A/N: Welcome to the first story in another series! :D I've been toying around with this idea for a long time and I finally decided that since Winter Break is coming up I should start writing! I hope you enjoy it!

Anything you recognize doesn't belong to me! I've used quotes from Smith & Jones, The Shakespeare Code, Gridlock, The Evolution of the Daleks, the Family of Blood, and The Last of the Time Lords.


Chapter One: Things Found

Martha Jones shivered as she slid into the passenger seat of Tom Milligan's van. A doctor. She was travelling with a doctor again. Life, it seemed, favored gallows humor. She glanced at her companion. He was handsome, in a rugged sort of way. She wondered what he was like before the Master and the Toclofane. There was a set to his eyes and his jaw that spoke of hardship, of anger put to purpose and determination, of patience and the potential of violence.

"I was studying to be a doctor," she said finally, to break the silence.

He looked at her. "Really?" She nodded. "Why'd you stop?"

She grinned. "Met a man. Went off to see the universe." Her smile died. "Ended up here."

"You're a hero," he said quietly. "You give people hope."

"You're a hero," she countered. "You save lives."

"I'm just a man, one ordinary man, doing what he can, and in the scheme of things, in the grand plan—if there even is one—I'm nothing."

"I've got this friend," she said thoughtfully, "and he always says 'there's no such thing as an ordinary human.'" It would be nice, she thought, to be a proper doctor, to be able to throw yourself into saving just a person. The Doctor loved people, collectively and individually, but all too-often he was caught up in the tide of the greater cause. Individuals fell by the wayside as he wrought changes that shaped the infrastructure. He touched thousands of lives. She would settle for touching one, for saving one. She realized, then, that she envied Doctor Tom Milligan. Everywhere she walked she saw destruction. The Doctor brought hope twinned with death. He thundered through the world like a hurricane. They were silent for the rest of the trip. Tom drove, and Martha leaned against the window, catching a few hours of precious sleep. There was never enough time.


He took her to see the rockets. The shipyard was massive, but not the biggest she'd seen. Russia had that honor, dubious as it was. She told him about Russia and the purpose of the rockets—war with the universe. He asked her if there was anything else he should know. She was feeling a bit whimsical, and if all went to plan he wouldn't remember anyway, so she told him about Shakespeare, about time travel and seeing the size of it all. To his credit he accepted what she said. Martha wondered if he was humoring because he thought she was mad, or if the general madness of their situation had stripped away his incredulity. She didn't think she had it in her to disbelieve anything, not after what she'd seen. Japan, god, Japan. All of the islands, burning. Millions of people dying, screaming. The solid wood of the dingy beneath her. The air—smoke and death and the smell of the sea.

She froze as a high-pitched voice challenged Tom. A Toclofane had arrived. She heard him speaking behind her, talking about his medical position. She couldn't risk looking back, couldn't risk moving at all. The TARDIS key would only protect her as long as she was unremarkable. If she did anything to call attention to herself the Toclofane would be able to see her. It wasn't buying Tom's story. The sound of metal sliding against metal cut through the air. She closed her eyes, waiting for the screams.

They never came. Instead a fizzling roar burst from behind her and something metal hit the ground. Martha whirled around. Tom was staring at the Toclofane lying on the ground, its blades still extended and smoking slightly. Martha's attention was fixed on the figure behind it. A woman stood with a strange looking gun still aimed at the ball of metal on the ground. Her eyes and hair were brown. Martha couldn't tell how long it was because, like her own, it was pulled into a tight bun. She wore tight gray pants made from some kind of sturdy material and a matching jacket. A backpack was slung over her shoulders and she wore sturdy black boots.

She holstered the odd weapon and touched her ear. "Control, this is the Bad Wolf. The preacher is safe, I repeat, the preacher is safe."

"Who are you?" Martha demanded. Tom was silent, but his hand strayed close to his own weapon.

The woman shook her head. "Can't tell you. I would, I really would, but this timeline is all ready fragile and one wrong push could dissolve it around us. Right now the only thing that's holding it together is the paradox machine, and even a TARDIS has limits." Her lips twisted into something that might have been a smile. "And besides, you wouldn't know it anyway." She pondered something for a moment, and then apparently came to a decision. "But you can call me the Bad Wolf."

"The Bad Wolf, like in Little Red Riding hood?" Apparently despite what she thought earlier, it was still possible for the universe to surprise Martha Jones.

The Bad Wolf shrugged. "Or like in the Three Little Pigs. The concept's basically the same."

Martha rolled her eyes. "You're worse than the Doctor, you are. Why should we trust you?"

"Don't bother to thank me for saving your life," the woman shot back. "And speaking of your friend, when you see him you'd best tell him that Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart wants to talk to him." Martha and Tom looked at each other blankly, and then back at the Bad Wolf. The woman sighed.

