"What in the hell is that?" River demanded as she looked the Bad Wolf up and down with heavy suspicion.
Rose flashed the professor a dubious look, but it was the Bad Wolf who supplied helpfully, "She can see me through you. She's mentally linked with your brain waves."
"Hold on a second ..." River breathed, staring at the glowing woman with wide, shocked eyes. "You're not ..."
"Hello, Melody," the Bad Wolf replied, her eerie smile turning up her features and making Rose shiver. "I've been so eager to finally meet you."
"But ... you're a myth!" River protested disbelievingly. "You're meant to be just a fantasy story passed down through the ages ..."
"Yes, I am," the Bad Wolf replied simply. "And now I'm here, because the Doctor is in danger once more. I brought you both here to help him."
Rose was distantly aware that Jenny, Vastra, Strax, and the Doctor were all speaking with one another and she blinked hard and forced her gaze away from the two invisible women in the room so that she could focus better on what was going on in the waking world around her.
"Time travel is ... damage," the Doctor muttered as his brow furrowed and he stared hard at anything in the old console room except for the glowing swirl of silver tendrils before them. "It's like a tear in the fabric of reality. That is the scar tissue of my journey through the universe. My path through ... time and space - from Gallifrey ... to Trenzalore."
He sighed wearily as he reached forward with the sonic, and after a few seconds of whirring, a myriad of voices began to ring forth through the cracks in time that danced and twisted before their eyes. Rose recognized some of the voices - the memories of the two Doctors from her past making her heart skip a beat as they echoed through the room around them.
The Doctor didn't get to finish explaining the way that he normally would have, however, as he suddenly swooned and then collapsed onto the dusty floor below, his right arm jarring as he went down hard.
"Doctor!" Rose shouted in concern, instantly running forward to kneel down at his side.
"I shouldn't be here," he groaned, his breath coming in heavy, panting gasps as he writhed in pain against the ground. "The paradox ... it's very bad ..." He twisted his bowtie awkwardly away from his throat, as though he was suddenly having a hard time breathing past it as he looked over Rose's shoulder and gasped desperately, "No! No, what are you doing? Somebody stop him!"
Rose followed his panicked gaze to see that Doctor Simeon was standing before the fractals of light in the center of the room and gazing into the glow as though it were a prize that he had fought very hard to win. "The Doctor's life is an open wound," he declared darkly," and an open wound can be entered."
"No. It would destroy you," the Doctor panted as he continued to work hard against his bowtie and fought to keep his eyes open to meet Doctor Simeon's gaze.
"Not at all - it will kill me, it will destroy you," the man in the top hat hissed venomously. "I can rewrite your every living moment. I can turn every one of your victories into defeats, poison every friendship, deliver pain to your every breath."
The Doctor still tried to argue with the crazed entity, but Rose's attention had been caught once more by the warm glow that stood just behind the silver-blue time stream. The Bad Wolf's ephemeral shine was like sunlight in the darkened room that they all stood in - she burned like a fire next to the swirling tendrils of time that crackled and stung like ice.
The creature met Rose's gaze evenly then turned her expressionless face towards Simeon as he backed into the time stream beside her.
Stop him, Rose begged silently.
"I am," the Bad Wolf replied simply, turning her glowing eyes back to Rose as she slowly reached her hand out towards her in a beckoning motion. The simple invitation and silent command were an exact repeat of what the Wolf had done back on Akhaten, and Rose instantly realized that if they were going to save the Doctor's life yet again, then they were going to have to do it together.
However, before she even had the chance to stand, the Doctor cried out in pain and began to writhe in vicious agony along the ground beside her.
"What's wrong with him? What's happening?" Rose demanded as her arms hovered uselessly over his flailing form. She wanted so desperately to reach out and offer him comfort, but she already knew that the time for comfort was past - now was the time for action.
"He's being rewritten," Madame Vastra muttered in disbelief as she watched the Doctor scream and toss about. "Simeon is attacking his entire timeline. He's dying all at once."
