I'm terribly sorry about how terribly long it's taken me to post this! I've been struggling with this chapter for months. On the other hand, these days I just can't stop writing, so I think the next updates will definitely take much less. Whether they'll be 3 or 4, I haven't been able to decide yet. Thanks once more to my dear friend and beta NoPondInTheForest for all her support and her help!
Drenched to the skin and hopelessly miserable, it was not without difficulty that the Tenth Doctor stood up. As he did, he took a glimpse of the next Doctor and Clara Oswald coming out of the TARDIS. Under any other circumstances he would have been more than pleased to see his spaceship and her two current occupants return. What happened his time however was absolutely unprecedented – he felt the temptation to take Rose in his arms and run away.
So this was the end, he kept thinking to himself. Chinny and Clara had finally come back to steal Rose away from him and to remind him that it was high time for him to regenerate.
All of a sudden, everything felt like a dream. Everything around him became blurry and hazy, and soon it started to spin. He fought against this sudden bout of anxiety of course. After all he just couldn't stay put. He had to come up with a plan really fast and sort things out straight away, and when it was all over he would wrap his protective arms around Rose and tell her he was determined he was never going to let her go again.
The Doctor closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them he saw Rose was standing still in front of him. By now she had obviously seen not only Chinny and Clara, but also the blue box parked behind them. He had described it to her a zillion times before, but this was indeed the first time she had ever laid eyes on the TARDIS. As he kept watching her, she had started to shake. At first he didn't make much out of it. It was early in the morning, the air was chilly and humid, and Rose's smock was completely soaked. It didn't occur to him that she might have been shaking for a very different reason. As a matter of fact, it never did until he eventually heard her speak.
"Back in a mo'," her sweet but trembling voice whispered, and those few words were enough to make the Doctor wake up from his trance. The thoughts of impending doom and the budding plans to escape that followed faded away the moment he turned around and saw Rose running away as fast as she could from not only from Chinny and Clara but also from himself. All of a sudden, his eyes went wide with disbelief. Disbelief met with relief when, unaware of himself as he had been, he became aware of the fact that the limbs that had momentarily felt numb were becoming alive again. He tried to follow her but his legs faltered, although they seemed to be regaining some confidence with every new attempt at taking another step. Then he tried to call out her name, but due to his terribly troubled breathing no sound ever made it to his throat. Meanwhile Rose kept running fast as could be, and soon she disappeared inside a thick bank of morning mist.
The moment Rose got out of the Tenth Doctor's sight was the moment Clara Oswald and the Eleventh Doctor reached him. He thought he had heard Clara mumble something he couldn't understand, next thing he knew she was also running away. Her reasons for doing so were very different from Rose's, that much he knew. She just wanted to get ahold of Rose herself.
Crossing his arms over his chest, the Eleventh Doctor watched his companion in silence until he could see her no more. He turned to his previous self thereon and found him staring into nothingness. To the older Time Lord, that came as an unspeakably appreciated relief. The fact that the Tenth Doctor didn't seem to be inclined to speak would spare him the hardship of having to explain why they had returned, even if he suspected that, deep down inside, the other Doctor had already guessed much of it.
Unfortunately for the Eleventh Doctor, it was not long until the bliss of silence was broken.
"You once told me there's always something you can do," he heard the younger Doctor mutter, and curiously enough those had been the very last words he had wanted him to say.
"Yeah, I guess I probably did," he answered, looking down with a smirk that indicated he was actually talking to no other but himself.
"Well, do something for goodness' sake," the Tenth Doctor's voice begged. His sad brown eyes went way beyond that – they implored him.
"I'm sorry, Sandshoes," answered the Eleventh Doctor when he finally found the strength to speak. "I'm afraid I just can't."
"Of course you can and you will," said the Tenth Doctor in both denial and disbelief. "You said you break the rules all the time, Chinny. This time, to make things even easier you won't even have to bother! Just tell me what to do and I'll do it myself."
"There's nothing you or I or anyone else can do this time, Sandshoes," the older Time Lord answered. "There are no rules that can be broken or alternative route that can be taken. No matter what we might dare to attempt, her lifetime as we know it would suffer the consequences. If she stayed, she would never meet good old Mr Fantastic. I'm sure you can imagine all the rest."
Indeed the Tenth Doctor could imagine. To be completely honest with himself, he had briefly pictured it in his mind a million times a day every day for the past few months, and each time he had also pictured his older self coming up with some perfect plan that would eventually save the day. Having just found out that there was no such plan, he understood that this was a truth he wasn't willing to accept.
