As soon as the tunnels had plunged them into complete darkness, the six figures stopped as though through mutual consensus. Rose and Bella leaned against the stone walls, panting hard.
"That was...different," Rose gasped.
Alice laughed smugly. "What's different is that Bella managed to run that far without tripping over her own two feet."
"Shut up, Alice," Bella muttered, blushing crimson in the darkness.
"What happened back there?" Jasper asked, still souding shocked.
"I gave Aro what he wanted," the Doctor said grimly. "Except it was more than he'd bargained for."
"What?" said Rose, Bella, and Jasper together.
"The Doctor's a Time Lord," Edward explained. His voice sounded slightly strained compared to its usual silky smoothness. "He's got the memories of not only more than 900 years and ten different lives, but also all the knowledge from his universe of what was, is, can be, will be, and could have been. The Time Vortex itself runs through his mind. That's quite a lot, even for Aro. The Doctor used the ambient psychic bond between members of the Volturi to relay it to all of them. It caused a mental overload. That's quite a lot of information," he added to the Time Lord, a little resentfully.
"I almost felt it, too, when it was going to happen," said Alice reassuringly, putting her hand on Edward's shoulder. "I also saw that the knowledge will eventually wipe itself from your mind, for your own protection. It'll stop soon, I promise."
"What?" asked Bella, her voice high with anxiety. "Are you okay, Edward?" She stumbled over to take his hand.
"I'm fine," said Edward, smiling slightly down at her. "Like Alice said, it'll go away. But it also means we'll have the Volturi on our backs again fairly soon, even if the attack was aimed directly at hindering them. We have to hurry. Alice, Jasper, can you get Rose and Bella back to the TARDIS? The Doctor and I will meet you back there after we sort this out."
"Sort what out?" Rose demanded, immediately suspicious. "We should come, too."
"No," said Edward forcefully. "You, Bella, Alice, and Jasper go back to the TARDIS. Now."
"What good will we possibly do there?" Rose asked angrily.
"Edward, what are you planning?" Alice asked, suspicious.
"You can see the future, and you know that I haven't decided yet," Edward growled, frustrated. "Which is why I want them out of the way. Just in case. Now go. That way," he added, pointing down the tunnel. "Three rights in a row at the places where the path forks, then two lefts."
"Look, just do what he says," said the Doctor placatingly as Edward took his arm and dragged him down a dark hallway. "It'll be fine. Rose has a key to get you inside. Make sure none of the Volturi try to get in or anything. Good luck!" And with that, he and Edward disappeared down the passageway.
Rose stood in the middle of the tunnel with her hands on her hips, staring after them furiously. Then she wheeled and turned to face Bella. "How can you stand it when he does that? You just let him?"
"What else am I supposed to do?" Bella pointed out, defensive. "He's stronger than I am."
"He's not here now, is he?"
"No," she admitted. "But they are, and I bet they agree with him."
"For the moment," Alice said absently, her eyes hard as she stared down the dark hallway after vampire and Time Lord. "Come on."
Alice picked up Bella, Jasper picked up Rose, and the two vampires ran easily down the pitch-black tunnels. Rose and Bella stared blindly into the darkness, until a blue light slowly became brighter, and then the TARDIS came into view in front of them.
Jasper let Rose down, and she pulled the TARDIS key out of her pocket, fitting it expertly into the lock. "The first time I did this, I almost broke the key," she said to Bella, who was watching, and smiling fondly down at the TARDIS door handle. "I couldn't get it open. The Doctor said something about alternate dimensions in the keyhole. He had to magnetize the key or something like that for me so it would work every time. And now it does!" she finished triumphantly as the lock clicked and she pushed the TARDIS door open.
Bella walked after Rose into the police box. "This thing is amazing," she said, still looking all around as she went inside. "And it travels through time and space, and occasionally from universe to universe? That must be so complicated..."
"Yes, well, the Doctor's the only one who can operate her," said Rose, leaning her elbows on the console and staring up at the central column. "Well, other people can, but it isn't generally a good idea. Even he has trouble sometimes."
"Why is it so complicated?" Bella asked, curious.
"The TARDIS is alive," Rose said softly, turning to look at her. "It can sometimes understand people telepathically, although that's really dangerous. It also translates everything that goes into my and the Doctor's head every time we land on an alien planet or in a different time."
"Alien planets? Is that common?" Bella sounded astonished.
