Disclaimer : The characters which follow do not belong to me. Obviously.
A/N : This is canon up until the moment Rose ends up trapped in the other universe. The story just wouldn't work if I included their conversation afterwards. Please forgive me. ;)
He didn't care. Life wasn't fair. Not paying any attention to what he was doing or where he would end up, he spun around a few wheels, pressed half a dozen buttons, and cranked down on the main lever, sending the ancient phone box hurtling once more through space and time. With a final kick against the central console, he sat down heavily on the metal floor and did what he did best. He thought. He thought about the times long in his past when he wasn't the only time lord. When he wasn't doomed to wander the furthest reaches of space, alone, staggering from one problem to another.
Rose was different. Her endless, and sometimes annoying, enthusiasm had reminded him of why he had become a time traveller in the first place. That rush of adventure and danger that he had almost become accustomed to was once again new and refreshing, and just when he thought he had finally found…
He quickly stopped that train of thought. There was nothing left he could do. No device ever created in the whole of time could accurately cross through the barriers of reality. Sure, there had been experiments on reality tunnelling, but they had all ended badly. For this world and for the one they were trying to reach. Most of the timelord's earlier jobs were preventing people from even attempting such a task. Rieland's Theory disproves even the possibility.
He snorted. That hadn't even been invented yet, and won't be for over a hundred thousand years. On Earth actually. Amazing what those apes will grow up to accomplish.
He glanced back up, looked at the course he had plotted, and punched the side of the console in disgust. Earth, London. April, 2006. Fantastic. For a brief instant he considered just grabbing Rose away from his past self and keeping her safe until everything with the Cybermen and the Darleks was over, but quickly discarded it. He knew first hand the consequences of meddling with things that were meant to happen. Besides he couldn't go back in time and fetch her, she didn't even exist in this reality any more. At the precise moment she was pulled through into the other reality, she would disappear again, no matter where she was. Not even the boundaries of the Tardis could protect her from that.
No, he would have to find a way to bring her back from there, and not mess with what had already happened. There had to be a way. He was the Doctor; He never lost. After adjusting his course slightly to end up somewhere on the far side of the moon, he sat back down, and continued thinking, allowing himself the faint glimmer of hope as a plan began to form in his mind.
When the whirling finally stopped, her face very quickly and suddenly met with the unforgiving floor. It took a moment for her to focus her mind on what had happened, and when the reality hit her, she could think of nothing but getting back as quickly as possible. Without thinking she activated her device again and prepared to be sent back to where she belonged; To the Doctor. Nothing happened.
"Rose," Pete said, pulling himself up off the floor, "the Doctor was closing the gap to the void. These devices are useless now."
"Doctor!" she shouted, her mind not willing to accept what was happening. "Doctor, where are you?" She rushed up to the wall where the breach in her world was and pressed her hands against it, as if trying to sense him on the other side of the wall. For a moment she thought she could hear the sound of the Tardis whirring, but then it was gone. The silence in the room was thick; each person only able to hear their own breathing and the faint sound of wind outside.
"It's not fair!" she screamed, banging her fists against the wall. "Why?"
How could she go back to living a life stuck on Earth after seeing but a fraction of the wonderful things across the whole Universe? To go back home, put the kettle on, and go out and get a normal job was just unthinkable. Ever since she had first stepped foot onto the Tardis she had never once regretted it, and had gradually believed that she would spend the rest of her life travelling the stars with her very own time traveller. It wasn't the life she had always dreamed of, but she wouldn't have changed it for anything.
The Doctor had told her that there was no way she would ever see Mickey again, and here he was. He had found a way to cross the worlds, but would the Doctor? Tiring herself out she turned around, only to be engulfed in a hug from her father, where she finally let out the tears she didn't even know she was holding back. She knew that she was probably never going to see the Doctor again, but just a few moments later, she felt a sudden warmth, and with it brought the hope that it might just be possible. If she had learnt one thing during her travels, it is that very little is impossible.
It was risky. Risky in the same sort of way of a mouse charging down a dinosaur. Twice. At least. It was basically going against the very first rule in the book of time travelling and being a successful timelord - if there was such a thing. To his knowledge it had never been done before; at least not by someone who truly understood the dangers; and definitely not without someone else nearby to help.
The question was, was it worth it? There was a good chance that even if he didn't destroy himself and the Tardis, along with a good portion of the galaxy, he still wouldn't be able to get Rose back. His left heart tightened at the thought of never being able to see her again, and so he decided to risk it. She risked her life to save him, and he would do the same. Composing himself, and clearing his mind of anything that might distract him he stood up at the console, opened it, and looked into the heart of the Tardis.
