Time Warp IV

Rose

She didn't know how to fight Reapers; if she had to, she would hazard a guess that the Doctor was right about them being invincible. How was it they had stopped them before? Hiding in an old church? Even that precaution had only worked temporarily. Now what was the oldest thing they had? The Doctor himself, of course; the big space base in the isolated pocket of the Milky Way was most definitely not something ancient and defensible. Probably the best place would be making some sort of queer igloo out of bits of Stonehenge, or going into the catacombs beneath the Roman Colosseum. Or a crawlspace where they couldn't get in, considering they were rather large.

"Hey, what if we found a crawlspace?" Rose touched the Doctor's arm to get his attention. Currently, they were walking – or more creeping very steadily and on tiptoes – through the corridors of the facility that was home to Project Negation. She wondered if this Myers character had any other shady interests and inventions under development. He could have some amazing super-weapon that could easily defeat the Reapers. Unless they were just… completely invulnerable. Which wouldn't surprise her. They weren't exactly the offspring of a reality with 'normal' parameters. Would they survive a nuclear bomb? They could kill anything.

"A crawlspace?" he asked. He was becoming jaded, more and more hopeless, and trying not to be. She didn't let it get to her, how could she? It seemed like he had every reason to be hopeless, but she was sure she would be able to do something. She, unlike him, would not relinquish her hope so easily. Charlie the scientist walked ahead of them with his gun out, pointing it around corners. Rose got the sneaking suspicion, however, that most of the soldiers they had seen earlier had already been devoured. Or not far off it.

"Well the Reapers are quite big," she said, "So if you hid in… a safe, you'd be alright, wouldn't you?"

"You'd run out of air."

"What about a maintenance shaft?"

"You'd starve to death eventually. Or they'd rip the walls apart. They can devour more than just organic life, it's anything, any matter that's… tainted," he said sourly. Sighing, she took hold of his arm. Charlie was not particularly listening to them. He was closer to the Doctor's mind-set about the situation than Rose's. Rose felt that she was unusually optimistic about this, and she had a new kind of faith in herself where normally she would just shovel all her faith into her image of the Doctor. But she knew more than anyone that the Doctor was flawed, and couldn't always save the day.

"What about a nuclear bomb?"

"And where are you going to find a nuclear bomb?"

"You can't blow us up," Charlie interrupted. So he was listening. Ten shifted uneasily within Rose's grasp, but she did not let him go. She was worried about him. Possibly more worried than she should be, given their… circumstances.

"I'm just, you know, spit-balling ideas," she said. "Brainstorming." Charlie glanced back at them, narrowed his eyes, lowered his gun a little.

"Are you two a couple?"

"Oh, yeah. We're engaged," Rose said proudly, "D'you wanna see my ring?" Asking people if they wanted to see her ring was a reflex. She had actually been to visit Jackie recently to show it off. Had it gone well? Not particularly. Jackie and Pete Tyler were… displeased with her conduct. Still. It had been months, she had said, why couldn't they get over her decision to leave Tentoo? Tentoo whose name was barely even spoken anymore. He was hardly even mentioned at all, by anyone. She didn't even know where he was, what he was doing, because he wasn't home with them anymore. Was it bad she barely thought of him?

"Your ring? The world is ending and you're showing off your ring?"

"The world's always ending," she shrugged.

"Yeah, so's your engagement if half the stuff your fiancé says is true," Charlie jibed, "How can you be so calm at a time like this?"

"What would be the point of worrying?"

"It's the natural reaction."

"Maybe for someone like you," she asked, failing somewhat at pretending she wasn't disappointed he did not want to see her engagement ring. She loved her engagement ring, and Ten normally seemed quite happy when she showed it to people. Well, he was on the one hand, on the other hand he waited with baited breath in case whoever-it-was told him he had made a terrible choice. But if they did say that, Rose would punch them. She'd already shown the ring to Amy Pond at least four times in the twelve days since he had proposed. Amy was doing a marvellous job at pretending like she was still genuinely interested.

