Here it is folks, the last chapter. Thank you for the reviews. I've got a whopper of an adventure almost completed featuring the Doc and Rose as characterised in this story and hope you'll come back for more!
-#-
The time machine tethered to the Doctors biorhythm once more, Rose stood within it after more hours of sleep than she had had in the last week combined. She hadn't started awake in the Tardis, her body too damaged, her mind and heart needing rest. No one had said a word when she emerged from the blue box later than usual.
"Ready?"
"Count me down," Rose confirmed, the butt of her rifle next to her right foot, the barrel in her hand.
The shift toppled her onto the grating at her feet, her leg still aching from the burn, making her unsteady. Righting herself readily enough, Rose looked around the corridor, the sound of engines telling her it was a ship, the volume that it was small.
Absentmindedly, she looked at her comm as she moved down the corridor and stopped dead. The Time Lord biorhythm signal blipped innocuously and time slowed for Rose. He was near.
Rose slung the rifle strap over her shoulder and took out her pistol instead, set it to stun.
The first door she came to clunked mechanically open as she approached and Rose stunned the two aliens within. A quick scan told her nothing in the room would be useful in locating the Doctor and she departed. The process was repeated six more times, a pile of stunned humanoids left in Rose's wake.
"You didn't even try to talk to them," the Doctor observed critically, turning a scathing glare on Rose.
She was unphased. "Couldn't take the chance, needed to find you." She looked at him with resignation, "besides, I get my comeuppance."
He frowned at her as, in the memory, Rose entered an empty room, clearly an observation deck, and stood captivated by the brilliant swirl of vibrant colours in the heart of space. Squinting suddenly, Rose ran to the glass and pressed her face against it before looking at her wrist, switching the comm to tell her the date.
A sad half laugh, half pained groan escaped her lips. The date was burned into her memory, the day she had stood on a beach, told the Doctor she loved him and watched him disappear before he could say anything of substance. She looked back up at the speck of blue floating next to the super nova and put her hand on the glass.
"Doctor..."
After a moment's sad reflection, Rose ran to the terminal on the far wall and began tearing it apart, trying to find a way to get a message to him. So focused was she that the butt of the rifle caught her unawares and she crumled to the ground in its wake.
"Oh...no," the Doctor grimaced.
"Yeah," Rose confirmed, hardened beyond the pain she knew was coming in the memory.
"Did you know who they were when you...?" he asked, looking aside at her.
"Yeah," she shrugged, "you know, vaguely from your memories. Not like they ever captured you, was it? Just had stories you'd heard."
Discomfited, the Doctor looked back to the memory as Rose awoke, strapped to a chair with all manner of instruments suspended above it. He had often wondered where the multitude of small cuts that littered Rose's body had come from. It was a good bet that most of them were the result of the events playing out in the memory.
"How did you get on board?" the humanoid asked in Lychandrian.
Moving her stiff and sore Jaw, Rose eyed the instruments that dangled just above her head before returning to her questioner. "Temporal shift from the near future, 'bout a few days out." The Lychandrins were known for perfecting what they saw as the art and science of torture. She didn't see any reason to lie to them.
The Lychandrin's hairless brow raised at her. "Temporal shift?"
Rose nodded matter of factly. "Time travel, yeah."
Sighing heavily, the humanoid stepped a few paces from her and pressed a button on a long panel that also hung from the ceiling. Six claw-like implements shot into Rose's chest and she let out a short sharp scream, surprised initially, slowly becoming aware of the pain flooding her torso.
"I had hoped our reputation would precede us and you would spare us any...fanciful tales," the Lychandrin said solemnly. "But if you will not, we will treat you to the height of our expertise."
"No," Rose said forcefully, "I'm tellin' ya the truth-"
"Time travel is the domain of the Time Lords and Daleks, both extinct. You lie," the Lychandrin said flatly, flicking a switch and sending 40, 000 volts through the spikes in Rose's chest. Every muscle in her body seized and the Doctor swallowed as he felt the sensation, or lack thereof, of her heart stopping momentarily. It was brief but Rose was still left shaking in the aftermath.
When her torturer turned away from her to inspect more tools at the side of the room, Rose fidgeted with her wrist until she had pressed down the two buttons that in conjuncture held the comm line open from her end. "I need a shift," she said quickly in English, "I need it fast. Don't respond, the comm's locked...and don't listen anymore after this." Swallowing, Rose knew her last order would likely be ignored by silent agreement amongst the personnel. As a hot liquid seeped through the probes in her chest, burning as it went, Rose could only hope Wolfram would shut the audio down when she started to scream.
-#-
The shift always took time. It was a massive power drain, coordinates had to be input, calibrated, checked and double checked. After being awoken from a shock induced sleep for the second time, Rose saw that her torturer had moved in with a long curving blade and was eyeing her ear with detached fascination.
"You're very good at this," she said, drawing his attention. He looked at her queerly and Rose eventually decided it was a smile.
"Thank you," he replied, looking her over again. "Where are you from?"
"Earth," Rose said blandly.
The Lychandrian's eyes grew a little wider. "Human?"
"Yeah."
"Hmm, I suppose earth is quite close...I've never worked on a human before."
"Really?" Rose said with polite interest.
"Mmm, I regret that we do not have someone more versed in psychological torture on board. You would have made a fascinating study," he said regretfully.
"Not really," Rose said, noting for the first time how hard it was to breath with the spikes in her chest. "Don't think there's much t'be done t'me psychologically right now that isn't already happenin'." She hung her head with a sad smile as she thought about the Tardis hovering out by the super nova, the closest she had been to the living Doctor in two years. Swallowing, she turned that resigned smile back on her torturer. "Go on then," she said quietly, "was never that fond of that ear anyway."
Dipping his head in acquiescence, the Lychandrian was about to take hold of the shell of her ear when Rose blinked from existence. She had no memory of arriving in the hanger.
-#-
Despite more sedatives coursing through her system than would be required to still a horse, Rose started awake only a few hours after Sandra and the med team had finished with her. She flung herself from the bed and crashed to the floor as her legs, unsteady from too much pain and too many drugs, failed her. Rose just managed to catch herself on the bed and clung to the side of it, her face a snarl as she tried to right herself. Sandra and another medic were on her in an instant, trying to get her back to bed.
"No!" Rose protested loudly, "I was so close, I've gotta get back!"
Swatting her would be helpers away, Rose finally stood with her arms supporting her, her eyes alight. "Get me some bloody clothes."
Wincing occasionally from her burns and the new additions to her catalogue of injuries, Rose moved around the hanger as if possessed. She tried to recreate exactly the conditions and codes that had led her to be transported aboard the Lychandrian ship next to the super nova. The only unknown variable was the Tardis which made the ultimate decision of where the shift came out and Rose was gaining a new appreciation for just how good the Doctor had been at flying it.
"You're trying to go back," Wolfram stated, standing next to where she lay under a section of the time machine.
"Yeah," Rose called up distractedly, eyeing a panel readout with fluctuating numbers.
