A/N: Of course, much of this will read similar. Because Rose isn't the first person here, is she?

Doctor Who – The Wandering Rose

The Next Second in Eternity

Rose flashed into existence inside a transparent tube in the middle of a stone room with a vaulted ceiling. She took in a large breath, and opened her eyes, with a sensation of shock borne from-

"Displacement" she wheezed. "I have been teleported."

The disoriented woman looked herself over. She was still wearing the familiar leather jacket and accompanying black clothes, singed and torn in some places where the glass of the dome had cut her. Wilf's holster was still at her belt, the revolver gun strapped in it. Rose quickly checked the weapon.

"Five bullets, assorted knick-knacks, and a sonic screwdriver. More than I sometimes had in worse fixes. Now how do I exit this thing?"

Rose pushed on the transparent material – some type of highly resistant polymer, going by touch. A part of it had invisible hinges, which allowed the young woman to push the cylinder open.

"Wonderful."

Rose looked around, taking in the room's medieval appearance and the evidently out of place equipment and teleporter, and a skull lying in the sand on the floor, attached by a pair of cables to a console featuring complex machinery.

The time traveller went over to the skull, picking it up. "Look at the state of you" she said with pity. "Human being, suffered some rather rough-looking cranial surgery. Did that happen to you here?"

She looked around and noticed the outline of a corpse in the sand, the word 'BIRD' having been traced with a shaking finger next to where the right hand had ended disintegrating. "Combusted?" Rose said with disgust as she put down the skull. She looked at the machinery it was still connected with, which brought her back to… "The teleporter" she spat. "Bloody Time Lords, did you actually burn a living, sentient being up just to bring me here? Every time I think I've seen your lowest you find a way to do something worse!"

Rose proceeded to inspect the rest of the room. "This place has gone into some disuse, it would seem." She frowned. "I'm missing something important." Then she spotted a television monitor on one of the curved walls, displaying only static, and walked over to it determinedly.

"If you're watching this, whichever Time Lord lapdog you may be, you need to understand this: I may not know a tenth of what your masters know, but I haven't been stuck for countless centuries of slaving obedience to a complete nutcase, so unlike you, I can think outside of the box. I know this is a trap, and you should know there's one beast you never put into a trap: the Bad Wolf. Also known as me."

Rose walked away from the screen, stopping again in front of the console.

"You don't want to talk to me yet, and I figured you wouldn't, but I'm absolutely certain you're listening" she said. "And you should worry, and I'll tell you why. First", and she sonicked the console, "this. Equipment consistent with extreme-long-range teleportation, meaning I'm not more than ten parsecs from where you brought me, which would be Gallifrey, currently placed in a pocket dimension out-of-synch by a second or so with Earth, and close to where Earth is in the regular time stream. I'm still in the same time zone, and I know how to hop back into the right one, which I will do as soon as I have stolen a TARDIS. Are you ready to negotiate?"

If anybody heard Rose, they didn't answer.

"I thought not" the woman ended up saying as she left the room through a sliding stone door and entered a narrow corridor. "But if you believe you're never going to have to talk to me, especially after shoving the remains of yet another of your innumerable victims against my nose, you're only proving how you understand very little. And if you think there is a limit to how far I'll go to make sure you don't escape the fate the Doctor was forced to decide for you, you understand nothing at all." She paused in front of another screen. "I'm the Bad Wolf. I'm coming for your boss, and I've got nothing to lose and tricks you can't imagine, so don't even dream of stopping me."

There was a shovel below the screen, its blade covered in dirt. Rose smiled mirthlessly as she reached for it. "What's that, a clue? I know Time Lords love their chosen names, so what does that make you? The Gardener? I loathe gardeners, all they know to do is torture and maim defenceless flowers and trees until they think the result looks pretty."

The young woman let go of the shovel and peeked through a windowless opening to the outside. She found herself peering at a vast interior courtyard from what had to be its central tower, planted on the inside of an immense circular castle, with corridors linking tower and outside structure on many levels.

Rose took a deep breath, savouring the salty tang of the air and listening to the sound of waves crashing on what had to be the outside walls.

"A castle built in the middle of the sea" the woman observed. "Skies are the wrong colour for most of Gallifrey and this isn't its wastes, so I'm not walking on your planet, but I'm very near. When the night falls, I'll be able to precisely ascertain my position from the stars, and there aren't too many possibilities within distance of Sol."

