Time Warp V

Rose

She woke up. She came gasping back to life, and thought that this was how Jack must feel whenever he dragged himself away from unreality. He was right when he said there was nothing, because she had certainly seen nothing. Her memory was a jarring connection straight from watching a sun supernova with the roar of the exploding machine behind her to now, waking up to humming machinery, rolling up off the floor.

"This doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make any sense…" she heard the Tenth Doctor rambling. She was woozy, and when she rubbed her hand on her face the back of it came back red; her nose was bleeding slightly. She almost yawned. "Rose, Rose?" he came panicking over to her side along the floor, like they were in the aftermath of a cataclysm. But as far as she could see, it was no cataclysm or scene of destruction. She could even see the time machine in the middle of the room, a very large device with a myriad of metallic pistons and gizmos pumping around it in a cylindrical fashion, a pod in the centre only slightly bigger than the exterior of the TARDIS. All of it was in shades of gold.

"I'm fine," she said stiffly. He was fussing over her.

"Your nose is bleeding."

"So what? I just saved us all, I think I can cope with a nosebleed," she muttered, not in the mood for his overprotectiveness. He had to learn, and she staggered to her feet, more tired than she thought she was. That was when she realised there were half a dozen soldiers with sonic guns trained on the pair of them and Charlie, who was still present, and that Charlie was looking elsewhere. No longer was Rose by the controls but a little distance from them.

"What's all this, Charlie?" a new voice asked. When she followed the sound of it she recognised the all-singing all-dancing reanimated corpse of one Todd Myers, who had cheated death thanks to Rose's charitability. She stood woozily in the centre of the trio.

"Rose, I don't think you're-"

"Don't think I'm what? Safe? I'm a lot bloody safer than you, alright? You could get shot as well, what happens if someone shoots me? It'd just bounce off," she hissed at him. And it would, too. She knew that from experience – the experience of Jack dropping his blaster a once a few months ago and accidentally blasting her in the abdomen. She'd been fine, if a little singed, and Ten hadn't heard a thing about it. Or had it been Tentoo at that point…? She was ashamed of how much they sometimes blurred in her memory…

"You need to stop what you're doing," Charlie said to Myers. Myers had his hand hovering dangerously over the controls to the machine.

Rose's hunch had been right – she had been able to cancel out time by forcing the star to supernova at the right moment. If she hadn't forced the machine onto full power, it would have disintegrated away before the star had a chance, but she had intervened.

"This again," Myers sighed, "I don't even know how you got in here."

"We were here in the future," Rose said, "And now we came back to the past. That machine is going to kill you and everyone."

"Who are you?"

"A time traveller sent to stop you from destroying everything, and guess what, I did," she said, weary and battered and exhausted, ignoring Ten's attempts to hold her up. He had given up faith completely because he hadn't even wanted to think about what she could do, and currently she was not inclined to speak to him. Besides, this mess still needed sorting out, and being as they had a whole platoon pointing guns at them she didn't think it was the best time to have a spat.

"If you're a time traveller then my machine works," Myers shrugged.

"Your machine doesn't work at all, not for what you want it for," Rose said, "Maybe it worked once, with Nadine, but that was a fluke. What I can do is nothing to do with that machine. It's going to rupture everything – I had to make that star supernova to sort it out." She pointed out of the window at the star, which was back and burning along nicely in its purple colour. The interior of the room was tinged slightly pink from the light of the star outside, contrasting with the yellowish lighting within their bright space.

"We don't know that this didn't happen before," Ten whispered to her.

"What?"

"We don't know that our intervention here didn't cause him to trip the machine, we don't know that we're not going to be stuck in a loop from now on of dying and reappearing and trying to stop it again," he said.

"You know what, I'm getting bloody sick of your pessimism," she said, "And of you not having faith in my abilities. Now shut up and let me sort this out since you're so incapable, Doctor."

"You cannot talk to me like-"

"We'll discuss this later, alright!? And you'd better shut up now so that I can make sure there actually is a later. It would be a shame to die when we've fallen out," she said coldly. That hurt him. Maybe he hadn't considered them having fallen out until that moment, but she most definitely did, she thought as she twisted her engagement ring restlessly around on her finger.

"You need to get away from those controls, Myers," Charlie warned him, "You don't know what you're doing – I ran the calculations, I tried to tell you before-"

"And I had all your security clearance revoked," he shrugged, "You're not stopping me from doing this. Project Negation will work; it needs to so that I can right the wrongs of the universe."

"You don't understand the way the universe works," Rose told him angrily, "You haven't got a clue, not any idea at all. If you trigger that machine, you'll be harvesting bits of the time vortex, too much of it at once. You shouldn't harvest any of it at all, it shouldn't be collected, it needs to move through people, like it moves through me. You don't have a clue what you're doing."

"The 'having a clue' part was Charlie's job."

"And I was wrong!" Charlie protested, "She's right, I had no idea! None of us did. This was stupid, and you don't have noble aims, you want to erase people from existence!"

"It's a really inefficient way to erase things from existence, too," Rose said, "I could do it by clicking my fingers." And then she did click her fingers, which was only for dramatic effect really, and watched the ten or so guns surrounding them in a circle disintegrate into golden atomic dust. It floated away as if carried on a sunbeam, the soldiers jumping as this happened, dispersing and scared. It only took a few seconds for the weapons to disappear out of the room completely. Now the only person in the room with a gun was Charlie, and he pointed this at Myers. Rose suspected they were too far away to get a good shot, though. Not that she approved of shooting anybody to begin with. "I don't want to do the same thing to you that I did to those guns, but if it's a choice between you and reality I pick reality."

"Rose…" Ten said uselessly.

