A/N: Thanks for all the lovely reviews, guys. I have very much enjoyed writing this story (it is finished) and I'm glad so many of you are enjoying reading it.

"Where did they go?" Rose hissed at the Doctor, panic rising in her throat. "Can't you just undo their teleport?"

"I can't reverse Time Lord teleports," he said back flatly. "How were they here?"

"Where's Tony?!"

"If you would stop screaming in my ear for two minutes I'd be able to figure it out, Rose" the Doctor growled at her. He waved his sonic in the direction of the TARDIS and the ship rematerialized as it came back into phase with the Earth. "Get in." The Vinvocci obeyed in silence, their eyes going wide when they entered the time ship but their mouths staying shut.

The Doctor was the last of the four through the doors and when he entered, Rose saw the fury of the Oncoming Storm in his face. "HARKNESS," he howled into the ship.

No one came. He ran to the console and tapped in a few commands. Not seeing anything helpful, he slammed his closed fist against the side of the monitor. "Come on!" The Doctor punched the monitor again. "Jack's gone. Teleported away, and it's too long ago to undo it."

Rose seethed. They had trusted him. They had trusted that back-stabbing conman with the most precious child in existence and he had run. As soon as she found the man, she would grind his head into dust and then light him on fire when he reanimated. The Doctor was adjusting controls far more roughly than usual and the TARDIS' lights dipped in objection.

"How were there Time Lords here, Doctor? Those were Time Lords, and they were here, and they can't be." Her voice shook as the reality of what she'd seen sank in.

The Doctor looked at Rose sharply. "Do you think I don't know that? There is no possible way they should have been able to be here. Something is very wrong. The Time Lock is breaking down."

"We need to get out of here," she added, the realization that sitting under the Master's nose with a TARDIS was probably not the best place to be.

"Yeah, I thought of that, Rose." He said sarcastically as he slammed a single button on the console. A number of switches flicked, lights went on and off, and the time rotor wheezed as it climbed and fell. "We have to get off Earth. Now."

"Where are we going?" Miss Addams asked.

"The Moon. Just far enough away he shouldn't be able to sense us, but close enough I can get readings from the planet." The TARDIS settled a moment earlier. They'd not entered the Vortex or gone terribly far, relatively speaking, so the ship hadn't shaken much.

"Who was that boy? And those people." Rossiter, the tall Vinvocci man, asked Rose sotto voce.

She looked at him, her eyes falling flat. "Our son." It was the first time she had ever spoken those words aloud, and she was surprised the honesty had come to her so easily. "He's our son, and those were some of the Doctor's people. Who are supposed to be dead."

"Time locked," the Doctor corrected.

"I'm sorry," Addams said insincerely. "But could you maybe take us to our ship in orbit? Local politics really aren't our thing…"

"The Master has control of every missile on the planet, you won't break orbit before he blows you up." The Time Lord spoke in a low, dangerous voice, eyes flashing. "So sit down, shut up, and stay out of my way."

The pair of Vinvocci looked at him with wide eyes and moved to the side of the room to sit on the floor. They whispered quietly to each other, but neither the Doctor nor Rose paid them any mind.

The Doctor was staring, unseeing, at one of the monitors on the console. His body was like a coiled spring, ready to erupt at the right trigger. Rose came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"We will get him back," she said with a certainty she didn't feel.

The Doctor hung his head and turned to look up at her. "Rose, when I ended the war," his voice was tight with the iron will it took to control his emotions any time he spoke of the war, "When I used the Moment and I ended everything, I locked them. The whole war, it's time locked. They're trapped in the last day. They shouldn't be able to get out."

"Time is bleeding, that's what the Ood told you," said Rose, the memory of the conversation coming back to her.

He let out a long breath, pushed himself away from the console, and began to pace the darkened room as he worked through the information he had. "You're right, they did. So that means there are cracks in time, disruptions. There must be some sort of crack they were able to come through, something that stretched back into the time lock and is breaking it down."

Rose was troubled. Something else he had told her a long time ago came back to her. "But if a couple of Time Lords could make it out of the Time Lock, what's to stop all the other horrible things that were there from coming through?"

Face set with a grim determination, the Doctor said, "Nothing. Nothing can stop them, not if they find a link strong enough to wedge open those cracks. There's some sort of convergence. There's something about Earth, so many things, just too many to be coincidental. There's something bigger coming than just a few monsters through some temporal rifts."

"Doctor," she said, her eyes darting to the monitor. He turned to watch with her. A large stream of fire was visible over the Earth, curling downward as it entered the spinning planet's gravity and seemed to reach the end of its trajectory on the island of Great Britain. "Another one of those coincidences?"

"Looks like," the Doctor said, looking over the top of his specs, frowning.

"The Master has taken over the Earth, we're on the moon, Time Lords have abducted our son, and it's the end of time itself," Rose summarized, surprised that her voice didn't waver.

"Time for tea?" the Doctor asked.

She nodded. "Tea."

It was, perhaps, the most eminently British thing she had ever done, to be facing the end of the world and decide to brew a pot of tea. Her mum had always pressed a cuppa into the hands of anyone in a crisis, which had annoyed Rose to no end when she was younger but as the years went by, she had realized the value of it. That spot of warmth that could centre the mind; the drinking of it automatic in its familiarity. It was a way to ground people, to hold panic at bay, and to give yourself time to think. Rose remembered the Sycorax invasion, when it had been that habit of Jackie's that had ultimately saved the Earth, when the tea had brought the Doctor 'round enough to challenge the invaders. If a thermos of tea had saved the world, maybe a pot of it would do the same for time.

