Flower and Willow: Chapter 16

[timelord1]

Title: Flower and Willow
Rating: Teen <--Back to Teen rating!!
Pairing: 10/Rose
Category: Drama, Romance, Humor, Action/Adventure
Summay:On their way to visit old friends, the Doctor and Rose come across a mystery in one of Kyoto's geisha districts in US-Occupied Japan, 1948.
Notes: Once again, this chapter is posted without a beta, so any mistakes are mine. Any historical controversy is all on the part of the author, and no offense is intended.
Slight warning: I don't know that it qualifies as either whump or hurt/comfort, but be forewarned it could be construed that way. Also, I HAVE NOT seen "The End of Time" yet, so any inference to anything remotely close to that story is purely conjecture based on what rumors I've heard, and in no way an attempt to rewrite canon. Apologies in advance. :)


The sudden sunlight was almost blinding. It took Rose a minute or two before her eyes adjusted to the change in light. She was standing on a sidewalk in the middle of a busy Japanese neighborhood. Mikazuki was nearby, as was the motionless body of the Doctor, lying in an awkward heap on the sidewalk. Mikazuki kicked his shoulder and he flopped onto his back. Rose couldn’t see him breathing, but had been around him long enough to know that didn’t always mean anything.
 
“What happened – what did you do?” Rose demanded, taking a step towards Mikazuki. Was it possible that she looked even older than she had a moment ago inside the teahouse? Her hands were definitely more wrinkled and spotted than before, she noticed. The woman was glaring at her.
 
“Gaijin,” Mikazuki spat. “I will give you one opportunity to save your life. Take my hand.”
 
Rose narrowed her eyes. “Where are we?”
 
“You may remain with your dead friend and find out, if you wish. Or, you can return to Kyoto with me right now. I will give you a job in the teahouse, teach you to be a true geisha.”
 
“Right,” Rose said, crossing her arms. “I’m so gonna just leave the Doctor on the sidewalk and come work for you – as a hooker, not a real geisha – so you can murder some more people, because that sounds like a much better option than stayin’ here.”
 
Mikazuki’s smile gave Rose a sickening chill. “Perhaps once you realize where you are, you’ll understand that I was offering you a far better option than remaining here. You see, I can move back and forth between the present day and this particular day, and if I’m touching someone or something, I can take it with me. I can also leave it behind.” She clamped her eyes shut and shuddered with the effort of concentration and Rose watched as she began to age even more. A second later she had disappeared, leaving Rose alone on the sidewalk with the Doctor’s body.
 
She knelt beside him and started slapping his face. “Oh, wake up! I don’t know for sure where we are, but I think I know and it’s not good, so wake up right now!” She looked around, trying to find something that would confirm her fears (or do the opposite), but all she could see was a large clock in the distance that said it was eight in the morning.
 
The Doctor was completely limp, ashen-faced and, as far as she could tell, not breathing at all. She hauled off and belted him across the face as hard as she could, but his head only flopped back and forth like a doll’s. His skin was cold. She’d seen him down and out before; heard one heart stop beating and the other barely hanging on while he languished in near-death suspended animation. Even then there had been some sign of life: warm skin, the occasional breath, color in his cheeks. Now, he looked utterly lifeless. For some stupid reason her brain rewound the day to the moment by the canal when he’d given her the little twirl and marveled at the fact that they were on their first date. Of course, her brain focused on his smile and the way his beautiful eyes twinkled when he looked at her.
 
She sat on the sidewalk and pulled his body into her lap and held him. If they were where she thought they were, it wouldn’t be long before they were blown up anyway, so who cared if people stared at the weeping geisha holding the dead man in the foreign uniform?
 
“Please wake up,” she choked, crushing him close to her. “I don’t want to die alone.”
 
Of course he waited until she was a complete wreck to wake up. He always did. His eyes snapped open and he sprung out of her grip to fall back onto the sidewalk. He retched and coughed, spitting a gob of something Rose didn’t want to look at into the gutter.
 
“Oh, mama!” he cried, getting to his feet so he could shake off the rest of the poison. He beamed at Rose, spitting one more time, and wiped his eyes like he’d just woken from a long nap.
 
“Best trick I ever learned from a honey badger. Time Lord don’t care – he’s just gonna get right back up and keep on going,” he sassed, snapping his fingers. “Tetraodontoxin? Really? Now, if she’d tried cyanide, we’d have had a serious problem on our hands. I can slip into a deathlike torpor and let my spectacular immune system process pufferfish venom, but you give me a glass of cyanide and I’ve got minutes, maybe seconds, to run a manual detox or I’m toast. Not as bad as aspirin, though. Have I ever mentioned aspirin to you, Rose? Never, ever give me an aspirin. Little white tablets of death, those are. D’you know that in Haiti and West Africa, they use tetraodontoxin in their zombie-making rituals? I think I was technically a zombie there for a few minutes when I was shambling about the teahouse, trying to hold my head up and remember how to speak. Didn’t get the slightest craving for brains, though.” He mused, looking at the sky for a moment before turning his attention back to Rose. “Where are we? And why does my jaw hurt?”
 
