Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC. I do not own any of it, nor do I get paid for it.

A/N Thank you for the lovely response on the last chapter. This chapter is enormous but I really didn't want to split it up.

Warnings for mentions of torture and character death. The quantic reanimator appeared in the Eighth Doctor Audio 'The Scapegoat'.

Happy Reading!

Chapter Nine

"You know we ought to move sooner or later. I think I feel the bougainvillea trying to crawl its way around my ankle," said Rose softly.

The Doctor lifted his head slightly and checked her ankle, in time to see the soft green tendril gently wrapping itself around it. With a smile, he nudged the vine with his toe and it retreated at once, leaving Rose's foot alone. "There," he said, sounding very pleased with himself. "Now, we don't have to move. Why your mother thought that having those ghastly things in her greenhouse was a good idea, I'll never know."

"It was a gift from the Verlossian ambassador. It would have been rude to refuse," said Rose, hiding her smile in his bare chest, feeling his single heart thudding. "And mum and dad will be back any minute. We don't want to walk out of their greenhouse half-dressed after not seeing them for a month."

"It's hardly our fault that we couldn't warn them of our arrival," said the Doctor, and Rose knew he would be pouting a little. "The coral is growing faster than I anticipated, and we promised to check the rift in Minsk…"

"I know, I know," said Rose and raised her chin to kiss him softly. "I spoke to Jake while you were checking on the coral," she continued when the Doctor released her lips and moved down to her neck.

"Mmm, have we got somewhere new to be?" he asked, shifting aside her blonde hair to access more skin of her neck.

"Iceland," she said, gasping slightly when his teeth scraped the hollow of her throat.

His head snapped up. "Really? Why don't we ever get sent to Belize or Cabo, eh? Could use a warm holiday," he joked.

"It's not a holiday, you daft man," giggled Rose. "There's been some unexplained activity and anomalous energy fluctuations in the vicinity."

"How is that not a holiday?" he asked with a cheeky smile and Rose had to agree. "We have a mystery to solve, Rose Tyler, and Iceland to explore. We haven't done that one already, have we?"

"Nope. We've done Greenland, not Iceland," said Rose.

She heard a curious clanging in her ear, but the Doctor continued to talk about their salvage trip to Greenland where they'd found a broken down vortex manipulator which the Doctor had been repairing.

"Rose, are you listening?" he asked and Rose blinked.

"Yeah, just thought I heard something," she said, shaking her head. "What were you saying?" But the ringing was getting louder, until she couldn't hear the Doctor's voice anymore and she awoke with a gasp.

Sitting up, Rose realised that she was in the scanner that she remembered from the TARDIS medbay, which was indeed where she was. The top of the scanner had opened up, as it did when it finished the scans. Good thing too, since Rose would have banged her head otherwise in her rush to sit up and given herself a concussion.

Hissing at the soreness of her muscles that reminded her that she had recently been tortured by the Daleks, Rose got out of the scanner and stretched a little. Her clothes had been left in a neat pile on the examination bed, and she wondered if it had been the Doctor who had undressed her. Deciding to dwell on it later, she took off the hospital gown and got dressed again. The clothes were slightly stiff with her dried sweat, but Rose deduced that there must have been an emergency for the Doctor to have left her in the scanner.

As she laced her boots, she sighed at the memory that she had taken refuge in. It had been about two years after they'd been married, and she and her Doctor had been in Minsk when they'd received a telepathic nudge from their TARDIS coral. They had rushed back to London the same day to check on the coral in her parents' greenhouse, and after making sure that it had everything it would need, they had left for Iceland only a day later.

It had been their life in that parallel world, rushing around the globe to solve mysteries, sometimes for Torchwood, but mostly when one or both of them inevitably stumbled into trouble. They were rarely ever in London, unless it was for holidays and special occasions or when their TARDIS coral called for them, usually because she needed something. In the years after she had lost it all, Rose relived those wondrous memories in her head time and time again, to remind herself of who she was and keep her sanity.

Shaking away those thoughts, she grabbed her coat and rushed towards the console room, where she could hear the Doctor speaking to a woman. Curious, Rose quickened her steps.

