Disclaimer: I don't own 'Doctor Who' or any of the related characters; you should know the drill by now

Feedback: I'd appreciate it, believe me

AN: These events take place a couple of days after the initial Toclafane assault; I felt that the Doctor would not be in the mood to talk to anyone at that stage of the proceedings, so it would be best to give him time to cool off before Rose started trying to talk to him

AN 2: This chapter features significant reference to the Third Doctor adventure "The Time Monster" and its sequel "The Quantum Archangel" (Which featured the Sixth Doctor); most of the relevant plot details will be explained in the chapter, but I thought people would like to know where I got this info from originally

Broken Faith

As she walked into the control room of her husband's ship- it might be a marriage of convenience more than anything else, but until she could win the Doctor over the Master certainly wasn't that poor a substitute-, Rose allowed herself a slight smile as she saw the Doctor sitting slumped in a chair by the conference table, staring solemnly at his hands as he clenched and unclenched his fists, clearly trying to get used to his increased vulnerability in this new body.

Rose hadn't liked having to see him age like that, of course- neither of them were meant to grow old, they were supposed to remain young and free as they travelled forever through the vast universe that the TARDIS allowed them to access-, but she just had to remember that it was necessary in order for him to see what she had come to see, and that proved enough.

Right now, with the Master currently off attending to resource allocation- now that he'd established his authority it was time for him to begin coordinating his efforts on a more long-term basis-, and Jack and the Jones family being shown to their new positions- the Joneses were now serving as staff while Jack was… just being kept out of harm's way, really; there was nowhere else for him to actually go in this situation-, it was time for her to answer her beloved Time Lord's many questions.

That was just one of the many things she loved about him, really; even if he didn't understand what she was doing here, Rose knew that the Doctor would always be grateful for a chance to learn something new…

What she hadn't expected, as she sat down opposite him- she wanted to look at him right now more than anything else; she still needed some time to adjust to him being so… old now-, was for him to sit slightly up and glare at her with an intensity she had never seen him display when he possessed this face; she'd seen it once or twice in his previous body, but that had only been when he was facing the Slitheen or the Daleks…

"Doctor?" she said, after a few moments had passed while he just stared silently at her, finally accepting that he wasn't going to start the conversation. "Isn't there… something you want to say to me?"

"How…?" the Doctor began, his voice wheezing slightly from the old age of his current form, but otherwise the same as Rose remembered it.

"Did I get here?" she finished, smiling slightly at him; she had a feeling the Doctor wanted to know more, of course- his initial anger due to this lack of understanding was naturally something she was keen to correct-, but he could only understand the answers to his other questions if they got the answer to that first one out of the way immediately.

"That'll do… for a start…" the Doctor muttered, his eyes narrowing as he looked at her. "When I saw you… at Dålig Ulv Stranden… how long ago…?"

"Just over a year for me," Rose replied, smiling slightly at him; it really was rather sweet of him to wonder how long she'd been waiting for him, even if he was still… annoyed (He couldn't be angry; after all, he loved her) at her. "The Master managed to reach back with the TARDIS and pull me through the gap just before it closed- actually, he managed to do it just a couple of seconds after your projection shut down-"

"A few… seconds?" the Doctor repeated, looking at her with an expression that could almost have been horror if it wasn't for the fact that Rose knew the Doctor couldn't be horrified at the thought of her having to wait for so short a time before returning here. "But… but that's impossible…"

"No it's not," Rose said, shaking her head as she looked reassuring at the Doctor. "The Master explained it all to me; after he found records of our last conversation in the TARDIS databanks, he studied the sensor information from when you sent that message to find the… frequency, for lack of a better term that he could use… of the other universe, and from there, having programmed the TARDIS to tap into the remnants of that tear…"

She smiled slightly. "Well, from what he told me later, all he needed to do was jury-rig a few of the dematerialisation systems to transmit the energy used for moving the TARDIS into something he'd developed that could move me through the tear; something about cracks in time-"

"TOMTIT…" the Doctor muttered, the light of inspiration filling his eyes.

"What?" Rose asked, looking at him in confusion, pushing aside the brief joy she felt at the sight of that familiar gleam that always appeared when the Doctor discovered something new.

"Transmission… Of Matter… Through… Interstitial… Time…" the Doctor wheezed, looking up at her with a forceful glare. "The Master helped develop it… to control a Chronovore- an evolved Reaper- back… in the seventies;… must have used it… to draw you through the rip… drew you through the gaps in time… to bring you back here…"

Rose's eyes widened.

