AN: I post this story weekly, and usually I leave the story to itself. I don't like to post personal notes, because that's not what this story is about. However, this week I post it with a heavy heart. I began this story because I was always drawn to the relationship of Rose and Pete. It's a father and daughter story. I was a girl who had a strong relationship with her father, too. He was my first teacher, my first pastor, my first cheerleader, and my biggest fan. He taught me how to be a historian, how to be a theologian, and was the one who was brave enough to first get behind the wheel of a car with me and attempt to teach me to drive. No one could sing more beautifully than his daughter, in his humble opinion. He hated every man I ever dated because they weren't good enough for me...and usually, he was right. In short, my father was my Pete Tyler.

Today, my father passed away.

I'm not into the idea of dedications of chapters or stories. Besides, one day I hope to dedicate my dissertation to him, as it's all his fault I'm in a Ph.D. program anyway. But in posting this chapter today of all days, I think of fathers and children and the bond between them, even across space and time, and how much we love them even when they leave us. It was my Dad who, many years ago, more than I care to think about, introduced me to my first Doctor, (that would be Four), and who attempted to explain how a phone booth could travel through time. Thank you, Daddy, for making me a giant nerd. You were the best father a girl could ask for.

It didn't take nearly as long as Pete expected that it would.

Miles ran off orders to the team gathered around him, dressed in black and looking solemn. They were typical Torchwood unit, all young, in their twenties. But Miles had picked them all carefully. This mission was top secret, few outside of the inner circle around Pete knew about it. Frankly, as he studied them all gathered there, he thought they looked little more than babies. Hardly older than the girl, Rose. Sending in sons and daughters to another world to go and fix the mess that Torchwood had started.

"Mickey," Miles barked as the younger man snapped his attention towards the Assistant Director. "You'll move in ahead of the tactical team. You know this world, and you know the Doctor and Rose Tyler. You know what to look for. You are armed and prepared, but if anything happens, you call control. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yeah," Mickey replied solemnly, looking nothing like the wide-eyed kid who had wandered into this world years ago. He reminded Pete more of Ricky Smith than Mickey. Still, there was that tinge of fear as he fingered the gun at his side. Good...he understood how dangerous this was.

"Jake, you will lead the tactical team after." Unsurprisingly, Miles turned to the most seasoned of the pair to head up the team. Jake too had grown up from his Preacher days. No longer the street thug, he had the makings of Miles' protege. If he succeeded in this mission, and they didn't die, Pete would have to talk to Miles about Jake taking more of a leading role.

"Right," Jake murmured, stepping forward to address the team. "Chrissie, your communications for the mission. Harry, you and the rest will be security and strike. If you see a Cybermen, destroy. Leave any civilians alone. Our main objective is the Cyberleader. Cybermen always look to one for direction. We find them, we neutralize them, the rest will stop."

Miles held up one of the jumpers in his hand. "You've all been issued the latest version of our trans-dimensional jumpers. These have a longer charge and can instantaneously jump back and forth between our reality and theirs. They are good for twenty of these jumps, so use them carefully, all right. If you see a man down…"

He paused, grimly, eyeing them all over his black-rimmed glasses. "If you see a man down, bring them home. We don't want to leave this technology on that side, as they don't have it. And we want their family to get them back, please."

Pete felt slightly ill as he watched each of the young faces nod, hard determination on their expressions.

"Right. You have your orders. Let's move." Miles stepped away, nodding at Mickey. Without a single word, Mickey pressed his jumper. In a flash, he disappeared. A slight murmur could be heard from the team, but nothing more.

"Mickey knows what he's supposed to be doing?" Pete frowned at Miles, who had wandered over to join him in the cluttered but functional top room of Torchwood.

"He'll communicate to Jake what he finds, before their team moves. Mickey's smart, he can run point." Miles glanced at the tablet in his hand. "I'm going to run down to mission control to better oversee this thing."

He looked up at Pete, a hint of a smile on his face. "You can handle this, boss. This is your mission. Pete Tyler, out to save the world."

