Hello! Firstly, I am so, so sorry that this has taken literally months to post. I've been stuck with uni work (as one part of the excuse), and I've been stuck on how best to resolve the situation I put the Doctor and Rose in. Kind of serves me right ... however, I did get hit by a Plot Bunny when I was on the train the other day, and it kind of sorted itself out from there. This is the second to last chapter, so the end is nigh! Thank you for sticking with this story (if you're returning to it), or thank you for reading it anew. I hope you enjoy it!

Chapter Seven: Shadows Play

A breath. Would another follow? He was conscious of the pull of his diaphragm hauling air through his nose, cool and accompanied by a familiar and oddly comforting scent. Different shades of dark flirted for his eyelids and felt all too bright, and he winced. Blinking made nigh on no difference to the dark, but he gave it a go anyway. His head felt as though it had absorbed the fog, a splitting headache stabbing in the depths. Passing uninvited into someone else's head was not a normal practice for him, but he still did not expect it to produce this kind of effect on him. Clearly trying to battle a daemon lurking in the mind of another was not without its consequences. How long was I in there? Another thought intertwined with the other, raising its ugly questions like stencilled eyebrows on a harlot: If this is a migraine, and I'm conscious of it, am I awake and back in my own head? Or is this somewhere else I really don't want to be … and where's Rose?

---(0)---

Everything was dark, and he was gone. There was Rose, and there was the Incubus, somewhere, waiting to launch the final attack. For a faceless volume of time, that was all she knew. The state of burning loneliness was nearly more than she could stand, and the unbridled terror that clawed at the space he had occupied threatened to drag her under, and she knew with awful certainty that she would not surface from the darkness. Alone in the dark, and with a creature hell-bent on her death.

And the Doctor was not there to save her. Not this time.

Rose knew he would not be coming back. With the Incubus being inside her head, she could gather smattered snips of a sense of what the creature was doing, rather than actual fully formed linear thoughts. It was how she imagined an animal processed life in its head: everything in the present, nothing in the past. Right now, the daemon holding her captive within her own head had one focus: keep the Doctor out. She was the intended victim, the calf without its parent, the completely vulnerable prey animal faced with a predator it could never escape, and that terrified her.

---(0)---

He needed to see her. "Lights," he rasped. Pale light bathed the room, and everything was deceptively, sickeningly normal: shoes on the floor, a book on the nightstand, even Derek, Rose's teddy, sat at the end of the bed and watching serenely as his owner fought silently against a parasite of the universe lodged in her head.

The Doctor checked her pulse, feeling her fright surge under his fingertips. Her eyelids fluttered, her lips parting in a silenced request for help.

He had to get back to her.

The Doctor positioned his fingertips lightly across Rose's temples, and closed his eyes.

Something whispered at the back of his mind that this might not be such a good idea. He had inexplicably left, pushed out into the real world like an unwanted guest.

Which was a serious problem.

While the Doctor was mildly telepathic at best, their consciousnesses had intertwined with each other, deep and welcomed by Rose, and their minds, effectively, had become one. That link should never have been severed. He had, effectively, been rammed back into his own head. Which explained the headache. You don't have complete control, not in there, the thought continued. This is dangerous. Even as the Doctor considered the argument, he chose to ignore himself, and let his consciousness reach for Rose.

It was like getting in the way of a hammer-throw champion with a sledge hammer. Gold prize, extended reign for another year, direct hit.

The Doctor screamed, throwing himself away from Rose and indeed off the bed completely, holding his head like it was a shattered watermelon. He lay rigid on the carpet, gasping. Everything was consumed by the pain, everything, and it was all he could do to keep himself from writhing across the floor with it. He could have been screaming, but if he was, he wasn't aware. Everything went a brilliant, scorching white and pain screeched in his ears. It felt as though he was dying, he had to be dying, nothing in life could be so painful.

Slowly, the pain abated, and the Doctor simply lay there for a while, recalling how to breathe, and also trying to persuade his hearts that they did not have to beat out his double pulse on base drums passed his ears. Eventually, he felt enabled to sit up. The splitting headache from before was back, but the pain trying to escape his scull was far preferable to what he had just suffered. He sat and breathed for a moment. All he could see in his head were empty sockets of the Incubus and its screaming, fanged maw.

