Chapter Text
You can't erase the past.
He of all people knows that.
He knows how mutable time is, how it flows and alters -- and how far one can get away with bending it before it twists out of shape and tears holes in reality.
You only get one chance to be in one time and place. Only one chance to alter the course of events before you have to let them go.
But he knows the way to cheat, too.
History is really just recorded memory. And memories can be altered. Erased. Even rewritten.
The Time Lords knew how fragile time could be. It was why they would not interfere in the course of events unless it seemed absolutely necessary. Maverick that he was, he understood the fear but refused to be bound by it.
The Time Lords had always considered memory to be fair game.
* * * * *
There was a way to go about doing this. There were forms, structures, recognized steps to the dance. He had done many things over the centuries of his existence -- but it had been long enough since he'd tried some of them that he'd mostly forgotten how.
So the first time he raised the matter -- tested the waters with a vague allusion towards the idea that there was something of a very physical nature that he might be interesting in doing if she were so inclined -- it wasn't so much of a surprise that she turned him down flat. With an insulting rapidity, actually. But the real problem was the discomfort that set in after the topic had been raised and tabled, changing the mood in the room and sapping the joy from what had up to that point been a fairly convivial meal.
If he couldn't unsay it, he could at least go one better than having the pair of them fumbling their way around the gaping chasm in the conversation that was the exchange they were pretending hadn't happened.
Really, it was a kindness to the girl, making her forget the thing he would rather not have said. The last thing he wanted to do was make her uncomfortable around him.
It was important that she stay. (How important, was a matter he wasn't inclined to examine. Introspection he tended to avoid out of sheer self-preservation.)
And all it took was a touch.
Ten minutes of memory gone, just like that.
She'd never miss it -- and she was so much happier with it gone...
* * * * *
If he'd had any sense (and really, he never had), he'd have let the matter drop. But days and then weeks passed, in the unmarked subjective fashion of those unhinged from the natural flow of events, and at some point he started to get the sense that she'd welcome him raising the matter again/for-the-first-time. And so he did, gleeful bravado ever being a strong suit, and she turned him down again. But not so badly this time -- as though she'd welcomed the indication of interest on his part, though she didn't share it. Less of a subtext of, "And let us never speak of this again," and more of a, "Try me again later on."
And so he would have let it stand, had she not made a little joke about it some time later. Not too much time -- a matter of hours -- and not really a cruel joke, but it wasn't a subject he was inclined to feel humorous about.
It occurred to him later that she might have actually been flirting with him a bit, and he hadn't recognized it at the time.
But by then it was too late, for he'd already taken those hours from her memory.
* * * * *
It was with a sense of obligation that he offered "Rickey" another opportunity to join them on the TARDIS. The boy had come through for them when it really counted and made the tough decision. And his companion might want a companion of her own, bright sociable being that she was.
It was with no particular sense of surprise that he heard Mickey's refusal. The boy hadn't come far enough from the paralytic terror of their last meeting to joyously run aboard an alien spaceship. The one thing that might have done it would have been following Rose -- if he loved her enough.
Either he didn't, or he'd gotten the point when his girlfriend pried herself from his arms and ran away with a strange (very strange) older (centuries older) man. She'd made a choice then, even if Mickey -- or Rose herself -- didn't quite realize what it had been yet.
He was only relieved Mickey turned the offer down because he didn't quite trust the lad not to freeze up in a crisis again.
It wasn't at all that he didn't want to have to share her attention with someone else.
* * * * *
He made the offer again, not too many hours after the adrenalin rush of near-destruction had faded a bit. Still not accepted, though there was a definite sense that she might agree if given time to think about it.
He couldn't stand the suspense, and took her memory of the question away after too many hours of fretting over what she'd eventually decide.
She had a better reaction every time he laid the matter before her. Either he was getting better at bringing it up, or she was getting more and more fond of him as they spent time together.
He'd try again later.
* * * * *
He didn't examine his motivations for booting that Adam lad off the TARDIS. He'd had travelling companions he wasn't particularly fond of, but he'd generally let them stay until they chose to leave or circumstances took them away.
He'd joked about Adam being Rose's new boyfriend in a very pointed manner, daring her to confirm or deny the allegation.
It was nothing to him if Rose wanted to bring a boy along. And she was having such fun showing off for the lad, too. If it made her happy, it made him happy.
Such a shame Rose's pet didn't work out. Such a relief that Rose was on the same page about dropping him off home -- it could have gotten messy if she'd tried to argue that Adam had just made a mistake and deserved a second chance. Either she'd have talked him into keeping the pest around (and given him the opportunity to screw up again), or he'd have upset her insisting (and risked her demanding to be taken home herself).
Disposing of the "competition" was beneath him. There was no "contest" taking place. He wasn't trying to "win" anything (or anyone).
* * * * *
She said yes.
She said yes and it should have been wonderful.
