Rose was dreaming - she knew that she was, she had to be. And yet it was so far outside of anything that she had ever experienced before - and that was including all of the things that the Bad Wolf had put her through in her journey to get back to this universe.

She blinked hard in an attempt to get her eyes to focus as she glanced around at her new surroundings. The room she was in was dimly-lit and oddly hazy around the edges, but she was able to make out a large, darkly-painted, pentagon-shaped table just in front of her.

"So glad you could make it."

Rose blinked and suddenly she was staring into a delicate china teacup that was being offered to her from across the table. She followed the arm holding it up to a familiar, green face and she flashed Madame Vastra a confused look as she asked, "Where am I?"

"Exactly where you were, but sleeping," the woman to Vastra's right replied. Rose blinked again and suddenly she was looking into the familiar features of Jenny, who was smiling at her encouragingly from across the table.

"Time travel has always been possible in dreams," Vastra explained as she busily continued to go about making them all tea. "We are waiting on only one more participant."

"Oh, no," a voice to Rose's left groaned. "Not the one with the gigantic head?" Rose smiled into her tea as she turned and immediately recognized the stocky, rounded features of Strax.

"It's hair, Strax," Jenny murmured with a roll of her eyes.

"Hair," he hissed with a disgusted sneer.

Suddenly, there was a puff of smoke to Rose's right and she blinked hard once more as she realized that the fifth chair at their table was suddenly occupied. This guest, too, she recognized immediately, and Rose silently berated herself for not catching on to Strax's strange, telling comment sooner.

"Madame Vastra," River drawled as she instantly laid eyes on their hostess.

"Professor," Vastra replied politely. "Help yourself to some tea."

But River seemed to have ideas of her own, and she called up for herself instead a glittering flute of champagne, complete with the rest of the bottle sitting in a bucket of ice just within reach. Jenny was the only one who seemed fascinated by the parlor trick. Vastra hid her look of disapproval in her own tea cup, Strax glared at her with an open look of confused disgust, and Rose stared hard at the table in front of her and wondered how she was ever going to manage to play this off without the help of the Doctor.

She could already feel River watching her speculatively - her champagne instantly forgotten as she laid eyes on the young human girl to her left. Rose silently gritted her teeth and forced herself to meet the professor's curious gaze.

"Ah, perhaps you two haven't met," Vastra stepped in politely. "This is the Doctor's companion." She nodded to Rose as she introduced her, but then stuttered to a stop as River whipped her head around to stare at the reptilian woman in unrestrained surprise. "That is ... his current traveling assistant," she finished lamely.

Rose attempted a smile, but it came out tight and strained, so she dropped her gaze to her tea once more instead. There were so many things sitting on the tip of her tongue that she wished to interject, but she swallowed the words and strictly reminded herself that they were all within some sort of shared dream state and she would have to keep a tight rein on her secrets if she wanted to keep them to herself.

"Have you gone a darker green?" Strax piped up unhelpfully as he narrowed his eyes on Vastra.

"Clara Oswald," Vastra finished hurriedly, clearly eager to be finished with the awkward introductions.

There was a beat of silence before the woman to Rose's right added tersely, "Professor River Song. The Doctor might have mentioned me?"

The other woman was clearly doing her very best to appear formal and straightforward, but Rose could hear the unrestrained hope in her voice. It was a hope that she, herself, knew only too well - it was a hope that cut like a knife whenever it was ignored or fell flat. So she forced herself to meet the professor's gaze once more and she did everything that she could to make her answering smile look and feel more genuine.

"Oh, yes. 'Course he has," Rose replied quietly. She couldn't help but notice as she took a closer look at River that the woman wasn't wearing a wedding ring, either. She also didn't look like any sort of professor that Rose had ever met - dressed in a long, shimmering gown of gold and white. What, exactly, was she a professor of? Rose realized belatedly that she had never asked the Doctor for details concerning his strange, sort-of, timey-wimey wife.

"It's nice to finally get to meet you, Professor," Rose added politely.

River narrowed her eyes ever-so-slightly as she nodded at Rose in return, clearly trying just as hard as she was to puzzle the other woman out. It seemed that jealous suspicion went both ways when it came to the Doctor.

"Perhaps we should get down to the business at hand," Vastra supplied helpfully, shifting nervously in her seat as she leaned forward and began her explanation for why she had brought them all together. With a wave of her hand, the air above the center of the table shifted to reveal space-time coordinates supposedly leading to "the Doctor's greatest secret".

"The Doctor does not discuss his secrets with anyone, my dear," Madame Vastra reminded Rose ominously. "If you're still entertaining the idea that you are the exception to this rule, ask yourself one question - what is his name?"

Rose felt a muscle in her jaw twitch as she stared hard back at Madame Vastra from across the table. Suddenly, the weight of her own secrets felt like a millstone around her neck as she clenched her teeth together and stubbornly refused to let loose a single one of them. She sensed that something was going on, here - something far more dangerous than any of them yet understood - and she felt the Doctor's absence keenly as she was forced to face the threat alone.

"Well, I know it," River piped up, flashing Rose a look that wasn't half smug as she turned to face her.