"And if I destroy it?"

"Than none of us will know how bad you mucked it up, will we? We'll all be dead." Miles smirked, handing him the tablet. "Jake and Mickey are under orders to bring the Doctor here if they find him. I'll leave the finer points of that interaction to you."

"If he lets me get a word in edgewise, yeah." Pete grimaced as he grabbed the tablet firmly, recalling the last time the Doctor was in their world. "He's the only one who can close this breech. He'll know what to do."

"I hope you're right." Miles nodded, glancing to Jake. "Five minutes, Simmonds."

"Right, boss." He waved to him as he continued to brief his team. Miles turned, leaving them to the command center. Pete watched him go, quietly hoping that this would all work. It was the only chance they had. Stop the Cybermen, prevent them from making the breech worse, and close it. The closing was the tricky part, and that was where the Doctor fit in. The mad, time and space traveling alien was the only one either Pete or Mickey could think of who could fix this. And if he couldn't...Pete didn't want to think of what would happen if he couldn't.

Time ticked by slowly, as Pete listened to communications downstairs from Mickey. Something about Rose and something called Daleks. He turned to Jake, who could hear everything clearly himself on his own ear piece. Jake's jaw tightened, but he waited, eyes glued to the watch on his wristband.

Ten...nine...eight…

The second ticked by so slowly, Pete wondered if the clock was moving at all. When the digital numbers hit zero, he turned to see the flash that was the tactical team standing right in front of him. Only two of their number remained behind with him, there to jump in at a moments notice.

Pete waited.

It only took a few minutes, even if it felt like a lifetime. He could hear the commands on the other end, and the voice of the Doctor, shocked, surprised. Within half a heartbeat Jake reappeared in the room, a startled looking Doctor standing by his side. He looked almost exactly the same as when he'd last seen him, three years before, tall, gangly, dark hair even more of a tangled mess, and completely startled. Pete almost smiled in relief.

"Parallel Earth, Parallel Torchwood," Jake was saying, the rest of a conversation started on the other side. "Except we found out what the institute was doing and Pete took control."

Whether the Doctor was listening or not, he stared around himself wildly, dark eyes brewing as he shook Jake off desperately. "I've got to get back. Rose is in danger, and her mother…"

"That'd be Jackie," Pete called, catching the Doctor's attention. "My wife in a parallel universe."

It sounded so strange to say it. He'd denied the fact that Jackie was his wife for so long, that it felt as if he'd just given in to the inevitable. The Doctor stared at him, not displeased, but certainly caught by the fact that Pete knew who Rose and her mother were. "And as for you, Doctor, at least this time I know who you are."

Impatience and exasperation flickered angrily across the thin man's face. "Right, yes, fine, hooray! But I've got to get back right now."

"No," Pete replied simply. Even in saying it, he could see a storm coalescing in the other man's gaze, one he was certain would break ugly on him if he didn't take a stand. He doubted that this Doctor had many people tell him no. Pete always had the distinct impression that the Doctor always knew he was the most impressive and capable being in the room. And usually, that was because he was. Which was why he needed him.

"You're not in charge here," Pete reminded him, ignoring the terrifying coldness forming on the Doctor's face. "This is our world, not yours, and you're going to listen for once."

Whether the Doctor intended to or not was hard to say. The man merely pierced him with eyes so hard and black, Pete was shocked he wasn't actually physically bleeding from it. Then, with a shrug, he whipped around, moving to the far curve of wall, pressing his body against it, long fingers sprawling across it, his ear laying there as if listening.

"When you left this world, you warned us there would be more Cybermen," Pete began, carefully approaching him. "So we sealed them inside the factories."

"Except people argued," supplied Jake in mild annoyance. "Said they were living. We should help them."

"And the debate went on," Pete continued. "But all that time, the Cybermen made plans. Infiltrated this version of Torchwood, mapped themselves onto your world, and vanished."

"When was this?" The Doctor's grim mouth barely moved.

"Three years ago," Pete replied.

