So the two plagiarized story got taken down as well as the other story the user stole. Thanks for the help, guys :) As always, keep an eye out for something like that to happen and if you see it, let me know immediately via a PM here or as a fanmail on tumblr and be sure to include a link if possible as well as the story title and username.

And now, here's the chapter. Let's see how many of you guessed right.


The Doctor watched helplessly as the TARDIS dematerialized. The last thing he heard over the wheezing of the ship and the roaring of the Futurekind, was Rose screaming, "NO!"

His breathing increased as his connection to the TARDIS was stretched and warped as she was pulled farther and farther away from him. There was a great, gaping hole where she should fill his mind, and now she was nothing but a tiny speck in the corner. It was painful, and he understood what Rose had meant when she said it was uncomfortable to not be in the same time as the TARDIS. This was not the first time he had been in a different time as her, but never, in all their years together, had they been separated by so much time and space.

And worse, he could no longer feel Rose's mind, or see her timelines. They were completely, utterly gone. That never happened unless someone was dead.

His hearts nearly stopped at the thought.

Knowing the Master though, death would be one of the kinder fates for Rose. The thought of what that bastard might be doing to her caused the Doctor's blood to run hot. The world around him grew into sharper focus. Time seemed to slow around him, the roaring of the Futurekind and the screams of his companions dulling, as he turned.

Fusing the TARDIS's coordinates was not much, but at least he could make it easier to find them. First he had to get out of here. Jack and Martha had their bodies pressed against the door. Martha was slapping at the hands reaching through, shrieking. Jack had both of his feet pressed into the ground, and was struggling to get the doors closed. The Doctor's eyes fell on Jack's vortex manipulator. Broken, he'd said. Nothing the Doctor couldn't fix.

Time sped back up and the Doctor raced across the room. He slammed his body against Jack's, bracing his foot against a stack of boxes near the wall, and grabbed his wrist. Pulling out the sonic, he quickly flipped through the settings to the one he needed and turned it on the manipulator.

"The hell are you doing?!" Jack yelled. "We need to get the door closed!"

"Hold still!" the Doctor ordered, switching to a new setting. "Don't move!"

"Look, I'm telling you, it's broken! It hasn't worked for years!"

"Done!" He switched off his sonic, and stuffed it in his pocket. "That's because you didn't have me! Martha, grab hold!" He reached for Martha's hand and pulled it onto the manipulator. "Now!"

Jack let out a long grunt of exertion, and then time opened up and swallowed them whole.

It was like whooshing through a colorful tunnel at a million miles per hour but without the pressure of the wind. In fact there was no sensation at all. Not even sight. The colors had to be how his mind perceived the time shift, but he could not identify them even if he tried.

Time split open and, quite literally, spat the three travelers out. They appeared in the same positions they had departed from, a hundred trillion years in the future, but the moment their feet touched solid ground, the pain caught up with them. Martha slumped against the wall, holding her head. Jack stumbled around, momentarily disoriented. The Doctor doubled over, face scrunched up in pain.

"Oh, my head!" Martha gasped.

The Doctor was moving before the pain had even begun to fade, stumbling forward. Every single one of his senses were branching out, searching the relative time and space for any sign of Rose and his TARDIS. His connection to the latter had strengthened the moment they arrived, but it was nowhere near what it should have been. They were in the same time, but she had gone from the size of a pinhead to a golf ball in his mind, when she should have been more like a football. Rose, though, he could not locate.

"Come on!" he rasped. "Come on! We have to find them! We have to find them now."

Jack grunted loudly, cracking his neck. He gave his head a quick shake, and exhaled a large puff of air. "Now hold on, Doc. We don't even know where we are."

"Earth, 21st century, right around the time when he would've landed." The Doctor whirled around, eyes wild. "We've got to find them now before he kills her or worse!"

"Doctor, he's not going to kill her," Jack said calmly.

"Yes he will!" He shouted. "You don't know him! He will kill her as slowly and painfully as possible simply because of what she means to me!"

He turned to go and abruptly found himself behind held in place by a pair of firm arms around his torso, pinning his own arms to his sides. "Let go of me!" the Doctor snarled, struggling.

But Jack refused to release him. "Doctor, listen to me! Calm down and listen to me, god dammit!"

The Doctor stopped struggling, but his breathing was rapid and shallow. "What?" he spat through clenched teeth.