"Hold on; you knew about that?" she asked, leaning forward slightly to better look him in the eyes as she tried to find evidence that her theory was wrong; he couldn't have known about that, or he would have used it already…

"Knew about it?" the Doctor repeated, looking back at Rose with his eyes narrowed. "I was there… when the Master… nearly destroyed Earth… by using TOMTIT… nearly drew the Chronovores-"

"You said you could have driven the Reapers back if you'd had the TARDIS; you could have-" Rose began.

"The Reapers… were basic animals; the Chronovores… are sentient… beings!" the Doctor hissed, his body giving the impression that he would be shouting if he had the physical strength to do so. "Angering them… attracting their attention… it would-"

"He used the Paradox Machine to divert the signal caused by him bringing me here to the future, in the year where you met him; there was no danger to Earth," Rose interjected, looking pointedly at him; as much as she loved him, she couldn't help but resent the fact that he'd never managed to recover her when the Master had done it in a matter of months. "From what he told me, it was perfectly simple-"

"'Perfectly simple'?" the Doctor repeated, looking at Rose as though she'd just told him the sky was green. "Paradox Machines… require the heart of the TARDIS… he mutilated her to install it-!"

"So what?" Rose asked, standing up to glare at him. "You could have convinced that thing to cope with a bit of discomfort if you'd actually tried; did you even think about doing that?"

For a moment the two former companions could only stare in silence at each other, the Doctor's glare giving away nothing about how he felt about Rose's last comment, before Rose finally sighed sadly as she looked at him.

"We meant everything to each other, Doctor," she said at last, grateful that it had been so long since she'd first learned that the Doctor hadn't come for her himself. "You're telling me that you never once considered even trying to get me back that way?"

"I thought of everything, Rose…" the Doctor said, his voice practically a growl as he glared at the woman before him, "and everything I thought of… would have put billions at risk…"

"If it had been the other way around, I would have done everything I could to get you back!" Rose yelled, her voice raising as she looked at him. "You were everything to me, Doctor; if I'd had even half of what you've got, I would have used all of it to try and figure out a way to get back to you!"

For a moment, the Doctor simply sat in silence, staring at the young woman before him, before he spoke once again.

"What happened to you, Rose?" he asked, his voice low as he shook his head sorrowfully. "You used to care about things…"

Rose sighed, bringing herself back under control as she looked at the man before her… the man she still loved, even if he sometimes found it hard to see and accept the way things were…

That was part of the Doctor's problem, really; even after she'd seen what he'd become after she'd left him- a man willing to kill children to 'save the day'-, he was still trying to convince her that they could win by sticking to his moral code, rather than doing what was necessary.

"I do care, Doctor," she said, looking at him with a slightly regretful expression; she shouldn't have shouted at him like she did, she knew that he would have done what he could to try and get her back if he didn't feel obligated to always consider the wide-scale effects of his actions (Unlike the Master, who recognised that you had to break eggs to make omelettes on this scale). "But sometimes you have to let some people die; you understand that, the Master showed me that file about Agent Yellow-"

"It's not… the same!" the Doctor practically growled, his voice low in his throat as he looked at Rose resolutely. "I only killed innocents… when it was a direct choice… to kill some now… or let everyone die later! This… isn't… necessary…"

Rose sighed slightly.

She knew that it would take time for the Doctor to see things the way she saw them now; she just wasn't expecting him to be this prepared to resist being with her.

She'd seen the wisdom of the Master's words; why couldn't the Doctor…?

"You'll understand," she said simply, standing up from the table, a saddened look in her eyes as she stared at the Doctor. "You just need time to appreciate our view."

"Never," the Doctor vowed, his expression resolute.

Rose could only shake her head slightly, her heart warmed at this renewed proof that her strong, defiant Doctor was still in this old body even as she wished he could see sense.

Once he understood why she'd done this…

She allowed herself a slight smile as she walked out of the room, her mind filled with thoughts of her and the Doctor, reunited once again and leading the new Human/Time Lord Empire to glory across the universe once he understood why she had chosen the path she had taken…

As the Master had shown her, the old ways wouldn't work any more; only strength would succeed to restore the Time Lords now.

The Doctor would understand that in time.

As the Doctor watched Rose leave the room, their recent conversation flying through his mind as he tried to process what she had just said to him, he couldn't help but shudder slightly.

Even without her constantly praising the Master's philosophy, all that talk about how he should have risked the wrath of the Chronovores to bring her back…

Even if she didn't know the full scale of what the Chronovores were capable of- even if she'd assumed that he'd be able to deal with them like he would have been able to 'fend off' the Reapers if the TARDIS had been working-, hadn't his warnings about what might happen to the universes if he'd tried to bring her back through the rift taught her anything about how dangerous it would be to try and bring her home?

It was starting to sound disturbingly like, as far as Rose was concerned, anything that could have reunited the two of them would have been acceptable simply because it brought the two of them together, the wider risks be damned…

What about her life at the Torchwood of that world; did that time mean nothing to her…?

