Chapter 5

Rose walked through the halls of Torchwood, making her way to the Doctor's room. She hadn't had any sleep the night before, thinking once again about the events that occurred over the last five days. This time, however, she had the additional memory of the Time Lord's very last visit to her the night before. She'd thought about the loss of the Doctor whom she knew she would never see again and the situation she'd been trying to cope with since that first kiss on the beach with the other Doctor. The Time Lord had again told her that she could make his other self better but she still didn't know how. And now she was told that she needed to be made better herself.

What was it that was wrong with her that needed to be made better? She had heard disappointment in the Time Lord's words when he voiced his concern about her rejecting his brother. Was that what was wrong with her? She got the feeling that it had something to do with the Bad Wolf thing that the Doctors had talked about or referred to, though that had to be at least part of the problem. She still couldn't figure out how she sent a message across the Void without being aware of doing so. The only thing she had been aware of, at the time, was her pressing need to find the Doctor.

Having reflected on it over the course of the night, she was coming to realize one of the problems was likely her attitude towards the metacrisis. While she had always been honestly worried about his condition, she could now see how utterly selfish she had been. Even when everyone had thought that he had been suffering from TARDIS withdrawal - which she now knew he still was enduring though not at such an extreme level as they had supposed - she'd wanted him to get better mostly for her sake. She had wanted her Doctor, not once thinking about the man she had been given to care for. It was selfishness that was preventing her from seeing the metacrisis for who he was. She knew she still didn't feel the same about him as she did the Doctor but, now that she understood her feelings, she was ashamed of her behavior and knew she had to at least try to make amends. The Doctor did say that it wouldn't be easy, after all. It certainly wasn't so far, especially given the events of the previous day, which she still was at a loss to understand, despite the Time Lord's explanation. Did the other Doctor really try to kill himself out of self-loathing? If so, was it her fault and how could she prevent him from trying again in the future?

Knocking on the door of the Doctor's room, she waited until he invited her in before opening the door and stepping through it. She watched as he raised his head to look at her standing just inside the door. The redness of her eyes told him that she hadn't had any sleep, a fact that appeared to distress him greatly.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to her. He dropped his head and looked at the fresh bandages on his hands, a nurse having just changed them only an hour before. "I made a mess of things, didn't I?"

"Maybe," she answered in a low tone that hid so much emotion: betrayal, fear, frustration, sorrow, sympathy and confusion all wrapped in that single word. "I'm trying to understand why."

He took a slow breath, focusing his eyes on the ceiling. "I don't know who or what I am. And my constantly shifting biology isn't helping me figure it out. I think…" He stopped, insight coming to him at that moment as he looked into Rose's eyes. "I think I reacted out of fear."

His statement obviously sent worry through Rose. She hadn't expected him to be afraid. Angry, hateful towards himself… but not afraid. His confession prompted her to walk up to his bed and take one of his hands gently. "What are you afraid of?"

"Me. Who I am, what I am, what I'm not… what I will become," he answered with a half-sob. "I'm sorry, Rose. I…" He hesitated, as if trying to find the right words. "My father was right. I am too dangerous to be left on my own. Dangerous to myself. I mean, look at what I did. Breaking that mirror just because it showed me what I am. I even seriously thought about ending my existence. All because I'm not fully Time Lord anymore. Not that I ever was fully Time Lord in the first place," he grumbled.

She frowned in confusion at his words. "What did you say?"

He was about to respond when his facial expression changed to one of completely wonder. "Oh… my… gawd! No way!" His eyes met hers for a moment. "I just realized… I'm half human on my mother's side," he answered, the stunned look on his face firmly in place.

"Yeah? So?"

"Something I said to a friend a long time ago. I'd only regenerated less than a day before and my mind was filled with odd images. I was a bit clairvoyant in my eighth life, just snippets here and there irrelevant to the grand scheme of the universe. And I told a friend that I was half human on my mother's side. But even as I said it, I had no idea where the statement had come from because I wasn't half-human, not genetically. My father had visited Earth in his youth and he'd had an affair with a human female. I was born from her. She died giving birth to me and I was raised by my stepmother. Well… my father… my other self was." He grimaced at his own words. "That's going to get confusing, I think."