"Honestly, I don't know what they're telling you Resistance people. The Brigadier is the head of UNIT—United Nations Intelligence Task Force. Ring any bells?"

"I know what UNIT is!" Martha snapped.

"Good!" The Bad Wolf ignored her tone and appeared genuinely pleased. "I'm working with them. For the past year, Martha Jones, UNIT has been making sure that you get where you need to be. More specifically, I have."

"I've never seen you before in my life," Martha protested.

The Bad Wolf raised an eyebrow. "You're not the only one who can hide in plain site." She bet and retrieved the Toclofane, which had stopped smoking. She rapped on the metal lightly, and when nothing happened, she unzipped her backpack and stuffed the sphere inside. "Now, I think we'd best go see Professor Dougherty," she remarked quietly, "before any Toclofane coming looking for their friend."


"You talked about timelines," Martha told the Bad Wolf as they Tom drove the van to an empty warehouse—their shelter until it was safe to meet the professor. "How d'you know about that?"

The Bad Wolf blinked at her. "Didn't I mention? I travel in time."

"You travel in time." Tom was skeptical.

She waved a hand as if he was being exceptionally dull. "Time, space, all of that. I can't see timelines, not without help, like a Time Lord, but I've got a gadget that can."

"Time Lord?" Tom again.

"Aliens. The Doctor is a Time Lord," Martha supplied.

"So is the Master." The Bad Wolf's voice was bleak.

"He's insane." Martha was adamant. Putting the Master and the Doctor together in the same group was wrong.

"Not contesting that," the Bad Wolf assured her. "He's a few screws short of a birdhouse all right, but he's still a Time Lord. That's how he knew to build a paradox machine. Have either of you ever seen a temporal paradox in action?" Martha shook her head. Tom looked at her like she had grown an extra eye in the middle of her forehead. She shuddered. "You don't want to; take it from someone who has."

"You've seen a paradox." It was Martha's turn to be skeptical.

"I caused a paradox." The Bad Wolf's voice was very quiet. "And without the rest of the Time Lords, there's no one to fix it, if it happens. If the TARDIS can't handle the ramifications of the Master's meddling and the Reapers appear they'll devour everyone on earth—maybe everything in the universe."

"The world hasn't ended yet, so obviously your paradox got fixed," Martha pointed out. "What did you do?"

A muscle in the Bad Wolf's jaw ticked. "A man died. He was supposed to be dead anyway, but I saved him. The only way to undue the paradox was to allow history to happen as it did. And he died." There was nothing any of them could say to that.


Professor Dougherty's eyes became almost impossibly wide as she regarded the dead Toclofane that the Bad Wolf produced from her backpack.

"How did you do this?" she breathed.

Martha and Tom turned to the Bad Wolf. The woman shrugged. "A lightening strike in south Africa brought one down. A local branch of UNIT managed to get the readings. They cobbled together this." She held out the strange-looking gun. "It generates a current of roughly 510 megajoules—enough to fry a Toclofane."

"If we had more of those weapons," Tom began, but Martha cut him off.

"We'd get more people killed. Remember, he's still got the Archangel Network up there. Fifteen satellites sending out a telepathic signal of fear, keeping people from resisting." She shook her head. "We stick to the plan. Now, let's see what they are."

They watched with interest as Dougherty examined the sphere. The Toclofane were the stuff of nightmares. They were nearly impervious to harm and took sadistic delight in killing people in the most painful way possible. Martha shuddered as she remembered Russia—the Toclofane caught the woman helping her escape. She screamed for twenty minutes before she died. Martha had been close enough to feel hot drops of blood splatter on her cheek. If she hadn't had the TARDIS key—but dwelling on it did no one any good.

Professor Dougherty gave a little cry of satisfaction as she managed to break the magnetic lock and opened the sphere. They leaned forward to look at the thing inside.

It was a face. A face pierced by wires. Blue, pupil-less eyes snapped open.

"Martha! Martha Jones!" the thing cried.

"It knows you!" Dougherty gasped.

"What are you!" Martha demanded, pale.

"You helped us to fly," the thing continued.

"What?" Tom was glaring at it. Only the Bad Wolf was calm, gazing at the sphere with an expression of disgust and pity.

"The skies are made of diamonds."

Martha stepped back from the Toclofane. It was true, oh god it was true. She thought of the little boy, of Cree, his eyes bright as he talked about Utopia. She thought of Padrag and Beltan Shafecane and the thousands of people that she and Jack and the Doctor sent away on that rocket. All of them, flying to Utopia, flying to this.

