They may have explained the creation of the Dream Lord in "Amy's Choice" but who knows, maybe the Metacrisis was able to get some of that Psychic Pollen through the cracks in dimensions so he could come over ;)

T again for language.

Chapter 7 – Healing

Last Time:

"How did you get in here?" The Doctor asked, this time calmly, not wanting to make any sudden moves, lest his clone decide to hurt her again.

"You think I wouldn't have a backup plan? A way to get inside her head?" He shook his head, his black hair flipping up a bit. "Really Doctor, it's insulting how much you underestimate me. Since you rejected us I've had more than plenty of time to learn a few new tricks. After all, I am the Dream Lord." He grinned.

"Just let Rose go, she doesn't need to hurt any more for you. This is between us now."

"Is that so?" He removed the blade from her neck but kept his arm firmly wrapped around her waist. He brought the knife down and brushed it over her side where the knife had been lodged in her physical body. Rose jerked in fear and remembrance.

"Stop, John, please, stop." She begged, tears streaming down her face.

"I was only ever John to you, wasn't I?" He leaned over her ear, pressing his entire body up against hers and whispering. "Never enough to be the Doctor for you." He jerked back and yelled. "You want him? Here!" He let go of her and shoved her towards the Doctor. She collapsed him his arms. "It was always him!" He shouted. "And I couldn't do anything about it! Until now." He looked around the area that was Rose's mind. Rose's subconscious screamed and clutched her head as the barren wasteland began to shake violently.

"Stop it you bastard!" The Doctor shouted at him. The Metacrisis just laughed.

"You're angry aren't you? Angry that I have control of her and you can't do anything to stop me. And once Rose is gone beyond saving, I'll do the same to you. It'll be like Gallifrey burning again, but worse!" He laughed again, and suddenly the Doctor felt helpless. How could he stop him?

"What happened to you?" Rose said as the Doctor helped her up. After she was upright she began walking towards the clone.

"Rose, no!" The Doctor shouted but she ignored him. The clone stumbled back in fear and recognition as Rose's eyes gradually glowed to a bright gold. When she spoke next her voice was ethereal and echoed around the three of them.

"What happened to you?" She repeated. The Metacrisis shrunk back and turned his head away. Soon the Bad Wolf was standing directly in front of him. He seemed to sober as he turned to stare into the depths of her powerful and compassionate eyes.

"All I ever wanted was your approval." He said softly. Rose's eyes seemed to dim a bit.

"And you have. My Doctor." She leaned over and snogged him as hard as she did back on Bad Wolf Bay. The Metacrisis groaned and ran his hands through her golden hair. A bright light enveloped them both, before leaving the Bad Wolf and entering the clone. Rose gasped, feeling herself come back. She looked at him sadly.

"I'm sorry for whatever I did to make you become like this." She said. "But please, you have to stop. Somewhere inside I know you're still the Doctor. And you'll do the right thing." The Metacrisis took a deep breath as his own eyes turned gold and the Bad Wolf's strength overpowered his own.

"D-Do you love me, Rose Tyler?" He was fading, but it was clear his eyes were tearing up.

"I do. So much. I love you." The Metacrisis smiled sadly and was lost in the golden light. When it dissipated he was gone. Rose looked downcast for a moment, but smiled when she felt the Doctor's hand on her shoulder.

"She's gone." She said with a sigh. "The Bad Wolf used up the rest of her life to get rid of him." She looked up at the Doctor and he wiped the tears from her eyes.

"Did you mean it?" He asked her. "What you said to him?"

"Mostly."

"Mostly?"

"I did love him. Before he went bonkers!" The Doctor chuckled. Rose looked around the ruined, burning wasteland that was her mind. "This will take a while to fix won't it?" She looked down to her left and noticed a sparkling pile of dust. The Doctor picked some up. It was Psychic Pollen. The same that had landed in the TARDIS rotor and induced the first dream state for him and the Ponds. So that's how he did it. The Doctor blew it away and sighed.

