Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, nor am I making any profit off of this. I'm simply enjoying playing around with the characters like they're part of my own personal doll house.

A/N: Thank you to everyone who's reading this story! It really means a lot to me! I do have most of it drafted up now, so I plan on keeping a regular posting schedule. Once again, please let me know what you think! Are the characters' voices coming across right?

Chapter 2 – Signals and Revelations

Within the hour, Rose was back in her office at Torchwood with the Doctor. He worked as a consultant for the Department of Alien Artifacts, so it was a fairly common sight to see him there. He often met Rose for lunch, and they had worked as partners on numerous projects in the past. Everyone at Torchwood seemed to know about the infamous duo.

The Doctor slipped on his 'sexy specs', as Rose liked to call them, and she showed him the email that she had received that morning about the Bad Wolf Project along with a set of documents that the young man in charge of the project had sent to her office while she was away.

As the Doctor poured over the documents with his reading glasses on, Rose silently paced the length of the room. Project, newspaper, sandwich, she repeated over and over in her mind, trying to find some link between the three. Surveillance, TV show, food... She had yet to find a connection, besides the fact that the words 'Bad Wolf' seemed to be chasing her. Maybe that was the connection, simply someone trying to get her attention for some reason or another.

"You're going to wear a hole in the floor," the Doctor admonished as he peered over his glasses at Rose.

She reluctantly stopped her pacing to ask, "Do you have any idea what's causing the signal?"

"Welll," the Doctor drew out the word in a way that only he could, "it could be any number of things. Space junk, an alien, an alien ship. Or it could be nothing at all, simply a rogue signal being broadcast from some other time or some other place that happens to be coming through right above the Earth. You lot are always sending signals of some sort, it's like you're just asking to be found."

"So basically, you don't know what it is."

"Nope," He said popping the 'p'. "But doesn't that just make it more exciting?"

A wide grin spread across the Doctor's face, and Rose found herself unable to keep one of her own forming in response.

"It's only exciting if it amounts to something interesting, Doctor."

"Quite right. So, let's do some more investigating before we get our hopes up, then. Where's this signal being tracked at?"

Rose grabbed the Doctor's hand and led him down the hallway to the lab that she had been in earlier that morning. She tried to introduce the Doctor to the head of the lab, but the pinstriped man instantly skittered off to the technical equipment in the room and began twisting dials and pushing buttons.

"Hang on, you can't do that!" The head of the lab, the young man that Rose had spoken to that morning, tried to peel the Doctor away from his precious equipment.

"I think you'll find that I just did," the Doctor replied stubbornly as he scanned over the readouts from one of the machines.

"But this is very sensitive equipment, and-"

"That's Dr. John Tyler, consultant for the Alien Artifacts department," Rose quickly interrupted before an argument could break out. "He knows what he's doing and he's got clearance to be in here."

"Just the Doctor, thanks," the Doctor said by way of introduction.

"Sorry, he likes to insult people when he's stressed," Rose apologized to the lab technician for her strange husband.

"I do not!" The Doctor said, looking up from a readout on one of the machines.

"He does. He's rude and not ginger."

The lab technician gave her a funny look, as though he thought Rose may have lost her mind. There were certainly plenty of rumors flying around Torchwood about Rose and Dr. Tyler and the strange antics that they got themselves into often. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Rose grinned at each other like loons over their little inside joke.

The Doctor began typing away at a keyboard while Rose discussed the project with the employees in the lab. Suddenly, he looked up from the machine's monitor with a frantic look to point at the lab technician, "You! Yes, you, head lab guy, you! Sorry, I didn't catch you name."

"Stephen," the lab technician that had been unhappy about the Doctor messing with his equipment replied.

"Right, Stephen, have you lot been able to decipher the signal that you're receiving?"

"No, none of our devices seemed to be able to recognize the technology."

The Doctor groaned, rubbing the back of his neck. "Right, yes, well you picked quite an accurate name for the project, then. The signal that you're receiving translates to the words 'Bad Wolf'."

"Nice coincidence!" Stephen replied happily.

"How many times do I have to tell you people?" The Doctor frantically waved his hands around to emphasize his point. "There is no such thing as a coincidence. Especially not one like this. There is something out there, transmitting that phrase for a reason. They didn't just wake up one morning and say, 'you know what, I want to mess with Planet Earth and send them a phrase from a nursery rhyme!'. They're doing this on purpose."

"Do you think it's actually the Bad Wolf?" Rose asked, excitement coursing through her veins at the same time that her heart constricted with terror.

"Ooh, who knows," the Doctor replied as his face lit up with pure excitement. "Could be, but my guess is it's something that knows of the Bad Wolf."

