A/N: Bit more romance in this chapter. Hope nobody minds.
Jack returned to the living in the restaurant, across from the haggard-looking Rose and the Doctor, who carried on obliviously with his story.
"He said, 'Whot's that on your head, mate?' And – "
"You alright?" Rose said tiredly.
"It killed me!" Jack whined. "That just wasn't fair!"
Rose sighed. "Tried the green one after you…well. Woke up here, so I'm guessing that didn't work either. Plan B, then?"
Jack nodded grimly.
The Doctor seemed to have noticed neither of them were paying attention to his story, because his laughter faded. "What is it?"
Rose spoke this time. "Theta Sigma, we're caught in a time loop."
The Doctor's expression was nearly as comical as it had been the first time. "What? What?"
"Time loop, Doc," Jack added, drawing his blaster slowly. "Rose'll explain." His eyes and Rose's met, and he nodded at her, bracing himself. She gripped the Doctor's arm in a vise and shut her eyes.
"Jack, what are you doing?" the Doctor asked in dread as Jack pointed the blaster at his own head.
"Don't fight, breathe it in, listen to Rose," Jack said like a mantra.
Realization dawned, and the Doctor took in a sharp breath and reached for him. "Jack, don't – "
Jack pulled the trigger.
Jack gasped and opened his eyes to find the restaurant nearly emptied. Chairs were strewn everywhere as the last few Warrenites waddled for the exits. No one seemed to have noticed his return to the living.
He sat up and checked his own table first. No sign of a struggle. Not even the glasses were tipped over. Good. The Doctor had listened to Rose and gone without a fight.
Picking up his blaster, Jack started to follow after the panicked crowds. He stopped when he spotted a familiar face.
"Urzen!" he called.
The restaurant owner froze in shock. The tray he was holding clattered to the floor. "But you were – you were – "
"I have issues staying dead," Jack explained with a shrug. Urzen trembled, staring at him as if he were a bomb with a lit fuse. "Look, can you tell me how exactly the Doctor saved your restaurant? Who did he save it from?"
Urzen shook even harder, his beady eyes blinking in fright. "I'm sorry! They – they said he was a dangerous criminal – and if I helped them – they told me to say he had helped me, and – "
"Wait, what?" His stomach boiled, and he snatched fistfuls of Urzen's shirt. "You mean you turned us in? To who? Who are they?"
Urzen made a horrible squeaking sound, and Jack shoved him away before he did something that the Doctor wouldn't have approved. The restaurant owner fled, shoving chairs behind him to block the path.
Jack stared after him, seething. They'd been expected. More than that, this was a hunt. This wasn't just some random kidnapper; this was somebody who not only wanted the Doctor, but knew how to set a trap for him.
And worse, he still had no idea who.
The restaurant was completely empty now, and Jack leapt over fallen chairs to get to the exit. The crisp night air stung his face as he traced steps taken several loops before, to the building across the street. He drew his blaster, listening for Muertons, but he encountered no one as he climbed the stairs to the teleport.
He inspected the teleport closely. It'd been disabled, so he couldn't travel through it, but he thought he knew how it worked. If he could track the signal of the last jump…
His mouth set into a grim line as he flexed his fingers. No vortex manipulator, no Doctor to guide him, not even a lousy sonic screwdriver. This was going to take awhile.
The first thing the Doctor registered when he awoke was the cloyingly sweet taste in his mouth. He ran his tongue around his mouth, considering. "Chloroform?" He wondered aloud. That wasn't right. Chloroform shouldn't have affected him; how did –
Rose. He sat bolt upright. The Muertons had drugged him and Rose, and if they'd hurt her –
She was next to him, hair draped over her face, and laying absolutely, unforgivably still.
His surge of panic subsided for the most part when he pressed his fingers to her neck and felt her pulse. One heart, just the one, ba-bum, ba-bumming away. He brushed the hair out of her face and glanced around at their surroundings. Small cell, what looked like a door sealed into the far wall, walls white and solid, ceiling just high enough for him to stand straight, dim light embedded in the ceiling. Too generic for him to identify its owner. Where did those Muertons come from, who were they working for, and what did they want with him and Rose? And why had Jack abandoned them?
