A/N: THis should answer some questions. Lot's of questions! Three more chapters to go.
Oh man, Doctor Who last night...cry. P-p-poor R-r-r-ose! Sob. How awful!

xxx xxx

"It's certainly Gallifryan."

Rose dragged herself to the top of the sand dune just in time for Odjya to glare at her. The time lords were close, shoulders touching, inspecting the rusted compass.

"You, girl." Odjya snapped, "Why didn't you show me this before?"

"Maybe I would have if you weren't such a bloomin' cow about everything." Rose muttered, just loud enough for the other woman to hear.

"Trust a silly little monkey to hold such a petty little grudge." Odjya sneered. She held Rose's gaze for a second longer before rolling her eyes and turning back to the object in question.

The Doctor wasn't paying attention to either of them. "They could be alive, Rose. Others, just like us." He looked at Odjya and laughed, "Our people! Living outside the paradox!"

"Don't get too excited." The time lady cautioned, "We haven't found them yet. In a thousand years, I've never seen any sign of Gallifryans still living on Beta. And even if they are here, we have no idea of where to even begin looking for them."

Rose wandered closer to them. She peered at the compass, held firmly in the Doctor's outstretched hand. Even now that she knew its origins, the worn device didn't seem overly impressive. Wow, a compass. Apparently no different in any way, shape or function to an earth compass.

"What's it do that's so special, then?" she queried, "Tell you which way north was a million years ago? Spin the planet so you're always going in the right direction?"

"Oh, nothing like that. It's just an ordinary circumnavigation device." The Doctor gave Rose an anxious smile. "Human have these, don't they? Surely you know what a compass does. The needle points in the direction of the strongest magnetic field, then you simply-"

"I know what a compass does." Rose rolled her eyes. Honestly, you'd think she'd been born in the stone age, from the way he treated her.

Odjya frowned at the girl. "Then there was no need to ask. Do you do nothing useful?"

Rose was about to protest when the Doctor interrupted.

"Rose is extremely useful. But let's get back to the compass. Living Gallifryans! There has to be some way to find them. As a wise man once said, you can't tread upon the face of the world without leaving so much as a footprint."

"You said that." Rose pointed out.

"Well, I did say a wise man." The Doctor grinned. "And I am a genius."

"Self-claimed genius." She teased.

The Doctor scratched his jaw self-consciously. "It doesn't make it any less true. Besides, I have an idea."

He stepped around Rose, and started off down the dunes. The dragon trail glistened amber in the early dawn light.

"Wait!" Odjya called, trailing after him. "What's your idea?"

Grinning, the Doctor glanced at her over his shoulder. "I'll tell you. You better pack up camp first, though. Catch up with me after."

"Oh no you don't." Rose growled. She took off after him at a run.

Odjya stared at the pair dumbly for a moment, before shaking her head angrily. Fine. She would pack their things. She would carry it all. She assumed that they would now be embarking on a wild goose chase to try and salvage their brother remnants, which annoyed her. Odjya knew nothing as soft and archaic as the average time lord could survive on Beta. It took a different mind, a cold mind, with a calculating brain-

"Oddy! You better hurry up! Don't want to be left behind!" Rose shouted.

She turned to the Doctor, giggling. The pair had already reached the dragon trail, and a quick glance back told Rose that Odjya hadn't done much but glare at their retreating backs.

"Oddy." The Doctor snorted. "Where'd you come up with that?"

Rose giggled again. "She's got such an awful name. Aren't all your lot s'posed to have named like Pythagoras and the Master and e equals m squared?"

"Generally speaking, yeah. Though sometimes girls have nicer names." The Doctor smiled happily, probably reminiscing about some long-lost high school crush.

"Like Odd-jar? It's horrible. Sounds like something you'd scrape off the bottom of your foot."

The two of them laughed as they walked along. Neither bothered to look back, to where Odjya was loaded up with three travel packs and three sleeping skins, plus her axes and a handful of other supplies.

"What's your big idea, anyway? Are we going to look for your people?" Rose wondered, once she'd expended her stock of jokes ridiculing the time lady.

"Yep." The Doctor looked down at her. "As long as it's alright with you, of course."

Rose almost burst out laughing. Like she could possibly stop the Doctor from doing something he wanted to. "Go ahead," she said, trying to mask a grin, "Make my day."

They didn't speak again until ten minutes later, when Odjya finally caught up with them. The time lady was huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf, bent over double under the load she carried.

"Are you out of breath?" Rose asked, as innocently as she could.

Odjya, too winded to speak, glared at her.

"You're right to carry those a little further, aren't you?" the Doctor wondered, falling into step beside Odjya, "It's just that I don't want to be out of breath while I'm explaining my idea to you."

