Reunions and Wolf Cubs

Chapter 7

I DO NOT OWN DOCTOR WHO!

Donna decided that she'd stay a week to catch up with her family and help them put the house back into order. Besides that, she thought it would be nice to be the one who actually knew what had been going on rather than missing it like she normally did. Donna also figured that if the Doctor couldn't get things worked out with Rose and the girls in that time then she had a week to plan how to help him do so.

The girls had stayed asleep through her departure, and Donna had to wonder what it would be like traveling with two children. Would the Doctor do something completely unlike himself and stay in one place until they got older? That would be boring, and he'd hate it before a week was done. Donna doubted that since, from what the girls had said, they'd been traveling with Rose into all sorts of trouble in the other universe.

She just hoped that the Doctor's driving skills didn't make him late. She also hoped that if they changed their minds about letting her stay, they'd at least tell her to her face.

The Doctor sent the TARDIS into the Time Vortex, setting it to 'hover' there. He set the coordinates to take them to exactly a week from when they had left Donna (triple checked it, didn't want it to be a year…again), leaving only the final lever to throw when they were ready to go.

Silence fell, neither he nor Rose knowing where to start. She'd shielded herself from him, although he could still tell that she was there. He could feel them, all three of them, there in his mind where he'd almost grown accustomed to the constant silence. He hadn't felt Jenny the first time, but he had to wonder now if they had had longer together if her telepathy would have shown itself.

"How long will they be asleep?" He asked into the silence.

"Another few hours at the very least," Rose answered, "usually depends on how tired they are. It's been less since they first joined me."

"How…how did this all happen?" He asked softly, really wanting to do nothing more than pull Rose to him and never let her go outside of hand-holding range ever again. Or hugging range…yes, hugging range would be good…although, that would make doing certain things (like flying the TARDIS) much more difficult. He guessed he would settle for hand-holding.

She approached him, hugging him tightly when he didn't move away from her. His arms came around her, holding her close as she buried herself into his chest. He moved them to the nearest available seat which, thanks to their (yes, he decided in his mind, their) ship was the sofa in the library. The library was larger now, having grown from taking in the other TARDIS. He would have to ask her about that.

"Where do you want me to start?" She asked him once they were settled.

"Where ever you want to," he replied. He had no idea why they were being so quiet. It wasn't as if the girls would be disturbed if they were loud. The girls, in fact, would be perfectly fine. The TARDIS would alert them if their daughters needed them.

"Jenny doesn't remember much about how she got to the other universe or what happened after she crashed," Rose began. The girls she could talk about. What had happened to her…that was something she had to work up to. "Between crashing and waking up with Tally untying her, she has little to no memory. I'm glad she doesn't."

Rose had found and wiped out Struan's files and notes, keeping Jenny's and Tally's just long enough to figure out what had been done to them. She didn't like death or killing, but she was glad that that man had been sentenced to death for his 'crimes against nature, children, and the human race'. She'd watched it carried out as her girls lay in the medical bay aboard her TARDIS, healing from at least the physical wounds. The nanogenes had had a lot of work to do, fixing the two little broken bodies. It had almost been like when they'd had to fix her, although her regeneration had taken care of most of it.

"Tally is, or was, at least half engineered, I didn't really understand most of it, but she was basically a 'template'," Rose spat the word out as if it were a curse, "for how to create the perfect fighter. Her memories…she reminded me a lot of your last self when we first met. It was her sending out a strong enough signal to be picked up by the TARDIS that drew me to them."

She went on to explain what had happened on Dracarious. Rose went into more detail than the girls had, filling in the giant gaps the girl's had left him with. All they'd said was, really, that they'd needed help and Rose had saved them and, eventually, adopted them.

"I couldn't just leave them behind," she finished with. "They needed me and…and I needed them." She burrowed further into him. "Still do, and they wanted back here as much as I did."

"How did you get back? Donna said you were in the parallel world that was created around her, but kept going in and out."