The woman drew herself back inside, and resumed walking the corridors. "The lighting is consistent with a single G-class star of comparable luminosity, which leaves exactly eight candidates, all of which I can identify from their distance to my star system of origin. From there it won't take me too long to reverse-engineer the teleporter so it transports me exactly where you don't want me to be. So quit being shy!" she shouted as she halted in front of yet another screen, right next to a wide murder hole. "Thanks to you, I've already had one hell of a horrible life. Now let's see how awful we can make yours!"

The screen flared to life, offering a black and white display. No interlocutor was showing up on it; just the outside view of a murder hole across the interior courtyard, through which Rose could discern a silhouette. She peeked closer, noticing the person she was seeing was moving halfway outside of view; the visible half was the left half of a woman dressed entirely in black, wearing a damaged black leather jacket and with short hair in a very light colour.

Rose cringed, and tentatively raised her left hand to her head. She saw the very same movement happen on the screen, confirming she was seeing herself from across the courtyard. Feeling uncomfortable, the time traveller went to the murder hole and peered across the courtyard. She found herself gazing at a humanoid-sized mass shrouded in a material that looked like a black plastic sheet. Then the figure turned to its left, and slowly ambled ahead, disappearing from view, and reappearing in front of the next murder hole on that side twelve seconds later.

"Okay… That's kinda creepy" Rose admitted out loud, returning to check the screen. It was now displaying the inside of a long, bending corridor with more murder holes lining its interior, the display advancing very slowly. "At least it means I'm not the only humanoid still alive inside this place, just got to check whether I can convince whatever this creature is to give me a hand." Rose's voice regained in confidence. "And you'll find out I'm quite good at getting all sorts of creatures to give me a hand, even when my enemy sees inside their head. So I'm going to make contact, but feel free to butt in. We aren't done, you and I, not by a very, very long shot."

Rose peered outside again, trying to ascertain if there was a direct route she could take from the tower to the dark and slow moving creature. There was one such route, which would take it through one of the axial corridors linking the outer castle to the interior tower. The woman went to check that corridor; sure enough, after a minute, the dark creature showed up.

Rose waved her hand quickly and shouted a "Hello!" at the creature, but that went unacknowledged. It just continued to lumber slowly in her direction, taking a step every third second, each ponderous footfall marked with a loud "Thump!" that shook the paved floor just enough for Rose to feel the tremor. "Encouraging" the woman muttered.

Rose stepped back to the corridor lining the outer wall of the central tower, going for the closest monitor. The display showed a straight corridor now, much like the one the dark creature was slowly marching through, and the point of view quite possibly moved at the same pace. "Don't tell me…" Rose went a little further back in her own corridor, stopping at a point where she could check if the display on a monitor would start showing her when the creature came in sight.

It was exactly what happened nearly a couple of minutes later, and Rose cringed, feeling very uncomfortable all of a sudden. "So you're trying to scare me" she said, waving at a fly and sounding less confident than she would have liked. "You're showing me what this thing is looking at. Is it following me? It has to be following me, but I can definitely outrun it."

The woman walked away into the next axial corridor. This one was lined with murder holes on either side, but narrower, not allowing any attempt at fitting through. At the far end lay a thick wooden double door, which Rose found was barred on the other side when she tried to pull it open.

"Absolutely wonderful" she muttered. "Well, I've got a program running in the sonic, but it's for the Tower of London. Option B…"

Rose focused on herself, tugging at where she knew she could connect with the Time Vortex, except-

"That's what's missing!" she exclaimed herself. "Alright, I'll admit this was a little bit clever, taking away my connexion from what makes me most dangerous. But I'm not calling it quits, you haven't seen anything yet."

That was the moment the dark creature chose to show up at the other end of the corridor, effectively trapping the time traveller.

"Oh, that's just brilliant" Rose said peevishly. "Well, option C: still got River's squareness gun and just enough battery for a couple of shots…" The scared woman drew the weapon and took a shot at the door, vanishing a good portion of it, only to reveal another metre of corridor ending on a stone wall.

"Okay… Now that's just unfair…" A fly buzzed past Rose's nose, and she turned around. The creature was nearly halfway along the corridor, continuing its slow and inexorable advance. "I remember you…" the woman mused. "I've seen you before, humanoid shape under a plastic cover except I'm pretty sure there were no rotting hands jutting from the sides." She looked up.

