Chapter Seventeen

Roughly three hours after the door to his cell had closed behind the Doctor it opened again. At least he thought that it was three hours. On every other planet he would have been able to narrow it down to the nanosecond, but here all he could do was make a guess. This planet had confused his time sense thoroughly, and being stuck in a windowless cell didn't exactly help the situation. On top of that, his headache had gotten worse as well.

He turned his attention to the people who had entered his cell, two guards and a man in a white lab coat. He groaned inwardly and hoped that he hadn't accidently run into the cliché evil scientist trying to take over the world. Again.

But instead of boring him to death with the sort of monologue that had become pretty much standard in that kind of situation, the man in the lab coat got to the point immediately.

"I am Doctor Gombar, the leader of the Meteorological Service and as such I am obliged to interrogate you within the first four hours of your arrest. Since we are expecting a huge storm to hit, I won't have time for this during the next few hours, so let's get it over with." He looked around in the cell, noting the lack of another sitting accommodation beyond the bed and decided, "Let's move this to conference room three."

He took a step back, indicating for the Doctor to follow him.

The Doctor made no move to get up, so the scientist gestured at the guards. "I can have them drag you there, or you can come along willingly. I'd prefer you'd come, but I can live with whatever you decide."

Groaning inwardly at the headache that decided to get worse upon movement, the Doctor followed the scientist out of his cell, curious where this would lead. He still wanted answers to his questions, and he had the feeling that the scientist was the person who could give them. The guards fell into place slightly behind, but made no move to restrain him.

They never made it to the conference room. On their way through the building, the small group came across a large control room, with windows to the corridor that provided an excellent view of what was going on inside. The Doctor turned his head, saw what was displayed on the main screen on the opposite wall and stopped dead in his tracks. The guards ran into him, but he didn't care. He just stood there, in the middle of the corridor, oblivious to his surroundings, his attention captured entirely by the data on the screen. He hadn't seen figures like these for years, and truth be told, he wouldn't have minded to never see them again.

"This is no ordinary storm you're expecting," he stated, staring at the display.

"No. It's a…"

"Time Storm," he finished the sentence.

"How do you know that?"

"Does it matter? It's headed directly at this city." Heedless of the guards that eyed him warily, he opened the door next to the row of windows and walked into the room. He stopped right in front of the large screen and took in the display, trying to figure out the meaning of the different readings.

He rubbed his forehead in a predictably futile attempt to ease his headache, then turned his attention back to the main screen. Finally the meaning of the figures on the monitor sank in, and a wave of sheer horror swept over him. Not even during the Time War, when they had used Time Storms as a means of last resort, had he ever seen a storm of this strength, and by the looks of it Donna and Jack would be right in the middle of things. Unless they made it back to the TARDIS in time the storm would kill them, and even in the TARDIS their chances of survival were slim. Even a dimensionally transcendent time ship would suffer from a Time Storm, despite the shielding he had reinforced after Skaro.

This was his fault. He had practically abducted them and brought them here. And now they'd probably die because of him.

He whirled around and turned to the scientist, not caring that his voice might betray his fear. "A Time Storm of this scale will destroy more than just your capital. You can count yourself lucky if it doesn't rip your planet apart."

"I know," the man said calmly. "But there isn't anything we can do. All we could do was warn the civilians, evacuate the city and get as many people as possible into the bunkers. That's what we always do."

The Doctor closed his eyes as he realised something. "That's what happened to the industrial complex where your people arrested me." He rubbed his forehead again. The headache really wasn't helping. It was already beginning to slow down his thought process and he had a dim feeling that it was only going to get worse.

Doctor Gombar nodded. "It was hit by a small storm only a few months ago, even if it looks as if it has been abandoned for decades. The storm hit with almost no forewarning. Fortunately we got all the workers out in time."

"They're getting stronger." It wasn't a question.

"They have been for some time." The scientist snorted. "We are called the Meteorological Service, but weather forecasts were never our main purpose. Once upon a time our people used to hop back and forth through the dimensions…"

"How?" the Doctor interrupted, curious where this would lead.

"The reality converter," Doctor Gombar said. "People would spend their mornings at home, pop over to Parallel/Alpha49 for lunch, go shopping on Parallel/Rho27 and listen to a concert on Parallel/Gamma68 in the evening. Whenever someone wanted to cross into another dimension, he would use the reality converter, capture the force of a Time Storm and create a portal. At least that's the story they told us. By the time we signed up with this agency, that wasn't true anymore, because it had already become dangerous."