The Doctor was standing at the console, one hand tweaking levers and switches on the console while the other tugged at his own hair in frustration. "...got Amaranthine and Lovat," he said.

"That brings it to eight planets in total," said the woman, looking worried. She noticed Rose in the doorway and turned to the Doctor quickly, who followed her gaze and nodded at Rose.

"Rose, this is Susan. Susan, this is Rose," he said absently. "I'm afraid we have an emergency right now. The Skaro Degradations have escaped."

"Where did they go?" she asked in horror, simultaneously trying to remember if her Doctor had ever mentioned a Susan before. The answer came crashing into her mind and she gasped as she looked at Susan. "Susan? The Doctor's granddaughter?" she asked.

Susan looked surprised, yet pleased. "Yes, I am," she said, noticing how pale her Grandfather had gone behind Rose's back. She cleared her throat hastily. "The Degradations have escaped onto eight different planets here in the outer reaches. The Time Lords' delta waves did nothing but knock them out for a while."

Rose flinched at the mention of the delta wave, but nodded along. "Are these planets close together?" she asked.

"Neighbouring planets," answered the Doctor, looking surprised at her question. "Why?"

"Because I realised that my first hunch about them was right," said Rose, through gritted teeth. "Those Skaro Degradations, I will encounter them once again in the future when the void dies out."

The Doctor stared at her in alarm. "What could possibly destroy the void?" he asked.

Rose shook her head quickly. "It's a long story," she said. "Look, if I encounter them in the future, then it means that they were locked up in the void, weren't they?"

"Perhaps," said the Doctor, looking displeased at not being given the whole picture. "The question is whether those Degradations are really a threat, now that they are away from the Dalek influence."

Rose stared at him like he was mad, and even Susan shot him an incredulous look. "Take it from someone who was briefly linked to their minds, and someone who has encountered an even advanced form in the future," said Rose. "They are very, very dangerous. You cannot kill them, not even with weapons that will reduce a Dalek to smithereens. They are incredibly strong and are capable of bleeding entire planets dry and torture and murder their population. There's only a dozen of them but they won't stop at just these eight planets if they are let loose."

Rose was breathing heavily as she finished, and her fists were clenched, remembering her narrow escape from them. The Doctor looked torn between believing her and the prospect of committing murder, possibly genocide, since those were the only ones of their race in existence.

"Grandfather, I am getting a transmission from the Time Lords," came Susan's worried voice.

The Doctor looked away from Rose. "What do they want now?" he snapped.

Susan shot him an admonishing look for his tone. "It's an alert asking all war TARDISes to destroy the Skaro Degradations. They speak of a possibility of the Skaro Degradations attacking Time Lord outposts if they are not stopped here. The devastation they describe..." Susan trailed off and shook her head.

"What do you mean 'possibility'?" asked Rose, confused.

"They must have seen it in the Matrix after the timelines changed," said the Doctor, his mind racing. "If they are indeed as dangerous as you and the Time Lords think they are, then trapping them in the void is our best chance."

"Except if the parallel worlds are sealed off, there isn't a way to create a breach in the void," said Rose.

"We could ask the Time Lords to create a localised breach, that's not a problem," said Susan quickly. "But how do we get the Skaro Degradations into that breach?"

"This will help," said the Doctor, holding up one of the two green dice that Androgar had given him for the delta waves. "It's keyed to the Skaro Degradations' molecular structure. If I am very clever, and I am very, very clever, I can reverse the polarity...actually, I'll forgo the technical jargon for now since we are short on time."

"I thought the void only attracted void stuff," said Rose, confused.

"The void stuff, as you call it, is a type of radiation and like all radiations, can infect hosts," said the Doctor with a bright gleam in his eyes. "All we need is a source, and I am sure the Time Lords…"

"If it's a source you need," said Rose and then waved at herself. "Been through the void so many times that I might as well be."

"Splendid," said the Doctor, though he did shoot her a curious look at the mention of travels through the void. "This delta wave has enough scope to encompass all eight planets and infect the Degradations. And then…"

"Like calls to like and they get sucked into the void," finished Rose triumphantly.

"Exactly!" said the Doctor, bouncing on his toes. "Except, we have to act very quickly before they scatter far enough to leave our range."