"Well, if you were looking for something to scare me I'll commend you for a job well done… Certainly worse than the skull back there. This is from a memory from the night I fled from Jimmy Stone's and had to sleep under a bridge next to piles and piles of garbage." Rose's voice was quivering, now. "There were lots of flies, and this thing looking very much like the long lump under a black plastic cover that seemed to twitch without wind. Lifted the plastic sheet and saw there was a dead guy rotting under the same bridge, most terrified I've been all my life. And now you've pulled that memory out of my past and somehow brought it to life here."

The veiled corpse was getting close now, only a dozen steps from its intended victim, its rotting hands extended at the height of Rose's face. The young woman attempted a feeble smile. "Well, I have a feeling this is it… Come to think of it I'm seventy-one, that's a regular human lifespan in my century of origin, if you don't count just the developed countries. And I'm not the first person to die here either…"

She recoiled against the wall behind her in an instinctive attempt to gain another second or two, knowing it was futile. Four steps left. "This is a terrible way to go, death by killer zombie…" Three steps left. "Come to think of it, I don't want to go." Two steps. "I'm scared." One step, hands reaching for her face. "I'm really, properly scared of dying!"

The creature froze, its hands halting only a few centimetres from Rose's face, close enough to become blurred.

Rose was shaking from head to toe. "Why are you stopping?"

There was no answer; the creature just stood still.

Then there was a rumbling, and Rose felt the castle animating itself, rearranging its rooms, and the stone shifted to reveal the entrance to a bedroom furnished in an 18th century style. She entered briskly, taking in the surroundings, the faint salty tang from the air mixed with the fragrance of a couple of sprigs of hemerocallis, which rested in a vase on a commode and under bright afternoon light coming through wide windows.

Rose went to the flowers and picked one up, a sardonic smile on her lips. "You aren't here by happenstance, are you? A flower that barely lives a day before fading and being replaced by a new one from the same stem."

She spotted the chimney, and an old, peeling painting on the mantelpiece representing-

"Now that's just cruel" Rose said grimly. "A reminder of the father I've only known for one day." A fly landed on the painting. "It's almost like this whole place has been designed to break me mentally, except it can't have been, since someone else was prisoner here first. And you're one of the jailors, aren't you?" and she turned to the morbid creature which was now entering the bedroom, having resumed its slow and inexorable advance.

"I probably could try and have you approach on one side of the bed and then climb over it and run off, but I've already been stuck in a corridor one too many times for today" Rose drawled as she grabbed a heavy wooden stool. "And if you're going to be my personal torturer, it's not going to end up as well as with your last prisoner. Let's see how you deal with the most slippery captive this side of the Doctor" she added, throwing the stool through one of the windows, shattering it.

Rose forced a grin. "Lesson number one: the only irreplaceable person in the torture chamber is the one you're interrogating. But their first instinct is always to survive as long as possible, trying their damnedest for a few more instants. Which is why you won't have seen this coming!" And Rose threw herself through the broken window, diving towards the sea that lay a good fifty metres below, at first attempting to stay horizontal to minimize her acceleration, and at the last possible second twisting so as to enter the waters vertically, braced hands first.

SPLASH!

The shock of entry made Rose see stars, and she barely managed to retain her breath. She tried to shake herself back into full awareness, only to meet the resistance from the mass of water she was plunged in, at a depth of ten or twelve metres, she couldn't tell right now. All she could see was-

The young woman barely managed to stop herself from gasping in fright as she spotted the litter of skulls covering the entire sea floor, following its slope downwards and away from the castle walls. Rose forced herself to swim back to the surface, breaking the waters and taking in some deep, hurried breaths. "What the hell are you Time Lords doing in this place, to have killed so many people?" she gasped.

It finally registered that the water was quite cold, and Rose's teeth began chittering. She swam back to shore; fortunately, there appeared to be a few places where the castle walls didn't run straight into the sea. One little ledge allowed the woman to leave the waters, and she was thankful to see the warm light from a fire flickering through a ground-level entrance. As she entered into the castle again, Rose wondered idly whether the relentless corpse she'd met upstairs could swim.