"Pretty common, yeah. About as often as we skip into the past or the future." Rose smiled. She made it sound so ordinary, but to tell the truth, it was hardly something you ever got used to, let alone something that could ever become commonplace.
Bella shook her head, her forehead creasing in something resembling confusion. "That's such a...strange way to live. It's like a bunch of moments. You don't even really have a home. Always roaming..."
"No, I have two homes. One in the Powell Estate in London, where I started out...and the other one here." Rose smiled softly. "This is my real home now, I guess. It's a great place to live."
"But your life seems so uncertain, somehow," said Bella. "So dangerous...you never know what tomorrow will bring. It could be anything..."
"Yes, well," said Rose uncomfortably. "That's the way the Doctor likes it. And I'll follow him wherever he goes. He'll never get rid of me."
Bella searched her face, comprehension in her eyes. "He's tried, hasn't he?"
"I'm not the first companion he's had," Rose admitted wryly, looking at the ground. "But he's different, somehow. He just is. He loves things with his whole heart, sometimes - or with both of them, I suppose it'd be - so somehow it doesn't matter if he's loved someone else. I'm still getting used to that.
"Very different from your Edward, though," she went on, looking at Bella with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. She sat down on the floor of the TARDIS, against the railings, and motioned to Bella to join her. "He's very protective, isn't he?"
"He doesn't like risks around me," Bella admitted, blushing a little as she sat next to the blond girl. "That's probably my fault, though. I have horrible luck. Edward says if there's anything dangerous in a hundred-mile radius, it will inevitably find me."
"Still, it's a weird way to think," Rose mused, staring up at the TARDIS ceiling. "It's like he's got this obsessive protective streak for some reason. Even the Doctor's not that bad about it; he knows he can't control the universe. As much as he might sometimes want to," she added as an afterthought.
Bella frowned uncomfortably. "The thing about vampires is, they don't die, but Edward believed for a while they had no souls. I think he's changed his mind about that now, but... he's still got a ridiculous guilt complex, and at the same time he wants to keep me around as long as he can."
"It's a question of souls?" Rose asked, surprised. "That is so...human." She couldn't come up with another way to put it, but she guessed that probably wouldn't make sense to someone who hadn't been off the planet for her whole life. "Still, he's got to change you sooner or later, I suppose," she went on, thinking the scenario through. "If he's so worried about you being safe. And vampires literally live forever, right? They don't age?"
"No, they don't. I brought him around eventually. Although as you can see," Bella said, gesturing down at herself, "we're still working out the details. ...But what about the Doctor? Edward said something about, what was it, 900 years and 10 lives...?"
"Yeah. Time Lords do this thing when they're about to die - they regenerate, change their entire bodies. They almost become different people, except with all their memories still intact. Well...assuming it goes all right. I've seen the Doctor regenerate once. You should have seen him before, he was completely different..." Rose trailed off softly, looking at the side of the TARDIS console as though there was some old memory hidden there for her eyes alone.
"...So he lives longer than a human would? And..." Bella stopped too, looking at Rose with sympathy written in her face.
Rose looked down at the younger girl and smiled. It was sort of a sad smile. "Yeah. But that's not gonna stop me if I can help it."
Bella nodded in comprehension, smiling too. She knew what is was like to love something that seemed like an impossible dream. It was worth it, just in case there might be a way, one chance in a million that you might end up for once with your dream as real in your hands instead of flitting away to the horizon and leaving you behind...
While they had been speaking, Alice and Jasper had entered the TARDIS behind them, and Alice had curled up onto the couch-like chair by the console, staring into the distance, Jasper watching over her protectively. Suddenly, though, Rose and Bella heard a sharp voice across the console that snapped them right out of their conversation. "What is it, Alice?" Jasper asked, reaching down and grasping her shoulder. Rose and Bella stood immediately at his tone and hurried across to the other side of the TARDIS to watch the scene.
"I don't know, exactly..." Alice said, her voice managing to be distant and frustrated at the same time. "The Doctor's hard to see around, and Edward's not making any solid decisions, really, but I think..." She trailed off for a moment, then her eyes snapped back to the present. "We need to get to the Great One now," she said definitively. "Before Edward can do what I think he's going to think about doing."
Rose raised an eyebrow at this convoluted statement, but Alice's tone was not to be argued with. Within seconds, the two vampires had the two humans on their backs and were racing out of the TARDIS and back down the dark underground hallways of the Volturi's lair, pausing only to slam the TARDIS door shut behind them.