"Back to where they did what they did to you," Wolfram pressed but this Rose did not answer, being too absorbed in doing exactly that. Huffing out an impatient breath, Wolfram knelt and whispered sharply at Rose, "we listened to you screaming the entire time this bloody thing was spooling up-"
"And I bloody well told you not to," Rose hissed back at him before returning to what she was doing.
"You were a god damned mess when you landed back...what if you die this time?"
Rose didn't look aside at him again. "Ya have your orders in case I don't come back," she stated much more calmly, knowing he couldn't argue with that. He stayed crouched looking at her for a long time and Rose knew he wanted to say something, also knew that he wouldn't. He left and she finished her work.
-#-
Stabbing her thigh with a shot of epinephrine, Rose marched into the centre of the time machine and stood with a new rifle at her hip. She nodded at her techs, avoided Wolfram's gaze and was blinked from the hanger.
It felt wrong the second she landed. The air, the smell of it, the sounds, the quality of the light. She was outside, not on a ship, and Rose gritted her teeth at the realisation. Looking around, she knew it was a city, a human city judging from the familiar detritus that lined the ally she had found herself in. Subconsciously she had avoided looking at her comm until last, a sinking feeling in her stomach that it would tell her what she didn't want to know.
Instead, it told her what she didn't completely understand. The Time Lord biorhythm signal wasn't flashing as it would have for the Doctor, it lit in a different pattern and Rose frowned at it. Unequivocally, it indicated that he was not near. Exactly what it was signalling was near, Rose had no idea.
Switching the comm to read the date, Rose saw that it was November 12, 1930 and hesitated. Earlier in the time stream. If something was going wrong, something the Doctor had fixed in the proper time stream, she would need to sort it or risk it wiping the future out.
Her disappointment blunting the effect of the adrenaline, Rose meandered the city, figuring out in short order that it was New York from the accents alone. Dusk was settling as she made her way into central park, having kept to the shadows with her rather big gun to avoid attention, it seemed like a good place to lay low and gather information. The park was teeming with life, a tent city that Rose hadn't expected.
The tent city's occupants eyed her warily as she stepped up to the heat of their fire and held her hands out. Across from her, a man looked her over quickly before smiling.
"Know a soldier when I see one," he said, stepping around the barrel that housed the flames and offering his hand. "Names Soloman. Corporal, Eighth Infantry."
Rose shook his hand, gave him a small smile in return. "Sergeant Smith, Rifles," she lied easily, taking the Doctor's alias and the regiment that Wolfram had come up through in the regular army.
"Ah, British," the other man said with raised brows, "explains some things."
Rose almost smirked. "Yeah, we're...forward thinkin' on the island."
Looking at the rifle slung across Rose's back, Soloman nodded to it. "War's been over a few years now. You expecting trouble...in New York of all places?" he asked, a little sceptical.
Crossing her arms, Rose leaned in slightly. "Actually...I am lookin' for trouble. Seen anythin'...I dunno, strange lately?" It was the best descriptor she could use. From ethereal projections of aliens that had barely survived the time war popping up in Cardiff to the devil incarnate chained in the mouth of a black hole, she was really looking for anything.
Soloman inhaled, shoved his hands in his pockets as he frowned at the darkness around them. "Since you ask..." he paused, "been men goin' missing from the camp for the past few weeks. Police try to say they just up and moved but...it's mostly them as get taken for a project in the sewers."
"Show me," Rose said with a force that surprised him.
At the lip of a sewer hole, Rose flicked on her slim torch to look within it and Soloman looked surprised once again, took a better look at the gun slung over her shoulder. "You Brits got some impressive kit."
Rose didn't reply, just clenched the light in her teeth and dropped into the hole swiftly. Leaning his head into the hole, Soloman said to her, "you going alone?"
"Yeah," Rose said up to him, screwing the torch into the slot underneath the barrel of her rifle.
"Not usually how the army works. You never go alone."
Rose raised the butt of her rifle to her shoulder, the light cutting through the deep darkness. "My team's a long way away. Just me for this." She looked up into Soloman's face, vaguely illuminated by her light. "Thanks."
She set off, the tunnels quiet, placing one boot in front of the other. Three quarters of an hour into the labyrinth, Rose fired a shot in before a moving shadow. "Stand to!" she hollered.
"Don't shoot!" the shadow cried, hands raised above its head as Rose approached it, rifle levelled.
"What do ya know about men disapearin' down here?" she asked.
"You're a woman," the shadow said with surprise.
"You're observant," Rose retorted, stepping to within a few feet of the beast, her torch outlining every detail of the grotesqueness of the face as it slowly lowered its hands to regard her.
"I've just...never seen a woman holding a gun before, that's all, it's pretty strange."
"Never seen anything half as weird as a pig-man before...an' for me, that's really sayin' somethin'." Rose admitted, lowering the barrel of the gun to point at his feet. "Ya don't look dangerous to me."
The creature let out an unamused huff of breath. "You've gotta be the only person who'll ever say that to me again."
"Tell me what's been done to ya, an' who did it," she ordered and Rose and the Doctor observing her wondered where her sympathy had gone, sympathy that was once so easily garnered. He led her through the tunnels for almost an hour longer, then up so many flights of stairs Rose had to wait for him as he weakened. She had stopped pointing the gun at him long ago.
"I think I'm dying," the creature whispered to her at the last flight of stairs.
Rose looked him over, placed two fingers against his throat and leaned in to listen to his breathing. "You sound rough," she agreed, stepping back. "I can't help ya, I'm sorry," she said, her face hard and the creature nodded.
"They're through there...good luck."
Looking at him a second longer, Rose crouched and made her way along a catwalk until she could regard the floor below. The Daleks were a disappointment rather than fear inducing and she watched them for a long while.
"Cult a' Skaro," she whispered, shaking her head, "all your fault." Sighting down on them, she steadied herself.
"Four...Daleks," the Doctor said, impressed with her brazenness.
"I'm a really great shot," Rose stated as her remembered self opened fire, hitting each Dalek with two shots before the last one standing could take aim at her. Their shredded hulks smoked below as Rose descended and walked to the incomplete wall, pushing aside plastic sheets as she went.
She laughed after the moment it had taken her to figure it out. "Empire State building," she said softly.
Two hours later, she shifted out of 1930s New York just as the top of the incomplete Empire State building erupted in an explosion. The waiting human-dalek shells and the commandless pig slaves went with it and they were never mentioned in conjunction with the story of the accident as it was later described.
-#-
Rose arrived back in the centre of the time machine with all eyes on her, relief settling around the room when she stepped from the machine of her own accord. Her team quickly averted their gaze from the tired, hollow look in her eyes and Rose passed them without a word. No one had to ask as to the success of the mission.
Some rudimentary hot provisions were always available at UNIT seeing as people were often coming and going at all hours of the night and day. Rose availed herself of these, devouring her food with single-minded ferocity, ignoring the few other personnel in the mess. A quick glance at her comm told her it was six pm, one week after her and her team had arrived in the parallel world, her home world.