That had been a warning shot. There would be no surviving another hit. Like the lioness, it would rip him apart.

---(0)---

Rose felt the whisper of the Doctor's mind brushing against her own. But her hope of his coming to her aid crushed to nothing when she felt the rush: like a blast of malevolent wind hurtling towards the destruction of something beyond her sight. She was nearly bowled over by it. But when she heard the scream, so distant and oddly so close, her throat closed up in panic. "What have you done to him?" Her voice sounded lonely, the crying of a dog left out in the cold. She couldn't feel him anymore, not at all. "What have you done?"

It laughed at her.

"I am not afraid of you! D'you hear?" The laughter continued, thrumming through the dark, all around and nothing she could do to reveal its dangerous source. "I'm not afraid of you!"

Oh, but you are, Rose, you really are afraid of me. I would be.

---(0)---

Their bond had never been a question of service. It was rescue, at the very heart of it; they had needed each other more acutely than either would be prepared to consider. But there it was, unsaid. That wasn't necessary. Together, they had saved entire galaxies, rescued entire species from the brink of extinction. And together, they had destroyed civilisations. Their understanding bridged centuries, and their shared knowledge of Time and each other spanning near a millennium fell beyond the scope of human comprehension.

But the TARDIS shared with another, aside from her Time Lord. Rose knew the time machine in a way the Doctor never could. That's what happens when the raw essence of a heart such as hers is revealed to another, after all. The human girl was not permitted to hold the knowledge the TARDIS had poured into her, though. It was like molten lava to her mind, the mind that belonged to a creature of such fleeting existence. But she was more than a blip on the face of Time, like so many humans.

This one was different.

He was such an odd one. His capacity to love was massive for his species, and he always managed to get himself hurt. All who walked through her doors were taken into his hearts and kept safe there, beyond their own life spans. Little things, to them both, but so huge. He made them so, opening himself up to the unbelievable pain their passing brought.

He was feeling something akin to that pain now.

Humans were his favourite. They always had been. He would pick them up, travel with them for as long as their lives allowed him to, and then they would leave, through varying means. Perhaps it was because they shared his biology, in part. Perhaps it was the fact that they had the ability to match his affection.

When the Doctor absorbed the raw power of the Vortex from Rose and forced it back through himself to the TARDIS, he sealed their intimate connection. The ferocity of the soul of a TARDIS is barely containable for a Time Lord. But his efforts to shield Rose from the power of the TARDIS was not as successful as he had hoped. A small, barely detectable link. The same link that she had used to wake the human when she herself could not wake her Time Lord in his distress. Now, he was frightened, and she could hear the human girl, the droplet in Time, screaming in the darkness.

--(0)--

The black peeled away. Its impossible motion frightened her as glaring yellow blazed through, until it enveloped her. Heat thrummed down on her, scorching her skin through its relentless glare. Rose tried to gasp, but choked on the hot air. Her eyes scouted her new surroundings…

She was back outside again. The African wilderness stared back, the sun bouncing into her eyes from the parched grasses. No life fled from her presence, or took an interest in her. No wind, no air. Just heat. The air – what little of it that there seemed to be – hung around her, heavy and carrying an awful, sickly-sweet odour. Her stomach cramped, and it took all her resolve to keep from retching. But, when she saw the source of the stench, that barely maintained resolve shattered, and she vomited, the blank eyes of the rotting lioness watching.

No hand soothed her back, no words of comfort whispered in her ear. Her loneliness dragged a sob through her. His absence hurt…

Something moved through the grass.

Rose straightened. Her eyes fired through the tinder-dry yellow. How she wanted it to be another lion. A lion, the dominant predator of Africa, would be more welcome to her eyes than the small, slinking form of the Incubus. She would never look at cats in the same way again…

But something else happened then, something that fired terror through her blood like a shot of injected poison.

Shadow bathed her in black light, blotting the sun like an unwanted guest. Darkened orange ate the grass lands surrounding her, a virus engulfing everything that dared exist in its path. The air clogged with drifting ash and blazing, consuming heat. The flames roared, possessed by the power of destruction. Panic burned her heart as much as the heat attacked her skin. Nowhere to run. How could she combat a bush fire?

And then there was something else to add to the terror of her situation, something that she had hoped would not come across her. She had known, right from the moment when she saw the lioness, that it was an inevitability. But that did not prevent her heart stopping when she saw the little grass not yet consumed by fire flatten under an unseen body.