The light, as it happened, came from a traditional fireplace that was burning some form of everlasting wood. Rose had no idea where the smoke was evacuated; she certainly didn't remember seeing evidence of a chimney. There was nowhere to sit in the small room, although the time traveller suspected it would have been a bad idea to sit and risk falling asleep in front of the fire. No room to manoeuvre should the walking dead make its way here. There was a stand next to the fire, on which hung an array of warm clothes exactly similar to Rose's, minus the underwear. A screen was there to remind the woman of the ever-present threat, showing a slow descent down spiralling stairs.

Rose took off most of her clothes, stripping down to her undergarments and laying her sodden attire aside after she'd taken out her sonic, Wilf's gun in its holster, a notebook and a pencil. Then she stood herself in front of the fire, mulling over her situation. "Which is that of a prisoner without chains, and constantly pursued by a relentless jailor slash executioner. Who are a lot better at their job than the slowness of their pace hints at, judging by how many people have died here before I arrived."

Rose drew a deep breath. "I've got to establish the layout of this place, or as much of it as I can figure, and find a way to measure how much time it takes for that thing to go from place to place." She shivered and turned around, looking away from the fire. "I'm missing something else" she said, rubbing some warmth into herself, "something that should be obvious." Rose frowned. "It's there, right at the edge of my consciousness, just like-"

Her eyes widened. "The drums. They're gone. I don't hear them anymore."

For the first time since she'd got teleported to the castle, Rose broke into a huge grin. "The drums are gone" she repeated, giggling, and she did a little dance in front of the fire. "Hey, Missy, I'm freed from the drums!" she shouted at the ceiling. There was no reply, of course, but this was definitely something Rose wanted to rub into the insane Time Lord's face whenever she'd get the chance.

After she got out of wherever she was.

The thought sobered Rose up. She was still inside the castle, and the veiled corpse would still be looking for her. Escaping it by swimming around the castle seemed a reliable option, but the time traveller didn't fancy another foray into the cold sea water. First order of business now she was mostly warm and dry was getting dressed. It felt rather suspicious that someone would have laid out an exact duplicate set of the clothes Rose had been wearing when she had arrived, but then again, it was a Time Lord who'd sent her in that place to begin with. A scan of the clothes revealed nothing to arouse suspicion – it was literally a copy of her clothes and even of the contents of her jacket, down to the missing screwdriver, notebook and pencil; there was also no replacement for Wilf's gun or its holster.

Rose got dressed and put her own sodden attire to dry by the fire, thinking as she did so about figuring out a few more escape routes in the sector. That would be her next order of business – she couldn't allow herself to be cornered again, not when she had no guarantee her pursuer would stop like they had in the first place.

She left the warming room, finding herself in one of the long, bending corridors lining the castle's outer perimeter. The monitoring screens were as present as everywhere the time traveller had been so far, and still showed a view of a descent along a spiralling flight of stairs. A brief view through a murder hole showed that the corpse was reaching ground level, which meant Rose had at most two minutes to herself, assuming the creature were on the opposite side of the 'wheel'. Rose would have barely enough time to open a door or two, and would have to gamble on whether the corridor lining the perimeter ran uninterrupted.

The first room Rose ducked into turned out to be a vestry, with a door bearing the number "3". Ironically, it prominently featured a pinstriped suit reminiscent of Rose's second Doctor, except for the fact it was blue. A light blue shirt and a burgundy cravat completed the ensemble as well as-

"Sandshoes" Rose groaned. "Are you really that amused at the notion of me replacing the Doctor in this universe? I'll stick to what I'm wearing, thank you very much…"

She checked the monitor inside the vestry. The creature was advancing on the ground-level corridor, but it couldn't be too close. The sound of its footsteps didn't reach Rose, and the doors she'd left open were nowhere in-

SLAM!

Rose jumped, and cringed. "Haunted castle, much?"

She opened the door to the vestry again. Said door still didn't appear on the monitor.

Rose waited, ticking away eighty-nine seconds, before the shambling corpse finally made an appearance in viewing distance of the open door. "Impeccable timing, my friend" Rose quipped at the creature. "Now let's see how fast you can go."

Rose broke into a run away from the shambling creature, pausing just long enough to open a door on the outer side of the corridor every now and then. All of the doors had numbers which followed no apparent logical progression. A good half of them opened on walls; every now and then, there was an unnumbered door which opened on a stairwell.