"I've done all I can." The Doctor replied somberly. "The rest will just take time."

"Thank you." She said. "I don't think I could have lasted much longer with him in here." She sniffed and tried not to cry but when the Doctor pulled her into his embrace she started to sob.

The Doctor's fingers slipped from Rose's temples and they both gasped into wakefulness. He sat upon her bed and, just like he had done inside her head, pulled her into his embrace, being careful not to touch her bandaged side. Rose gripped onto his tweed lapel like it was her last lifeline, and maybe it was. Her breaths were short and raspy.

"These next few weeks are going to be rough before your mind begins to heal from the trauma." Rose merely nodded against his chest. "But no matter what happens, how alone and terrified you feel, I'll always be here."

"Thank you." She whispered, not having the strength to say anything else.

"Just sleep." He replied, pulling her closer. "It'll start the healing process.

She did as she was told.

Rose leaned on the Doctor heavily as he helped her into the library.

"Equal amounts of physical therapy and mental rest will be the fastest way to heal your mind and body." He had said earlier. As they entered the library Rose sniffed the air.

"Do I smell chlorine?" She asked, holding back a grin.

"Yeah, that's the swimming pool." Rose laughed, before wincing and grabbing her side. The Doctor immediately stopped. Rose smiled through gritted teeth. "Nothing's ever average for you huh?"

After they walked past a few book shelves they found Amy and Rory waiting for them in the pool. As soon as they saw the Doctor and Rose they hopped out, grabbing towels to dry themselves off with. Rose giggled inwardly at Amy's expression as her eyes hungrily roamed over her husband's wet, bare chest. Better than her checking out the Doctor. She felt ridiculous, swallowing down the sudden rise of unnecessary jealousy. Still need to work on that.

"I hope you don't mind us here." Rory said as he ran a towel over his arms, chest and stomach.

"No, you have a right to know too." The Doctor let Rose lean on a book shelf while he ran and got her a lawn chair to sit on. "It's dangerous to run by the pool." She commented as the Doctor helped her onto it.

"Psht. Please, I can run by the pool, while defeating a Cybermen army with my right hand and a Sontaran fleet with my right...no, left...where was I?" Rose laughed again but bit back a cry.

"Don't make me laugh." She begged, grinning and clutching her side. The smile fell from her face. "Let's make this quick before I have another episode." She placed two fingers between her eyebrows and gently massaged her head.

"Episodes?" Rory asked, naturally curious.

"Tell you later." The Doctor said, before turning to Rose. "Alright, what happened after...after..."

"After you left me and your clone on Bad Wolf Bay?"

"Yeah." Rose took a deep breath and prepared to begin.

"Well, after you left, things were a bit strained, but it was okay. At least at first. Then my mum made some stupid remark to him about being just a clone when he couldn't fix the stupid washer as fast as she wanted." She scrunched up her face in anger. "The notion got into his head that that was all he was and I didn't think he was good enough." She twisted her mouth in thought. "Probably didn't help that I missed you, the real you, so much." The Doctor rubbed her shoulder and she closed her eyes in pleasure.

"Anyway, things seemed to go downhill from there. He became violent and vengeful. And then there was the baby–" She looked down at her flat stomach and frowned. "I tried to convince him that I loved him and we had sex. I didn't think I'd get pregnant so fast, I wouldn't have slept with him if I'd known..." She sniffed.

"It's okay, you don't have to continue." The Doctor said.

"No, I want to. I was six months along when I entered into his study without knocking." She closed her eyes to tears as the memory came back in a flash of light.

"John? John I was wondering if-" She opened the door to his study and stopped. He was seated at his desk, bits and pieces of machinery decorating it. At the sound of her voice the Doctor's clone spun around. Rose's heart leapt in fear at the flash of anger in his eyes.

