Us
And now they are through, with the help of forces from within and beyond ourselves, and the notion, the sudden realisation, that our efforts were fruitless, that our trickery and control over physics and reality and the thoughts of those around us have failed, leaving a last battle, the final one, one monster against two foes, each armed with blades, and made doubly dangerous through their anger, their adrenaline too, and the sudden horrifying truth that perhaps we overplayed our hand, and that in a world of physical being we truly have no place, for ours is a form which is all too easily destroyed...
Rose
The Doctor sat in the middle of the web tower, wrapped in silky entrails, gazing vacantly over Rose's shoulder. She yearned to rush immediately to his aid, but knew the better, for the spider above wanted to draw her out into the open like that, an easy target to be attacked from any angle. No. Rose and Jack stood their ground by the door, swords raised, and a pistol in Jack's free hand. He fired a shot at the monstrosity rushing towards them from down the web, but the bullet had no effect, serving only to draw the slightest of blood.
The spider bore down upon them with salivating jowls and lethal pincers, it's eight eyes red with malice. There was something different here now, something non-threatening and perfect, and with ease Rose slid away from the clumsy beast, nicking one of it's great hairy legs as she avoided it's lunge.
It shrieked and span, attempting to knock her down with it's enormous back sac, but again she danced away, feeling the grip of some far off force for good controlling her movements, a force which seemed impossibly to come from another aspect of the spider, which turned it's attention to Jack, aiming to plant a whopping good bite in his shin. He stabbed it in one of the eyes, sending it reeling away, tripping over it's injured leg.
She felt it's fear, real and honest and miserable, as it scurried over to the Doctor and picked him up between it's pincers.
"Drop the swords!" the spider howled, pus seeming from it's ruined eye socket. "Drop the swords, and let us be! I shall not kill the Time Lord, he shall through me be emperor of all! The lowly will see him, only him, will know nothing of me, and grovel at his feet from this day 'til his last! Join us, little people! Be part of something greater!"
"There's the difference between him and you." Rose spat. "He's never wanted to be emperor of anything. He's better than you."
"He's weak!"
"Is he? Seems to be you who looks weak now, Znya. Only you."
"Drop your weapons, or I shall surely kill him!"
"You won't." Rose said calmly. "Because you are him. A part of him, anyway. Some dank and gruesome offshoot of his mind, given flesh by forces from beyond. And you were never lying, for in a strange way you truly are his daughter. His grief, born out of watching Romana waste away as she did, spawned you. You live off grief, you are grief, you lurk in his thoughts and manifest in times of violence, the one thing of all else that he deplores. He can live without you - he'll be better without you - but you haven't any existence without him."
If spiders could frown, then this one surely did. "How can you know all this?"
"Because...I remember it." Rose broke into a grin and witnessed the events from eyes which were not hers, but which now lived in her thoughts as if memories of her own past. Lying in bed, addled with the agony of severe radiation sickness, whilst a curly haired man morosely stood over her, tears dancing in his baby blue eyes, of which the whites had turned red. Red and white, the colours of the spider, the colours of tear-filled eyes, the colours of misery and torpor. A Doctor, not her Doctor, but a Doctor, who fell in love despite himself, and who would have burnt the universe for Romana, just as he would do in a heartbeat for Rose.
"Your dying, Znya. Your attacking yourself! Let it end, for goodness sake, and let him go!"
"We aren't asking." Jack chimed in, taking a step forwards, sword raised.
"The Toymaker said..." the spider drifted off, dropping the Doctor, who fell to the webbed floor with a dull clunk.
"The Toymaker ain't here." Jack spat. "It's you and us now, petal, and there ain't room in this tower for all of us."
The spider quivered where it stood, one of it's eight legs bleeding profusely and it's eye socket red raw and gruesome.
"Maybe I'll kill you both anyway," she purred. "For all your fancy words, you cannot think seriously to take me down. And when your gone, so too will any lingering hope still in the mind of my dear father. The war took most of him. Your deaths will take the rest."
The spider lunged at them again, but they were ready. Linking their hands, they gazed into it's seven eyes and channelled everything into them, all that they were, the days they'd had and, though they couldn't see them, the days yet to come. At this the spider went berserk a screeched to a halt, grabbing the Doctor and scurrying up the web just as had been promised, fleeing physically into the astral plane with the man Rose and Romana loved, from there to never return.
And no chance, not in a million years, was she having that.
Stepping away from Jack, and with strength she didn't possess, she lifted the sword by the blade and threw it clear across the room, the blade plunging into the back of the spider, a flood of juices escaping the wound. Znya dropped the Doctor again and fell backwards from the webbed wall, thumping to it's back with a pool of reddish fluid, blood and mucus, forming a puddle around it. It twitched there momentarily before the legs folded tight around the body and it seemed to shrivel and lose size, motionless in death. The physical form of Znya died and so too did whatever counted for the rest of her, the alien thoughts flooding from Rose's mind and memory too, so that she remembered nothing of Romana or any other Doctor, nor even what the spider had been, other than a foe who sought the Doctor's mind for terrible means. The web around them started to shrivel and was no longer sticky underfoot.
Rose and Jack embraced, and Rose burst into tears whilst Jack laughed weakly and dropped his sword.
"Hey! Room for a little one?"
The Doctor stood before them grinning, covered in decaying web and alien saliva, his eyes clear and blue and entirely his own.