The Doctor pulled away, nodding as he faced the other two. Whatever he had been doing, he wandered, Pete leading the way out of the room and out into the hallway beyond. There, a large pane of glass looked out over London.

"It's taken them three years to cross the Void, but we can pop to and fro in a few seconds?" The Doctor stopped, as wheels turned almost automatically, and Pete wondered if he already had it all mostly worked out already. "Must be the sheer mass of Cybermen crossing all at once."

The fact the Doctor could do that was rather frightening, Pete decided.

"Yeah, Mickey said you'd rattle off that sort of stuff." Pete gulped. He quietly directed Jake and the Doctor out of the room and to the hallway beyond.

Like a child with a new toy, the Doctor perked up at the mention of the man who used to travel with him. "Oh, where is the Mickey Boy?"

"He went first," Pete explained, ruefully. "Any chance to go and find Miss Rose Tyler."

The Doctor's delight turned into frankness in a nanosecond. "She's your daughter. You do know that. Did Mickey explain?"

His daughter. Pete tried hard not to scoff in the other man's face.

"She's not mine. She's the child of a dead man."

Pete turned to the scene of London spread below. "Look at it," he breathed, barely recognizable as the same world the Doctor had left behind three years before. "A world of peace. They are calling it the Golden Age."

"Who's the President now," the Doctor asked mildly as he came to stand beside him.

"Harriet Jones," Pete replied, knowing that the Doctor would recognize the name.

As before, the same sad distrust flickered as he grimaced. "Ooof, I'd keep an eye on her."

"But it's a lie," Pete continued, as if the Doctor has said nothing. "Temperatures have risen by two degrees in the last six months. The ice caps are melting. They're saying all this is going to be flooded. That's not just global warming, is it?"

"No,' the Doctor replied quietly.

"It's the breach?"

"I've been trying to tell you," the Doctor sighed, impatiently. "Travel between parallel worlds is impossible."

It took several long seconds for Pete to figure out what he meant by that. Not that travel between parallel worlds wasn't attainable, travel between parallel worlds shouldn't happen. That realization made him sick. They had long known that the Cybermen's attempts were posing a threat to their world, it was why they had done this. It had not occurred to any of them that they were adding to the problem with every jump between worlds that they made.

But the Doctor continued, unaware of Pete's horror in his aggravation. "And then the Daleks break down the walls with a Sphere."

That was a word he hadn't heard before. "Daleks?"

The Doctor ignored him as he continued to rant. "Then the Cybermen travelled across, then you lot. Those discs? Every time you jump from one reality to another, you rip a hole in the universe. This planet is starting to boil. Keep going and both worlds will fall into the Void."

"But you can stop it," Pete insisted, cutting into the Doctor's anger desperately. He had to stop it. He was the only one who could. "You can seal the breach?"

"Leaving five million Cybermen stranded on my Earth," the Doctor shot back as if he thought Pete mad. And perhaps Pete was. But all he knew was that his world would be destroyed. And the Doctor's world at least had him in it.

"That's your problem," he replied, more coldly than he thought himself possible, and hated himself for it. "The famous Doctor. You can seal the breach?"

The Doctor studied him for a long moment, midnight dark eyes eyeing him critically. What did he see, Pete wondered? Did he see the Pete Tyler who had fathered his beloved Rose? Or did he see a man who had, for the last three years, fought and struggled, who had lived and breathed this threat, and who just so terribly wanted it to be done, to keep his promise to Harriet Jones, to not fail this time...not like he did the last.

"Hmmm," the Doctor chuckled, thoughtful. "Pete Tyler, I knew you when you were dead."

Ignoring how odd that statement sounded, he continued in that warm, condescending way of his, as if Pete were a particularly cute child. "Now here you are, fighting alone. There's a chance, back on my world. Jackie Tyler might still be alive."

He saw in an instant what the Doctor was up to, and he wasn't going to play that game. "My wife died."

"Her husband died. Good match," the Doctor replied breezily.

He was trying to talk Pete into not simply closing the breach, but defeating the Cybermen while they were at it. And the sad thing was that he was succeeding. The thought of saving Rose's mother when he had failed his own wife was far too tantalizing.