"How did I make that other wall move?" Rose heaved in between breaths. "There's something I said that made it happen." But she had little time to ponder about that. The corridor had opened into a wide hallway, with its only exit situated on the inside wall. It led into a small garden with a filled grave at the centre of it, and there was no other exit.

"Stairwell it is."

Rose ran again. She had a good deal of mapping to do. Hopefully the castle wouldn't invalidate her hypothesis and move again without prompting.

The day-night cycle turned out to follow a strict pattern of twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night. Rose was grateful that her time sense was still intact now that she had lost her connection to the Vortex; it had been immensely helpful in the past couple of days and nights in timing the constraints placed on her by the relentlessly pursuing creature.

"And you're not giving up, are you, old monster?" Rose muttered drowsily, looking at the monitoring screen inside the bedroom with Pete's portrait. She'd just been taking a nap there, setting the sonic to wake her up with a safety margin.

"Fifty-seven minutes is the best I can get here" she muttered, getting up from the bed. "I need a better bedroom. I managed eighty-two from the upper floor to the ground dining hall. Would love being able to squeeze in a second sleep cycle."

She walked over to the window she'd shattered during her first visit. Somehow it had been repaired, and the stool she'd thrown had been replaced, but Rose was pretty certain nobody had been effecting the repairs. The bedroom appeared to have just reset in her absence. It was an inconsistency, considering the skull attached to cables had still been present in the teleporter's room when Rose last checked, and she'd been absent from that room longer than she had been from the bedroom.

That train of thought led to Rose's third day's project: finding out if she could leave a permanent trace of her passage. Which first meant running downstairs, as far as she could, and conveniently would give the woman some time to make and eat breakfast. And this, in turn, led to another useful discovery made when Rose reached the pantry.

"So, your stores refill as well" she muttered with a faint smile. "At least I know whoever set this up doesn't want me to die of hunger – but that begs the question of whether they want something from me other than just killing me." She brought a cereal bowl along with her to the adjoining dining hall. "Among the things they don't want me doing are the dishes" she remarked wryly, "turns out I can run away from my evening soup and not have to bother returning to clean up. And this means you need less than nine hours to reset. I could try and put a tighter clock on that, might be useful, but that doesn't explain my predecessor upstairs, their skull's still lying there."

Rose sat herself down, distractedly eating the cereals with one hand, while her other hand ticked the seconds away on the table. "I'd never have thought I'd miss having a rhythm playing in my head…" She sighed, laying down her spoon in the bowl. "Then again, I've been hearing the sound of drums for most of my life. Until I came here I could barely remember what it was like not to hear them all the time" She looked up in the direction of the hall's entrance; the walking corpse was standing there, as if it were listening to-

"You aren't moving" Rose shouted as she started away from her seat. "Why aren't you moving?" she added, barely above a whisper. "You're always moving – except that one time, but I'm not deathly afraid of you right now, and you're not moving, the castle is moving. The castle is moving…"

Rose ran to the windows lining the interior courtyard. Her next words came out as a roar. "For God's sake! I've spent nearly two days mapping out this bloody castle and now it's all gone to waste! Arg!" She took out her notebook, angrily tore off the pages on which she'd laid down floor plans and threw the whole sheaf on the floor. Then she returned her attention to the spectacle of the various floors turning around, and the axial corridors rotating above her head, like clockwork. Until it stopped, the castle having rearranged itself in-

"I'm an idiot... It's just a new configuration. If I manage to program the various floor plans into the sonic and adjust them whenever the configuration changes, I'm set. It should be possible to get the map to display on one of those bloody omnipresent screens."

Thump.

"Now you're moving again…" Rose said for the dark creature. "It's you or the castle. Isn't that wizard…"

The woman hastily collected the torn sheets from her notebook before leading her pursuer around the table. The trick was the simplest in the book, but it was effective, and allowed the time traveller to run off. She had another day's worth of mapping to do…

Three days later, a wearying Rose was digging in the interior courtyard and keeping an anxious watch on the monitor screen visible through a window. There was only one exit, and the time traveller intended to try setting a trap up for her relentless pursuer. And digging up the only grave in the whole castle seemed one decent way of learning something about its resident walking corpse. Rose just needed to get to the bottom of it without taking longer than an eight hour break away from the courtyard – that was the resetting time for all the rooms.

