A/N: *ducks rotting fruit* I'm so sorry! I never meant for it to take this long to update. Somehow, preparations for Christmas, family visits, cleaning and plain laziness got in the way.

That said, here's the new chapter. Still not beta-ed! Hope you'll enjoy!

Chapter 10

"What are we doing now?" Amy asked, still shivering and clutching Rory, as if he might die again if she released him.

The Doctor turned knobs and pushed buttons, sometimes with a bit of difficulty, seeing as everything was still frozen. "Me? I'm going to blow up the Tardis," he replied matter-of-factly.

"What!?"

/*/

Rose woke with a start. She sucked in deep breaths of air, like she'd been drowning and had just breached the surface. It took her a minute to think around the pounding headache she had, but eventually she remembered.

She'd been in the nursery with Amy, Rory and the Doctor, and… something had happened. She couldn't remember birdsong, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. Or…

She'd died…

She'd died and this was the real world. The Doctor wasn't coming for her and she was alone. Again.

/*/

Rory woke up with a pounding headache. As the memories floated back to him, he was glad to find Amy at his side, alive and well, and in the early stages of waking up, herself.

They looked into each other's eyes, jumped up and raced to the console room. Once there, they found the Doctor staring at something in his hand.

"Any questions?" he asked, obviously feeling good about himself.

"Uhm, what's that?" Amy asked. Rory leaned closer to examine the tiny white dots on the Doctor's hand.

"A speck of psychic pollen from the candle meadows of Karass don Slava. Must have been hanging around for ages. Fell in the time rotor, heated up and induced a dream state for all of us," the Doctor explained, pushing the pollen around on his hand. He walked over to the Tardis doors and blew them out into the universe.

Amy was frowning at him, as if there was something about him that she just couldn't quite figure out, but she didn't say anything.

"So that was the Dream Lord then? Those little specks," Rory asked.

"No, no. No. Sorry, wasn't it obvious?" the Doctor asked, coming back over to the console. "he Dream Lord was me. Psychic pollen. It's a mind parasite. It feeds on everything dark in you, gives it a voice, turns it against you. I'm nine hundred and seven. It had a lot to go on."

Amy asked why the polled didn't feed on her and Rory, but the Doctor explained that they didn't have enough darkness in them.

"And Rose does?" Rory asked, frowning. He liked Rose. She always seemed upbeat, she was intelligent, and she didn't overlook him like the Doctor often did.

The Doctor stilled for a moment. "Rose has been through a lot over the years… Still, even her darkest dreams aren't enough to really give voice to anything, she just created her own failing world when she was in the alternate universe."

"Speaking of which, why isn't she here yet?" Rory asked, glancing over to the stairs as if the blonde would somehow appear.

"I'll go check," Amy volunteered quickly. Both men looked over with a sceptical look on their faces. They both knew that the two women didn't exactly get along.

Amy rolled her eyes. "What, I'm bored!" And with that, she nimbly started up the stairs and set out to find Rose's bedroom. In reality, she'd been trying to figure out the Doctor, had any of what the Dream Lord had said been true?

/*/

Back in the console room, a question occurred to Rory. "Doctor, what I don't get is, you blew up the Tardis, that stopped that dream, but what stopped the Leadworth dream?" he asked curiously, as the Doctor pulled levers and twisted knobs on the console.

He looked up. "You should really ask your wife about that," he said, looked a tab embarrassed.

Rory frowned. "Why?"

"Because… you're human, isn't that what humans do?" the Doctor asked evasively, escaping to the other side of the console.

But Rory wanted answers, so he followed him. "What happened?"

The Doctor finally looked up at his companion. "We crashed the camper van," he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. Apparently, that habit had transferred from his last self.

"Oh, right. I don't remember that bit."

The Doctor kept his eyes on the buttons he was pretending to be fine-tuning. "You wouldn't, you weren't there."

Rory frowned. "Then where was I?"

"Uhm… dead, you were dead. Mrs Poggit got you," the Doctor finally responded.

"Oh…"

"That's what convinced Amy that it couldn't be the real universe, so we decided to crash the van," the Doctor explained, dashing around the console again, hoping that Rory wouldn't ask–

"But then what convinced you? And what about Rose, she was the most adamant of all of us that the Leadworth world was the real one."

The Doctor stilled, screwing his eyes shut to try to shut out the memory. "Rose wasn't there either," he managed to whisper eventually.

Rory's face softened. "Oh… I'm sorry, Doctor. But…"

The Doctor grimaced, not caring that the nurse saw him. "But what, Rory?" he asked with a resigned sigh.