He gave her a look, a mixture of pleading and good-humour. Odjya sighed audibly, and hung her head in silent agreement.

"Capital work." The Doctor slapped her on the back, probably intending to demonstrate his good will, but only succeeding in pitching the time lady face-first into the sand. "Help her up, will you Rose?" he said, not so much as breaking stride.

"Pain in the arse." Rose murmured. She stopped, and turned back to help Odjya.

Seeing as there was little chance of her ever being dragged to her feet under the weight of the bags, Rose hefted two of the travel packs from Odjya's back, and slung them over her shoulder.

"I don't need your help." Odjya spat, when Rose offered her a hand up.

Rose glared at her. A tiny pulse twitched in her neck.

"Fine." She said at last, and dumped both travel packs onto the sand, inches from Odjya's face. "Don't expect it, either."

"Is there something going on between you two?" the Doctor asked, when Rose caught up to him once again.

"What do you mean? Of course there's nothing going on. Odd-jar and me, we're like this." Rose held up her hand, index and middle finger crossed.

The Doctor slung an arm around her shoulders, but said nothing. They walked on, not speaking, not looking back. They were still following the dragon trail, so Rose assumed they were heading away from Gymnophiona. She tried to judge whether this was true by picking out a familiar feature in the landscape, but there were none. Nothing but sand, sand, sand.

Dawn was in full swing by time Odjya struggled alongside them.

"Thought we'd lost you there for a while." The Doctor said, smiling amiably.

"Not so lucky." Odjya panted. She was sweating heavily, and for a split second, Rose almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

"Well, good. Now that there are no more delays," the Doctor glared at both women, who stared back blandly, "I'll tell you my idea."

He waited a full minute for something to interrupt. There was nothing as annoying as getting to the mid-point of a speech, only to have the earth erupt around you, or be invaded, or have a random member of the audience announce that they were the sabotagee.

When nothing happened, he coughed to hide his embarrassment, and said; "The compass in lab-issue. The duel-headed minotaur logo on the base proves that."

Rose rolled her eyes again. Duel-headed minotaur her ass.

"There was laboratories on Beta, once. I thought they'd all been erased." The Doctor glanced sideways at Odjya. "But obviously not. Whoever owned this compass visited one of the labs. Think about it. These deep-space exploration labs are equipped with everything a group of Gallifryans would need to survive on for months, even years. Food, power, weaponry."

"You think they're still there." Rose said, "Still in the labs."

The Doctor nodded. "It's a dangerous planet. Desert worms, Slitheen, Sycorax. The labs would be built strong, to survive the harsh conditions. Tiny fortresses of civilisation, spread all around Beta. Existing outside the paradox, unreachable even to the Daleks."

Odjya stopped. She dropped the packs and sleeping skins on the ground, making enough noise that the Doctor paused to stare at her.

"Beta doesn't exist outside the paradox, it exists before it." She panted, using the back of her hand to wipe the sweat from her forehead. "From what the Wartime Council could determine, Beta is one of a handful of planets that could be the Daleks home world."

"Could be?" Rose queried, "You mean you don't know?"

Odjya leered. "Of course not. Why would the Daleks allow us to know where they originated from? We would have instantly destroyed that world, and wiped them out."

"If it's only out of a handful of planets, why didn't you just destroy them all?" Rose wondered, then looked up guiltily at the Doctor. He didn't look impressed at her question.

"At first, we were going to." Odjya told her. "But then we realised something. We don't really know where the Daleks originated from, and there's no way to be sure. So what makes us so sure that we evolved on Gallifrey? By destroying that handful of planets, we could have wiped out the bacterium that birthed our race."

Ew, thought Rose. Bacterium.

"Don't look like that." The Doctor laughed, noting Rose's expression. "Humans evolved the same way. You know the theory, don't you? A rock from Mars hit Earth and the Martian bacteria provided the basis for all life on the planet."

"Yeah, but…" Rose trailed. Ew, bacterium.

"So you see our dilemma." Said Odjya, "The purpose of having laboratories on Beta is to determine whether or not it is in fact the Daleks home world. Or even if it is our own. Perhaps the time lords were spawned from a meteorite that came off Beta. Who knows? This far in the past, it's hard to do anything and realise the repercussions."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at this. "Like kidnapping a handful of primitive aliens and dumping them here, in the hope that they'll grow up big and strong and wipe out the Daleks?" his tone was cynical, "What's stopping them from wiping us out? What makes you think they'll break through the paradox at all?"

Odjya shrugged. The gesture seemed strange to Rose, almost as if the time lady didn't care one way or the other. Surely, wiping out the Daleks was the entire point…

"I'll make sure they break through. I have an entire life to devote to this, Doctor. Nothing will stop me, nothing at all."