"Then you get started on the delta wave, Grandfather," said Susan, at once. "I'll go to Gallifrey and inform the Time Lords about creating a breach in the void."

"How will you get there?" asked Rose curiously.

"I have this," said Susan, holding up a Time Ring.

The Doctor's eyes narrowed. "Where did you get that?" he demanded. "I thought you weren't sent to Vermillion by the Time Lords."

"I wasn't," said Susan, averting her gaze. "Oh Grandfather, can't this wait?"

"It most certainly cannot," he said, rounding on her. "Whose orders are you following, Susan?"

"Nobody's," she said at once. At his look of disbelief, she shook her head bitterly. "I'd hoped you thought better of me than this, Grandfather. I shall ask the Time Lords for that breach…" she said as she disappeared.

The Doctor grit his teeth in frustration and turned back to the console. He could feel Rose's concerned gaze on him but he didn't want to face that either. He decided to focus on tweaking the delta wave.

A beacon lit up on the console and he read the message from the Time Lords telling them that they would be ready to create the breach whenever he was ready.

He turned to Rose. "Hold on to something," he said, plugging in the delta wave conduit into the console.

A low, whirring noise filled the TARDIS and Rose recognised the sound as being something that had echoed through her head when she had been in that telepathic chamber.

"Alright, give me your hand," said the Doctor, and waited until Rose placed her hand in his. He stuck something that looked like a clear square of plaster to her palm and took it off almost immediately before sticking it onto the green dice.

The whirr became louder and a triumphant smile graced the Doctor's face. "Is it working?" asked Rose, guessing the answer already but wanting to make sure.

"It is," he said. "And here comes the breach," he added and pulled a lever.

To Rose's immense surprise, the ceiling became transparent and they could see the eight planets projected in front of them. A blackness was growing behind them, and Rose's awe slowly transformed into confusion. "Doctor, what's happening?" she asked.

The Doctor was staring at the sight in horror, before he jumped into action. "Close the breach! Close it at once!" he shouted into the TARDIS communication systems. "Can anyone hear me? Shut it down at once!"

Rose felt a strange sense of numbness envelop her heart and she found herself unable to look away as the blackness converged on all of those eight planets, diminishing their bright glow until they all looked sickly grey. She could faintly hear the Doctor screaming at the Time Lords to stop the breach, but it was too late.

Within moments, the blackness had swallowed all of the planets and left only dark space in its wake. The Doctor fell silent, and Rose slowly looked down at him.

"What happened?" she asked, hating how hoarse her voice had gone. "What went wrong?" she demanded, her voice getting stronger.

"Nothing," he said, looking pale with disbelief. "It should have only affected the Skaro Degradation, not the people or the planets themselves."

"How-how many people did we just murder?" asked Rose, her voice trembling with anger. "Doctor," she said sharply when he didn't answer.

"Twenty two billion, give or take," he murmured through stiff lips. "Eight whole planets…"

Rose felt her knees about to give away and she sat down on the stuffed jumpseat next to the console, before she could collapse. "Can we change it?" she asked, knowing the answer already.

"No," he said, and he sounded angry now. "They are gone. Trapped in the void forever. Or until it apparently dies out, according to your bright knowledge," he added bitingly.

Rose shot to her feet and glared at him, realising that he was lashing out but was unable to stop herself from retaliating just the same. "Don't you dare," she snapped. "You have no idea what you are even talking about."

"Enlighten me then," he said, rounding on her, his eyes flashing in anger.

"It is the future. I can't tell you," she said, equally angrily.

"That seems to be your excuse for everything," he said cruelly. "Well, congratulations Rose Tyler, your mistake just led to the deaths of twenty two billion people." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, his eyes widened. "Rose, I did not mean…"

"Yeah, you did mean that," said Rose, having gone pale at his words. "I must have got it wrong, and I am the reason why those people are dead."

The Doctor walked around the console until he was standing right in front of her. "Something in the delta waves or my calculations must have been wrong," he said. "It wasn't your fault, I promise you, Rose. It was mine."

"It was neither, actually," came Susan's voice from the TARDIS communication systems.

