CHAPTER ONE: CRASH

"...and re-calibrate the defenses because the last thing we need is another Titanic incident." the Doctor rambled, flicking buttons and bouncing around the console.

Rose snapped out of her daydream, "Wait, what about the Titanic?" When the navy-blue-clad Time Lord didn't respond, his counterpart stepped forward scratching the back of his head, "Oh, the Titanic may have crashed into the TARDIS."

"I think he makes half this stuff up," Mickey mumbled from beside Rose, his arms crossed and his feet firmly on the metal grating whilst hers dangled idly. He and Martha had, had an argument last night and he'd been sulking all day. Rose hadn't heard what it involved but they'd been shouting a lot.

"Well... it wasn't the real Titanic. It was a space one," he explained, gesticulating this way and that with both hands playing the roles of either vessel and clapping loudly when they collided, all the while donning that mad, toothy grin Rose loved so much. It was times like this she saw how similar he and the Doctor could be, and how she remembered not to compare them. Two different people, she told herself, he's half-human! She supposed it helped that the younger double had begun to set himself apart from the Doctor physically. He no longer wore suits everyday, instead opting for the casual jeans and t-shirt. At first he looked naked and awkward, like he was trying too hard to be human, but after a fashion he settled into mortal life. Moreover, not a month after the Doctor had offered Rose and his clone the option to travel on-board, had he stopped gelling his hair. Flopping over the top of his forehead, she found she actually preferred it natural.

"I hated that bloody film." Donna added after the silence had become deafening. Even the soles of the Doctor's converse had relented their insistent banging. Rose shot her a quizzical look, OH! The Titanic!

"Want me to draw you like one of my French girls?" Jack winked, as he rounded the coral strut, hair still damp from his shower.

"From the amount of product I can smell on you, you'd think you were one of the French girls." she quipped. Both Mickey and Rose chuckled as the-Doctor-in-blue hummed lightly with a smile in Donna's direction; it was halfway between a laugh and a sigh. Rose had never seen the Doctor so happy than in the past four months, and she had never seen him look as worse than in the first week of their journeying. Donna's human mind couldn't sustain the knowledge of nine-hundred years of life and an IQ of four digits, so in three days her condition had deteriorated until he'd been forced to induce a coma. Both Doctors agreed they'd have to remove the alien consciousness thus killing the DoctorDonna. But it was either that or she died. And so the Doctor had spent the following ninety-six hours at her bedside waiting for her to wake. He didn't eat or sleep and although she'd been informed Gallifreyans could survive for over forty days without food or drink, she couldn't help but worry. He hung his head as if the weight of all the agony and self-loathing made it so. When she finally did rouse, her memory from the moment she and the TARDIS were burning at the heart of the Dalek Crucible had been wiped and she was suffice to say "back to normal".

Jack couldn't hide the grin that spread across his face, "There's nothing wrong with a man taking care of himself," he punctuated the retort by dragging his left hand through his dark locks and admiring himself in the reflection of the TARDIS monitor. The Doctor side-stepped away to avoid the Captain's infectious vanity.

"Oh come on, we can all have a good mirror-mirror moment later!" he bursted, skipping toward the double doors, "Right now we've landed on Julio Ay, one of the few planets in the Barstos Galaxy. Made entirely of water! The fantastic thing about this place is that it's so far away from the sun that it's eternally frozen. Literally frozen!" He turned to face the group but continued backing away, "The sun's light reflects off the surface and from far away worlds you can see patterns of swirling water vapour and other gases so it looks like a shining marble in the sky."

Donna nudged Mickey on the shoulder, "That's Time Lord for 'bring your thermals'." She strutted off behind the centre column in search of her hooded jacket.

The Doctor ignored her and babbled on about the moon made of glass. Rose beamed up at her Doctor, he replied by grasping her hand the way he had done all those years ago.

"Wait," the Doctor cocked his head up and inhaled deeply, flaring his nostrils, "we're missing one."

"Donna just went to get her coat," said Jack.

"No, not her." he squinted. "MARTHA!"

"Oh. She's..." Mickey hesitated, "sleeping."

"What? She'll miss the ice planet of the nineteenth kingdom!" he pouted.

Jack started, "Doc, I think she just wants to be left alone."

"Oh all right." As he pirouetted to face the doors, Rose swore she heard him mutter "humans" under his breath.

The Time Lord was just reaching for the handle when the whole ship shuddered and wheezed. It wasn't like the dematerialization sequence, Rose noted. It was more. She heard it in every pocket of her mind, calling out for help. Unspoken words reverberating throughout her entire being. The TARDIS was lost. She was crying out for help.

Then darkness cast over them.