"I'm sorry," Rose told him gently.

"Not your fault I'm a complicated event in time and space with three sets of parents."

"Three sets of parents?"

"Well, there's the Doctor's parents, Donna's parents, and the Doctor and Donna as my parents, all three sets being my direct parents according to my memories."

"That is confusing," Rose agreed. "But when I said I was sorry, I was referring to your mother dying giving birth to you. I mean, the Doctor's mother… the other Doctor…" She sighed. "You know what I mean."

"Thank you but I never knew her, never felt any connection to her, and I didn't even know about her existence until I was an adult. That was also when I'd learned that I had been genetically altered before I was even born to be as close to Gallifreyan as I could be without being an exact clone of my father. If he hadn't altered it while I was in my mother's womb, the structure of my DNA would have collapsed. As it is, my father's restructuring of my genome gave me less than five percent of human DNA, which is why it always confused me why I'd tell anyone that I was half human when it obviously wasn't true. I wrote off what I'd said to my friend as post-regeneration sickness. But it wasn't." He breathed for a moment as he considered the implications of his words. "I had a premonition. I saw my own future and I didn't even realize it. I saw... me. Me, with my human heart, Time Lord brain, and half human skin," he finished with a hint of a laugh, obviously still in wonder of the revelation while upset about his physical makeup.

"Did you know about what would happen to you? I mean, with your changing physiology?"

"Not to this extent, no," he answered softly with a shake of his head. "I wouldn't have left me behind in this condition if I did."

"That really is going to get confusing," Rose commented concerning his unique familial ties. "How about we call the other you your brother?" she suggested, remembering how the Doctor had referred to his duplicate self. Seeing the uncertainty on his face, she pressed on. "Well, you keep saying that you're him and he's you, right? If that's true, then wouldn't that make you identical twins… sort of?"

He seemed to consider her words. "Never thought of it like that. I suppose that's one way of looking at it. Of course, that would mean that Donna is my sister and not my mother… which actually I think I like better anyway." He looked at his wrapped hands sitting on his lap and the memory of why they were hurt came to him once more. "I am sorry, Rose. For being so damaged, both physically and mentally." He huffed. "Some reward for all you've done, eh? Getting a messed up Time Lord and a rubbish human instead of the man you went after."

"Don't talk like that," she berated him gently, though her eyes reflected the same sentiments he had voiced.

"No, it's okay. I know I'm not what you want. Hell, I wouldn't want me if I were in your place." He took a shaky breath. "I won't make you stay with me if you don't want to. And I'll repay you for the medical bills I have no doubt all of this is costing. May take me a while because I'll have to find a job and someplace to live first." He gave a quiet laugh. "If anyone would give me a job, considering how completely rubbish I am."

"I'm not leaving you," she put in firmly, negating his depressive words.

"You're not?" he questioned, hope filling his eyes. Seeing confirmation on her face, he smiled gently, a smile which quickly turned to confusion. "Why not?"

Rose frowned at the question. "You want me to leave?"

"No!" he exclaimed quickly. "I mean, of course not. It's just… with what I just told you… and with what happened yesterday…"

"I'm sorry," she interrupted him, putting slightly more pressure on his hand to emphasize her word but not enough to harm his still healing appendage.

"What for?" he asked. "I'm the one messing things up."

"I've been treating you horribly." He opened his mouth to protest but was overruled by Rose reaching up and putting a single finger on his lips. "I have been. I've been trying to make you into the Doctor and that was wrong of me. You're your own person and I should have been getting to know you, not forcing you to be someone else."

"But I am the Doctor," he countered. "But I'm not," he added, clearly distressed.