Rose threw her arms around him and went to kiss him, but he put his hand up, catching her lips with his fingers. He shook his head, retched again, and spit out another yellowy gob onto the sidewalk.
 
“Still processing. Definitely a bad time to kiss me. I mean, besides the whole spitting up poison thing, I really want to brush my teeth before you get in there again if you don’t mind.” He winked and hugged her back, resting his face against her shoulder. “I love these ‘Oh, I thought you were dead but I’m so glad you’re not!’ hugs. Now, where are we?”
 
She hadn’t been able to stop crying, so she sniffed and wiped her face on the sleeve of her kimono. “I think we’re in Hiroshima.”
 
The Doctor looked around and when he spotted a building with a domed roof, his shoulders slumped like someone let the air out of him.
 
“Bomb Dome,” he said. We’re less than two hundred meters from the hypocentre. Have you seen a newspaper – do you know what day it is?”
 
Rose put one hand on her hip. “Yeah, because while I thought you were dead, I was also curious about what day it was so I knew what to have put on your headstone! No, I haven’t seen a newspaper, but that crazy bitch from the teahouse said she could move back and forth between the present day and here, so I’m guessing today’s the day.”
 
The Doctor spun around again and saw the clock. “Nonononono that’s not enough time! We’ve got less than ten minutes to get out of here!”
 
Rose sunk away from him and her face crumpled. It was the first time since she’d met him that the Doctor looked genuinely afraid. The look of panic on his face froze her blood. “But, you’ll get us out of here, won’t you?” she asked. Her voice sounded so small.
 
He looked at her, wild-eyed, his brows knitted together. “I can’t,” he said. “We’ve got no TARDIS.”
 
*****
 
His mind was processing every possible scenario, running simulations and calculating odds at a dizzying pace. In the end it came to just two options; try to run (best possible outcome: make it into the predicted survival zone to suffer flash burns, shrapnel damage, radiation sickness and possibly burn alive in the firestorm), or sit down and wait to be vaporized (best possible outcome: relatively painless death). Neither option was acceptable.
 
8:09 AM
 
When he’d looked at the clock his senses had locked onto local time and kept prodding him with reminders. You’re going to die in six minutes. Please prepare.
 
There had to be something. Rose is going to die in six minutes. Get out of here! Five minutes, thirty seconds.
 
His head was pounding. He kept looking around as his brain worked, and he noticed several odd bundles scattered on the sidewalk. Not bundles. They were bodies. As he watched, a woman in a familiar brown kimono appeared out of thin air, holding the collar of a slumped man in uniform. She set the body down, gave it a kick, and vanished again. He ran to the nearest body and knew without assessment that the man, and all the others on the street like him, were dead. Humans didn’t have the option of going into torpor to process pufferfish venom. The question was, how was she able to move from this point in history to what was her present day in 1948 Kyoto? If the TARDIS hadn’t shut down on him in the middle of processing the readings he’d taken, he might have the answer.
 
8:10.
 
The irony of the situation made him smirk. The TARDIS decided to have a tizzy and give him the cold shoulder in what had turned out to be the one moment he needed her the most.
 
Mikazuki popped in once again, dropped off another body, and vanished. They were so close to the hypocentre that the bodies would be vaporized by the bomb. No trace, except for possibly a dark patch on the sidewalk. Which is what he and Rose were going to be if he didn’t come up with something fast. Rose was standing beside him, chewing her bottom lip and looking up at him in terrified silence. She took hold of his hand and squeezed. He couldn’t let her die here, but it was too late to try to run.
 
Maybe there was something he could discern from the readings stored in the sonic. He took it out of his pocket and was surprised at how warm it felt in his hand. Pulsating warmth, like a heartbeat. The end that usually glowed bright blue was pulsing amber light.
 
8:11.
 
He could hear the rumble of an approaching plane in the distance. Focus! He studied the end of the sonic, staring at it to try and figure out what it was doing. The last time he’d used it was when he’d stuck it in the port on the TARDIS, just before she’d gone dark. Maybe she hadn’t shut him out, maybe she’d been diverting power in case…
 
“If I had Huon particles, I could bring her to me,” he said aloud, staring at the amber glow coming from the sonic. Snatches of ideas were coming into his mind. “Reverse a teleport. If I had sufficiently agitated particle energy…”
 
The atomic blast at Hiroshima released Gamma and Neutron radiation – Gamma radiation, the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation available on earth. Not a Huon particle, but there was going to be an abundance of them in three minutes and fifteen seconds.
 
