I could not help myself mentioning the (Tennant's) Casanova bet. It's my personal canon that Nine bet Casanova he could regenerate into Casanova's exact form, but screwed it up with the eye color.

Iason (also written as Jason) is Greek. It means "Healer."