"Explain," ordered the Doctor as he and Rose turned to the console together.

"The Time Lords filtered the delta wave remotely from Gallifrey," said Susan. "They did not want to take any chances. Grandfather, I tried to stop them…"

The Doctor turned off the transmission and flopped down onto the jumpseat with his head in his hands. Rose's eyes softened as she sat down next to him and touched his arm tentatively.

He stiffened at her touch before relaxing a little. "I am tired, Rose," he said, looking up at the ceiling where the empty sky was still visible. "Tired of seeing what people are capable becoming." Rose didn't know what to say to that, but the Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out her ring. "I saw the inscription inside it," he said and ignored it when Rose stiffened a little. "My name and yours bound in a symbol signifying union, made by my own hand unless I am mistaken."

Rose sighed and took the ring from him, wearing it back on her left ring finger. "It isn't quite so simple," she said.

"Tell me anyway," he pleaded. "I need to know. I need to know that something good comes out of all this."

Rose felt compassion well in her heart and she inhaled deeply. "I still don't think it's a good idea but I'll try and tell you all that I can. Just, promise to hear me out and not interrupt until I am done," she added beseechingly.

He met her earnest gaze for a moment before nodding. "Alright," he said.

Rose nodded back gratefully and took another deep breath before beginning. "I was nineteen when we met. I was a shop girl in London, early twenty-first century. We travelled together for a while, almost a year but it could have been more," she smiled a little. "It's always hard to tell with the TARDIS. Anyway, we arrived at this place called the Game Station which was being attacked by...these very powerful enemies of yours to control the Earth and build an army. They were going to win, and we would have died, but you sent me away with the TARDIS."

The Doctor stared at her in shock and almost defied her request of silence to ask a barrage of questions, but then nodded slowly and waited for her to continue.

"I didn't like it," she said with a bitter chuckle, grateful for his silence. "Couldn't just leave you to die like that. So, I...opened the heart of the TARDIS." She heard his sharp gasp and met his gaze for an instant before looking down at the ring on her hand. "I looked into the TARDIS and the TARDIS looked into me," her voice was flat as she said it, and out of the corner of her eyes, she saw the Doctor tense. "I destroyed the enemies, but the power of the vortex was too much. It was killing me, so you took it out of me. You had to regenerate immediately afterwards, but we both missed the fact that some remnant of the vortex had remained inside me."

She had to pause for a moment before continuing. "We continued our travels in the TARDIS as usual. We, um, went from friends to uh, more," she went a little pink and avoided his gaze entirely, trying not to remember the blissful months after Krop Tor when she and the Doctor had finally become lovers. She cleared her throat and focused on the present. "Then, there was a war," she said, her voice hitching slightly. "We won but I was trapped in a parallel world with no way back. The walls were sealed. I can't tell you why," she said hastily when he opened his mouth.

He closed it and nodded at her to go on. She sighed again and twirled her ring around her finger. "I wanted to find a way back, naturally," she said. "I had my mum and the parallel version of my dad with me, and they had a son too, but I knew I had to come back. I worked for this organisation that my dad ran, called Torchwood, and we built this dimension cannon to seek travel between universes. It didn't work for a long time, until suddenly it did. An old enemy was trying to destroy all of reality and the walls between universes had been weakened. It was what killed the void."

They both flinched at the mention of the void, and were silent for a few moments before Rose gathered enough nerve to continue.

"Anyway, I travelled between universes, trying to find you as well as finding a way to stop all of reality from being destroyed," she said. "I found you, but you were shot. Instead of regenerating, however, you used the energy to heal yourself and siphoned the rest of it into a living biological receptacle." She felt his questioning gaze, and smiled a little. "It was your hand that you'd lost in a sword fight soon after regenerating. It grew back and all, but it didn't half creep me out." Even he smiled a little at that. "You had a friend. She was so amazing, and she touched that hand causing…"

"An instantaneous biological metacrisis," he said, breaking his silence in shock as the puzzle pieces began to make sense. "Sorry," he said when Rose raised her eyebrows at him.

