Chapter 3: Wild Fire
With the roar of Time, Life, Death, and everything in between surging through her, Rose Tyler flew through the Cosylian forest, running so fast that her feet barely touched the ground. Everything else was slow and sluggish in comparison.
She was doing what she knew she was meant to do, what she had been born to do. She was finally back in the right universe, she had regained her abilities as Bad Wolf, and she was using her abilities to help those in need. She loved every minute of it, loved the electric exhilaration that came with finally letting the Wolf loose and racing along the boundary between impossible and possible, with Time howling its endless song through her mind, and empathy and strength coursing through in her human heart the entire time.
Sometimes the Wolf's power threatened to overwhelm her, for the line between too much and just enough was extraordinarily thin. Rose had spent years learning to filter out some of the Wolf's vast temporal senses so she wouldn't burn completely amid Time's raging light. When she got it just right, she never felt so free.
She merged her mind with the Wolf's, and together they could run faster, run farther, and save far more lives than Rose could have on her own. Now, she could feel the last part of the jigsaw puzzle that her life had become in the last few years finally sliding into place. She had once opened the Heart of the TARDIS and become Bad Wolf to save her Doctor. Now Bad Wolf was leading back to the place where Rose had left her heart so many years ago. The two of them were finally going home.
The TARDIS key that hung on a sturdy necklace chain around Rose's neck (where it had been since the day she had resolved to find the locked doors it went to even if it took the rest of her life) was warmer than it had been in years, and faintly glowing gold.
She had first come to Cosylian accidentally on one of her early dimension jumps. She hadn't meant to burst through a fissure between worlds into a laboratory in the middle of the night, startling the scientists working in it. She'd known the moment she arrived that the TARDIS and Doctor were nowhere on the planet, but her cannon had needed half an hour to recharge, and the Bad Wolf part of her had sparked and tugged insistently at the timelines surrounding the lab. So she had stayed for a little while, taking note of all the papers on the lab tables, each page covered in chemical formulae and graphs. She hadn't realized what she and the Wolf had done until after she had lifted her hand from the nearest notebook and seen the result of a subtly shifted timeline.
She hadn't been able to understand the exact meanings behind the symbols and characters on the paper, but she knew without a doubt what had happened. A few minor differences in which atomic bonds were broken or formed, small changes to the amounts of a specific molecule in a reaction or two, that was all.
The rest of that jump had only gotten stranger after that, and yet here she was on Cosylian again, this time on purpose, and not a moment too soon. This time, it had been clear from the beginning that the Doctor and his TARDIS were on the planet. Not because the entire city of Rhessyc had been in an uproar over the disrespectful behaviour of a particular visitor when Rose had arrived, nor because she had learned within the first few minutes of being there that this visitor had picked up and licked one of the five sacred objects kept on the Altar of the Mother Goddess in the Northern World Council building, then proceeded to run from authorities into the jungle.
It wasn't even the licking part that gave the Doctor's presence away. It was the fact that for the first time in years, Rose could actually understand what the planet's native inhabitants were saying. The Wolf within her had soon recognized the subtle telepathic presence of the TARDIS in the back of her mind, and the time ship had hummed happily in response from somewhere outside Rhessyc.
With the TARDIS a good distance away and the locals warning her over and over again about the fatal dangers of their forests. Rose had decided to wait in the city for the Doctor (presumably under arrest by the city's guard troops). She had passed the time in the central marketplace, talking with locals about the disrespectful visitor, and Cosylian's history, including a variant of a deadly type fungus that had been eradicated decades earlier with the help of the Mother Goddess herself. (That had been a bit of a shock to learn about, since Rose was fairly certain that miraculous event actually stemmed from her first jump to Cosylian.)
Then the suns had set, the Creeping Night warning signals had blasted through the city, and everything had gone to hell.
As she ran out of Rhessyc into the dark jungle, heading straight for the growing cloud of Creeping Night spores in the distance, Rose stretched out her budding telepathic senses toward the TARDIS. She was instantly met with a surge of distress from the time ship. The Doctor was in trouble, and the TARDIS was a bit worried about his ability to get out of it.