"What are you doing?" He demanded, standing up so quickly he knocked his chair over. "Don't you know I'm busy?"

"Nothing, I was just wondering if you wanted your lunch now or-"

"Just like you." He interrupted her. "Always worrying about minor, insignificant details. There are planets exploding at this very moment, and you're concerned if I want chips with my bloody sandwich!" He walked over and towered over her. "I'm sick and tired of it! Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. You're too domestic for me." She shrunk back.

"John, I didn't mean, I..."

"Shut up!"

"No, you shut up!" Rose suddenly got angry. How dare he insult her, after all that they've been through? And she was carrying his child, no less! "I've had to wait for so many years for things to go my way, and I'm not going to have you yell at me in my own home after all that's happened, what we've done." John stood there, quivering for a moment. Suddenly his hand lashed out and connected with her cheek with such a force she stumbled backwards, her body striking the dresser by the door. She collapsed to the floor and gasped at a sudden pain in her abdomen. Reaching her hand down, it came back up covered in blood.

"Ultimately we lost the baby." She wiped her hands over her eyes to get rid of the moisture. "That pushed him over the edge. He kept saying it was my fault that we lost the baby, and before I could stop myself I said if he was really the Doctor he wouldn't have hurt me or our baby." She shut her eyes and shivered. The beatings, the mindless sex, everything he made her go through, it was nearly too much to bear.

"One day he realized it was ultimately your fault that he existed, how he was born in blood and battle and that you had to pay for what he was going through. In order to separate himself from you he changed his clothes and dyed his hair, to remind himself of his birth in blood and war. I don't even know where he got that stick of eyeliner." The Doctor brushed a strand of hair behind her ear.

"He became obsessed with finding a way over here, and nothing worked, until one day he found he could manipulate the walls between the universe just enough to send a projection over, just like you did on Bad Wolf Bay the first time."

"Just an imagine, no touch." She paused for a breath.

"He killed a man, a security guard at the Torchwood in our world to steal the shape-shifting device, and, after throwing some Psychic Pollen(which he also stole from Torchwood) through a small rupture in time to induce your dreams, he made his first test as the Dream Lord."

"That was when we first met him and he made Amy pregnant." Rory commented and Amy touched her stomach, thinking also of the child Melody that had been stolen from them. Those bastards had also stolen their chance of having a family, ever again.

"I could see everything he did to you three then and I couldn't stop him. He wouldn't listen to me. Rory, when you were leaning over your child's crib and when you realized your child never existed, the Metacrisis was laughing at the pain you were going through. It was like retribution for the pain in his own heart, and he wouldn't let me help him." All four of them were silent for a minute.

"So, how did you get to this dimension?" The Doctor asked her.

"As I said before, he was obsessed with finding a way over here so he could use me in the projections for your torture as well. One day the Dimension Cannon suddenly began working, and we realised the walls between universes were cracking."

"The cracks in time." Amy piped up, remembering. Rose nodded.

"Once we were here, John – the clone – wanted to take revenge on everyone who had done wrong against him. He stole a space ship from the Torchwood 3 here and he took me to the Sycorax home planet where he cut off the leader's hand, because if the previous leader hadn't done that to you he never would have existed. When we got back to Earth he killed Jack over a dozen times for finding your hand and keeping it. Speaking of which, we need to talk about Jack." The Doctor nodded. Rose closed her eyes and placed her head in her hands, her brain barely processing the horror of watching what looked like the Doctor kill her best friend in unspeakable barbaric ways.

"Jack! It's not him, he's not the Doctor! JACK!" She shuddered and the Doctor placed a hand on her back, snapping her out of it. She rubbed her hands over her face and looked up again. "The only one he wouldn't touch was Donna. It was like his revenge switch was turned off towards her. He had a sort of fondness, hell, he might have even loved her at some point."

"That would make sense." The Doctor said.

