Different Dimensions

Rose is in a Henrik’s display window, having difficulty dressing a mannequin in an evening gown. She struggles to fit the pre-bent arm through the arm hole. “Oh, you just don’t want to wear this dress, do you?” she says to the mannequin, as if it can hear her. “Very well then. I’ll just do what I did when I could not get the clothes on my Barbie dolls.” Rose pulls the arm off the mannequin and begins to slide the arm up through the sleeve, but she suddenly stops and simply stands there, staring at the detached arm, in her hand as her mind drifts back to the first time she’d ever met him. Her mind flashes back to the night in the Henrik’s basement when the mannequins attacked her, and how he, like a Dark Knight in black leather, swept in and took her by the hand. “Run!” was his first word to her.

She smiles sadly and dabs a tear from the corner of her eye as she puts the arm back on the mannequin and stands back to see how it looks. Satisfied, she commences positioning the next one when she hears an unmistakable sound.

Without a thought or a word to anyone, Rose drops what she is doing and races out the front door of the store. Once out on the street, she stops, looking lost, turning her head to look up and down the street. She finally gets a fix on the direction that the sound is coming from, and she runs, fast as she can in that direction.

She races round the corner and runs right into someone, landing square on her fanny in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Pardon me, Miss. Are you alright?”

Rose doesn‘t even look up. “Oh, yeah, quite.” She takes the hand extended to her, just as the Tardis materializes. The door opens as she runs to it, and she sees him standing there, his arms open, waiting to embrace her…

And then the alarm goes off.

“No!” Rose cries as she rolls over and shuts the clock off. She wanted to stay in the dream forever- but it never lasts.

She sits up and looks around her room. It’s so much bigger than the one she had in the Powell Estate flat, but it’s still all shades of pink.

She hears the baby crying and heads into the nursery.

“Hi there, Johnny,” she smiles down at the squalling baby. She picks him up, but he continues to cry. “You need a new nappy,” Rose tells him as she lies him on the changing table.

When she’s finished changing him, she looks down at the ginger haired boy and hears…

“Am I ginger?”

“No. You’re just sorta brown.”

“Oh, I wanted to be ginger. I've never been ginger.”

Rose lifts Johnny up until his cheek is pressed against hers. She hears him sucking on his fist. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, believing for a moment that she could conjure a new reality, if she just concentrated hard enough…

“Rose Tyler, look at you.”

She turns to see him standing in the doorway. Her heart starts to race. “You may not be ginger,” Rose tells him, “but your son is.”

He walks into the room with a look of happy bewilderment on his face. “May I?” he asks, holding his hands out.

Rose hands him his son and stands back, cherishing the moment.

“I’ve never seen anything so… perfect. Rose, he’s perfect!” He spins around with the baby and then plants a kiss on Rose’s cheek.

Rose reaches out and pulls him closer, planting her lips on his-

“Oh, thank you, Rose,” Jackie Tyler says, “I heard him crying, but I couldn’t get out of bed. I’ve never been so tired. I have no idea how I did this alone when you were a baby.”

“Well, you don’t have to do it alone this time.” Rose says, handing the baby over to her mother and giving them both a kiss on the cheek.

“Are you a hungry boy, Johnny?” Jackie coos at him. “Mommy’s gonna feed you,” she tells him as she sits in the rocking chair and loosens her robe so that Johnny can latch on to her breast.

“Has Dad already left for work?” Rose asks glancing out the window.

“Yeah,” Jackie says, “he had an early conference call with a Japanese client. Do you have to work today?”

“Yeah, and after, Mickey and I will probably go do something.”

“Alright then,” her mother says. “It’s good to know you’re not in constant danger anymore.”

“Mum…” Rose replies in a rather hurt tone.

“Well, I won’t apologize for being glad that you are safe and not having to constantly worry about you anymore.”

“You never needed to worry about me when I was with him! And just- just look at all that you have now because of him: Daddy, and- and this big house, and Johnny- y-you‘d probably be dead if not for him!”

“I never said I wasn’t grateful to him, I’m just…” Jackie struggled for a diplomatic way to say it, “more relaxed now that he’s not around.”

“Oh, Mum!” Rose cries and runs out of the room.

Jackie closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I guess I shouldn’t have said anything,” she says, glancing down at her son.

Rose was on the verge of tears all day at work. Truth be told, it wasn’t because of her mother’s crass remarks; she was always on the verge of tears, ever since she’d been stranded in this damn dimension.

This dimension was not terribly different from her own, except for the fact that her father was still alive, there were dozens of zeppelins in the sky, Mickey’s grandmother called him Ricky, and there was no Doctor.

Oh, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Above anything else from her time with him, Rose had learned that it’s possible to beat the odds. She spent weeks on the internet looking for some sign of him, of this dimension’s version of him, hoping he could find a way to deliver her back to her own dimension, back to her own Doctor. But there were simply no websites that referred to a mysterious man calling himself The Doctor who showed up in the nick of time to save the world on a weekly basis. She finally gave up. Perhaps none of the Timelords had survived in this dimension.

It was so hard for her to resign herself to going back to the tedium of working at Henrik’s after all the adventure she and The Doctor had faced together. Her father was rich enough that she did not really need to work, but she had to do something or she felt she would go mad. With all the Cybermen of this dimension now gone, the world seemed like such a sheltered place. Even Mickey had given up fighting for the survival of mankind and started attending London University.

Walking through the front doors of Henrik’s, Rose wonders if she will ever feel alive again. She feels so dead inside now, and she doesn’t know how much longer she can survive on memories and fantasies.

That afternoon, Rose is in the window dressing the mannequins when she thinks she sees one of them move.

She stops what she’s doing and glares at the mannequin for a moment. Then she shakes her head, “Rose, Tyler, you are losing your mind,” she tells herself and goes back to what she was doing. Pretty soon she is standing there staring at the mannequins wishing they would attack her just to break up the monotony. Suddenly she becomes aware of a familiar sound.

She hesitates for a moment to be sure she isn’t imagining things, and then bolts out the door of the store.

Once on the street, she knows exactly where the sound is coming from. It is like this in all her dreams. She races around the corner, and just like in her dream, she runs right into someone, and lands on her bottom, but unlike her dreams, there is no Doctor and no Tardis in sight, just an old fashioned red phone booth.

“Pardon me, are you alright?”

“Yes, quite alright,” she says, and picks herself up from the ground. Then, suddenly, right there in front of her, it’s him, but not him. It’s the old him, not the new him- the him before he regenerated.

“Perhaps you should slow down a bit when you’re going around corners,” he says with that chiding, yet amused tone of his.

To Rose’s dismay, he starts to walk away. “But… Doctor!” she calls to him, but he keeps walking.

Rose quickly catches him, slightly tugging on his leather jacket, “Doctor?” she says.

“Oh, no, I’m not a doctor,” he tells her. “Do you need a doctor?”

“No. But you’re… The Doctor.”

“No, I’m sorry. You must have mistaken me for someone else,” he tells her, glancing nervously over his shoulder he begins speed walking away from her, but she follows.

“You are The Doctor.”

He laughs at her insistence. “Don’t be silly,” he tells her. “Are you going to continue to follow me around like this?”

“Yes.”

“Alright then. I’m The Professor by the way, what‘s your name?”

“Rose.”

“Nice to meet you Rose. Now, run for your life.”