It didn't take Bad Wolf very long to find the Doctor's TARDIS, since her own TARDIS had parked only two blocks away from it. She hummed Hungry Like the Wolf to herself as she slipped her key (which she'd kept in a small white box which also held her and John's wedding rings) into the lock of the blue box, and stepped inside, pausing in the entrance.
"Hello, Old Girl, I love what you've done with the place," she murmured, before dashing to the controls. "And I'm hungry like the wolf!" She sang as she ran around. She took the breaks off (something the Doctor always forgot to do), then paused, wondering where exactly she should take the TARDIS. She didn't want her to be alone, but who else knew how to drive her? "Jack!" Bad Wolf crowed, and began dashing about again. She wasn't sure that Jack would know how to drive her, but he'd figure it out.
"Rose?" Bad Wolf whirled around to face the startled voice behind her. She blinked once, twice, then scowled. "Oh well that's just lovely. Listen, I realize I'm a time rotor short of a TARDIS at the moment, but that is no reason to go generating hallucinations!" She shouted, turning back to the TARDIS controls.
"Sorry, but who're you yelling at?"
Bad Wolf huffed impatiently. "You, my brain. Both? All I know is you're not real," She turned around again, and walked into the personal space of her hallucination. "You can't be real," she whispered, looking him over closely, "I killed you." The hallucination Doctor reached out to touch her, but Bad Wolf danced out of reach, back over to the controls.
"I'm not a hallucination, Rose," the Doctor called desperately, moving closer to Bad Wolf.
"'Course you are. Saw you die myself. Hell, I pulled the trigger! And now this is my brain's last ditch effort to pull me back to sanity and change my mind," Bad Wolf said firmly. Part of her wondered why she was arguing with a figment of her imagination. The majority of her didn't particularly care.
"Change your mind? Change it from what?" The Doctor asked uneasily.
"Why, from absorbing the heart of the TARDIS, of course. Again. 'Course, this time, I can't die, so it'll be loads more fun!" She sang cheerfully, before her face turned serious. "I'm going to kill them all. The Silence. Every last one of them," she whispered, her eyes unfocusing. She giggled after a moment, and her eyes returned to the Doctor. "Except for Madame Kovarian. I'm going to atomize her piece by piece, make sure she can feel it. I figure I'll start with the non-vital organs; the appendix, the tonsils, a lung, a kidney, the spleen. Can you live without the spleen? Ah, well, I was always rubbish at anatomy." She turned away from him, and went back to the controls.
"Rose—"
"Don't call me that!" She snarled, turning back to him with her teeth bared like some sort of rabid animal.
"What should I call you, then?" The Doctor asked warily, his hands raised in surrender.
"Bad Wolf. That's what I'm calling myself now…" She trailed off and turned away again, slower this time.
"Alright…Bad Wolf…you can't merge with the heart of the TARDIS again," he pleaded.
"Sure I can!" Bad Wolf sang cheerfully.
"Bad Wolf…Rose…" The Doctor put his hand on Bad Wolf's shoulder, and she stiffened under his touch, as if he were King Midas.
"No. No no no no no no no no…." She muttered, pulling away from the Doctor, who was not a hallucination, and backing away, fear making her eyes go wide. "You're dead. I killed you. And then I killed you again mid-regeneration. You. Are. DEAD!" She screamed.
"Hush, hush, calm down," The Doctor said, stepping closer, then stopping when Bad Wolf whimpered in fear. "That wasn't me. Well, I was there, but the body you shot wasn't mine. There's this police force, and they have these machines that look like whatever person they want them too; they owed me a favor, so I got them to make their machine, the tessalecta, look like me. I was riding inside of it. You didn't kill me, you just made the Silence think I'm dead. See? Everything's okay!" The Doctor said with a hopeful smile.
Bad Wolf slowly stepped closer to the Doctor, the fear gone from her face. She reached a hand out to touch his face, and the Doctor smiled reassuringly at her. He raised his hands to hug her, and only barely registered the flash of rage on her face before her fist collided with his jaw and sent him to the ground. "Ow!" He shouted in protest.