"Someone like me? What's that mean?" he questioned.

"Someone who leads a normal life."

"A normal life? You call this a normal life? I haven't seen my family for years! I've been dragged out here to work on this doomsday device," he argued.

"And let's just say this isn't the first doomsday I've been a part of," she said. The Doctor slipped out of her arms to walk somewhere else, but she was busy talking to Charlie.

"You're pretty high and mighty, you know," he snapped.

"I'm not, I'm just the only one here who hasn't lost all hope just because some idiot's tried to build a time machine. Loads of people try to build time machines; lots of people succeed in building time machines. This is only the middle of the fourth millennia, there's loads of stuff yet to happen in the future," Rose said, "Like Jack!" she was addressing the Doctor now, "Jack's a fixed point in time, I made him that way, but how can he be a fixed point in time when he won't even be born until the Fifty-First Century if all this has gone on? And I know what you'll say, you'll-"

"Rose."

"-you'll say 'the time vortex is being destroyed, don't you get it? There aren't any fixed or fluctuating points anymore. I'm the Doctor, I know everything, it's my right to wander around being broody all the time.'"

"Rose."

"Well you know something, I'm getting sick of it. We've barely even been here and you're acting like we've lost already, this is nothing. We were just picked up from the ship and dropped here, the end of the world doesn't come about as suddenly as that, alright? If-"

"Rose!" he shouted, cutting her off. Charlie had been observing, not daring to interrupt once Rose turned her anguish and annoyance against the Doctor rather than against him.

"What!?"

"Look out there," he said. She hadn't even noticed they were passing a window. Not the same window as before, but the outside space was so vast (of course it was) that the view barely changed. There were just some different outcroppings of the spacestation they were on visible, that was all. "Look at the star," he said. She did look at the star. Earlier it had been bathing them in its soft, purplish light, when they had first arrived. How long ago had that been? It couldn't even be more than twenty minutes, could it?

But he was right about the star. It was different. Like it was pulsing, a heart going too fast out there in the middle of the universe, and its light was definitely brighter and closer to pink than it was to blue.

"That star's expanding," Charlie said, "It's going to supernova. How is that possible?"

"It's whatever's happening with the machine," said Ten hollowly, staring at it, slack-jawed, "That star is going to explode and take out this entire solar system, maybe more."

"Well isn't that just us?" Rose asked, "We can leave, we'll-"

"No," he said, "No, Rose. There isn't anything."

"There must be something."

"There isn't, alright? I'm telling you. The universe is destabilising around us, that's proof. You can't reverse a supernova."

"Oh, but you can trigger one by using an experimental time machine a thousand lightyears away?" she questioned him coldly. Now she was fiddling with the engagement ring, twisting it around her finger. She missed the sandworm. How long ago had that been? An hour, two? Then their harpoon gun versus a big worm seemed like impossible odds. The biggest challenge she faced was trying to accurately change gears in a ten-foot-high monster truck. And now this? Had the worm just been too easy?

"I've never seen a star do that before. It's going to explode."

"…Right. Well. Come on, then. We've still got to go and see this machine," Rose said.

The Doctor rounded on her, "Aren't you listening to-"

"I think you're the one who isn't listening to me! You stay here and star at the bloody thing if you want, but Charlie is going to take me to the machine. You can stay here and hope the Reapers get you before the supernova, if that's what you want," she said decisively, putting her hands on her hips. Obviously, she didn't want him to get killed by Reapers. In fact, she was going to work her hardest to stop him getting killed by Reapers. But that didn't mean she was going to stand for this sort of attitude.

"Rose…" he began softly, changing tone.

"Don't 'Rose' me," she said coldly, "I'm not in the mood. Now I'm going to save the universe, you do what you like. Come on, Charlie." She turned on her heels and began to walk away, and Charlie followed her. He probably supposed that he was going to die either way, and maybe she frightened him a bit too much to argue. Very quickly, the Doctor relented and came to join them. "Oh, so you haven't completely given up all hope?"

