The road less travelled...

Title: Redemption 19/?
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Summary: When you have lost everything, what do you do to get it back?
Characters: The non-Doctor first glimpsed at the end of Name of the Doctor and a lot of old friends.

Part XIX

“Listen!”

The Vadlott hears a voice from behinds him and glances around to see whether he is the one being addressed. Instead he sees a red-haired woman walking swiftly in the direction of a blonde female, whom the Vadlott feels looks vaguely familiar.

He came to Earth in pursuit of the ship carrying the Adiposian first family and arrived in this open space just in time to see the baby Adipose taken up into the massive ship hanging in the sky high above the heads of those who have gathered to see what is happening. He watched, too, as the nanny fell to her death when her teleport beam was switched off. And now here he is, forcing his way through the large crowd, trying to see if the young woman is indeed Rose Tyler.

“...a tall blonde woman called Sylvia,” he hears from the redhead as he gets closer. “Tell her that bin there. Right, it’ll all make sense. That bin there.”

Instinctively, the Vadlott turns his head in the direction the woman is pointing and sees a rubbish bin attached to a wall several hundred yards away.

He turns back to see the woman with red hair all but skip away down a nearby lane. And Rose – he can see her profile clearly now and is positive it’s her – is walking in the opposite direction from where he is standing. He steps forward, about to call her name, only to remember at the last instant that she will have no idea who he is.

Stopping short, he watches as she continues to walk away – before disappearing into thin air.

At the same instant he feels the ripple across his time sense. He frowns, swiftly crossing the short distance to the place where she vanished and checking with his sonic screwdriver that there are no other elements at play.

His mind is whirling with possibilities, remembering what Jack had said about the parallel universe in which Rose, her mother and Mickey Smith had ended up. Perhaps people on that side have found a way to come across into this universe – and maybe, just maybe, that means he could go there himself.

As he turns and begins making his way back to his tardis, he wonders at the feelings of enthusiasm that greets that thought. After all, it’s not that long since he found himself fearing that the Doctor had been lost forever and that he would have to fill that empty place. Yet now he is longing to be alone.

The truth is that he is tired: tired of having to clean up the Doctor’s messes; tired of taking those whom the Doctor did not or could not save back to their families and having to bear witness to that grief; tired of not being free to go where and do as he chooses, both from fear that the Doctor will already be there, and because he hates the thought of leaving people in distress.

The sight of a blonde woman, looking rather panicked, but also strangely familiar, stops him in his tracks. It takes him a moment, but then he remembers the explosion at the wedding reception and the people he helped there. She had been among them, the person who was so worried about someone called Donna. Although it’s a long shot, he wonders if that is the red-haired woman who spoke to Rose.

When she begins looking in first one rubbish bin and then another, he knows he’s found the right person.

“That bin there,” he tells her, pointing at the receptacle the redhead had indicated.

She huffs impatiently and crosses to have a look, a disgusted expression on her face as she pokes around before extracting a ring of keys.

“Ridiculous!” she exclaims, wiping them on a tissue from her pocket. “It’s completely mad to be so busy going to stay with friends that she can’t even drop the car home like a sensible person would.” She glares at the Vadlott. “Lucky for you that you didn’t take them yourself.”

“Thank you,” he retorts in wounded tones, and sees her flush as if she has only just realised how rude she sounded.

“Well - some people would!” she says defensively and stalks off.

As he watches her walk away, the Vadlott tries very hard to remember exactly what it is about human beings that he actually likes. Perhaps – almost certainly, in fact – she didn’t remember the help he had given her friends and relations, but that isn’t any excuse for the assumptions she has just made about him.

Only just suppressing a snort, as well as the urge to call something insulting after her, he turns on his heel and resumes his passage towards the blue box waiting patiently on the far side of the square. The body of the nanny, he notices, has been removed, and the crowds have been dispersed by the police officers who are guarding the location, having presumably viewed the death as a suicide.

Back on board the tardis, he sets the old girl into the vortex and begins testing for weak points along the wall between the two universes which shows up brightly on his scanner as a result of recent activity. He uses the tardis to apply pressure at various places, waiting to see if one will give.

His mind races ahead of his task, imaging that world on the other side of the wall and whether he might find a place it in. He can’t help wondering, as he does so, whether Rose would consider travelling with him in the same way as she did with the Doctor. He is getting tired of being alone.

The Vadlott tests every point along that line in the hope of finding a gap that he and the tardis can slip through, but nothing gives and eventually, sadly, he realises that the openings are being controlled by people on the other side.

And since he doubts they even know he exists, why would they want to help him?

* * *
He likes visiting museums. Unkind people might suggest that he is, in some ways, trying to keep score, but he prefers to think of it as keeping track of the progress of different civilisations. He enjoys seeing items he once touched and used and played with during his visits to the respective eras. He is intrigued if something vital is missing. He even, much as it pains him to admit it, amuses himself by mocking errors made by the museums in their descriptions. Silly archaeologists and historians.