Steaming cup of tea in hand, Rose wandered the corridors. The Vinvocci had followed them to the galley and were chattering inanely and she'd not wanted to listen to them. She tried to clear her mind as she walked, but her thoughts, naturally, kept drifting to Tony. She knew they needed more information before they could act, and their best bet of finding him would be to figure out what enabled them to break out of the time lock in the first place. But still, she was employing every bit of her training as a Torchwood agent and a U.N.I.T. captain to suppress the desire to scream and rampage and tear the worlds apart until she found him. That wouldn't do any good, she knew, but her heart still beat heavily in her chest as instinct warred with conditioning to rule her.

She found herself suddenly in front of Tony's bedroom door, her thoughts having directed her this way. She pushed open the door and breathed in deeply. The room still had his familiar scent. He'd spent so much time outside on Gallifrey that he perpetually smelled of the grass and the earth and the salt air that blew in from the sea. He had spent so little time outdoors in London and Rose had loved seeing how he had taken to spending his time on the land in the months they spent on that warmly coloured planet.

Rose stepped into his room and looked around. The room was simple and white. A bookshelf to one side, stuffed with texts, was the most occupied part of the space. There was a small, simple table he used as a desk, where the stand for his sonic screwdriver stood empty. Rose smiled to herself on seeing it was empty, glad he at least had the tool with him. While he was nowhere near the Doctor's skill in finding his way out of situations with the device, he certainly had picked up more than a few tricks from John and then the Doctor.

Beside the red wood stand lay a book. Rose's heart dropped to her feet when she saw it. She knew every inch of that book, having kept it safe for over a year and agonizing over when to give it to the boy. She couldn't bear the thought of Tony hating her once the truth was known and while she knew he would have to be told eventually, even now, the thought that he might know, left her feeling sick.

A dry, cracked, silver leaf had been inserted between two pages as a bookmark. Rose reached over, placing her tea on the desk, and picked up the journal with shaking hands, opening it to the indicated page.

Her eyes scanned the familiar words, and she saw, beside the swirling Gallifreyan phrase that John had used to sign off every entry, Tony's own pencil marks, where he had translated it.

"Your loving father," read the boy's neat cursive.

Rose dropped onto the soft yellow duvet, holding the book to her chest. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to calm the rolling unease within her.

"He saw it, then?" the Doctor's voice came from the doorway. Rose looked up at him. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the doorjamb.

It took a moment for the words to sink in and when they did, Rose wasn't sure whether to scream or cry. "Why didn't you ask me?"

The tall man stepped in and sat down beside her, folding his hands in his lap. He spoke softly, but without a hint of contrition in his voice. "I let John tell him," he nodded to the book, "because Tony needed to know, and at least this way, we both got to tell him."

"I wasn't ready for him to know," she whispered. "I don't want him to hate me."

"Oh, Rose," the Doctor said, hugging her sideways around her shoulders. "He would never hate you. I don't think he has it in him." He paused a moment, seeming uncertain about telling her more. "I needed to tell him. In case anything happens. Just like John with the journal, I had to make sure he would know."

She leaned her head on the man's shoulder, letting out a sigh. "I reserve the right to be pissed off at you later," she mumbled. "But right now, I just want to find him and we can sort out the rest after."

The Doctor kissed the top of her head and let out a sigh of his own. "Then that's what we'll do."

"Any big epiphanies?" Rose asked. She'd not had any ideas of her own.

He shook his head. "Nothing."

"Well, you're usually good at coming up with something in the face of danger, so maybe we should just to materialize in front of the Master and take it from there."

"Rose, I like your style," he said with a half-smile at her, nudging her shoulder playfully.

"Doctor, I think you might want to hear this," called Rossiter, the male Vinvocci. "There's a wide band transmission coming in from Earth."

The Doctor left Tony's room and Rose followed close behind, replacing the journal on his desk as she left. They were soon in the console room. Rossitter handed the Doctor his communicator and pushed a button which apparently played the recorded signal.

Rose could almost hear the elation in his voice as he spoke. "A star fell from the sky." He spoke softly, but with an edge of the madness she knew was barely beneath the surface. "Don't you want to know where from?"

The Doctor drew his lips into a firm line, his nostrils flaring. "Because now it makes sense, Doctor," the Time Lord's voice rang out from the communicator. "The whole of my life. My Destiny. That star was a diamond."

Rose felt the Doctor tense beside her, his eyes wide with surprise. "And that diamond is a white point star." Surprise took her as well.

"No," the Doctor hissed. "That is not possible." His hands clenched into fists at his sides.

"And I have worked all night to sanctify that gift. Now the star is mine. I can increase the signal and use it as a lifeline." She could hear the grin on his face in the way he twirled the words as he spoke. "Do you get it now? Do you see? Keep watching, Doctor. This should be spectacular. Over and out." The communicator went quiet, but a moment later a sound began. A rhythm of four, cast out into the universe.

"What's that about?" asked Addams, clearly still peeved at not being returned to her ship.

"A whitepoint star is only found on Gallifrey," Rose said. "The Doctor's home planet. There's no reason one should be falling to Earth."

"It's the Time Lords, Rose," he breathed heavily. "The Time Lords are returning. They've found a crack and they made a link."

"Oh my God," she said, her eyes going wide. "So everything is coming through."

His eyes, hard and cold, met hers. "The Time War is coming to Earth."