"What are you?"

"A creature of the time vortex," she answered for herself, "I was created by trying to abuse the same power you are now, and I did it all with the noble aim of saving someone's life. And I caused chaos, but I'd do it again, because I'd have to. It nearly killed me and it did kill the man I love. I extinguished the lives of millions of lifeforms, do you really think you will make me bat an eyelash?" At present, Rose was doing something people often liked to call 'acting,' or 'bluffing.' Myers didn't know that, but she was also quite sure Ten didn't know it, either. That he thought she actually was remorseless and had turned into a cold-blooded killer going around and extinguishing people on a whim.

"Step back from the machine," Charlie said again, "Or I'll shoot you."

"I'd be able to activate it before you fire a round that actually hits me. We both know you've always been a shit marksman, Charlie," Myers said coolly. The soldiers were uninvolving themselves. Three of them scattered and ran out of the room, probably because they were scared of Rose.

"I could make the whole building disappear beneath our feet," she said, "And I could easily escape unharmed and just leave you here in a vacuum. Or you can just not press that button, and we could all stay alive. You clearly fancy yourself a bit, I can't believe that you'd really want to end it all like that. Because you were dead in the future we saw, dead right there where you're standing. I guess the initial explosion took you out, you probably didn't even get to see the machine kick in."

"Dead?" he asked, "That can't be possible."

"It's possible, it's the truth," said Charlie, "I saw it, she's saved me. She's given me a second chance – you don't know what else she can do. Travelling through time at will? Kicking down the doors to get in here?" They were talking about her as if she was a god. Was she a god? What exactly was it that made someone into a god?

Was this divine intervention? She was the divine intervention? Rose Tyler was the deus ex machina come to reverse everything and save the day and the heroes? Who was the hero in that scenario – Charlie? It certainly wasn't Ten. It struck her that she would rather he didn't know anything about these thoughts she was having…

But if she was really all-powerful, if she really commanded reality at her fingertips, then there were all sorts of things she must be able to do. Abilities she hadn't even tapped into yet, and the presence of that supernova and that mixture of the time vortex and its energy feeding out of the gaps in space and into her… She raised her hand, and the universe bent to her will.

When time froze now, it washed over her warmly. Stopping everything around her was the most natural thing in the world, and instead of everything turning sharper and hard to look out, bright and friendly colours radiated out of the surface of the air and welcomed her into the embrace of this further extension of her powers. And now it was only her. The Doctor didn't get a free pass, and neither did Charlie and his device. Everything else was motionless. She didn't need to negotiate with Myers at all, and so she did not. She just walked leisurely towards him and the control panel and lifted him up. She carried him as easily and as carefully as though she was carrying an egg liable to break – after all, could she hold him to account for his destruction of the universe? When he had destroyed it, he had died. And now he had not, and he did not intend to, and regardless of the true goal behind his Project Negation, having intentions was not a crime.

In this stutter of her own creation, Rose took Charlie's gun as well, took it and disintegrated it like she had all the others. He didn't need the upper-hand anymore, because she had the upper-hand, and what a calm upper-hand it was. In the blink of an eye all this was happening, but the rules of time did not apply to her. As long as she didn't abuse this power, the time vortex would let her channel it through her and out of her fingertips. And so Rose used her calm upper-hand to destroy the controls for Project Negation, she smashed them into pieces with her fist and her superstrength, she tore down the large pistons and ripped the wires inside the central pod to shreds. Did she spend five minutes, ten, twenty, or more, in that freeze-frame existence? The machine had to be destroyed irreparably, had to be sabotaged, and she would put her trust in Charlie to erase all the plans for it.

When the machine lay in pieces in front of Rose, and only then, did she deem that her work was done. The warm colours sank away and she heard the shouts of terror from the soldiers and the scientists. Again she heard her name slip out of Ten's mouth in a pitiful whisper, turning around from where she had been standing to admire her saboteur's handiwork.

"What did you do, Rose…"

"I fixed it," she said, "It's my job to fix it."

"No it isn't," he told her.

"Yes, it is," she said, "And I'm getting really sick of this 'poor little Rose needs to be protected' act. Your precious Rose knows exactly how to take care of herself, and I sorted this out when you couldn't even dream of being able to."

"You're not meant to have that kind of power! No one is!" he argued.

"You destroyed it!" Charlie exclaimed joyfully.

"You destroyed it!" Myers exclaimed furiously.

Rose and the Doctor ignored them both.

"I don't approve of this," Ten said, "You're going to hurt yourself."

"I'm going to be fine, you just don't understand me, just like you don't understand Jack. And that's not even your problem, because you don't even want to try," she said, "I never thought that I'd be accusing the Doctor, of all people, of being closed-minded. There's all sorts of things you don't know, and I'm not some sort of pet that needs to be supervised all the time! I stay on the TARDIS because I want to be with you, not because I want to travel the stars. I don't need the TARDIS to travel the stars, and I have every shred of knowledge in the entire universe waiting for me to reach out and touch."

"It isn't your power to wield! And I do understand, I understand that this is dangerous-"

"Of course it's dangerous if it gets misused! But I'm not going to misuse it! Why do you have such little faith in me!? You think I'm going to get into a bad mood and make everyone around me vanish like that? Or blow up a planet because I feel like it? There is such a thing as using power for good! The TARDIS gives you power and you would never abuse it!" she argued with him, furious.

"Rose, you're not-"

"NO! You're the one who's 'not'! Charlie, make sure he can never build another machine, and try and make sure he gets arrested for something," Rose ordered Charlie, "The Doctor and I are leaving now. I don't think you'll see us again." She grabbed hold of Ten's arm and shifted them away from that godforsaken star system.