Unfortunately, the Under Gallery proved to be filled with only more questions and not very many answers as Kate led them into a room littered with shards of broken glass that seemed to have shattered off of the empty oil landscapes lining the wall before them.
"But ... how is that possible?" Rose asked as she gazed at the tablet that Kate had put in the Doctor's hands that showed the pictures as they once were - complete with still, miniature figures that were now nowhere to be seen. "Something's got out of the paintings."
"Lots of somethings," the Doctor agreed ominously. "Dangerous."
Suddenly, a loud hissing noise filled the room and a bright light began to strobe from somewhere behind them. The Doctor and Rose turned in unison to gaze at the swirling lines of golden light that seemed to form a sort of tunnel in the air above their heads.
"Oh, no, not now!" the Doctor groaned in frustration.
"Doctor, what is it?" Rose demanded, eyeing the disturbance nervously.
"No, not now, I'm busy!" he continued as though she hadn't spoken, glaring at the wispy golden tunnel as though it had personally offended him. "I remember this," he added as an aside to Rose, his eyes still trained on the anomaly before them. "Almost remember," he amended with a small shrug.
"Doctor, what are you talking about?" Rose asked in frustration, not at all liking the way that he was slowly approaching the thing as though he intended to jump headlong down the rabbit hole.
"Oh," the Doctor murmured, reaching for the fez that he had nicked from one of the Under Gallery's displays and then promptly donned earlier during their trip, "of course. This is where I come in." He stepped back without any further explanation and tossed the obnoxious accessory into the swirling light, where it immediately disappeared. Though Rose couldn't say that she mourned the loss of the dreaded fez, she did feel a sharp stab of fear as the Doctor immediately jumped in after it, shouting excitedly the entire time.
"Geronimo!"
"Doctor!" Rose cried as she desperately attempted to jump in after him, but Kate's grip was firm on her elbow, keeping her locked in place as she felt her mental connection with the Doctor thin and grow taught, like a rubber band being pulled almost to the point of snapping.
"Wait!" Kate hissed under her breath, her eyes narrowing as she attempted to make sense of the muttered voices emanating from the wormhole before them. "Listen."
The murmured words echoing through the room around them were indistinct and difficult to make out, but the familiarity of the voices made Rose's heart skip a beat as she leaned in closer towards the swirling light of the time fissure. "Doctor, is that you?" she called out curiously.
"Ah, hello, Clara," the Doctor called back breezily, his use of her fake name immediately alerting her to the fact that he was not alone. "Can you hear me?"
"Yeah, it's me. We can hear you," she replied quickly. "Where are you?"
"England, 1562."
Rose stopped breathing altogether as this second voice met her ears. She reached out to her mental bond on instinct, but was met only with the quiet regret and sympathy of her current Doctor on the other end of it. I'm sorry, Rose, he murmured sadly, filling her thoughts with as much loving reassurance as he could manage through the distance that separated them.
"Doctor ...?" she finally breathed in quiet disbelief, both longing and dreading to hear the familiar voice of her dead husband once more.
"Yep," two separate voices answered in tandem.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me ..." Rose sighed exasperatedly, rolling her eyes as a third Doctor suddenly seemed to join the first two. She found that she was bitterly disappointed to find that the third gravelly voice was one that she didn't recognize. She didn't realize until that exact moment that she had been hoping to hear a familiar Northern accent, but it seemed that the universe had supplied her with a different, even earlier version of the Doctor instead.
Whoever this new man was - he filled her current Doctor with absolute dread, which Rose could sense even over the great distance that separated them. She listened with rapt attention as the three Time Lords bickered amongst themselves and then were promptly taken prisoner by the woman who may or may not have been an alien from outer space posing as the Queen of England.
"Oh, but that man is clever," Kate murmured in awe from where she still stood next to Rose in the secluded room of the Under Gallery. "Come on," she commanded easily, motioning for Rose to follow her as she quickly turned on her heel to leave.
"Where are we going?" Rose asked nervously, hating the idea of leaving the wormhole behind and still desperately fighting back the urge to jump through it herself.
"My office," Kate replied matter-of-factly, "otherwise known as the Tower of London."