"You let me think I killed you!" Bad Wolf shrieked, rage making her eyes burn like fire. "Killed you. Did you think that would go over well? That I'd just be able to accept it and move on with my life? Or did you think at all? And you were there the whole bloody time. Why the hell didn't you find some way to let me know you were in there, that I wasn't killing you?!" She screamed.
The Doctor picked himself up slowly, rubbing his jaw. "You're right, I'm sorry. I should have realized that, for someone as innocent as you, taking a life—" The Doctor was cut off by Bad Wolf's derisive laugh.
"Innocent? Oh Doctor…I've killed before," She snapped, and the Doctor thought he saw some of the insanity return to her eyes.
"Right, right," he back tracked, trying to think of a way to calm her down, "I'm sure at some point, in order to save yourself, you had to take a life, but I'm sure—" he was cut off again.
"In order to save myself, right. You know, that's what I told myself in the beginning? That it was necessary. Even that lie fell through in the end. My hands have more blood on them than yours, Doctor," she spit his name out like it left a bad taste in her mouth.
But now the Doctor was getting angry. He'd opened up to her before, told her what he'd done to his people, how dare she dismiss that now? "Are you forgetting, Rose," he said quietly, anger filling his voice, "that I destroyed my entire planet? My whole race? And most of the daleks in the process?"
"And I killed the whole bloody universe!" Bad Wolf yelled at him.
The TARDIS went dead silent after that. "You…you what?" The Doctor managed to choke out.
"Didn't you wonder how I came back?" Bad Wolf taunted, circling him now like he was her prey. "I created a paradox, a huge bloody paradox that swallowed the whole universe; I slipped out of the tears at the edges," she stopped so that she was right in front of him. "And I managed to hold it together, barely. And then you. You had to go and make me think I'd killed you. The Doctor. The one man who would be able to keep this universe safe. How could you ever think I would survive that?" She whispered, shaking her head. She started for the door.
"Rose, I—"
"I SAID DON'T CALL ME THAT!" Bad Wolf whirled around, her face murderous. And in that moment, the Doctor thought she might actually kill him. "Rose Tyler died a long time ago. You would do well to forget her," she said in a quieter tone, full of bitterness. She left then, and the Doctor didn't try to stop her.
He sat down on the jump seat, staring off into the distance. Rose had murdered an entire universe. That was a googolplex of people. It was an accident; he knew it was an accident, even if she didn't say it was. But still, all those people…
The Doctor dropped his head into his hands. Rose, his Rose, was a murderer. He didn't know if he should hug her and try to make her better, or take her straight down to the Shadow Proclamation and make her face judgment. Both, of course, were assuming he could find her again and catch her.
He groaned. Never in his long life had he thought that he would one day have to figure out a way to catch Rose Tyler. Rose Tyler…he was still calling her that, even though she'd claimed that that part of her had died…
And with that, the Doctor realized that he still believed in Rose Tyler. She was still there, she could still be saved, and she could still be loved.
The Doctor stood, and went to the controls. He had to find her. He would find her, and he would help her.
Bad Wolf stalked onto her TARDIS, and paced back and forth in the control room, still fuming over her shouting match with the Doctor. "Grah!" She screamed, and kicked the wall of the TARDIS. The TARDIS hummed reproachfully at her, but secretly, she was happy that the insanity that had completely closed off her Wolf's mind had diminished; it still lingered at the edges, but it was no longer all-consuming.
Bad Wolf stalked out of the main room and down the hall into her work out room. She hadn't been in there in a long time, not since she'd decided not to kill anyone, but she needed to blow off some steam. She through her army green jacket to the side and started attacking the punching bag; not bothering to wrap her knuckles first. She went at it for hours, screaming her frustration as she went, until her knuckles were bruised and bloody and her throat was raw and torn.
And she was still angry. She wandered back into the console room, muttering to herself, before she set the coordinates to the small room in Torchwood's Cardiff division where she and Jack usually met.