She waved his apology away. "Yeah," she nodded. "Another Doctor, but with one heart. When the enemies were dealt with and all, the full Time Lord Doctor decided that the metacrisis Doctor and I would be happy together and dropped us off in the parallel world. Didn't exactly give either of us a choice," she said bitterly and looked away. "But I loved him and he loved me, and we were so ready to spend the rest of our life together. He was the Doctor, in every way possible, just with one heart instead of two. And we were so, so happy," her eyes filled with tears. "We eloped only a month after being left in the parallel world and started to grow our TARDIS coral so that we could continue running through time and space as always."

She stopped then and wiped away her tears and the Doctor felt himself reaching for her before he stopped himself. He didn't think she would appreciate his touch. Instead, he waited patiently for her to compose herself and continue.

"It happened about five years after we were married," said Rose, her voice sombre now. "It was the most mundane thing ever, but he forgot our anniversary. I didn't think much of it, because god, he could be so absent-minded. But then it was other things as well. Forgetting appointments, meals, small things which progressively got worse. Then the blackouts started and we finally did a few scans. The doctors thought it was early onset of Alzheimer's but we both knew different. The metacrisis was failing and the Doctor's mind was not strong enough to sustain it. The TARDIS coral started weakening without him and without that link to sustain him, the deterioration accelerated. I could see them both dying away slowly, and there was nothing I could do to help either one of them."

Rose started sobbing at this point, accepting the handkerchief that the Doctor gave her to blow her nose.

"Around the same time, I found out that my aging had almost stopped. The vortex remnant had been changing me slowly all these years, and those frequent trips through the void had only strengthened the Artron and Huon particles in my system," she sniffed again before continuing. "The Doctor died a year after his symptoms first started. He spent his last days using the TARDIS coral to enhance that vortex manipulator so I could find a way back, or at least, get away from Earth before people started asking too many questions. He begged me to leave, but I couldn't abandon him, no matter what. He could barely recognise me in the final weeks, and it got so painful to watch him wither away like that, but I didn't leave him. I stayed until the end."

The Doctor stayed quiet as Rose sobbed into the handkerchief and felt his hearts clench with sorrow for her. Then, he remembered the scars she bore and he realised that her story was about to take a turn for the worse. Rose didn't notice his paleness or his stiff posture before she continued.

"The Doctor asked to be cremated, like the Time Lords, and we arranged for his ashes to be scattered into space. We were driving back from the shuttle base back to London and there was a particularly icy part of the road. I was in the car behind my parents and my brother, when everything went dark. I later discovered that Torchwood had ambushed us, sending the first car crashing off the hill, killing my parents and my little brother," she sniffed again, and took a deep breath before continuing. "They were careful not to harm me. Not that time at least," she said bitterly.

Her hands trembled lightly, and yet again the Doctor felt an incredible urge to comfort her, especially since he could guess what had happened next. He stopped himself once again, and waited for her to continue.

"They had this...facility under Torchwood Tower," she said, her voice almost mechanical now. "I don't know if my dad or the few friends I had in Torchwood knew about it. I hope every day that they had no idea what was going on in there. I wasn't the only test subject nor was I the first one." Her voice shook as she continued. "It wasn't so bad at first. Blood samples mostly, to see why I wasn't aging. Then, they noticed how quickly I was healing from their serums and things. It got worse after that. They had salvaged a quantic reanimator on one of their raids, and they'd just found an ideal subject to test it on."

The Doctor inhaled sharply at the mention of the vile device. It explained the scars on her. Quantic reanimator was a temporal device, one of the worst of its kind. It allowed its subject to be killed in any way possible before the temporal shift righted itself to a time before the subject was killed, making it "alive" again as if nothing had ever happened. Except, the scars remained as a reminder of the "death" that the subject had suffered.

Rose smiled bitterly at his gasp. "Guess you know what that is then," she said. "Don't think I have ever died so many times without actually dying. Shot, poisoned, starved, stabbed, you name it and it's been done. I wish I could say I lost track of time, but time was the one thing I never forgot. It was five years, seven months and thirteen days and I remember every second of it. It became a game to them. Watching me die in agony over and over, and then bringing me back to life to start all over again."

The Doctor could feel his rage simmering under the surface but he forced himself to tamp it down so that he could listen to her continue. Regardless, his fists clenched tightly, which Rose noticed but ignored.

