AN ~ This chap's longer than usual but hey, I figure I owe it to you guys XD The Moment you have all been waiting for is getting REALLY close I SWEAR.

Meanwhile, please PLEASE for the sake of all Whovians, particularly those of us down here on Terra Australis, sign this petition to BRING DOCTOR WHO DOWN UNDER!

http:/www . change . org/petitions/british-broadcasting-company-bring-doctor-who-to-australia# (get rid of the spaces obviously)

Love, Australian Whovians

.o.o.o.

Chapter Thirteen ~ Mission

Mickey tried to keep to a walk as he hurried through the Torchwood corridors after Rose. He was completely in two minds about this – was he on Rose's side, or Jenny's? - but if someone didn't catch Rose soon, who knows what she might do?

He burst out the door to find Rose rather anti-climatically sitting on the front step, hugging her legs, picking at a loose thread on the knee of her jeans.

"What the 'ell was that?" he blurted, without thinking about his words first. Rose turned her face towards him, jaw open, eyes wide in shock.

"You're takin' her side?"

"Yeah, I am! You were right 'orrible just now! D'you know how hard it is for her to make friends?"

"I guess not, but-"

"D'you have any idea what it might be like to have an alien dad who you've never met, and probably never will coz he's stuck in another universe?"

"No, but-"

"Can you even imagine?"

"No! But-"

"Her friends all believe her, by the way, and Lynch personally invited them all to join Torchwood. Just in case you wanted to congratulate her or anything."

"How dare you!" Rose stood up. "What, suddenly I'm a bad mother am I? I'm mad because that girl in there destroyed my only chance to see him again, and the fact that I'm pissed off and crying makes me a bad mother?"

"I don't think you're a bad Mum Rose, come on!" Mickey reasoned. "I understand you're wound up, but Jenny was really worried about you back there. There was no way of knowing what she'd done – least of all before she did it. I'm just asking you to have a little perspective and try to see it through someone else's eyes. You've invested way too much in the Dimension project, if you ask me. It was a long shot that it even worked; it could just as easily have shut down of its own accord."

"But it didn't."

"Yeah, well, next time we'll label the electrics with 'do not sabotage: you may be destroying an inter-universal experiment.'"

"You mean you didn't?"

"What part of secret did you not understand?"

Rose made a fist, and swung it wildly in Mickey's direction. He ducked, but she would not have hit him anyway. She roared with anguish, knowing that in truth there was noone to blame. Mickey was right. As her hand fell back to her side, now limp, Mickey gently wrapped his arms around her and let her cry into his chest.

.o.o.o.

Donna watched the Doctor fume at the controls, considering what to say to interrupt his vicious abuse of the TARDIS' buttons and levers. Her puzzlement wasn't for lack of questions – who was Sarah? What did she mean about the stars? What was UNIT? - but rather an invisible barrier that seemed to have appeared around the Doctor. One which jokes and banter, Donna's instinctive method of communication, would not break through.

"Who's Jenny?" she asked quietly.

The Doctor's shoulders deflated with a heavy sigh, and he turned to Donna with the darkest, saddest gaze she had ever seen.

"Do you remember what I told you about Rose?"

"Uhm...yes..." It wasn't much, though.

"Jenny is our daughter."

Donna's jaw dropped. Before she could properly process this information – thankfully for the Doctor, before the speel of questions in her mind reached her tongue – they landed. The Doctor flew at the doors, tore them open and sprung into the room with his usual energy, his heavy gaze only remembered by an edge to his gait and his words.

"Doctor!" Cheers arose outside. Donna crept towards the door, feeling very out of place all of a sudden. Aliens, fine. Ancient Rome, great. But friends of the Doctor? He was so amazing; no doubt they would be expecting her to be as great. It sounded so stupid but what if they didn't...like her?

"Sarah! Martha! This is Donna Noble!" The Doctor directed the attention of everyone in the room towards the TARDIS doors as Donna tried to covertly edge her way to the Doctor's side. Sarah – the woman from the video – and a younger woman with dark skin smiled, applauded and greeted the bewildered redhead as the Doctor introduced them.

"This is Martha Jones and Sarah-Jane Smith."

"They- They travelled with you?" Donna hoped she sounded more speculative than hopeful.

"Yep. Sarah was a while ago, too. "

"Can't get rid of 'em!"

The new arrival, none other than the notorious Captain Jack, meant it as a joke. Everyone in the room could tell. That's why the Doctor cleared his throat and changed the topic before things got too serious.