One thing he does not expect, though, is to be confronted with a stone plaque bearing an illustration of something very closely resembling a tardis. Approaching the glass case, he checks the description, which suggests that the stonework was part of a prayer stand, and then moves in for a closer look at the carved design.

The Vadlott has no difficulty in recognising the man on the left, having now had a number of meetings with him, but the woman in the right is more of a puzzle. For one thing her carved form has suffered more damage in the intervening years, but in addition the Vadlott is not necessarily familiar with all of the Doctor’s companions. It is clearly not Martha, and nor is it Rose, but the other Time Lord could have picked up a score of women to travel with him in his tenth body and the Vadlott would not know them unless he saw them with his own eyes.

All of that aside, though, she does remind him a little of the distinctive red-haired woman he saw during the affair with the Adipose.

“I see you’ve stumbled across the biggest puzzle in our Ancient Rome collection,” a voice says beside him and he starts, looking down to find a woman in museum uniform beside him. She smiles. “Sorry to have startled you, but not many people take as much interest in that as you seem to have.”

“Tell me about it,” he suggests.

“Well, the man and woman are clear enough,” the lady says, indicating each one with her finger, just avoiding pressing against the glass case. “Our biggest puzzle has been this rectangular shape in the middle. No one is quite sure what it is. It isn’t the right design for a temple of the time to which we’ve managed to date it – the first century A.D. If these squares are windows, they shouldn’t go all the way to the floor or they will weaken the structural integrity of the wall, and if they are panels, it’s strange to have them on the outside.”

“Could it be a fake?” prompts the Vadlott, his eyes flicking across to the blue box standing unnoticed in the corner before returning to the woman in front of him.

“If it is, it’s a very good one,” she says rather tersely. “The best I’ve ever seen, in fact. All of our attempts at dating it give the same readings. The work is exquisite. Our only question is – that.” Her finger repeatedly stabs the glass in front of the stairs leading up to the door in time with her words. “What is that?!”

He considers answering all of her questions, of providing her with more information than she had ever dreamed possible, by taking her to visit the very time period in which she clearly has such interest. He imagines her disbelief and shock as she found pieces with which she is so familiar in their new and unused state.

However he quickly rejects the idea. The problem is his ongoing aversion to archaeologists and people in similar fields. He generally finds that they are simply not willing to fully detach from their own era and embrace everything the places he takes them have to offer.

At least, that’s the first excuse that springs to mind. Deep down, he knows there is another, better reason: he still is unsure of whether he actually wants to have a companion with him or not. The company is all well and good, and being alone means he doesn’t have to risk his life for others. His eyes travel of the carved form of the Doctor and he thinks back to the moment when he faced the other man who was created in the same regeneration. His body, despite its apparent age, has lasted more than twice as long as that one thanks to him not having to throw his life away for someone else.

“Thank you,” he says quietly to the young woman and watches as she walks away.

He turns back to the stone tablet, fishing his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and scanning the object. This provides him with a far more accurate date than the suggestion made by the museum researcher: 80A.D., a year after the eruption of Vesuvius and Volcano Day. He also notes that there is a tiny mark on one side of the sculpture and the sonic indicates it as the individual mark of Caecilius, one of the few survivors of the eruption. The Vadlott is in no doubt either of the reason for Caecilius’ survival or why this stone tablet was made.

As he turns to go back to his tardis, he hopes the Doctor and his new companion enjoyed their little brush with death.

* * *
The tardis arrives on the Oodsphere in response to an alarm blaring from what the Vadlott quickly discovers is the only non-natural base on the planet. This causes him to become rather circumspect because he has never felt that the Ood were naturally dangerous. If he had to choose, he would consider it more likely that the enemy would be the humans on the base.

Leaving his tardis, he steps out onto the snow-covered planet, drawing his battered leather coat more closely around himself to stave off the chill. He sets off across the ground in the direction from which the tardis had detected the alarm, intrigued to notice that it’s been turned off.

He clambers up a rocky hill – and almost walks into the back of a blue box that is most certainly not his.

Crossly, he scrambles around to the front of the box and eyes the two sets of footprints heading off in the direction from which he knows the alarm was coming. Perhaps being rather cynical, the Vadlott suspects he now knows exactly why those alarms were sounding, and he decides to let the Doctor sort out his own mess for once.

Turning away, he fixes on an angle that will avoid him intersecting with the other Time Lord and sets off through the snow. His intention is to head back to his tardis eventually, but he decides that he may as well take the time to see if any of the planet’s natives are willing to say hello.

That mental thought receives a sudden and rather shocking response when the Vadlott rounds a large rocky outcrop and finds himself confronted by a dozen Ood, standing in ranks, clearly waiting for him.

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