A/N: Yes, I know this chapter is way too short. It's only half the chapter, in fact. But I'm having terrible trouble with the internet, and this is as much as I could put up (it drops out about every fifteen seconds). This chapter is...odd. Might explain a few things.
Sorry about the terrible delays, I moved last weekend and between the internet trouble and MOOOving, I just ran out of time. Still working on debugging this virus-riddled computer. Updates will have to be weekly...ugh...

xxx xxx

"The scream of the warheads."

"The screams of the people."

Odjya sat back to watch him. She was smiling, good-humoured. Like she thought it was funny. "The screams of a thousand time ships launching and crashing back down. The screams of people being crushed under vessels, buildings, being ripped limb from limb. The screams of out hidden enemy picking us out, one by one."

"Stop smiling."

The Doctor scowled at her. His hearts were thundering against the wall of his chest, the pounding blood in his ears almost drown out her words. He was angry, angry and afraid.

"The lovers and the parents and the children, huddled over their dead in the streets." Odjya shook her head, still smiling. "Knowing it meant death to be exposed, but remaining none-the-less. We all knew we would die, Doctor. We knew no one could get out alive."

"But you did." He said.

He watched her dismally from across the camp fire. Rose was sound asleep beside him, and the Doctor said a silent prayer of thanks. He didn't want her to hear this, what he had done, the pain he had caused.

Of course, the time war wasn't his fault. He'd been its end, not its beginning.

"As did you." Odjya stared back at him, her gaze level. Her tone was bold, defiant, but far from cold. It was almost as though she was daring him to confess, or to prove her wrong.

He couldn't. Couldn't prove her wrong; there he was, flesh and blood, entertaining his fantasies. But was she really just a dream? Should he confess, and shatter this illusion, that he wasn't the last of his people? Or should he keep it going, for just a little longer.

It was one thing to be the last of your kind. It was another thing entirely to be the catalyst of their destruction.

"Yeah, well. I got lucky." The Doctor said, looking away.

"Can you honestly call it lucky?" Odjya gave a short, brash laugh. "I lost everyone. I watched my people die. There was nothing I could do."

The Doctor looked up sharply. "But you survived. Everyone else died, and you survived. I've travelled, Odjya, and I know. I've searched for a hundred years, and found no one, only to stumble upon you, hidden in the prehistoric Beta desert."

He would have said more, but Odjya interrupted. "Almost too good to be true, isn't it? Has it truly only been a hundred years for you?"

"A hundred, three hundred. Six hundred. Time has changed for me." The Doctor shrugged nonchalantly. It was true. Time wasn't what it had been. He aged, and the centuries treated him differently.

"I must have been here a thousand years." Odjya said. She stared at him, eyes drowning in black. Black from side to side, totally lost in shadow. "At first, I was merely waiting. I waited a hundred years, searched the entire continent. At last I came to realise that it was possible that no one else made it here, that maybe no one else at all survived.

"So I began to search."

Her voice regained its hard, cruel tone. Odjya had made up her mind. She knew.

"Obviously you never returned to Gallifrey." The Doctor remarked. He tried to keep his voice casual and friendly.

"I always planned to. But there was no way for me to be certain that the war was over, or that it would ever be over. I kept to the back water parts of the universe, primordial Raxacoricotallapatorius, and your pet's solar system."

Odjya gestured to Rose's still form.

So, she was tinkering around earth. That would explain the African axes, and the Sycorax, which hailed from the largest of Neptune's moons. It would even go a ways to explain her dress fashion, the bare feet and boy's khaki shorts, so far removed from the archaic robes worn by the majority of Gallifryan officials.

"And when you found on one," the Doctor studied the time lady carefully as he spoke, "You decided to play God. You decided to save the species."

Odjya frowned at him. "They're our people, Doctor. What is life without companionship and understanding? I have no desire to be a hermit for the rest of eternity."

"You said it yourself. Change or die. The time lords hadn't changed in ten thousand years before the war."

The Doctor felt his skin prickle, so cold was the glare Odjya wore. Absently, he reached down for Rose's hand, and gripped it tightly. Rose groaned, but didn't wake.

"Are you saying we deserved to die?" Odjya demanded, yellow light glinting off the black pools of her eyes.

"I'm just saying everything has its time. And maybe our time has come, and gone." He tried to meet her gaze, and his resolve melted under the force of her stare.

"You killed them."

The Doctor gazed up at the impossible Beta sky, startling gold at the horizon in the wake of dawn, crowded with stars for the rest of its bulk, and tried to ignore the statement.

"You killed them, you bastard."

Hard to ignore a girl who's spent a thousand years mourning her lost people while she screams at you. Hard to think of the reasons you did it, which seemed like such good reasons at the time.

"Speak to me!"

