keep_counting | Fic: The Detective (Doctor Who) (AU

Title: The Detective
Characters/Pairings: Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Sarah-Jane Smith, Idris, Martha Jones, Donna Noble, Jack Harkness and the Master - slight Ten/Rose
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Slight spoilers for some of what goes on in the first season of BBC's Sherlock, crackish, meta-humor all around.
Genre: AU/Crossover/Friendship/Adventure/Crime/Drama
Word-count: 3,561
Disclaimer: I don't own anything in relation to this.
A/N: This is not exactly a crossover: this is basically the idea sprung from a mental image of Ten as Sherlock Holmes and Rose as John Watson. I had to write that, naturally.
Summary: "I solve crimes," he said. 'Hell yes', Rose Tyler thought.

”You know,” she said one afternoon, newspaper lowered so she could peek at him over it. ”I always thought that after I’d finished school and grown up a bit, life was supposed to get less crazy.”

His response was looking at her like she was the odd-ball in the family.

oOo

It had all happened rather randomly and unseemly, after her old landlord had kicked her out. It wasn’t that Harriet Jones was a bad woman, far from it, but considering Rose’s lack of paying rent for the last… well, let’s just say several months, and the fact that she still hadn’t found a proper job, well, the woman had had little but no choice, really. And Rose didn’t blame her. Though it was quite a smack in the face to suddenly stand without roof over your head.

It wasn’t her fault that apparently no-one wanted someone with her skills. It might possibly have something to do with the fact that not even Rose herself could actually define those skills, but they revolved around gymnastics, being observant and wanting to care for people. Oh, and adventure. She certainly wanted that.

So, circus artist. Right.

No, she really needed to either a) find a job, or b) find a roommate.

Which was honestly easier said than done. Not even her mother wanted to live with her.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” she’d said over the phone. “There simply isn’t any room.”

Okay, so maybe there wasn’t any room and maybe her mother just wanted to give her a proper push so that she might actually get to do something with her life, and not end up in some dead-beat job where she would sit and contemplate various and creative ways of suicide instead of actually following the boss’ order. It didn’t help that she had inherited Jackie’s complete lack of respect for authorities and so had been sacked from her last job for punching her boss in the face.

Really, punching stupid, misogynist assholes in the face should be considered legal. Instead it got you fired and, ultimately, kicked out of your home.

But it was all of these events – the punching-of-the-boss-in-his-stupid-face, the lack of a job, the getting kicked out of her apartment – that made her end up crashing on Mickey’s couch for a few days. It was actually sort of nice, if it wasn’t for the big glaring obvious fact that she couldn’t stay long, because she needed to move on and she couldn’t just horn in on her ex-boyfriends hospitality forever (even if she really wanted to at this point), and it did give her a breather where she could actually relax a bit and think of what she wanted to do.

And so, for once in the short but somewhat miserable life of Rose Marion Tyler, all she actually had to do was sit and watch as event unfolded around her, and she was finally granted the single greatest opportunity of her life.

And the magic word was investigation.

“She’s a journalist,” Mickey explained one morning over cornflakes and re-runs of Star Trek (and really, science-fiction had never really been Rose’s thing, what with all the aliens that conveniently looked like humans). “Smith, her name is, just like mine, Sarah-Jane Smith.”

“So not just like yours,” she couldn’t help but tease, but Mickey didn’t even notice, just keep prattling on about this odd woman who had apparently recently interviewed him about hacking or computers or possibly steam engines or something (Mickey tended to talk even more than Jackie, and Rose sometimes wondered if she just picked these types because of their gob).

“But she apparently knows this guy who needs a roommate,” he finished off, and immediately Rose’s attention was gained.

“Really?” she asked. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing,” Mickey said. “Or at least, I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean, ‘you don’t think so’?”

“Well, I don’t actually…”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he a terrorist bomber?”

“No, I’m pretty sure.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Dunno either, but Sarah-Jane sounded impressed every time she spoke about him,” Mickey finally said. “Though there was a bit of irritated fondness there as well.”

Rose frowned. “So, you want me to just move in with some guy that neither of us know anything about?”

“Hey, Sarah-Jane vouched for him, that’s pretty good,” he defended. “And I didn’t say you should move in with him this second, but it’s worth a look, isn’t it?”

Rose smiled slightly. “Yeah. Yeah I guess it is.”

oOo

And that was pretty much how she came to meet… the Doctor.