Luckily for them all, UNIT seemed to be an organization that moved very quickly, and it didn't take them long at all before Kate was ushering Rose into the top-secret area that she called the "Black Archives". The whole place had an eerie, uncomfortable atmosphere to it, and Rose couldn't shake the odd, itching sense of déjà vu that seemed to follow her every footstep as she and Kate hurried down the long, dark corridors.
"The Black Archive," Kate announced grandly as they went, "highest security rating on the planet. The entire staff have their memories wiped at the end of every shift. Automated memory filters in the ceiling."
"'Memory filters'?" Rose repeated dubiously. "Then ... how do you even know what's really down here? Wouldn't you just forget every time that you left?"
"Certain memories can be preserved, depending on your security rating," Kate replied evenly as she flashed her credentials and a man standing nearby instantly granted them access. "You have a top level security rating from your last visit. You'll be able to retain your knowledge of all that you see down here."
"Well, I obviously didn't remember the last time," Rose grumbled as they entered the secure facility and she immediately laid eyes on a wall full of photos - some of them showing black-and-white security images of her and Kate walking through the Black Archive on a day that she had absolutely no memory of.
Rose also caught glimpses of other faces on the wall as well - some known, and some unfamiliar to her, with brightly colored strings that seemed to connect them all together in some sort of infinite, intricate web. It looked as though UNIT had been attempting to lay them all out in some sort of basic, chronological order. Rose held her breath as she slowly moved down the length of the wall, tracking back through the Doctor's history without her (she recognized the photos of River, Jenny, Vastra, and Strax as she went, as well as the couple who she had met in the dalek asylum - she had forgotten their names at first, but UNIT had helpfully labeled their images as Amy and Rory), until she got to a large gap that stood between one group of photos and the next. The area there was filled with varying pictures of a nineteen-year-old blonde with wide, brown eyes and a sunny, bright smile.
Rose swallowed thickly around the lump in her throat as she blinked away the sudden tears in her eyes and forced herself to focus back on Kate once more. It wouldn't do to waste time taking a walk down memory lane while the Doctor was trapped in a prison cell in the sixteenth-century with two other versions of himself. She told herself that she would have time enough to peruse the old pictures later.
She found Kate on the other side of the room, staring pointedly at an oddly familiar leather cuff that was propped up like a piece in a museum on a silver stand behind a wall of glass.
"What is that?" Rose asked warily, stepping forward to get a better look.
"Time travel," Kate replied ominously. "A vortex manipulator bequeathed to the UNIT archive by Captain Jack Harkness on the occasion of his death. Well, one of them, anyway."
Rose felt her heart drop into her stomach as she stared wide-eyed at the old vortex manipulator and tried very hard to get control over her erratic breath. All of the old secrets hidden down here in the Black Archive were quickly becoming too much for her, and she longed desperately for the Doctor - if only so that he could explain a little bit of what was going on.
"What do you mean 'one of them'?" Rose asked breathlessly, her voice little more than a whisper as tears began to sting the back of her eyes once more and threatened to spill over onto her cheeks.
Kate ignored Rose's question, however, as she moved around the glass panel and opened the door that would allow them to reach the old vortex manipulator. "This is how we're going to find the Doctor," she explained simply. "I don't have the activation code - the Doctor has always kept it hidden from us. Let's hope he changes his mind."
As if on cue, Kate's phone began to ring, but Rose couldn't bring herself to focus on the other woman's muttered conversation as she peered closely at the old leather cuff before her. It was exactly as she remembered it, though it looked lost and lonely without a certain rogue American time agent attached to it. She ran her fingers gently across the worn buttons and felt her heart ache for all that she had loved and lost in her long, long life.
Rose was so distracted by the old memories, that she didn't realize until it was almost too late that Kate and her companions were actually zygons in disguise. She watched in horror as the blonde woman before her morphed and changed into a giant red alien covered in suckers.
"Prepare to dispose of one more human," the creature hissed as it glared down at Rose. "We have acquired the device."
Kate's phone suddenly began to buzz from where the alien had abandoned it next to the vortex manipulator, shocking Rose into action as she quickly snatched it, memorized the short line of letters and digits, and hastily inputted them into the time traveling device. She slid the leather cuff around her hand, flashed the zygons her best imitation of Jack's old, cheeky grin, and pressed the final button that immediately zapped her out of existence.