Rose didn't bother trying to avoid patches of the fog of death as she changed course, putting on a new burst of speed as she leapt over rocks and fallen branches with the grace of the wolves she was named for. She had helped the residents of Rhessyc for long enough tonight. She hadn't been able to ignore their panicked cries, couldn't bear the thought of letting them die knowing she could have helped them. She had pushed her limits as the Wolf, forcing her way closer and closer to the boundary between time and space until both began to bend to her will. Yet even with all that power, she was running out of time to find the Doctor.
She'd have to find the TARDIS first, and together they could locate him more easily.
Rose's entire being was a live wire, her eyes burning like liquid gold as she ran. One wave of her hand and the Wolf's power made any fog of death spores in her way vanish from existence. She would find a way to help the native cosylians take care of the rest later, after they were all evacuated to safety and she had rescued her missing Time Lord.
The TARDIS was half-shrouded in the fog of death by the time Rose stumbled upon it, with thousands of tiny, bluish-grey spores collecting along the edge of the ship's shields. It hadn't taken Rose long to find her once she'd stopped searching for lost cosylians. She knew the TARDIS was close to Rhessyc, could sense it in her mind like a distant extension of herself and the Wolf.
She rounded a titanic tree into a clearing near one of the dirt footpaths leading into the city, and there she was. That marvelous, beautiful, one-of-a-kind police box that she had yearned to see again for so, so long.
Rose rushed over to the TARDIS and pressed her palms and forehead to the blue doors with a shuddering gasp.
"Oh my god, you're really here. Finally! Thank god, I found you, I found you…" she whispered, luminous eyes falling shut and a wide smile spreading across her face when she felt the ship's warm telepathic hum roll through her mind. The hum rushed through her again, this time with a somewhat anxious undertone. The Doctor still needed their help.
Rose pulled away from the doors and yanked the necklace chain with the TARDIS key on it from around her neck. With a glance at the clouds of fog spores that were slowly starting to creep into the clearing again, she shoved the key into the lock and turned it, shoving the door open and slamming it shut just as quickly behind her. The TARDIS immediately raised the console room lights from their dim resting states. Rose grinned as she took in the familiar interior, patting the nearest coral strut in thanks as she jogged up the ramp to the console itself. To her relief, not much had changed since she had last set foot there.
"Right then," she muttered aloud, determinedly surveying the ship's controls, "let's find the Doctor." Bad Wolf had only flown the TARDIS once, but that would have to be enough. There wasn't enough time to search the forest with the Creeping Night smothering everything in its path.
Rose placed her hands on an open part of the console and closed her eyes, focusing all her attention on projecting one, specific thought to the TARDIS. 'Help me take us to him.' She hadn't had much of a chance to practice things like this in Pete's parallel universe. She could only do her best with what little she'd learned from the Wolf herself.
The TARDIS' telepathic hum slowly changed pitch, strengthening and rising as she sent back a series of hazy impressions of sight, sound and emotion that made Rose's fingers twitch with newly-remembered movements.
She opened her eyes, breath quickening in anticipation of what she was about to do. The time rotor pumped once as she moved her hands to the controls now impressed into her memory, as if the TARDIS wanted to show just how anxious she was to get moving.
Rose took a deep breath, nodding in agreement as she eyed the dematerialization lever beneath her right hand. 'Here we go,' she thought.
She threw the lever and let out an enthusiastic whoop when the TARDIS dematerialized exactly as she was supposed to.
The TARDIS wouldn't let Rose outside when they rematerialized. The moment she heard a clatter beside the ramp and turned to see what it was, she understood why.
The TARDIS pushed a wave of concern into her mind as Rose ducked under the ramp's railing and picked up the blue, hooded biohazard suit that had appeared on the floor. She groaned, realizing what the TARDIS was trying to make her do, and threw an anxious look at the door.
"We don't have much time, he could be dying," she protested aloud.