"I don't think you're looking at the facts properly."

"And I think you're ignoring some of the facts on purpose," she said. He grimaced. She did not know if he knew to what she was referring, and she didn't really care. No doubt he would carry on pretending, because she was 'his' Rose and she needed to be taken care of and kept snuggled up warmly in a billion layers of bubble-wrap, sealed for eternity in the TARDIS so that no harm would come to her. It would be like Beauty and the Beast, with her in a jar to keep her from her ultimate fate of decay and extinguishment.

…Perhaps that was an exaggeration.

"How close is this lab?" she changed the subject. Well, began a subject, to take her mind of her own idle thoughts. She did think that Ten wouldn't complain if she offered to live in a bell-jar for the rest of her natural life, though; him some sick, voyeuristic guardian.

"Not far," Charlie answered, "Around the corner… is that where those things will be? Reapers?"

"…Yeah," Ten said, "Staying near the epicentre of all this. Trying to stop that before they turn their attention to anything else. Might not have sensed us here yet…" He sounded like he was halfway towards suggesting they leave. If only they were able to do so, but if Rose's connection to the time vortex was really disintegrating as much as she sensed it was, she doubted she would be able to take them anywhere. Or that the TARDIS would work. Or that anything would work. If a nearby star was being ruptured to the point of annihilation, what chance did she stand? Not much of one, and not for long. So he didn't suggest leaving. He wasn't as cruel as that.

She took another step and while her foot was suspended the floor rattled. She would say the earth shook if they were on a solid planet surface. The three of them paused in this minute moment and the ripple of a freeze washed jarringly over them again; jumping into a swimming pool when the water was too cold, taking a while to adjust to this new state of perpetual uncomfortableness. That was how it felt being submerged within these static loci, drowning in motionless temporality.

"We'd better hurry up. We should get there before the freeze ends, shouldn't we?" Charlie said. He was fishing to find something that might help; Rose didn't think it mattered if the freeze was on or not, because if it didn't affect her then it certainly wouldn't affect the Reapers, meaning the Reapers will have slaughtered all the soldiers very easily while they were stuck. She would be terribly surprised to find anybody still alive in this laboratory.

They didn't have to wait long to find out.

"It's here," Charlie said, going up to a set of double doors, pulling out an ID card. There was no way to see into the room before entering, but the walls had an unusual quality. Like they were cracked, or more like existence was cracked. A crack in time – she'd heard that before. Ten had mentioned it, in relation to Amy and Rory, and cracks erasing people from existence… how had they fixed it then? These temporal fissures were seeping out of the very fabric of the universe surrounding them; Charlie's ID card would not work. "Shit – shit! We can't get it."

"Let me do it," Rose said, walking past him.

"Let you do what? You haven't got clearance."

"No, I don't need clearance. I've got a foot." And then she kicked the doors down, hitting the sweet spot right in the middle with her boot that dented both of the incredibly heavy metal doors and sent them flying back on their hinges.

"Those doors are made of tungsten! How did you do that?" Charlie demanded.

"Superstrength," she shrugged, and made to go into the room. Keeping an eye out for Reapers. If only Reapers didn't have a nasty habit of materialising out of nowhere.

Within it was an awesome sight, a very blatant catastrophe of somebody with delusions of grandeur – i.e. Myers. For want of a better word, there was an explosion in the centre of the room. This explosion was stopped just like everything else, and was more of those brilliant white cracks. A colour so vivid it could only be nothing made corporeal, a blinding void in the middle of this large lab. It was impossible to tell what the time machine had looked like before. There were some dead in the room, but very few; they must have died before the arrival of the Reapers, possibly in the explosion they were witnessing.

"So it's not finished…" Rose mused.

"What?" Ten asked her vacantly. He had only half-heard, with the rest of his attention he was focusing on the same point of obliteration she was.

"The explosion of the machine," she said, "If it's an explosion of… time, who knows how long it will take to finish exploding?"