"We used the rift in Cardiff," she placed a finger against his lips before he could go into a ramble on how dangerous that was. "The walls between the worlds were weakening, and Jenny's almost as good at the science stuff as you are. Between her, our TARDIS, what I'd learned, and Tally's insights, we managed it safely. As for Donna's world, we skipped around the vortex and went where I was needed. The girls hated it, two months locked inside the ship while I was sorting out what was going on."

"I'd imagine," he knew how much he hated being in one place too long. Even if Tally was in no way related to him, he could see her hating it just as much as Jenny did. Jenny was, and he already knew she liked the running.

"Yeah, well, we finally got to Cardiff and my TARDIS was trying to recharge. We were outside, trying to relax a bit from our latest adventure when Torchwood showed up." Even though it had been Jack, just the name itself was enough to make her shudder. "After a rather confusing reunion with Jack, we spent the time until the Daleks showed up with him and his team." She shoved his shoulder. "I want a full explanation, by the way, from you on why you left our friend behind!"

The Doctor winched. "I was more concerned about you at the time, and…well…he's unsettling. It's taken me this long to be able to spend even a little bit of time around him. Just his presence now makes me want to run away, and the TARDIS feels much the same way."

"Jack told me about that, and it took time for Jenny to stop frowning at him." Rose settled again. Jack had forgiven them both, and the Doctor did have a point. Until she'd seen him again, she hadn't even registered what she'd done to him. She hadn't even been certain if that part of her memory, her bringing Jack back to life, was real or wishful thinking. "The first thing she asked was why he was a fixed point, and then Ianto and Gwen teased him about," she giggled, "being 'bloody Harry Potter'."

He laughed. "How did he like that?"

"He wore the Gryffindor tie the girls found for him for a week until someone took it from him and hid it. That, or I don't really want to know what he came up to using it for." Rose told him, shaking her head.

"Agreed," the Doctor didn't want to think of that either. "What happened Rose?" He'd turned somber again, and this body did that rather well when it wanted to.

She sighed. "It started about a year or so after Norway," she began softly, "I wasn't noticeably aging, Mum commented on it and Dad just wanted to run a few tests. Nothing extreme, he just wanted to make sure I was alright and wasn't going to pop out of existence or something." The irony (was it irony? She wasn't certain and was too tired to care) of that was not lost on her. "He never got to anything beyond blood tests, and I never told him about my chest or head hurting."

Rose tightened her hold on him. She hated these memories as much as he hated the ones from the Time War. He held her closer, if that was even possible at this point. Her mind was locked tightly away from him, nothing leaking over except the sense that she didn't want to talk about this but she had to at the same time.

"We'd just lost Mickey to a dimension jump experiment, or so we thought at the time. His gran had just died and he'd been acting reckless, having to deal with that again." She shook her head. "I suppose it was less destructive than the first time, but it was still just as frightening." She forced herself to relax against the man holding her. "Someone in the science department had gotten hold of my file and decided that despite what the boss said I was more alien than human because of what the test results said."

"Rose," he didn't really need her to continue. He could guess where her story was going. Why hadn't he thought to run tests after the Game Station? Too much else going on at the time he supposed, but he still should have thought about it. She never should have been able to make it off Earth, never mind done what she'd done. Twice now, come to think of it. Maybe if he had, it would have changed things. At the very least she would have been aware, would have been able to keep herself out of their hands.

"Yeah, really don't like needles now." She shivered at the memories this was bringing forward. However, if she could manage it with Jack then she was going to manage it with the Doctor. "I was called to Dad's office one day and I just went not thinking anything of it. I'd just gotten off a really strange call with Mum…I thought she might have been having me on or that the universe was trying to shove me out of it and wanted to talk to him."

"It was a trap," he had to force his anger into the back of his mind. Rose had escaped, she was alright and back where she belonged with him. It was over and no one was going to do anything like it to her ever again. If anyone did, they'd have to face him as the Oncoming Storm and few survived that.

"Yep," she went quiet for a moment. "I think they must have run every test they could think of and more that they made up just for me while I was there." That was part of why she'd been unable to leave the girls behind. She knew what being a lab rat was like and it was a fate she didn't wish on anyone. She'd rescue a Dalek from that fate (she supposed that, technically, she had already done just that). Not that the Dalek had thanked her for doing so, but that was beside the point.

