A/N: Hold on tight because we're officially going off-canon with this one! From here on out there will be dialogue from canon sprinkled in, but there'll be additions and plot changes as well.

It didn't take Rose long to square everything away back in her waking life. Most of her physical assets had been bequeathed to her after Pete had passed away, so it was easy enough to pass on what remained to Tony and his descendants. She left all of her husband's remaining things to Tony as well. She knew that her brother would look after the Doctor's memory in this universe and pass on his fantastic, impossible stories so that they might live on forever.

Still, she was forced to wait for three more months before the Bad Wolf visited her again. And in that time, Rose never once stopped dreaming about him. Every night he was there, waiting for her in some form or another. Sometimes they were memories of their past adventures. Sometimes they were recollections from the two previous times when the Bad Wolf had allowed her a glimpse into his parallel world. Sometimes, it was just her and her husband living a normal, human life. His face never looked the same way twice, but it was always, without fail, the exact same man.

She was dreaming of his newest face - the one with the floppy hair and the youthful complexion - when the Bad Wolf finally came for her again.

"Are you ready?" the lady in gold asked gently.

"Does it matter?" Rose asked sarcastically.

"No," the Bad Wolf agreed simply. "But I have seen all of time and space and I know how humans can be about death."

"Well, you already told me that it's not really a death, remember?" Rose reminded her teasingly. She sobered quickly under the creature's strange, otherworldly expression, though, and she added, "What's going to happen to me?"

"Your body will disappear from that universe and your atoms will be redistributed as your mind is pulled into this universe, where your cells will reconverge and form into a new body," the Bad Wolf replied, her words rattling off in that factual, practical way that Rose had always associated with the Doctor.

"Right," Rose sighed slowly. No chance she had the time to work that one out, so she simply took one last deep breath before completely surrendering herself tot he alluring hum of the Bad Wolf's energy. She had another brief flash of memory from her life from oh, so long ago when she had seen for just a moment all of time and space laid out before her in the time vortex. Somehow, Rose knew that this had to happen - that this was always going to happen - in exactly this way.

She felt no sense of fear or foreboding as she stepped into the blinding golden light of time and felt herself being slowly disintegrated into atoms. She simply filled her mind with memories of the Doctor and trusted the universe to sort out the rest.

This time, when she awoke back in her home universe, the experience was so immensely different from anything that Rose had experienced before that it made her head spin. She wasn't just dreaming anymore - the Bad Wolf had taken her far beyond that. She was actually, properly there - lying in a bed that she didn't immediately recognize and looking around at another person's room.

She supposed that she shouldn't have been surprised when she looked down and noticed a young, petite frame instead of her usual body - she should have been used to the Bad Wolf putting her into other people's heads by now. But it wasn't someone else's head - not this time. It was hers.

"Okay ..." Rose muttered slowly, her throat closing up in surprise when a strange new voice suddenly sprang from her mouth and reached her ears.

"Hold on ..." she gasped breathlessly, "that's ... that's a new voice!"

She immediately jumped to her feet and began scanning around the strange room in search of some sort of reflective surface. Everything around her felt ... different in a way that she had never experienced before. She blinked hard a few times and realized that it wasn't her eyes playing tricks on her - she was simply a few inches shorter than she was used to.

"Alright, this is really, properly weird," she muttered out loud to herself. "Have I finally lost it?"

Unable to find a mirror anywhere during her cursory glance around the room, Rose moved to the desk chair sitting at the end of her borrowed bed and collapsed down into it, suddenly feeling weak-kneed and dizzy. Sudden movement out of the corner of her eye drew Rose's gaze to the black laptop screen sitting on the desk before her. In its darkened reflection, she was finally able to catch a proper glimpse of herself. It was there that she could see that she was the same girl again - the Clara/Oswin/Oswald woman.

"No way," Rose gasped out loud in surprise, blinking hard at her odd new reflection and then reaching up tentatively to poke her own cheek in disbelief. "This is ... this is completely mad."

"Clara!"

