A soft refrain of something she half-recognized led Rose to the TARDIS library. As she entered, she saw with some relief that this room at least hadn't changed that much. Though the surrounding architecture was different, with dark wood panels and ornate light fixtures, the mounds of loose books and huge shelves stacked to bursting were still the same.

And in the corner, the Doctor's favorite old Edwardian desk sat under the same pile of writing materials and half-eaten food it usually was. The chair behind it was a different one. It was the overstuffed Victorian red armchair that she usually favored, as opposed to the twentieth-century office chair on wheels her Doctor always used.

Beside the desk, an old-fashioned gramophone was playing a classical music record. After a moment, she smiled as the memory of where she'd heard it before came back to her. The Doctor had just given her a proper tour around the TARDIS, after the Slitheen invasion, when she'd asked him if there was a spare room she could have.

Rose had been in awe when he'd shown her the library, and had been wandering around, trailing her fingers over the odd assortment of furniture, blowing dust off books and reading their covers. She'd never been much for libraries, but the one on the TARDIS was exactly what libraries should look like to her mind.

When she'd found the gramophone, tucked away in a cupboard, she'd removed it and asked him about. "I'd forgotten that was there," he'd mused, and had put the needle on the record. "Puccini! I haven't listened to opera in ages. Puccini was a nice man."

Rose had smiled and laughed, and he'd taken her hand to show her the rest of the ship, the strains of Puccini following them.

"Hello," said a young voice, and Rose turned to find the boy from earlier seated in the Doctor's chair, frowning over a book as he made notes with an old-fashioned quill.

"Um, hello," Rose answered, smiling a bit uncertainly. "It's Jamie, right?"

The boy looked up at her and smiled. "Yep. Dad ask you to check in on us?"

"Yeah," she nodded. "Where's, um, your sister?"

"Gwyneth," Jamie said. "She's over there on the sofa."

Rose looked round to where the young girl was curled up around a pillow, snoring and drooling onto the upholstered chintz. She laughed. "She's so sweet."

"Only when she's sleeping. Otherwise she's a nightmare."

Rose turned back to Jamie and sat down in the chair opposite the desk. "Spoken like a true brother. And you're not a troublemaker in the slightest, I suppose?"

Jamie rolled his eyes. "Look, whatever Mum and Dad said, it isn't true. Mostly. Probably."

Rose laughed. "You sound like me."

Jamie looked down at the book he was reading and shifted in his chair. "Yeah."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I guess this is as weird for you as it is for me."

The boy bit his lip. "It's only going to get weirder, Rose."

"You can call me Mum, I don't mind," she said, then added, "It's just, I mean…I know how hard it can be, to see family and yet it not be family and…it's all just so confusing. I mean, I know I'm not your mum, not really, not yet anyway. But if it's easier for you, it's okay by me."

Jamie stared at her for a moment, then laughed. "It's good to see you're not that different from her."

"She's a bit smarter," Rose shrugged.

"Only 'cause she's been around longer," he pointed out. "You'll get the hang of it all, eventually. If we make it through this alive," he added, thoughtfully.

Rose reached across the desk and took his hand. "The Doctor will think of something. He always does."

Jamie met her gaze. "Rose…Mum. There may be nothing left that he can do."

……………………………………………………………………………….

"Good heavens, Doctor," Sarah-Jane said, pulling away from him. "I had a hard time believing the other one, but this…you're so…understated."

The Doctor shrugged and let go of her. "Nothing wrong with this jumper."

"No," she laughed, "it's a very nice jumper. Red looks good on you."

He laughed and hugged her again quickly. "You look fantastic. And," he noticed, pointing to her hand, "you got married! Well done, Sarah-Jane! Who's the lucky bloke?"

"He's not exactly a bloke. They don't have that term on Farristell."

The Doctor gaped at her for a moment. "You married an alien!"

She snorted. "Don't know why you're surprised."

He sighed and touched her cheek. "Fair point. I'm sorry I left you, Sarah."

She took his hand and gave it a soft squeeze. "It's all in the past. The important thing now," she said, "is to get rid of these bloody Daleks and get this whole mess sorted out. How are we doing, Harriet?"

"Not well, I'm afraid," Harriet Jones said, coming to stand beside them. "They're inside the secondary defense ring now."

"Any communications?"

"None," Harriet shook her head. "We've tried hailing them, but I suppose there's no chance of a surrender."

