For once, the Doctor did exactly what Rose needed him to do.
He just stood there, holding her, letting her sob into his shoulder and blurt out all sorts of things that didn't make any sort of coherent sense. The familiar leather smell of his jacket made things worse at first, but after a bit it seemed to have a calming effect on her. It was just another sensation – another aspect of him, like the green velvet that always smelled of cinnamon for some strange reason. Leather, cinnamon, and that clean crisp linen smell that had accompanied the pinstriped suit.
She found herself smiling and pulled away from him, wiping her tears with her shirtsleeve. God, she was still in that awful jumpsuit she'd been wearing to repair the S75. Oh, well. Engine grease and leather went together.
"You alright?" the Doctor asked, his familiar northern accent making her smile again.
Rose nodded. "Yeah, sorry. It's just…" she shrugged.
He swallowed and looked away from her. "It couldn't have been easy for you."
That made her laugh. He looked at her curiously. Rose waved a hand dismissively. "It still isn't," she snorted. "If it was easy, it wouldn't be you."
"Rose, I –"
"I'm human," she interrupted him. "But I fell in love with a Time Lord. Not just an alien man that's got a dozen times my lifespan. That would be complicated enough on its own. But I fell in love with a man who travels time and alters history and lives in a thousand different places at once."
"Well, that's a bit of an overstatement."
"Shut it. Point is," she continued, "it's not easy. It was never easy, and it's never going to be easy, but I deal with it because I love you. I love you, Doctor, and I'm selfish, and I won't give you up for anything, I don't care how complicated it gets. The you that I married understands that because he feels the same. You feel the same."
He stared at her for a long time, almost looking like he was going to argue, but logic won out in the end. There wasn't any way he could deny his feelings for Rose. Not now.
She stepped forward and took a hold of his jacket lapels and looked up at him. Not quite expectantly, but invitingly.
Slowly, he lifted a hand to the side of her face, and gently tipped her head upwards. His head tilted down and his lips brushed hers briefly and softly. With a small sigh, her mouth parted slightly and his lips returned to hers, pressing more insistently. By the time their tongues met, Rose had lost her ability to stand and he was supporting her weight against him.
A discreet cough behind them brought them back to reality. They parted, but the Doctor still kept an arm around Rose's waist, supporting her slightly. Good thing, too…that kiss had made her a bit weak in the knees.
"So sorry," said Harriet Jones, "am I interrupting?"
……………………………………………………………………………….
"The Daleks are inside the first defense ring," came Jack's voice over the radio.
Rose stood to the side as Ten's long-fingered hands flew over the TARDIS controls. Eight was busy rewiring something to a secondary consol, and she looked over at him in time to see him jump back and yelp as the controls sparked.
Good to see some things didn't change.
Ten tugged on a chain and pulled down a computer monitor, on which there was a graphics display of little colored blips. The green blips were moving towards the blue blips, and then there were red blips and then some of the blue blips were blinking and fading.
"It's working so far," Ten mused, "but we'd better come up with something else, fast. They're not far outside Jupiter's orbit. The defense satellites' gravity fields are working to slow down the Dalek engines, but they won't stop the fleet."
"If we can buy Jack time to get Weapon Station up and running, it'll be worth it," Eight commented.
"What's on this Weapon Station?" Rose asked.
Eight pulled at a loose wire, which sparked. He winced and replaced the wire. "Ever heard of a Delta Wave?"
Rose shook her head and was about to ask for an explanation when she looked over to Ten, who had frozen with a look of horror on his face. He punched a button on the consol with more force than Rose thought was necessary. "Jack?" he demanded, his voice containing an edge that made her shiver slightly.
"What, Doctor?" Jack's voice came back, sounding a little hurried.
"A question about this weapon…"
"I've got it covered, Doctor," Jack cut him off. "The Delta Burst is focused through a series of trillium lenses."
Ten bit his lip. "It'll work, you think?"
