Chapter 7: Wednesday

On Wednesday morning, when Mickey Smith woke, it was to the sound of Rose Tyler, singing in his kitchen. He had never heard the language she was using, but it was elegant, sophisticated and precise. It was also heart-rendingly beautiful.

He walked in after her and greeted her, not with the kiss he wanted, but with a warm, tender hug. She laughed, that sweet, fairy twinkle that warmed him right to the soul. Then she handed him a full English breakfast and turned to the table, carrying a pot of tea. He reached behind him on the counter and picked up her plate as well, and carried them both to the table, bemused.

"How long have you been up?"

"Long enough," she told him, a lonely, distant, sad look in her eyes.

They ate their breakfast and talked about other things, things they never used to talk about. Mickey wondered aloud how old friends were getting on without them in the Universe next door, and Rose made jokes about the people they'd met who were similar but oh so different.

"I mean, look at Sarah Jane," she giggled.

Mickey roared with laughter over this one. They had met her, once, while chasing an alien through a feminist convention. In their home Universe, she was simple Sarah Jane, always exploring and ever waiting. In this Universe, she had never had anything to wait for, so she was the powerful senior editor of a world class feminist magazine and, to their great amusement, an avowed lesbian, partnered to a pretty little Australian flight attendant named Tegan.

When they finished, though, they put the past away and everything went quiet. "Well?" Mickey asked.

"It's time. We need to get together. You, me, Jake, Mum, and Pete. At the house, I think, because Mum's going to have a bad enough night as it is."

Pete was waiting for them when they arrived, having set everything up in the parlor and chased away the staff for the day. "Your mother needs her rest, Rose, but I agree it's important to talk, because there's something you need to know. The blood tests they ran came back completely inscrutable. Your biochemistry has gone completely off the charts. And I don't have to tell you what the worry is doing to Jacks."

Rose laughed and hugged her mother close, then patted her distended belly where her baby sister waited just a little longer. "I have to tell you something important, because you need to understand what's happening to me. I love you all, even the baby, and you're my family."

Jake shook his head. "I work for you, I thought," he said with a grin.

Rose smiled back at him. "You're family, Jake, trust me."

Then she sat down, holding her mother's hand, and willing Jackie's unnatural calm that had continued throughout her pregnancy to make it a few more hours. "I'll try to make it quick, because you both need your rest – you aren't going to be getting any after today for a long time to come." And she smirked at them gleefully as Jackie shook her head.

"That's going to take some getting used to, that is," Jackie said with a sigh. "You can see the future now, or something, I suppose? I just felt the first contraction when you got here."

"Something like that, yes," Rose said.

"What did he do to you?" Jackie asked, sounding resigned now, instead of furious.

"It's like I told you before. I did it to myself. I didn't know what I meant before, though. I've been changing the whole time – Mickey got it exactly right – it began when I looked into the TARDIS. I did something I shouldn't have done, and I created a causal nexus."

"Causal whatsits?" asked Mickey, while Pete looked at her through squinted eyes, calculating, his brilliant mind racing along at light speed beyond what Mickey or even Jake could come up with.

"She did something to the law of cause and effect," Pete said, as she looked at him, her eyebrow raised, waiting for his answer.

"Right. Cause comes before effect most of the time. But I looked into the Untempered Schism, I absorbed the Time Vortex, and every bit of me existed at every moment in the Universe for a few minutes. And the heart of the TARDIS effectively 'grants wishes'. I made a wish, and that wish effected things so that things happened out of order."

"This is way over my head," Jackie confessed.

Rose nodded, kindly, and tightened her grip on her mother's hand. "The Universe requires Time Lords. Every Universe that exists has to have them, just like it has to have stars and empty space and life. Without them, the Universe dies. But this Universe exists without them. They died here before even the Doctor was born, in a war of their own making. But the Universe can't not have them."

"Okay," said Mickey, "I'm with you so far."

"Is that what the Doctor is?" asked Jake.

"I wished that I could save the Doctor, I wished that I could be like him so that I could be with him forever. And ever so slowly, I started to change. His TARDIS held off the change for a little while, she has that much power and much, much more."

"But what does that mean?" Jackie demanded. "You're becoming him or something?"

Rose smiled. "No, I'm turning into me," she said kindly. "The new and improved Rose Tyler."

Mickey sighed. "Now with cryptic phrases," he finished for her, in his best BBC announcer's voice.

"Two for one special," continued Jake. "Get the new and improved Rose and we'll throw in space alien behavior absolutely free."

Rose nodded. "Yep," she said and, just because she felt like it, popped the p. "Still available with cheesy smile and mum who slaps!"

Jackie did indeed deliver a whack to the back of her head. "Are you going to leave us then?" Jackie asked after a few minutes.