"The stars!" he prompted looking around for a computer of some sort and whipping out his Brainy Specs as he headed over to the nearest screen and – instead of waiting for Martha and her password – promptly hacked it with a wave of the sonic screwdriver.

"Earth is not close enough to the darkness to track it before it's too late, even with modified alien tech from Torchwood, so we've created a signal network to get the information through. We've been monitoring the stars with data received by stations on Melena 7, Saade and Messaline," Martha filled in, directing her speech at Donna as the Doctor, no doubt, had already discovered this in his rapid analysis of the last three years of records.

"It's gone! Why's it gone?" the Doctor muttered, whacking the back of the computer as if to make it cough up the missing statistics. Martha was already explaining.

"Melena Prima – that galaxy's sun – disappeared two months ago. We had to evacuate. We're setting up another station on Poosh, but it'll be-"

"Woah!"

The Doctor jumped back from the screen as a huge spike on the graph flashed before them.

"What was that?" Donna and Sarah-Jane asked at once.

"Messaline," the Doctor read out the graph's label.

"And we're current," Martha noted with a frown, reading over the Doctor's shoulder. Jack sidled up and examined the screen as well.

"It can't be their sun already." He shook his head. "The darkness hasn't travelled that fast before. It's constant."

With a glint in his eye that his companions had come to identify as let's go and poke it with a stick, the Doctor pulled a plug out of the back of the monitor, then picked up the hard-drive box of the computer and crossed the room to plug it into a bigger screen. He minimised the graph, still plunging up and down as it drew itself in the corner, and brought up a radar screen. Donna had grown quite used to feeling completely bewildered lately – in fact, she was beginning to wonder if she would ever wipe the expression off her face – but she was running out of words to fathom just how strange and wonderful this whole situation made her feel.

"That's Messaline, right?" she pointed to a green dot, proud to be keeping up. The blue dots must be other planets in the system, she figured, which meant the red dot they were orbiting around must be - "And that's the sun."

"Good, Donna!" The Doctor praised. Suddenly, the red dot flashed off the screen and back on again. Then off a moment later, and then two reappeared, overlapping slightly. The observers glanced at each other, eyebrows raised.

"Replay the graph," Sarah-Jane suggested. The Doctor waved his screwdriver, and the graph and radar screen switched places. The graph was a few seconds behind, so they all got to observe the spike on the records that coincided with the strange sun activity they had just observed on the radar.

The Doctor turned to Martha and Jack, who were staring in complete awe at the screen above their heads.

"I take it that's not what it looks like when a star disappears."

"Not at all." Jack said.

"The graph should dip, not spike," Martha explained. "And there definitely shouldn't be two red dots."

"Hey, they're gone," Donna pointed out, frowning. "No wait, they're back."

The Doctor removed his Brainy Specs and slipped them into his pocket with an enthusiastic grin.

"To Messaline then!" He gestured to the TARDIS with his screwdriver before tucking that too inside his jacket pocket.

"We're going to investigate exploding suns?" Donna asked, near breathless, as Jack and Martha passed her, chatting like old friends.

"Yep."

"In deep space."

"Yep."

"With a time machine."

"Yep."

"I love my life!" With an excited squeal, she disappeared to the TARDIS. With a gentle smile after his latest assistant, the Doctor turned to face Sarah-Jane, who was talking on her mobile to Luke. Seeing his eyes on her, she hung up.

"Someone has to stay at home base," she reasoned, tears welling in her eyes though she was confident in her decision. "You keep out of trouble, okay?"

The Doctor embraced her and rested his chin on the top of her head for a moment before letting her go.

"Off you go then," she dismissed him, wiping a stray tear from her cheek. "She's waiting for you. Don't make the same mistake."

"I won't."

.o.o.o.

Rose lifted her head off Mickey's lapel at long last, and wiped her eyes with the back of a hand.

"I'm sorry," she exhaled.

"It's okay. You just need to get your mind off things for a while. There's a training mission taking off tomorrow morning. Lynch'll want Jenny and her friends on it. Why don't we go too? Pete and the others can fix things back here and we'll try again when we get back."

"No, I don't want to leave."

"You won't be any good here. You don't know enough of the science and you won't be getting any sleep."

Rose blinked, unfazed.

"It's only a couple of months – three, maybe four. Come on Rose, it'll be good for you."

Rose frowned at him, a little irritated at how well her friend knew her, but appreciative of his concern. She sighed in surrender and let him pull her slowly back towards the door.