He could see nothing around him. Colours and shapes jumped and twisted all across his vision. Flashes of words, thoughts, images, nothing meaning anything to him. Just when he thought he couldn't take any more of it, things started to make sense. He understood the words. He could focus on the people and the places. Like a camera clicking into focus the last of the blurs became clear, and he saw everything.
Every person who had ever lived he could see, and knew everything about. He tried concentrating on one on Earth at the moment, and straight away knew everything he had done since the moment he was born up till then. He could see the possible futures for this person, not many lasting more than a mere sixty years, and then nothing. He tried again, reaching out further this time to other planets. Things were the same here. He knew everything about every single one of them; how old they were, likes, dislikes, even exactly how many atoms they were made up of.
He looked around again. Another planet now, where he knew someone would cause a fission reactor overload in exactly twenty-three days. He reached out with his mind to tweak things so he wouldn't.
"No!"
The voice made him stop. How was this possible? He knew everything, yet not where this voice came from. The very idea of something he didn't know scared him.
"That's not why we did this."
There was that voice again. We? An image of Rose flashed across his mind, and he remembered what he was trying to do. He looked back at the planet. It made sense now. The fission disaster was going to be the worst one ever seen in the planet's history, but the people would learn from it, and it narrowed the odds considerably of it ever happening again, and indeed preventing further disasters of it's kind.
"We need to get her back."
He knew it wasn't his place to meddle, but Rose belonged here. There was a gap in the possible futures that was unusually large. Each person affects the entire futures of everyone around them - within the light radius of course - but Rose was a major factor. Without her, the universe will take a very different path. No, she needed to be rescued. He looked around and studied every atom, but she wasn't there. He could see a few traces of hair and skin, but no more than that.
"She is in another universe."
Another universe? How was that even possible? He could see every atom that there was and ever would be, so how could there be even another universe. That was impossible.
"I've been there."
He looked into the memories he was being shown, and saw atoms he didn't recognise; his mind opened up once more. It was as though he had been studying a wall his entire life - knew every brick and every fault – and then turned around to see a whole city behind him. He needed to understand them; to see them all. He tried to reach out to them.
"Rose."
It was difficult. He had always understood everything he had seen, but now he was being told to ignore the first things in his entire existence he didn't know. He had to find Rose though. What he knew had to be protected first. He looked at the hairs he found that belonged to Rose, and it wasn't long before he found a match. He knew exactly where she was and how to get there. It all made sense now.
"Thank you."
He slipped back across to the familiar and comforting atoms he knew so well.
"I must go after her."
It wasn't possible in the Tardis. He knew how it worked. He had lived there his whole life; been grown inside it so that none would gaze upon the depths of the time vortex. However now he knew, and his mind was open in a way it never had been before. He glanced around and the Tardis sprang back to life. Parts that had never worked before now worked again – levers and panels that the Doctor had built out of pieces he could find lying around changed to how they originally looked – and finally with his new understanding of the way things worked added a final large red button onto the centre panel.
He then looked at the Doctor, and knew he was dieing. No living thing was meant to interact with him the way the Doctor had, and he was paying the price. There would be no regeneration this time. His atoms would simply fall away from one another, and it would be all over. Despite all the dangers they had been through together, the Doctor had always cared for him, and kept him safe. It was time to repay the favour.
With a blast of light the energy inside him burst out all at once, and back into the Tardis. A moment later, the Doctor fell to pieces. All that was left of the 10th generation timelord was a pile of dust.
A branch of light reached out and brushed against what was the Doctor, and the dust started to move. It glowed and spun around faster and faster, until it began to join together, and a minute later the Doctor was back, standing as good as new with a massive grin on his face.
"Thank you," he said again, as the last of the energy moved back into the console.
As the lid was closing, it paused for a moment, and a tiny ball of energy flew out and disappeared out through the wall of the Tardis. The Doctor looked confused for a moment, but then shrugged as the lid fell closed and all was calm again.
It was time to rescue Rose.
A/N : I believe that when Rose looked into the heart of the Tardis (HotT) she became 'Bad Wolf'. She wasn't quite Rose, and she wasn't quite HotT either. She was something different. What I tried for here is the Doctor's interaction with it, and almost creating a totally new identity. Not sure if this story even makes sense, but it did in my head! I have an idea on making this into a longer story, but I'm not sure if I should just leave it as is.
Your comments would be nice. Yes, you.