"You are the Doctor," she told him firmly. "But you are different too." She took a slow breath, her eyes showing that she was thinking of how to phrase her next words. "And I've been too selfish to see who you really are, making you feel like you had to prove yourself to me."

"And who am I really?" the Doctor questioned warily.

She smiled gently. "The best of both worlds." Seeing the confusion on his face, she added, "At least, you will be once we've taken care of the problems we are going through now."

"We?"

She sighed, sitting beside his bed as she did so, self-deprecation plain in her features. "You're not the only one who's a rubbish human at the moment. I mean, up until last night, the only thing that I could think of was trying to change you into someone you're not. That's a pretty selfish attitude, isn't it. And then there's the whole Bad Wolf thing you keep talking about… and the weird dreams…"

"Dreams?" Turning to sit on the bed so that he was facing her, he reached over and took her hand in his. "Are you having bad dreams, Rose?"

"Sort of," she admitted. "Not exactly bad. Most of the time they're just… strange."

"How are they strange?"

Her eyes met his. "Sometimes… they come true."

"Well… there is such thing as coincidence, you know. I mean, I could dream about eating a banana and then eat a banana the next day."

"The dreams that come true are usually a lot more complicated than that."

He frowned at her words. "How complicated?"

She dropped her head, plainly unsettled by the subject and unwilling to respond.

"Rose?" the Doctor pressed gently.

She closed her eyes, knowing that he would continue to try to get her to open up – albeit with kindness – until she relented, which she decided to do so to avoid the pressure. "I once had a dream in which there was this building on fire and dozens of bodies everywhere and screaming. Three days later, there was an explosion on a council estate caused by a gas leak. Everyone in the building burned to death," she finished quietly.

The Doctor instantly was off the bed and crouching in front of her, examining her eyes as if he could see what was going on in her mind by doing so. "When did this start?"

She shrugged slightly. "Don't know. After Canary Wharf I guess. Had a couple here and there before then that seemed to come true but it wasn't like it is now. Before they'd been more like… feelings… but now they're so vivid. I never thought much about it until recently. Thought it was just a coincidence."

"There's no such thing as coincidence," he told her gently.

"But you just said…"

"I know what I said," he interrupted her, righting himself to his full height. "There's coincidence and there's no coincidence and something like this is definitely no coincidence. Dreams don't just come true, Rose. Not like that. Most of the time, they are random images created by your mind for one reason or another. For a dream to actually come true, either the dream becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – like eating a banana after dreaming about eating a banana – or there must be some sort of psychic ability inherent in the dreamer which makes the dream truly prophetic. It is highly unusual for someone to have the dream you described and for it to come true."

"So… you're saying I'm psychic?"

"Maybe," he answered as he nodded. "It probably has to do with Bad Wolf. Having been touched by the time vortex very likely activated the recessive telepathic/psychic gene inherent in all humans which would definitely explain how you were able to send that message across universes while still being unaware of your actions, especially with the Void amplifying your abilities. You jumped universes to find me, yes? But while you were looking for me an alternate timeline came into effect, one that revolved around Donna, caused by the Trickster Brigade convincing her to change her mind about a key event of her life. I don't know the details of that timeline, other than the stars were going out there as well, but I do know that you helped her reset it to the way it should be. Your subconscious mind must have remembered that alternate timeline and it sent the same message you gave Donna only far more expansively. Two words that would tell me that something catastrophic was about to happen."

"And they were Bad Wolf," Rose supposed.