"They're us," she choked out. Bile was rising in her throat and her stomach heaved. "I thought it was possible. The Master has the Doctor's TARDIS, but he could only travel between the years 100 Trillion and last year—the Doctor managed to fuse the coordinates. They're people from the end of the universe, human beings." She stared at the face in the metal sphere, revulsion written in her eyes and the twist of her lips. "They're us."

"But that's a paradox!" Dougherty protested. "They can't be us, it would mean that they've come back in time to kill their ancestors! Shouldn't they, I don't know, dissolve or something?"

"That's where the paradox machine comes in," the Bad Wolf spoke up from her position behind them. She pushed herself off the wall she'd been leaning against and moved closer to the Toclofane—the human, if it could be called that. "A living TARDIS, the last in the universe. The only thing capable of sustaining the strain on the timelines turned into a machine to do just that."

"But why?" Tom cried. "If you're human beings why kill us?"

"Because it's so much fun!" the thing responded. Martha turned paler, if possible. The Bad Wolf looked away, and Tom Milligan pulled his gun from its holster and filled the thing with bullets.


"They say that you alone can kill the Master." Professor Doughtery's voice was loud in the silence. "Can you do it, Martha Jones? Is it true?"

Martha pulled herself together and tore her eyes away from the thing that had been a human being, once. "It's why I've been travelling. The Master and the Doctor have been coming to Earth for years, you see, and they've been watched. There's UNIT and Torchwood and a host of other agencies, even private individuals. There was a man named Clive Finch who ran a website tracking him, and after he was killed another man named Mickey Smith took over. But anyway, the Doctor worked with UNIT for a while in the sixties, and they realized that having a weapon against hostile Time Lords would be a good idea." She pulled a slim black case out of her pack and opened it. Three vials rested in the top, with room for a fourth. A strange contraption that looked like a cross between a gun and a hypodermic needle rested on the bottom. "Four chemicals. Inject the Master with this and it'll kill him stone dead."

Tom held out his gun. "Get me close enough and I'll kill him with this."

Martha shook her head. "Time Lords have this trick, this way of cheating death. They can literally bring themselves back to life."

"So the Master's immortal, then. Perfect." Dougherty's voice was caustic and she rolled her eyes.

"Inject him with this and he won't regenerate. He'll be dead and stay dead."

"That's why Martha Jones came back." It was the Bad Wolf's turn to speak. "The last chemical is housed in an abandoned UNIT facility nearby, but you need someone who knows the place, its traps and secrets." Her lips twisted into a predatory grin. "And that's where I come in."


"They say that Martha Jones has returned home." The Master's voice cut across the silence of the room. In his bird cage hanging from the ceiling, the Doctor did not respond. "Why would she do that? What are you planning?"

"I have one thing to say to you," he reminded the Master. "You know what it is."

"Oh no!" The other Time Lord's face was a mask of mad fury. "You don't get that line. This is my turn! My empire! All made possible by humans." He was close to the cage now, his face almost touching the bars. "Little Red Riding Hood is about to meet the Big Bad Wolf."

Something in the Doctor's eyes shifted. "What did you say?"

"You heard me," the Master snorted.

"Why those words? Why the wolf?"

"Why does it matter?" The Master frowned. "What do they mean to you?" He was intrigued, but the Doctor refused to answer. After the silence stretched into minutes, he turned on his heel and left. He had better things to do than wait for his captive to grace him with the sound of his voice. He would talk eventually, oh, he would talk.


It was dark when they reached the relative safety of the slave compound. "It's cheaper than building barracks," Tom explained as he led them into one of the packed houses. "A hundred people to each house, and every morning they're ferried to the shipyards."

"Did you bring food?" one of the women called.

Tom shook his head. "I couldn't get any, I'm sorry."

"All we've got is water," a man offered.

"Are you Martha Jones?" She turned to face the young man who had asked. "They say you can kill the Master. Can you do it? Really, can you kill him? Tell me you can, please say that you can." Her reply was lost in the roar of voices that followed, questions, pleas, prayers from a hundred mouths crowded the air.

One voice stood out. It was close, almost on top of them. "Rose Tyler, it is you!"

Martha blinked as the Bad Wolf's head whipped to the side. "Sarah Jane Smith!" she cried, and then she was hugging a petite brunette woman. They were laughing and Martha was shocked to see tears streaming down the Bad Wolf's—Rose's—face. Wait. Rose. Rose.

Rose, her name was. You're not replacing her.

Rose would know.

The North wind blows, and carries down the distant—Rose?

Oh, big mistake, because that name keeps me fighting!

I came here with Rose…

He had this friend…

She's just an invention. Rose, I call her. Rose. She seems to disappear later on.

She gasped. "Oh my god. You're that Rose. You're the Doctor's Rose."

The Bad Wolf, Rose, turned to face her. "How do you know who I am?" Her voice was guarded and her shoulders tense.