He processed all this in the seconds before Rose stirred.
"Rose?" the Doctor murmured, wrapping an arm around her to prop her up. "Rose?"
With a groan, Rose opened her eyes. He smiled at her in relief, the panic etched into his face moments before gone. "Hello."
She blinked and sluggishly sat up.
"Oh, good, you're alright," the Doctor said cheerily. "Now do you mind telling me where we are and why I've let a bunch of Muertons drug us? My mouth tastes almost worst than pears."
She tackled him in a hug like she hadn't seen him in ages. "Because if you didn't let them they would have beaten you half to death."
The Doctor hugged her back in confusion. "Oh, those blokes? The big, muscle-y ones that do other people's dirty work? I could have taken them, easy. Still doesn't explain why Jack blew his head off. What's going on?"
"Long story."
He pulled her away from him and held her at arms length. "So tell me. Being enigmatic's my job, Rose. It doesn't suit you at all."
"We're caught in a time loop."
The Doctor's voice went up an octave. "What? That's – "
"Doctor, for once, just this once," Rose snapped, "Shut your gob."
Recognizing the expression Jackie often wore when she was preparing for a slap, the Doctor closed his mouth with a snap.
"You don't remember because you are causing the time loop," Rose recited, "And erasing the memories of everyone, including you, within a certain distance. That distance doesn't include me and Jack, so we remember. Five and a half minutes from the moment you woke up, the Muertons are going to take you away. I don't know what happens after that, but our guess – your guess – is that whoever hired the Muertons wants some information out of you regarding whatever the future you did on Warren Delta Three before we got there. Jack blew his head off so that he can avoid being captured and figure out who hired the Muertons so you can get us out of this cell."
The Doctor stared at her as she spoke. Every word made logical sense, and yet absolutely no sense at all. "Blimey. Did you have that practiced?"
"There wasn't much else to do while we waited for the loop to reset," she replied, exasperated. "So what do we do?"
"Because that'd be pretty hard to make up on the spot," the Doctor continued, "Which makes your story more believable."
"Believable?" Rose repeated incredulously.
"Creating a time loop is impossible without other Time Lords. Which means I'm hallucinating or something." He frowned. "I'm still drugged."
"Theta Sigma was your old Academy nickname," Rose said flatly. "You woke up fifteen seconds before I did. You had a granddaughter named Susan Foreman."
The Doctor blanched. "What?"
"You told me all that to prove to yourself later that this really is a time loop."
The Doctor rubbed the back of his head. "But Rose, it's still impossible. I mean really, properly impossible."
She smiled a bit. "That's what you said last time. And I told you I've seen you do loads of impossible things. And sure enough, you did one more."
The Doctor opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it again.
"Now how long've we got?"
"You said five and a half minutes," the Doctor calculated. "It's been a minute twenty since you woke up."
"Four more minutes," she smiled sadly, hugging him again.
The Doctor slung his overcoat around her. "So, what, they come take me in four minutes. Assuming this isn't a drug-induced hallucination."
"It's not."
"Alright, then, it's not. But then what? What happens to you?"
"I sit here, bored out of my mind until the loop resets. Until you reset it."
"But why are you here?" he asked, dread creeping into his voice. "If they just want me, why did they take you too?"
"Because…" she hesitated. "Originally, Jack said, they took you away, for a long time, and Jack thinks they tortured you. But you didn't tell them anything, so they came and took me. And then the loop repeated." The Doctor's grip on her tightened, and she hastily added, "But that's not going to happen, because you're going to tell them whatever they want to know, or at least pretend to. And I'm going to try and escape, maybe."
"Maybe?"
"Last time didn't go too well," Rose admitted. "You told us the wall was made out of…Billy-train?"
"Bilitane?" the Doctor said delightedly, examining the wall with fresh glee. "Blimey, I could resonate through that in thirty minutes!"
"We did. And there were some wires in there. And Jack said he knew what he was doing, and pulled out a wire." She bit her lip. "And it electrocuted him."
"Ah." The Doctor winced. "You'd better not try it then."
"Already did," she replied flippantly, "Pulled another wire. It killed me too. Might as well give it another shot. You're going to reset the loop anyway. Doesn't matter if I die."