"Don't give me that, Chinny," said the younger Time Lord with a stony expression on his face. "You know what? When I think of all those stories about everything you've been doing since I regenerated, have you ever wondered what the common ground is? 'Cause I believe I can tell you. You keep changing the future, Chinny. You change the future all the time, so please don't tell me that this time for some stupid reason you've just decided that you can't!"
"You don't understand, do you?" asked the Eleventh Doctor furrowing his brow. "If we changed her future our past would change just as much. We would never have met her, Sandshoes. Don't you understand that? If keeping her today means tomorrow Rose Tyler will be wiped out not only from our lives but also from our memories never to come back again, then I'm terribly sorry Sandshoes, but I'll do everything in my power to send her back."
"Oh, look at you!" said the Tenth Doctor with sarcasm as he kept frowning at his past self. "The man that would laugh in the face of paradox! You seriously want me to believe now you're terribly scared of them?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Sandshoes. Paradoxes never scared me. It's just that I find them bromidic and dull, and they just don't interest me. The only reason why I always laughed at them was that I could never understand why you used to be so scared of them all the time."
Thereupon something happened, something that took the Tenth Doctor utterly by surprise. After his future self said those words, something clicked inside his brain. Whether it had been a sudden revelation he just couldn't decide, not yet. Maybe he had always known. Maybe he had fully understood upon meeting the next Doctor for the very first time. Truth be told, they hadn't even been together for too long when he realised that, where he had been overcautious, the Eleventh Doctor had seemed to be reckless. His hearts and soul had often been overwhelmed with sorrow, yet the future Doctor always seemed to react to things the way an enthusiastic child would have done, and now that he had become aware of it, he had also understood why.
All his life, the Eleventh Doctor had desperately been trying to escape from what he had been, from everything this sad and lonely incarnation ever was. And yet, now that there was real evidence that something terrible might be about to happen to someone they both loved so very dearly and that they unquestionably had to do whatever it took to protect her from harm, it occurred to the Tenth Doctor that the older Time Lord had probably never been more like him in what he had already lived of his seemingly long next life.
"There's no time to lose," added the Eleventh Doctor as soon as he noticed that something was very different in the way the younger Time Lord was looking at him at the time.
Having just said those words, he turned around and strode in the direction of the TARDIS. The Tenth Doctor followed right behind and soon they both were going through the door and bouncing towards the console, coming to a halt the moment they found themselves standing right in front of the scanner reading all the date displayed in the screen.
"The scanner says it's a newly-formed wormhole," said the Eleventh Doctor in a tone that terrified his younger self, "and as you can see from these readings, it seems to have been born deep in another universe. To be precise, in the universe where Rose now lives."
"And yet, for some mysterious reason, it's coming to the universe that's recently been trying to steal her back," the Tenth Doctor took over, astonished and wide-eyed. "So it's coming for her."
All at once, his eyes opened even more widely when the loudest bang he had ever heard - and he had heard quite many - came from the side. He turned to the right and watched as the doors of his very own TARDIS, which had been in stasis since the moment Chinny had found him, were being shaken from behind by something that seemed to possess the roaring force of a supernova explosion.
"Not just for her I'm afraid," his future self shouted. "Whatever's coming through that wormhole is falling into your TARDIS."
"So it's also coming for me," said the Tenth Doctor almost imperceptibly. For a moment he kept staring at his spaceship in silence, his narrowed eyes fixed on the blinding white light shining out of the cracks between the doors and the frame. Whether or not that white light might have posed a real threat to him was something that didn't bother him in the slightest. It was the possibility that it could actually be putting Rose in danger that gave his mind the clarity it had been wanting and the clarity that was finally making him understand. No matter how badly he might want her to stay with him. Just by being there or anywhere else with him she would be in constant danger, the way she had always been.
"We must take her home, where she'll be safe," he finally owned up, even if in doing so his two hearts sank inside his chest. He spent the next few seconds silently staring into nothingness, the agitation inside him written all over his face.
"I'm really sorry Sandshoes," said the Eleventh Doctor when the ceaseless noise inside the younger TARDIS seemed to be giving them both a momentary break. "I wish there was another way, but sometimes there just isn't. That's why we keep losing them."
Amelia Pond. And Rory. Those words suddenly echoed in the Tenth Doctor's ears as he realised he had completely forgotten that his future self had also known loss, despair, and loneliness.