"Listen. Everything's going to fine. I promise you." Jack swallowed once. "I am so sorry. I really am. For both of you. You gotta believe me." He let go of the Doctor's arms and backed away a few steps.

"Why should I?"

"That's rich," Jack muttered. He lifted his wrist and started punching in coordinates on his vortex manipulator. "At least you got this to work again. You've just made things a whole lot simpler. Both of you grab on. This is going to be worse than before."

Martha glanced at the Doctor for a second then placed her hand on top of the manipulator. He followed suit a moment after. "Where're we going?" she asked.

"Cardiff."

And then time swallowed them up again, spitting them out a second later relatively speaking, over a hundred miles to the west. The dematerialization didn't hurt, nor did the traveling itself. It was not until after they had arrived and their bodies had rematerialized, that the stress of rocketing unprotected through time and space caught up with them. Their migraines had not even properly faded from last time, and now they were back twofold.

The Doctor stumbled backwards, completely disoriented, his time senses flailing to establish themselves, and he felt his legs bump something hard. He fell backwards on his bum, and his head connected with something soft. He heard his companions groaning quietly and Jack attempting to make a joke about what positions they had landed in. The Doctor groaned, reaching up to massage his temples.

His senses were starting to calm, having established his relative location. Earth, early 21st century. His timeline steadied, as did his companions', and slowly the blistering pain in his head began to dissipate. He reached out mentally and felt Martha's timeline steady and he got close enough to Jack's all-wrong one to know it was stable. Good. He wanted to reach out and search for Rose's but he didn't have the capacity to accomplish that at the moment.

He felt like he was lying across a table and his head was on something soft, but not too squishy. A couch possibly.

He opened his eyes and was immediately met with bright light. Wincing, he slammed them shut again as the pain in his head spiked. Okay, so seeing was temporarily out. He took a deep breath and focused on what he could hear. The steady hum of machines—possibly computers—and generators and the faint electrical buzz of lights; the steady trickle of water (odd) and from the way it echoed, he assumed the room was very large and open, probably composed of some sort of stone or cement, and various metals. Also there was a distant animal screeching, reptilian. No, avian, no…. Whatever it was, it didn't belong in this time period.

When the pain in his head had faded to a dull throb, he finally opened his eyes. The lights didn't seem nearly as bright now, for which he was grateful. The ceiling was made of white bricks and it sloped down behind his head. A line of black caught his attention and he craned his neck to see it better.

Nine thick, black letters surrounded by black lines… Even upside down he recognized the word they spelled, and something cold settled in his gut.

TORCHWOOD.

No!

He lurched to his feet, knocking the table back onto the couch. Martha and Jack had both hit the floor when they had materialized, and were just now starting to sit up. "Martha!" he rasped. Martha looked up, holding her head. "Martha, get up. We've got to get out of here."

"What? Why?"

He pointed furiously at the word on the wall. She followed his gaze, staring at the word for a moment, and he saw the moment she connected the dots. Her eyes widened and she inhaled sharply. But instead of getting to her feet and helping him locate an exit, she turned to Jack. "Why did you bring us here?"

"I work here," Jack said simply, but he was watching the Doctor warily.

The Doctor glowered.

"You what?!" she yelped. "But didn't Torchwood—"

"They did," the Doctor growled. Jack swallowed nervously. "Everything Torchwood did, and you're part of it?"

"I swear, it's not what you think. You encountered Torchwood One at Canary Wharf. We're Torchwood Three. We were almost completely independent for years and entirely on our own since the old regime was destroyed. This Torchwood is better, I rebuilt it in your honor. Please, Doc, I've got so much to tell you and show you. You need to let me."

"Give me one good reason why I should!"

"Rose."

That brought the Doctor up short. He pressed his lips together and took a deep breath. His body was practically vibrating with the urge to move, to get away from the threat of Torchwood, and find his mate.

"You're not telling us everything," Martha said suddenly.

The brief look of guilt on Jack's face was proof enough. He said nothing, pushing himself to his feet, and walked to the nearest computer terminal. There was another one adjacent to it, and just to the left of that was a room with blinds covering all the windows, and the doors firmly shut. Funnily enough, there was a sign taped to the door that read in bold letters: Boldly gone where no man has gone before.

Underneath it someone had scrawled in red ink: Is that a fucking Star Wars joke?