"What changed?"

"We don't know. The Meteorological Service noticed the Time Storms getting stronger. Safely holding up a portal long enough for someone to pass through became almost impossible. The reality converter couldn't hold the force of the storms in check, and the power they exuded began to rip apart the fabric of time and space. To save the planet, the Meteorological Service declared crossing into other dimensions illegal, banned the technology, and after a few decades the knowledge that we had ever been able to travel to other dimensions began to fade. Now we try to keep it that way, and we monitor our networks to suppress every idea going in that direction. But that didn't stop the Time Storms. They are still building, and we don't know how to stop them."

Gombar sighed. "We figured out early on that the storms only affect people when they are out in the open, unprotected. So we issue storm warnings whenever a Time Storm is going to hit. Unfortunately there are no caves or tunnels in this area, and we can't build any because the ground is nearly impenetrable here. So we began to build bunkers on the surface, but there are not nearly enough of them. We tell the general public that the bunkers provide protection, but in the end they are nothing more than reinforced steel under a massive layer of concrete. Expose them to a Time Storm long enough, and they will crumble under the sheer force of Time."

And kill the people who had sought shelter inside, the Doctor thought. Then he paused. Something about what Gombar had said was important, more important than information about the bunkers, or the Xerian Meteorological Service trying to control people's knowledge. Then realisation hit. Fabric of time, Gombar had said. As it had before, with the misplaced trader in medieval London, it all came down to the shock waves.

"Oh yes, that's it!" He grinned manically. "The Time Storms got stronger at the time the full force of the shock waves hit Xeriax. Until then you had only experienced smaller disturbances, and apparently discovered the occasional piece of flotsam you weren't supposed to have, like the technology for your reality converters."

"What are you talking about?" the scientist asked, apparently confused by the Doctor's sudden change of demeanour. "What shock wave?"

"Not only the reality converters, your entire equipment is based on technology that was invented by my people," the Doctor said, carefully avoiding the term 'Time Lord'. "There was a war, and we lost. And the cataclysm that ended it sent shock waves through the entire universe, carrying along debris from the war like flotsam, including some of the dimension-crossing equipment your people used. Eventually the equipment stranded on Xeriax, you found out what it could do and pressed the proverbial red button."

"What red button?"

"What are you, a parrot?" the Doctor asked impatiently, still not entirely certain where his reasoning would lead. Everything came down to the end of the Time War and the cracks in reality. Without them, none of this would have happened. Not the Xerians crossing dimensions, not the Cybermen, not Canary Wharf, not Rose being imprisoned in another universe – and ultimately all of this was his fault. "As a result of the war, or rather its end, there are tiny fractures in the fabric of reality, which enabled you to travel between dimensions using the alien technology that washed up here on the shock waves. Without those cracks you'd have been like a prisoner trying to break out of his cell by throwing cotton pads at the wall. If you had left the fissures alone, they would have healed eventually, like they did on other planets that were hit by the shock waves. But whenever you used the reality converters to cross into another dimension, you widened them, bit by bit, until they merged into a gaping wound in the fabric of reality.

"The first fissures into the Void between dimensions were the reason the first storm built. And when you started to gather their force to visit parallel worlds, this opened even more cracks, which fuelled the storms. And every storm ripped the fabric of reality further apart."

The Doctor paused and waited for the moment when realisation would hit. He didn't have to wait for long.

"This is our fault," Doctor Gombar said. "We set all of this in motion, and now it is going to destroy us, our people, our entire planet."

The Doctor was silent. Ultimately, it was he who stood at the beginning of this chain reaction, but he had never imagined that something remotely like this would happen.

"Is there something we can do to stop this?" the scientist asked.

Unfortunately the figures on the monitor told the Doctor that they had no such luck. "At this point, the system is self-sustaining." And eventually it would be self-destructing, but from the look at Gombar's face the scientist knew what he was not saying. "But there is something I can do."

"You? Why you?"

"Because I'm the only one who can."

~o~o~o~

The Doctor stood like a statue in the middle of a large plaza, waiting for the Time Storm to hit. In one of the corners of the square the Meteorological Service had built a small surveillance post, but otherwise the plaza was completely empty. He didn't need help anyway. He was the only person on the entire planet who might have an infinitesimal chance of stopping this storm, and every form of so-called assistance would have been nothing more than a distraction. The plaza around him was more or less optional, too. He could have done this basically anywhere, but open space made it easier. Less distractions and less collateral damage. If he survived this, that was. Otherwise collateral damage wouldn't matter anyway.