The food coupled with the low in the wake of the adrenaline wearing off saw Rose having a hard time keeping her eyes open and focused as she walked into the hanger. Walking up to the main console, Rose didn't dare sit at it, knowing she would fall asleep the second her body was supported. She regarded it for a long minute as one of the tech's tentatively asked her what adjustments they should make. She failed to answer him and instead, after another long moment of contemplation, reached down for a rubber mallet that lay on the ground and walloped the console, sending a cascade of sparks into the air. The tech's ducked and by the time they looked up, Rose was walking to the blue box.
"Take the night," she called warily over her shoulder.
Bending at the hips, Rose unhooked the couplings that joined the massive cables which linked the Tardis to the console, tossed them aside and slammed the Tardis door shut. Every inch of her hurt as she leaned with both hands on the console. They had been a week in the parallel world but Rose knew she had been travelling for longer than that, some chronal sixth sense told her so. That she had been so close to the Doctor on the Lychandrian ship came back to Rose and anger burned trough her,
"Where are ya!?" she raged, slamming a fist down on the console
"Well, here. At least, a bit a' me is."
She spun quickly to see the Northern Doctor behind her, smiling his daft smile, big ears and all.
For a moment, just a moment, she was overcome with hope, mind-numbingly euphoric hope. Then reality set in and she stiffened, the light leaving her face. "A bit a ya...the bit that's in my head, ya mean, from the game station?"
"Yes," the Northern Doctor replied.
Rose sighed, her shoulders slumping imperceptibly.
"You would prefer the idiot?" the Northern Doctor said knowingly and Rose settled her butt against the console tiredly and regarded him. He crossed his arms, put his weight jauntily on one leg.
"Why do you call him the idiot?" Rose asked, recalling the dream she had had just after the Beach.
Something shifted in the Northern Doctor's stone grey eyes. They didn't roam her face to take in the bruise on her jaw, stayed locked with hers instead. "It's because of him that you're in this mess. How stupid does a man have to be to do all of this to you, Rose Tyler?"
Her name on his lips made her close her eyes, her breath initially hitching from the emotion, her chest and stomach staying constricted from the physical pain in them thereafter. She had expected he would still be there when she opened her eyes but he was gone and she was exhausted. She slept like she might never wake up again and part of her was disappointed when she did.
-#-
Two more weeks in the parallel world's timeline, countless more in terms of how long she travelled and nothing. Rose's only consolation was that the next shift took her outside of London two days into the future, sparing her the radioactive fall out she would not have survived and letting her know what she had to do.
She silently thanked the Tardis upon her return and told Magambo that she needed to evacuate UNIT headquarters. Two days later, a spaceship replica of the Titanic decimated London, sending a blanket of radiation over the area, from Crawley to Stevenage, Oxford to Basildon.
Magambo subjected Rose to a scathing, obscenity laden tirade for an hour and a half on how she was capable of letting all those people die for lack of a warning. Not seeming to hear most of it, Rose worked on the time machine the entire time, trying to make sense of the shift reads for the past two weeks, trying to see some pattern in the Tardis' logic that would allow her to predict the shift, better direct it.
"Her family was in London," Wolfram said quietly to Rose after Magambo had left, the hanger still ringing in the unnatural silence she had left behind. When she didn't respond, he pushed ever so slightly, "time travel...we can undo this, right?"
Rose looked sharply aside at him, a deep frown creasing her once flawless features. "This...never happened. It's...wrong...it's..." she let out a frustrated groan, the mechanics of the spatial-temporal matrix being far too complicated for such simple ideas as 'undoing' anything. "The man we need would have been on that ship, the Titanic, that's a fixed point in time," Rose tried again, Wolfram frowning at her. "If we can restore him t'this time stream, these fixed points still happen, the Titanic will still happen, just like the Globe Theatre, just like Manhattan, only the outcomes'll be different."
"So the nuclear storm...?" Wolfram ventured, uncertain he followed clearly.
"Could still happen," Rose said, returning to plugging away at code on the console with angry taps of keys. "But if he's here, I doubt it," she murmured after a minute.
"How do we...restore him?" Wolfram asked and Rose didn't meet his eyes, instead rubbed at her forehead as she looked at the flashing green lines of code on the screen before her.
She thought about the parallel time streams she had seen and how even the slim fragments of Doctor's vast knowledge that she now had access to contained no trace of any such phenomenon. "We find him...because I honestly don't know."
-#-
When Rose's memory resolved the landscape of the next shift, the Doctor whispered, "no," very quietly. He had thought to bring Martha to Cheem and they had only just escaped. "No, no, no," he repeated and at his side, Rose squeezed his hand.
It was a testament to how done with the whole process Rose was that she barely looked around, just long enough to establish that the world was alien, before regarding her comm equally quickly then raising it to her lips. "Base, spool it up, bring me back." It was harder to keep the frustration form her voice the longer this went on.
She dropped her arm heavily and began walking about, more to keep herself alert than to explore. The emptiness of the city got to her within seconds. It towered and sprawled, a massive network of enormous trees woven into structures that resembled buildings.
A whisper in a northern accent curled through Rose's mind, Cheem. She frowned, trying to place the name for a second before it came to her. The trees, the living trees. It was their planet.
It was empty.
Rose's heart started to pump harder, goose pimples broke out over her flesh and she slung her Rifle around and brought it to her shoulder, slowly spun on the spot to better survey her surroundings.
"Shit," she whispered, wondering how she had let herself get so exposed, a multitude of hiding places visible in the branches above her. Slowly, she backed toward the nearest trunk. A shot just missed the toe of her boot and Rose fired roughly in the in the direction it had come, moving faster to gain her cover.
"Do you smell, mother of mine?" A giddy voice.
"Yes, son of mine."
"The scent of a Time Lord, mother of mine."
"At long last, son of mine."
Rose listened to this with growing disquiet from her cover. Whatever the source of the voices, their owners were speaking English, confusing enough given that Cheem was light years from Earth. The Time Lord biorhythm detector had also not hit on the planet, which meant that whatever they were, they were talking about her.
"Base, how long for the shift?" she whispered into her comm.
"About an hour twenty."
Rose wet her lips, thought hard, just as a face peered around a corner at her and smiled. The face brought Rose back to the first trip she had ever taken with the Doctor, Platform One and the trees. Then a blaster was levelled at her and Rose was thankful for her quick reflexes, firing first and sprinting away in a storm of blaster fire.
She ran harder than she ever had before and considering she had travelled with the Doctor, that was impressive. As she went, she tried to focus on the details she needed to stay alive. Their voices and the blaster patterns told her there were two of them behind her. Her training told her if there was already more than one, there was likely more than two and herding had always been a good strategy.
Turning abruptly, Rose caught them out and picked off the first tree-humanoid her sights found, shattering it into a million flaming splinters before it could scream. Its compatriot's blaster fire hit Rose in the stomach and she was kicked back, rolled to the side and found cover before quickly pointing her gun back out. Her hunter no where in sight, Rose slipped back around the tree she sheltered behind and regarded the wound in her stomach, fused into a tight black hole the size of a tea cup saucer. She swallowed, the pain intense, the difficulty she was having breathing alarming.