"And when he was ready he prepared to lash you into his spider-web of dream worlds again, using me as the target point. Now, up until this point I hadn't tried to stop him, but when I did he became so enraged he stabbed me and hooked my brain up to his new dream machine so I wouldn't die."

"What do you remember of the Dream Worlds?"

"Everything." She replied to the Doctor's question. "I was there but I couldn't control what I was doing. I remember you going crazy, Amy bringing me back, our four children, our life..." She suddenly stopped. Her body began shaking violently.

"She's having an episode." The Doctor leapt up and grabbed a piece of leather from his pocket, shoving it in between her teeth. "Tie her arms and legs down." He threw some rope to Amy and Rory. "She lashes out and either tries to hurt me or herself with this kind of episode."

"There's different kinds?" Amy asked and the Doctor nodded.

Over the next few weeks those kinds became painfully clear. In the middle of the night Rose would wake up screaming and sobbing, other times she would become still as a stone, like her senses of sight, hearing and overall thought were switched off.

The TARDIS had moved Rose's bed to one side of the Doctor's bedroom so he could always keep an eye on her while her mind attempted to heal itself from all the damage the clone had done to her, not just what he'd done inside her head, but also the horrors she had gone through both in the real world and the dream one. The Doctor would have put her in his own bed to watch her even better, but the last thing he wanted to do was put her in a situation she wasn't ready for.

One particular night the Doctor woke up to Rose screaming his name. He leapt out of his bed and ran over to her side.

"Rose, I'm here." He leaned over her and squeaked when her hands shot out and wrapped around his throat.

"Leave me alone!" She shouted. "Doctor!" She yelled his name again.

"Rose, it's me, the Doctor." He gasped, talking with difficulty due to lack of oxygen. "Wake up!" Her hands suddenly released from his neck. He rubbed the area and gulped in air gratefully.

"I'm sorry." She whispered, before crying out and clutching her head. "He's inside me." She sobbed. "I can hear him laughing, calling me a worthless whore, hurting me...raping me." The Doctor climbed on top of the duvet and held her close, wiping the sweat off her forehead.

"He's not there anymore." He reminded her. "Just the echo of the things he's done to you."

"Please, get him out!" Rose begged, as if she didn't hear him. "I can't take it anymore, he's always there!" She sobbed hysterically. The Doctor shushed her and rubbed her back until her cries died down to quiet hiccups and then soft breathing that signaled she had finally fallen asleep, still fighting for peace in the shattered recesses of her mind. As the Doctor stroked the hair off her forehead, she muttered,

"Jacelyn." The Doctor's hearts clenched, knowing how much it killed her to know her daughter never existed yet still had nine years of memories of her, Lohrna, Tanya and Treynol. He knew what it felt like to miss someone who never existed. And for the millionth time he cursed his clone for turning Rose into a haunted, tainted image of the perfect, beautiful Rose Tyler she had been before.

"In the pain there is healing.
In your name I find healing.
So I'm holdin' on.
I'm barely holdin' on to you."

Two weeks later the Doctor, Rose and Rory were inside the Med Bay and Amy was wandering elsewhere in the TARDIS, finding all the medical terminology boring to tears (to put it in her own words).

Rose sat still on the examining table, staring straight ahead but her eyes registering nothing.

"I've never seen anything like this." Rory said as he snapped her fingers in front of her face in an attempt to gain her attention, but she didn't even blink.

"Bright side, she could win in a stare-down with a weeping angel." The Doctor said as he pulled the bandages off her injured side. Rory examined the wound and nodded.

"Looking good." He grabbed the new bandages from the Doctor's hands and put them on. "If only her mind was healing as quickly."

"She's getting better." The Doctor insisted. "She's not having as many episodes." They both started as Rose gasped, her eyes flickering between them both.

"Again?" The men nodded. "I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault, Rose." The Doctor reminded her.

"But it is!" She retorted. "I made John go crazy!"