"What are you two going on about?" Stephen asked, feeling as though he had missed a huge part of the conversation.

"Welll," the Doctor said, drawing out the word, "there's something out there called the 'Bad Wolf' that seems to like following us around with words a lot."

"Um, okay then," Stephen was pretty sure now that the rumors of these two being crazy weren't too far off.

"Don't try to understand it. We still don't." Rose suggested with a kind smile.

"So then, as I see it we have two options now," The Doctor added as he bounced on the balls of his feet with joy. "One: We do nothing, and wait to see if whatever's out there shouting 'Bad Wolf' ever does something. Or, B: We push the big red proverbial button and return the signal to them to see if there really is something out there."

Rose and the Doctor grinned maniacally at each other, before simultaneously shouting, "Big red button!" and high-fiving each other.

"You two are mad," Stephen said, looking between the two.

"Yup!" Rose agreed happily.

While the Doctor got to work pulling out wires from one device and typing instructions into another, he explained, "It'll take too long to try to construct a new message with this primitive technology, so we'll just have to settle for pinging their message back to them."

"If anyone has the right to send about the message 'Bad Wolf', I think we do." Rose replied.

"You have no idea," the Doctor mumbled as he continued working.

Rose and Stephen, and a few bewildered lab technicians, looked on as the Doctor finished his work and animatedly hit the 'Enter' button on the keyboard with finality.

"There, all done," The Doctor proclaimed as he bubbled over with excitement. "The signal's been transmitted back to whatever's out there, hovering above the Earth so very patiently. Personally, I hate patience. I'm rubbish at it."

One of the devices on the desk beeped suddenly, and the Doctor rushed over to it to read the monitor attached to it.

"They've sent another signal! 'Surrender the Bad Wolf or the planet will be-" the Doctor's words cut off with an audible gulp, and the terror in his eyes as he stared at Rose made her blood run cold.

"What, Doctor? The planet will be what?" Rose asked with dread.

"Exterminated."

Immediately, Rose began barking out orders to the nearest Torchwood employees while the Doctor muttered under his breath and furiously typed away at various machines.

Rose tried calling her father on his mobile, but it went straight to voicemail, so she turned to Stephen and said, "Get Pete Tyler, Head of Torchwood! I don't care what he's in the middle of, tell him we have Daleks incoming."

Stephen stood frozen to the spot, simply staring at Rose with confusion.

"What are you waiting for!?" Rose shouted at him. "Don't just stand there, RUN!"

Stephen's eyes widened perceptibly as the full commanding force of Rose Tyler washed over him. Then, he did as he was told and broke out into a run to find the head of Torchwood.

The Doctor had successfully rewired one of the devices and its monitor now displayed an image of a single Dalek ship orbiting above the Earth. "There's only one ship, but it's fully loaded. That's more than two thousand Daleks right above planet Earth."

Rose swore, and turned to the nearest lab technician. "Run down to the weapons stores and get them to start distributing the polycarbide guns to anyone and everyone that's been trained to use one. They're built to damage the skin of a Dalek."

The man ran off obediently, while Rose turned to someone else to demand, "Go to my secretary and have her call in all off-duty Torchwood agents in the area. We're going to need everyone that we can get."

Rose looked over at the Doctor to find him staring at her. It wasn't often that he saw the soldier side of his Rose anymore, but every time he did it filled him with both pride for how far she had come and guilt for what he had turned his companions into.

Rose recognized the all-too-familiar look of guilt in her husband's eyes, so to distract him she asked, "How long do we have?"

"Well, they seem to be launching Daleks from the ship as we speak. I'd say we have about 20 minutes, give or take, before they get here."

"Right, okay then," Rose began her pacing again.

Having distributed all of the necessary orders that she could think of and that she had the clearance to issue, Rose whipped out her mobile to ring up her mother. Once the word "Dalek" had been uttered, it took very little explanation to persuade her mother to pull her brother, Tony, out of school early for the day and to secure themselves in the shelter room that had been built into basement of the Tyler mansion when it was rebuilt after the Cybermen attack years back.

"I thought you said there weren't Daleks in this universe," the Doctor said pensively when Rose finished the conversation with her mother.

"There aren't, as far as we're aware," Rose explained. "We had them when the walls around the universes were collapsing, because they were able to come through to this universe from our old one, but other than that they've never been seen here. My theory is that the Daleks and the Time Lords existed together, as a sort of balancing act. So, since you guys only existed in the one universe, the Daleks do, too. But if that's the case, how'd they get here now?"

"Ohh," The Doctor tugged at his ear as he thought, "They probably fell through the Void and managed to slip through a tiny crack to this universe. Similar to the first time we accidentally ended up here, when there were the Cybermen."