To take her mind off of these facts, Rose stood and began moving around the tree-building, opposite the way she had come, listening to the angry mutterings of the other hunter. She tracked him for a long while, never quite managing to set eyes on him until she finally saw movement as she rounded one of the massive trunks. The motion of bringing the butt of the rifle to her shoulder spared her head as a blaster shot struck the tree where it had been only seconds before.
And she was running again, once more pursued by a pair of them, this time her stomach slowing her an unacceptable amount. She just couldn't breath properly. Having no choice, Rose ducked aside and leant against one of the trunks, heaving lungfulls as quietly as she could. She would wait for them to come to her.
With a crack like a whip, a stiff tendril shot from the adjacent tree-building and wrapped about Rose's neck. Clutching at the vine, Rose was dragged forward to the tree that wielded the liana, the grin in its face unnatural.
"Time Lord," the tree stated triumphantly.
"Idiot," Rose choked, pulling on the liana to bring the tree closer, kicking out its feet. In the scuffle that ensued, the tree was outmatched and Rose managed to pin it face down, bring her hand around its face and snap its neck. The blackness that had been creeping into Rose's vision from the periphery receded as the liana loosened around her neck and she ripped at it to get it off.
"Sister of mine?" The frantic calls came immediately and Rose staggered to her feet once more, pelted unsteadily away from the inquiring voices. She tripped on a root, clumsy in a way she wouldn't have otherwise been were she not injured, and snapped from existence.
Landing in the time machine, the shift caused Rose to hit hard, winding her. Once more, her team rushed to their sprawled leader.
The Doctor sat slumped on an operating bench and watched Sandra and her team, excising burned tissue, sewing up Rose's liver sans a sizeable portion, rejoining the severed portions of her large intestine. Before the sleeping gas had knocked her out, Rose's eyes had been slivers of blood red, every vessel shot from being choked. Around her neck, a near black bruise with blood seeping from small abrasions about it.
"Could've been worse," Rose said, watching.
"You were aware of what was happening...even though were asleep," the Doctor realised suddenly, looking at her and Rose shrugged.
"Didn't feel it, if that's what you're worried about," and she nodded at him to reach out to the memory for the sensation she had felt then. He did so, felt nothing. "I lived, s'all that matters."
Hesitantly, the Doctor lifted the hem of her t-shirt to stare at the faint scar on her abdomen, a mottled patch the size of a hand. His war had lasted 200 years but Rose had managed to condense the level of violence he had faced in half that time into about a month.
Letting his hand drop, he rubbed at his eyes, exhausted from the exchange of memories and the emotions they evoked. Rose was too, he could feel it in their connection and he stood to hold her, his cheek on the crown of her head.
"M'okay," she said softly, mistaking the gesture for concern over her in the memory.
"I know," he said in amazement, realising it was true. Whatever she had seen, whatever she had done, she had survived and was still, more or less the brilliant soul he cared for more than anyone else in the multiverse. And she was sharing parts of herself that shamed and wounded her with him, trying to bind him to her in a psychic feat that would've nearly undone the hardiest Time Lord.
He hugged her tighter, willed his mental strength into her, never wanting her to be as alone as she had been in any of those memories ever again.
-#-
Rose spared the cemetery a longer glance than she normally did her surroundings after a shift, on account of how it was a cemetery and that was at least something new. Not just a city, a cemetery. A familiar feeling of frustration and exhaustion swept over her when her comm flashed out the not quite Time Lord signal on the biorhythm tracker. She was just about to check the date when the sun dappled day blinked from around her and she suddenly found herself in mist covered field in the dead of night, breath coming out of her in thick clouds.
"The hell?" she said, rifle instantly in her hands and levelled, turning on the spot to take in her new surroundings and possibly find cover.
Bad Wolf? BAD WOLF? Rose's comm assaulted her ears in the quiet of the night.
"Hush up, will ya?" she hissed back, afraid lest she be found by someone or something she'd rather not be. "No bloody code names, what'd I tell ya?"
Sorry, we just lost you for twenty minutes there...
Rose frowned. What?"
Your signal went down...we couldn't raise you on the comm for twenty minutes.
Turning her wrist upward and looking over the stock of the rifle, Rose read the date. December 2, 1954. "What the bloody hell," she bit out in a confused whisper.
"Yeah, s'a bit of a mind fuck," a voice called from the mist and Rose levelled her gun in the general direction of it. "Put the gun down, I won't hurt ya."
Rose's eyes narrowed. "How d'ya know I've got a gun?" A figure materialised from the mist and Rose's eyes went wide.
"Cause I'd have a gun pointed at me if I were you...an' I was."
Those observing the memory shivered at the mental discomfort of two different perspectives of the same event colliding. The Doctor started to giggle.
"Wow...I've never talked to myself!" he said, a manic grin on his features.
At his side, Rose frowned. "What d'ya mean you've never talked to yourself? I've seen your memories, your different selves have held bloody townhall meetin's together." She crossed her arms.
"Weeelll, Yeeeah, but technically never been in the same place...as the same person..."
Rose let out a bark of a laugh. "That's a bloody big technicality," she said, knowing he meant the human him and the Time Lord him.
He sniffed. "Didn't share memories then. It's completely different."
Snorting in disbelief, Rose shook her head at him and the memory resumed.
"Don't move," Rose whispered, gun still levelled at the woman who looked identical to her, her mind running over every possible way in which this could be a trap.
The other Rose was unperturbed. "I know your thinkin' somethin's up. But y've got t'trust me. I'm you, but in the future. The near future."
The gun didn't move and the other Rose sighed. "There's nothin' I can say to make this easier. You're already thinkin' whatever could be capable of takin' your shape could be able to get in your head, get your memories, your feelin's."
Grip on the gun tightening, Rose shifted a little closer to her doppelgänger. That was exactly what she had been thinking. The other Rose took a step closer despite the gun. "One of two things happens, you know that, an' I already know which."
"Either I shoot ya," Rose said low and deadly, "or I don't..."
"And I shoot ya...or I don't," the other Rose finished. After a minute, Rose groaned loudly in frustration and lowered the rifle, the other Rose twitching the corner of her lips up.
"Now I can let ya in on the secret. I don't shoot ya."
Rose shook her head in disbelief at the whole situation.
It's going to take us longer than normal to bring you back. We've lost your shift coordinates.
"Shit," Rose hissed, then into her comm, "how long?"
"Ten hours," the other Rose said as the comm chattered back.
About Ten hours.
Rose looked at herself, then down at the comm. The strange biorhythm signal was gone and there was no sign of the Doctor. "Just get working on it," she said, barely keeping the exasperation from her tone.
We're on it.
The other Rose was lighting a cigarette and offered the pack to Rose when she approached. Rose frowned at the other woman. "I don't smoke," she said obviously.
Shrugging, the other Rose stuffed the pack into her blue jacket. "Let me know when your toes go numb."