“Smith,” he said, smiling brightly. “John Smith, but everyone calls me the Doctor, so if you please, you may also call me the Doctor. In fact, it would probably please me more than it would you, I can’t imagine you would care that much what you called me, unless it was something completely silly that made you laugh or something completely outrageous like ‘Alonzo’ or something. Isn’t that just a great name though? You don’t meet many people in Britain with it however, and believe me I’ve checked. Mind you, not that a lot of people in England like being stopped in the middle of the street and be asked for their name. So prickly, aren’t you all?”

Rose blinked. “Um… aren’t you English as well?”

“Ah, yes, of course,” he said, as if just realizing the fact. “So, very prickly the lot of us are. What did you say your name was again?”

“I didn’t,” she said and couldn’t help but smile. “But it’s Rose. Rose Tyler.”

“Nice to meet you Rose,” he said, reaching out to shake her hand, and all she could do was shake it back and wonder if now was a good time to run for her life. “As I said, my name is John Smith, but I would very much like it if you called me the Doctor.”

“Okay, so… so you’re a doctor?”

“Oh no, not at all,” he said, frowning as if the question in itself was weird. “No, far from it. Didn’t Sarah-Jane tell you what I did?”

“Uh no, she wasn’t… she just said it was something special, something I might not have heard of. I thought you might, like, cure cancer or something,” Rose admitted, feeling embarrassed. “I dunno.”

“Oh it’s nothing like that. Wouldn’t it be great though?” his brown eyes lifting towards the ceiling as if lost in his own little world of dreaming. “No, what I do is… well, not as important. Though important to some people. It’s important to me. I think it’s important to Martha. I’d say she does appreciate it, what I do I mean, even if she rolls her eyes quite a lot,” he looked back at her then. “It’s amazing isn’t it, the way you girls all roll your eyes as if you think us men can’t see. I always notice. Well, not always, I mean, I wouldn’t know it if there were some times I hadn’t noticed, because I wouldn’t have noticed them.”

Rose blinked. “Quite,” was all she could think to say. Clearly now was a good time to runrunrun. “And what exactly is it that you do?”

“I solve crimes,” he said. ‘Hell yes,’ Rose thought.

So, suffice to say, she didn’t run for her life, not this time, and before she knew it he had swept her away and landed her opposite a building.

A very blue building.

The door to said very blue building was flung open and a woman stormed out; it was hard to guess her age, her long brown hair and smooth skin making her look only a few years older than Rose herself, but her dress was long and heavy and possibly fashioned by Queen Victoria herself. Rose was slightly amused.

“I’m Idris,” the woman said, practically bouncing where she stood and there were matching grins on their faces, the Doctor and this Idris, their land-lady as it were. They looked like two children, like brother and sister.

“Let me guess, Idris Smith?” Rose asked and wondered if they were all just one big family, Sarah-Jane and the Doctor and this crazy woman.

“Do you want to see the apartment?” Idris asked, her gaze focused extremely intently on Rose. “Or have you already seen it?”

“She hasn’t seen it,” the Doctor said. “But she’s about to. That is, if you still want to, Rose?” he reached out a hand to her, just like that, like they had been friends for years, like they’d been through thick and thin together already. “What do you say? Want to come with me?”

She took his hand.

oOo

“You sleep with your screwdriver by your bed?”

“You never know when you might have use of a screwdriver, Rose.”

oOo

Rose had wanted adventure, and it seemed like she had gotten it. Just one day living together with this crazy consulting detective or whatever he wanted to call himself and she had already been kidnapped.

“So, you live with John Smith?” the woman asked, the fluorescent light from the warehouse lamps falling in a green shade over her form. She was wearing a suit, much like said John Smith, though hers was a dark shade of blue instead of the brown pinstripes he seemed to prefer. And she had a sort of commanding presence, though she managed to have it while both sounding and looking bored.

“Um… well… almost,” Rose mumbled. “Is this… am I in some kind of trouble?”

The woman’s eyes lit up. “Oh, no-no, not at all.” Then she blinked and straightened, suddenly looking incredibly menacing again. “That is, unless you want to start some.”

“I don’t!” Rose assured her. “Not at all…”

“Because space-boy might seem all high and mighty, but he has this stupid tendency to constantly get hurt…”

“Space-boy?”

“And he has this stupid preference for girls, and it’s not even in a creepy weird way, it’s in a genuine falls-mad-in-love way, I mean everything with Romana was a mess and then there was River or was it Melody? They were all blonde, you can’t expect me to remember.”

“Of course,” Rose just said, not following at all, but too scared to do anything but agree with this mad person. “Um… so… space-boy?”

The woman smiled. “He wanted to be an astronaut when he was little.”