The time ship sent a pulse of prickly insistence back at her, along with a sensation that was reminiscent of exhaustion. Rose huffed, lowering the suit and quickly studying the other objects at her feet. A pair of gloves, a sleek, full-face respirator mask that had to be from a century far in the future, and an orange, lightweight emergency stretcher with handles on both sides, folded in half so it was easier to carry. The sight of the stretcher told Rose a lot about how worried the TARDIS actually was. She had been in the time ship's sick bay a number of times before, and never seen anything like what she was being given now.
'Alright,' Rose conceded. She was a bit tired from wielding the power of Bad Wolf for so long. She hadn't ever used her power like this, never sustained so much of it for so long. She knew it couldn't be a good idea to keep going like this, and evidently, so did the TARDIS.
She rushed through pulling on the biohazard suit and respirator mask, wincing when the suit's hood and cuffs, and the straps of the respirator, suddenly tightened around her face, ankles, wrists, and head all at once. At least she was somewhat familiar with the proper process of putting on protective equipment, only because the parallel universe's Torchwood had required biohazard training for everyone in the dimension cannon program. She picked up the folded stretcher last, surprised at how impossibly light it felt. The small set of buttons beside one of the handles gave her some indication that there was more to it than there first appeared.
She pulled on the doors again. The TARDIS let them crack open with a somber, fizzling hum that amounted to a murmur of 'Be safe, come home.'
"I will," Rose whispered, drawing on every bit of the Wolf's expansive powers she could as she slipped outside. The door swung closed behind her of its own accord.
She didn't know how far she and the TARDIS had traveled. Wherever they had landed was so engulfed with Creeping Night spores that she could barely see the trunk of the nearest tree just a few feet away.
It was so, so dark. She couldn't see the rest of the forest, let alone any sign of the Doctor. The sound of her own breathing reverberated through her eardrums, the mechanical hiss of air in and out of her respirator the only sound audible in the dead and silent jungle.
She turned this way and that, searching the darkness for any sign of a body, a sonic screwdriver, anything living whatsoever. Her fiery gaze burned away thousands of spores wherever she looked.
Where was the Doctor? Surely the TARDIS had brought them close to him. Surely…
Small lights around the outer edges of her mask suddenly flickered on. She gasped as a scene of staggering devastation was illuminated before her.
Now she understood what the barkeeper meant. This was what the people of Rhessyc were fleeing. Every inch of ground, every leaf, every bush, every pool of stagnant water Rose thought she could see ahead of her if she squinted hard enough, all of it was covered in a thin layer of pale blue particles. Plant leaves were slowly starting to droop under its weight, some on the brink of giving way. It looked like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption, after the clouds of ash finally fell from the heavens to choke and smother all life below.
Rose looked up, wondering how thick the cloud of Creeping Night spores was. There was only seething grey fog above her, no stars, no moons, no distant lights of evacuation shuttles. Nothing at all.
The deep, three-toned warning from Rhessyc's horns suddenly rumbled through the night. Rose whirled around, squinting in the direction the baritone signal had come from. Maybe she wasn't as far from the city as she'd thought.
'Oh Doctor…' She swallowed hard and took a step forward, then another, swiftly moving beyond the protection of the TARDIS' shields. The lights on her mask swept through the fog in wide strokes as she searched, listening intently with the Wolf's amplified senses for any sign of another lifeform in the area.
Eight steps past the towering tree directly in front of the TARDIS, she finally heard it. A faint whimper, barely audible through her biohazard suit.
She jerked to a halt, holding her breath as she waited, desperate to hear the sound again.
Another whimper drifted out of the fog from somewhere to her right. Rose cautiously made her way toward it, golden flares of the Wolf's power searing through each new cloud of spores her footsteps sent spiraling into the air.
There was a small pond ahead of her, formed in a depression at the base of a massive tree. The whimpers grew more and more audible as Rose approached it.
She grimaced at the delicate, white web of exposed Creeping Night fungus slowly growing across the surface of the pond. The TARDIS was just barely visible through the foliage from there, veiled in millions of spores that fell like snow.
A metallic 'clink' made her look down. She quickly stooped and pried the object she'd stepped on out of the dusty soil, turning her head away when more spores shot into the air with the movements of her fingers. She knew the feel of the object in her hand even before she'd wiped off the silver outer casing. It was the sonic screwdriver.