"There's more important things at stake," Pete replied, and didn't know who he was trying to convince, himself, or the Doctor. He stared at him with pleading helplessness. "Doctor...help us."

"What, close the breach? Stop the Cybermen? Defeat the Daleks?" The alien leaned in close, his dark eyes boring through Pete. "Do you believe I can do that?"

"Yes," Pete replied, simply.

The Doctor pulled away, shrugging as he did so. "Maybe that's all I need. Off we go, then!"

And like that, the Doctor whipped around, back to the room, snagging one of the jumper discs from a table as he went. In Pete's ear he could hear Miles snapping at him, telling him not to do what Pete knew very well he was going to do. The Doctor strode ahead, a mad, pied piper, grinning as Jake joined them with a determined air.

"So, a trans-dimensional device tucked inside these things. Quite clever. How did you manage that?" The Doctor studied it, flipping it over in his long fingers.,

"Had one of scientists bastardize the original technology Lumic used. Most of it was from your universe, we think. The rest is alien technology we've either found on our own or has been lent to us by our partner civilizations."

"Partner civilizations? You don't work by the axiom of 'it's alien, it's ours'?"

"Don't make friends that way, no." Pete wondered at the bitterness underlying the Doctor's words. "How are we going to do this?"

"Well, I thought we'd pick up our clever devices and just push the buttons." And without warning, the Doctor pressed his jumper. Cursing, Pete rushed to follow suit, Jake just behind.

The familiar squeezing sensation deposited them in a room, very much like the one they just had left, only less cluttered, sterile, and empty. In its middle, levers rose from the floor. Pete spun around, staring. It was almost the copy of the room they had just left, save for the lack of clutter and the painful, gleaming whiteness of it.

"Jake, you know anyplace that has good mobile service around here?" The Doctor reached inside his pocket. Pete expected him to pull out his sonic device once more, but instead, he pulled out a mobile telephone.

Jake glanced at Pete and grinned. "No, but I know where Yvonne Hartmann's office is. Come on!"

Wondering, Pete followed the pair, out to the elevator that looked nearly the same as the one they used. Not as smooth, he noted, but it got them down to the floor he recognized by heart. It was where his office was. And where Yvonne's office would be in this building.

"Doubt she'll be using this," Jake called, briefly checking out the space. Not as posh as it was in his world, Pete noted, and it strangely was a relief, knowing that not everything was a mirror image from his Torchwood to this one.

"First of all, I need to make a phone call. You don't mind?" The Doctor didn't seem to care one way or another if they did. Jake smirked and told Pete to cover the door. Pete did, watching , as the Doctor dialed on an old fashioned, hand held phone on Yvonne's desk and started a conversation that they only had one side of.

"Jackie, you're alive!" Pete ignored the small leap in his heart at the Doctor's words. "Listen…"

Whatever he would have said obviously got cut off by Jackie. Judging from the faint sounds even Pete could here, she was in her usually, high hysterics. He tried not to smile, to remind himself that this wasn't his wife.

"Shush, listen, tell me where are you?" The Doctor's patience was already wearing thin. "Yeah, which one? Is there any sort of sign? Anything to identify it?"

Clearly, the Doctor didn't know Jackie well if he expected sensible out of her in a crises.

"North corner, staircase three," the Doctor said, having apparently figured out where she was. "Just keep low, we're trying our best."

Without any further explanation, he rang off, looking to Pete. "I've got to go. I'm sorry."

Pete blinked back at him. He'd promised to fix the breach, to fix all of this. And now he was waltzing off to save...a woman who happened to look an awful damned lot like his wife.

The Doctor met his frustration with ancient, dark eyes. "Jacqueline Andrea Suzette Tyler."

"She's not my wife," Pete insisted, wishing someone would just listen to him on this, especially the niggling part of his own heart that wished desperately that she was.

"I was at the wedding," the Doctor continued, mockingly accusing him. "You got her name wrong."