“Oh! Oh, so you’re his…”

“I’m his sister,” the woman finished for her. “I’m Donna. Donna Noble. And you better be good to my little brother, or I will slap you so hard you’ll spin all the way into the future, got it?”

“Yes,” Rose said. “Got it.

oOo

“You didn’t tell me your family was rich,” Rose said to him as she returned back home, just in time to watch one of the Doctor’s latest inventions explode in the kitchen. Foam everywhere. Great.

“My family?” he mumbled absently, as if not sure what she was talking about. But he had to know, because hello, limousine and henchmen and suits. It was all a bit dodgy and all a bit magnificent. “Ah, you’ve met Donna.”

“Yes,” Rose said. “Charming woman.”

“Did she threaten to kill you?”

“No, she just said she’d punch me if I wasn’t nice to you.”

“Really?” he asked, squinting at her through his safety-goggles. “Huh. She must like you.”

oOo

It was another three days before Rose got to meet Martha Jones. She hadn’t wanted to pry, had assumed that she was his girlfriend and that he was sure to tell her when he felt like the time was right. They hadn’t even known each other for a week.

Though the events of that week made it feel like it had been years. In a sort of good, oh-god-we-almost-got-killed kind of way. If that could fall under any ‘good’ category known to man.

Rose had wanted adventure. That’s what she got.

“Well, I don’t know how fast it’s spreading,” Martha Jones, Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard hissed, her warm breath making fog through the cold night air. “But we do have definite proof that it’s a person doing it; it’s not just some rats accidentally catching it and then passing it on to humans. This is biological warfare and there’s a serious mastermind behind.”

“A mastermind, huh?” the Doctor said, and Rose didn’t know if she should be excited or disturbed over the fact that he was smiling so widely. People were dead.

People were dead and he said he was going to stop it. And for some completely unfathomable reason, Rose was completely sure that he would.

That was incidentally also how she got to meet Jack Harkness, who had mixed the chemicals and sold the chemicals and made a fortune on the chemicals, but honestly hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. But that was probably a story for another day.

“See you later,” he’d said and winked at her, and she’d thought he was hand-cuffed and on his way into a police-car, but then all of the sudden everyone was shouting and Martha was glaring at the Doctor who only lifted his eyebrow, as Jack Harkness slipped away into the darkness again.

“Thought we might need a favour one day,” he told Rose as they walked home later. “Always nice to have some ready to be cashed in.”

oOo

It hadn’t been Jack Harkness, so it had to be someone else.

“He doesn’t use a name,” the Doctor said. “Just like me! He just calls himself…”

“The Master.”

“Exactly! Isn’t it brilliant?”

“Doctor… people are dead.”

“Yes,” he sobered immediately. “That of course, isn’t so brilliant. But the rest of it! Isn’t it just amazing?”

She couldn’t not answer his winning grin. “It’s plain fantastic,” she told him.

oOo

“What is it your sister does exactly?”

“She runs the country.”

“What? Excuse me?”

“Sorry, I thought I’d stopped mumbling. It’s just that this article is so fascinating. Did you know that time travel might well be possible in the future? Only I would think, if they invented time travel in the future, wouldn’t we know about it already? I mean, they should be able to travel back, shouldn’t they? If I invented a time machine in the future, I would simply travel back in time and give it to myself, thus rendering me having to build a time machine unnecessary. Wouldn’t that be great, having a time machine? We could go visit Shakespeare!... sorry, you were saying something?”

“No. Nevermind. And a time machine sounds great.”

oOo

The next time Donna kidnapped her, she at least just brought her to a coffee-house.

“He likes you,” the older woman told her, sipping her coffee like it was the nectar of the gods. “You’ve lasted much longer than the others.”

“Eh, the others?”

“Yes. His other friends. His other girlfriends. His other flatmates. Seriously, the man burns through them like a chain-smoker burns through cigarettes. It’s like he just can’t stand still, and not a lot of people have the patience for all of that. Not to mention the gob, the weird experiments and… have you seen the screwdriver?”

“Yes,” Rose said. “He mentioned something about making it into a device that could unlock doors and things?”

Donna rolled her eyes. “He’s been saying that for years. Just smile and nod. It’s what I do.”

Yep, Rose thought. She is definitely part of the British Government.

oOo

She couldn’t believe that he had sent her away. His life was in mortal danger – the Master was a complete madman, and yet he had sent her away.

“Drive faster,” she shouted at the taxi-driver, because she had to be there, had to get there in time.

