TITLE: Mutability

AUTHOR: Effie Perine

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing; if I owned Doctor Who there would have been more reasons for the Doctor to get naked. I have just enough money to see Pirates of the Caribbean next week, try suing me. All you'll get is 5 giant scarves and three different kinds of combat boots.

A/N: I don't want Rose to leave. For now this is a one-shot, and if I don't get another bottle of Effen vodka it's likely to stay that way. The vodka, btw, is the reason for all the philosophical rambling and anything that doesn't make sense. My beta reader is easily distracted. Resubmitting to fix some errors.

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What had attracted him to this particular TARDIS all those regenerations ago had been her character. While most TARDIS's had been cool machines of a benevolent but distant culture this one had a personality, a set of quirks that made it different then the others. By definition these little idiosyncrasies should have interfered with it's functioning but somehow it worked. The same could have been said about him. The moment he had seen the TARDIS he had fallen in love with it, though he was unfamiliar with the full meaning of that word at the time.

Some humans recognised the phenomena. If a machine was around long enough, kept working long enough it developed little quirks. A personality. Humans got quite affectionate, referring to them as a person, gave them names. He supposed he had gotten the same way. The TARDIS was wilful, stubborn, even mischievous, but he fancied that if she had achieved sentience after so many years or indeed been aware all along then she loved him as much as he loved her. They were both relics of a dead planet that no one now even really knew existed, alone but for each other. He had expected to live out the rest of his life like that, just him and the TARDIS and his guilt for the last of his regenerations until he parked the TARDIS on some corner of a blind world let himself fade and let her fade with him. The last of Gallifrey gathering dust, the blue box and the odd skeleton deep inside.

Now he could expect nothing more. The hope that had dared to burn in him had gone, along with the brave human girl who died in battle. The Doctor supposed it had been foolish of him to become so attached, the Timelords would have scoffed, have called him back to Gallifrey and seen to it he could no longer continue such an inappropriate entendre. The Timelords would never know Rose. She burned brighter then the suns, defiant and hopeful. She had burned through him despite the few paltry defences he had put up. The last him had known, probably from the first moment he took her hand but had tried to ignore it, only slipping now and then in moments of weakness, until that glorious horrifying moment when he realised that she saw everything he saw and it was killing her. In that moment he was not alone and the first human knew what it was like to be a Time lord.

There had been no point denying it then, and he had died for her. Then he as he was now with this knowledge came into existence. He gave her time to adjust, time to grow. She became magnificent. Then she was gone. All his genius managed a brief moment to talk, to hear her say it, to almost say it back but she was gone. Unreachable. It had almost been a relief to deal with a screaming redhead in a bridal gown just so he could put off that moment when the TARDIS was quiet and there was no one but him.

Just him and the TARDIS.

He spent a while just wandering. Random buttons, random places. A cause or two. He couldn't stop being The Doctor, not really. He needed to move.

This was the currant problem. He was not moving. The TARDIS had decided, apparently of her own free will, to pause right in the middle of a galaxy formed around a minor black hole only just far enough to stop being totally sucked in. He had yelled, fixed, meddled, calibrated and beat with a hammer for almost an earth month, all the time watching the gauges with a feeling of overwhelming panic. The TARDIS was powering herself, using a method that technically did not exist. Somehow she was doing it, and if she didn't stop soon all the power she was amassing would make them explode. Literally. The TARDIS could just not handle the amount of power building but yet she was taking more. He didn't know if it was necessity or spite that put all the lights on emergency backup for that month, not why he could not get any warm water. After a while the sense of panic had dulled, and he had tried reading and tinkering. Even spent a forgettable hour trying to knit. Eventually he had tried a traditionally human and slightly melodramatic gesture of Going To Bed and staying there. That had lasted almost a whole three hours. By the fifth week he was camped in the control room hoping inspiration would strike and he could stop this, whatever it was, from happening.

Maybe the TARDIS was just responding to him mood. Maybe both of them had gone through enough and it was time to stop. Maybe… maybe while he was pondering, the lights came back on. He just made it out of his makeshift bed in time to see the TARDIS controls start moving on their own.

----

The whole family had come to the mansion to see out the Dame's end despite the storm that raged outside. The nickname had been picked up almost a lifetime ago but it stuck, Rose would always think of her as the Dame. The sheer power of her personality was legend. She had taken Rose under her wing when she started at Torchwood and helped her adjust to a whole new way of life.

It was hard to equate the frail little woman in the bed with the force of nature she had been. The change had been sudden and unexpected, though Rose supposed it had been coming for a while. She was well past 90 now, they should have been keeping a better eye on her, but it had been almost blasphemy to suggest she was ill. She had collapsed at dinner the day before last and the Torchwood physician had delivered the news to the disbelieving hosts, Rose's mother and father. Funny that now she thought of it she couldn't remember his name, he had been the Dames physician, not Rose's. He had made most of the family clear out, they had gone to the guest rooms on the other side of house but the Dame's brother and Rose's parents had refused, like Rose they could not leave her now. While the Dame had no children of her own she had been active in so many lives that it was hard to imagine life without her, not just in Rose's family but so many other who had needed guidance. It had been a joke of Rose's mum that the Dame picked up strays like most women shopped. She had picked up Rose in her wake like so many others. Rose felt she was a little better because of it.

Intellectually she knew the woman in the bed was the same woman she had known, but it was so hard to relate the two. The woman she had known was strong and forceful, unstoppable. Had helped Rose when Rose was floundering with her life. In the bed was just a dying old woman, impossibly tiny and weak. Barely conscious, and connected to a heart monitor that could do nothing as the beeps became increasingly erratic.

