Running
He started flipping switches as soon as she closed the door. He had to trust that she knew what she was getting into. Her lapse into unconsciousness didn't seem to phase her. Neither did his ship, for that matter. The way the TARDIS had greeted her still sung in his mind. He felt pulled towards her and he couldn't understand why. She was an enigma and he was intrigued.
Luckily, he had scanned her and the TARDIS knew her signature. Something told him that the TARDIS would be able to track her even if he hadn't scanned her already. All he had to do was get to a quiet place so he could track her. He wasn't quite sure what she was, or what she was to him, but he knew that Rassilon couldn't have her.
With renewed determination, he began working on a way to get his Wolf back. He didn't even notice the possessive, or if he did, he chose to ignore it.
~DW~~DW~~DW~
"Rose Tyler. The Doctor's missing Rose?" Koschei looked at the girl in a new light. So this is the woman that finally managed to catch the Doctor's eye. On the surface, she looked plain. Oh, she was beautiful in her own way, yes, but nothing about her was remarkable. She hummed with golden energy, though. The same energy that had enveloped his mind and freed him. It sung of Time and Power and if he were still the Master, he would want her for his own.
"Yeah, I guess I am."
"What happened to you?"
"Was in another Universe. Lived my life with my husband. But an accident when I was traveling with him altered my physiology. I stopped aging. I'm close to a thousand years old by now. I actually don't have a clue how old I am. There's some of the end of my life in the other Universe that I'm a bit sketchy on, to be honest. It was, traumatic."
"Maybe later, between the Doctor and I, we can get those memories back."
"I'd like that, but first, we need to get out of here." They were in a sealed room. They walls were completely white and Rose couldn't see any crevices to give away where a door might be. But then, she was used to Time Lord technology and how misleading it could be. She unfocused her eyes and began looking for something out of place. Something out of the corner of her eye. There! She reached into her pockets and found the one tool she had taken from her Joshua: his sonic screwdriver. She smirked. They hadn't bothered patting her down. She fumbled for just a moment and switched it to the correct setting. She couldn't just override the locking mechanism, she had to hack the system and that would take time. Hopefully, they weren't watching.
~DW~~DW~~DW~
A century or more in this stupid War and the Doctor finally found himself facing off against his own kind. As much as he loathed them most of the time, or at least most of their practices, he didn't ever want to fight them. They had done something unforgivable and kidnapped the Wolf. It hadn't taken him long to find her, either. They had kept her on Gallifrey, and had only moved her to a more secluded location. He'd been here, once before, back when he'd been put on trial and exiled. It was a prison specially designed for Time Lords. And he had never successfully broken out of it before, let alone gotten someone else out. Well, there was a first time for everything.
He snuck in through one of the many tunnels that ran beneath the city. Each connected to another building so in times of War, such as now, people could still go about their business. There were guards, of course. But the Doctor hadn't spent a thousand years meddling in the Universe and not figured out how to get around guards.
The Control Room was a bit trickier to get into. The entrance was covered by a perception filter. He passed it several times before he noticed it. Gaining entry was exceedingly simple. It began to worry him how easy this was all, him getting in here. He still hadn't found her yet. He flipped through the cameras, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. When he finally found her, she was with someone else. He didn't recognize the person, but Rose seemed to be leading him out so he must be a prisoner as well. The Doctor shrugged. It wouldn't be the first time a companion brought a stray on board.
He quickly pulled up the schematics to the complex and began heading in their direction. Hopefully, between the three of them, they could get out of here quickly.
~DW~~DW~~DW~
It didn't take her long at all to hack through the controls. As soon as the door opened, she grabbed Koschei's hand and they began running. With any luck, they would run into the Doctor and get out of here. She didn't dare reach out with her senses to find him. Lucky enough that they had gotten out of the room so quickly. She had no idea how many guards there would be, if any, and didn't really care to fight any of them. The last thing she wanted was to go head to head with a Gallifreyan. She was more than a match for one, but that didn't mean she wanted to fight one.
Koschei stayed silent through most of their running. He had quite a bit to process. Here he was, freed of the bindings that Rassilon had cast on him, running with his best frenemies girlfriend, trying to meet up with him. It was a bit surreal, and mad. But not a bad place to be.
They ran headlong through the corridors, not stopping, and not looking behind. It was a maze, with several twists and turns. Koschei had no idea where they were going, and he wasn't sure if Rose did either.
They rounded a corner and ran head-long into the Doctor. There was some confusion, and tangled limbs. When all three were upright again, the Doctor immediately went on guard. The one person he really didn't want to see was in front of him. Throwing the Master into all of this would be more chaos than he thought he could deal with. He opened his mouth to speak as much when the Wolf interrupted him.
"Koschei, you alright?"
"Yeah, Rose, I'm alright." He turned to the Doctor, slight smirk on his face. "Fancy meeting you here."
"What do you want?" Before Koschei could answer, the Wolf held up her hand to her face, placing her finger on her lips.
"Fingers on lips." It took a moment, and a raised eyebrow from her, but they both complied. "Now, we get out of here. You boys can hash out your problems later." She turned to the Doctor. "Lead us out."
~DW~~DW~~DW~
It was strange, being in the Doctor's TARDIS again. She was wary of him, but she still greeted him like a friend. It made him feel good as well as confused the Doctor. Actually, the Doctor was confused about a lot right now. Like how the Master, no, Koschei, was calling the Wolf by Rose. She'd never offered him her real name. And how was it she could fly his ship? She was a bundle of mysteries that he planned to unravel.