Rose felt a dozen different snide remarks rushing forward to take the place of all of the secrets threatening to burst forth off of her tongue, and she flashed the professor a tight, unamused smile as she bit them all back and forced herself to remain respectfully distant. She knew that if she were still her old self, Rose might have had a harder time remaining silent, but she was easily twice the age of River, and she liked to think that she had gained a bit of wisdom and restraint over the course of her extended years.

"Yeah?" she finally muttered casually. "How'd you manage that, then?"

"I made him," River replied with an unrepentant shrug.

"How?" Rose pressed, interested to hear the professor's recounting of the "complicated" wedding that the Doctor had only vaguely alluded to.

"It took a while ..." River admitted with a sigh, raising her eyebrows in a weary expression as she primly returned to her glass of champagne.

"So you're ... a friend of his, then?" Rose asked testily, narrowing her eyes slightly as she gazed at River from over the rim of her teacup.

"A little more than a friend," River replied confidently, without even a hint of hesitation. "A long time ago ..." she added quietly, almost as an afterthought.

"He's still never contacted you?" Madame Vastra asked gently, her expression filled with sympathy for the other woman.

"He doesn't like endings," River replied simply, flashing their reptilian hostess a terse smile.

Suddenly, Jenny twitched and began shifting uncomfortably in her seat and Rose furrowed her brow at her from across the table in a look of quiet concern as Madame Vastra and River continued talking over the information that Vastra had collected about the Doctor.

Rose was startled back to the matter at hand as the center of the table lit up once more and a man's grim face appeared. "The Doctor has a secret, you know," the hologram muttered ominously. "He has one he will take to the grave. It is discovered."

"You misunderstood ..." River breathed in horror.

But their conversation was quickly interrupted as Jenny began breathing heavily and apologizing for no apparent reason. "I think I've been murdered ..." the young woman cried out desperately as her image began to blink and then fade away before their eyes.

"Jenny!" Madame Vastra shouted in terror.

"What's happened to her?" Rose demanded worriedly.

"You're under attack," River stated solemnly as Jenny's image finally dissipated into nothing, her chair sitting empty and forlorn against the table. "You must wake up now. Just wake up! Do it!" Her voice was raised in panic now as the professor reached forward and slapped Madame Vastra hard across the cheek.

The reptilian woman immediately blinked out of existence, now leaving two empty chairs on the opposite end of the table.

"You, too, Strax," River commanded, grabbing her half-empty glass of champagne and throwing it into the alien's face.

Rose leapt to her feet in surprise as their small party instantly dwindled to just her and River. Before she could make another move, however, the room suddenly flooded with creatures in Victorian suits and top hats, their appearance seeming almost human if not for the sickly pale skin, sharpened, dangerous teeth, and their complete lack of eyes.

"Tell the Doctor, tell the Doctor, tell the Doctor ..." they whispered ominously in unison.

"Tell him what?" Rose snarled, glaring at the encroaching men with as much venom as she could muster in her terrified state.

Suddenly, the center of the table illuminated for a third time - this time revealing a male face that Rose recognized.

"His friends are lost forever more, unless he goes to Trenzalore," the man who Rose had known as Doctor Simeon stated simply.

"No, you can't say that," River replied, her words coming out fast and terrified. "He can't go there - you know he can't! The Doctor can never go to Trenzalore!"

"Rose?"

The strange new voice and the sound of her true name made Rose jump in surprise as she glanced quickly behind her, looking frantically for the source. However, the only other things in the room with them were more of the strange, not-human men who were slowly approaching her and River on all sides.

"Rose?" the voice whispered again. It was familiar, but with no face to pair it with, and with her sleeping mind working against her, Rose couldn't quite place where she recognized it from.

"Rose ..." the voice called again, its quite concern pulling her slowly forward towards consciousness.

She blinked once, and then suddenly she was lying in bed in the exact same position that she had fallen asleep in. With the dream quickly fading away and her conscious mind returning to her, Rose began to recall what had preceded her strange, otherworldly dream.

After the exhausting day that they had both had and the subsequent talk about their respective exes (and their long bout of heated, passionate snogging), Rose and the Doctor had fallen into an exhausted pile of half-clothed limbs and quickly fallen asleep in her bed. It reminded her of back when she had been traveling with the Doctor in her old body. Whenever they had had a particularly rough or trying adventure, one of them would always seek the other one out and they would curl up around one another until they felt safe and relaxed enough to drift off to sleep. It was an unspoken, agreed-upon habit that they had fallen into without even realizing that it was becoming routine.

At the present moment, the Doctor had one arm wrapped tight around Rose's shoulders and his opposite hand was running gently through her hair as he murmured her name softly into the crown of her head. She had woken up in similar positions before - both with the Doctor, and with her husband - whenever she was having particularly bad dreams.

"Do you want to talk about it?" he whispered gently as he pressed light, comforting kisses to her forehead and ran his thumb along the arch of her brow and across her temple.

Rose shivered as the details of her dream rushed back to her and she squeezed her arms tighter around the Doctor from where she lay resting against his chest.

"Doctor, I have to tell you something," she murmured hesitantly as she stared unseeingly into space and fought to keep herself from shivering once more.

"What is it, love?" he asked, sending her a mental wave of peace and reassurance as he tightened his hold around her shoulders supportively.

Rose fisted her hand in his rumpled Oxford as she twisted her head and forced herself to meet the Doctor's concerned green gaze.

"Doctor, what do you know about Trenzalore?" she asked quietly.