a/n: I wasn't going to post this until next week, but someone reminded me that today is TenToo's fifth birthday (Ten did refer to TenToo's creation as being 'born'), and my only possible response was to post an additional chapter. Happy birthday to the Part Human Doctor. :)

Chapter Nineteen

That evening, the heat wave finally broke. Rain came down in sheets, dropping the ambient temperature by five degrees in the first few minutes of the storm. Half an hour in, it was fifteen degrees cooler than it had been that afternoon, and the rain showed no sign of abating.

The drive from the Hub back to the farmhouse was silent, the only sounds being the thwap thwap thwap of the windshield wipers, the steady tapping of rain on the roof of Rose's car and the impatient drumming of the Doctor's fingers on the arm rest of the passenger side door. Despite his jovial attitude in front of the others earlier, she could tell he was livid, in that quiet, deadly way he got. Oh, she knew he wasn't angry with her but at the situation. Injustice of any sort made him furious. And to top it off, her stepdad was insisting, albeit covertly, that they not go back and help sort whatever was going on.

And what was worse, for him at any rate, was that he knew she was right. They couldn't just run off to London and solve whatever problems were there. They needed more information. They needed a direction. They needed a plan. And until they had one, they were stuck.

Rose could tell that the forced inactivity was getting to the Doctor, and not just in regards to the current crisis. Working on his projects and helping out at Torchwood Three weren't enough of a distraction for him. She strongly suspected that working for Torchwood in any capacity wouldn't be enough of a challenge either, not long term at any rate.

The Doctor had been on this planet almost two months, and she knew that it was already stifling him. And now that there was a problem, a problem serious enough to warrant his attention and spark his interest, he was essentially being told to bugger off. She was furious with Pete for that.

And her heart broke as she knew every clear night he went out and stared at the stars.

For someone who had been able to travel to any time and whose backyard had been the universe, being trapped in one time, on one planet, in one city, in a house that wasn't bigger on the inside…. It just seemed wrong. It was almost as if he had been sentenced to prison. She just hoped that parole in the form of the new TARDIS came soon.

~oOo~

He sat at a table in his plain blue and white kitchen in Croyden. His elbows rested on its smooth surface and his head in was propped up in his hands as he listened to the day's transmissions from the surveillance equipment he had personally placed in Pete Tyler's Torchwood office. He had done it every day for weeks, and he had yet to learn anything of value. Today's highlights included a discussion of why a shipment of grape Vitex hadn't arrived in Prague on time, a conversation with a mechanic about when his Aston Martin would be out of the shop, and a heated argument with his wife about coming home for tea.

Wow, Jackie Tyler had a mouth on her.

Luckily the computer containing the recordings would automatically skip long periods of silence. If he had had to listen to all of it, he didn't think he'd be able to stand it.

He picked up his mug, drained the rest of his cuppa and then nibbled on some biscuits. He should have bought a coffee at the coffee shop, he thought. Or possibly an espresso. If he was going to listen to all this drivel without falling asleep, he really needed more caffeine.

Pete had a few more conversations with staff about interoffice politics and plumbing problems in the men's loo on the second floor. There was also a telephone call about a long overdue promotion at Vitex. For one of the richest men in the world and the head of one of the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet, good God, the man was boring.

He got up and made his way to the refrigerator for a bottle of a highly caffeinated version of Vitex, thinking it ironic that he was drinking the energy drink produced by the man he was eavesdropping on. After twisting the plastic cap open, he took a long swig and sat back down at the table.

Suddenly he sat straight in his chair, eyes wide. He quickly fumbled in his pocket for his mobile, nearly knocking over his drink in his rush to retrieve it. Once he finally held it in his hands, he rapidly typed in a text and pressed send. It was only two words. One location.

San Francisco.

~oOo~

Later that night, the Doctor lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to the patter of rain against the bedroom window, one arm wrapped around a very soft, very warm, and very naked Rose Tyler. Sound asleep, she had her head on his shoulder with an arm draped across his chest and one of her legs entangled with his.

As soon as they had gotten home from the Hub, Rose had immediately pulled him upstairs and into their bedroom. Although certain aspects of their relationship were still quite new and he wasn't familiar with all the ins and outs of human sexuality, no pun intended, he strongly suspected that the passion she had demonstrated was as much to distract him from his foul mood as anything else. And it had worked. For a little while at any rate.

Despite Rose having very thoroughly made love to him, and vice versa, he was completely unable to sleep. Like the proverbial broken record, the events of the day ran over and over in his mind. Mass registrations at gunpoint. The formation of UNIT. Pete's use of code words. Registrations. UNIT. Code words. He finally decided to get up and head out to his shop as a distraction from his racing thoughts.