"After Canary Wharf," he mumbled, "I was convinced that nothing compared or would ever compare to the pain of losing her. I was so wrong! Giving her up forever was infinitely worse."
"Things are never that simple Sandshoes," the Eleventh Doctor reassured him. "You just did what was best for her, and no one can blame you for doing what you did."
"Well, you did. Don't you remember?" said the Tenth Doctor, his soul crashing to the ground. "You blamed me once, yet now I can only be glad you remember my reasons to let her go 'cause I seem to have forgotten them all myself."
"I'm sorry I said what I said, Sandshoes," apologised the Eleventh Doctor. "I was being too hard on you. Ever since you regenerated I guess I've always been hard on you, but I'm never doing that again. You just did what you felt you had to do, and you did it just for her. You meant well."
"Well, I keep telling myself that," answered the Tenth Doctor, "otherwise I know I won't be strong enough to give her up once again."
The truth was that Clara Oswald hadn't the faintest idea what was really going on. By the time the Doctor had popped by her room for the second time that morning, she had already got up, taken off her Elizabethan nightgown and put on her red dress. Whereas on his first visit the Doctor's mind had mostly been blown by the excitement of his recent rescue mission in the Tower in the company of Anne Boleyn, all he seemed to care about on this new occasion was their imminent trip to the Moon. In fact, Clara had barely had time to take her black leather jacket from the edge of the bed when she realised he was pushing her out of her Whitehall bedchamber and into the TARDIS. Closing the door of his beloved ship behind them, the Doctor started to pull levers and press endless buttons as he went on and on about the unparalleled sweet flavours and the unimaginable side effects of the cocktails they were about to taste.
Suddenly it had all seemed so perfect and natural to Clara that she had actually believed the time for some peace and quiet and some fun had come at long last. Still, since the day she first met the Doctor she had known for a fact that it only took a split second for his plans to be altered by completely unexpected events. Unfortunately for her, this time would be no exception. As a matter of fact, they had been inside the TARDIS for barely sixty seconds when she noticed the first signs indicating that the Doctor's perfect plans had all at once become just failed intentions.
Clara first noticed something was wrong when the Doctor's characteristic frolic around the console finished and his eyes fell on the scanner. He instantly became completely silent, which Clara interpreted as the first sign of trouble. Then he became really very pale, which to her was the definite proof that something was terribly wrong. She asked what was going on, but the Doctor never even answered, probably because he hadn't even been listening in the first place. In due time life won the battle and returned to his fleetingly petrified face. Looking down, his eyes darted to the sides as he eventually spoke.
"We have to go back," he had muttered. "We must go back to Whitehall."
"Doctor, what's wrong?" she asked again.
"We must go back to Whitehall," he repeated. Without the shadow of a doubt, to himself.
Clara knew only too well there was something the Doctor wasn't telling her, that something of the utmost importance had definitely been left unsaid. Crossing his arms over his chest as he frowned, the Doctor took another walk around the console, although this time it was a silent one. She kept watching him as he pushed all the levers he had previously pulled and hit the one button that would cancel all the actions undertaken by all the buttons he had previously pressed. When this new walk around the console was over, she saw him fix his eyes on the scanner once again. There was something else on his mind, she just knew it, but whatever it was he just wouldn't say.
"Hope we won't get there too soon, nor too late," he muttered enigmatically confirming Clara's suspicion.
Then, instead of pushing the last of the levers, Clara clearly saw him pulling it. Immediately afterwards, an ear-splitting sound startled them both. Clara turned her head and laid eyes on the Tenth Doctor's TARDIS, the place where that strange sound had undoubtedly come from.
"Oh well," she heard the Doctor say behind her, "at least I've tried to do my best."
As the noise went on and on, his hands dropped heavily to the brim of the console while they both waited impatiently for the TARDIS to land. When the Doctor briefly turned around to look at her, Clara locked her big brown eyes with his and searched inside them in the hope of finding the answers to all of her questions, the way she had always done. This time however it seemed that there were no answers. The Doctor's singular enthusiastic gaze had been taken over by anger and wrath.
At long last the TARDIS landed. Then they walked out through the door and spotted the Tenth Doctor and his friend, and now she found herself running in search of Rose Tyler in the cold London early morning air.
It didn't take Clara very long to spot Rose in spite of the scattered banks of mist surrounding them. She found her sitting on the grass not very from the entrance to Whitehall Palace, her head resting on her knees and her arms wrapped around her legs. Clara had the feeling that she had fallen down and got hurt so she immediately rushed to her.