I did it because…I was tired of war. We were such an old race. We had reached the end of the line, anyway. There's a thousand million billion other lives out there that would have been lost otherwise…

"I'm sorry."

His words were so soft, so ashamed, that Odjya stopped screaming for a moment, and just stared at him. She was panting.

Now it the time to pray.

"Odjya, I-"

"Save it." Odjya snapped. "It doesn't matter, anyway. You're here now, and that's what counts. You can help me."

After a moment of stunned, choked silence, the Doctor managed to say, "Help you with what?"

"Stop the war, destroy the Daleks. Rebuild our society." Odjya shrugged. She was so casual about it, the Doctor almost thought he'd heard wrong, and she'd actually said something along the lines of 'how's the weather in Queensland? Nice day here, isn't it?'

"But." He said, before the words caught up with him.

And then he realised what he should have known all along. The Rax, the Sycorax, it's not out of place at all. He was right all along. Beta is uninhabited, because nothing can survive on Beta.

Unless you have a God, a Creator, a maniac with a time machine, who can go back and erase all the wrong ever done.

The Rax would fight the Sycorax, because it was in their nature to do so. They would force each other to evolve and, guided by a God, triumph over such endeavours as space exploration, time travel. Six million years before they were supposed to.

And when they had colonised new planets, enslaved primates and eradicated troublesome little slugs? It would all be up to the God. A living God was a dictator beyond the touch of death.

"But you can't." Even in his own ears, the Doctor's words sounded lame. "Nothing can survive on Beta."

Not even the desert worms, which spread their way from world to world, infesting and devouring every other living life form, until they were it.

"They can, if I say they can." Odjya smirked.

The anger and accusation was gone from her face, sucked back down into the abyss of her soul, if such she possessed.

"It's wrong. You can't change things like this." The Doctor protested. He didn't look at her, instead keeping his eyes on Rose.

"Tell me, Doctor." Odjya leant forwards, eyes boring into him, "You have this ape for a companion, and you would have me believe you long for no other camaraderie. But I wonder, is it all an act? Or did the war and the loss of your entire people truly leave you unaffected?"

When he didn't answer, Odjya continued. "Did you not lose somebody close to you?"

Of course I lost someone, you miserable bitch, the Doctor thought bitterly. He had been lonely all his life, but there had been people… Romana, even K-9, until the unit had been found earlier on that year. He missed them both terribly.

Beautiful, genius Romana. Not until Rose had someone filled the hole in him left by Romana. Even then, Rose was just…

"I lost people. I lost everybody, just like you." The Doctor risked a glance at Odjya. She was watching him carefully. "But I had no choice. If there was to be anything left, anything at all…it had to be done."

The time lady smiled coolly. Her voice was smooth, level, programmed. "And now, I will make things so that it never has to be done."

It was wrong, wrong, wrong. Time changed, and the order of time changed, every day. But nothing should ever be altered so much, or so deliberately.

The Doctor knew that, and yet also knew that he should be over joyed. His people, alive. No more angst, no more guilt. No more salt-in-the-wound comments about him killing his entire race. No more genocide.

"Nothing can survive on Beta." He repeated, his eyes drifting back to Rose.

It was an offer to be considered, certainly.

Then Odjya dropped the real bombshell, the warhead she'd prepared for an occasion exactly like this.

"With me, you can bear children."

In Rose's curled-up hand, there was an object.

The Doctor glanced up away from it, to stare at Odjya. Her eyes were cold as ever, studying his reaction carefully.

He opened his mouth to speak. "I-"

With a resonating BOOM, the ground beneath them gave way. The Doctor lunged for Rose, to save her or himself, he didn't know. It was too late, anyway.

The dishwater yellow light of dawn shimmered across the rising neck of a monster, a desert worm, heaving up out of the sand. by sheer millimetres, the Doctor avoided being thrown onto the last hot embers of the camp fire, dragging Rose away with him.

Odjya toppled onto it, and there was a hiss of charring flesh. The worm's sleek head now swayed ten yards above the desert sand. Long lines of star-lit saliva dripped from its jaws.

The earth beneath them buckled again, and a second gruesome head erupted up in a spray of sand.

"Odjya! Rose!" the Doctor bellowed.

Rose's hand was torn from his grip as th second worm reared up between them. Odjya was nowhere to be seen, nor heard. Adreniline thundered through his veins, as hot and cold as liquid nitrogen.

"Fire! We need fire!"

The Doctor stared, trembling but frozen, at the swaying beasts before him. He barely recognised Rose's voice as she screamed for fire.

Sometimes, when you have everything to do, it's difficult to do anything at all.

"Doctor, wake up! We need fire!"

There were many things unsaid.

xxx xxx

Like the rest of the chapter, for example.

Really, really sorry. For everything.

Thank Hellsing's Rip Van Winkle for the chapter name.