Title: And Kills Potent Kings (1/1)

Characters: Tenth Doctor, Rose, the Master

Rating: a rather morbid PG, probably.

Spoilers: based largely on my spec and other people's spec for the ending of series four, as well as things I've noticed throughout the season and memories I've dredged up from Classic Who.

Summary: This time, he fights.

"As experiences go, I'm getting pretty sick of this one," said the Doctor, trying to pinch his suit back together to cover the hole. He'd liked this suit, much more so than the blue one, but was having to face the fact that it was finally and irrevocably ruined. All those planets, all that racing to save the world, whichever one he happened to be on at the time, all the mud and dirt and dust and blood— and this is what it came down to. Blood again.

"Not something I'd advocate for anyone," said Rose sympathetically. Since it had happened she'd been rather contrite, which was only to be expected. There was still something there— something essential, something Rose— and she remembered vividly a time when all she wanted was his arms around her, holding on. The hugging had gone well with the running, he recalled, like tea and cake. Warm embraces in stark environments, a fond and physical delusion. A hand to hold.

He'd got her tied up. It seemed best, under the circumstances. There wasn't anything else for her to do, of course— it was beyond that now. Her hands, stained and wet, twisted under the rope, writhed, then she clasped them together and simply stared at him.

"And it's true," she said, watching him find the next breath, "you've done quite a lot of this. Different every time, isn't it?" Her head cocked to one side, birdlike, and for a second everything Rose was stripped away and she was cold, clinical, all the human warmth dissipated like steam in the sun. She observed him thoroughly, and then Rose was allowed back in. The Doctor sank back against the wall.

"I expect— they've trained you well?"

"Very well," she acknowledged. "Although I'm not sure who you mean by 'They'."

"Torch—" he said, and had a slight coughing fit. "Torchwood." Rose nodded, looking thoughtful.

"Primarily, yeah. I had some of the necessary experience, after all, all they had to do was— bump it up a notch." She grinned fondly, reminiscently at him for a moment and it was all he could do not to return it. She looked so much like yesterday, like the ghost of companions past. "I never really thanked you properly, Doctor, for all you'd done for me."

He rubbed a hand over his face. "Oh, I hate to take credit for all of it."

She watched him avidly. "You've smeared a bit of blood, just by your nose."

"It'll be gone soon enough," he said evenly, and changed the subject. "Yes, I have done this lots of times. And yes, it has been a different way every time. But the sheer novelty of the thing doesn't make me any more keen to experience it again. After all— it's a bit of a waste, isn't it? I've only got a few chances left."

"Maybe you should settle down, next time," she suggested. "Take it easy, have a bit of a rest. Retire."

"Oh, I couldn't do that! Got lots of things to do! Whole galaxies— whole universes— waiting for me to come and experience them. Be the first Time Lord to walk their beaches, scour their valleys, roam their hills, win their limbo tournaments."

Rose shook her head and looked down at her hands again. "It's a lost cause, with you, innit? You'll never stop. You'll never, ever stop."

He faced her, serious again. "That's right. No matter what you do, I'll never ever stop."

"Never say never ever," she said softly, almost whimsically, to her blood-covered hands. The Doctor twitched, and winced, and lifted his own hands away from his body to eye the hole— in suit, in skin, in body, in right heart— she'd made in him.

"Never thought you'd go about it this way," he said, purposefully avoiding the single-eyed stare of the gun barrel on the floor just to her right.

"I've died this way, more than once," said Rose, fiercely, looking up at him. "I should think you deserve the same."

He lurched away from the wall, swaying, strength failing with blood loss, but the fire still there, still burning. "You didn't die," he told her, teeth clenched. "You are not him. You are Rose, Rose Tyler, you once saved the universe— more than once! All he did was try to destroy it. He tried to destroy me— he has destroyed me, temporarily— and he's trying to destroy you, Rose— Rose! Look at me!" He stepped closer, despite the fact that he knew this wasn't wise, and bent wincing to stare in her eyes. "And I didn't kill him," he gritted out. "I never would."

"But the Master has died," she said softly, "and he wouldn't have found me if he hadn't died, and he wouldn't have died if it weren't for you. Doesn't that make it still your fault?"

The Doctor breathed harshly, and settled stumblingly to his knees in front of her.

"I didn't want him to die," he said. "I wanted him to live, so I wouldn't be alone."

"But you aren't alone."

"No. Not now. But I was then."

"Then why didn't you step in front of me?" There it was again, coldness, starkness: something alien and yet still familiar looking out from her eyes. The Doctor turned his gaze to the ground. He couldn't bear to see it. "Why not die for me, if you wanted me to live that much?"

"I didn't have the time."

Rose laughed, or the Master laughed, or they both laughed, merrily. "You're a bleedin' Time Lord, you pompous sod, if there's anything you've got, it's time."

"If you wanted to live so much," said the Doctor slowly, and he steeled himself to look back up, "if you wanted to live so much that you found her— you found Rose— and— took her— then why didn't you just regenerate?"

Rose leaned forward, and grinned at him.

"It's so much more fun this way."