They set off, the other Rose leading them across the shin high grass, Rose lost in contemplation about what exactly had happened, how and how worried she should be. A thought occurred to her but the other Rose spoke before she could.
"No, ya can't ask me anythin' about your future. I don't know exactly what's goin' on, but playin' with that kind a knowledge in our here and now is dangerous."
Rose sighed, hugged herself as the damp air seeped through her clothes. She looked aside at her counterpart as the other woman took a drag of her smoke.
After a long stretch of contemplative and silent walking, the other Rose stopped abruptly and frowned in thought, drew deeply on her fag. "Right...she's here..." she murmured as she turned in a circle, squinted into the dark. "Oi!" she called out and Rose glared at her.
"What the hell?" Rose hissed.
"That you lot then?" came a voice form the mist and Rose spun to look in it's direction, crouched, her rifle levelled.
"Yeah, s'us," the other Rose called nonchalantly.
The Doctor would have howled with laughter had the memory not required so much focus, been so confusing. Three perspectives on the same event was maddening, the most he had ever dealt with was two. At his side, Rose frowned in uncomfortable concentration as she tried to hold the memory together for them.
The third Rose materialised with a fag already dangling form her lips and Rose soon lost track of which had come first as the two stood talking.
"Bloody circus this is."
"Tell me about it. Should get you back faster this time, though, getting' easier to trace the faulty shift."
"If it is a faulty shift. But yeah, should be faster."
"Jesus fucking christ! what's going on?" Rose stormed at her selfs. They looked over at her, puffed on and dropped their fags to their sides in identical motions.
"Sorry. We know we didn't tell ya anythin' when we were you, so we can't say anythin'," they said simultaneously, looked at one another with narrowed eyes a second, then back at Rose. Rose groaned, stamped her feet a few times as they started to tingle, then looked up at her selfs. They looked back at her knowingly, one stepping toward her with a hand outstretched. The red package she held out had 'Pall Mall' written in yellow letters with a coat of arms similarly coloured. Rose took it and clumsily knocked out a fag, put it between her lips as her counterpart held out a light. She coughed harshly as they continued walking, glowering at the practised way in which her future selfs inhaled.
It did help with the cold though.
"Where're we goin'?" Rose asked after a while.
"Gettin' t'shelter," one of them replied, "which reminds me, should we make a run for it? I don't fancy getting' caught out if we don't have ta-"
The other shook their head. "It never works anyway-"
"But we always do it-"
"Fine."
And they ran. Cresting a hill, the lights of a building became visible through the mist just as a rain started, a wind coming with it that blew it nearly sideways. They were drenched by the time they reached the cluster of buildings, a farm stead by the looks of it. The nearest shelter was a barn and they wrenched at the heavy wooden door to open it a foot, each slipping in then applying their weight to close it again. They stood panting, appreciating that the barn was at least a little warmer than outside. Another round of smokes were lit, the small dancing flame illuminating the three identical faces like a scene out of Macbeth, Rose coughing again.
"'Least you figure it out," the other Rose said to the third Rose.
"How's that?"
"You're the last one," the other Rose reasoned, "Sos you've got've figured it out or there'd be a fourth."
The third Rose shrugged which neither of her compatriots found very comforting. Rose started to pace, eyeing the other two hard. "Problem with the shift," she muttered, then shook her head, "nah, can't have been, s'worked up 'til now." The other Roses watched her with mild curiosity. "Then there was that weird reading," she continued under her breath, "could've been that..."
Suddenly she stopped and walked back up to her selfs. "If I'm tryin' to find a way to get around this, that means I've always tried to get 'round this and you lot still show up regardless...so there's no point in me tryin' to figure it out." They looked at her, dragging on their fags in silence. Rose sighed and turned away. "Why is it so fucking hard to find him?"
Again, the other two treated this as a rhetorical question but the third Rose, the one who had arrived last, narrowed her eyes in thought.
"Do you remember how he used to wake us up in the morning?" the other Rose said with a small smile after a long silence.
"The old him would bang on the door until we answered then hand us a coffee," the third Rose said, the same smile creeping onto her lips.
"He never bothered knocking after he changed," Rose added, "he'd barge in and-"
"Ask our opinion on what tie he should wear," the other Rose finished and the three of them laughed.
"I loved that brown one with the-"
"Kinda blue swirly things on it?"
"Yes!"
"He always wanted to wear that...black...grey thing-"
"With the squares-"
"So boring."
The Doctor watched them all with a daft grin on his face. "I always knew you hated that tie, just wanted to bug you, Weeell, needed an excuse to see you in the morning."
Rose smacked him as her three remembered selfs reminisced, the only person any of them had met in years who recalled the Doctor with as much fondness as they did.
We've got a lock on you, one of their comms buzzed.
The third Rose replied into hers, "bring me back." She looked at her younger selfs and nodded.
"Good luck," the two said in unison and their third blinked from existence with a flash of light.
The other Rose lasted another hour before she was likewise shifted back to her team and Rose was left alone, another four hours to go.
She was petting one of the horses when the barn opened, the night still thick outside, and a lantern appeared, then an arm and finally a man. He started when he saw Rose.
"What're you doing?" the man asked, frowning at her, fairly polite all things considered.
"Sorry," Rose said, facing him, "just needed to get out of the weather.
The man held his lantern a little higher. "Wernt plannin' on pilferin' any of me livestock with that gun, were ya?"
Rose looked over her shoulder at the barrel of her rifle before smiling sheepishly at the man. "No, sorry, I'm..." she hesitated, "m'with the army." She shrugged, not feeling terribly creative, the nicotine keeping her awake but not on her toes.
"You're a woman," the man pointed out and Rose remembered the date.
"Yeah...well...it's a brave new world."
Again, the man frowned at her. "Nearest barracks' in Harlow, what're doing here?"
"Got lost." Another shrug. "Where is this?"
"We're in Clavering, that's a long way to have come lost," he looked at Rose like she was thick and she was certain she was setting the women's rights movement back a decade with him.
"Long, long training exercise," she improvised and something in her face must have convinced the farmer of the fact because he nodded sympathetically.
"Well," he took out a lighter and a pack of smokes, handed them to Rose. It was a red labelled pack of Pall Malls. "Have a fag and when I'm done with Nancy, I'll make ya a cuppa."
Rose thanked him quietly and lit a smoke. He refused to take the cigarettes or lighter back when Rose offered and she pocketed them with a smirk. "Who's Nancy?"
The farmer grinned broadly and patted the doe eyed jersey at the back of the stable.
"I fought in France," he said over the sound of milk hitting the tin bottom of the pail, "It's not any kind of place I'd wish on a woman...not any kind of place I'd wish on anyone."
Leaned against the wood of the stall, Rose watched the almost hypnotic movement of the milking. "Tell me about the day the war ended, for you I mean, when ya heard," Rose asked softly.
Smoking like it was an old habit, she listened with a burning hope to a story of a man seeing the end of something he never dreamed he would. His relief at coming home, at seeing the people he loved again and the second chance at life all spoke to Rose. She wanted, she wished, she prayed to Time and Space.