"It'll be burning away, like when a nuclear reactor melts down," the Doctor explained.

"But it's not finished burning yet."

"What do you mean 'finished'? When it 'finishes' we die, Rose," he said. She stepped towards it.

"Where's the controls?" she turned to ask Charlie.

But it was at this point that the freeze reversed. She could practically see the energy pulse that vibrated the molecules of the air, returning everything to its natural colour. Only then did they hear the noise. Instantly when time was briefly restored Rose clapped her hands over her ears – it was like standing next to a jet engine it was so loud, a jet engine which would soon hit the point of sonic boom.

That was when the Reapers appeared.

"That's Myers!" Charlie exclaimed. Had he not seen the monsters in the air? There were half a dozen at least that came shimmering with their ethereal, crimson hue into the room, brandishing their dragon wings and their scythe tails. Their roaring was only slightly heard over the ripping sound of the explosion. How long was it going to take for the supernova?

Charlie was pointing out a dead body.

"Reapers!" Ten shouted. Charlie glanced around and screamed when he saw one, the biggest one. Yet, they were not approaching Rose and the Doctor. They had not found them during the freeze, only now.

"We're like them," she realised, "Or, I am. A creature of the time vortex." They were training their beady eyes only on Ten and Charlie, but not on her.

"You're not a creature of the time vortex!" Ten argued, "You're from East London!"

"Shut up! That doesn't mean anything here, I'm like them, they're not going to attack me. They must have stayed away before because you were with me!"

"And what's so special about you?" the Doctor demanded. They were both shouting, but there was too much chaos for either of them to quite achieve the level of anger at one another they might do in a less-turbulent environment. The force of the explosion was creating an air tunnel around them too, like being in a tornado. Every few seconds she felt she was in danger of being swept up off her feet, and swept into that belly of impending nothingness that approached. It was growing now, and when she turned to look out of the large window running along half of the right-hand, circular wall, she could see the star. The star on the right, the exploding machine dead-ahead, the Reapers clustering on the left.

She turned to glare at the Tenth Doctor and felt the wrath of the time vortex, the dying time vortex, rise up inside her. She didn't know if her ideas were her own or external, but she had one finally. One that had been on the tip of her tongue for a while now.

"I'm reality," she said. She had said this before, or Bad Wolf had. In that moment, it was impossible for the girl, the entity, to tell where Rose Tyler ended and the Bad Wolf began. She suspected the divide between the personas was not as cut and dry as some might like it to be, but hardly cared in that moment.

"Rose…" he stammered, and she knew that her eyes were gold and furious. She knew that her whole body had conjured up a glow. She knew that she was visually as imposing as anything else threatening them in that room, that terrible crucible of quantum paradoxes and other such jargon. She saw in his face that he thought he had lost her forever.

"Where are the controls?" she asked Charlie, somebody asked Charlie. Was it her? She barely knew herself.

"What are you!?" Charlie yelled.

"The controls," she said. She felt calm, but the voice that slipped out of her was booming and dulled everything else floating around them. No other soundwaves were quite as important as when this concoction of energy in the body of woman was talking. Charlie pointed to the same place as he had pointed earlier, when he showed them the body of Todd Myers, the now-deceased mastermind behind the entire thing.

She was unsure of if she walked or ran or flew or floated towards those controls, nor was she sure of what she was doing when she arrived. Did she even move at all or did the world move around her? The supernova was growing exponentially behind her, but not exponentially enough. That star was being fed by temporal energy, that star was providing all the solar power of the machine. It had a symbiotic link to the thing, and she was going to exploit it.

It was exactly as Amy and Rory and River and Eleven had done. The TARDIS had exploded, had knocked out reality when it did. And how had they fixed it, she thought to herself, as she pushed the power of the machine to maximum in order to detonate it? They had blown up the TARDIS again in its place. The Reapers screeched the same time the death of the star outside was triggered, the same time the broken explosion in the very room burst at its deadly seams, and the last thing she heard was the Doctor screaming at her to stop.