"Stop it! No you didn't." He leaned in front of her, staring her right in the eyes. "I know you. You only make people better, like you did me."

"And ruin others' lives like Mickey, Jack, Sarah Jane and my dad." Obviously she had been thinking this over for a while.

"Rory, can we have some time alone?" Rory nodded and took off to find his wife.

"Okay, first of all," The Doctor said once Rory was gone. He climbed onto the examining bed next to her and she moved over to make room for him. "Mickey is safe and happy in this world, married to Martha, and basically I destroyed her life so-"

"But I made Jack immortal. John told me. Numerous times." The Doctor shook his head.

"The Bad Wolf was only doing what she thought was best. And look at all the good he's done–"

"–All the people he's shagged."

"Exactly!" The both laughed.

"And Sarah Jane? I made her life hell by saying you never mentioned her. I was a bitch that day."

"Well, there's no denying that."

"Oi!" Rose shouted, slapping his arm.

"No, seriously, she's fine with it. You even became friends, right?"

"I guess so. And my dad, my real dad? I tried to save his life but he had to die anyway to make up for my stupid mistakes." The Doctor was silent for a moment, looking into her face that looked back at him full of self-disgust.

"We all make mistakes." He finally said. "It's what makes you human. I wouldn't have any aboard if you guys were perfect. I can't fault you for wanting your father alive. I never said it back then but I understand. I probably would have done the same to get anyone from my family back." Rose looked down in thought. Perhaps he was right.

"Okay."

"See? It's not your fault John went insane. In fact, the human chemicals in his body may have mixed with his Time Lord senses, screwing them up. And with the knowledge of the loss of Donna...yeah I'm not surprised he went crazy."

"And you left me there with him anyway?!" Rose cried.

"I wasn't thinking!"

"He coulda killed me!"

"I know! And you don't know how guilty I feel about it." Rose looked at him sympathetically. She smiled, reaching out to run her fingers over his cheek.

"No sideburns this time." She said with a small smile. After all this time she was finally able to study his newest regeneration, her mind finally uncontrolled and mostly undamaged. The Doctor just looked at her with an unreadable emotion on his face.

Suddenly he grabbed the sides of her face and kissed her soundly. She moaned as his tongue asked for access and she willingly gave. As he dove deeper into her, his hands slipped under her top. Suddenly he paused and pulled back slightly.

"Rose, I'm sorry. If you're not ready we–"

"Doctor?"

"Yes?"

"Shut up." With that she shoved her lips back onto his. The Doctor grinned against her kiss.

Everything was going to turn out right after all.

"I'm hangin' on another day,
Just to see what you will throw my way.
And I'm hanging on to the words you say.
You said that I will, I'll be okay.

The broken lights on the freeway left me here alone.
I may have lost my way now, haven't forgotten my way home...

I'm fallin' apart, I'm barely breathing
with a broken heart that's still beating.
In the pain there is healing,
In your name I find meaning.
So I'm holdin' on, I'm holdin' on, I'm holdin' on
I'm barely holdin' on to you."

~End~

I swear I wrote that stare-down contest with a weeping angel line wayy before Angels of Manhattan aired. X| The tragedy of the Ponds never having children just kills me, but it makes perfect sense. First time I was watching Asylum and I felt like my world was being torn apart. A Whovian world where Amy and Rory aren't together? GAH. Glad they sorted it out. Aaaand for those who haven't seen P.S., it's on Youtube, a short unfilmed scene voiced over by Rory that closes off Angels of Manhattan. Highly. Recommend.

Anywayy there you have it! Thanks for all those fantastic reviews, I'm sure this is one of my highest rated stories, which really really surprises me :D

Next Tuesday I'll probably post something in my deleted scenes story "After the Running"(which will either be Ten/Rose fluff or Eleven/Rose angst, you can vote in your review if ya like, which would really help me decide which to post first!), so you might want to check that out, there's already two chapters posted. Thanks again! :)

~BADWOLF~