And with that, Odjya plucked her travel pack from the desert floor, and stalked away.

xxx

A day and a half later, the argument persisted.

Who was right, who was wrong, who knew what would happen? Good questions that no one could answer.

"Can we stop for the night?" Rose asked, staring up at the starry sky and feeling a familiar pang of homesickness.

The Doctor and Odjya were both ahead of her, once again shoulder to shoulder in some private conversation. Rose didn't mind, she really didn't, but it made her feel terribly lonely. She longed for the company of Mickey, of Jack, or even her mother. Anyone, really. Nothing would have been more appreciated than a human presence. For the past twenty four hours the Doctor had been unbearably alien.

It had never occurred to Rose just how different the Gallifryans were. Various creatures she'd met had referred to them as pompous, arrogant, ancient. And from what she could hear from the frequent, hushes conversations that never included her, that's exactly what the time lords were.

"What, already?" the Doctor glanced back at Rose.

"It's almost midnight." She pointed at the moon, high in the sky. "We've been walking all day."

"She's right, Doctor, we ought to stop. Let the human rest." Odjya said with a haughty sigh.

Rose was too tired to even roll her eyes. She sunk to the ground, closing her eyes for a few moments before shrugging out of her travel pack.

"Goodnight." She muttered, and flopping back on the sand.

The geography of the desert had changed. The wide, high plateaus, filled with rolling sand dunes had given way to mountains of sand and pebbles. This made walking during morning and evening easier, huge dark shadows thrown off by the mountains cooled the weaving gullies and valleys.

Midday, though, was as hot as ever. At Rose's insistence they stopped, finding whatever shade they could, to wait out the scalding sun. She wasn't sure how much relief it really offered, however; even though the desert air was a boiling forty degrees Celsius, at ground level it was twenty degrees warmer.

The Doctor dumped his pack to the ground, and sat on it. Even at night, the desert floor scorched.

"Is she sleeping yet?" Odjya wondered, watching Rose.

The time lady stood behind the Doctor. She was obviously impatient, constantly shifting her weight from one foot to the other, crossing her arms, uncrossing them, tucking a stray dreadlock behind her sunburnt ears.

"Not yet." The Doctor replied. His voice was cool, but his eyes were warm when Odjya couldn't see them. Rose, Rose, beautiful Rose. He almost wished that, despite the awesome discovery of another of his own kind, that he and Rose had never come to Beta.

Or that maybe, he'd never found that book…

"Leave her anyway. We have things to discuss." Odjya said.

The Doctor frowned at her. "Wait."

A minute later, Rose was asleep. She was snoring softly, the only sound of life in the remorseless desert. The two time lords were like statues, never moving in the slightest, even to blink or breath.

"Now we can go." The Doctor said at last.

Silently, Odjya picked a trail through the dunes, to a shallow oasis half a mile away. Rather more clumsily, and a good deal more noisily, the Doctor followed.

"Your human mentioned that the Daleks refer to you as the Oncoming Storm." Odjya said, grinning slyly, "I would have never imagined it was because you were as noisy as one."

The Doctor didn't reply. His mind was what he'd seen earlier on that day. He should have told Rose, he really should have. It was just… he was so ashamed. This trip was turning out to be a disaster. He never would have imagined his people would do such a thing, and yet…

"Try not to dwell on it." Odjya said. She intended for her voice to be soothing, but it the sentiment came out as harsh and snappish as ever. "We have other things to talk about."

This caught the Doctor's attention.

"Like what?" he wondered.

He was standing ankle-deep in the cool oasis water, pants rolled up to his knees, shirt undone to the waist. His shoes, socks, jacket and tie were long gone, strewn across two hundred miles of desert.

Secretly, he had never felt so alone as he did right then. Alarm bells were ringing in his heads, though he wasn't sure why. There were decisions to be made, and not all of them were his.

"Like this journey." Odjya replied. "Do you really expect us to find any living Gallifryans?"

No. Not anymore.

"We can't just give up on them, Odjya." The Doctor told her, but his voice lacked conviction. "They could be there. We have to look."

Odjya smiled. "They're all dead, you know."

No.

"We don't know that. There could be someone-"

"They died a hundred years ago. We're too late." The time lady sighed, and the smile faded from her face. "I had hope too, you know. Once. But this proves it. You and I are the last of our kind, on the last refuge planet I ever had hope in."

Beta was forbidden for a reason.

"You don't know…" the Doctor paused, swallowed hard. He ought to be listening to Odjya, because she was right. There was no one else left, not even on Beta. This was the bomb shelter, this was the forgotten island. And there was no one here. No one else had survived.

"Our own idiocy had killed us." Odjya's soft, raspy voice drew the Doctor from his reverie. "Trying to destroy the Daleks a million years before they were existed. We were fools."