The sudden voice mad her startle and Rose had to choke down a scream as a young girl suddenly filled the doorway to her left.

"What, can you seriously still not get it to work?" the stranger asked, rolling her eyes at Rose in that tbored, exasperated way that all teenagers had.

"What? What's not working?" Rose stuttered awkwardly.

"Your ... computer," the girl replied, looking confusedly between Rose and her darkened laptop screen. "You know that it has to be turned on, right?"

"Er, right!" Rose agreed, her voice coming out thin and slightly shrill as she fought to get a handle on the insane situation that she had suddenly found herself in. "Right, of course. I knew that."

"Right ..." the young girl replied skeptically. "Well, is it okay if I go and see Nina? You can call her mum."

"Er, yeah, sure, of course!" Rose replied brightly, attempting to hide her confusion and worry with a forced smile and a terse nod. It was obvious that this girl somehow knew her, but Rose had no idea what their relationship was. Were they related? Was Rose somehow meant to be watching her? She didn't even know this girl's name!

The girl smiled at her, though - clearly pleased to have gotten what she wanted out of their conversation. However, she hesitated in the doorway for just a moment longer and then turned a thoughtful look on Rose. "You should phone that number if you're still having trouble," she suggested lightly.

"Number?" Rose repeated, tilting her head in question at the young girl.

"Yeah, that number you got from the lady at the tech shop," the teenager elaborated with another haughty roll of her eyes. "It's a help line."

"Right, yes," Rose muttered distractedly. "I'll do that, then, I'll call them!"

The teenager flashed Rose one last strange, skeptical look before she disappeared from the doorway and left Rose alone with her own thoughts once more.

"Right, then, I'll just phone them, shall I?" Rose muttered under her breath to herself. "I'll tell them all about how I've just woken up in a different universe, in a different body, and see if they've got any specialists for that."

She paused for a moment in her one-sided monologue and watched her expression screw into one of confusion as she met her eyes in the dark monitor of her laptop once more. "Why am I talking to myself like this? I don't usually do this ..." she mused to herself, cocking her head to the side as she leaned in closer to her reflection. "Do all of these words just come along with the new body? Is this what's meant to happen? Blimey, now I know how the Doctor feels ..."

Her words halted again and she watched her strange new face shift into an expression of wide-eyed, open-mouthed shock. "The Doctor!" she gasped. "Of course!"

Rose suddenly remembered that she had been brought here by the Bad Wolf for a purpose - to find the Doctor. The only question now was - how was she supposed to do that? She didn't even rightfully know where and when she was, let alone where he might be on his own timeline. She wondered if this universe's Torchwood was still up and running - if she could hack into their databases, then maybe she could find some sort of clue as to where he was and what he was currently doing.

Rose reached forward and powered on the laptop without a second thought, waiting impatiently as it booted up. Her foot jiggled underneath the desk table and she bit her lip in anticipation as she watched the loading bar slowly fill and then the stock image of a wide, open field underneath a bright blue sky lit up her desktop screen.

She immediately attempted to open the Internet, but an error message interrupted her, telling her that she was having network connectivity issues.

"Oh, come on," she groaned under her breath, moving to click on the empty-looking Wi-Fi button at the bottom of her screen. But it seemed that her laptop wasn't able to pick up any nearby networks, and her screen remained as blank and unresponsive as ever.

Just as she was about to abandon her venture and try to come up with a new plan, Rose suddenly caught sight of a bright yellow post-it note clinging to the edge of the desk near her right hand. It had a phone number scrawled on it in an unrecognizable hand along with an eight-digit string of nonsense letters and numbers. Her gaze immediately moved up to the phone that was sitting on a charging cradle on the far corner of the desk and Rose narrowed her eyes on it speculatively before finally shrugging and reaching for it.

She dialed the number that had been left for her and was about to hang up after the tenth ring when suddenly a man's voice met her ears.

"Hello?"

"Ah! Hello!" Rose replied brightly. "I can't find the Internet."

"Sorry ...?" the man responded slowly.

"Well, I'm trying to get my Wi-Fi connected," she elaborated quickly, "but it's like ... there's nothing there?"

