A/N to any history buffs among my readers: I fully realize that the next turning point is the weakest and cheapest of the lot, at once the most obvious and the least likely to actually achieve its stated goals – but then, I'm not writing historiography, am I? I beg your forgiveness for what I hope will be a good yarn, nevertheless.

Fifth Intermission

Alpha Rose started her now-habitual swing to the monitors, but then caught sight of Jared's face. Just as the Swedish Rose had flashed out, he'd drawn breath to speak, his expression suddenly slightly panicked.

"Jared? What is it?" a little panicked, herself.

"Nothing," he muttered, wiping his face blank as he turned around to watch the dimension cannon's readouts. "I think I programmed that right."

Jack pounced, already swinging his arm up with his personal time jumper. "Should I go back and help?"

Jared shook his head. "No, it's..." Even as he spoke, the pale yellow traces of Swedish Rose's parallel world flickered into existence alongside the other four. "... already too late," Jared finished through the relieved grin splitting his face. "Guess I was right, after all."

He turned back to Jack. "It only takes a couple of seconds, subjectively to us here, for the changes they're making in history to catch up to us. You wouldn't have had time to even make the jump – let alone find out where and when to go to. I didn't have time to tell you – as you saw. I wouldn't have had time if I'd been wrong, either."

Jack's arm sank back down, while he continued giving Jared a level look – a hair below a glare. "So let's take just a little more time beforehand, OK?"

Rose's eyebrows shot up at the idea of Jack Harkness advocating careful planning before any action, but forbore making any comments, as did Jared, who only nodded absently.

There were now only two parallels left to be established, their own Beta and Reich World. Jared picked up one of the remaining paperbacks and turned around, sighing. Reich Rose was still across the room, sitting slumped on the edge of the platform, elaborately ignoring the activity around the cannon's controls. In the last few minutes, their dog Tock had wandered over to her, and was now lying beside her with his head on her knee, gazing up soulfully at this mirror image of his own mistress and thumping his long tail on the floor while she absently stroked his fur.

Jared shared an apprehensive glance with his Rose. She shrugged and bobbed her head back at him, apologetically indicating he probably had a better chance than she did at talking the other woman out of whatever funk she was in. So he took a deep breath, tucked the book under one arm, and "casually wandered" over to sit on Tock's other side, dangling his feet likewise over the edge. Alpha Rose and Jack leaned against the console side-by-side to watch, arms identically crossed.

"I'm not doin' it," Reich Rose stated flatly before Jared could say a word. She didn't turn to look at him, staring obstinately across the Hub instead.

"So how've you been?" he asked, innocently conversational. She just shot him a disgusted glare, and didn't deign to reply. "All right," he acknowledged, nodding, then returned to the subject with one word. "Why?"

Reich Rose's face scrunched up, a tremor creeping into her voice. "All those millions of people dying... all the suffering..." She sniffed, blinking back sudden tears. "What's the point?"

"What about all the billions of people who lived – who would continue to live on into the limitless future? Countless individuals, spreading throughout creation in your universe?"

She shook her head. "If I don't even create the split, they'll never be born. They'll never know. You can't hold me responsible for preventing their births."

Jared thought a moment. "And what about you?" he asked gently. "The cannon is protecting you for the time being, while the situation is in flux, but pretty soon that's going to run out. You'll..." He stopped for a moment, looking for a word, then settled for the unsatisfactory, "... disappear." Then, stronger, "You'll die, Rose."

"Well, I won't exactly care, then, will I?" she said defiantly, oozing hurt. "No more pain or disappointment sounds pretty good to me."

Jared didn't know what to say, so for once, kept his mouth shut. Alpha Rose, though, couldn't stay still any longer. She padded softly over and melted down on Reich Rose's other side, putting her arm around her doppelganger's shoulders. "Been having a rough time?" she prodded gently.

Reich Rose bit her lips, a pair of stray tears escaping her blinking eyes. Finally, she nodded. "Things didn't exactly work out the way we'd hoped," she whispered simply.