"Not a chance in hell," the Doctor agreed. "We've got to destroy every last one of them in order to win this. The Daleks don't take prisoners, and we can't afford to."

"Agreed," Sarah-Jane said. "And I think I might have something that'll help us."

"What's that?" the Doctor asked, frowning.

She led them down into the center of the control room and motioned one of her aids forward. The young man held a large metal box, which Sarah-Jane opened with a small hand-held device. It hissed open, and revealed a complicated looking bit of machinery inside.

The Doctor's eyebrows rose in surprise. "You're kidding me! This is perfect! Where'd you get it?"

"The Farristellian Science Institute. It's their second working prototype."

Harriet Jones frowned at it and looked at the Doctor. "What is it?" she asked.

The Doctor grinned widely. "A Time Dilation Field Generator!"

…………………………………………………………………………….

"A what?" Rose asked into her headset, struggling to keep stride with the Doctor, who was moving swiftly ahead of her, his suit jacket thrown over his shoulder.

He paused and looked back at her, but she waved him on towards the TARDIS. The landing bay looked so vast and empty without all those ships, she noted. It was a good thing they had more than one evacuation protocol in place.

Sarah-Jane said something in her earpiece, and Rose replied, "Yeah, alright. I'm going to help the other two with the whole universe-unraveling problem if you can manage that one and the whole Daleks-are-going-to-eat-us thing. Okay? Yeah. Yes. Perfect. Okay, good luck, Sarah."

Rose caught up with the Doctor and said, "Sara-Jane nicked a Time Dilation Field Generator from the Farristellian Science Institute."

"Oh, well done, Sarah-Jane," he said.

"What exactly is that? I'm not familiar with the name."

"It's a bit of technology that generates the same warping effect on space-time that you get at the event horizon of a black hole," he explained. "Practically speaking, it'll create a bubble in which time will move more slowly inside than out."

"So we can use it to slow down the Dalek fleet while we figure out how to fix this?"

"Exactly," the Doctor nodded, shrugging back into his suit jacket and buttoning it. "He's working on interfacing the technology, I assume?"

"Who?"

He gestured back towards the lift. "Him, the other one. Nine, whatever you want to call him."

"Oh," she said. "Yeah. He's up there with Sarah-Jane."

He winced. "Ooo, glad I missed that conversation."

Rose laughed, then stopped herself. "Sorry, this probably isn't the best time to laugh."

"No," he admitted, "but then that's never stopped us, has it?" He imitated Queen Victoria's high upper-class drawl, "I'm so not amused."

She snorted, pulling open the TARDIS door and stepping inside. The other Doctor, the one she'd married, was bending over the controls, looking none too happy. As he looked up at her, she sighed, realizing he'd probably just come to the same conclusion that she and Ten had come to.

"We," he said, "are in rather deep trouble, I'm afraid."

………………………………………………………………………………

"I just don't understand," Ten said, hanging his head down into the pit that once housed the Eye of Harmony. "How can it be gone? The TARDIS still has power, what's she drawing power from if not the Eye?"

"It's auxiliary power," Eight said, handing him a tool. "It's leeching off the Vortex."

"Yeah, but what's powering the Vortex if not the Eye?"

"Fair point," Eight admitted. "So it's not gone so much as it's…what? Inaccessible?"

"Something like that," Ten sighed. "I knew I should've paid closer attention to that class at the Academy."

"Yes, I clearly recall sleeping through most of that," Eight smiled wistfully. "They never should have seated me at the back."

"And it was right after lunch, do you remember that? Like I could really stay awake for that, and coupled with the Professor's droning monotone…I mean, honestly!" Ten bent over and scanned the surface of the spherical impression.

"The rest of them managed it, though I'll never know how. Fat lot of help they were, too, all so serious and stuffy."

"Yes, well, that's our specialty, isn't it? Serious and stuffy. Do you know, I had a Krillotane call us dusty old senators to my face?"

Eight blinked. "Really? A Krillotane thought we were old and dusty? You let a Krillotane say that?"

"Yeah, well, K-9 blew him up later, but the point is that he was sort of right, wasn't he?" Ten sighed, and placed a hand against the cool metal of the pit. "I never fit in there, did I?"

"No," Eight sighed. "Never. Even with the changes in the Time Council Romana brought around. Didn't help that I brought home a human to marry."

"Bet the family were pleased."

"Don't know, never spoke to them," Eight said, an uncharacteristic edge to his voice.