"Oh my God…"

Rose did not allow it to move before she started running. Her eyes shot over the area, finding a gorge through the towering flare of fire. She darted through it, fearing her only avenue would seal itself before she got through it. Scrub torched around her, forcing her to jump it more than once. A fleeting part of her brain noted how impressive her leaps were in some cases. Running for your life as a daily occurrence certainly held its advantages.

The torrents of flame were a maze to her, a blistering, relentless death trap. The next turn down a wall of fire could well be her last, she was more than aware of it, yet she had to trust herself, offering herself to instinct like a blind lamb. And all the while, she could hear it, barrelling closer and closer, panting in the heat of its own creation. Perhaps the flames were just as dangerous for it as they were for her. What have you done?

Then something happened that she completely, utterly, did not expect. Neither, she realised, did the beast behind her: she heard a strangled yelp of dismay and shock emanate from its invisible body above the crackle of the dying grass –

A familiar wheeze rumbled over the fury of the fire and the Incubus' shriek. The shuddering image of the TARDIS materialised through the flames as she angled her staggered sprint towards the sound of salvation. The little air she could glean from around her snagged in her chest, desperation fuelling her lithe dance around the burning scrub and hunched trees. The Incubus screamed behind her, enraged by the challenge to its power by the invading force. It doubled its effort, abandoning the chase of sport for the chase of blood.

Rose screeched when it snagged her ankle, nearly throwing her centre of balance straight into the soil. Her other foot righted her, kicking out and managing to surge her forward … right into the TARDIS door. The wood bristled under her touch with heat and salvation. But before she could fumble the door open, the Incubus slammed into her back. The doors bust, sending them both flailing into the depths of the consol room.

--(0)--

Everything went black. The Doctor pulled his wide eyes from the face under his slender fingers, searching the sudden pitch for answers. His TARDIS never suffered power failure, not like a human house, and it frightened him, on top of everything, that something so serious as a loss of power should be happening, not right now, not when he could be about to lose her… His mind reached for his ship. She was focused on something, something beyond where he was allowed to go. She was functional, just not in the respect that she should be. Whatever it was that she was engaging in, he was not permitted to enter, which was made perfectly clear to him when their link was dampened.

"Oh no," he breathed, "not you too."

The lights flared back to life, too bright, then dipped again, only to peter out altogether.

Under the Doctor's fingers, Rose gasped.

--(0)--

Rose found her feet, throwing herself onto them when she finally managed to stop her body. She staggered back into the consol, feeling its familiar coolness under her fingers and gripping it, hard.

"Doctor?" She did not dare turn away from the slowly recovering beast before her. "DOCTOR!"

He wasn't coming. He had to be here, he had to have come to save her, he –

The beast arose, finding its feet and giving its head a vigorous shake. The fanged maw of the thing stretched and clicked, the small eyes darting over the interior, seeking its prey. The great grey scaled back flexed, talons digging into the grilling. Rose simply stopped breathing as the black, soulless eyes found her. It took a step forward, screeching at her. The shoulders bunched, bracing to spring –

The Incubus never made it a foot closer to her.

It was like someone kicked her from inside, pain and blackness, then –

Light. There was light, and softness, and touch. The touch she had wanted, needed more than anything in the world. Her eyes focused on the face hovering over her own. The anxiousness in his features was upsetting, deep lines engraved around those frightened, dark eyes.

"Rose?" he ventured tentatively, afraid of the response, afraid that he stared into the eyes of a shell. "Please, talk to me. Please…"

Rose's face cracked into a radiant, lovely smile. "Hello."

He laughed, that relieved, hoarse laugh of his as he pulled her up into his arms, kissing her face and clutching her to his chest. His fingers curled into her hair as though entwining himself in her would keep her there with him, forever. "I though I'd lost you," the Doctor breathed. "I thought you were gone, I thought you were gone…"

"Seems to be going around a bit, that," Rose smiled into the stuff of his shirt.