The Doctor got to his feet, feeling sensation start to drain away. All the nerve endings were dying, preparing to be sparked from within by the regeneration process, and it was difficult for him to move. The hole was enormous. His hands could barely cover. He wanted Rose back, and in a way he wanted the Master back, and both of them so he wouldn't be alone— and now this. Now that he wasn't by himself— now that there was Jenny, and Donna, and Martha, and Sarah Jane, and Jack, and Romana, all probably searching for him light-years away— here they were.

Like this.

Such and such, he told himself. This and that. So and so. His synapses were colliding, collapsing. Like so. Thrust, parry, thrust and lunge. The name was lost. He had to fight. He leaned against the wall again, sank down onto the concrete floor. He was dying again, so he could live again, and he wondered suddenly about John Smith, a proper human, dying inside him. Did he feel it? Did he know it?

This wasn't fair.

"This isn't fair," he said, a bit sullenly.

Rose looked up from twisting her hands in her bonds. "Tell me about it."

"No, I mean, really, it isn't fair. This isn't right. I don't want it. I don't have time for this!"

"But everyone has time to die," Rose pointed out reasonably. "It's not like you need an appointment."

The Doctor thought of a diary, over a billion years old, with only a limited, set, specific number of days inside. There was a section for him, and it wasn't full yet. He didn't tell this to Rose, because she would call him a sentimental fool with a God complex, and he hated it when she was right.

He managed, once again and for the last time, to stand up. "I'm the Doctor," he declared giddily, "and I refuse to let this happen. Got that?" He looked upwards at the blank ceiling. "GOT THAT? This time I'm going to fight it! This time, I'll still be myself, I won't be any other me. I'll let the regeneration cycle run through me, and for a brief time I'll be burnt up, electric, phoenixed in flame, and then I'll be the same, big hair and sideburns and, and—"

"You'll have to get a new suit, whatever happens," said Rose. He glared at her.

"Don't interrupt! I'll be me a while longer, because I'm not meant to die like this, and you weren't meant to kill me. He gave up his regenerations, and had no right to take you the way he did. He is the one responsible for his own death. He, as far as I'm concerned, can follow the rest of the bloody universe into hell!"

"I'm not there already?" murmured Rose, but the Doctor was still not listening. He hadn't really been listening for some time now. She'd tried to tell him.

It could work, if only he would pay attention. But she'd lost his trust. And as much as she wanted, deep down, to let him in on the secret, she was no longer sure she wanted the weight of his faith. Not any more.

He sat down again; or fell, rather. His blood spilled further on the floor. His hearts stopped briefly, and he let out a groan as his eyes fluttered shut.

Rose succeeded in worming her blood-slipped hands from their bonds, and went to his side. With all her warmth and her humanity she looked down at this man— the Doctor— who knew her better than she knew herself and yet still hadn't seen her coming. He was the storm, to be sure, and she was the wolf, howling in it. The moon didn't know that the tide was following it.

She murmured, with someone else's voice, "What's in a name?"

She'd loved him once, and she loved him still. She was just better at hiding it. She really wished he'd have let her tell him, before he slipped into unconsciousness. But there was no fixing things now; he'd died with determination in his mind, the determination to short-circuit his own biology and fix things the way he wanted, and she had no doubt that it would work. The Doctor was very bloody-minded about things, and usually the universe slotted into place with a little nudging.

His mouth opened and a whisp of gold floated out, circled like smoke under Rose's breath; she'd bent quite close to him without realizing it, one bloodied hand on his shoulder and the other on his cheek. She hesitated, then dipped her mouth towards his. Caught the next bit of the Vortex between her own lips, caught his lips in her own. Missed the double beat of his pulse and began to cry, helplessly.

She said, sternly, "Stop it, Rose. Now, I mean it. Stop it this instant, or I'll give you something to cry about."

But she couldn't stop. This wasn't her fault. She couldn't be blamed for being weak, for wanting to find a way back to the Doctor. For taking a compromise when it was offered her. The Master, in her mind, ordered her about. She was tired of taking orders, but rested her hopes on the thought that it would soon be over. She tried to stop crying. She kissed the Doctor's chin, his throat, buried her fingers in his hair and sobbed.

She would never be through with aliens, she thought.

Aloud, she said, "Humans. Will wonders never cease? How do you lot manage, if you go around moping all the time?"

The thrill of gold, the regeneration process, was rippling over the Doctor's skin; but true to his determination, left him intact, unchanged. This, too, was familiar and yet still strange. But it was a fact.

He was a fact.

The Doctor breathed.

"Right, then," said the Master with infinite satisfaction, and slid out of Rose's brain as silently as a ghost. Freed at last, she buried her face in her bloody hands and sobbed till she could bear to stop, drowning out the sounds that came as the body of the Doctor awakened to a new life: looking the same, and living different.

At length she dropped her hands from her face, frightened as a child looking out from behind the sofa, and looked directly into what were once the Doctor's eyes. The Time Lord smiled, more than a little wickedly.

"Oh, Rose Tyler," said the Master softly, "what fun we'll have! What games we'll play. Tell you what." He leapt to his feet, suit flapping over the now healed hole in his skin, and held out a helping hand to her, still on the floor, at his knees. "How about a spot of world domination, to start with?"

She'd never be rid of aliens, Rose thought. And they'd never be rid of her, either.

She took his hand.