"Well," Ten said, "that's not surprising. I fought so hard for them." He closed his eyes and rubbed his hand over his face. "I did, I fought so hard to save their lives. Everyone's life. I didn't want it to end how it did. It wasn't my plan, but they asked me to carry it out. They asked me…because they thought I could do it."

He sat down, suddenly weary. Eight said nothing, just watched him silently. "The Time Council," Ten continued, "entrusted me with the trigger to blow up our entire world because they thought I had so little love for it that I wouldn't hesitate."

"And did you hesitate?"

"No," he whispered, pain clawing its way into his throat. He swallowed against it. "What does that make me?"

Rose had been silent throughout this exchange, standing against the far wall of the room. Now she came forward and said gently, "The Doctor. It makes you the Doctor."

They both looked at her. "You had to make a decision," she said, "and they trusted you to do that. Maybe they thought it for the wrong reasons, but you're still the only one of them who would've made a decision either way. The others, they watched the universe but they never experienced it like you did. They never experienced the need for sacrifice, where even one life can tip the balance between good and evil. They never understood that, but you did."

She sighed. "It doesn't make you perfect. It doesn't even make you good. But neither does it make you evil. You're the Doctor. You're the only one willing to hold the scalpel."

"And you're going to have to make a decision now," said another voice, and they all turned to see Jamie standing in the doorway.

His father looked over at him, opening his mouth to tell him to go back to bed, but then changed his mind and gestured him over. "What is it, son?"

"I think I figured it out."

……………………………………………………………………………..

"This is…this is really quite brilliant," Ten said, looking over the data in the TARDIS control room. "Well done, Jamie."

Eight ruffled his son's hair.

"I still don't quite get it," Rose said, smoothing her son's hair down automatically. "How can there be no Eye of Harmony in this universe?"

"Because," Eight explained, "it's not a real universe."

"How is that? I mean, we're real enough," she protested.

"Yes, but this universe isn't our universe. It's an amalgam universe, a patchwork quilt of space-time, in a way."

She opened her mouth to say something, but Ten interjected, "We've all been sort of…transplanted, I guess you could say. I think I see what happened now. Whatever happened on Gamestation, it ended up being me – your version of the ninth me – that absorbed the Time Vortex, not you. It was the one thing he had that could bring you back to life and stop the Daleks as well. But he wasn't meant to do it, and it sent a temporal ripple through your universe that's grown into a tsunami."

"Can we go there and stop him?" she said.

Ten shook his head. "We can't. We can't go anywhere near that time, it's too unstable."

"Then what the hell do we do?"

Jamie spoke up. "We create an Eye of Harmony. It's frequency will cancel out the temporal tsunami, as he named it, and everything with sort itself out."

"And," Rose said, "how exactly do we do that?"

"Well," Eight mused, "we could combine the power sources of the three TARDIS's that are here, that would give us enough energy. If we used the Time Dilation device Sarah-Jane brought in…"

"Yes!" Ten said. "If we reverse the field generator, combine it with the energy force…yes, that'd work well enough to create a black hole and pierce its center, but we'd need something to focus it. There's nothing in the universe powerful enough."

"Yes, there is," Jamie said. "You have it on board your TARDIS, tucked away."

Ten shook his head. "It won't work, there are still two pieces missing and we don't have the locator. It would take far two long."

"No," he shook his head, "it won't. The pieces are here."

Eight looked between both of them, then shook his head. "You can't be talking about what I think you are," he said slowly. "The pieces were restored a long time ago."

"Yes," Ten said, "but they were gathered again, Romana and I found them again, just before the Time War ended. We'd hoped to use it as a last resort, but we couldn't find the last two pieces in time."

"Because they're here," Jamie said.

"I don't understand," he frowned.

"Remember Princess Astra?"

Ten stared at him, then he shook his head. "No. That's not possible."

"It's true," Jamie said. "Trust me, I know. We both know, we've both always known."

Eight stared at his son. "Wait…no. Absolutely not. Jamie…" he pulled the boy close to him. "You have to be wrong," he whispered into the boy's hair.

"I'm not," he said, leaning into his father's hug. "I'm sorry."

Rose's heart was beating against her ribcage. She didn't know what was going on, but she was damn sure she didn't like it. "What does he mean? Jamie, what're you talking about?"

"It's us, Mum," Jamie said softly. "Gwyneth and I are the last two pieces."

"The last two pieces to what?" she asked.

Ten breathed out a long, pained sigh. "The last two pieces of the Key to Time."

…………………………………………………………………………

TBC