Beneath that in blue ink, different handwriting: That's Star Trek.

And below that in a different shade of blue ink, different handwriting: Shame on you, Owen.

The red ink again: Fuck off, Ianto.

And lastly, at the bottom, written in black ink, a very elegant script: That wasn't me. But she's right. Shame on you.

The Doctor frowned. Suddenly he realized there was something bothering him, and it was not just the fact he was in Torchwood.

He looked around the main room properly for the first time. It was large and open, made of cement and metal just like he had thought, with a large machine in the center of the room, covered almost entirely in metallic panels, which stretched up to the ceiling. Water trickled down the sides into a moat at the very bottom of the room, underneath a floor made of grating.

Across the way was a room with glass walls that housed an array of weapons. There were no windows, and there appeared to be large pipes running up and through the walls, which meant it was probably underground. There were several doors but he could not tell if they led outside, or further into the base. Open walkways higher up in the walls revealed the other levels in the building, and then he noticed the winding staircases that led up to them. There was even a basketball hoop hanging off one of them.

He turned. Behind him was a large archway that led down into a sanitary white room—some sort of infirmary, it seemed. And the couch underneath TORCHWOOD was well worn.

All this equipment, all these rooms, items, even a box of leftover pizza at one of the computer terminals—but no people. Torchwood One had been a proper agency. Their ethics and practices were a bit questionable but they had been fully staffed, like UNIT. This place was empty. "This is a fully active branch of Torchwood, isn't it?" he asked.

"There's only half a dozen of us, but yeah. Fully active."

"So where is everybody?"

Jack shook his head, his fingers clacking away on the keyboard. "It's standard protocol if the entire team leaves the city that one of us logs the departure date and time in case of any rift activity in our absence. There's nothing since…last year when we all went out to the countryside. So someone's around." He frowned and looked around the room. "IANTO? TOSH?"

There was no answer except for a screech from above and a huge mass came soaring out of what appeared to be a cave near the ceiling.

Martha shrieked in surprise. "Is that a dinosaur?!"

Jack smiled. "Her name's Myfanwy."

She stared at him like he was mad.

"Myfanwy indeed," the Doctor murmured, watching the prehistoric reptile sore around the uppermost part of the room. "That's a fully grown pteranodon… How on Earth did you—?"

"Came through the Rift last year. Ianto trapped her on his own and I helped him tranquilize her. Ianto got a job; we got a pet."

"And you keep her here?"

"No. Her enclosure leads out of the building and she's free to come and go as she likes."

"Is she friendly?" Martha asked curiously.

"Sort of. She doesn't attack us. Toss her some chocolate—preferably dark—and she will love you for life." He chuckled once more at the shock on her face then his mirth died away. "But she shouldn't be the only one here." He turned back to the computer terminal. "The team must just be out on a job or something."

"What kind of data do you have access to on those?" the Doctor asked curiously.

"A lot."

"Can you search for any temporal disturbances or shifts? We can figure out were the TARDIS landed."

"How can you be so sure this Master bloke's here?" Martha asked. "With the TARDIS he could've gone anywhere."

"No. When the TARDIS was dematerializing, I fused the coordinates. Permanently." The Doctor explained. "He can only travel between the year 100 trillion and the last place the TARDIS landed, which is here and now. I plugged in the same coordinates to your manipulator."

"Yeah, well, either we landed too late or he landed too early."

Martha frowned and folded her arms. "What do you mean?"

"I mean—" he turned to face them both with his hands on his hips "—this is not the date the TARDIS landed on."

"And how do you know that?"

All at once it clicked. He'd been suspicious for a while now just from little things Jack had said and done over the last few hours and now he was sure. "Because he knows when it landed." The Doctor stated quietly. He was calm. That was a bit surprising, considering how utterly furious he was. "Don't you?"

Jack cocked his head slightly but said nothing.

"You said either the TARDIS was early or we were late, which means it's already here. Don't lie and pretend you didn't know. All this equipment monitoring temporal disturbances and the rift activity—you would've known the moment it landed."

Jack pursed his lips and exhaled slowly. "The TARDIS doesn't register as a temporal disturbance. That's how you evaded Torchwood all these years."