The room was silent, aside from the muffled sobs of Roses mother and the howling wind that rushed around the house, so the Dame's last words to her nearest relative, an elderly brother who, came across clearly.

"Justin?"

He held her hand in his, both so old and careworn, "Old girl?"

"I'm dying."

Rose could see that tears started on his cheeks, but he managed a halfway cheerful voice. "Don't be ridiculous old girl, your fine; you've just fainted, just low blood sugar or something." He smoothed down her short white hair, not sure who he was comforting.

"Don't lie to me. I'm dying." Her voice was faint, but the resolute tone they all knew so well was there, "I've almost done it once already, I know what it is. Don't worry Justin; I've had… a fantastic life. I'm not sorry to go. Tell Rose … to have a fantastic life."

Rose started at those familiar words.

"Justin," The Dame said, a smile the likes of which Rose had never seen before making its way onto the weathered face, "He's coming. Can you hear it? He's come for me."

The grand old Dame, the pioneer of Torchwood, died. Outside the storm raged with a queer intense sound.

The physician was quickly at her side, and pronounced the time of death, covering the tiny body with the thick quilt she had slept under. Dr Harris, that was it, funny she had forgotten. Rose watched with a numb detachment as her parents filed out down to the guest quarters on the other side of the mansion, until only she, Justin and Dr Harris remained. The physician seemed the most uncomfortable in the silence and after the assurance to Justin that the Dame had not suffered. While the two men systematically went through the socially acceptable phrases, Rose remained by the window, making pictures out of the rainy garden, a dog, a horse, a box, a tree. Anything to escape the cold reality of the room. It was with the same numb detachment she noticed that the old woman's left hand was just visible where the quilt was slightly bunched up. The lamplight of the room made it seem to almost glow.

She was dead.

It was Rose who heard it first. Over the sympathetic murmurings of the two old men in the corner who neither wanted to deliver or hear the bad news and the fading muffle sobs of Roses mother and the awkward words of comfort her father offered as they left for their quarters, footsteps bounding up the side stairs straight towards the Dames room. Not one of the family, who all knew better at this time to interrupt, nor the children, who were safely asleep on the other side of the mansion, she knew each one of their walks. Like an arrow, the stranger seemed to find the door, and Rose was the only one who didn't jump when the door was flung open by a slim man in a drenched oxford suit tweed getup.

"Uh, Hello," he managed, all the time looking at Rose like he'd seen a ghost.

"Who are you?" Justin demanded, striding toward the door, fully prepared to push the interloper out.

"I'm The Doctor," the man explained closing the door, either ignoring or not noticing the falter in Justin's step or the look of fascinated fear of the physician, never once taking his eyes of Rose were she stood by the window watching the newcomer.

"Rose?"

"Yes?" even as she said it Rose felt stupid. She had a feeling she knew who he meant.

"But you're not..." the man looked shattered and confused and when he said it the words were hopeless yet desperate, "Rose Tyler?"

"No, Rose Lucas," she said. It was with a fatal certainty she knew who he was and what he had come for. "Rose Tyler's my grand-aunt, they say I look just like her." She felt pathetic saying it but the words had to be said. "I'm sorry." She gestured towards the bed where the body of her grand-aunt, the great Dame Rose Tyler, was resting in the eternal sleep.

"No."

The word seemed to escape him without any conscious control the man, The Doctor, whom Rose had told her namesake all about, who her great grandmother Jackie had cursed and praised in the same breath when she thought little Rose couldn't hear and her grandfather Justin quietly admired and told little Rose all the stories. The Doctor who always came in the nick of time had come too late. Rose didn't know how he had crossed the dimensions, but while he had managed the space the time was 80 years too late.

All three of them watched as the legendary Doctor crossed the room, to the quilt covered body, he reached out as if to touch her but pulled back.

"No."

Both Rose Tyler's brother Justin and the Torchwood physician protested on reflex, but Rose quieted them with a single phrase. She said the words that her aunt had told her when she was a child, and her aunt had been putting her to sleep with stories of her travels.
"She had a Fantastic life."

It was like she had cut puppets strings. The Doctor sagged against the wall.

"All this time," he said, "All this way."

In the absolute silence Rose Lucas wanted to cry for The Doctor. The physician had retreated to a corner, fussing over his bag; he had no part in this family and didn't know how to deal with the legend from his organisations archives. Rose's grandfather Justin Tyler simply didn't know what to say, he had been born when his sister Rose Tyler was well into her late 20's, and knew The Doctor only by story. Rose could feel empathy but it felt weak and pale next to the palpable grief of this man, The Doctor who had travelled all this way to find nothing.

-----

The universe was burning in her veins. She was the Bad Wolf, she made herself. She had taken the words to lead herself to herself. The Bad Wolf, the unknown element, the uncontrolled force, she took the mantle and wore it proudly, remaking the universe to give herself room to breathe and work. She could see all that was, all that is, all that would be. Across time, space, everything that ever could be.

She knew what it was to be a Timelord.

She brought life…

She sat up suddenly, long ash blonde hair falling over her shoulders. The cotton shift was too tight across the chest and it hurt to breathe, but everything hurt. She scrabbled at the sheets, recoiling at the shock of the people around her. In her chest her heart was fluttering wildly, she fought to catch her breath.

"What the Bloody Hell was that?" she demanded.