After placing a gentle kiss in her hair, he carefully extricated himself from her embrace, got out of bed and looked for his clothes. They were strewn haphazardly across the room, a visible reminder of how quickly they had been removed. His shirt and his shoes were on the floor next to the bed, but it took him a moment to locate his trousers, which had been tossed across the room and had landed on top of the wardrobe. Due to the low light of the room, he was completely unable to find his pants or one of his socks, so he pulled clean ones out of his chest of drawers.

He dressed quickly and quietly, not wanting to risk waking Rose up, but before he left the room, he paused at the door and turned back to look at her. And smiled. Though still asleep, she had managed to grab his pillow and was now hugging it tightly to herself. Her nose was buried in it, and her soft, blonde hair was a tangled mess strewn across the pillow and hiding her face from view. Beautiful wasn't the correct word for her at the moment. No, adorable fit better. And he felt a fresh wave of love for her.

Not for the first time he wondered what on Earth she saw in him. He felt so… well, blessed wasn't a word he normally used, not in any context, but it was the only one that seemed to fit how he felt about having her in his life. He had lost the TARDIS, he had lost his near immortality, but what he had gained far, far outweighed what he had lost. After they had been separated, he would have given up anything short of the collapse of two universes for just one more day with her. But he now had more than one day; he had the rest of his life.

As he stood there watching her sleep, his thoughts turned to the other him, the full Time Lord him. In some ways the Time Lord Doctor had known what he was giving up by leaving her here with him, yet he knew that in other ways the other Doctor didn't have a clue as to what he was missing. He had never truly lived life on the slow path, with all the boredom and frustration and happiness and joy and love it contained.

For a moment he wondered how the other Doctor was doing. He had had a limited amount of telepathic communication with him when he had first been left with her in Pete's World, always when his other self had been distraught, but they hadn't had any contact in weeks. He hoped that was a good sign, that his other self was more at peace than he had been after losing both Donna and Rose within the span of a few hours, but he strongly suspected it wasn't the case.

But regardless of how his other self was doing, there was nothing he could do about it. He had his own problems to worry about, starting with whatever was going on in London. He reminded himself that he had been planning on going out to the lab, and he headed out the door.

~oOo~

An hour later, the Doctor paced the lab, his hair, jacket and trainers still slightly damp due to his run through the rain from the house to the barn. Restless and frustrated and having found he couldn't concentrate on any of his various projects, he began again to retrace the day's events in his mind.

Things in Great Britain were becoming more and more dangerous. Between the heightened security, the rumors of an alien invasion, the DNA testing for registration and threats of deportation and imprisonment for noncompliance, and now Pete's use of code words to tell them they should lay low and not come back…. It all added up to a nasty situation that threatened to get even nastier.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

Every instinct he had was to get into the thick of this, to sort this, but for the moment his hands were tied. Rose insisted they not run off half-cocked, that they investigate and figure out what the problem was before they ran back to London. But that's not how he operated. He had almost never operated that way. True, some regenerations had been more cautious, more methodical, made plans before they acted, but most just jumped right in with both feet, with no plan on how to sort the problem they faced and sometimes with no real understanding of what the problem even was.

"And it always worked," he said aloud. "Well, I say always… more, usually. Well, I say usually…."

The Doctor ran his hands through his hair in frustration, causing it to stick up every which way, and realized he was talking to himself.

He had always hated feeling powerless, but before there had always been some way to do something about it. Now, however, he felt thwarted at every turn. There were massive problems in London, and Pete obviously didn't want his involvement in sorting them. The changes in Rose's physiology were beginning to scare him, and he had hit a dead end in investigating them due to primitive 21st century medical equipment and a sonic that, if he were honest, only worked half as well as the original. If that. And then there was the TARDIS coral.

The Doctor crossed over to the heavy, glass fish tank that held the branch which had been broken off from his original TARDIS. After carefully removing it from its home, he held it in his hand and examined it. He had tried to recreate the conditions it would have been exposed to on Gallifrey as best he could. The damp sand it was nestled in contained nutrients he had synthesized. Over the tank he had placed a light which simulated the average temperature of his home planet and the wavelengths of the light the planet had received from its binary star system. And since TARDISes needed three sources of energy in the form of nutrients, light along the visible and invisible spectrum, and Vortex energy, it was near the Rift, which should be providing it the additional energy it needed to grow as well.

But it didn't seem to be working. He had to face the fact that there was something seriously wrong with the coral. He had been able to shatterfry the plasmic shell fairly quickly with the use of his sonic, and he had managed to find a dimensional stabilizer in the archives at Torchwood. But shatterfrying the plasmic shell and using the dimensional stabilizer hadn't had any noticeable effect. After weeks of treatments, the coral should be responding. In fact, assuming a TARDIS took two thousand years to grow normally, reducing that time by the power of 59 should allow it to be ready to fly within a year. Even with a conservative estimate of a TARDIS taking four thousand years to be ready, it still should be ready to travel in two years' time. Their TARDIS wouldn't be as big as the old TARDIS had been, not in their lifetimes, but within weeks it should have been as large as the old console room, possibly even large enough to have several rooms.

