A/N: Chapter title is one of my favourite ever descriptions of a colour, from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It's how JKR describes the Knight Bus. Credit given where credit's due.
"Come on you bloody thing, WORK!" Rose screamed at the metal component she had just spent four hours fruitlessly attempting to integrate into the coral plinth at the centre of their TARDIS' console room. She made to throw it but stopped herself at the last moment. It had taken her three weeks to assemble the part according to John's instructions, she couldn't lose it now in a fit of pique.
She saw Tony creep into the room out of the corner of her eye and looked over at him. "Oi! Boy genius, come here and help. She likes you more anyway."
It had been three months since they had moved into the TARDIS and Rose's attempts at integrating the components John had described for her had been thwarted at every turn by the uncooperative Joan, as Tony called the ship. Well, she should be a ship, but without any sort of navigational system, she certainly wasn't going anywhere.
Rose was intensely aggravated. The rift on the beach was growing by the day, and she didn't know how long they had before it closed itself. The TARDIS remained stubbornly rooted in the black soil of Gallifrey, refusing to allow Rose to make any sort of progress towards installing navigational components.
She had read and re-read the books she'd been left. John had spent years carefully developing instructions for her to do this very thing. His earliest-dated notebook told her exactly how he'd come to believe it might be possible to get back.
Rose, I saw it. Kasterborous. I saw it when we were visiting New Zealand. Do you remember when we went to that observatory with all the radiotelescopes? Can't usually see the stars individually from Earth but with those high-powered telescopes in that black sky, oh it was perfect. I don't know how, Rose, but those seventeen stars are in exactly the same alignment as they were when Gallifrey existed, but that shouldn't be possible because it's locked, out of time and space. All space.
The gravity of Gallifrey kept its binary suns at a certain position relative to the others in that constellation. They should have moved once the planet was time locked, but they haven't moved. They are exactly where they should be and that can only be true if Gallifrey is here. And if Gallifrey is here, the Schism can be here.
That's how you're getting home. You're going to travel like a Time Lord, my Rose. You're going to surf through the fabric of reality in a brand new TARDIS, right from the beaches of Gallifrey. You lucky thing.
He had spent all that was left of his life working on instructions for her. Instructions about how to find this world and how to use its naturally occurring Time Vortex aperture to get back to her own reality. Instructions for how to nurture the TARDIS so let her grow, and how to outfit her as a ship. Everything he had written had born out in reality so far, except these bleeding navigational components.
Tony stepped over to her and rested a hand on her shoulder. He was nearly as tall as she, now, having hit a growth spurt in the last month. Rose hoped they could get the navigation working sooner rather than later, if only to be able to pop to another planet to get him some new clothes since the ones she had brought were now too small. He was wearing her extra trainers, and his jeans barely reached his ankles.
"Still can't get anything installed?" He looked over the console, which still held only a rudimentary time rotor, a very primitive vortex flux stabilizer knob, and nothing else.
"Every time I try, something grows in the way. John didn't write anything how to deal with a TARDIS that doesn't want to go anywhere." She crossed her arms over her chest and huffed in frustration.
Tony ran his hands over the console. "Don't know what you expect me to do about it. I understand the theory but you're the one who built a dimension cannon."
"A TARDIS isn't a dimension cannon," Rose muttered, feeling petulant at being bested, yet again, by a telepathic plant.
"Isn't that how we're using it? Theory's the same, yeah?"
She ran her fingers through her still very blonde hair. Thanks to a Quorosi hair treatment, she'd never have to worry about her roots again. It was a small thing, but she was pleased she hadn't ended up with horribly two-toned hair during their months on Gallifrey. It would have been just one more thing to frustrate her right now. Thinking on what Tony had said, she rolled his suggestion around in her head.
"Yeah, suppose. Well, if a dimension cannon could object, anyway. This TARDIS is as stubborn as you."
"Probably. I think I might have an idea. John's last notebook mentioned the Schism, Vortex, rift, whatever, having a certain phase value. Maybe if we can measure that, we can at least get her to acknowledge the rift is there, yeah? Maybe once she realizes there's something to latch onto…" he trailed off, shrugging his shoulders in a non-committal gesture.
Rose set the coordinate entry computer assembly on the floor by the console. She pulled herself up to her full height and stretched. She'd spend hours today bent over her workbench and the console and her muscles were stiff. "Now's as good a time as any, I guess. Could use a walk anyway."
They left the tree-like TARDIS and walked towards the beach. The yellow sun blazed brightly high in the sky and there wasn't even the slightest breeze. The land was utterly still. The rustle of the two Tylers walking through long grasses seemed louder in the dead air. While they were at least a kilometre away, she could hear the bubbling sound of small waves rolling onto the beach.
"Did you bring your sonic?" Tony asked Rose suddenly. His voice seemed loud in the very quiet atmosphere and Rose startled a bit at the question.
"'Course." She pulled it out and tossed it in the air, catching it mid-spin before launching it into the air again. The Doctor had fiddled with his sonic screwdriver constantly, and now that she regularly carried the comforting weight of the ultimate multi-tool, she understood the appeal. The smooth metal and the even weight of it made it the perfect object for busy fingers to manipulate.
"I did too," he said proudly, pulling out his matching device. It looked very similar to Rose's own, but was scuffed and marked up from having been a favourite play thing of the boy for many years.
It had been a Christmas gift to Tony, just a week after Rose and John had been married. She remembered the look on the boy's face when he'd pulled it out of the long, thin box John had packaged it in. At the time, it'd done little more than blink and whirr and was nothing more than a toy for the child who was only four years old. But as the years went by and Tony grew into a little scientist in his own right, John had unlocked some of the previously hidden abilities of the device and taught him how to put it to use. The screwdriver was Tony's prized possession, and Rose knew it was as much sentimentality as utility.