-#-
Rose was amazed when the shift spit her out exactly where she had been before she was ripped to 1954, cemetery and all. She was unimpressed as hell when a second later she found herself on a misty moor in the thick of night. Swearing under her breath, she turned at the sound of her code name coming through over a comm some distance from her. She raised a brow, remembered, sighed, and walked toward it.
-#-
The third time it happened, she was glad the earlier versions of herself were a ways away, allowing her to curse an undignified blue streak. She was collected by the time she heard herself call out in the mist. Grateful that the interval between losing the time she wanted and getting back to her team was shorter, Rose arrived in the Time machine and told the personnel and science workers to take the night. She strode into the Tardis, unhooking the couplings, and shut the door.
Leaning on the console, Rose took a deep breath and let her mind open, hearing the mournful sound of the Tardis more clearly as she did so. "Are ya here?" she asked into the stillness of the console room, eyes closed. "I need your help, I can't figure out what's going on with this...temporal shift."
Opening her eyes, she smiled wearily. "Hi."
He was across the console from her, arms crossed, a smile in his eyes. "You keep getting thrown back in time," he stated and she had to focus on his words, not how his voice warmed her soul.
"Yeah...I'm in 2007 one minute, 1954 the next," she said, shaking her head. She had thought it was a problem with the machine, then she had thought it could be a problem with the Tardis but more and more she thought it might be something at the shift point. "There's a weird signal...the biorhythm tracker, in 2007, there's something there..."
He moved slowly around the console to stand next to her and Rose fought for focus. "Maybe the biorhythm tracker isn't just tracking biorhythms."
Rose frowned. "How d'ya mean?"
"Think about it, it gave you a strange signal for the Daleks in New York, what do they have in common with Time Lords?"
"Nothing!" Rose said vehemently and had to smile at herself when the Doctor grinned. She tapped her foot as his grey eyes searched her face. "Emergency temporal shifts," Rose whispered suddenly and he nodded, pleased with her. She thought hard, wetted her lips, something tickling the far reaches of her brain. "Angels."
"Not a bad guess," Northern conceded as Rose looked to the ceiling of the Tardis in disbelief at her own stupidity.
"Of course, that's why I get thrown back t'the same place each time." Groaning, she closed her eyes and felt him pull her into a hug from behind, his long arms about her shoulders, his cheek at her temple.
"Don't do that," Rose said quietly even as she leaned back into his embrace.
"Why's that?" the Northern Doctor murmured in her ear.
"Because I'm tired an' when I'm tired I can't always focus properly and you might just be-" Rose looked over her shoulder to find there was no one there, "gone."
-#-
There was no need to return to 2007. It was far enough in the future, far enough away geographically that Rose decided the angels could bloody well have a corner of London, it didn't matter. The whole event had made her cautious of her biorhythm tracker though, uncertain of whether or not it was hindering or helping, especially given her success rate at locating the Doctor with it.
She worked on the time machine and the targeting for a week and still had no brilliant ideas. Slaving the Tardis to something that approximately homed in on Time Lord physiology was the best idea she had. It was the only idea she had.
And it left a nasty feeling in her gut as she stood within the time machine again and her team counted her down. A modicum of relief washed over Rose when she found the shift had at least not taken her back to the cemetery, that her adjustments had been enough. The relief was short lived as she felt fatigue hit her in a way it hadn't for any of the other shifts, not even when she had been injured.
The world she stood on was barren, all rocks and dust and inhospitable blackness. "No stars," Rose whispered as she looked up, gravely concerned by the inky sky. Her comm wouldn't settle on the date, kept scrolling through numbers and Rose eventually switched to the biorhythm read. Nothing.
"Fuck sakes," she whispered. "Base? Get me back," she said into the comm before taking out a fag and lighting it. She walked to stay awake in the hours it would be before she could be retrieved.
"Where was this again?" Rose asked as she watched her remembered self hike amongst the desolation. She knew from his memories that this had in fact been a place the Doctor had visited.
"100 trillion," the Doctor said, looking about the empty space with mild interest.
"Blimey, no wonder I felt like trash," she said with a shake of her head.
"Uncapsuled trip almost a hundred trillion years, yeeeeaah," he conceded, impressed with her, "might feel like you need a nap."
Rose smiled, "made this bit cake." The Doctor frowned at her in question as a carrying cry echoed from the hills.
"HUUUUUUMMAAAAAAN!"
The Doctor's face fell. Rose smiled sympathetically.
In the memory, Rose stood with a fag dangling form her lips, easing her rifle around her shoulder and into her hands when the first of them appeared. "Shit," she whispered, the fag falling as she dropped the gun from her shoulder, a wave of screaming people crashing down the hill across the way from her.
There was no other choice. She ran.
Her limbs protested, adrenaline struggling to combat the fatigue of a shift so brutally far in the future. Had she not been exhausted by that fact, Rose might have outrun them, she was in good enough shape. As it was she stumbled too often, recognized the tell tale signs that her body would fail her any minute. She was a little surprised when it was her mind that did so first, letting her run into a ravine without noticing, run into a wall with her pursuers on all sides without noticing.
Rose's shoulder hit the wall, she rolled, her pistol coming out as she did so and she was firing. This succeeded in slowing the horde momentarily as they tripped over their comrades but she was beset in a second.
It was another one of those memories where the Doctor stood breathing heavily, fists clenched at his sides as his blood swam with the chemicals that had coursed through her body. He couldn't even see her anymore, could barely make out the sound of her struggles, her angry shouts as she tried to fend them off. He felt her flagging.
"ROSE!" the Doctor shouted, felt her hand slip into his as the surroundings changed instantaneously.
They were back in the time machine, two of the futurekind still latched onto Rose in the memory. She kicked one off of her, shot it down, elbowed the other that had its teeth sunk into her shoulder, spun and fired.
Wolfram was the first of the team in the circle of the time machine and she spun on him, wild eyed and bleeding, trembling with adrenaline and shock from the shift, her blaster levelled at his face. He drew up short, hands raised palm toward her. Rose's finger was still on the trigger.
"Bad Wolf," he whispered, low enough that only she could hear. Rose's breathing was sporadic as she stood, gun still pointing at him, unable to process that she was safe.
"Tyler," Wolfram tried again, his whisper sharper and Rose abruptly stood from her readied position, lowered her pistol with aching slowness, the brightness in her eyes still present as she looked aside at the things she had brought back with her.
Gun down, the Bio workers rushed to look at the futurekind as Rose dropped to a knee beside them.
"What are th-" one of the workers began to ask her but Rose cut through the question.
"Burn them," she said.
Standing, Rose found Sandra waiting behind her and let herself be led from the hanger, no one daring to touch her. Following, it was Wolfram who delicately pried the pistol from Rose's iron grip, her fingers unwilling to part with it of their own accord. Only then did he nod to the medics and they began to stitch her up. Rose collapsed back on the table heavily and was asleep before anyone mentioned anaesthetics. She didn't feel the needles and string that bound her flesh back together.
