This story has been rewritten. Please see chapter 1 for details.
Chapter 14
He took a broad step into the TARDIS a few hours later, careful to avoid the mess still slopped at the threshold.
"So what do I call you now?" Rose asked as she followed, her jacket thudding onto the rail behind him. "You never said."
"Dunno." He hurried up the ramp to check on the results on the screen. Excellent; the particles were done. Time for sublimation. He cracked his knuckles and let his hands fly across the keyboard.
A shadow darkened the controls. Rose stood next to him, holding up her mobile phone with a you've-done-something-naughty look on her face. "Been going through my stuff, have you?"
He winced. "Now be fair. You can't fault me for wanting to test out the new hardware. You practically asked me to with the way you carried on about sonic technology."
She turned the mobile over in her hand, hunting for evidence of tampering. "Fess up. What have you done to it?"
"Nothing dangerous, promise. Just maximized the signal output."
Her eyes widened and she flexed her fingers around the plastic casing as if suddenly afraid it might slip from her grasp and be lost forever. "Does that mean I can call the Doctor now?" she asked in a breathy voice.
Guilt settled inside him, too uncomfortable and tight for his thin frame. "Not exactly—"
A small glass tube lifted out of the fabrication panel with a hiss.
"What's that?" She put her phone away and walked toward it.
"That," he said as he positioned his glasses on his nose, "is your trininum gas."
"It's ready?"
"Yep," he said with a pop of the 'p'. He moved around her and held up the beaker in the light of the time rotor, gold vapor swirling inside.
"Yield looks good, color looks right on." Rose squeezed his shoulder. "We did it."
"Don't celebrate yet. We only have enough for one. Now hand me a needle, will you?" He pointed underneath the console. "Should be in a drawer just under there." A moment later he felt a plastic handle nudge against his palm.
While holding the beaker steady, he pierced the thin, rubbery cap at the top and the syringe filled with gas. Rose laid the dimension cannon on the dashboard and he injected the gas into the inner shell of the disc. "There we are," he said as he twisted the dial at the top. "Fully ionized thermal plasma."
"Thirty minutes to charge, you said?"
He put on his most smug smirk. "If you weren't in a TARDIS, perhaps. You lot insist on punching holes through realities to create time energy, but TARDISes come by it naturally." He plugged the disc back into the console. "A quick trip through the vortex and we'll be all charged and ready to go."
Rose stuck her tongue out between her teeth, but a smile tugged at her eyes. "What did I say about rule three and cheating?"
"It's not cheating," he said as he toggled the power cue. "Using one's available resources is simply being prudent." He threw down the lever.
The floor beneath him lurched, forcing him to latch onto the railing as the dimension cannon spun across the floor. What on Gallifrey? Did the stabilizers get off-kilter? The clash of breaking glass below overpowered the grind of the time rotor. That would be the workstation—as if his control room weren't already a disaster.
"Rough right this time 'round," Rose said as she gripped the dash next to him.
The ship pitched to the right. He braced against the controls, scouring the array of panels and notches for anything amiss. "This doesn't make sense. I activated the automatic power cue to smooth the flight. I even set the ship to soft land. We must be experiencing vortex turbulence of some kind."
As if to validate his hypothesis, the ship plummeted and flung him to the floor. Pain spread along the back of his skull as a sparkling crimson haze enveloped the room. Above the throb in his ears, he heard the wail of an alarm, then nothing; the ship had stilled.
Rose cursed from somewhere to his left. "Turbulence my rear. Ugh, my head."
He pulled himself to his feet and staggered toward her sprawled form. The hem of her plum blouse had crept up past her navel, her hair splayed across the grating. "You all right?" he asked her.
"'M fine," she muttered as he hoisted her up. "What happened?"
"We've landed."
She yanked her shirt down. "Yeah, I gathered that much, Sherlock. Where?"
"No idea." He darted toward the navigation panel and scanned the monitor. "Looks like we're in the outer universe. The emergency landing protocol must have activated before the computer could finish plotting the flight vectors." He twisted the viewscreen toward him. "Something created a huge time distortion in the lower quadrant of the universe. Must be why we were spit out." He tapped the controls to reset the vectors. "That's bizarre."
"What?"
"I can't access the vortex." He tapped again. "It's almost like it's been … corrupted."
"What, like a computer file?" she asked.
"Right. Delete a few lines of code and file becomes unreadable, and the vortex—"
"Delete?" Rose rushed toward the doors and tugged them open. Stars dotted the expanse, a million pinpricks of light all glimmering contently until one in the far corner went dark, then another. "It's here," she whispered.
Red saturated the chamber once more but without the aid of a blow to the head. The cloister bell tolled, sonorous and mournful. Each gong reverberated through the floor straight up into his chest like the striking of a clock at the midnight hour.
No.
He ran toward the open doors and caught himself on the edge of the door frame. One by one, stars blinked out until darkness consumed half the sky. His legs fastened in place.
Fingernails dug into his arm. "Move the TARDIS, now!" Rose yelled into his ear.