A pleading cry once again echoed through the fog, incoherent and desperate all at once. Rose straightened and squelched through the increasingly wet soil toward it, glaring at the tendrils of Creeping Night that tried to stick to her boots until they disappeared from existence all together.
"Doctor!" she shouted.
Silence.
"Doctor!"
It took her a few precious seconds to recognize the dark shape on the other side of the tree, lying half in the water, half on shore, as a humanoid being. Then he moved, and she caught sight of a pair of stained white trainers. Rose's boots slipped and slid in the mud as she scrambled over to him. "Doctor!"
She could hear his pitiful, rasping pleas as she crouched at his side. "I won't do it! Please, just don't….I didn't mean…Never…I have to…"
Rose clenched her jaw and closed her eyes, trying to block out his words as best she could. 'I'm sorry,' she thought, 'I'm sorry I took so long.'
This was not the reunion she had imagined back in Pete's World, or even two hours ago. Not with the Doctor jerking away at the sound of her voice, writhing in muddy, fog-infected water at the edge of a pond. Not with her face obscured and her voice mechanized by the respirator she wore for safety. Not with the Doctor delirious and pleading with enemies only he could see, his eyes just barely cracked open and staring at nothing.
Lace-like tendrils of Creeping Night were slowly crawling up his right arm where it trailed in the water, continuing upward until they disappearing under his bunched sleeve. His whole body trembled, and red, inflamed scratches crisscrossed what she could see of his skin. Some of the scratches were bleeding. Beneath his coat, his suit jacket and oxford were also partially undone, like something had tried to rip them open in one go.
Rose's throat tightened and her heart clenched when she realized what must have happened. The Doctor had been trying to scratch and claw at his own skin without realizing what he was doing, possibly because of his reaction to the Creeping Night. That had only given the fog more entry points into his body.
A snarl from the Wolf tore from Rose's throat as she bared her teeth, flinging her power at every strand of Creeping Night threatening to take the Doctor away from her. One pathetic lifeform on a small, jungle planet was not going to succeed in doing that. Not today, not ever.
The explosion of light that resulted made every tendril of it touching the Time Lord's skin wither, die, and disappear— along with the entire pond.
Rose cringed at what remained of the bone-dry pond bed. She was getting tired, and her sloppiness could have cost her and the Doctor greatly.
She couldn't afford to make a mistake like that again.
The Doctor remained oblivious to the incident. "Please….I'm…sorry…I'm sorry…" His words were interspersed with rasping breaths and choked whimpers.
"Shhhh," Rose soothed, "it's just me, Doctor. It's me, Rose. I'm, I came back and I'm here to stay. You'll be okay. You have to be okay."
She unfolded the stretcher and was startled when it suddenly hummed to life in her hands. She tried to set it down beside her, only for it to come to a halt an inch above the ground.
Rose blinked. A hover-stretcher, that was new. Humanoid emergency technology clearly improved in the future.
Hands clenching and unclenching with uncertainty, she reached for the Doctor's arms. She really didn't want to have to do this, but there was no other choice and no one else around to help her do it. She wasn't prepared for the Time Lord to wrench himself away at the first brush of her gloves against his coat. He struggled and screamed like she was holding an open flame to his bare skin when she tightened her grip and held him down, fearful that he would injure himself further.
"No…I can't…please...Stop, I—" His begging cut off as he descended into a harsh coughing fit. Rose ached to comfort him, but she knew he wouldn't, couldn't, recognize the gesture for what it was intended to be. Not when he didn't even recognize her.
The TARDIS was practically ringing alarm bells in her head via their tentative bond.
They were running out of time. If Rose didn't get the Doctor into the TARDIS as soon as possible, she was going to lose her chance to save him in his current form. She may have gotten rid of the Creeping Night on his skin, but it was still suffocating him from the inside out.
Rose gritted her teeth as she reached for the Doctor again, steeling herself (and her heart) for her upcoming task. It wouldn't be pleasant for either of them.