The Doctor's hand dropped to his side. His fingers rubbed the smooth surface of a hard, cool ball.

Odjya gave a barking laugh. "Good thing your monkey didn't find these. She does put her nose out of joint sometimes."

Hours early, while Rose slept at high noon, the two Gallifryans had gone for a stroll. Thirty miles separated them and the sea, where Odjya guessed the laboratory to be. In fact, when he shielded his eyes from the blazing sun, and squinted against the glare, the Doctor could almost make out the glittering dome so popular amongst time lords-

And then they'd found the eggs.

Some were cracked, others looked to have hatched. It was just an abandon nest, resting peacefully atop a pebble mountain. The nest itself was simple, a sort of crater scooped out of the rocks, close to four feet across.

"Hullo." The Doctor had said, "What's there on Beta that lays eggs in the desert?"

The answer was nothing, because the only flourishing organisms on Beta were amphibian, and all laid their eggs in water.

"They're the Desert Worms. Genetically modified eggs, if I'm not mistaken." Odjya had told him, and then ducked down to picked up one unharmed egg.

For a minute, the Doctor had been unable to tear his eyes off her. His mind buzzed, wondering if he'd misheard.

"We didn't." he had protested, shaking his head. Trying to clear his brain.

"We did." Odjya had been smiling by that stage. "As I'm sure you already know, in a few thousand years, there will be a catastrophe on Beta. All life on the planet will be extinguished. That's why all previous attempts to destroy the Daleks early on were unsuccessful."

If you have a pest, introduce a predator.

"I know."

The Doctor felt a pain in his chest that he couldn't quite explain. Odjya had healed him, so it wasn't anything physical. But God, it felt like someone had just ripped out his still-beating heart.

"Then by any chance, do you know what the catastrophe will be?" the time lady had looked curious, as if she actually didn't know. "As far as I can tell, we were never sure of what happened."

Could have been anything. The Doctor hadn't given her an answer. There had been something, something shiny and white, half buried amongst the eggs.

"What's this?" he'd wondered, crouching down to retrieve it.

One hard tug jerked the object free from the sand, and both Gallifryans had stared at it for minutes in disbelief.

"It's an arm." Odjya had managed to say. Her eyes were wide, mouth slack.

Half an hours searching under the boiling sun had found other bones, all human. Well, human enough. The Doctor had sniffed the arm bone carefully, and determined it was Gallifryan.

Hard to tell over the stench of rotting black flesh, but it had to be Gallifryan.

"You're thinking of this afternoon." Odjya said.

Her voice dragged the Doctor back to reality. He wiped his eyes furiously with his hand. That poor bastard, chewed apart by worms his own people had created, dead out there in the desert.

"You couldn't have done anything, Doctor. So don't think about it."

Odjya was very close to him now. Small black waves, stirred by a gentle breeze, lapped at their ankles. The few stunted shrubs shimmied in the wind.

"I could have done something. This should never have happened. The time war, the Daleks, Beta. None of this should've happened!" his voice was very loud in the night air.

Even the wind seemed stunned for a moment, and everything was still before life breathed back in.

"Let me take your mind off it."

Odjya took a step closer, so that she was pressed against him. Her wiry arms slipped around his neck, forcing him down to meet her mouth.

"Wait!" the Doctor protested, but by then it was too late. Odjya's mouth was on his, and her stench of wet animal filled his head.

She held him there for a second, her teeth cutting into his lip, fingers almost dragging the flesh from his neck.

"Odjya, stop!" he shouted. His voice was muffled, and she wasn't listening at any rate.

Her hands dropped from around his neck and she latched on instead to his shirt, wrenching the tails from his pants. Feeling him pulling away, the time lady snaked one arm around his waist, pressing against the small of his back, while the other hand fumbled with his belt buckle.

"Stop it!"

"What's going on here?"

The Doctor could have sworn Rose's voice was the loudest he'd ever heard, yet he was sure she was whispering. He tore his eyes off Odjya, grabbed her wrists and jerked her hands off him.

"Doctor, what…?"

Rose was standing right there, at the edge of the oasis. Her eyes were huge and drowning black, her hair white in the moon light.

"It's not what it looks like. Rose!"

Too late. The girl was already running. She must have heard them go. Perhaps she hadn't been asleep at all.

"What do you think you're doing!" the Doctor bristled, turning on Odjya.

The time lady had the decency to look meek. "For our people-"

"You said it yourself! Our people are dead!"

The Doctor gave her one last withering glare, then spun on his heel, and ran.

"Rose!"

xxx xxx

Man, that Odjya is a bi-atch. I can hardly believe I made her up!
Update should be Thursday. Stupid work at the stupid abbatoir. Grumble grumble.