He suddenly pulled back from her, holding her in front of him, clearly not wanting to relinquish his hold on his Rose just yet. Just looking at her burned, her incredible recovery a searing impossibility. She talked without his request, briefly outlining everything that happened, from the darkness through to the unexplained appearance of the TARDIS, rupturing the Incubus' deathly grip on her mind. The fact that she was there to tell him blinded his intellect. She was so complete, so whole and alive, so so alive. No trace of the untold experience within her own consciousness tempered her eyes, no haunted post-nightmare tension tightened the muscle of her arms beneath his grip. Questions vied for being granted voice, shoving through his head in a torrent of importance. None of them, however, succeeded.

The unearthly shriek that rang through the corridors grabbed their attention and pulled. The pair stopped breathing at the sound, and the Doctor felt that coiling of her muscles that he had missed earlier. Another scream, and he was on his feet, pulling her up behind him without so much as a glance behind. He knew what it was, there was only one thing that it could possibly be, and he would have called himself a fool if he denied that the knowledge did not unnerve him. Still.

The Control Room. There it was, bawling and yowling like an animal caged – well, he had to concede, that was exactly what it was, in a manner. The Incubus was back in its demonic feline form, hissing and lashing out at the force of blue light surrounding it. It squealed at every contact with the forcefield, spinning and baring its fangs at every unyielding angle. And then its black pits settled on the Doctor, leaning his weight against the consol, and it cringed, baring its discoloured fangs in fearful hate. Its legs sank down and pushed it onto its belly under his unblinking stare. The wrath of a Time Lord, the most immeasurable force in the known universe. All focused, in that moment, on one parasitic creature.

"That's where it was when I woke up," Rose said, tentatively reaching his side and slipping her fingers around his. She was afraid now, being able to see the Incubus in the flesh as it writhed under the Doctor's glare. "It was all huge and … toothy. It jumped, and I felt this – shove. No, a kick. Like someone was kickin' me from my own head."

"You were shoved from your own head." His eyes never diverted their gaze as he offered her his explanation. "When you were … trapped … the TARDIS blocked me from her and concentrated her power. And it seems, Rose Tyler," the Doctor turned to her then and offered her a humourless smile, "that she was connecting herself to you.

"When a Time Lord and a TARDIS are teamed, they form a bond, a deep connection," he explained, his speech picking up pace. "That connection is only shared between TARDIS and pilot. However, Rose, I think that when you opened the heart of the TARDIS a year ago, a piece of your consciousness bled into her. I thought I'd pulled down the bridge, but clearly not as completely as I'd thought. She knew you were in danger, and she looked after you."

"Last night," Rose began slowly, "y'know, when I came in your room and you were -" the end of the sentence stalled, its truth lying beyond completion with the pain of the memories it evidently surfaced within him. "I was woken up by something, like a distant nudge, right in my head. I thought it was my mind playing tricks, and I rolled over. But then it happened again, and it was like I could feel the worry of her, a bit like a child tugging for attention, and then I listened, and…"

His attention levered back on the Incubus. "You've been feeding on me for months, that's one thing." His tone was dangerously level. "But when I gave you the option of an existence of peace, you chose violence and cruelty. Your actions have pulled you down into your own destruction." Without a further word, the Doctor turned to the consol, deftly setting coordinates into his beloved ship. The TARDIS juddered in protest, but he ignored her, slamming down three levers and raising the handbrake, releasing the time machine into the Vortex, the Incubus hissing and screeching from within its prison. "You should have taken the offer."

Rose watched, unsure of what to say. The Doctor was mad. His jaw was set firmly, his anger at what the Incubus had done giving his hand a slight shake with his barely suppressed rage. But his eyes, his eyes burned. There he was, the Oncoming Storm, the untempered fire so feared by so many other species, a force of fury and love and ire pushed to his absolute, merciless edge. And she knew that it was not because of what the creature had done to him, but what it had done to her.

Release me.

He ignored the demand in his head. Rose, it seemed, was not privy to its voice: the TARIS had completely evicted the Incubus from her consciousness. The yowling reached a splitting crescendo in his mind.

Release ME!

No. The Doctor passed around the plinth, holding down a resisting lever. You tried to hurt her. You've brought this on yourself.

Cruel, heartless –

The Doctor's head snapped up from the controls, and the Incubus found itself under the focus of that all-consuming ire. The eyes of the Doctor seared its skin. "You don't understand, do you?" he snarled. "I was trying to protect you from this! This is what I am! I give a chance, just one chance. I even told you that was it. This is your doing."