"But the stone wall upstairs… might not reset" Rose heaved between two shovelfuls. "Someone… scratched the words… Bad Wolf… into a wall… and they've stayed… longer than eight hours."

The time traveller stopped shovelling, giving her arms a bit of time to rest, and clambered out of the hole she'd been able to dig so far, and to check the monitor she could see through a window. What she saw was the face of a wall.

"This doesn't make sense… unless…"

She bolted for the door and reached it at the instant the veiled corpse pushed it open. Rose shoved the door back with renewed energy born from desperation, and managed to slam it shut. She jammed the shovel under the handle, its blade digging into the gravel path, and held onto it loosely, ready to reposition should her pursuer manage to make it shift. Thankfully, it didn't; and after fifteen seconds of trying the corpse just stopped.

"Great…" Rose heaved. "You can set traps… I'm good at traps."

She took a couple of steps back, and looked through the window closest to the door. The shambling corpse walked past there, dragging its black plastic cover along as it moved away, puzzling Rose. "Where are you going now? There's only one way in and one way out…"

There was no answer, but she wasn't really expecting one. The woman in black sighed, and took advantage of her forced break before she returned to her task.

The rest of the day went and night fell. For the first time, Rose had managed to gain several hours in which she could work, and those had been put to good use, shovelling and shovelling until she'd reached a depth of a metre and a half. That was where she finally hit stone.

Patiently, the time traveller got rid of the final layers of dirt, exposing a message engraved on the worn stone slab, reading 'I AM IN 12'.

"Okay, that's not the resident zombie's grave, obviously" the young woman wheezed. "What does this mean, then? Should I be looking for room number 12?"

Then Rose jumped backwards as the veiled corpse burst through the side of the dugout, cornering her. "No!" she shouted in panic. "I only wanted to know why there was a freshly dug grave here and whether it was yours!"

The creature stopped, its long, rotting fingers inches away from Rose's face. And the castle started to move again.

"Close one…"

She didn't wait until the castle had stopped moving to scramble away.

A few more days passed. Rose kept exploring, getting more and more familiar with the layout of the castle, and how to move it. "Which is simple, really" she told herself one evening as she sat in a dining hall, a plate of cooling soup in front of her. "All I have to do to get the rooms to shift is make a confession to my pursuer. I can keep the castle moving as long as I don't run out of truths to tell. And some of the rooms, like the garden, this place or the bedroom are always accessible, but all paths to the outside are now cut off no matter what I do."

She moodily twirled the congealing soup. "And it keeps coming all the time. The longest I can get myself if I lure the thing to one end of the castle and then run to the other is eighty-three minutes. If I jam the door to the walled garden, I get three hundred and five minutes until it bursts out from the grave, it's the only exception to that rule, but I don't need that kind of time unless I wish to think. I can't do anything else with it, not even sleep. It's too cold out there."

A fly buzzed in front of Rose's face, and she let her spoon drop into her plate with a clatter. "You wouldn't tell me what's supposed to lay behind that door marked twelve that's always stonewalled, would you?" she addressed the walking corpse. "Used up the squareness gun the first time we met, and I'm going to run out of things to tell you anyway, sooner or later – there's truths I can never tell you. So why are you here, really? To make my purgatory an introduction to spending eternity in hell?"

Rose hadn't expected an answer. She ran back to the central tower, and specifically the teleporter room near the top of it, where she stopped, catching up her breath. She sonicked the equipment in the room. "Judging by how the silhouette and the 'BIRD' word disappeared, you've reset too, you're just out of energy. Run out of people to burn" she added as she crouched to pick up the skull lying in the room and detach it from the two cables linking it to the machinery. "I wonder why they got you and none of your other unfortunate fellows to activate this teleporter" Rose mused. "It should be in the exact same state it was right before I arrived, meaning there's a copy of me exactly as I was thirteen days ago in the databanks, complete with their own leather jacket and a not-yet depleted squareness gun. Why was it you, of all people, who were used to materialize me here? Was it because someone experimented on you too? Are we both test subjects of twisted Time Lords, and set to share the same miserable fate?"