"Exactly. That completely explains how you sent that message to me. With the Void being closed now, the amplification that allowed you to send messages across universes is gone, making you exactly as you were before." He paused. "Hold on… That doesn't explain your dreams. You said these prophetic dreams really started after Canary Wharf, that they were relatively mild before then." His eyes brightened as he remembered another piece of information. "Harry told me the other day that there was something different with us – you, me and Jackie, that is, as well as Mickey when he was here. Apparently, our universe imbued us with a resonance that doesn't exist in this universe. Take a bit of the time vortex still in you activating the recessive telepathic/psychic gene and couple that with being in a universe different from the one you were born in, one in which the laws of physics are slightly different than the ones from our original universe, thus giving us this resonance that Harry was talking about…" A wondrous look came to his face. "That's it. Has to be. This universe plus Bad Wolf and you get…" He smiled at Rose, pride obvious on his face. "…Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth. Of course, the only way to know for certain how this whole new universe/Bad Wolf thing affects you is for me to examine you. Once I do that I'll have a better idea on how to teach you to properly control it instead of being totally or at least near-totally unaware of Bad Wolf as you have been in the past. Should also be able to help you understand your dreams and determine which dreams you should pay attention to and which are caused by random firing of your synapses. As for me… the resonance explains a lot. My biology was semi-stable until we arrived here and then it started to go all wonky once the TARDIS withdrawals kicked in and my physiology went into overdrive which means that I'm not only trying to adapt to myself but also to this universe."

"Well, one thing definitely hasn't changed with you," Rose commented with a smile.

"What's that?"

"You still have one hell of a gob."

The Doctor laughed gently at her observation. His joy instantly shifted to alarm as a wave of agony struck him, causing him to cry out and drop to his knees, curling into himself.

"Doctor!" Rose exclaimed, immediately moving to his aide.

It was a couple of seconds before he could find a voice to respond to her concern. "Adjustment…" he explained, panting against the pain. "Worst…" Tears escaped his eyes despite how tightly he had them closed. "Harry. G…Get Harry."

She hesitated for a second – purely out of not wanting to leave his side in his time of need – before hurrying to the call button, pressing it, and returning to the Doctor. Unsure what else she could do – and with the Doctor seemingly unable to tell her – she ran her hands gently over the top of his head in a comforting manner, giving him verbal reassurance that help was on the way.

"An adjustment?" Dr. Sullivan questioned as he and a nurse hurried into the room only a moment later.

Rose nodded in confirmation. "He said it was the worst." As to emphasize her words, the metacrisis cried out in pain, tightening his already fetal-like position.

"I'll need to run a scan on him, find out exactly what is going on inside him," Harry told her as he put on a stethoscope. He pressed the instrument to the Doctor's back just above his heart. "Heart rate's fast even for him. If he were fully human, I'd say he was in cardiac arrest. We need to slow it down but I still don't know enough about his biology to risk giving him anything."

"What about the pain?" Rose questioned hurriedly. "Can't you do anything about that?"

He considered her words quickly, remembering that the half-alien couldn't take some medications that were commonly used by humans. "Small dose of morphine should help."

"N… no," the Doctor grunted out. "No painkillers. Could… could have a negative effect… with me adjusting… like this."

"You may be the Doctor, but I am your doctor and I am not going to let you endure this when you are obviously in a great deal of pain and it's continuing beyond what has been normal these last few days," Harry contradicted him.

"No painkillers," the hybrid insisted. "Just need time. Already feel it…" He sighed with obvious relief, telling those around that the agony he had been in had dissipated. "That's better. Much better."

"It's gone?" Rose questioned, just to verify what she concluded mentally.

He nodded his confirmation as a ponderous expression came to his face. "But I think I need Harry to scan me."

Immediately, concern showed on Rose's and Harry's faces. "What's wrong?" Rose asked.

"I don't think anything is wrong. In fact… I haven't felt so good since we arrived here," the Doctor admitted. "Well, I shouldn't say good. Still hurt a little bit. But I think I'm done adjusting. I feel… I don't know. I never felt like this but it seems… right. Well, as right as I'm going to get, anyway. Something's still off but I can't seem to put my finger on it."

"Well, in that case, we'd better get you into the examination room," Harry stated. Turning his head, he ordered the nurse to bring a wheelchair.

"I don't need a wheelchair,' the Doctor protested as the nurse left to obey. "I can walk." Seeing the look on the physician's features, he sighed. "I know. Ward regulations."