"They had a TARDIS a few rooms from where I was," she continued after a few moments of silence. "I'd felt it before, but put it off as wishful thinking." The smile on her face was small and sad. "She was so weak, and I doubt they even knew what they had but I did once I was close enough." She shrugged a little. "It took time, but she managed to get through to me." Rose had to wipe tears away. Her ship, her friend was dead. Parts of her lived on in this TARDIS, but her soul was gone.

She felt the TARDIS hum in her mind, offering comfort and understanding. It had been a short reunion, but it had been nice not being the only one anymore. She had been happy to take on her sister ship's responsibilities and charges. Rose had been her wolf first after all. It was her doing that allowed them the ability to connect in the other universe.

The Doctor hugged her again, offering what comfort he could. Caan had been correct; a child of time had died. A TARDIS was just as alive as any other sentient being. He'd seen a TARDIS die before, had seen several self-destruct during the war. He didn't know if any of those had done it on their own, but it didn't really matter.

With a shaky breath, Rose continued. "They were moving me and the alarms went off. I don't know if she set them off or if it was an actual alarm. I didn't care at that point; I just rolled off the bed and crawled away while the guards were trying to secure the area. I crawled right into her consul room." She had to stop again. She never had found out what had happened that day. "I passed out, which turned out to be a good thing because I was unconscious when I regenerated."

He winched in sympathy. Regeneration hurt, useful yes but painful. "It was Bad Wolf, wasn't it, that caused it?" And that made it his fault. Rose had only looked into the heart of the TARDIS in order to rescue him.

"Yes," she grinned, "and it wasn't your fault Doctor. I'd do it again if I had to…" she trailed off. "Which I did today, didn't I? That's how we got out of there after my TARDIS exploded," which, honestly, should have killed them all and caused far more damage than it had when her ship had been destroyed. The only thing that had saved them from that fate was Rose absorbing much of the released power and taking on the full mantle of Bad Wolf once again.

"Yes, do you not remember it?"

"No, I do…vaguely." She frowned. "It takes a while, but the memories eventually come back. I sort of remember the Game Station now, and the escape from Torchwood although I don't know how much was from Bad Wolf or the experiments." She shrugged, having had decades to get used to it. "Whatever it was, the TARDIS had enough power to get us to the rift there to recharge. She disguised herself like she saw in my memory, only red because that's what fit in that universe." She paused for a moment. "Actually, I think she just liked that color. She liked it almost as much as she liked the shape, because her chameleon circuit worked just fine she just refused to use it." She cocked her head. "I think it did anyway, otherwise she would have just stayed a stone looking cylinder with a door right?"

The Doctor chuckled. Yes, that sounded like a Type-40 TARDIS. Part of the reason, he'd discovered in the last part of the war when every available TARDIS and other vessel was put into use, that the Type-40s were being decommissioned was that they had 'far too much personality'. Stuffy, his people were. He liked his ship even if they didn't always agree on certain things and her perchance for taking him places he never intended to go verses where he wanted to go. They made it work.

"Right," he agreed with her. "So off to explore that universe then?"

Rose nodded. "Yea, but I let her choose where to go at first. It took months for us both to recover and she sometimes had trouble finding energy to charge her powercells. She wasn't compatible with that universe exactly, something about being from a pan-dimensional planet." She looked at him.

"Yes, that's why I wasn't worried about running into any Time Lords or another me when we first went there. Gallifrey, and thus its people, were pan-dimensional so we technically existed in every dimension at the same time. It's why we could travel to other dimensions but we also never stayed there permanently, oh some did but never a TARDIS. At least, not one that wasn't a Type-83 or higher. All the others were resistant to keeping any permanent charge if they had to refuel in any dimension other than this one." He babbled on in explanation.

Rose leaned further into him and relaxed naturally this time instead of forcing herself to do so. She'd missed his babble.