As she got closer, she realised Rose was crying, silently but bitterly, and all at once Clara felt she had absolutely no right to be there. She stumbled to a halt, and for a while just watched Rose from the distance. As she did, it occurred to her that she didn't even need to ask Rose why she was crying. She just knew. Partly because certain things had been ridiculously obvious even when no Captain Jack Harkness had been there to explain them, but especially because she had pictured herself in Rose's position many times before this moment came. In her mind's eye she had cried the same tears and felt Rose's same pain piercing through her soul, then the very next second she had felt selfish and stupid. Wasn't she having the time of her life after all? Wasn't just the fact that she was now travelling with the Doctor enough reason to not give a damn about what the future might have in store? She knew it was, but still sometimes that thought would just get stuck in her head and darken even her brightest day – the thought that one day, sooner or later, the alien she had come to love so very dearly might simply vanish from her stupid little life for good.
Her whole body shivered as Clara eventually decided to take the few decisive steps separating her from Rose. The realisation had just hit her that, were someone to ever be able to understand the nature of Rose's pain and offer some real solace, that someone was definitely her. Upon reaching her, Clara crouched down behind her and gently put a hand on her drenched shoulder. Rose of course knew straight away whose hand was trying to comfort her, as it had been on that same shoulder before. Determined to show Clara how much she appreciated that gesture, she made a successful effort to regain some of her composure. She even managed to stop crying, if only briefly, and slowly turned around, her eyes searching for Clara's. Making eye contact with her made tears start to fall down Rose's face again. Her first impulse in that moment was to bury her face in her knees, but Clara never gave her the chance.
Overlooking the fact that Rose was utterly soaked through, Clara opened her arms and hugged her, letting her weep silently against her chest. Not only was Rose silently grateful that Clara was holding her in her arms, she was also grateful for her silence, for leaving unasked so many questions that ultimately weren't really needed. Her heart and her soul were breaking, and that was too plain to see.
Not even when Rose finally felt the need to find some relief through words did Clara feel there was any need to rush the conversation in any degree.
"I know I shouldn't be so sad," Rose started, somewhat calmer than she had seemed a few minutes before. "I'm just going back 'ome so 's all there waiting to happen and soon he'll be comin' for me! 'S just that… What happens to me and 'im in the end, the way things end… 'S just not what I want!"
Rose started to weep again, and Clara tried to soothe her by caressing the hair on top of her head. She wished there had been something else she could have done to reassure her, but she just wouldn't tell Rose what she knew about her future even if she suspected that, whatever the Doctor might have told her, he hadn't told her the truth. All she could do was state the obvious.
Rose knew that in the end she would be losing the Doctor, and it was that loss that she was dreading more than anything else in the world. Unfortunately for Clara Oswald, when it came to the uneasiness and fear that the loss of someone you love makes you feel, she could relate to that too.
"I lost my mom when I was about your age," she told her. "Your world stops when something like that happens, then one day you realise that the real world has kept moving and that you must keep moving as well. Things will always find a way to become the opposite of what you hoped they'd be, Rose, but you just can't let that bring you down. You need to find your own way. You have to cherish what you had and be grateful that one fine day those people came your way."
"Even if you made them hurt?" Rose asked in between sobs. Clara was greatly surprised by such an unexpected question. In fact, the more she tried to remember the look on the Doctors' faces every time they had looked at Rose from the moment the Tenth Doctor saved her from the scaffold, the clearer it became to her there had never been any trace of hurt in them. "Does 'e still think of me?" Rose went on. "I know that 'e really shouldn't and that it's really selfish of me to ask if he does, but... Does 'e?"
"I'm sure he does," Clara answered.
"So you don't know then, do ya?" Rose pressed on.
"Well, he tends to keep to himself, the Doctor," said Clara. "I know he's had lots of friends, but he never speaks about them."
"Ya mean lots of friends or lots of girlfriends?" a puzzled Rose asked.
"I mean lots of girl friends" Clara answered, separating the two words to make her meaning clear. She narrowed her eyes lightly and looked down as soon as she realised that she completely ignored what the real answer to that question was.
"He's had lots of boy friends too," a very familiar voice said not far from them, "though I like to think I've always been the sexiest."
When Rose and Clara looked around they saw Captain Jack Harkness making a beeline for them. Further away behind him they spotted Edward, Queen Elizabeth and Anne Boleyn. Rose noticed they were all wearing the same outfits they had been wearing for the ball the Doctor and her had attended before they teleported to eighteenth century Venice, which meant they had got back to Elizabethan London early in the morning the very next day.