She said it almost like it was a joke, but the Doctor's mouth went dry. "Don't say that," he replied firmly. "It matters."
"Well how else am I going to help?"
Something electric coursed through him, and the Doctor's voice hardened like ice. "You dead is not going to help me. So you're not getting the screwdriver."
Her hands on his chest clenched fistfuls of his coat. "But I want to do something useful!"
His eyes darkened. "No."
Rose pulled away from him. "It might help. I might get the right wire this time. I need to try."
"I said no."
She glared back at him, but her eyes gradually softened. She embraced him again, planting her lips along his jaw until she reached his ear. "Please, Doctor," she whispered. She snaked a hand into his jacket, feeling for the screwdriver.
The Doctor snatched her by the wrist and pulled her away so he could look her in the eye. "Rose," he said, voice nearly breaking on the syllable but filled with resolve, "I'm not going to let you. What if I don't manage to create a time loop?"
"You will." She said it like it was fact, as unquestionable as the laws of time or Jack's existence.
"But what if I don't?" he snapped. "What if I don't? What if I don't manage to do the impossible and you stay dead?"
Rose observed the way he clenched his teeth, the way his muscles tensed, on edge, and said tenderly, "You can. I believe in you."
The Doctor let out a laugh, hoarse and hollow and mirthless. "You have far, far too much faith in me, Rose Tyler."
The corner of her mouth twitched. "Maybe I do. But if anybody can do the impossible, it's you."
The Doctor considered this for a moment. "True enough, I suppose…" But his hearts thundered like war drums in his chest, and he thought he could already feel the emptiness her leaving would give him. There was impossible, and there was impossible. He wondered which would hurt more, her actual death or this knowledge that he was going to fail her.
"I've died in this time loop twice now," she told him softly, and he thought time stopped, just for a moment. "First time I got shot. In the restaurant. And I'm fine, now, because you fixed it. You reset the loop. And I'll be fine again. Trust me."
He looked at her, and the way her jaw set, the way her eyes burned with determination, and he knew that he had lost.
He took the sonic screwdriver from his breast pocket, placed it into her hand, and wrapped her fingers around it. She smiled gratefully, approving, and the Doctor felt the emptiness implode in his chest. She didn't understand.
He snatched her other wrist tightly, almost too tightly. He pressed her hand to his chest until he was sure she felt the double thrum of his hearts.
"Do you feel that?" he asked. "Those are yours. Yours to break, if you want."
There was a flicker of surprise in her face. She clutched the sonic screwdriver tightly, but stared at where he kept her other hand pressed to his chest.
"I love you, Rose," he said, and oh, did he mean it.
Her eyes widened and her breath hitched. He'd said it before, but not very often, and never without prodding or her saying it first. He let her hand drop off his chest. The distant sound of footsteps replaced the beating of his hearts in his ears.
Rose looked at the screwdriver in her hand and back up at him. "I…I love you, too," she said softly, and pressed the screwdriver back in his hand.
He stared at the tool in his hand, then back at her. His hearts swelled inside him with hope and fire, and for a moment he felt like he could do impossible things if it meant saving her. "Thank you," he whispered.
The Muertons' stomping grew ever closer to the door, and this time Rose heard it. Eyes shining, she swallowed. "You know what to do, yeah?"
The Doctor gave her a small smile, tucking the screwdriver back into his breast pocket. "Tell them whatever they want to hear. Don't get tortured, don't let them bring you into it. Create a time loop, which is still imposs – "
"That's what you said last time," she smiled back, "And then you did it."
The Muertons entered, aiming their guns at Rose.
"Right, right, I'm coming," the Doctor said hastily before they could say anything, untangling himself from Rose. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to tell me who you're working for right now, eh?"
The Muertons only dragged him roughly towards the door.
"Aw, come on, be a sport!" the Doctor complained, trying to regain his footing.
Rose hugged her arms to her chest as the door slammed shut behind them, fighting every instinct to launch herself after them. He was going to be fine. Jack was going to find out who had them.
Alone in the cell, she sat down, curled her legs up to her chest, and tried not to cry.