Metal clattered under his feet as he ran, his pulse hammering against the sore spot at the back of his head. "All I can do is a quick transference jump, but that won't get us far. We just dematerialized. We're not at full power yet."
"Just do it!" she said as she slammed the doors.
He pounded a random set of coordinates into the computer, activated every power boosting maneuver he could think of, and yanked down the lever.
The transference jump was almost instantaneous. No dematerialization, no vortex, no turbulence. Just silence.
"Did we move?" She eyed the dome as if half-expecting the room to dissolve.
He entered a few commands into the keyboard to confirm. "Yes. We're in the next quadrant over, but without the vortex we're crippled, stuck in this time period."
Rose trained her dark eyes on him, her face sapped of color. Without a word, she picked up her navy jacket from the floor and threw it over her shoulders.
The sound of zipping doused him with cold. "Rose—"
She strode to the other side of the time rotor, her face a mask of detachment, and retrieved the dimension cannon from the floor.
His feet were moving before he could think. "Rose, wait."
Hair obscured her face as she hooked the cannon onto her belt with a shaking hand. "We don't have time to wait. I have to get back and regroup with Torchwood and stop this crap once and for all."
The air in the room compressed. "But you can't go."
She snapped her head up, her eyes moist but fierce. "Don't you see? It's the only thing I can do."
"Just stop and think for a minute—"
"I've waited as long as I can! Years, I've been chased by this ruddy thing for years." She squeezed her eyes shut, then blew out a long breath as if to gather herself. "I don't wanna go, and if I could split myself in two to be with you I would, but I can't let you be dissolved." Her eyelids opened, the teal reflection of the time rotor swimming inside her dark pupils. "I care too much about you to let that happen."
Pain, fear, and panic billowed up in him, each swell of emotion muddling into the next. "Please, I—I just need a little time to try one last thing. It'll take days for the darkness to consume everything anyway. There's no rush."
Her gaze drifted toward the doors. "But all those people out there—"
He snatched up her hands and rotated her to the side. "Time will rewrite itself. As soon as we sort it, everything will be restored, like a system reboot."
"But … if everything is gonna revert what about you? Everything we've done?" Deep creases formed across her forehead. "Will that all … revert?"
A stab of sympathy twisted inside him. "No, everything will reset to the moment the darkness first appeared, which is now. The TARDIS should shield me from the effects." He tightened his grip on her hands. "But if you leave I can't stop the cracks from sealing behind you. We will never see each other again."
Rose blinked back a fresh wave of tears.
"There is another way," he said with gaining speed. "I can cross my own timeline and tell myself to start the synthesis process earlier. I can make another cannon and go with you. It'll rewrite everything."
She yanked from his grasp. "That will cause a paradox, and you can't travel back in time anyway. The vortex is down."
"Yes, but the dimension cannon doesn't rely on the vortex. If we wire the cannon into the TARDIS mainframe we can bypass the vortex entirely."
She shook her head. "Rule two, remember? I've seen the aftermath of paradoxes and I never want to see it again. Besides, you're not just risking this world. All of creation could fall apart. You can't."
He gently tipped her chin upward. "But we've not even started, you and I. Isn't that worth fighting for?"
She covered his hand, her warmth seeping into his skin. "This isn't just about you and me, remember?"
Even as he held her, he felt her slipping away. He looped his finger through a stray bang that had wiggled free of her hairpin and tucked it behind her ear. Something hot stuck to his fingertips. "Rose, you're bleeding."
"Really?" She pressed her fingers into her scalp and winced. "Oh, it's not that bad. I'll be fine."
The sonic cooed as he focused the beam onto her pupils. "Any pain? Difficulty concentrating?"
"Only when there's a light shining in my face."
"Rose—"
"I can handle a little headache." She rubbed her face. Mascara smeared into the sunken circles below her eyes, accentuating the purplish hue.
"You need rest."
"A couple of paracetamol and I'll be right as rain."
He touched her shoulder. "Go and take a minute. I'm sure there's some stocked in the kitchen somewhere."
"I can't, not with everything going on—"
"Might as well. You can't go anywhere for half an hour anyway. The cannon never had a chance to charge."
She dropped her head in what was either a resigned nod or just plain exhaustion and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Fine. Be back soon." She shuffled toward the corridor.
"Oh, and Rose?" he called in a casual tone.
"Hm?"
"Can I see the dimension cannon? I need to double check and make sure it's in working order … just in case."
Her half-lidded gaze roamed over him for a moment, but she handed it over. "It'll be okay, you know," she said quietly. "We'll figure a way through this, together."
"I hope so."
She turned to walk down the hallway once more.
"Take your time," he called as she disappeared from view.
He hurried back to the console and hooked the cannon back up to the tiny port. A spray of white sparks ejected from the dashboard and the safety protocols flashed on the screen.
"I'm well aware of the dangers, thank you," he said as he whacked the time rotor, "but we haven't got long and we're out of options. If we're going to make this work, you've got to become a paradox machine."
The TARDIS shuddered under his touch and the room once more took on a blood-red hue.