When Rose opened her eyes again, she was standing alone in a long, dark hallway that looked distinctly medieval. She groaned as she pressed her hands to her head and swayed slightly on the spot, fighting to get her bearings back after the jarring experience of using a vortex manipulator for the first time. It all reminded her of her days of using the dimension cannon with Torchwood - which, in turn, just brought up more memories that she wasn't exactly eager to relive.
Suddenly, there was a gentle tug at the back of her mind that instantly grounded Rose's thoughts and reminded her of her current objective. She glanced up and set her eyes in the direction where she could feel the Doctor's presence emanating from and moved quickly towards him. Now that they were in the same time and place once more, their mental bond had come fully back online and she could clearly sense him just down the hallway, tucked away behind an old wooden door.
She could also sense that he wasn't alone, and Rose could feel the strange way that time was bending around the area as she stepped closer towards the prison cell that was currently holding three versions of the same man within it. There were voices murmuring quietly to one another on the other side of the door, and Rose could feel her Doctor's heartache like a stab in her own chest as she crept slowly forward and strained her ears to listen.
"Did you ever count?" the Doctor with the unfamiliar voice asked quietly.
"Count what?" Rose's Doctor replied gruffly.
"How many children there were on Gallifrey that day," the other man elaborated tersely.
Another shockwave of pain rolled over Rose and she squeezed her eyes shut tight as she silently reached out to her bondmate and attempted to console his troubled thoughts.
"I have absolutely no idea," the Doctor lied succinctly.
"How old are you now?" the other man insisted curiously.
"Ah, I don't know. I lose track," the Doctor replied irritatedly. "Twelve-hundred-and-something, I think - unless I'm lying. I can't remember if I'm lying about my age, that's how old I am."
Rose wondered if he was lying - she had a direct link to the man's thoughts, and even she couldn't quite figure it out. The first time that she and the Doctor had reconnected in this universe, he had told her that he was a thousand-years-old. She knew for a fact that two hundred years hadn't passed for him since then, so it was clear that there was a disconnect somewhere in his story. However, it wasn't as though it mattered much - time and age never really did, when it came to the man who could change his face and keep on going into eternity.
"Four hundred years older than me," the gruff, unfamiliar voice replied, "and in all that time you've never even wondered how many there were? You never once counted?"
The Doctor's anger flared, then, and Rose's hands fisted in frustration at her sides as she fought the urge to barrel into the room and throw her arms around him in a desperate attempt to shield him from his own pain.
"Tell me," he muttered coldly," what would be the point?"
"Two-point-four-seven-billion." The old, familiar voice stopped Rose's breath, just as it had done earlier in the day when she had heard it through the time fissure in the Under Gallery.
"You did count!" the younger Doctor shot back angrily.
"You forgot?" Rose's previous Doctor spat in contempt. "Four hundred years, is that all it takes?"
"I moved on," the Doctor lied again, his tone low and dangerous as a sensation of crushing guilt swept over him.
"Where?" the other Doctor snapped angrily. "Where can you be now that you can forget something like that?"
"Spoilers," the Doctor muttered quietly.
"No," the other Doctor growled dangerously. "No, no, no - for once, I'd like to know where I'm going."
"No," Rose's current Doctor snapped in reply, "you really wouldn't."
And suddenly, Rose couldn't take it anymore. It was bad enough having one Doctor's self-hatred filling her thoughts without having to deal with all three of them arguing with each other over the weight of their shared regret. She needed to do something - she needed to save her daft, precious alien from himself.
Rose pressed her hand to the old wooden door and tried not to be too surprised when it swung easily open, instantly granting her access to the large prison cell beyond. However, she did gasp in surprise when she realized that there weren't just three pairs of eyes staring back at her in dumbfounded shock, but four.
"Oh," Rose breathed as she went quickly down the line form her Doctor, to the face of her dead husband, to the old, weary-looking man sitting against the wall, and then to the young blonde woman leaning casually against his side.
"It's you ..." she muttered in disbelief.
A/N: I went back and forth for a long time trying to decide if I wanted to add Nine into this adventure or not. I love him so, so much and I really wanted him to come along for the reunion ride, but I eventually decided that it would just make this already incredibly long fic even more drawn-out, so I had to leave him out and stick with the canon cast. I might do a separate 50th-fix-it sometime in the future and add him in then. I just really, REALLY want Chris to come back to Doctor Who. D'X