"Like sunlight through a magnifying glass."
"Daleks are a lot smarter than ants, Jack," Ten said. "And this is the same Emperor Dalek we faced back on Gamestation. He'll be expecting something like this."
"Got a better plan?"
Ten sighed. "Not yet, no. TARDIS out."
Eight looked at Ten with a knowing gaze. "You've tried this before, I take it?"
"Yeah," Ten said. "Didn't exactly work out as planned. Damn it!" He ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end. "If only I could figure out why. Or how. How did they survive? Rose destroyed them. I saw it happen."
"I what?" Rose squeaked.
He waved a dismissive hand. "Well, it was you but you had all the power of the Time Vortex running through you at the time. You basically picked the Dalek fleet apart atom by atom."
"Oh, well done," Eight grinned. "But we don't have the luxury of that option, sadly," he sighed, standing and brushing off his hands. "I'm not about to let you – any version of you – absorb the Time Vortex and kill yourself, even if we could access it."
Ten frowned. "What do you mean, even if we could?"
Eight stared at him. "The Eye of Harmony," he said, as though explaining to a two-year old why the sky was blue.
"What about the Eye of Harmony?" Ten took a step forward. "What happened to it?"
Eight blinked. "It's inactive. Gone. Kaput."
……………………………………………………………………………
Torchwood Emergency Protocols dictated that all auxiliary power to non-essential systems be rerouted to primary systems like shields and weapons. Thus, it was a bit warm and stuffy in the control room, and Rose wiped at a bit of brow sweat in irritation. She'd already unbuttoned and tied the top of her coveralls about her waist, and had nearly sweated through the white tank top she wore.
Of course, running around like a chicken with her head cut off trying to coordinate a massive space battle wasn't helping.
"I know what they said, but they've got to get that secondary satellite repaired," she spat angrily, flipping a switch on the panel in front of Diana. "Jack?"
"We're ready, but they're not in firing range yet," Jack said.
"Doctor?"
There was a muffled reply. Rose leaned over the consol and looked down at the Doctor, who was sprawled beneath another array of controls, hard at work with the sonic screwdriver. "What was that?" she asked.
He removed a bundle of wiring from in between his teeth. "I said, I'm trying, but they're working almost twice as fast as me." He sat up and removed his leather jacket.
"There's three of you."
"And the Daleks are how many?"
"Point taken," she said, sighing as he lay back again and went back to work.
Harriet Jones had paused mid-sentence in conversation with Diana Goddard. Rose caught her eye, and Harriet shook her head in disbelief. "I'm still not used to this," the older woman said, nodding her head at the Doctor.
"Welcome to my world," Rose snorted. "I don't think I'll ever understand."
The control room door slid open and the tenth Doctor ran up to Rose, breathless, his hair disheveled and standing on end. "Rose," he gasped.
"What?" she snapped, her irritation with him flaring up again as she noticed Harriet Jones taking an involuntary step backwards.
"Gamestation," he breathed, ignoring the tone of her voice. He gripped her arm urgently. "Rose, you have to tell me what happened on Gamestation. Everything you can remember."
She opened her mouth to reply, but noticed the other Doctor looking at them curiously. "Office," she said, pointing over her shoulder to the lift. "Now."
……………………………………………………………………………………
Rose sipped the cup of tea the Doctor handed her gratefully. "So what now?" she asked.
He shrugged, but there was a tightness around his mouth that she recognized, despite it being a very different mouth than the one she was used to. He straightened his green coat and ran a hand through his curly hair. "I don't exactly know," he said in that beautifully cultured voice of his, bringing up the holographic display.
Rose looked at it in awe. "You see," he continued, "something's gone wrong, terribly wrong with time and space. Dimensional lines are blurring, and the time stream is folding in on itself. If it continues, then…it's like a jumper with a thread loose. One good tug, and it all unravels."
She stared at him. "That doesn't sound very reassuring."