"It was an ordinary day when I escaped," she said, her trembling became worse. "I was being carved to pieces when I went numb. It terrified me, because I thought I was dying. You'd think I'd be glad to die after having all of that happen to me, but I couldn't let myself die. I couldn't just give up. The next thing I remember is this golden heat and when I woke up, I was alone. I was still in my cell and the torture instruments were still there, but everyone in there…" her breath hitched and she let her face fall into her hands. "They had been turned to dust."

Stunned, the Doctor stared at her, unable to think of a single thing to say. Rose continued on before he got a chance to respond.

"It wasn't just the people who were holding me, but all those poor aliens and everybody else in Torchwood Tower. People who had no idea what was going on underneath them, people who were just coming in to work. I-I've never hated or scared myself more. So, I ran. Torchwood had kept my possessions safe, including the modified vortex manipulator, and I ran away from Earth as quickly as I could. I didn't even feel safe to return until nearly fifteen years had passed. I flew under the radar, used aliases and never drew attention to myself for nearly eight decades. Then, a group of Daleks found me on Trenzalore."

The Doctor hissed at the mention of that place, but Rose was too lost in her memories to register it.

"They wanted me to open a breach between the two universes. I couldn't do that, so I activated a failsafe on the vortex manipulator and caused an explosion. I thought it would kill me, but I woke up on Karn. Where I met you." She inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly before raising her red-rimmed eyes to him. "And that's all."

The Doctor stayed silent, looking at the sorrow, fear and exhaustion in her eyes. He didn't know what to make of all the information that had been given to him. He had no doubts that everything she had told him was the truth, despite some of the stuff that she left out.

"I am sorry, Rose," he said finally. "For everything that happened to you."

She shook her head bitterly. "You are apologising for the wrong things," she said. "I will understand if you want me to leave."

He looked astonished. "Do you want to leave?" he asked.

"Well, no," she said, averting her gaze. "But you know what I did…"

"You were trying to survive and you had no control over it, Rose," he said.

"Doesn't make it right though, does it?" she asked, looking back at him with tears in her eyes.

"Doesn't make it wrong either," he said. "Rose, what you went through was terrible, and you reacted in self defense. It is similar to how a-a Time Lord would fight back if they had been backed into enough of a corner." At her questioning look, he sighed. "There was a reason why Morbius fed on the life force of Time Lords. It is an incredibly powerful energy and what you described may well have been the remnants of the vortex within your life force reacting to danger. You did what any other being does when faced with death and let your self-preservation kick in. You cannot keep blaming yourself for it."

Rose looked down at her hands and nodded slowly. "So, you are fine if I stay?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yes," he said. His eyes fell to her ring that she was fiddling with, and he went slightly pale. "Look, Rose, I…"

Rose followed his gaze and covered her ring with her other hand. "I didn't agree to tell you everything because I want you to be my husband, Doctor," she interrupted, her voice slightly cold. "My husband is dead, and I have mourned him. I do not expect, nor do I want you to be him."

"Then what do you want me to be, Rose?" he asked, feeling a little relieved.

She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. "A friend, comrade in arms, whatever you wanna call it," she said.

He waited for her to open her eyes and nodded slowly. "I think I can do that," he said.

Rose smiled a little and stood up. "Thank you," she said, turning to go back to her room.

"Rose!" called the Doctor and she turned around in question. "I have something in the medbay for getting rid of those scars. If you want, of course," he added hastily.

Rose stared at him for a few long moments before nodding quickly as fresh tears began to flow from her eyes. "Please," she said.

With a soft smile, the Doctor walked up to her and offered his hand. Rose placed her hand in hers and let him take her in the direction of the medbay.

There would be more questions to answer, and many things to mourn, but for now, Rose let the Doctor get those physical scars off her one at a time, with a gentleness that surprised her.

In the midst of chaos and death, it was a solitary moment of healing. For Rose, and perhaps even the Doctor.

A/N Phew, that was exhausting. Let me know what you thought of it.

The next chapter will deal with the events that follow the Time Lords' actions. It will be up soon.

See you then!