He would never admit it to anyone, but he was scared to death. He hadn't attempted anything remotely like this since the Time War, and even then he wouldn't even have considered doing it without at least three or four Time Lords to anchor him. He had conjured up a Time Storm on his own during one of the last battles before the end, true, but at the time he had been beyond caring what would happen to him and everyone else who got caught up in it, because slim as it was, it had been the only chance left to change the outcome of the battle. He had known that he was grasping at straws, already knowing what he would have to do to end the war, but he had had to try every other possible solution first. And had failed.

This time, failing would mean condemning Jack, Donna and everyone else in this city, because the bunkers wouldn't be able to withstand a storm of this strength. And losing Jack and Donna just wasn't going to happen. Not when he was the reason that they were here in the first place. He would contain this Time Storm and while he was at it, repair the fissures in the fabric of reality, or else one day the planet would be ripped apart. Maybe not this time, maybe not the next, but if the Time Storms didn't cease it would happen eventually. So he had to do something about it, even if it wasn't going to be easy.

Which might have been the understatement of the century, he added mentally. Compared to what he was about to do, bringing himself in tune with the ventilator on Platform One had been children's play. He had told Jack that he could control Time to a certain extent, but trying to contain a Time Storm was much more difficult, especially without anyone who could anchor him and without being able to feel Time like he should. If he wasn't careful, if he made a wrong decision, not only would this planet die, he would most likely condemn the entire star system.

"No time like the present," he said to no one in particular, then he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He concentrated on the feel of the air around him and on what he should be feeling: the planet turning under his feet, falling through space, hurtling around its star, the star system moving through its galaxy, the universe expanding.

For a seemingly endless moment there was absolutely nothing, but suddenly he felt as if he had broken through a glass barrier. Time was back, and once again he could see timelines swirling around him. He searched them carefully, and eventually found the dark, tangled mass that represented the Time Storm.

Tentatively he reached out and touched a timeline with his mind, but as soon as he made contact he knew he had made a mistake. The Storm was a lot stronger than he had thought, and way too powerful to be controlled by him alone.

He began fighting it nonetheless, knowing what was at stake. He tried to draw the force of the storm upon itself, folding the mass of timelines, and for a few moments he thought that he was gaining on the storm. But the Time Storm was beginning to draw him in, an irresistible force threatening to crush him. Before he even realised what was happening, he was in far too deep, the maelstrom of time pulling him in. And it was already too late to draw back. This would be the end.

For a moment his thoughts began to wander, but with an enormous effort of will he forced every unrelated thought to the back of his mind, in a desperate attempt to regain control over the storm. But still the force of Time was tugging on him, distracting him, trying to shake him off, and he knew that he wouldn't be able to hold it back for much longer, much less contain it.

For a nanosecond he asked himself what would happen if he gave up, but he dismissed the thought immediately. What was threatening this planet was ultimately his fault, and he would do everything in his power to stop it, even if it was the last thing he ever did.

Suddenly he became aware of an almost imperceptible attempt at telepathic contact, and he reached out for the thin mental tendrils. Grasping one of them like a lifeline, he felt every sensation heighten. The TARDIS was lending him power, guiding him, anchoring him.

He didn't dare to divide his attention to tell how long he fought the storm. Slowly he gained on it, until he felt it begin to die down. Then one of the buildings on his left began to crumble, no longer able to withstand the force of Time. Windows shattered, and a shower of debris hit him. Brief as it was, it was enough to break his concentration.

Then a time eddy struck him, and he lost all the progress he had already made. Once again the storm began to draw him in. He clung to his connection to the TARDIS, but this time even the additional power of the time ship seemed to be not enough to save him.

He felt his anguish being echoed by the TARDIS, followed by a cry for help that reverberated throughout reality, then the maelstrom of time began to swallow him.

Rose…

~o~o~o~

Rose…

Rose Tyler looked up from the schematics she had been studying, almost certain that she had heard something, when suddenly a feeling of distress washed over her and she gasped.

Jake, who had been occupying one of the four other desks in the room, turned his attention to her. "Rose? Something wrong?"

She gulped, gripping the table to keep her hands from shaking, but shook her head. "I'm fine."

Jake raised his eyebrows. "You're white as a sheet."

"I'm fine," Rose repeated, not entirely sure that she convinced him, and not really caring, because at this moment another wave of distress hit her.

"No, you're not." Jake got up from his chair and came over to her desk. "What's wrong?"