Alpha Rose squeezed her shoulders in sympathy, nodding, remembering the rough time she and her stepfather, Beta's Pete, had gone through just getting used to the idea of each other being around. And she hadn't been responsible for her own mother's death. She could only imagine the other woman's situation – let alone the troubles attendant on escaping a hostile foreign occupation and immigrating to another country. She didn't know what kind of reception the Greater Americans had given the former Resistance fighter and his former Collaborator daughter, or whether they'd enlisted the pair in their own continuing fight against the Nazis, but it was fairly obvious that the girl had not found a fairy-tale ending to her sad story. Hopefully further betrayal on top of all that she'd suffered before hadn't been part of it.

Jared may have caught a sense of the situation, but he couldn't let it go without a bit more of a fight. "Rose..." he began softly. "How many people died in your world wars? All together?"

" 'World wars' ?" Reich Rose was befuddled. "You mean the Great War?"

Jared blinked, then caught on. "You only had one? One massive war?"

She nodded. "You had more?"

"Yeah." He pointedly turned her back to his question, though. "How many?"

She shrugged. "I don't know... I think in school they said it was over fifty million." Her voice oozed pain, saying without words how can you think that's a small number?

He nodded back. "That's probably about right." A pause, then he took a breath to begin again. "I'd set up our dimension cannon, back in Beta before this happened, to try to do a survey of the parallels, comparing the twentieth century deaths from major wars and famines in each – totaling up the clusters of deaths over a certain threshold. It looked like that was the bloodiest century for all of them, but with greatly varying totals. Beta was about in the middle. You know which one was the worst? Alpha. This one right here, the main one. It had over two hundred and three million deaths due to war and man-made famine. All of the other parallels did better than this, one way or another. But you know which one was the best?"

He paused, and she shook her head, though she had a clue where he was leading.

"Yours," he said simply, confirming her fear. "You had only seventy million, total."

Reich Rose was bewildered all over again, the Great War so fresh in her own history making that assessment seem completely false and illogical. "How? With the Reich taking over the world? And nuking London?"

"Less than a million people actually died in the bombing of London. And the Great War was the ONLY major conflict of the entire century in your world. The rest were staved off and conflicts settled – relatively – peacefully, or at least they weren't allowed to spread across continents and suck in a lot of other combatant nations, keeping the damage – and the body count – relatively contained. And that," he continued, staving off her obvious next question, "was arguably largely due to the influence of one single man. The man whose life you need to go save. It's ironic," he added as if in a side note, "that in some ways, you have the easiest job of all. All you need to do is prevent a single assassin from pulling the trigger."

Reich Rose was trying not to care, holding on to her own misery, but Alpha Rose asked for her, leaning forward to peer around at Jared. "Who?"

Jared's mouth gratefully twitched at his partner for feeding him the line. "Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian empire, of course, whose assassination sparked World War One in our world."

Reich Rose was still obstinately shaking her head.

Jared was curious about something in particular, which he hadn't of course been able to pick up through the cannon. "What happened to the Jews in your world, Rose?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, did anything... in particular... happen to them that you can think of from your history lessons?" He was trying not to ask too leading a question.

"There was a... mass migration of them to New Israel in the twenties and thirties, I think. Now the majority of the Jews in the world live there."

"New Israel? In Palestine?"

"No, it's in Africa. I forget what they used to call it." Diverted, she tried to remember. "Um... it's southwest of Morocco?"

"Western Sahara?"

"That's the place," she agreed. She sighed, exasperated. "Why are you asking?"

Jared paused before he replied, leaning forward to emphasize it. "In Alpha, in the second of our great wars, the Nazis – the same guys you fought later and are still fighting – murdered over six million Jews. And almost as many more Gypsies, so-called 'defectives', and other people." Her face showed her horror, and he nodded. "That's right, murdered. Put them into death camps and shot or gassed them en masse. And that was only one of the genocides in Alpha that apparently didn't happen, or didn't happen to the same scale, in your world.

"Rose..." he pressed on, attempting to sway the reluctant, wounded young woman. "Of all the parallels here, even with the horrible situation you're currently in, you came closest to getting it right. And you have the best chance of solving those problems now and going on, to make the best possible world. If you're given the chance. If all those billions of people, right on the cusp of being right now, are given the chance."

Reich Rose's face crumpled, and she covered it with her hands, sobbing. But her head was still shaking violently, No.

Jared backed down immediately, nodding his head and patting her back. "I understand. Of course. And it's totally your decision." He hesitated a moment, then went on. "But before you make your final decision, there's one more thing you need to know."

And what he told her then... changed everything.