“Easy there, we’ll make it love.” And she freezes, everything inside her turning to ice, because she knows that voice and the Master turns around to grin brightly at her.

oOo

“Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“Why do you call yourself that? ‘The Doctor’ I mean. Why not ‘The Detective’?”

“You don’t think ‘The Detective’ sounds a bit… pompous?”

“I dunno.”

“It’s because I want to help people.”

“Come again?”

“I call myself the Doctor because I want to help people.”

oOo

“Comfortable?”

“You might be surprised at this,” Rose said, her tone sharp. “But lying in the back of a car, strapped in explosives with a madman standing over you, is not exactly a situation that leaves anyone feeling comfortable.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he grinned down at her. “I could imagine worse.”

Unfortunately, so could Rose.

“Don’t worry,” he said, in a tone that clearly told her that his words where hogwash and there was good reason to worry. “I only want to kill the Doctor. You’re just a pawn.”

“Thanks, I feel much better now.”

“Thought you might.”

She frowned. “He’s not going to play your little game you know. He might be amused now, but what you’re doing is wrong.”

“Nah, I think you’re wrong about that.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets, leaning back a little. “I think he is much more like me than he wants to admit. The first of his kind. And soon, the last of his kind as well.”

“Well, you are as dramatic as him, I must say.”

He laughed. “Ready for the show darling?”

Rose bit her lip, willing herself not to shake, not to pale, not to show her fear. Martha, please come soon. Donna, anyone. Please be here. Please don’t let him get hurt.

oOo

“Are you bothered by it? I mean, I suppose you could call me ‘John’ if you would rather.”

“Nah, I kinda like it. It fits.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. You do help people. And I want to help people too.”

“So what should your name be? ‘The Assistant’?”

“Oh please! An assistant just assists, I am much more than that. You can’t tie your own shoe-laces without me.”

“Not true!”

“It’s very true!”

oOo

“Oh, come on, just give me what I need,” the Master sighed, shoulders rolling, arms flailing in an exaggeration of his annoyance. “Seriously. It’s not like you have a choice. Your little friend is going to blow sky-high if you don’t.”

“I don’t think you’re in a position to threaten much,” the Doctor said. “No matter what you do, they’re going to get you. I’ve set them on your tail. Nowhere is safe.”

“Oh yada, yada,” he hissed. “What’s it to you? She’ll still be dead.”

“No she won’t,” Rose said, because she may just be a sad drop-out with no career and no future, but she was Jackie Tyler’s daughter and she had faced down madmen before, hell, she lived with one, and she was not going to die here, like this where they’d have to put the remains of her body in little bags and ship them off to her relatives. And she wasn’t going to let him hurt the Doctor.

So she tackled him to the floor instead.

oOo

“What about Companion?”

“What?”

“Well, for when I introduce you to people. ‘Friend’ sounds so common. And you’re clearly not happy about ‘the Assistant’. So you could be my companion instead.”

“Doesn’t that sound a bit like I take money for sex though?”

“Aw come on! Honestly, sometimes you’re vulgar as a sailor, I swear.”

“You haven’t heard half of it.”

oOo

One really bad thing about explosives, especially homemade ones, is that they’re very unstable.

One very good thing about explosives, at least in this situation, is that they’re very unstable.

Because it gives the Doctor just enough time to get her out of the vest and pull her towards him, after she has crashed to the ground along with the Master.

Then, of course, the bomb goes off.

oOo

“I like that though.”

“What?”

“I mean, apart from the creepily implied sexual aspect, ‘companion’ actually sounds nice.”

“Yeah. Yeah it does.”

oOo

She wakes and everything is white.

“So, let’s not do that again anytime soon, okay?” the Doctor said, sitting by her bedside with a bandage plastered to one side of his forehead and his arm in a sling. “I mean, it was all good fun and games but next time you might be in a coma for more than three days, and you know I can’t go longer than that without tea. Or tying my shoe-laces.”

She could hear the worry in his tone, hidden behind joking and casualness and she reached out a hand, despite the pain and tiredness in her limbs, to just gently lay her hand over his.

“Sure,” she said. “We’ll blow things up with more safety precautions next.”

His grin was wide and as bright as the sun. “See,” he said. “This is why you’re the perfect companion.”

“Doctor?”

“Yeah?”

“Could the perfect companion maybe get some sleep?”

His smile turned soft and to her great surprise, he leaned over to softly kiss her on the cheek.

“Of course. I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah,” she said, drifting off. “Later.”

oOo

His response was looking at her like she was the odd-ball in the family.

“Honestly, Rose. All the craziness has only just started.”