Existence
By Fluffy Nabs
Doctor Who – Ninth Doctor/Rose Vignette
Rating: All ages
She was looking at him, her head cocked to one side, her eyebrows furrowed, and the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth at the corner of her mouth.
He punched in some commands at the console and glanced up at her again. "What?"
"I was thinking," she started.
"A dangerous pastime," he teased her.
She huffed a laugh and shook her head at him. "No, seriously. You come from a planet that, technically, never existed. Or at least the people on it never existed."
His face darkened. "I knew you would eventually have questions about this."
She studied his face for a moment longer. "If you don't want to talk about it, we won't."
He shook his head. "No, that's alright. Ask your questions."
"Okay." She took a deep breath. "So your mother and father don't exist any more. They never did."
He took a long time to answer her. "My mother wasn't of Gallifrey."
She blinked. "Oh." He watched as she digested that. "But your father was?"
"Yes."
"So, technically, in this universe, your mother and father couldn't have met, and she couldn't have had you - the baby you -" She trailed off. "Are you born? Or do you hatch from an egg, or something? How does that work, anyway?"
"It's complicated."
She looked around them at the control room. "Time ship," she said. "I happen to have all the time I need to hear the story."
"So you do. But that's not a story for right now. You were asking me about the fact of my existence, not the manner of my conception."
"So I was," she conceded. "Alright, then. So your mother is still out there, right? She exists somewhere in some time. But she never met your father, and never, uh, conceived you with him. You shouldn't exist, but you do. This ship shouldn't exist, either, but it does."
He leaned on his forearms on the console of the TARDIS, looking without seeing at the figures and calculations and gadgets and the blue-green, soothing light. "Sometimes that can happen."
She waited.
"My mother, in fact, does not exist. The history that had caused her to be born never happened. Her grandparents never met, her parents were never created, and thus she was never born. I don't have a mother, or a father, or a planet, or anything."
She came around the console to him, now, and placed a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her and she had the most sympathetic look on her face. "You have me."
He couldn't help but smile at her. She tried so hard. "That I do." Briefly, he laid his hand on top of hers.
She asked, "So how is it that you exist here?"
"Paradox," he said shortly. "Somehow I was ripped away from the upheaval of the Time War, and thrown to safety." She standing next to him now, her hands shoved into the front pockets of her hooded sweatshirt. He studied her zipper, pink plastic, as he spoke to her. "With enough warning, the TARDIS can create a paradox in time and space. Highly dangerous, though, and not recommended. But she's in my head, you know."
She nodded.
"She knew what I was doing, even though I tried hiding it from her, and she took us… away."
"I'm glad she did."
He looked up at her.
"If she hadn't, we wouldn't have met, yeah?"
He stood to his full height and looked down at her. She was so sincere. He reached out a hand and cupped her cheek, feeling her smile forming against the palm of his hand. "Funny how things work out."
The moment passed, and he took his hand away, and stepped back a little bit. He looked down into her still-smiling face, so eager to help, to learn, to see, to live. Not for the first time since meeting her, he was glad that he hadn't been wiped from existence, after all. "Where to next, then?"
End