Nightmares pitched her from her bed on two occasions, dropping her to the floor both times, her body too low on energy to even support her weight. Each time medics got her back onto the bed and she was asleep before they'd fully managed it.
When she finally woke properly, Sandra informed her she had slept three days and Rose groaned through her dry mouth. Sandra protesting, Rose hauled herself into her battered and bloodied clothing and went to the Tardis. Every inch of her hurt every step of the way and she was angry. They had been at this for months and she felt they were farther away from accomplishing their mission, not closer.
Frustrated, Rose threw herself on the cot and ripped at the button on her jeans, plunged a hand into them and thought of him. At the time, she hadn't paid much attention to which him it was she thought about, either would have done. He had been on her mind a lot at that time, that version of him, it seemed only proper it was his daft face she fantasised about.
"You trusted him more than me," the Doctor murmured, watching her memory of the fantasy, watching his former self snogging Rose Tyler with a determined focus.
"What makes ya say that?" Rose asked from his side, biting at her thumb nail in mild discomfort at the scene before them.
"You just did," the Doctor stated, a fact. And it was true. Infused in the memory was the real reason Rose had thought of the Northern Doctor then. He was safety, reliability in a way the man he became never was to her.
Uneasy for a different reason then, Rose looked askance at the Doctor, tried to read his feelings. "He needed me more'n you," she said softly, another fact, "an' I think that made him keep me closer."
"I kept you close!" he said with more ferocity than he had intended, making him realise he was more wounded by this than he had thought.
"No you didn't! Marseilles t'the pits of hell, you loved swanin' off on your own!" Rose snapped back.
"Only because I trusted you to handle yourself!" the Doctor said. "I always did! He knew you would need to grow and that you never would with him coddling you. So when he changed he wanted to be the person you had made him, made me, someone softer, someone easier to love! An...an equal!"
Somewhere in his tirade, Rose had stopped looking at him with reactive fury and was instead questioning. "You didn't think I loved you...like that, when you were...him..." she frowned at the insufficiency of the English language and instead projected the essence of the question at the Doctor with as much force and clarity as she could.
"No, I thought I was too hard," a voice said softly behind Rose and she turned to find him, the Northern Doctor, looking solemn. "I was callous...I didn't listen...I was stupid, so stupid sometimes."
Rose shook her head, not quite comprehending.
"He," the Northern Doctor nodded his head at the man behind Rose and she quickly looked over her shoulder, "he wouldn't have taken you to see your father's death. He would have been smarter than that."
"You call him the idiot," Rose pointed out.
"You should hear what he calls me," Northern said with a broad smile and Rose let out a single laugh.
"Did ya really not know how I felt about ya?" she asked, suddenly feeling like she was 19 again.
"I knew," he said quietly, "I knew you wanted more...I knew the limits of what I could give you."
"So when ya changed..." Rose asked, unsure if she wanted to know the answer to her half a question.
"I nudged the process a little, steered myself towards someone I thought you'd appreciate a bit more."
"Fixed the face, for one," the Doctor said under his breath behind Rose and Northern glared at him.
"I liked your face," Rose said with a short, pained laugh and the Northern Doctor smiled warmly at her. "You were handsome, really, that," she indicated the fantasy, where he had driven her mad by the very idea of kissing him, "that wasn't nothing."
He smiled, moved closer to her and Rose looked at her feet, certain she was blushing. "Would you ever have done that?" she asked, looking aside at the fantasy briefly before retuning her gaze to his green jumper, briefly flickering to his eyes.
"I wouldn't have come to you, no," he said truthfully, "but clever you, you already knew that."
She shrugged. Even on their first journey's, Rose had had the vague feeling that whatever he felt for her was deep but that the height of it physically, for him, was to hold her hand. Getting to know him better, sharing some of his memories after he'd changed, she'd learned that wasn't just him, that was a Time Lord thing.
"Except for that kiss, yeah?" Rose said after a minute, thinking of Satellite Five, warmly smiling at him and he grinned daftly back at her.
"I like kissing, me. Those moves I told you about, kissing was definitely my favourite." Rose looked up at him and he nodded earnestly. "Why do you think the idiot gets off on licking everything? Comes by that honestly."
They looked over at the other Doctor who, true to his human nature, was more than a little invested in the show of himself, even his former self, snogging a writhing Rose Tyler.
Rose shook her head, crossed her arms. "You never did any of that," she stated.
"Not that you saw," Northern said and pulled her into a kiss.
Like any physically defined act that occurred in mind space, Rose experienced it as though through her senses of taste and touch, of sight and scent. The Doctor had explained it as a compilation of shared knowledge on their parts, of what the sensations were that comprised each act, even something as simple as when they held hands.
The kiss then, she knew, was part what she remembered their first and only kiss being, part what she imagined it would be and equally part of those things for the Doctor. Meaning it was about as close to reality as one could get. And it was brilliant.
"You're really good at that," she breathed when his lips parted from hers.
"Told you, my favourite," he said softly as she leaned her head against his chest, felt the cool of him bleeding through the leather jacket. She looked back to the memory, to the fantasy she had had, and felt how unbelievably good that unending kiss had been. Somehow, and Rose suspected this was not a trick of the mind, she had not wanted for breath during it, so practised had he been.
She blushed when he took his tongue lower down her abdomen in the memory. "That wasn't a kiss," she said, biting her lip.
"A kiss," the Northern Doctor said as though reading words form a page, "a touch of lips signifying a greeting, reverence, love or desire. Looks like a kiss to me."
Rose laughed as her remembered self cried out under the Doctor's caresses. She turned to smile at the Northern Doctor but he was gone and Rose frowned, looked about to find the brown suited Doctor watching her, seeming exhausted.
"Sorry," he said quietly, "I'm tired. I couldn't keep him here."
Rose shook her head at that, "S'okay."
"You can see him again...often as you like after this," the Doctor said, stuffing his hands in his pockets, showing his fatigue.
Stepping to him, Rose ran her hands over his face, through his hair, across his shoulders and chest and he was smiling tiredly by the time she let them rest on his lapels. "Janus," she whispered, "two faces, past an' future. God of change...of time, in the sense of beginnin's and endin's.
"You're the same man t'me...I see so much of him in ya..."
The Doctor wrapped his arms around her and she did likewise, sensing that he felt vulnerable, insufficient.
"It's not that I trust ya less than him," Rose said, having had time to think through the nature of her feelings about the Northern Doctor. "Right then...and now...I've already lost him, pain's already there. But you?" They watched the fantasy fade, endorphins flooding Rose's system as she slipped her hand from inside her jeans, brought both hands to her face as it twisted in grief. "You were still out there...always the chance I'd find ya...always the chance I'd lose ya." They looked at one another, his face hard and old. "Still always the chance I'll lose ya," she whispered and he pulled her forcefully to his chest, held her until he knew it hurt, knowing she wouldn't settle for less.
He watched her sob upon the cot in the Tardis. "I'm sorry," he said softly, still with an edge to his voice, "I'm so sorry."