Instead it had been weeks and, despite the shatterfrying and using the dimensional stabilizer and locating it near the Rift, it hadn't grown at all. And what was worse, he still couldn't sense it telepathically, and that is what should have happened first.

He needed to be honest with himself. It wasn't that it wasn't working. It was that it hadn't worked.

With a heavy heart, he gently placed the coral back in its tank and turned off the grow light, and then he sank into the nearest chair and dropped his head into his hands. That little piece of TARDIS coral had given him hope that he and Rose could travel the stars again. The Doctor in the TARDIS with Rose Tyler, as it should be.

But wouldn't be.

And for a moment he wished the full Time Lord him had never given it to him, had never gotten his hopes up.

He shoved down the pain of his dashed hopes and realized that for the first time since the metacrisis he felt… diminished. Less than. Inferior to his old self and inferior to the full Time Lord Doctor. He knew who he was and he knew who he had been, and for the first time he looked at himself, at this regeneration and this biological metacrisis body, and he felt lacking.

No, he told himself firmly. He wasn't lacking anything. Not in who he was, and not in what he didn't have. Even though he was now part human, he was still the Doctor, and regardless of how he had lived his life in the past, this was his life now. And it was a brilliant life, this life on the slow path with the love of his life. It was something he had only dreamed about. And even without a TARDIS, even without traveling in time, he still had a Time Lord consciousness. He could analyze the data, he could look at the patterns in time, and he could figure out what was going on. This whole business in London was somehow entangled with their home universe and he could solve this. If he could only find the first cause, figure out what had caused the entanglement in the first place, perhaps he could determine how it had shaped events here, how the events were different than they would have been had the entanglement not occurred. That might not lead directly to an answer to what was going on, to the break-in at the mansion, the traitor at Torchwood, and Pete's reluctance to have them return and help, but it was a place to start.

Now with a firm goal in mind, his thoughts turned inward as he traced the possible first causes of the entanglement of the universes. He knew the number was limited. The entanglement of universes, like the entanglement of molecules, always began with the universes touching, being in almost physical contact somehow despite the Void. Although he hadn't been in this universe long, the cause had to have been present in both universes. He should be able to figure it out.

The Doctor began to mentally list every interaction between the universes that he knew about. He immediately discounted their first arrival on Pete's World. As he had told everyone at Torchwood Three earlier, it hadn't begun with the fateful arrival of the TARDIS in Pete's World during the Cybermen mess. They wouldn't have crossed the Void at all had there not been a crack between the universes to begin with.

Could Torchwood playing with the Void before the Battle of Canary Wharf have caused the entanglement? It was a possibility, but an extremely slim one. Normally, entangled universes were caused by cataclysmic events, events on a cosmic scale. The damage Torchwood had caused to the wall between the universes was fairly limited. Not to mention the fact that the weakness between the universes had already been there when they started playing with it; they were just making it worse. Still, he thought with a sigh, it couldn't be entirely rejected.

What about the Reality Bomb? Again, it was a possibility, and again it was a slim one. Although in one timeline it had gone off, creating the holes between universes that Rose had traveled through using the dimension cannon, they had ultimately stopped Davros and time had been rewritten. The cracks caused by the reality bomb had been healed and the stars had returned. The stars had returned….

But not all of them, he remembered suddenly.

Some of them in this universe were still gone.

Wide-eyed, he lunged at his computer. His fingers flew across the keyboard, bringing up a star map and a list of the missing stars onto the dual screens. As it had before, the list of the missing stars seemed familiar to him, but he wasn't sure why. His gut told him there was something wrong with it.

As he stared at it, with a start he realized one of the stars on the map was out of place. It was listed as much closer than it was in reality. Once he discovered the mistake, he began to notice others. Some were placed at the wrong distance; others were even listed as the wrong type.

Inwardly bemoaning the state of astrophysics on Pete's World, he began to make corrections. It wasn't enough. He typed again, fixing data and tweaking locations. Still not enough.

He expanded his analysis of the star charts, determined to examine the data for each and every star in the affected area and correct its type and location if necessary. After every adjustment, he stopped to stare at the charts.

The charts were still wrong.

Another adjustment.

Still wrong.

And again.

And again.

Finally after an hour he leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen in shock. He had always told others to keep an open mind, yet when it came down to this, he hadn't even considered the possibility. The answer had been staring him in the face the whole time, and he had just been too blind, too stubborn, or perhaps just too stupid, to see it.

He knew what had caused the destruction of the Kern's homeworld.

He knew why the stars were gone.

He knew what had caused the entanglement.

And he knew who had caused it.

He had.