"You weren't willing to live in a world where she's dead, but you were absolutely convinced that the dream with the ice star was the real one. Why is that?"

The Doctor paused, actually considering answering that question, when Amy burst in and saved him.

"She's still asleep. I can't wake her up!" she shouts, and the Time Lord jolted into action, running as fast as he ever had to Rose's room. He would never admit it, but he was worried. Rose hadn't been there when he realized both worlds were fake, so she might not have even considered the possibility. What if she was stuck there forever, thinking that he had abandoned her?

Her room was the same as he remembered it. Various items of clothing were strewn around the room, as well as several alien souvenirs and bits and bobs of alien technology that the Doctor sometimes worked on while Rose was sleeping or reading. He really did spend an inordinately large amount of time in his companion's room.

But this time, the soft pink, gold and purple overtones of the rooms couldn't soothe him as much as they usually do when he sees her prone form laying on the bed.

He sat down gently next to her on the bed, carefully brushing a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. She looked so much younger and more fragile like this. It was odd, though it shouldn't be; he was so much more used to seeing this pink and yellow human be strong. He saw her as the Bad Wolf as she saved him and the universe, he was used to seeing her unflinchingly stare down at Daleks, Cybermen and Slytheen alike, with barely so much as a whimper. She even looked at him that way, even when he was at his worst, even when she was faced with all the things that he'd done… she stayed, and she fought, and she cared. And no matter how much he fought her to her face, in the privacy of his own mind, he could admit that he needed that from her more than anything else.

Relative privacy, he amended when the Tardis gave him a comforting nudge in his mind.

He was vaguely aware of Amy and Rory standing at the door, staring at him, but he paid them no mind as he checked Rose's pulse. It was steady, but a little on the slow side, though he'd expected that. Next, he did something he probably wouldn't have done if it was anyone else, not after the Madame de Pompadour fiasco. He put his fingertips on Rose's temples and entered her mind, hoping he wouldn't see what he expected to see.

The mind of a person who's awake is already a bit of a jumbled mess, unless you've had 900 years of practise as he'd had. But the mind of a sleeping person is something completely different. It was very hard for the Doctor to gain entry, not because Rose had any real defences to speak of – he was going to have to work on that with her – but because he was mostly at the mercy of her current thoughts, and a mind in a sleep state works about 10 times faster than a mind awake. It was a good thing he was a Time Lord.

The first impression he felt from her was such a bone-deep sadness and loneliness that he had to let go for a second. It didn't come close to what he'd felt after the Time War, but it was still so profound that he couldn't believe his Rose was capable of such feeling.

With new determination, he delved back in, and was shocked to suddenly find himself in an unfamiliar room. It was filled to the brim with alien technology and was that a pterodactyl? Wherever he was, he didn't seem to have any control over his body.

"Rose, you in there?" a voice echoed through the cavernous room. The Doctor looked up, though not of his own volition, and spotted Jack coming out of an office of some kind. Jack frowned at him. "Are you alright, you look a little… down… well, more than usual."

The Doctor shook his head and waved a hand at the captain, though he still wasn't in control of his body at the time. He got up and walked over to Jack, but something in the corner of his eyes caught his eye. He looked over and saw Rose standing there, or, rather, a reflexion of her, as it was a metal wall. Rose was pregnant. He knew she'd told him that while they were in Leadworth, but she was as big as Amy had been! And she was alone.

A tear slipped from Rose's eye, and the Doctor raised a hand at the same time, for the first time in control. He paused and she did the same. He frowned, as did she, and held his hand in front of his face. The hand he saw was achingly familiar, but it was not his own. The fingers were slender and feminine and the ring finger held a ring with Rose's birthstone in it. He looked up sharply at the reflexion, and so did Rose.

He was looking through Rose's eyes.

/*/

The Doctor jerked back to reality, letting go of Rose's head. She was alone again, and it was all his fault. Again.

"Well, Doctor, what did you see?" Amy asked tentatively from the door.

He looked up, his haunted eyes meeting hers. "She's trapped."

Amy looked at Rory, not knowing what to say to comfort her friend.

"What can we do?" Rory asked, a determined set to his jaw.

The Doctor studied his friends, even as another part of his brain was already formulating a plan. They really were extraordinary, he realized as they stood there, ready to help him, no matter the cost.

"We're going to save her," he replied, a steely note in his voice as he gathered his Rose in his arms and stepped out of the room. He was going to save her, if he had to go to the ends of the universe to get her.

A/N: Review?