The Doctor trailed off when he realized that Rose hadn't said anything or responded to any of his questions. He looked down at the now sleeping woman who was cuddled tightly into his side. For the first time since they'd been brought back together, he took the time to take her in.

Over all, she still looked like herself even if she had regenerated. Occasionally that had been known to happen on Gallifrey, but it normally had more to do with having a biological receptacle (like his hand) nearby when regenerating. The biggest difference he could think of was that her hair appeared naturally blonde now, although thinking about it her eyes had more gold in them than they had had before. She was still his Rose though, and that was the important thing.

Carefully, he maneuvered himself from underneath her and stood up. He picked her up, frowning at how light she was. Not that she'd ever been heavy to him, but even so she should be heavier now. The Doctor carried Rose to her room, or rather to where her room should have been.

This isn't funny, he sent to his ship. He got a sense of amusement and determination in return. I wasn't going to leave her alone! He protested. Rose had never been in his room, he was rarely in his room. She would feel more comfortable in a space she knew. He would be staying right by her side, not wanting to let her out of his sight just yet if ever again.

With a grumble, the door to Rose's room appeared. The Doctor sent a brief, sarcastic thank you to her before entering. He froze for a moment, wondering why the room was different before his brain caught up. The TARDIS must have joined her room from her ship with the one on his.

He really did need to figure out how that had happened. First the girls' room, then the library, and now Rose's room were all slightly different. What else had changed on his ship? No, he corrected himself, their ship. He felt the TARDIS hum in smug agreement with him. He had a feeling that the ship knew exactly what was going on.

Pushing those thoughts aside for now, he settled Rose on the bed. He removed her shoes, socks, belt, and emptied her pockets. He hesitated for a moment and then changed her completely into jimjams. He removed his top layer and was going to leave it at that until he noticed a pair of his own jimjams on Rose's desk chair. He took the hint (for once) and changed into them before settling beside Rose on the bed.

He was almost asleep when the door creaked open. He tensed, but relaxed when Jenny wondered in, Tally on her back still mostly asleep. Without acknowledging him in the slightest, she clambered into the bed and cuddled into Rose. Rose shifted away from him to turn over and fling her arm around both girls. He adjusted the blankets and then settled himself behind the young woman who had stolen his hearts the moment she took his hand (he was being a clichéd romantic but he really didn't care). Hesitantly, he mimicked her position with his hand laying over hers on Tally's back. Rose twitched, lacing their fingers together as best she could in this position.

She mumbled something, but he didn't quite catch it. Since all he felt from any of them was contentment and safety, he doubted it was anything bad. They all eventually settled into sleep.

The TARDIS dimmed all the lights on board, settling herself into rest just as her people were doing. They could all worry about other things later. Right now, it was time to heal.

The Doctor woke up to find intense green eyes staring at him. He returned the stare, wondering what Tally was thinking of. Jenny looked the same as she always had, just smaller and her sharper features softened by youth, with his eyes and (he could say now) Rose's hair. He bet if he pulled out images of his past regenerations he'd find other aspects of himself in Jenny's features.

Tally, however, was a complete mystery. She did, indeed, look like Rose to some degree. The same bone structure, eye shape, skin tone, and all the hallmarks of future potential still soft with childhood. The main differences, aside from her eye color, were her hair and the length of her limbs. She was all knees-and-elbows, already taller than Jenny despite Jenny being older. Her hair matched his for color, and if it matched his in length it would probably be sticking up in every direction it could. It was trying to, defying both gravity and the braid it was still in to poof out at odd angles.

The Doctor would love to know what sort of adoption ceremony Rose had used. It probably had something dealing with blood, considering the likeness between her and the girls. Time Lords, individually, had a wide base of genetic material to choose from because of regeneration. So it was entirely possible for any children he had would have parts of him from any past generations and, in theory, future ones as well.

Mum and Jenny are still sleeping. She said at last, closing her eyes again as she relaxed against him. Somehow she had ended up between him and Rose. Jenny had as well, and the two blondes were cuddled up together still asleep. Jenny had a bad dream and needed all of us together.