Rose kept the skull in hand and climbed up the final flight of stairs. She found herself at the very top of the central tower, higher than at any point accessible in the castle. Night had fallen again, and the time traveller put down the skull on one of the parapets and leaned next to it, looking up at the stars. "Sol's supposed to be over there, showing in the constellation of Böotes, and with it, the Earth" she mused. "So close, and yet so far away from Tau Ceti – that's the one we're orbiting, isn't it? But the stars are in the wrong positions." She frowned. "I know I only teleported here and didn't time travel – I can feel the difference. But the stars have moved. If I didn't know any better, I'd say I've travelled nearly a million years into the future. Did I stay comatose for nearly a million years? Was I your prisoner all that time? Were you holding me in stasis? And if you were, why set me loose here after all that time?"

As always, flies announced the arrival of Rose's perpetual pursuer. It was losing its power to intimidate her. In fact, the young woman was in the mood for a gamble.

"The Bad Wolf" she said out loud when its steps got close. The creature halted, waiting like Rose knew it would, giving her time to speak her confession. "Once upon a time, I was just a human girl, just another chav from the Estates, and then I met the Doctor. We travelled for a year across all of time and space, and then we confronted the Daleks above the Earth, in the year two hundred one hundred. He sent me away with the TARDIS, to live a good life while he'd die nearly two hundred thousand years in the future, but I refused to let that stand. My friend Mickey and my mum helped me force open the heart of the TARDIS. I looked into it and the TARDIS looked into me, and that's how I found my way back to the Doctor. I became the Bad Wolf. And to this day, I'm still scared of what I became."

Below, the castle began to rotate once more. Rose didn't wait for it to finish and started her way down towards door "12". This time, it opened on a corridor, with a distant light at its end.

"Of course…" Rose said bitterly to herself, ticking the seconds as she walked along the corridor. "Bad Wolf would be what you really want to learn about." The corridor opened on a narrow space, offering no room to manoeuvre away from the veiled corpse. Four feet into it lay a rough mineral barrier that gave the appearance of diamond, too thick for Rose to discern its actual mass, but not thick enough to entirely blot out the light from the other side. And at the top of the barrier shone the word "HOME".

Rose shook her head. "I'm not playing." She took out her sonic and scanned the mineral. "Worse than diamond, you're pure azbantium, four hundred times as hard. Twenty metres thick. It'd take an eternity to chip through, even if I had the tools and if I had the time, and I have neither… But…" She leant forward. "That's definitely an impact. Just a few centimetres in depth, but it's there. Someone's been working their way through that wall, and it must have taken a hell of a long time, especially for a little…" Rose's voice went hoarse. "Especially for a little bird… A little bird…"

She looked with horror at the creature standing at the very end of the opposite hallway. "You knew. You've known all this time. And I should have figured it out. Creature from my own nightmares. Misshapen skull from horrible experiments. All the messages left behind – left by an earlier version of me."

The creature didn't reply, of course. And Rose swallowed, and balled her fists. "I must have been repeating the same thirteen days for nearly a million years. I must have been coming down here and must have been watching you advance on a trapped me over twenty-five million times, and every time, all I was doing…"

Rose turned around, and looked at her balled fists. "All I've been doing is punch a near-indestructible wall."

And the time traveller punched, as hard as she could. She punched again, and when she no longer could, she started to kick, until like the twenty-five million times before, the creature caught up with her, reached for her face, and drained her life away, sending its victim into oblivion.

For a little while.

Rose returned to consciousness, and to pain, lying face first on the floor and noticing there were absolutely no signs of her pursuer.

"Turns out… I really... do not… want to… talk…" she managed to wheeze. She hiccupped, and forced herself to start crawling away from the wall.

"In a way… I'll get out of here… thanks to the Master…" she let out, slowly making her way, the pain from her broken hands and feet only a distant memory sensation in the middle of what promised to be a very long agony. "Time Lord cells… have spread in my body… They're everywhere… Merged with every organ… And they just refuse to die… so they drag the rest of me with them… Trying to regenerate… even when they can't… do it… anymore…"

She was a third of the way through the corridor. "I think… in my current condition… it will take me a day and a half… to reach the top of the tower… And I know…" and she clawed another 'step' further, "I have a day and a half… because I've done it before…"

It was the longest day and a half in Rose's current life – she couldn't quite call it the longest day of her life when she knew she was one of many millions of iterations in a chain, and there would possibly be a hundred billion more iterations before one of her finally got through the Azbantium barrier. And every single time but the last, she'd have to go through an agony the final version of her would never remember, but would know all her previous versions would have endured until she'd finally slip through out of the trap, out of the reach of her relentless pursuer, out to confront her captor, Rassilon, and make sure that particular Time Lord among all never survived the Time War. All she'd have to do at that point was find a TARDIS and look into its heart.