He made an effort at a smile. "I'm sorry, I wish I could tell you with certainty what's going to happen, but I can't."
"S'alright," she smiled. "You'll think of something."
A real smile spread across his face. "You're so confident, Rose Tyler. And you don't even know me."
She set the teacup down and walked over to him. "Yeah, I do. You might have changed, but you're still the same person, inside. I can see that. The Doctor – the one I travel with – he's been hurt a lot by something. He rarely talks about it, but he's lost so much, and that's caused him to hide a lot of himself away. But it's still there. You're still there, in him, I think."
The Doctor stared at her, a strange look on his face, and Rose looked away, blushing. "Sorry," she mumbled, "that probably sounded like a load of silly rubbish."
She started to walk away, but he caught her hand. "No," he said softly, "it didn't."
Rose bit her lip as he pressed the palm of his hand to her cheek. It was warm and soft, not calloused and rough like the hand she was used to, but it still felt the same in a way. It felt just as right. "Thank you, Rose," he whispered, and she could hear the catch in his voice, and it made her heart leap into her throat.
She thought he might kiss her, but there was a beeping from the TARDIS controls, and they separated. He looked at something on a small screen, and his eyes hardened. "Rose," he said, "would you do me a favor?"
"Yes, Doctor?"
He looked up at her and gave her a tight smile. "Go and check on the children? I don't trust their silence." He gestured towards a door to the back of the main room.
It was clearly a dismissal of the For-Your-Own-Good variety, but Rose's curiosity about the children overcame her and she nodded. "Alright, yeah."
"Thank you, darling," he said absently.
Rose smirked. At least the other her had him well-trained.
……………………………………………………………………………………
"They're through the primary defense ring," his former self said.
The Doctor groaned. "Yeah, I know," he said into his borrowed headset. "They've also adapted to the Farristellian shielding. The remaining ships are useless."
"Well," came the other's reply through the radio, "they're not much of a barricade, but they're something."
Was he ever really that optimistic? Seemed like a lifetime ago.
Oh, wait. It was.
He sat up and switched off the sonic screwdriver, wiping angrily at sweat that dripped into his eye. What idiot engineer hadn't considered air conditioning as part of the primary life support system? He'd taken off his coat already, but found himself wishing he'd worn a lighter jumper as he pushed up the red sleeves past his elbows.
"Where did these defenses come from, anyway?" he asked no one in particular. "They seem specifically designed to combat Daleks."
"They were originally designed by a team of Torchwood engineers after they obtained data concerning Van Statten's Dalek," Diana Goddard said, her high heels clipping along the metal decking.
The Doctor blinked. "But you had that facility filled in with concrete and all the records destroyed."
She looked over at him. "Yeah, that's what I thought. I'd forgotten about Adam."
"Adam? Oh." He closed his eyes. "That git. Where is he now?"
"Dead," she said evenly. He looked at her. "He went in for Farristellian medical treatment, but there were complications. Something to do with a neural implant, I'm not exactly sure what."
Great. Perfect. Fantastic. More guilt on his shoulders, because he just couldn't get enough of that, could he? Granted, it really was Adam's own damn fault for being such a selfish, greedy little bugger, but still…he'd been right about one thing. The Doctor had been in charge, and had blundered it. He should've kept a closer eye on the kid.
Well, they couldn't all be Rose, could they?
"Miss Goddard? I've just received word that Ambassador Smith is on board and on her way up," said a young man at a communications station.
The Doctor half-heard this as he stood, brushing off his black trousers. He looked up just as the lift doors opened, and his jaw dropped.
Sarah-Jane. It was Sarah-Jane Smith.
Her gaze darted around the control room, glossing over him. "Where's Rose?" she asked Diana. "I must speak with her at once."
The Doctor stared. She looked amazing! He did a quick calculation in his head from the year he'd dropped her off in. She should be…well, with the average human lifespan of her generation, she should be dead by now. Good-looking corpse.
