Chapter One: Golden Mist

Most nights her bed would have been welcoming, warm, wonderful. The horrors of the day seemed to melt into nothingness once Rose Tyler lay on her bed, and her dreams of her Doctor surfaced. However, she never made it her red-covered mattress that night, and her dreams turned to nightmares as new memories assaulted her consciousness. Just mere hours earlier, her daughter had stumbled upon a Dalek, long since dead, but it wasn't just the hollow tin can that made her heart hammer and her breath catch.

The memories- yes, she was pretty positive, now, that they were real, not simply her "overactive imagination"- hit her full force as she scooped her daughter into her arms and ran as fast as her legs could carry her back to the house. In the few minutes it took for her to reach the door, Grace made no sound, not even the tiniest cry or whimper. When her feet touched the ground once again, her large eyes, slightly moist, gazed into her mothers' with a ferocious might, trying to figure out why her mother had handled her so roughly.

With quiet recognition and lugubriosity, brown pierced brown as their eyes connected, inches away. There, hidden beneath layers of fog, fear glimmered in Rose's eyes. Even at five, Grace knew this look, and with no words, she soundlessly took Rose's hand and gently pulled her into her own room, just up the stairs from the doorway.

Rose glanced faintly at her surroundings- a light blue room with glow-in-the-dark stars dancing around the ceiling- before slipping under the pale blue bedspread of her daughter's twin bed. As she squirmed a bit to get comfortable, she stole a glance at the window, the sky outside black and peaceful. She put her head to the pillow, and Grace hugged her once she had settled down. Minutes ticked by, and Rose began to content herself, allowing sleep.

"Mum?"

"Mmhm?"

"It won't hurt you, Mum. It's not alive anymore."

Rose's eyelids, which had been drooping with fatigue, shot open at this last sentence, catching the last word. "Anymore?"

"Not anymore," Grace repeated sleepily, her breathing becoming slower and easier as she drifted into dreamland. "I turned it off."

--------------------------

After an hour or so, Rose had pulled away from her daughter's sleeping form and left the room. The radio played softly from the pale green-walled kitchen downstairs, and Rose decided that a good cuppa would help her relax as her daughter's last words replayed in her head.

"It's not alive anymore. I turned it off."

Turned it off? If her dreams- no, memories- were correct, one couldn't simply "turn off" a Dalek. She scurried around the quaint room, grabbing a kettle from beneath the stove and filling it with water as she considered the night's occurrences. Had it really been just over an hour since she had run, breathless, from the field across the meadow? A loud whistling stole her thoughts as she was forced to return all attention to the stove, careful not to wake Grace or her parents as they slept, doors away.

Later, as her tea cooled, Rose pondered whether she had convinced herself too soon that her memories were real, or if they were simply coincidence. Her parents assured her that she had never witnessed a life as dangerous as that with her Doctor, but she couldn't help but wonder about the missing 3 years of her life. At 19, she had lived life with few complaints, a shopgirl in from the Powell Estate in Cardiff. Her boyfriend, Mickey, adored her, and her mother, Jackie, was as loud and abrasive as ever, God bless her. Then, the next thing she knew, she awoke in a brightly lit hospital, hooked up to tubes and screaming for her mother.

From that time on, she had come to know her life. Her father had somehow miraculously returned from the dead, married once again to her mother; Mickey had lost his spunk and ever-happy personality, replaced by a brooding, cautious man; and she had a daughter.

Funny, it was. She couldn't remember giving birth to her child, and her parents claimed they hadn't known anything about the birth until she awoke from her coma. Three years were missing, and a child had been brought into the world, and no one had noticed. Without her knowledge, she had become a single mother at the age of only 21. That was four years ago, and no one had stepped forward as the father.

She had believed, a year later, that the Doctor might be the father- why else would she dream so often, and so lovingly about him? However, when she presented this to her family, they had blanched, and immediately informed her that no such man existed. She thought they seemed rather frightened by the topic, but she pushed her idea on them more. She took her dreams to her doctor, Doctor Smith, and he hesitantly told her that she was experiencing side-effects from her coma. Intense dreams, so much so that they seemed real, were to be expected, he had said. He then prescribed her some medication and sent her home.

The medication had caused her to stop dreaming, but when her daughter started talking, she asked her mother where "daddy" was, and Rose started slipping to bed at night, crying. These tortuous nights caused her to lose weight dramatically, which her daughter- and only her daughter- noticed. Months later, she forgot to take her medicine one night, and she dreamed. She dreamt of a man with two faces and a little blue box (that wasn't so little inside). She knew, somehow, this man was the same man with different appearances, and she trusted him immensely. He took her to a beautiful planet that night, with orange beaches and blue grass. There were no natives, only Rose and her Doctor, who changed his faces and his clothes constantly before her eyes, images slurred, blurred. One thing remained the same at all times.

The sky.

As Rose contemplated the endless sky and its stars that freckled it forever, her eyelids drooped, and her body slowly sagged forward over the table. She lovingly put her head over her arms, crossed in front of her on the table, and dreamed.

---------------------------

Gold mist surrounded her as she opened the door of the TARDIS and stepped onto the platform. The entire history of all things swirled in her head, pounding, burning, horrible- and wonderful.

"What have you done?" The Doctor yelled to her as the mist shone brighter. She looked him square in the eye, and images of what could be flashed behind her pupils.

"I looked into the TARDIS, and the TARDIS looked into me," she responded as if it were the simplest fact. The words that fled from the Doctor's mouth escaped her consciousness as a beam of deadly light shot at her. Faster than light itself, her palm lept up to catch the beam, deftly reflecting it and throwing it back at its owner, disintegrating the Dalek with ease. "I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here."

He urged her to stop, but she couldn't. The power dripped from her very being. She heard her name, and looked at him in sadness.

"I want you safe. My Doctor." She raised her head to the fleet of Daleks, hate pouring from her eyes, heavier than the power of even the TARDIS. "You are tiny. I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence and I divide them." She raised her hand and fixed her stare on the Dalek emperor. "Everything must come to dust. All things. Everything dies."

So, I lied. It turns out I did have time to write this chapter today- or, at least, I made time to write it. Who am I kidding? I'm not going to study for the SATs. I'll just prepare my project and be done with my homework tonight. Hopefully, another update will come in a few days, at least within a week.

Quote of the day: "Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent."— Frantz Fanon