“Got it,” he said, grabbing Rose’s hand and sprinting towards Bomb Dome. If she knew they were running towards the hypocentre, there’s no telling what she would do.  His head was thundering as necessary information poured in and got processed.
 
15 kiloton energy yield, flung out across the city in a white fireball. He could harness the energy yield, primitive though it was, and lock on to the TARDIS which, beautiful ship that she was, was probably at that moment diverting all its power to the Vortex to lock onto any sort of signal from the sonic. She was out there, his TARDIS, reaching out her hand through time and space to grasp them and bring them home. She had to be. Bomb detonation came 43 seconds after deployment, which would be in about a minute and a half. He adusted the sonic as they ran, calculations racing in his mind as fast as his legs pumped towards the spot just shy of the Aioi Bridge. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t matter.
 
8:13.
 
Sunlight gleamed off the silver hull of the flying superfortress miles overhead. The people of Hiroshima had no idea what was about to hit them. A young woman in a brown kimono was walking near the bridge, carrying a basket on her way to the market.
 
“Rose,” he said, locking the final setting into the sonic. “Grab onto my belt and do not let go.”
 
“What’s happening?” she asked, her dark eyes wide as saucers.
 
“We’re going for a ride,” he said, grabbing a handful of her hair and holding her head close to his chest. “Keep your eyes closed and your head down.”
 
Jackie Tyler’s voice popped into his head. Keep your head down, Doctor…
 
8:14.
 
Bomb bay doors were opened. The bomb was starting to fall. He checked the setting again, just to make sure.
 
Find us, my beautiful TARDIS. Find us!
 
He held his arm in the air and pressed the button, closing his eyes and lowering his head. Rose was clutching his belt, burying her head in his chest. He clutched her so tightly his hand started to cramp.
 
The white chute on the bomb deployed. The chain reaction was already beginning, a few hundred meters directly above them.
 
He hadn’t accounted for the Electromagnetic Pulse. He looked up, flicking one more setting on the sonic to guard against the pulse that could shut down the sonic and leave them there to die. As a result, he was staring straight up in the air in the instant the bomb completed its initial chain reaction and burst overhead in a searing white flash.
 
They were flung like toys towards the woman in the brown kimono, slamming into her right shoulder as every other living thing and most of the buildings around them vanished in the silent fury of the bomb. They were not there to feel the 34 kilopascals of pressure from the shockwave, or have their eardrums ruptured by the Mach stem. Fission byproduct and steam shot into the stratosphere in a dense mushroom cloud and the Doctor and Rose were propelled three years forward in time, straight into the waiting TARDIS.
 
Mikazuki Aoko, the woman in the brown kimono, was accidentally brought forward in time with them. The TARDIS shook her off like a bug, depositing her somewhere around the same approximate time frame without regard for her safety or condition. The TARDIS had her Doctor and her Rose back, and would not concern herself with ancillaries.
 
*****
 
An hour after dawn the next day in the 1948 Kyoto timeline, Lieutenant Bob Pace forced his way into the Chrysanthemum Teahouse, his sidearm drawn. He swept from room to room, searching for the Doctor and his girl, but only found Mikazuki Aoko, the proprietress, collapsed in the hallway outside the private room. The official report listed her death as natural causes; old age. She was twenty-five years old.
 
*****
 
Rose was lying on her back on the floor of the TARDIS control room. Her head was screaming for relief from its throbbing ache and when she sat up she felt a warm trickle spilling down from her nose and over her lips. She wiped her hand across her face and it came back bloody.
 
“Doctor?” she cried, hauling herself slowly to her feet. The room was spinning and she sat down in the seat by the controls, holding the sides of her head with her hands. The TARDIS was idling patiently and Rose could tell by the way the seat was vibrating that they were in flight. Her scalp was itching and she scratched it. To her horror she felt the hair she touched break off in her hands and come out in clumps.
 
“Doctor!”
 
“Over here,” he said, his voice eerily calm. She saw him then. He was on his hands and knees near the doors, head bowed, breathing with deep, measured breaths. The top of his head was a mess of raw blisters, and his shirt was a torn mess. The sonic was on the floor beside him, warped like a pair of sunglasses left on a car dashboard on a hot day.
 
She could feel blood dripping from her nose. “Something’s wrong,” she said. That didn’t begin to cover it. She felt weak, like she would pass out if she closed her eyes for a moment.
 
“Yeah, a bit. But we’re not dead, so we’ve got that going for us,” he said. “Can you do me a favor, please?” She hated the calm in his voice. That terrified her more than anything else. He wouldn’t look up at her, but just kept his head down. She saw spatters of blood on the floor beneath him.
 