Rose wasn't sure if the hazy images that seemed to be floating around the room now were real or just another part of her subconscious playing tricks on her, but she watched in fascination nonetheless as the many faces of the Doctor glanced upwards in varying expressions of fear and pain.
"It is done," a single voice declared as it echoed throughout the entire time stream, instantly turning the cool blue light into a fiery, angry red.
"Rose." She blinked through her haze of tears to see River leaning close to her, her own expression filled with pain and sympathy as the two of them bent over the gasping, crying form of the man who they both loved. "Rose, do something," she begged quietly.
"What can I do?" Rose sobbed desperately, not caring in the least any more who might question the fact that she appeared to be talking to herself.
"Alone, you can do nothing," the Bad Wolf replied evenly, immediately drawing the attention of the two women back to the center of the room once more. She was still standing next to the Doctor's broken timeline, her left arm outstretched invitingly towards Rose. "But we've always worked better when we're together, haven't we, Little Flower? Come. It's time to save the Doctor again."
This time, there was no hesitation as Rose gave the Doctor's hand one last parting squeeze, silently promising him that she would fix this mess that they had found themselves in, and then stepped forward to touch the fingertips of the creature of time before her.
Rose breathed in a gasp of air as light flooded her senses and she felt the raw power of all of time and space explode inside of her head. Suddenly, she wasn't Rose Tyler anymore - she was something more.
The Great Intelligence uses water and ice to manipulate and freeze, the Bad Wolf's voice growled as she turned towards the bright red tendrils of time before her. Let's show him how the flame at the heart of the universe can burn.
The creature who was no longer Rose Tyler raised her hand and delicately touched her finger to one of the spider webs crackling off of the Doctor's timeline. Immediately, she could see the entirety of his life - from the beginning to the end, laid out before her into infinity as she lost herself completely in the Doctor. And throughout all of it was Simeon - always standing int he background and watching with his poisonous, vicious glare. However, as soon as the Bad Wolf entered into the time stream, his eyes began to widen with a look of sudden, real fear.
"No!" the Great Intelligence growled in frustration. "No, you can't do this!"
The Bad Wolf gritted her teeth as she thrust her hand further down the lines of the Doctor's time stream and allowed the blazing heat of time to flow through her fingers and directly into the heart of the Great Intelligence.
"No!" Simeon shouted again in contempt, but the rest of his protests were silenced as the Bad Wolf quickly and efficiently turned every last echo of the Great Intelligence into nothing more than a pile of ashes blowing away on the breeze.
The Bad Wolf gasped when she finally pulled her hand out of the light, which had returned to its original silvery-blue color. The branches and tendrils of the Doctor's time stream seemed to cling to her skin, wanting to pull her in deeper, but she was able to quickly and efficiently complete the time loops and reroute any attempted paradoxes as she extricated herself from the Doctor's timeline.
When she turned around to face the others once more, she saw that River had disappeared (her connection with Rose severed when Rose took all of time and space into her head) and Jenny, Vastra, and Strax were all staring at her in wide-eyed, open-mouthed shock.
"Now it is done," she informed them simply. Her gaze then dropped to the Doctor, who was now lying prone on the floor, blinking dazedly up at the ceiling and panting breathlessly. She was at his side in an instant, kneeling next to him and placing one of her hands gently against his heaving chest.
"It's you ..." the Doctor murmured as he blinked hard and attempted to focus on her features, which were still ringed in a bright yellow glow.
"It's me," the Bad Wolf agreed, her eyes sparkling gold as she smiled down at him with Rose's dainty human lips. "You're safe now, my Doctor."
"And what ... about Rose?" he breathed haltingly.
"Safe as well. I would not have brought her here if I did not intend to keep her," the Bad Wolf informed him simply.
"'Keep her'?" the Doctor repeated, furrowing his brows up at her in confusion. "What do you mean, 'keep her'?"