And you? He was out of practice talking like this, but the girls did it so naturally he couldn't bring himself to shut them out and tell them not to do so. He liked having that presence back in his mind, telling him he was no longer alone. Well, he had the TARDIS but she preferred emotions and static shocks verses words.

I had one as well. She was staring at him. Are you going to keep us?

That was a loaded question that meant just as much as it implied. It was also one that needed answered.

Yes, all of you and to the best of my ability. He responded, gingerly wrapping an arm around her much smaller form. It had been a very long time since he'd held someone of this size. He tried to stay away from small children. It brought all the guilt back to the forefront of his mind of all those he'd failed to save at the end of the Time War. Hundreds of thousands of children who would never get to grow up, and it was all his fault.

Your way was quick and merciful, Tally had sensed where his thoughts were going. She wasn't exactly reading them or his memories as she was seeing them via her own powers. It could get awfully mixed up in her head. The other fates were worse and slow and without mercy. I've seen children die like that, seen them forced to kill each other for adult amusement. Those dreams never go away.

No they don't, he agreed. This girl, in her own way, was just as damaged as he was. Like him, Rose had come in and rescued her without a second thought. He smiled widely, mode turning around in an instant. Shall we wake them up?

Tally nodded her head, opening her own eyes and returning his smile. In that moment they had irrevocably bonded as parent and child in the most basic way possible. It was in that moment that Tally trusted him and the Doctor fully accepted her as one of his daughters.

With muffled giggles, the two brunettes pounced on the sleeping blondes and began tickling them. Rose and Jenny shrieked in surprise, fumbling to escape the onslaught. Jenny wiggled away and fell off the bed with a thump. She popped back up and went to 'rescue' Rose from the double onslaught.

I give! Rose mentally cried out, breathless from laughing.

Tally giggled. "That was fun!"

"Fun was it?" Rose smiled wickedly. "I don't think you got tickled enough."

"I don't think Jenny did either," the Doctor added in.

Both girls tumbled off the bed, giggling as they tried to escape. Their parents went after them, capturing one and tickling them until they were breathless with laughter as well. Eventually, all of them ended up back on the bed.

"We're back," Jenny huffed, "where we started."

"I'm hungry," Tally announced, yawning. "I want tea."

"I can manage that," the Doctor untangled himself from Rose. "Shall we?"

She took his offered hand. "Yes, race you to the kitchen?"

The girls dashed out of the room. Rose took the opportunity to kiss the man beside her. He returned the kiss with enthusiasm.

"That's a new way to wake up," she said softly once they separated.

"Yes, yes it is," he agreed whole-heartedly.

"Too domestic for you?" She asked hesitantly.

"I'll get used to it," he replied. "Well, I think I'll get used to it. It's going to be hard though, with the running."

"We're used to running," Rose informed him, "we love the running."

"They're going to wonder off, get into trouble."

"We already do that, proves they're ours."

"Don't suppose they'll listen if they get told to stay in the TARDIS?"

"Hardly, and they can fly a TARDIS so really it'd be a waste of time."

"Sounds about right," he nodded to himself. "Um…I don't suppose their cooking skills are akin to mine in this body are they?" The thought had occurred to him that they'd left two children under the age of ten alone in the kitchen.

Rose shook her head. "More likely Jenny's teasing Tally about there not being pears onboard."

"She likes pears?"

"And bananas," Rose told him before he could go off on a rant about pears being evil. "Hate apples though, the both of them." It made buying fruit both easy and difficult. She wondered if the TARDIS would be able to create a room capable of growing bananas, just to feed the three of them.

"But pears?" He would have to fix that. How could she like pears?

"It could be worse," Rose told him, "she could hate bananas."

"Don't even joke about that!" He told her, looking mildly alarmed.

She smiled at him, wide and amused. Just like that, they'd fallen back into their normal banter and easy way of just being together.

Mum! Jenny's threatening to cook something!

Dad! Tally's going to eat all the bananas!

"Kitchen?" Rose asked him, knowing the girls were doing this on purpose.

"Kitchen," he tightened his grip on her hand. "Why does it feel like there's a story there?"

Grinning, Rose didn't say a word.