Martha choked out a laugh. "He talked about you, a lot."

She shook her head. "He doesn't do that." Her face was carefully blank. "He just moves on."

"I think you'll find he's changed a bit," the other woman—Sarah Jane, said gently. Her eyes were sad as she laid a comforting hand on Rose's arm. "He came to see me after Canary Wharf. I saw your name on the list, but he said that you weren't dead, that you were trapped in a parallel world. I've never seen him like that, Rose. He was just—blank. Flat. And then he tried to hide it with a grin and a lot of babble, but it was there. He missed you."

"Still does." It was Martha's turn to speak now. Her voice was level and low. "It drove me crazy. I was right there in front of him doing all these incredible things, and then he'd look right through me. He misses you, and he'll be glad to see you again." She took a deep breath. "But now it's time for me to do what I came here to do." She turned to the rest of the people crowding around them. "You want me to talk? I'll talk. But not about me. There's someone else you should know about—the man who sent me here, who told me to walk the Earth."

She told them about the Doctor; about everything she'd seen him do, all the times they'd saved the Earth together. She told them about his people and his planet and everything that he'd sacrificed to keep them safe. She remembered after she told them that she loved the Doctor that the woman he loved, the one he remembered even when he forgot himself, was standing in the room with her. She glanced at Rose, but there was no anger on the woman's face. Instead a sad understanding glimmered in her eyes. Martha told the people to pass on what they knew, to tell everyone, and then she fell silent.

Rose stepped forward. "Feels like I've been preparing for this forever," she said slowly. "Everywhere I've been, trying to get back here, I end up telling this story." And then she began to speak. She told them about how she met the Doctor in the basement of a shop in London, surrounded by mannequins brought to life. She told them about seeing the Earth burn in the year five billion and understanding suddenly what it was like to be completely and utterly alone. She told them about the Slitheen and blowing up Downing street, about the Daleks and the Time War, about the Sycorax, about Queen Victoria and the Wire and the Beast and the Isolus and finally she told them about Torchwood, about Canary Wharf and the void. She didn't tell them that she loved the Doctor, but she didn't need to. Martha could see it shining out of her. The affection and pride and overwhelming trust burned in her voice.

And then, to her surprise, Sarah Jane stood next to Rose. "You've got three people here who have travelled with the Doctor. He never stays, he never stops, and he never asks for your thanks, but right now he needs you. He can fix this," she gestured to their surroundings. "All of it. He can fix everything, but he needs your help."

A woman burst through the door. "He's here! The Master is here!"

"Hide them!" another person yelled, and Rose and Martha were pushed down on the stairs and covered with a coat. People clustered around them, shielding them from prying eyes.


The Master stalked through the deserted streets of the slave compound. Soldiers followed him, guns at the ready. He grinned as he stopped in the middle of the street. "Martha, Martha Jo-ones!" he called in a sing-song voice. "Come out come out wherever you are!" Silence was the only response he received. "Either you come out, Miss Jones," he went on in a normal voice, "or I give the order, and my lovely boys will start shooting. Ask yourself, what would the Doctor do?"

Martha pushed the coat off of her and stood. Hands grasped at her as she moved down the stairs to stand by the door. Tom Milligan grabbed her arm. "Don't go," he pleaded. "He'll kill you."

"I have to," she responded with a sad smile. She studied him for a moment, and then did something she'd wanted to do all night. She stood on her tip-toes and pressed a quick kiss to his lips. Then she was out the door and in the street.

Tom watched through the mail slot as she walked to the Master, as she threw the pack containing their one hope at his feet, as he destroyed it with a blast from his laser screwdriver. He rested his head against the cool wood of the door. It was over. They were dead, all of them. The world would burn and nothing mattered any more.

"You have a friend in there, Miss Jones." The Master's voice drifted through the air again. "I'd like to meet them. Come out, or Martha Jones dies."

Tom pushed himself away from the door and went to open it, but a hand on his arm stopped him. He turned, and stared at the Bad Wolf, at Rose, he reminded himself.

"You are a good man, Thomas Milligan," she said quietly, "and there's no need for you to die tonight." She gave him a small smile. "That's my job. Stay put. Keep them safe, and remember what we told you. Remember the Doctor." And then she was gone.

Martha didn't turn around when she heard the door close softly. She stared at the Master, holding back rage, not fear. Now the real plan began.

"Who are you then?" he asked the person behind her.

"I'm the big Bad Wolf," Rose replied. She didn't sound afraid at all, if anything, scorn coated her words and made them razor sharp. The Master seemed amused.

"What does that make me, the Woodsman?" he sneered.

She shook her head. "You're the three little pigs, and I'm going to huff, and I'm going to puff, and then Martha Jones and I are going to blow your house down."