"I brought her back to this universe for a purpose," the Bad Wolf explained evenly. "I was created to save the Doctor, but the Doctor is safe now. I am the Bad Wolf and my story is done."
The Doctor opened his mouth to question her further - always, always with the questions, it was one of the reasons why she loved him so much - but the creature simply leaned down and pressed her lips to his in order to silence him. She knew that even though her story was done, her work throughout all of time and space was far from over. She would still always be there, always making sure that her Doctor was safe. But for now, he had his Rose and his TARDIS and they were more than enough to see him through to another day.
Goodbye, my Doctor, her voice whispered through the air as she slowly disentangled herself from Rose's mind and then dissipated in a cloud of glittering gold. I love you ...
As soon as the Bad Wolf had disappeared, Rose leaned back from the Doctor, one of her hands coming to his cheek as she gazed down at his expression of stunned surprise.
"Hello," she whispered groggily, blinking sluggishly down at him.
"Hello," the Doctor repeated, his exhausted smile instantly making Rose forget the weary ache in her limbs. He groaned as he forced himself up, propping his weight onto one of his elbows as he brought his other hand to her own cheek, where his thumb lovingly caressed the soft skin there. "Saved the day again," he added with a bemused smile. "How many more times are you planning on saving my life?"
Rose let out a small, breathless laugh as she leaned into his touch and replied earnestly, "As many times as it takes."
The metaphorical cat - or, perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a Wolf - was out of the bag after that. The Doctor and Rose awkwardly explained to Jenny, Vastra, and Strax the full extent of Rose's identity and her history with the Doctor, as well as the creation and subsequent timeline meddling of the Bad Wolf.
"But I don't understand ..." Madame Vastra insisted as the Doctor ushered them all back into the safety of his proper TARDIS and prepared to take them home. "Why all the secrecy? And why would this ... Bad Wolf give Rose an entirely new name and a fictional, human life?"
"We ... don't really know," Rose replied sheepishly, shrugging her shoulders in the green woman's direction. "Just one more mystery that we still haven't managed to work out yet."
"But what's going to happen when Clara - I mean ... what's going to happen to Rose when she dies again?" Jenny piped up curiously. "Not that I'm saying it's going to happen any time soon or anything, but we all gotta go sometime, haven't we? Is the Bad Wolf going to make you a whole new body all over again?"
"Don't know about that, either," Rose admitted hoenstly with another tight-lipped smile.
"Are you certain she's human?" Strax murmured thoughtfully, his tiny, beady eyes narrowing as he tilted his entire body to the side in order to look up at Rose from a different angle.
"'Course I'm human, what else could I be?" Rose asked defensively.
"Have you been completely thorough in your examination, Doctor?" Strax insisted, reaching forward and curiously beginning to lift the hem of Rose's skirt.
She squeaked in embarrassed protest, but didn't get a chance to slap the alien's hand away before the Doctor quickly stepped between them and effectively cut Strax off from whatever "examination" he had been intending to do.
"Yep! Everything is completely, totally, fully checked out," the Doctor replied brightly. "Rose is human as human can be. She's got all the human parts she needs - everything's up to code. No need for further examination."
Strax grumbled in obvious distrust as he stepped away once more, but he let the matter drop nonetheless, much to the group's collective relief.
A few moments later, Jenny, Vastra, and Strax were all dropped back off in Victorian London where they belonged (well, one out of the three did, anyway), and then it was back to the vortex for Rose and the Doctor. After all the time that they had spent talking about the Bad Wolf and explaining Rose's own past, she was finally ready to turn their next conversation towards another woman - the last loose end that Rose was determined to tie up, whether the Doctor liked it or not.
He had already shown her the basics of how to fly the TARDIS, and Rose silently allowed the sentient ship to guide her through the rest of the details as she quietly urged the Doctor out of the way (despite his confused protests) and set their next destination. "The biggest library in the universe", River had said. It was all the information that the TARDIS needed to set her coordinates, and in to time, they were sailing through time and into the fifty-first century.