“Yeah,” she said. “What?”
 
“Could you give me a hand getting up? I’m having a little trouble seeing.”
 
She stumbled over to him and knelt beside him. She put her fingers gently under his chin and lifted his face so she could see it. And what did he do, with what looked like a sunburn from hell strafed across his face, blood coming from his nose, and his eyes so swollen they were barely able to open? He smiled at her, of course.
 
“You’re not going to believe this,” he sputtered with a nervous laugh. “But this was the one occasion where I actually should have listened to your mother. I’m never going to live it down.”
 
She got under his arm and helped him to his feet as best she could, given how weak she felt. He put his arm around her and felt her forehead with the back of his other hand.
 
“You’re burning up. It’s got to be radiation sickness, probably advanced because of the way we came through time to the TARDIS. Let’s get you to the infirmary and you can take one of my secret stash of black pills. I think I have a couple left. Hope I do. Handy little buggers. I think I’ll take mine with a Pethedine chaser, as long as we’re going to be in there. How’s your pain, Rose?”
 
They staggered and the Doctor winced when he slammed into the doorway. “You might have to give me a little help around corners. That flash got me but good. Shouldn’t have looked up, but I had to adjust for the EMP at the last second, or it would have all been for nothing. Just flash-blind, is all. I’m sure of it.”
 
“You don’t sound sure,” Rose said, leading the short way into the infirmary, which the TARDIS had kindly moved to the forward hallway off the control room. She helped the Doctor into a chair and leaned against the exam table to catch her breath. Her hands were white and it wasn’t from the geisha makeup.
 
“Are you all right?” he asked. “I mean, I know you’re not all right, but your breathing is shallower than I’d like it to be.”
 
“It’s shallower than I’d like it to be, too,” she said. “Where are these magic black pills?”
 
“In the red-paneled cabinet on the wall,” he answered, leaning his head back. When the top of his head touched the wall, he drew in a sharp breath and drooped forward in the chair. “Ouch. There’s a blue bottle in there, or should be.”
 
Rose found the bottle among a row of glass phials. She found a phial marked “Pethedine” and took that out as well, along with a needle. The blue bottle felt empty, but when she gave it a shake she heard at least a couple of pills rattling around inside. She opened the lid. There were two black discs inside, about the size of Necco wafers.
 
“Two left,” she said.
 
The Doctor smiled. “Perfect. I’ve got to put that on my list to get more. Brilliant, they are. Too bad they’re so hard to find. Take one right now – just swallow it dry. Should start reversing the effects of the radiation sickness in about fifteen minutes.”
 
She took hers and put the other disc in his outstretched hand so he could take his. He popped the pill and swallowed, then wiped the blood away from his nose and felt his eyelids, frowning.
 
“It was just the flash,” he said softly, as if he were trying to soothe himself. “It’ll be all right.” He took a breath and raised his head in Rose’s general direction. “Now, if you could help me with that Pethedine, I’d be most appreciative. You’ve drawn up an injection before. I need about 10 cc’s.”
 
“What’s it for?” Rose asked. She stuck the needle into the phial and drew out the liquid, squirting out the excess until there was exactly 10 cc’s with no air in the syringe. She started to hand it to him, then stopped. “Do you want me to give it to you?”
 
He nodded, taking off what was left of his uniform shirt and pushing up the sleeve of his undershirt. He pointed to the outside of his shoulder. “Right in there would be good. Pethedine is akin to morphine. Burn’s a bit uncomfortable.”
 
She did as he instructed, and within a few moments she saw him begin to relax.
 
“Much better,” he said with a sigh. “You feeling any better yet?”
 
“Still pretty weak,” she said. “But not as dizzy.”
 
He smiled. “Excellent. Could I get you to do just one more thing for me? Now that I’ve got that lovely, lovely painkiller in my system, I thought if you could just pry the swelling open on one eye and have a look. Describe what you see so I know for certain it’s just flash blindness and I can stop being such a ninny?”
 
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Rose said.
 
The Doctor scoffed. “You could run me over with a car right now and I’d just be mildly annoyed. I’ll tell you to stop if it starts to hurt.” She hesitated and he fumbled with his hand until he caught hold of hers. “Please. Just look. I can’t wait for the swelling to go down.”
 
She brought his hand to her lips and gave it a kiss, then let go and put her fingers gently on either side of his eyelid. She pulled as lightly as she could and saw his jaw clench, but kept going so she only had to do it once. The part of the eyeball that was supposed to be white was bright red. The pupil had a grayish cast to it. She made a little noise in her throat and let go.
 
“All right,” he said with a sigh. “Definitely a bit more than the flash, then. Still, better than both of us dead, right? Right. So, I guess it’s time I taught you how to fly the TARDIS, since I won’t be doing it any time soon.”