Jackie had insisted the sonic screwdriver be kept at Rose and John's flat in Cardiff after Tony had made a habit of surreptitiously loosening his tutor's chair's legs during lessons. After Mister George had hit the floor, hard, for the third time, and was faced with a too-innocent looking young Master Tyler, Jackie had banished the device to Wales indefinitely.
Rose had thought to grab it when she was packing the workshop into her TARDIS rucksack the day before she left for London the last time, and had waited until Tony's tenth birthday to give it back to him, newly enabled with all of its functions. She knew how crucial the sonic had proven to be on many of her and the Doctor's adventures, so she felt better knowing there was a fully functioning backup around, just in case. As it was, it'd be impossible to complete the modifications to the stubbornly planet-bound TARDIS without a sonic.
She and Tony passed by the stand of coral formations – the TARDIS forest, she'd come to call it – and stepped onto the warm, white sand of the peaceful beach. Tony, who seemed to have outgrown the worst of his tendency to chatter since their arrival on Gallifrey, nonetheless seemed to decide today was the perfect day to catch up on his talking.
"So once we get the phase reading from the rift, Schism, what on Earth – on Gallifrey? – are we supposed to call it? John calls it so many different things. Does it even have a name? I don't know. Where was I? Oh, yeah, phase reading. We should be able to tell the TARDIS with our minds, yeah? She is telepathic, and it's not like there's any sort of input mechanism for us."
"I have no idea, Tony, I really don't," Rose said, breaking into his breathless paragraph. "I guess I can try to use my connection to her to communicate it. Can't hurt to try."
"You're gonna go Bad Wolf aren't you?" His eyes lit up gleefully. He'd heard the story of when she'd swallowed the Time Vortex from John and had pestered her endlessly for about a month over whether she could still glow and dissolve matter. She had finally snapped at the child and told him it was a one-off event and would never happen again. She'd not told him, of course, about the fact that Bad Wolf still flickered like a candlelight at the back of her mind.
Rose scoffed. "No, I'm not. It was once, Tony."
"But you got to be a superhero!" He was laughing now, relishing their return to an old subject of much bickering.
"I was not a superhero, you daft child," she responded, shaking her head and fond amusement colouring her voice. "I contained a transtemporal vortex for a few minutes."
"Superhero," Tony sing-songed.
"Shut it, kid," she said with a laugh, a smile on her lips. He ran ahead and she sped up to follow him around the last bit of rock that separated them from the right. But as she reached him, she saw a look of surprise on his face. "Tony?"
His already pale skin blanched and the smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose stood out like dark points. His eyes were fixed on the Schism. The rift in the fabric of reality had been little larger than a football across when they'd initially found it.
Now she stood before the two metre wide gap in spacetime. Discharges of blue energy passed over the gaping, swirling maw of time and she lost all sense of hearing as a dull roar consumed all sound. The hairs on her skin all stood at once and she felt her heart jump in her chest. Her head began to throb and she forced herself to turn away.
Tony was frozen in place, his eyes reflecting the violently violet whirling, rippling Vortex. His mouth was fixed in a surprised O. Rose reached out to touch him and felt a shock of discharge from his skin. "Tony?" She screamed over the roaring in her ears, but could not hear her own voice.
"TONY!" Louder, now. And still he didn't see her. She felt a panicked cry rising in her throat and forced it down. "Tony, look at me!" Desperate and screaming she choked on her own words.
He screamed. High and hard and pained the scream tore from his lungs and shattered through the hurricane-like roaring in Rose's ears.
Spurred to action, she reached out for him again and felt the burn of the wavering blue energy from the Vortex. Rose forced her muscles not to withdraw at the shock and pushed her hands through the painful, swirling energy and placed them on Tony's shoulders. With all of her strength, she pulled the screaming child away, turning him enough to break his line of sight.
Her arms burned with the lashes of the Vortex discharge and her heart leapt painfully with each movement. The golden gleam constantly present at the edges of her vision consumed her field of view as the boy collapsed into her arms and they both fell to the soft sand.
She crawled slowly, arms shuddering, back the way they had come. Dragging the tall, but slight, child behind her, she rounded the high, wall-like stone that usually occluded the Vortex from view and with the last of her strength lifted Tony into her lap.
Her hands shook as she raised them to his face. She could feel his breath coming evenly and with a quick movement of her hands, was able to feel his pulse. He was still alive.
She breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the unconscious child to her chest, kissing his blonde head. Rose let out a shuddering breath as the fear settled fully on her shoulders. She rocked back and forth with him, letting the terror wash through her. She could feel his small chest expanding under her hands and knew he breathed still.
Soon, she heard him groan and she released him.
His eyes flickered open for a moment and he met her gaze. Weakly, he mouthed "Rose" and fell back into unconsciousness.
Feeling the strength returning to her legs, she put Tony gently on the sand and stood herself up, shaking out the suddenly very present aches in every muscle she had. Rose crouched down and pulled one of Tony's arms around her shoulders, shifting the rest of him to settle across her in a fireman's carry. She rose slowly, somewhat unsteadily, with the unconscious child across her shoulders, and set back the way they came.
She had only walked a few metres when she saw a shadow on the beach ahead out of the corner of her eye. Out of necessity, she had been looking down at her feet as she carried Tony. Rose chanced a look up, shifting the weight of the child carefully so as to not drop him.
There, not ten feet ahead of her, in the middle of the beach, stood their TARDIS; red bark gleaming in the bright light of the day.
Rose rushed forward the last few metres and pushed the door open with her foot. She had only enough strength to set Tony down carefully inside the entrance before the darkness claimed her and she collapsed to the floor.