"I dunno. Maybe I've eaten something wrong," she said, knowing that that was not the case.

"Rose, the food in the cafeteria is bad, but not that bad. I know an old ready room on sublevel B that hasn't been in use since the war against the Cybers. You can collapse on one of the beds, and then you can tell me what exactly is going on here."

Rose opened her mouth to tell him that his concern was unnecessary but shut it again and nodded instead. She really wasn't feeling all that well. Fortunately they had been alone in the room, because she wasn't sure how she would have reacted to anyone but Jake or Mickey seeing her like that.

They had barely reached Jake's secret ready room, when a third wave of distress shook her, stronger this time, and she suddenly felt as if an incoming tide was trying to draw her under. She sat down on one of the beds, gasping for air, but the feeling didn't subside.

Rose shook her head in an attempt to shake off the sensation and tried to concentrate. Something was very familiar about the emotion she was receiving, even though she couldn't quite place it. But she was fairly certain that whatever was going on here was somehow related to her past. During their first meeting between dimensions the Doctor had said that she might be telepathic now, and what she was experiencing felt a bit like when the TARDIS had tried to communicate with her after the Gamestation. Just the feeling of distress was new.

Eventually the wave receded, and she became aware of someone calling her name.

"Rose?" Jake asked, sounding clearly worried.

She looked up. "I think something is wrong. With the Doctor or the TARDIS, or maybe both of them." She had barely finished her sentence when another wave of distress hit her.

"How do you know that?"

Rose ignored him, because once more the feeling of being drawn underwater tried to overwhelm her. But this time she was prepared and slowly she began to follow the feeling of distress back to its source, shutting everything else out. She acted by pure instinct, descending deeper and deeper into her mind, until she reached a small golden knot. For an indeterminable amount of time she simply regarded it, then reached out and touched it. And remembered.

I looked into the TARDIS and the TARDIS looked into me.

She had forged a bond with the TARDIS, and now something was wrong with the ship. The TARDIS was screaming across the Void, begging for help.

~o~o~o~

The Doctor felt himself being torn apart by the storm, bit by bit, fibre by fibre. He tried to fight it, but he was not strong enough. This was his fault, all of this. Nothing would have happened if he hadn't used the Moment. This was his punishment, and it was only fair that his life ended like this. It should have ended long ago. The only thing that he regretted was that he couldn't save the people on this planet, and that Donna and Jack would have to die because of him. And Rose…

Ever since Krop Tor, when he had finally acted on his feelings, against his better judgement, he had felt that he was living on borrowed time. He had had another chance to end it on Darlig Ulv Stranden, and he had used it to tie her even more tightly to him. Now fate had finally found him, and he didn't even get the chance to say goodbye. She would never know what had happened to him.

His thoughts were interrupted when he suddenly perceived a light in the middle of the Storm, unfazed by the chaos surrounding it. Slowly but steadily it came nearer, and eventually it engulfed him completely, even if it didn't touch him.

For some time he just stared at the phenomenon in wonder, then reached out with his mind and touched it.

I want you safe. My Doctor…

"Rose?" he asked disbelievingly. Somehow she had known that something was wrong, and now she was trying to save him. Even if that might mean her end.

What he felt from the entity surrounding him was neither confirmation nor denial.

I take the words. I scatter them…

"Bad Wolf…" the Doctor muttered in astonishment.

The light around him brightened, warmth surrounded him, and he could almost imagine Rose standing next to him, her tongue poking through her teeth as she smiled at him and reached for his hand.

A message to lead myself here.

For the first time in what seemed more than the few hours since he had set foot on Xeriax his head was clear, the headache gone. And finally he understood.

Even before his concentration had been broken, the TARDIS had realised that she alone was not strong enough to anchor him. She had done what she normally only did when they were safely in the Vortex and he was asleep: She had bridged the Void and established a connection with Rose. Only this time she had called Bad Wolf.

"What have you done?" he asked his ship angrily. "Do you have any idea how dangerous…"

The TARDIS sent him the mental equivalent of an electric shock before he had even finished his sentence, followed by the image of a woman with crossed arms and raised eyebrows that looked a lot like Jackie Tyler. Too much for his liking, if he was honest.

If the Doctor could have glared at the ship, he would have. As things were, he sent her the telepathic equivalent of a stern look. "This could kill Rose, and you know that. I bet she wasn't even asleep when you made contact…"

The golden glowing entity surrounding him effectively ended the telepathic argument between him and his ship with a flash.

I made my choice a long time ago.