"You're up early Captain," Clara said as she released Rose from her arms.
"I never went to bed, more like, Miss Oswald. It's great to see you again!" said Jack. "After that terrific party last night Eddie told us all about his new play. To cut a long story short, Annie, Lizzy and I got really excited about it, and what it all boils down to is that on the opening night I'll be playing Rosalind."
"Rosalind?" the two girls asked in some confusion.
"You need to brush up your de Vere, my dears," Jack told them. "You've ever heard of As You Like It? It's about this girl Rosalind. Someone's put a price on her head," he added, winking at Rose, "so she runs away with her cousin Celia. Much to Eddie's regret, the name of Clara was ruled out immediately. Audiences are very likely to associate it to the Duke of Clarence so you'd never give that name to a character they're supposed to love. Anyway, it's a comedy, so in the end they all find love and everyone's happy. I'm afraid that's not what happens in real life though, is it?"
Jack had heard it all of course. As his gaze locked with Rose's, he slowly stepped towards her, knelt down and smiled softly at her. He tugged a few wet strands of blonde hair behind her ear as he cleared his throat to speak again. There was just so much he wanted to say to her.
"Look at you, Rosie," he said. "So young but so strong, so passionate and so brave, oh Rose… The things you've done! You don't know but I do, and I also do know that he'll never stop loving you and that no matter how hard he might try, he will never ever forget you."
Captain Jack's little confession had been the very thing that Rose had been longing to hear for months. She raised a hand to wipe her tears off her face, but she didn't say a word. She didn't dare break the spell her soul had just been put under at all.
"You know I thought you fancied me at first? Now it just sounds ridiculous! From the day he went and changed his hair, things have never been the same between us again," he joked, shaking his head as he spoke. "The thing is that I was there not long after you first met, and even if it was early days I saw what was going on - what was really going on with you two. Now that I'm over a hundred years old I'm positive I'll never see anything like that again."
An almost imperceptible smile made its way to Rose's lips. Jack smiled tenderly at her when he noticed, but he said nothing. As it happened, he spent the next few minutes in silence trying to choose very carefully the words he was going to say next. He wanted to tell Rose that he had also been there after the Doctor had lost her and that he never was the same again. However he was prevented from doing so by a sudden gust of wind followed by a whooshing sound that made them all turn their heads.
In a matter of seconds the TARDIS materialised in front of them. Jack, Rose and Clara watched as the door opened and the Tenth Doctor emerged from his spaceship. His desperate eyes were looking for Rose, who stood up the moment she saw him. She tried to run to him, but the drenched shift she was wearing was tangled between her knees, making it difficult for her to even walk. It was the Doctor who ran to her instead and held her tight in his soaked arms. They both knew what was coming and that it would be coming soon, and yet it was impossible not to still feel overwhelmed with joy just by something as simple as being in each other's arms.
Clara just couldn't stop looking at them. Now that Rose wasn't there to see her, she let herself shed a few tears as well. She was trying to hold back the ones that would soon follow when her attention was drawn to the TARDIS again. She hadn't even noticed but the other Doctor had also stepped outside the door, which he was now leaning against. She could tell he had been looking at her long before she laid eyes on him. When he gave her a half smile, Clara somehow had the feeling that there was something very important that he was trying to say to her, and the reason why he just wasn't doing it probably was that, even if he was a Time Lord, this definitely wasn't the time or the place.
Upon noticing the TARDIS materialising not far away from them, Edward, Anne and Queen Elizabeth rushed towards their time travelling friends. Much to their regret, the scene they found upon reaching them made all of their welcoming words, even Edward's, vanish like specks of dust in a haze. They inferred the only reason why the arrival of the lady Clara and the other Doctor would ever have made the lady Rose cry, and something broke inside each of them when they understood that the precious time together enjoyed by their two very dear friends was coming to an end.
Rose was still clinging to the Doctor's neck, her face buried in his lapels when she heard the newcomers' footsteps approaching them. She pulled back with some reluctance and the Doctor released her from his arms quite reluctantly as well. She brushed her tears off her face once more, then took a few steps towards her sixteenth-century friends. Crossing her arms against her drenched and terribly cold chest, she uttered the words they had feared that she might actually hear her say.
"Edward, Anne, Your Majesty," she mumbled, holding back some new tears, "I reckon this is goodbye then."