How had he known that? Over twenty years ago that had happened. Their wedding, him in his borrowed suit, her in pale pink, him stumbling over her name - who gave their child four names anyway - and her saying it was all right, she'd seen it happen on Eastenders, she supposed it could happen to anyone.

That had happened….he'd seen it, and it really had happened here.

"Now, then, Jakey boy, if I can open the bonding chamber on this thing." The Doctor spun off to snag Jake's gun, studying it, apparently knowing what he was doing. Like a whirlwind he was, a hyperactive child with the power of the universe in his hands. "It'll work on polycarbide."

"What's polycarbide," Jake wondered aloud, starring in vague worry as the Doctor prodded his weapon, as fearful as Pete regarding the Doctor and what he was up a high powered, alien grade gun.

"Skin of a Dalek," the Doctor murmured, his tongue clicking on the last syllable.

They were fighting Cybermen, weren't they? Pete felt disgruntled, knowing the Doctor never had answered his earlier question. "What is a Dalek?"

If it occurred to the Doctor he'd been rude and not explained, he certainly didn't seem to care. "Daleks are a race of mutants housed inside polycarbide bodies, though, when I say housed, really it's more integrated as they have sensory perception out of those bodies much more effectively than they do with their own flesh."

"So like Cybermen, yeah," Jake nodded, attempting to make sense of it.

"Except Daleks aren't human, and never have been. They'd cringe at the idea, frankly, as they find your entire race disgusting." The Doctor reached into his jacket, and this time pulled out his screwdriver. It whirled as he poked the gun carefully. When he noticed the blank and vaguely horrified stares on his compatriots faces, he shrugged. "Nothing personal. Daleks think everyone who isn't a Dalek is disgusting and worthy of extermination, human, Zygon, or otherwise. They hate my people the most, but that's a whole other story."

As mad as that all sounded to Pete, somehow he couldn't say it shocked him. "So what are they doing here?"

"They are the ones that caused this whole mess in the first place." The gun opened, and he fiddled with its insides, pocketing something from it. "They got themselves a Void ship. It's able to travel the void between parallel universes. Should only be theoretical, none of my people thought it was possible. But they have one, and they've been waiting there, all these years, hiding."

His expression fell and faltered, melting into something broken, sad, and weary. In an instant, it was gone, however, as he patted his jacket pocket, where the bit from the gun lay, impossibly concealed in a space that should have been too small for it. "In any case, the Daleks decided to make their appearance, they began pushing through the void, trying to get to this universe. Only problem was, they were bad at it. Daleks are horrible time travelers, never could get the knack of it, and when they did hit on this universe, it caused a crack in reality, opening up the walls between this universe and the closest one to it."

"Ours," murmured Pete. It all started to make a weird sort of sense.

"That's how the Cybermen fell into your world in the first place," The Doctor replied, grim and apologetic. "They were never supposed to be there, not really. They were always just in this universe. My guess is that, somehow, one of them fell through the cracks forming in between realities, the ones the Daleks were causing. Your Torchwood got a hold of it, gave it to Lumic, and the rest you can already guess."

"So when the Cybermen started disappearing, they weren't just following some random signal that Lumic had set up," Jake pieced together. "They were coming back the way they came….coming home."

"And now the Daleks have come through, and they've brought some hitchhikers along with, and it's going to get real interesting here soon if we don't figure out how to keep them from blowing each other apart." The Doctor's manic grin returned as he bounded across the space, leading the way. "So, next course of action, we have to find a random Dalek."

"Find them? Why?" Jake rushed to keep up, looking as alarmed by that idea as Pete felt, as he too raced after.

"Well, if we want to find out who's bright idea it was, got to get them to take us to their leader, eh?" He flashed white teeth at the pair of them as he popped one of the elevator buttons.

"You said these Daleks hate everyone, your people especially," Jake growled as the elevator opened to let them in. "How do you know they won't just kill you?"

"Because I'm the Doctor," he replied, the manic grin only widening in an expression that was looking more and more mad.

"That's reassuring," Pete breathed darkly as the elevator dropped.