The Doctor shook that thought off; wondering how Rose felt about her life in that world wouldn't help him now, and the only thing he could do was figure out what the Master had done to bring Rose to this point and work out how to get through to her from there.

TOMTIT's addition to the equation at least answered the question of how the Master had been able to bring the Toclafane through to this time in small numbers without activating the Paradox Machine. With TOMTIT's ability to move matter through time itself- admittedly by moving things through temporal 'molecules' rather than actual time travel-, when plugged into the TARDIS's power supply- particularly when it was still newly-refuelled from his visit to the Cardiff Rift-, after modifying the TARDIS to generate a paradox field to cope with the potential issues caused by his actions, it wouldn't be impossible to assume that TOMTIT could draw Rose through the tear he'd used to say goodbye. After that, drawing the Toclafane to Earth from… wherever they came from… would hardly be difficult; assuming they were in the same universe, the TARDIS could compensate for the range issue easily enough…

The issue of how the Master got the machinery working was a problem, of course- TOMTIT wasn't simply a matter of programming in a few key details and waiting; it required a certain creative ingenuity with the equations that the Master could never get his head around and that even the Doctor had trouble with sometimes-, but if meeting the likes of Edward Waterfield or John Finer had taught the Doctor anything, it was that humanity regularly displayed an uncanny knack for understanding time if given the chance to work on it a bit.

All the Master would need was someone with the right kind of mind, and he could have worked out the necessary equations to recover Rose any time he wanted (For a moment the Doctor contemplated what might have happened to Stuart Hyde- he could certainly have done the calculations and assembled TOMTIT practically from memory-, but shook that thought off; the Archangel network might have prevented him sensing the Master's presence, but the disappearance or death of Stuart Hyde- particularly after his 'regression' during that Quantum Archangel affair when the Master's trap made him thirty years younger- would have set off far too many red flags among the right areas for him to not notice, so Hyde was almost certainly alive, while the Master had simply taken the plans for TOMTIT from some old records or something).

Why he'd gone to that kind of effort to recover one lost companion was more of a question, but the Doctor had worked that part of the issue out after that comment the Master had made when he was trying to ask his old friend about the Toclafane and the Master had started discussing Rose instead.

"You had such faith in her 'goodness', and the moment she sees you again she goes and does that right in front of you without knowing the freak can get back up…"

The Master wanted to break his faith in his companions.

He wanted to convince the Doctor that he was wrong about the human race he had dedicated his lives to protecting by convincing him that they hadn't been worth it, and what better way to do that than by showing him that those human beings he valued most highly- those who he'd chosen to travel with him (Even if he'd not always welcomed their presence at first he'd always grown to like them in the end; even back in his first incarnation, he wouldn't have allowed Ian and Barbara to keep coming along with him if he hadn't wanted them to)- could fall far below his 'standards'…

The Doctor wasn't going to give his old enemy that satisfaction.

That was why he'd told Martha to go and find Sarah when she'd left the Valiant; to prove to the Master- even if he prayed his old foe would never learn what he'd told her to do- that he would never lose faith in his friends.

Rose had let him down- to say the least- by marrying the Master and agreeing to this insane plan of his, but she was just one of many-

The Doctor froze.

One of many…

Where had that thought come from?

After he'd spent so long thinking of her as… well, as more than just another companion (Even he wasn't entirely sure how that had started; his ninth self had just… really bonded with her when they'd met at the beginning of his last life, all those long years ago in that department store basement and he'd continued to feel close to her after his regeneration)…, now he was thinking of her as just one companion among the many he'd travelled with?

It wasn't that he didn't care about his companions a great deal, of course, but he'd always thought of Rose as… more…, and now here he was, thinking of her as…

The Doctor shook that thought off; he wasn't sure where that train of thought was going anyway, and now wasn't the time to start thinking about that in more detail anyway.

But still… even as he sat there, trying to gather the strength to stand for whenever the Master came back to shove him back in that pathetic 'tent' that was the closest thing he had to a room on this thing… even as he prepared himself for however long it would take Martha to get back here after carrying out the task he'd given her… the Doctor couldn't shake the thought that had just crossed his mind.

Looking back on his time with Rose now…

Even without thinking about his recent meeting with her, the memory of her loss didn't hurt as much as it had done at first… and, now that he thought about it, he'd been feeling that way for a while now.

He'd still missed her, of course he did, but it was in the same way that he missed Anji, Erimem or Harry; the way you missed a friend, but not the way you missed a close friend, like a part of him would always miss Fitz, Evelyn or Sarah…

What had changed?

And more importantly, why had it changed?