Farristell. Of course. Their medical technology – if she'd received any of it, of course she was in perfect health.
"She's in her office," Diana replied, "with one of the Doctors."
Sarah-Jane blinked. "With – what?"
Diana shifted her weight uneasily and sort of half-nodded at the Doctor. "Well, she's with one in her office, there's another one, and apparently there's one still in the TARDIS. Something about a time anomaly, I think."
"Time flux," he interjected, smiling widely when Sarah-Jane's head snapped in his direction.
She stared and gaped. "D…Doctor?" she managed.
He grinned and waved. "Hello."
………………………………………………………………………………………..
Rose waved her hand over the lock panel on her office door, ensuring they wouldn't be disturbed. Not that it would stop a sonic screwdriver, but she thought the other Doctor would get the hint.
"Now," she said, "what's going on?"
The Doctor shrugged out of his suit jacket and loosened his tie. "Bloody hot in here."
"Central air's on the fritz. Blame the Daleks. Now, what the hell is going on? What's this about Gamestation?"
He leaned against her desk and folded his arms. "Remember how Jack and I said this was the same fleet that attacked us in 200100?"
She frowned. "You said that, yeah, but I don't see how."
"It was the life-readings we took. The pattern reads partially human," he explained.
"I don't understand…they were destroyed, weren't they? You destroyed them."
"Yes," he said, "they were destroyed, I thought, but somehow one of them must've survived…hold on." He stood upright, staring at her. "You said I destroyed them?"
She stared back at him. "That's what you told me happened. I don't remember any of it. Why?"
"The Eye of Harmony," he said. "Something's happened to it. Something's gone wrong."
Rose shook her head. "I don't understand, Doctor."
He chewed on his bottom lip for a moment. "I know, Rose, I'm sorry."
She sucked in a breath, trying to keep a hold of her sanity. "Doctor, please…what's going on?"
The Doctor took a step forward, standing directly in front of her. He placed a hand to either side of her face, and tilted her head upwards. "I'm going to find out, Rose. Just hold still, and try to relax. I need to find out what happened on Gamestation, and you're the only one here that knows."
"But…you were there…" she said weakly, closing her eyes.
She could feel him in her mind, sifting through her memories. Scenes flashed before her eyes – their wedding on Gallifrey, the eighth Doctor asking her to waltz in the streets of Vienna on a hot summer night, the ninth Doctor taking her hand and telling her to run, the births of her children - and she gasped, but he held her firmly, reassuringly.
And at last he found what he was looking for, and Rose cried out, clapping a hand to her mouth in horror. He withdrew quickly from her mind and his hands fell away from her face. Rose felt cold with shock, sinking slowly to the floor as the implications of what she'd seen hit her.
"Oh, Rose," the Doctor said, his voice strained and hoarse, "that's just it. I wasn't there. It wasn't me." He closed his eyes. "I was wrong. Something happened to the TARDIS. This isn't my reality at all. Something is pulling alternate dimensions together; cramming them into one, unraveling and reweaving them into something different. This is a different world. A different universe."
"I…died," Rose gasped, looking up at him. "I can feel it. I remember what it felt like."
He pulled her to her feet and held her tightly. "Rose…I'm so sorry."
"He saved me," she said against his shoulder. "My Doctor, he saved me…but oh, God, what did he do?"
The Doctor closed his eyes. "What he had to," he said, opening his eyes again and stroking the back of her head.
She pulled away and looked at him. "But whatever he did…"
"He did what I would do," he said, pressing his palm to her cheek. "I would tear the universe apart if it meant saving your life."
Tears ran down her cheek. "You idiot," she sobbed. "You bloody, stupid, stubborn idiot." She leaned her forehead against his. "It's what he's done, isn't it? Torn the universe apart to save me."
He swallowed. "Yes."
…………………………………………………………………………………
TBC