"The Internet?" the man repeated dubiously. "It's 1207 ..."

"No, I've got half-past three," Rose replied slowly, glancing at the date and time readout at the bottom of her laptop screen. "Could that be a part of the issue? Is there something wrong with my settings?"

"Listen, where did you get this number?" the man demanded, completely ignoring her.

"The ... woman in the shop?" she replied hesitantly. That was what the teenager had said, right? Some lady had given her that number? "Someone wrote it down for me. This ... this is a helpline, isn't it?"

"What woman? Who was she?" the man asked, his voice just as confused and demanding as ever.

"I don't know, she was just some woman," Rose replied evasively. "So, is this a helpline or not? Can you help me fix my computer?"

"Well, I'm not actually ... This isn't ..." the man stuttered awkwardly before sighing heavily and asking, "You have clicked on the Wi-Fi button, haven't you?"

"Of course I have," Rose snapped impatiently. "It's not my first time using one of these things, you know, I just ..." Her words ended on a surprised gasp as a new network connection suddenly popped up on her screen before her eyes. It was labeled "Maitland_Family" and it was at full bars. She clicked on it without a second thought, eager to have this issue fixed so that she could move on to more important things.

"Oh, wait! Something's just come up," she explained into the phone receiver. A window instantly filled the center of the screen, prompting her for a password. "Oh, but it needs a password ..."

"So ... put in your password ..." the man replied slowly.

Rose was really getting tired of his condescending remarks very quickly. She rolled her eyes as she remembered all of the times when she was still so young and the Doctor had treated her like a dribbling, useless child.

"Yeah, thanks, I know how passwords work," she responded tersely. "I just haven't got one ..."

"Well, you'll need a password ..." the man explained with a sigh.

"Oh, wait!" Rose cut him off, remembering once more the small yellow post-it note where she had first found the number to call him. "There's some letters and numbers written down here, I'll try that ..."

It wasn't until she was four digits into the strange sequence that something clicked in her mind and her fingers immediately froze over the keyboard as she stared down in shock at the eight-digit code.

"Well ...?" the man on the other end of the line was prompting her. "Did that work?"

But Rose couldn't find it in herself to answer him. She was still too busy simply staring at those six seemingly-random letters scrawled out in pen before her.

"Oh ..." she breathed softly. "But that's ..."

"What? What is it now?" the man asked irritatedly.

RYCBAR

"Run, you clever boy," Rose whispered as images from her vivid dreams played before her eyes like a movie reel, "and remember ..."

"What did you say?" the man demanded, his voice cracking through the connection as his words came out on a shout.

"It's ..." Rose attempted weakly, but her words were cut off as a loud pounding began to shake the room around her and the sound of a doorbell being insistently rung filled her ears.

"Oi!" she snapped, instantly hanging up the phone and shutting her laptop in frustration. "What's all that noise, then?"

She peered curiously out of the room that she still hadn't managed to venture out of yet and had a look around the corridor outside. It seemed that she was in some sort of small, two-story house and - since the teenager had left - she was completely alone.

Did she live here, then? Would it be odd for her to check the door and see who could be trying so desperately to get in?

Rose quickly decided that she would just have to take her chances, because there was no way that she could sit through the rest of the day with all of the racket that the person at the door was making.

"Hello, yes, I hear you!" she called out over the noise as she quickly descended to the lower level of the house and eyed the entryway warily. The mottled glass door at the foot of the stairs gave her a blurry look at the person making all of the fuss outside, and she could see what looked like the outline of a man in strange brown robes.

"Hello?" she asked as she turned the knob on the unfamiliar door to reveal ...

"Clara!" the man breathed in quiet disbelief. "Clara Oswald!"

"Oh," Rose replied intelligently as she matched the man's wide-eyed expression of shock with one of her own. She was distantly aware that her mouth was hanging slightly open, waiting for her to come up with something better to say, but no words came.

Because standing right in front of her with a brand new face and a look in his eyes like a dying man who had finally found salvation was none other than the Doctor.