"So...Rose?" The Doctor called her by the name he'd heard Koschei call her. He expected her to wince. What he didn't expect was for her to grin widely at him and envelope him into a rib crushing hug.
"The Old Girl jump-started my memories when I stepped inside. It was a bit much for me to process, hence the collapsing. I would've come by them eventually, but she decided I needed a little push."
"Okay...how is it you can communicate with her?"
"Ah, well, that I can't tell you. It's your future. Or at least it was. I'm not sure how that will all happen now that I've met you before I met you." The Doctor pinched the bridge of his nose. So she was from his future.
"If it makes you feel any better, Theta, I'm also from your future. Just a bit farther off than she is. I'm not sure what's going on here, or why she's jumped so far back into your Time Stream, but I'm thankful for it. Otherwise, she wouldn't have found me or saved me." The Doctor turned to Koschei. For the first time in a very long time, he could see the young boy that he grew up with. It was, very strange. The Wolf, no, Rose, interrupted before he could really think of anything to say.
"Alright. We're in the Vortex and there we will stay for a while. It seems I owe you both some explanations. And maybe, between the three of us, we can figure out a way to end this War."
~DW~~DW~~DW~
The settled in the Library. This had always been the Doctor's retreat when Rose traveled with him. It didn't surprise her that they settled there. The TARDIS, helpful thing that she was, had a tray of tea and biscuits waiting for them. Rose settled in a chair by herself, with each of the Time Lords sitting across from her. She took a moment to take a long sip of tea before settling back into the chair.
"For the first nineteen years of my life, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Then I met a man called 'Doctor' and my entire life changed. He showed me incredible worlds and opened my mind to how vast the Universe actually was. We traveled together for a year, relatively speaking, before he tried sending me away. We were cornered, no way to escape. He sent me to the TARDIS to get something, then remotely had her send me home. I was crushed. He needed my help, but I couldn't fly the TARDIS and he knew it. He did it to save me and condemn himself. But I was, if nothing else, stubborn." Rose paused, taking another long sip of her tea. The men across from her had adopted almost identical expressions. The were perched on the edges of their seat, fingers steepled, absorbing her every word.
"I did something, incredibly stupid. I opened the Heart of the TARDIS and absorbed her. Together, we got back to the Doctor." The Doctor sitting across from her opened his mouth, but closed it almost immediately. She took it as a sign to continue.
"I don't know how long I held her inside. I was a Goddess and could see all that was, is, and could be. With a wave of my hand, I destroyed the Daleks. Atom by atom they disintegrated. I said that I ended the Time War and brought a man back to life indefinitely. But my mind was burning and he could see that. He removed the Vortex from me and siphoned it back to the TARDIS. He held it for only a short time but the damage was already done. By the time I woke, he was beginning to Regenerate. Even though I watched him change, I didn't trust him. Not at first. I was so confused. But it didn't take long for me to see that he was the same person, just different packaging. We went back to our adventures as if nothing happened. It wasn't until we were separated in different Universes that I noticed the changes." She paused again, as if to collect her thoughts. The memories were still tumbling through her mind, but she and the TARDIS both knew that this Doctor needed to know her past. Because otherwise, their plan would never work.
"After months for me, he managed to get a message across. He told me it was impossible for him to cross back over, to come get me. I confessed my love to him. The message was cut off before he could do the same. I wondered what he'd meant to say and I knew that I would never find out. That was before the stars started going out. We didn't know how or what, but the walls between Universes were weakening. We built this machine to cross Universes. I was the only one who didn't get dangerously sick from the jumps. I don't know how long I actually jumped. Linear time, it was just a few months. But I stayed in each Universe for different amounts of time each. I was aboard the Valiant." She looked pointedly at Koschei and he averted his eyes. The Doctor watched the two and wondered what the exchange was all about but for once he shut his mouth and listened.
"Eventually, I made it to the correct Universe, but something was wrong. Part of the Trickster Brigade attached itself to his current companion. It changed her entire course. It was such a subtle difference but it changed the Universe. To make things right, I took her back in time to change the tiny decision she had made that had created this little Universe. She ended up killing herself. Soon after, I found you again.
"Things didn't end up quite like I imagined. I had fought so hard to get back to you. Yet here I was, on a beach, with two versions of you. The Time Lord and the human/Time Lord biological meta-crisis. And you, left me with an impossible choice. Which to chose. You wouldn't let the copy come with us, and I couldn't leave him. And I chose him." Rose stopped talking and sighed deeply.
"Why wouldn't I take you both?" It was Koschei who answered.
"Have you seen yourself with yourself? One is bad enough." The Doctor ignored Koschei.
"Seriously, Rose. Why wouldn't I take you both?"
"You thought it best. Give me the human life you thought I wanted with an almost exact copy. The one adventure you could never have. And we had a great life together. But all things end and everything dies. Eventually, I made it to the end of the Universe where I was captured and tortured. When I finally escaped, I was vengeful. I was also very unstable. I destroyed not only my captors, but the entire Universe. I fell into the Void. When I woke, I was in Hell. The Time War was waging above my head. I helped where I could, always trying to keep to the shadows. Interfering when I could. Eventually, I landed on that planet where I met you."
Rose stood and pursed her lips together.
"We have quite a bit of work cut out for us, boys. Not the least of which will be stopping this War. I think it's time we stopped running."