But he wanted perfection -- he wanted to be smoothly competent and surprising her with his amazing skills in yet another arena of expertise. Instead they fumbled about trying to figure out each other's desires and reactions, he in this still-new body that hadn't been put through this particular set of paces yet and she with a self-confidence in her abilities out of all proportion to her actual experience. A well-matched pair in their mutual clumsiness.
It could have been an endearing memory, to be followed by better ones after he learned how this incarnation wanted to go about this activity and she learned an infinite number of tricks outside her previous lovers' skills sets.
But it wasn't how he wanted her first memory of the two of them together to be.
She'd said yes now, she'd say it again later.
When she woke in the morning he was gone from her room, along with the memories of the night before.
* * * * *
A hard lesson to learn, the very finite limits of what alterations in history one could get away with. Much harder for her, learning it through such an emotionally fraught event. Having a father for the first time she could remember, only long enough to batter her heart with a sense of just what she had lost and couldn't steal back.
Afterwards, back on the TARDIS and well away from 1987 London, she came to him. This time she wasn't waiting for him to offer, she was asking.
She wanted comfort and he gave it. He couldn't give her what she'd wanted most, so he'd give her what he had.
He really dithered over it afterwards, while she slept. Was it better to leave her with the memory of the sweet to ease the bitter? Or would it get things off on the wrong foot, "starting off" with such painful associations?
In the end what decided him was the vague sense that he wasn't overly keen on being Rose's consolation prize in the place of the father she'd never had. The age difference made things dodgy enough without so explicitly linking himself to Peter Tyler.
Next time he'd let her keep the memories.
* * * * *
Jack Harkness couldn't have been a better destabilizing influence had he been designed for the purpose.
He'd been enjoying the process of growing more comfortable with Rose, looking forward to the point when he would undoubtedly figure out exactly how to intensify their relationship a bit without completely fucking things up. But after a single meeting with "Captain" Jack, Rose was showing an excess of initiative. He wasn't keen on trying things out with a witness -- someone to notice if Rose suddenly showed a few gaps in memory, someone to ensure that there wouldn't be any retries or "do overs."
He blamed Jack's omnivorous sexual charisma for putting ideas in Rose's head, without ever really considering the effects of the erasures on Rose's point of view. He saw ongoing progress with her -- but without the memory of the steps they'd made, she saw stagnation.
One thing Jack did turn out to be good for -- aside from helping with some of the always-postponed repairs and maintenance on the TARDIS -- was impartiality. If Rose seemed inclined to play Jack off against him as a motivating factor, Jack was just as happy to let himself be used to tease Rose. Whichever way the game ended up, he just wanted to be a player.
It turned out to be a surprisingly stable system, and out of reckless curiosity he let the game play out to Jack's satisfaction over the course of several days. The potential pairings were run through in rapid succession and by the third or fourth "night" they were on to figuring out whose bed seemed almost big enough to fit three comfortably.
There was a certain giddy thrill in letting someone else be in the driver's seat. The Doctor let matters go on for about a week before concluding that it had been fun but he couldn't very well go on leaving someone else in control. And he was barely confident of his ability to work a somewhat-sexual relationship with just one human without unpleasantness -- two was more than he thought he wanted to juggle long-term.
It seemed to be working out so very well, though. He liked having Jack around, and the three of them were having so much fun together.
He wanted to buy time to consider things before they became irrevocable.
* * * * *
When wiping two different people it was vital to ensure they didn't have any discrepancies to compare. Don't leave enough time between erasing the first and the second that they might run into each other and detect a problem. Make sure the pair of them were in the same places and doing the same things that they'd been on the morning he was sending them back to. When he'd decided to run this little threesome experiment, he'd made a mental note of a "zero point" to revert them to and what each of them had been doing at the time. Rose had her breakfast in the garden every morning, so there was no trick there, but he had to commit a very small act of sabotage in undoing the repair Jack had been making at the start time to get him back to it.
Jack gave him much to ponder on several levels. Setting aside the ongoing relationship experiment he'd disrupted and then contributed towards, there was his declared issue with having his memory tampered with. Hopefully a week wouldn't be as upsetting to Jack as two years, but just to be sure it was best he never found out. (Though, really -- how could one travel in time and balk at having their memory erased occasionally? How else to prevent creating paradoxes through foreknowledge of one's own subjective timeline? The Doctor was perhaps failing to sufficiently consider the effects of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect in preventing non-Time Lords from interacting with past and future versions of themselves.)
Jack was not Rose, nor from her time period, and so his reactions couldn't be used as a valid predictor of hers. Hopefully she wouldn't share his particular odd aversion to the odd bit of memory-tampering. Even if she'd had that strange reaction to learning of the telepathic translation effect, it wasn't at all the same kind of thing, and anyway she'd gotten used to it right away.
He still didn't believe it had been wrong to be removing the odd memory here and there. But he suspected it might upset his current pair of companions if they knew about it.
He'd think about the matter of Jack for a while. Next time he'd let things stand -- he wouldn't risk erasing memories again.
Meanwhile, they were off to Japan.