He was about to open his mouth to tell her that he was not worth risking her life, something she would most likely not have accepted as a valid argument anyway, when the TARDIS sent him an image of a clock ticking down to zero.

The TARDIS was right. Time was running out. The Time Storm had almost reached the city, and when it hit, it would only take a short length of time to destroy not only the regular buildings, but also the bunkers in which people had sought shelter.

Again he got the feeling that Rose was reaching for his hand, like she always did before they ran – into danger or away from it. It didn't really matter, but then it never had. All that mattered was her being with him. He smiled briefly and reached out for her, suddenly feeling her warmth permeating him. Then he began to concentrate on the task at hand again.

In the beginning he made very little progress, and he was farther from stemming this Time Storm than he had been when he had begun to fight it for the first time, but at least he was able to push it back far enough that the maelstrom stopped pulling on him. Now he could concentrate on containing the storm once again.

It was only after a few minutes that he realised that fighting the storm had somehow become easier than it had been before. He could anticipate time eddies earlier than he had been able before, which allowed him to either avoid or counteract them, and soon he had reached the point when the time eddy had hit him the first time, when the storm had already been dying down.

Better with two.

If the golden entity surrounding him had been able to grin at him, he was certain she would have done it. Because she was right.

Together they could do almost anything, and with the Bad Wolf and the TARDIS anchoring him, he could use all his strength to fight the storm, instead of having to split his concentration to keep anchored to the TARDIS.

With renewed effort he began to contain the Time Storm, drawing it on itself until it slowly began to collapse, a process that could best be compared to the formation of a black hole. When the process finally came to a hold, the Doctor held a compact mass of tangled timelines, held together by sheer force of will. Now all that was left was to get rid of it.

For a second he divided his attention between the Time Storm and the Void between dimensions, searching for a fissure, only to realise that Bad Wolf had foreseen his intention. She already had created a stable pathway into the Void, using one of the fractures in the fabric of reality that the storm had created.

The Doctor took the tangled mass that represented the Time Storm and pushed. Mentally he guided the remnants of the storm through the pathway, then he began to close the passage. The golden entity representing the Bad Wolf shot towards the Void, and for a second he feared that she would be drawn into it, like Rose would have been in Torchwood Tower if Pete hadn't shown up and saved her.

She didn't. Bad Wolf simply touched the Void, and the tear began to heal, much faster than it would have if he had closed it on his own. The scar glowed for a moment, then it vanished.

Then Bad Wolf returned to him, and together they began to repair the damage to the fabric of reality the Time Storms had done during the last decades, closing the tears one by one. He would concentrate on a fissure, start the task of closing it and then Bad Wolf would accelerate the process.

Eventually they had healed all of the large fissures, leaving only the very small ones, which weren't nearly big enough to fuel another Time Storm and would eventually heal on their own. For a moment Bad Wolf returned to him, and warmth suffused the Doctor. He felt the mental equivalent of a hug, followed by a goodbye, then the entity vanished as fast as it had come.

He released a breath he hadn't even realised he'd been holding, and slowly opened his eyes again. The buildings around him had crumbled to dust, the second row of buildings looked as if they were centuries old, but beneath that the city seemed to be untouched. Even though the Time Storm could have destroyed the entire city, it had hit mainly this part and spared other areas. So far, his plan had worked.

As soon as he saw the scientists from the Meteorological Service leave their tent, he decided that now would be the time to vanish from the scene, especially since the dust in the air would cover his disappearance. It was time to set the second part of his plan into motion.

~o~o~o~

When Rose came back to her senses, Jake's worried face was looming over her. She squinted against the light, the bright lamps in the ready room not doing anything for the murder headache that had settled in her head.

"Rose?"

"Give me a mo'," she croaked, trying to sit up.

"Whoa, slowly!" Jake helped her up and steadied her.

"How long was I out?"

"Three hours. What happened?"

"I don't know." Seeing Jake's sceptical look, she amended, "Well, I've got an idea, but I'm not really sure. Ever since the Gamestation I've had a connection with the TARDIS, and I could feel she needed my help. I think… I became Bad Wolf again."

"But didn't you say that it had almost killed you?"

"The TARDIS would never do anything that could harm me," she said with conviction.

"But…"

"Jake, please… Just trust me." She slowly stood up, her legs still a bit shaky, but keeping her upright. "But please do me a favour: Don't tell anyone."

Jake grinned in understanding. "Yeah, I could do without your mum yelling at me because I didn't stop you."

Rose grinned back. "See?"