"But that doesn't change the fact that you've known this whole time. You knew about the Master, too, didn't you? You knew Rose would get taken." He walked towards him slowly, hands curled into fists and stuffed in his trouser pockets. It was strange, having the urge to punch someone. This body wasn't one for physical violence. He knew how to fight but this body preferred using wit and words as weapons. Right now, however, he very much wanted his fist to make contact with the captain's jaw. Or maybe his nose or eye. "Where are they, Jack?"

He took a deep breath and let it out, turning to face him fully. "I can't answer that."

"You better start trying."

"I can't. We are at a serious risk for a paradox here and until I know exactly when we are I can't tell you anything. I'm sorry, Doc. Now just give me a second while I figure out the date, alright?"

Martha glanced between them fearfully. The Doctor seemed calm but she had been around long enough to recognize that look in his eye, the way his shoulders were tensed. He was furious. She had never seen him be physically violent, but that may have been about to change.

For a long moment it was completely silent except for the trickling of water.

An alarm began to blare and Martha jumped in surprise. It did not sound like a warning, though. Two orange lights on either side of a cell in the area just below them began flashing. Behind the bars, a large vault door slowly rolled aside and before it could even open all the way, a woman was wriggling through the opening. The cell doors parted, but they were not fast enough either, and she shoved them out of her way. She looked around the room wildly and skidded to a stop when she spotted them up by the computers.

It was Rose.

She stood there looking up at them for a moment in mixture of utter disbelief and wonder. Her chest was heaving like she had run flat out, her hair windblown and messy, and just a bit shorter than Martha remembered. She was not wearing the same clothes from earlier—a brown bomber jacket, red shirt, jeans, and a pair of worn trainers. She did not look at all hurt, either.

"Hey, Rosie." Jack greeted. "I'm back."

Rose's lips parted and she let out a quiet, breathy noise. She glanced at him then her eyes were on the Doctor again.

"Rose?" the Doctor whispered and then he was flying past Martha, nearly crashing into the railing. He cleared the small set of stairs in one hop. Rose made a sound that was half laugh, half sob and ran the last few feet to him.

They collided at the bottom of the stairs. She threw her arms around his shoulders and he crushed her tightly to him, lifting her right off the floor. Rose buried her face in his neck, clutching desperately at his back, and sobbed loudly. She pulled back as he set her down, her hands moving to his face and tracing every inch like she was trying to commit it to memory, and then she pulled him down for a kiss.

Martha looked away to give them a moment of privacy. Her eyes fell on the only other occupant of the room: Jack. He was watching them with a mixture of relief and sadness. It was obvious why. Rose must have been here for a while before Jack left with them. He really had known the entire time. But then cold settled in her belly and a new question arose in her mind.

Just how long has it been for Rose?

Rose, for her part, could not believe it. She had been waiting so long for this moment, not knowing for sure if it would ever happen, but hoping and praying that it would. She had forgotten just how it felt when he held her in his arms, the way his hair felt when it slid through his fingers, the quiet humming noise in the back of his throat he made when he was happy, his scent, his taste, the way his lean body felt against hers.

She pulled back when the need for air became too great and sucked in a big gulp of air then pressed a quick succession of kisses to his lips. "You're here!" she gasped between kisses. "You're here…you're here…"

She rested her forehead on his, opening her eyes and blinking away the tears so she could see him.

"Rose, how…?" he whispered. "How are you here? How are you—? You…you're not hurt." He took a step back so he could see her properly. "You're not hurt at all. Not even a scratch. But I—I heard you…he said he'd…"

Oh, God. He didn't understand yet. He thought it'd been minutes for her, maybe hours at best. The realization brought a fresh wave of tears to her eyes and she covered her mouth with her hands, shaking her heard. "Oh, Doctor," she murmured. "Those injuries—they healed months ago."

The Doctor stiffened as the reality of their situation finally began to dawn on him. She could practically hear the thoughts whizzing around his brain. (Though, maybe she actually could. It was the first time she had been around him since—) He swallowed. "How long has it been Rose? Tell me, please."

She took a deep breath and let it out on a sob. "Eighteen months. 'S been eighteen months."


DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG I'VE BEEN WAITING TO POST THIS CHAPTER? A YEAR. THAT'S RIGHT. I'VE BEEN PLANNING THIS FOR OVER A FREAKING YEAR. AND I'VE BEEN DROPPING HINTS FOR AGES. (See: Cardiff) *laughs maniacally*

Also, we're over 1500 reviews now *hyperventilates* Thank you ZenaraTheDragon!