"No," she said, definitively. "You're my family. I'll be here, I'll love you, I'll look after you, all of you. It takes two hundred years to grow a TARDIS and apparently, what changed me is also causing the TARDIS key to grow a new TARDIS."

"But how do you know so much now?" Pete asked. "I've seen you do things, say things, that you never could have done, never would have known."

"I looked into the TARDIS and the TARDIS looked into me," she quoted while her mother shivered and the others looked at her, expressions ranging from morose to glum. "I'll become what he is. That's what the causal nexus did. I was drawn into this Universe because there has to be a Time Lord here and there wasn't until he came. He didn't know, I didn't know, but now I do. I had to come here because this Universe had to have a Time Lord, and it had to have a Time Lord because I came. Hard to explain, really."

Pete nodded, though, as close to understanding as any of them could be.

"But you'll be alone, Sweetheart," Jackie said. "Can't you stop it? We'll be gone, and you'll go on alone, forever."

"I know, Mum." She brushed a tear away from her cheek, and forced yet another smile. "I can't change it, and I wouldn't if I could. This Universe does need someone – it needs a Doctor, but it can't have him. So it will have to settle for me, instead. Being alone is, in a way, part and parcel, but it's also my punishment, for what I did to him, and what I did to Captain Jack."

Mickey, who had met Jack once, frowned. "What's Jack got to do with all this?"

"I saved his life," she said, her voice trembling.

"That's a good thing, though," protested Jackie.

"Not that way." She buried her face in her hands. "That Universe had a major anomaly in it, now, a single, fixed point in the middle of everything that is born and lives and dies. And that's Jack. I didn't just save his life once, you see." She looked at all of them and drew in a deep, shaky breath, as if begging them to forgive her for a crime they couldn't even comprehend. "I saved it forever."

"But to save a life…" Jackie said.

"It's the sort of thing that can never go unpunished, Mum. I condemned him to a living hell of endlessness. It hurt both of them, so very much, and I didn't even know. Jack wouldn't even blame me, he's not like that. The Doctor probably considers it singularly appropriate. But that sort of act demands payment in kind."

They didn't understand, she realized that almost immediately, so she waited for the next question. It came from Pete, of course, who looked shocked and shaken by all of this. "So what will you do?"

"I'll live out my life, however long it is. I'll grow old, eventually, and then I'll die. And it will happen, again and again, twelve times. Worlds will turn under my feet and I'll feel them. People will walk by and I'll see them. Eternity will pass and I'll live it. Worlds will begin and end, and I'll make them. That'll be my job, my task, my responsibility. But for now and for the rest of your lives, I'll still be Rose Tyler, former shop-girl, Torchwood employee, and Defender of the Earth. I'll do things that confuse you and make you angry, but I would have done that anyway. And I'll take your hand, and tell you to run, and we'll run, for as long as you can, together."

Then she stood up and she left the room, to let them talk about it amongst themselves. At the door, she stopped. "Pete, you'd better have her bag packed. I'll be back with the car in three hours and we'll be ready to go."

Victoria Rose Tyler was born at 11:45 pm at the Torchwood Infirmary on that Wednesday night. She was blonde haired and had a happy dimpled smile and brown eyes that could steal the world. Her sister Rose Marion Tyler held the baby for the first minute of her life, then stepped away into another room, where it was quiet, and collapsed.

At midnight, Mickey found her there. He wondered if she had lied to them, if she had known she was dying of something alien and cureless and utterly unstoppable. She would not have done it to protect him or Pete, but to protect Jackie and ensure the safety of the baby, she would have lied to her very last breath.

He reached out and took her hand, and found it cooler than living, human warmth, but not cold. A quick shift to touch her wrist found her pulse, but the single beat he expected was instead a twinned throb against his fingertips. In almost the same instant that Victoria Tyler was born into the human race, her sister had left humanity behind. She was changed, then, and lost to them forever, but wonderfully, terribly alive.

She was like the Doctor, now, then, and might as well be with him as she was as distant from their human lives as the stars she would now inhabit.. Mickey found himself laughing and crying at the same time, and didn't know which emotion hurt more.

A new born Time Lord walked the winds of Time in her dreams, and touched the beginning and ending of things. She saw again in exquisite detail every moment she ever spent with the man she loved more than her own life, including some moments she never knew she'd been with him. She saw now what she could never have seen as that precious, innocent girl he loved so dearly in return.

As a human being, she could never have stayed with him. As a Time Lord, she could never have been with him. In this Universe or in any other, she could never, ever have him. But here, in her new home, she could be as close to him as she would ever have been. Here, there was no Doctor, and she could never touch him. But there was something.