Harry gave him an understanding smile as the nurse returned. Rose kept close as the Doctor was helped to his feet, sat in the wheelchair, and allowed himself to be taken to the examination room. Following the same procedures he had done many times before, he stripped down to his underwear and positioned himself on the platform in front of the Velinian scanner, allowing the nurse to operate the machine and take a real-time image of his body. Once the scan was done, he quickly got dressed before going over to the reader and looking over Harry's shoulder.

"Well…" he commented with a smile. "Would you look at that? I appear to be perfectly half-human. Well, close enough. More like 49.999999 percent human. Don't see that very often. When crossing species, one half usually is more dominant than the other. Not so with me, apparently. All my organs seemed to have finished deciding what they are. That's good. Still have that weakness in my dorsal fibula, though." His face dropped a moment later. "Oh… that's what I couldn't figure out before. It hasn't altered much this whole time."

Harry concurred with his disappointment. "I was hoping that with your adjusting it would resolve itself completely. If you really are finished adjusting, I'm afraid it may be a permanent thing for you."

Rose, who had been slightly observing the two of them looking at the readings, went up to take a look for herself. "What hasn't changed?" The Doctor pointed out the odd coloring in the scan of his brain. "What does it mean?" she asked with concern.

"It means my mood swings are staying," he responded somberly. "Apparently, I'm manic/depressive. Not as bad as when we first arrived but… still going to be a problem."

"You mean… all those moments of anger and depression… the suicidal tendencies… they're permanent?"

"Not quite so severe, I hope," Harry answered, turning to the hybrid. "In any case, there are options we can look into."

The Doctor exhaled, obviously displeased. "Mood stabilizers."

"You mean drugs," Rose supposed.

"Only as a last resort," Harry put in. "We have an excellent psychiatrist…"

"I don't need a psychiatrist," the Doctor interrupted. "I have my own methods to help my mental state."

"That may be so but can you assure me with absolute certainty that your methods will prevent a repetition of what happened yesterday? What if they fail and you do need psychiatric assistance or a mood stabilizer in addition to your methods? How can you be certain that you are completely done adjusting?"

"I am. Isn't that enough?" Seeing doubt in Dr. Sullivan's eyes, the hybrid looked over at Rose, who was pleading with her eyes for him to consent to Harry's suggestions. After a moment, he took a slow deep breath and exhaled, running a hand over his head. "All right. We'll do it your way," he relented. "But how much longer must I stay here? I've already been here nearly four days and it's driving my bonkers. Not to mention the food is terrible. You call that mess of brown you served yesterday steak and potato pie?" He stopped abruptly, an odd look on his face. "I'm being rude again, aren't I. Sorry, can't help it. Both of my siblings were rude which means rude plus rude equals very rude. Unless we're talking multiplication in which case rude times rude is rude. Either way, I'm rude so… sorry."

"Siblings?" Harry questioned with a frown.

"The Doctor and Donna Noble," Rose explained. "We figured it would be less confusing if they were called his brother and sister since he has their memories, especially if he talks about his lineage."

"I see," came the slightly befuddled response. "Getting back to the point, I'll consult with Dr. Gentillini and see if we can arrange an appointment as soon as possible. She's our resident psychiatrist," Harry explained to the Doctor. "If she finds you mentally fit to leave and if your biology has indeed stopped shifting, then I will release you from the ward."

"How soon will this be, then?" the Doctor asked.

"Hopefully you'll be able to see her today. I'll be continuing to scan you on a daily basis to make sure that you are correct in your assessment."

"I am correct."

"I'll be the judge of that. In the meantime, I suggest that you get as much rest as possible. I'm afraid you are going to be here for a few more days." He turned to the nurse, who had been working on a separate terminal, entering the latest data into the Doctor's medical file. "Please take the Doctor back to his room."

"I can take myself," the Doctor protested. Seeing the look in Harry's eyes, he groaned. "Ward regulations," he grumbled. "I hate hospitals."