A/N

Eleven's POV.

Trying to balance the urges to write any of the three stories in this universe. Ugh Ugh. Still need a beta if anyone is interested.

DWDWDWDWDWDW

Chapter 3

There'd been a rift, you see. Smack dab in the middle of a rock slide on the edges of Trenzalore plain, there'd been a Rift. The Rift's light set aglow an ancient road sign, leaning haphazardly among the fallen rocks and covered with graffiti.

Way of the Bad Wolf – Hello Sweetie

Hard to miss, that. And so he knew. He knew what he could do. He could smell it in the very air of this cursed place. He was dying, and he had just enough time. Maybe.

Back into the TARDIS once again, perhaps for the last time. She was damaged and her navigation systems were almost completely shriveled, but Sexy could do it this. It had been Emergency Program Omega for a hundred years. As he bumped along with his oldest friend through the time vortex, he clutched the amber in his pocket and felt the burn of his death curling in his liver. The nanites were still contained — but not for long. He would have to regenerate soon. But not before one last trip to see his River.

He remembered this time to turn off the breaks, and he arrived deep in the library core minutes after he'd left, a lifetime ago. He didn't look at the empty chair. He couldn't. His sonic wasn't enough this time to keep her ghost, that's why he'd given her a special one long ago, made for that precious purpose. But just a sonic wouldn't do to keep her. Not for what he had planned. He pulled out the Ridelian memory cube and with a couple of quick connections he'd done in his mind twelve thousand six hundred and three times, he downloaded her memories, the last bits of her soul, into his little blue cube, one already infused with psychic protections and a matrix of his own memories of every moment they had shared.

He couldn't bring her back to life. It was a fixed point, and there was no clever way out — he'd been too stupid in his last life, and far more stupid in this one. But he could give her something profoundly wonderful.

Back to the TARDIS and full reverse, and sparks lit the console ablaze and nearly blinded him. A hard landing whipped him against a support strut and his ribs pushed hard against his upper right liver, letting him bleed the nanites into his body in a slow trickle that wouldn't stop until they consumed him.

No time. Never enough time, even if he was the last Time Lord.

He dragged himself out the door, pressing a kiss against the blue panels of the door as he closed them. Three more steps, he checked the zip on his backpack, put one hand on his favorite cowboy hat with the hole River had shot in it one faithful day at Lake Silencio, and he jumped into the Rift with a, "Geronimo!"

What he saw there terrified him. He was no different that what he remembered from so long ago. What he'd run from for countless centuries. This time it surrounded him, seduced him, haunted him, chased him to the edge of madness. Truth and impossibility collided. Lies were sweet and time was merciless. He would be the end of all things — or the beginning. Or both. Or nothing and nothingness. Run. Run. Run!

He was lost. He was nothing. Or everything. He was. Or he wasn't.

Then, he had fingers. And they clutched at an edge. Maybe he should pull himself up?

He staggered a bit at the top. When reality returned and he was something once again, the pain hit like a 51st century cartoon coyote getting hit with a galactic sized anvil. Twice. Planet Acme was really very unpleasant.

But this wasn't unpleasant. This planet was impossible.

He smelled the air here. Silver and Galienicium and Forthian desert moss. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen there was a version of Gallifrey that had been untouched. River had told him when she was very young and he was very old, that she would like to be put to rest on Gallifrey. It sounded like the kind of place that she wouldn't be allowed to rest very long, too much to discover.

Neither of them were fond of resting. Which had often been a very, very good thing.

It had been more than an idle thought. She'd repeated it, over and over again, in the quiet of nights as she grew older and he younger. Not when they were running for their lives, but when they were making happy memories to comfort them both when death came near. From the moment that they met, when their bond was weaving slowly and delicately and impossibly strong. After their marriage, that insane adventure, their bond was strong enough to break slowly, with slippery delicacy that left them both mostly sane until the moment that it would finally fracture. An impossible thing for a Time Lord, much less two. But his River, his brilliant bespoke psychopath, she'd done it. And one day soon — she would no longer fill the emptiness in his mind.

He'd loved her and he had to let her go. And she'd told him where. He'd known when. But how? How was another matter entirely.

Then Rose Tyler ran toward him, an old bond flared to life, throbbing in a different place within the vastness of his mind than the ghost of the bond to his wife. Rose swept him up in her familiar unfamiliar arms and he collapsed into her for a precious eternity, the echoes of a younger mind starbursting in sorrow and exultation at the feel of her again.