And then she'd have to die one last time – for good. Because she'd be inside the time lock containing Gallifrey, in the middle of the Time War, and after having seen for herself what the Time Lords were ready to do to escape their fate, finding out they were ready to end time itself, and with it everyone and everything other than them that had ever existed and would ever exist, Rose understood why the Doctor had decided that they should all die in the Time War, locked away from all other realities in a dimension they could never escape before they all burned.

And Rose would never try and escape the fate she now knew she would be sentenced to face alongside the Time Lords. She'd already been on Gallifrey, alongside the Doctor who didn't call himself the Doctor, doing the terrifying deed along with him, so he wouldn't have to bear the burden alone forever. So that one day, when he found out what had truly happened to Rose in the end, the Doctor would remember the young chav from the Estates who soothed his pains and ended up taking on his burdens for a little while, protecting her reality for however long it took him to return, and he would remember that this young human who helped him and fell in love with him, this young person once so full of compassion also felt that there was no other way, that Gallifrey truly had to burn. The Doctor would finally know, beyond any possible doubt, that someone had been by his side and had agreed what he did, no matter how terrible it would be, would have been the right call.

And then he could heal.

Rose just hoped he would find someone to stay with him when the time came for him to remember.

Her progression continued. The longest and most trying part was finding her way up the spiralling stairs of the central tower, ascending without slipping back down. She whiled away that time of struggle by reminiscing on all her adventures, with the Doctor at first; then with Donna, who had sacrificed herself just like Rose once had, looking in the heart of the TARDIS; with Martha, now defender of the Earth, and with poor Sally, killed by the Carrionites. She thought of the adventure Jack would never remember, and the ones they'd shared since – and prior, back when she didn't know what he would become. Of the enigmatic Professor River Song, who would never remember her again in her past, and only remember her times with the Doctor until that one day she'd go to the Library and meet a complete stranger. Of Ian and Barbara, who were unfortunate enough to cross her path and have one adventure too many, and of John Wick, the tormented soul who'd watched over a human version of her and taught so many young boys things that could save their lives in the bloody battlefields of the Great War.

So many old friends… So many people Rose had left behind, but she knew, as she finally crawled her way onto the upper floor, that every single subsequent version of her would remember them; that the eternity she was trapped in would never feel long enough for her to forget them.

She had started to rot. The flesh on her hands, the most of herself Rose could see, but not quite feel, had begun to quiver. It wouldn't be hard to peel off enough flesh at her temples to put contacts directly on her skull, which would end up interfacing with the teleporter as it burned the rest of her. It wasn't hard to guess what would happen to that skull either. The next version of her would take it up the tower and leave it on the parapet, from where it would fall into the sea as the next her ran down to the azbantium barrier. One breadcrumb joining the many breadcrumbs her first self must have laid down, like the dirt-encrusted shovel that was leaning by the door of the teleporter room, her first clue to herself that she would need to dig down to the message informing her of the importance of room twelve.

And there was one last clue to leave for the next her before she went. There was a large accumulation of dust on the sides of the teleporter's room, a layer centimetres thick at its deepest – enough of it that she could write down one word for the next Rose to ponder over. And this Rose already knew the word. After all, it had to have been written by every single one of her previous iterations just so the Rose who'd be restored immediately after would have a clue as to what had been going on, and so that she would finally understand that she had chosen her path, and had to keep going, even if it meant dying. 'BIRD', she scrawled in the dust with her index finger – the word that would keep informing an inordinate number of Roses until, one day in the very distant future, one last Rose would die and leave behind a message for the version of her that would finally break out of her prison, who would be able to guess just how long her previous selves would have had to keep killing themselves so that she could finally escape.

"When I manage this…" she gurgled, "I'll have to… find a way… to tell someone… I'm one hell of a bird…"

Rose made the rest of the way to the teleporter's supporting apparatus, and plugged herself in. Then, with one last effort, she reached up, and pulled the lever for the twenty-fifth millionth time.

A/N: If you've read through this and got here, and enjoyed this read, I'd love a word from you.