"So does that mean somewhere there's a crack between the universes that could potentially rip open to the Void again?" Rose asked, her voice filled with worry.

"Probably not. Tiny cracks tend to happen often, little fissures at the edge of the universe caused by the normal stretching and pulling and ripping that comes with universal expansion. Like when the skin on your hand gets really dry, and simply bending your knuckles causes the skin to crack and break open," The Doctor demonstrated by holding his hand out in front of him and flexing it. "But when it's tiny cracks like that, they heal themselves, just like your the skin on your hand would. Problems, like when the Cybermen leaked through from this universe to our old universe, only happen when people find those cracks and rip them open further. Once they get too big, the cracks can't seal on their own anymore and somebody like a Time Lord with a TARDIS has to step in to save the day."

"If these cracks are so common, and one big enough for an entire Dalek ship to slip through is considered small enough to not be harmful, how come you couldn't get through one of those to get to me when I was trapped here?" Rose looked a bit hurt.

"Oh Rose," The Doctor wrapped her up in his arms for a big embrace. "Believe me, if that would have worked, I promise you that you would have found a big blue box waiting for you as soon as you looked away from that white wall after Canary Wharf. The TARDIS is much bigger, and much more dimensionally complicated than a Dalek ship. Trying to move the TARDIS through a tiny crack like that would require punching through it with so much force that it would rip open and destroy all of the universes at once."

"Okay. I'm sorry, I had to ask though," Rose blinked away the moisture that had formed in her eyes as she moved out of his arms to survey the monitor displaying the Dalek ship on it. "So, you think these Daleks must have come from our universe, yeah?"

"Yup."

"How? Didn't we kill them all off? You know, end of the Time War at the Game Station, all the Daleks sucked into the Void at Canary Wharf, blowing up Davros and the Genesis Ark. There shouldn't be any left after all of that."

"Welll, the thing about the Daleks is that no matter how many times we seem to get rid of them, they just come back. One slips through into the Void and then back again, or the Dalek Emperor escapes the time lock. They're a right pain, and an awful lot like you humans with your will to survive. Even at the very end of the universe, the humans are still making ends meet. Didn't see any Daleks there, though. Maybe I finally got rid of them once and for all," the Doctor stared into space thoughtfully for a moment.

"Your will to survive seems to be even stronger than that of the Daleks."

"I suppose," the Doctor looked back at the machines with a dark look in his eyes. "I should get back to this. I'm going to see if I can get any more information about them. What they want, why they're here, the usual stuff."

"Oh," Rose's eyes lit up as something clicked in her mind. "Hang on, what was that message that they sent last? I didn't really pay attention to it, what with the 'Exterminate' and all."

"'Surrender the Bad Wolf or the planet will be exterminated,'" the Doctor read. "That's not good. That is very, very not good."

"So they want something that doesn't actually exist except as a jumble of words that have been tossed across all of space and time and two different universes?"

"Er, well, yes. Apparently." The Doctor knew differently, that the Bad Wolf was indeed a very real, very powerful, and very dangerous being. But it was gone now. He had died to take the power of the Vortex out of Rose and to return her to being her very human-y self again. There was no way to return the power to Rose without universal destruction, or at the very least killing his favorite pink and yellow human in the process. Especially not without a TARDIS to look into. Bad Wolf no longer existed, so they couldn't very well surrender it to the Daleks, even if they had wanted to.

"Okay, but how do they even know about Bad Wolf? And if it's just words, then how could it be surrendered to them?" Rose's eyes opened wide with realization as she stared at the Doctor, dumbfounded. "Bad Wolf isn't just a phrase that's been following us, is it, Doctor?"

"No, it isn't," he agreed solemnly.

"They want the Bad Wolf surrendered to them, so it must be something that can be surrendered, unless of course they have no idea what it even is," Rose paused in thought for a moment. "I suppose they could have just seen the words everywhere and assumed it was some powerful force that they could use as a weapon. But more than likely, Bad Wolf is actually an object. Or a person."

"Maybe," the Doctor stared evasively at the floor as he rubbed the back of his neck.

"Okay, so here's what I know about it. The Bad Wolf words led me back to the Game Station to save you. I looked into the heart of the TARDIS, and somehow flew it back to you. There was this beautiful music, and apparently the Daleks all dropped dead, and then you died and regenerated. You told me at the time that you sang a song and they all ran away, but you told me later that I'm really the one that destroyed them all somehow. And I looked into the TARDIS just before then, so I'm guessing I used the power that helped me fly the TARDIS to destroy them. Also, to scatter the words as the message that led me there in the first place. So really, I am the Bad Wolf, aren't I? Me, combined with the power in the heart of the TARDIS, is the Bad Wolf."