-#-
Another week lost to recuperation and the shift brought Rose to ancient Rome. A little bit of poking around while she waited for the return shift, there being sign of the Doctor's biorhythm, and she discovered the creatures in the heart of Pompei. The Doctor thought her eyes looked hollow as she walked from the mountain and when she was a suitable distance, triggered the charges she had placed within it. Amidst screams and ash and failing light, Rose looked out over the city she had doomed and the Doctor realised he had never felt so close to her, had never understood her so well.
-#-
She returned from Pompei finished with the whole mission, fed up and burnt out. She turned in the time machine and stared hard at the Tardis, ignoring her team. "What is it then? Huh? What do you know that I don't? Can ya help me? Can ya?" Why is it so fucking hard to find him, she thought.
She was breathing hard, her body so worn down. The warmth that spread from her chest to the last stretches of her finger tips and toes seemed natural, comforting. Her eyes glowed golden though no one else saw it with her back to them. As though guided by an invisible hand, Rose saw the parallel time streams flying by in her mind. Enough flashes to tell a story as though on fast forward, to show how important Donna had been, how she had saved the Doctor's life time and again, not just on Christmas Eve. And Rose saw herself in the altered time stream talking to Donna, knew in that moment what needed to be done as a point flashed at the same stretch along the parallel orange strands. Rose held on to it, to the feel of it.
"Untether the biorhythm tracker from the shift." Rose said as she turned back to her crew, her eyes strangely out of focus.
"What?" they stammered.
Rose ignored them, began the process herself. "Untether it," she repeated.
It was a short shift, a time within spitting distance of the one she had just left. A sunny day, an innocuous street corner in London. She stood watching a blue car, Donna within, and the choice that was made. Simultaneously, as though through rippled heat waves impressed on the same image, she saw a woman in heavy green coat step in front of a lorry, change the traffic patterns, change the future.
"This is it," Rose said quietly, so certain for the first time in years that it made her chest ache with the security of it.
She returned, they sent her out again, she met Donna numerous times, each time letting on a little more until finally she told the other woman that she would die the next time they met. She hated saying it, knowing what this woman was to the Doctor, how brave she truly was.
Before what she knew would be the last shift, she told her team to prepare to return to their home universe.
"Did you find him?" Wolfram asked as Rose stepped into the circle of the time machine, rifleless as she had been for her last several trips.
"I will," Rose said. "Torchwood Tower, lock onto all personnel except Bad Wolf and bring them home," she said firmly into her comm and every face in the room looked up to her.
"What about you?" Wolfram asked, the question on the minds of everyone else.
Rose smiled, not the brilliant smile of the woman she had been two years ago, but an expression unmistakable as a smile. "I've got a Doctor's appointment," she quipped before standing at attention and saluting her team. The personnel all snapped to and did likewise, the science workers looked merely perplexed.
"Good luck," Wolfram said.
"Thanks," Rose replied and was gone.
The second her feet hit the pavement, Rose ran for Donna and crouched next her. "Tell him-"
Time unravelled around Rose though the street stayed in the same place, the buildings, the people. A shock wave of altered time emanated from the epicentre where Donna lay and into it, Rose concentrated, her eyes glowing, sending out the words to the universe, the only message she could hope to get to him. Bad Wolf blanketed every piece of paper, every sign, every flag along the ripples.
And Rose breathed hard, hope burning in her chest before she raised her comm to her lips. "Torchwood Tower, lock onto the Tardis signal."
-#-
The rest of the memories flitted by, the Doctor having been present for many of them. "You saved the multiverse," he whispered aside to Rose. She didn't respond save for a small smile. "No one has any idea what you did-"
"Sound familiar?" Rose asked and a grin slowly split his features.
"Come on," she said, taking his hand, "I think we're done."
-#-
The first sensation they had was one of hunger, the second was that their backs ached. Brilliant moon light shone down on them through the open Tardis doors where they sat before them. Everything else considered, the first thing Rose could think to do was kiss him.
For the first time, he had held nothing back and Rose felt overcome with her need to feel him, to express how much that meant to her. Similarly strong feelings were coursing through the Doctor along with the fact that he had never been able to resist a kiss from Rose Tyler. Still, a niggling thought appeared at the back of his mind even as she sat on his lap, forced him to lean back against the railing as she kissed him.
Rose, he said into her mind.
There was no response, her mindspace a chaotic jumble, overloaded with emotions and several hundred years of memories that hadn't been there a few hours prior.
Carefully, the Doctor pulled her back from her and started stifling her thought processes.
"What're you doing?" she said shakily, now breathing unsteadily in a way that had nothing to do with their moment of passion.
"Putting you to sleep," he murmured, hugging her to him as she started to go limp.
"No," she said softly, brow furrowed in confusion as her hands gripped at his suit jacket weakly.
It's been a lot for you, you need rest. It's okay, I'll still be here, you'll feel me. Just rest.
And Rose remembered nothing more. The Doctor got to his knees and hauled her up with him, walked to their bedroom and laid her down. It hit him halfway there how tired he was, too, in a way he didn't remember being when he had done the ritual as a Time Lord. He lay beside her, felt her in his mind with no need to be guarded, and smiled as he drifted off.
-#-
They had always felt one another when they woke up in the mornings, but never in the way they did the afternoon they awoke after the binding. It was akin to the feeling they had when they were both in their flat or the Tardis. The other person was there, minding their own business but readily at hand should they be needed. The Doctor realised first that this would be a permanent state of affairs, that a part of her would live in his mind for the rest of his life and likewise a part of him with her. He felt Rose coming to and smiled, nuzzled at her where she lay against his chest.
Rose was slower to wake, her mind still full and adjusting. Her eyes gradually flickered open, took in the soft light the Tardis was giving them. Roaming the Doctor's chest with her hands, she breathed him in, adjusted to consciousness as she felt his lips against her forehead. It only hit her once she pushed herself up to look into his eyes.
"Hallo," he said softly, grinning the grin that had won her over after his regeneration.
"Hi," she replied weakly, looking back and forth between his eyes. "I can feel ya..." she trailed off. Again, the insufficiency of language might've bothered her, bothered them both, if not for the fact that they now sat comfortably in each others minds.
He was still grinning at her but there was something behind his eyes, something deep. He was scared but excited, saw the possibility of their relationship in a way he never had before. And it was dawning on Rose that they were connected, had both made the choice to do so and he could not, would not go swanning off with as much abandon as he would have in days past.
The thought made her grin.
"Can we have sex yet?" she asked, recalling where they had been interrupted by the need for a mental break.
"Uuuuhhmmm, no," the Doctor said and smiled when she looked grumpily at him, "best to lay off the excitement for a bit. Don't want to fry your synapses...or mine, for that matter."
"If we can't do that anymore, I'm suing you Time Lord lot for compensation," Rose stated, snuggling back down on his chest, his laugh shaking her pleasantly.
A comfortable silence stretched between them in which Rose smiled as she felt him think about making her coffee. Then, "where do you want to go?" His voice betrayed his excitement even as it drifted across their connection to Rose.
"Gallifrey," she whispered, "I want t'see the sky."