His clone — no…his brother was also there, looking at him with far far too much knowledge of precisely how intensely he felt. For years, their unique bond flickered in and out of existence like interuniversal static. He knew that more of his life than he was comfortable with must have been broadcast to this copy of an old self. In the last moments of his regeneration he had felt an echo of his own pain as this other self writhed and screamed a lifetime away.

Now, they shared words, yes. But it was more than that. Loss and joy and pain and pain and pain. His brother may be mostly human, but perhaps that made him understand even more how deeply it hurt to be involved and to care and to risk everything over and over again. And Rose, Rose always saw more of him than anyone else except River. That why he feared her so.

He told them he was dying. Not hard to figure out, what with the coughing and regeneration energy already boiling in his gut.

We go through lives far too quickly, brother. This one will not be easy. There is still the Valeyard…

Yes, yes, brother! I know. I worry. But it cannot be helped. I can't go throwing myself into a convenient black hole or get my head chopped off when the universe is at risk unless I show up to defuse the Silence and surrender my name.

There was a long mental silence that took no time at all. Understanding like this was almost painful, in that it no longer existed in his universe. It was the rarest, most beautiful thing in existence. It ached.

Do not regenerate in anger, brother. Remember that you are loved.

Rose did not hear all of this, but love was in her eyes as well as her Doctor's, his impossible brother. He read their timelines, and the beauty of it, the struggle and the bliss of it was too beautiful to stare at for long.

When he pulled River's cube out of his backpack, it felt right. Those timelines didn't just shift and flow around the event, they sang. River laughed in his mind, joyful and sad and ever ever curious. "This, this is my wife. This is River Song."

"Your wife!" The mostly-human Doctor squealed while Rose simply held her breath, staring at the box with a strange fascination.

Her smile turned wry fairly quickly. "I didn't think it could be done, but really, Doctor, I can't see you marrying a computer. Who was she?"

He tried to stop the look of desperate sadness that flickered over his face, but his control was at its limits. Rose took a step forward, and he was unable to resist.

"She is…she, she was…" Tears formed and streamed down the Doctor's face, and Rose took a few more steps, wrapping her arms around the Time Lord and holding him to her, letting him cry into her shoulder. In another moment, he felt his brother's long arms encase them both, a storm of tears between the lot of them. The bonds he'd resisted for so long flared for a brilliant, impossible moment, full and strong and tying him to this universe in a way that he could not fight. His life, the long long years since he'd been the other man poured through the connection, and he could feel every laugh and flinch and the deep sorrow of both his brother and this woman they loved that he was not there with them. And their lives, full of frustration and hope and brilliant intimacy and the comfort of presence that he could never enjoy, all of that experience filled his hearts almost to overflowing. The one adventure he could never have, now held in his mind in brilliant Technicolor, to be taken out and cherished if he ever survived the battle to come. He broke away, gasping, clutching the cube and knowing that River too, had felt all of that. That she was ready, throbbing in his mind.

"Your TARDIS isn't quite right, is she?"

His brother answered, scratching his neck and rocking on his heels, staring sharply at River's cube and listening with intensity that wasn't human.

And babbling a bit, Still did that. Bad habit, but useful. "It's an 'it'. Not a she. That's the problem. I mean, it should be a she, but she isn't, she's an it, which is the problem."

Rose huffed. "It's not the same. We go precisely where we set the coordinates. But that's not always where we need to be."

He looked at Rose, his hearts beating so fast. "You are brilliant, Rose Tyler. You are so remarkably brilliant for a human. No, wait…" He looked closer. "Not quite human anymore. Not only. Not just."

She gave him her tongue-touched grin, and he ached with feelings that cracked and bled with remembered need. "I fit better now. And my forever matches his. Helps to have the brain to see what he sees too. Bad Wolf can be dead useful, when the Atraxi are mucking about looking for some mass murderer or there are fish vampires in Amsterdam. Or to know that our Tardis needs to be more, or things here will go pear shaped before long."

He swallowed the lump in his throat. "Well, my old girl was always a bit insane. Wonderfully so, but that's why they'd put her in a museum. Uncontrollable, she. Grown from the original, the rumors said, and rumors are usually dead-on right. She…she contains all of them, in a way. Everything. She was also the Bad Wolf. And she gave birth to River, in her fashion. And so…"

He held up a blue cube, with lightning that flared over the surface in phosphorescent green patterns that swirled with a hypnotizing impatience.

"River was meant for more. She is a child of the Tardis."

His brother blinked at him, already understanding, but unable to react. Rose though, Rose became golden, eternal. Rose became the Bad Wolf once more. She reached out, and touched the cube that was River Song, and he said goodbye to his wife.

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