The Doctor didn't reply, but the guilt and sadness that filled his eyes as he looked up to meet her eyes was all the confirmation that she needed.

"Wow, okay then," Rose sank down into the nearest chair. "So, if I'm the Bad Wolf, then the Daleks want me?"

"No, they want the Time Vortex. That's the power that you got from the heart of the TARDIS."

"If I did that though, is it still in me? Locked away somewhere, along with the memories of that time?"

"No. It was in you. You were overflowing with all of the power of the Time Vortex. All of time and space at your control. But no one is meant to have that kind of power, Rose. It was burning you up from the inside, so I removed every trace of it from you."

"And if no one is meant to have that power, that's what killed you, didn't it?" Still sitting, Rose placed her head in her hands. Her next statement came out as almost a whisper, "I killed you."

"Oh Rose, it wasn't your fault," the Doctor squeezed her hand reassuringly. "I would willingly die over and over again from now until the end of time just to save you. Besides, it was the only way to return the power to the TARDIS."

Rose looked up at him suddenly, "If the power only went through you, and didn't stay within you, then how come it killed you? I wasn't just a conduit, it was actually in me and I used it, but I survived. How did I survive, Doctor?"

"That I don't know. I've never really stopped to question it, I was just glad that you were alive."

"Should it have killed me?" Rose stared at her Doctor with big, brown eyes that could see right through him.

"I don't know, Rose," the Doctor ran his hands through his hair in frustration as he walked around the room. "Nobody's ever had the power of the Vortex running through them like that. Looking into the heart of the TARDIS shouldn't have transferred the power to you, it should have killed you instantly for even trying it."

"So, that's a yes, then. It should have killed me. What makes me different then?"

"Everything," the Doctor looked at her with love shining in his eyes. "You are fantastic, my Rose Tyler."

"And so are you," Rose gave him a cheeky smile.

The Doctor laughed at the reference to his ninth self before agreeing, "Yes, and so am I."

"Anyway, back to the point I was trying to make," Rose's tone grew serious again. "If Bad Wolf is a person, namely an enhanced me, then how do these Daleks know this? Why do they want the Bad Wolf? Do they know what it looks like? What I look like?"

The Doctor sat there stunned for a minute. She had so many questions that he hadn't even considered yet. "Weellll, I suppose if word got around that an entire Dalek fleet, including the Emperor, were all destroyed at the hands of some entity called Bad Wolf, it would cause them to go about seeking vengeance."

"But how would they know about the Bad Wolf? Only the Daleks that were there at the attack on the Game Station would know about it, right?"

The Doctor smacked himself on the forehead before saying, "Oh, Rose Tyler, you are brilliant! That's exactly it! This is a Dalek ship from that very attack. You had some trouble controlling the power, you know, bringing a bit too much life in places, so what if you didn't quite destroy one of the ships? What if, instead of being atomized, it got sent into the Void, where it fell through a crack and ended up here?"

"Are there any others that got away, then?"

"Oooh, probably not. You were pretty thorough," the Doctor smirked at her.

"I wish I remembered it," Rose said wistfully. She thought she could almost hear golden music echoing in the back of her mind.

The Doctor's face turned deadly serious as he replied firmly, "You can't. If you remember it, the memories will burn your mind and you will die. A human mind isn't built to withstand that kind of power, Rose, even if it's just seeing a copy of the memories."

"Right, then," Rose took her cue to drop the subject. "So, there's a Dalek ship above the Earth. The Daleks want me, or rather a me that no longer exists, and they must know what I look like if they were there to witness the events at the Game Station. They know there's someone here that can interpret their signal, because we sent it back to them from this location. I'm guessing with their superior Dalek technology, they probably figured out where the signal came from and were able to get access to at least some of the information surrounding the equipment, possibly even Torchwood's records considering that we've only got Earth firewalls protecting it."

"Yeah, so how does this help us?" the Doctor prodded her on, wanting to see what all she could deduct on her own.

"The signal could be traced back to this lab, which is in my department. The department that I, Rose Tyler, all looking like Bad Wolf as a sitting duck, am head of."

The Doctor nodded solemnly in response.

"Guess we know where the Daleks will be headed then," Rose added bitterly.

"Yup. Straight to Torchwood at Canary Wharf."

Rose groaned, "Been there, done that, and I'd rather not relive this one again, thank you very much. I've had enough of Daleks and big white Torchwood walls for a lifetime."

"Agreed."

"At least we can concentrate the attack here, then, and hopefully limit the amount of civilian casualties."

"Hopefully," the Doctor replied as he stared morosely at the monitors displaying the single Dalek ship in orbit and the hoard of Daleks continuously flying out of it towards planet Earth.

What had started out as such a brilliantly normal day was quickly turning into a nightmare.