She stepped into the room, and Jack was there in minutes. He walked in with a grin, his arms open and ready for a hug, but stopped when he took in the state of Rose. She was sweaty and bleeding, pacing back and forth in the small room, and cursing in several different alien languages.
"Rose?" She turned to glare at him when she heard her true name, but huffed and kept pacing. Jack sat down on an old desk that had been put in the room for storage, and waited; he knew Rose well enough to know that she'd tell him when he was ready.
She stopped and faced him abruptly. "I spoke to the Doctor today," she declared; her voice was rough from all the screaming she'd done, and it hurt to talk, but she ignored it.
Jack raised an eyebrow, and looked her over again. "I take it it didn't go well?" He asked wryly.
Rose nodded, and, after much prodding, sat down and told him the whole story. Jack bandaged her knuckles while she spoke, keeping his face down so that she wouldn't see the anger on his face. She'd come to him to calm down, she didn't need to know that he was planning his own shouting match with the Doctor as they spoke.
When she'd finished talking, Bad Wolf was tired. She allowed Jack to pull her in for a hug, and let her forehead rest on his shoulder as she closed her eyes. "I'm so sorry I couldn't save you from Madame Kovarian," Jack whispered, and Bad Wolf heard the pain in his voice.
"Hey," she said, pulling away and holding his face between her hands so that he was looking at her. "I told you to leave. I told you to take Melody, and leave. That was my decision, and don't you ever, for one second, think that anything that happened as a result of my decision is your fault. Okay?" She asked, her eyes darting back and forth between Jack's to make sure he understood.
Jack sighed, and looked away, but nodded and smiled at Bad Wolf. She smiled back. "Good. Now, where did you take Melody? I want to keep an eye on her, make sure she's safe."
Jack watched the TARDIS leave, and turned away. He'd told Rose where he'd dropped off the baby—Melody, her name was Melody—and she'd left soon after. He was left alone to try and figure out a way to contact the Doctor.
He was almost out the door when he felt the wind that he associated with Rose's arrival. When he turned, however, it was the blue box that greeted him, not the red door. Well, that was easy.
The Doctor poked his head out, frowning. "It didn't make the noise. Why didn't it make the noise?" He murmured before his eyes landed on Jack. "Jack!" he smiled, stepping out of the TARDIS and closer to his old friend. "Have you seen—" he was cut off as he was punched for the second time that day. The good news was Jack had nothing on Rose. The bad news was he'd hit the same spot Rose had.
"Right, starting to get used to that…" he muttered, standing up and dusting himself off.
"You let her think she'd killed you? Are you crazy?!" Jack yelled.
"So I'll take that as a yes, Rose has been here?" The Doctor asked wearily.
"Damn straight she has! She came in here, her hands practically mangled, furious beyond belief, and all because you couldn't be bothered to tell her you were in a robot and not dying!"
The Doctor rubbed his head. "I know, I know, I screwed up. I'm trying to find her now, do you know where she is?" He pleaded.
Jack considered him for a moment. "I'm not sure you're what she needs right now," he said at last.
The Doctor gaped at him. "I'm always what she needs!" He retorted, then winced at the look Jack was giving him. "Right, that came out rather arrogantly. What I mean is, I can help her heal."
Jack shook his head. "You need to let her cool off first. The way she is now, she might kill you on sight. For real this time. Let her be for a while, if I think she's ready for you, I'll send her your way. Or you her way. One or the other. But only if I think you're both ready," Jack said firmly, glaring at the Doctor who just stared at him.
"When did you turn into her dad?" He had to duck as a stapler flew at his head.
So, now Rose knows the Doctor knows that she's in the right universe, and the Doctor knows that Rose killed the other universe. Rose is still a wee bit on the nuts side, and the Doctor has decided he can fix her. I think I can safely say we made a lot of progress plot wise in this chapter, what do you guys think?
Thank you all for the lovely reviews; I caught myself doing this odd little dance like an overly-pleased eight year old as I read them.
Thanks also to all those who followed and reviewed! You guys make me happy, too!
Until next time!