Back to Our Reality

FOUR

For the Doctor each passing day went by slower than the last and it was only a matter of time before he knew he couldn't take it anymore.

They had been on this planet for little under three weeks now and nothing had happened.

He still didn't have a job, although it was looking more likely with each passing day. Pete and come to him and Rose when he had returned from Torchwood the day after they had arrived. He had explained to them that he wanted to try and get both of them jobs there, but that it was just an impossibility until the current Director decided that it was time to retire. Neither of them had any documents to say that they were eligible to work in the country and with each member of Torchwood having a basic level of psychic training, there was no way that the Doctor's psychic paper would be able to get them in either. So they were left without jobs until the day that Pete became Director (for they all knew that that was what would happen eventually).

Unlike the Doctor, Rose had considered working elsewhere. An employer in a local shop would be fooled enough by the psychic paper, allowing Rose to get herself in, but the Doctor had been adamant that he didn't want her working in a shop again, much to her annoyance. She wasn't annoyed at the fact that he kept telling her that she was too good for that kind of job; she was annoyed that it seemed to be him making the decisions for her. Rose knew he didn't mean it, and was only trying to make her feel better about herself and to show her that she didn't need to constantly put herself down, but being told constantly every time she brought the conversation up was slowly becoming frustrating.

Jackie, on the other hand, was having the time of her life. No longer having to work (although she really wouldn't find going out to do something with her day occasionally), Jackie had been using her time to meet up with her parallel double's friends. It had been hard at first, knowing that these people had presumed her to be dead, to keep from letting it slip that she was in fact a different Jackie from a completely different world.

She also didn't have many of the same memories as her double. The last twenty years here and been completely different from what she had experienced back at home. This was a world where Pete had made a name for himself and hadn't died in that accident back in 1987; it was a world in which she was supposed to have been childless and so it was difficult coming up with a believable story that meant that Rose was her daughter. Eventually she had come up with the story that she had felt she had been too young to raise a child, had put Rose up for adoption and 20 years later she had finally made her way back to her birth mother and father. It seemed the kind of story that she would read in her old gossip magazines back home, so it was hardly that much of a shock when the story did make the celebrity news headlines. The shock was finding out that she was practically a celebrity.

But while this was a world in which her early life and marriage was almost entirely the same, it was a world in which she was going to have to keep living the lie she had found herself in. Sometimes she wondered if she would be able to continue to pull it off.

Thankfully, those times were few and far between, because, right now, she couldn't be happier.

....

Rose sat on her bed with a book she had picked up open in her hands. She stared at the words on the page but her mind wouldn't take them in. It was only after a while that she realised she had read the same sentence over and over again, getting no further with the tale in her palms.

She sighed. Nearly three weeks they had been here and it was the longest three weeks of her life. It wasn't so much the fact that she no longer had the whole of time and space at her finger tips that bothered her, it was more the fact that the Doctor was becoming more and more distant with every new day. The first few days of them being trapped here had given her some hope that he might adjust to his new environment; particularly their second day and their shopping trip. Back then, things seemed like they might be okay, but it was a couple of days after that that the Doctor started to distance himself.